BECOMING XIX: RECIPROCITY

The effect, and Hegel speaks of the Effect here and even of effect qua effect (what we call the
world or nature viewed formally), "as such has a being dependent on" the cause and is thus
"different from" it (154). Equally, however, "such a dependence… is reflection-into-self and
immediacy." Not only, negatively, is it not part of the effect's definition or inner being to be
an effect, as Aquinas saw but without apparently concluding thereupon to causality's
abstractness as such, but the effect is not in truth dependent in the normal sense of
dependence. That is, it reacts back upon its cause, as it were actively, though of course
conceptually only, the whole point being that both effect and cause are abstract and finite
notions. In thus constituting the effect the cause "is at the same time the pre-constitution of
the effect", i.e. the cause is this. It is this, i.e. qua cause or "so long as the effect is kept
separate from the cause." In looking beyond this separation Hegel does not commit himself to
"pantheism" but rather reminds us that cause and effect have been found to be finite and
hence untrue categories. "In God we live and move and have our being", the author of The
Acts of the Apostles reports them as proclaiming of the transcendent God they preached.
The cause as cause is the effect's pre-constitution. That is, the effect is to be found constituted
"in" the cause in idea, i.e. really. Notwithstanding, "There is thus already in existence another
substance on which the effect takes place." It is "immediate", as following immediately upon
this conception of effecting something in something (else), and thus "passive", yet "it is a
substance, and it is therefore active also." Hegel says also (156, Zus.) that "the two sides"
acting and reacting, the cause and the effect, should be "recognised for factors of a third and
higher, which is the notion and nothing else." So we might think that the notion is already
what is referred to in the earlier passage. This is not the case though and the latter is rather
"the substrate" so extensively discussed or rather expounded in the Greater Logic? These
successive categories of relation, from Inward and Outward through Substance and Accidents
to causality are not so much instances as aspects of the Absolute Relation which necessarily,
as absolute, does not relate anything else existing independently and separately from itself.
Abstraction begins, rather, in taking it apart. This is why Hegel is so variously interpreted as
theist or atheist, like Spinoza before him, though differently. He is, however, in direct line
with Augustine and Aquinas (and therefore with the Judaic explosion represented in what we
call the New Testament), for whom ipsae relationes sunt personae. But nor can we say that
Hegel's is a simple case of abstracting from the positive or concrete theological context,
which he rather interprets, as he had made explicit in The Phenomenology of Mind. That the
Logic does not make it "explicit" is not because it is merely implicit there but rather that it is
the Logic's whole meaning and, especially, outcome.

Necessity is being that is because it is [cf. WL 6:215…]: it is the unity of being

with itself, where being has itself as its ground; but the reverse is also true, that
because it has a ground, it is not being, but simply shine, relationship, or
mediation. Causality is this posited going-over of originative being, the cause,
into shine or mere positedness, and conversely of positedness into
originativeness.1

Necessity, Hegel also says, is "absolute Negativity". This recalls Augustine's non aliquo
modo est, sed est, est, said of God. Now why does Hegel dismiss this characterisation of God,
repeatedly, as leaving us with empty abstraction, whereas he appears to see absolute
1
Hegel, Science of Logic, original text at WL 6:239 (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1969), as quoted in Robert M.
Wallace, Hegel's Theory of Freedom, 4.17.
Negativity as the badge of the absolutely concrete, of the Notion and, finally, of Thought? I
wish I could answer these questions better than I do. Being, one might wish to say, can only
be limited by being. Being is therefore infinite, unlimited, i.e. it has no essence, since essence
is the principle of limitation making a thing to be this and not that. It is thus also the principle
of negativity in "nature", of negation in logic. Anything in and by its essence negates every
other thing, since also individuals have their essence (apart, that is, from the abstract Scotistic
essence of in general being an individual) though, says Aquinas, we cannot know it. Thus in
"This rose is red" the predicate, "red", stands for (supponit pro) just this rose that is being
spoken about, whichever it is. There is no other way to account for the copula as identifying
subject and predicate, as Hegel insists that it does. That is why he, for his part, finds
predication false. If one denies this "supposition of the predicate", like Frege, who makes of it
a "concept" "predicated of " the subject in infinite regress (the predicate is predicated "of" and
this that I say now and so on), then one has also to deny any function to "the bare copula". Yet
the copula actually expresses identity, whether in thought or in being, at the same time as it,
this word est, asserts and names being itself. The predicate rather stands for the same as does
the subject, but in the manner of the predicate, i.e. as connoting the "denoted" subject. Thus
"is a member of class C" cannot itself be read as "is a member of the class of things which are
members of class C" and so on. Individuals, that is, have their essence, as do individual
concepts, and this is a basis for Hegel's grand resolution of negativity in the Notion. Thus in
itself this, today, calls for a new effort within the Fregean school to save itself from being a
mere product of Understanding (Verstand) and no more.

What is said here though, it seems clear, in the passage just quoted from the Greater Logic, is
that being is not being, is not the true being. That is rather relationship, something at least
presaged, again, in Trinitarian theology, where person and relation are equated, i.e. identified.
But being, necessity, is also mediation, which is, of course, thinking. This is the basic idealist
stance. Thinking, furthermore, is subjective, not in the sense of limitation but absolutely, as
we say that the thinker legislates for the universe, despite "liberalist" protests to the contrary.
Nothing is "only" my opinion. Rather, "my" is taken from "I", the universal of universals.
Only and eternally I am. Therefore, we beget one another, again eternally and at every
moment, as Hume darkly envisaged. The mutual solipsism is no longer vicious. Whatever one
identifies as the external or "objective" marks of the I, of any person, could equally be said of
someone else as if that first person had never been, said then, in the last resort, of a
Doppelgänger as second or third person. Hence, it can be argued, I am you ("Whoever hears
you hears me", taken unrestrictedly) or I am he or she ("Whatever you do to her you do to
me"). This corresponds to all that Hegel says about thinking and knowledge as it does also to
all that we can mean by love, as volition belongs to "Cognition in general" (223, 233).

But we are by no means out of the wood yet, of this demanding transition from Essence to the
Notion, in Hegel's terms. The Notion! The word "Testament", mentioned above, means
covenant, as between two or more. Use of this term here instances the figurative imperfection
of the religious representation of the Content, such as the Judaic culture of that time was most
at home with. God sent his emissaries to and concluded treaties with men. In philosophy
thought there is no longer two but one, as in the aphorism "I am that". This is here worked out
in Logic itself, in the form of its forms (forma formarum), especially in the section headed
"The Subjective Notion", which we shall shortly come to. So although Logic is prolonged into
Nature and Spirit it is Logic itself which elicits them, thus in a manner containing them as the
part which stands for or "accomplishes" the whole as, in the developed "Concept", every part
thus stands for the whole. Thereby, however, both part and whole are abolished in their very
notion. The only notion left standing is the notion of the Notion or, rather, the Notion itself as
Truth, all finite notions being false. That's where we are going.

Meanwhile, we have to "assimilate" the distinction between cause and effect (153, Zus.),
terms distinct but identical (in their reference). They are "one and the same content". It is
laughable how some commentators "bristle up" against this assertion, as if convicting Hegel
of a crass error indeed. Yet an endless series of causes is equally an endless series of effects,
since even the very first cause causes itself to be a cause, while even the very last effect is
also "an effect of itself", since it, "in its identity with the cause, is itself defined as a cause,
and at the same time as another cause,… and so on for ever."

The effect is only posited as effect with reference to the cause. It is immediately, reflected
into self. Causality passes into Action and Reaction, or Reciprocity. Thus the progress ad
infinitum of causes and effects is "really and truly suspended", though we are only halfway to
the alternative. We have now a "self-contained relationship", "one and the same thing" in
Reciprocity, but this "only distinguishes turn and turn about", retaining the other even if only
as "equally supposed" in the other of its other, effect in cause and cause in effect. The aim, it
is clear, is to yield the field of vision to relation as such, in a unity no longer eliciting a
destructive abstraction.

*********************

We might try here to think abstraction concretely, non-abstractly, that is to say. A certain
concession to the finite historical mode might be advisable.

Abstraction has been a central topic of philosophical thinking, distinguishing man from the
animals in the dawning of his intelligence. Due to dialectic in its cyclical aspect reflection, not
only our own reflection here, returns upon the Greek clarity concerning the open secret that in
speech we identify what our thought has first separated, such as the rose and its redness. This
is a logical doctrine about predication as such and so has nothing to do with the intent and
psychological character of sentences, such as whether they are speculative or practical,
defining or contingently descriptive. Even hesitation between indicative and imperative mood
makes much less difference than has been supposed.

Thus from the point of view of logic the rose's being red or the wet weather being a good
thing from the farmers' point of view fall under the same net. Here we can see how the whole
scientific project lies under the sign of abstraction, the whole creation of language rather. Just
to name, to form the idea, of weather is to separate it from any effects it is here and now
having upon us or upon the animals. It becomes an object for thought and study

Language was surely devised as a remedy for the fate that fell upon us of habitual and
continual concept-formation, a "sea-change" in our being. For we were and are able to
entertain just one concept at a time. So thought itself hides from us the simple unity of the
world and existence, where all is a continuum, the category of "thing" not yet having been
invented. From this we pluck out, abs-tract, both the rose and the red rose indifferently. The
emergence of language might be dramatised as the frenzied effort of our young species,
bewildered by the paralysis, the morbid excrescence of continual obsessive abstraction that
had fallen upon it, to restore things to how they were. It was like the wish to be rid of the gift
of X-ray vision, to see again the fresh surface of "things". But, as is the way of the dialectic,
they could only be restored with a difference, the difference that is poetry.
The project of language itself may conceivably be one day renounced in a return to a
symbolic and intuitive existence foreshadowed now in the work of artists. Or there might be
just one word, substantive and no longer a mere name, in which all the secrets of the world
are unlocked. But who will speak it? Or is it, as in theology, being eternally spoken in an
eternally actual utterance inseparable, even if really distinct, from its speaker.

A commitment to dialectic has to open us to these perspectives, since as a total shift in truth-
theory it leaves nothing untouched. It might seem to make our cognitive claims more modest
although it is actually widening our scope with a view to a surer grasp upon and identity with
a much greater and truer reality than rationalism was prepared to envisage.

At first then one thinks of abstraction as the dawning of intelligence, of intelligibility rather if
we suppose a dormant potentiality in the creature becoming man. It is a light, all the same, the
intellectus agens of later philosophy, which whether the subject will or not streams out from
him upon all he sees. We imagine him picking out substance, general natures, of a mammoth
maybe, eventually of himself as subject. But our own principle of dialectic, stimulated indeed
by our imagination which makes all things real, forces us over into the opposite. It came
slowly, abstraction, something started to go wrong in the prehistoric consciousness, things
really began to fall apart and become indeed "things", first then. Would the centre hold? He,
and she, didn't know. The very sky seemed to be tearing apart, clouds drew away from their
background, that unitary and so beautiful picture later caught by the Impressionists, or any
painters at all. Birds appeared in the mind without their song, husbands without their wives.
He saw women prior to their characteristics, with faces that might have been men's faces; in
his mind snow drew away from its whiteness, helping him to feel the beginnings of gratitude
for its brilliant colour, tempering the winter darkness.

But mostly he suffered violent disorientation. During the millennia in which it lasted disquiet
grew to thunder, neuroses abounded, violence and fear. Nothing was given any more,
everything mocked him with its converse possibility. When the sun came out he thought it
might have rained, when he embraced his wife he knew he could throttle her instead. He
might even eat his children if he felt like it. Cries, shouts, fierce gestures, sometimes group
conflicts with little rhyme or reason, became the order of the day. He could not ask himself
why all this had happened, but only feel it, like a dog faced with an inexplicable personality
change, seemingly for the worse, in his master.

But over the centuries, in his rough throat, a pattern began to develop, as he strove to piece
together again what the new light inside him was tearing apart. He had begun to feel heat as
separate from the fire causing it; he needed to make it clear again to himself and others that it
was the fire that was hot. At first he gestured, then there were typical even representative
sounds as he strove to reunite, to identify, the fire and its heat. As he made the same sounds
over and over again, like a bird singing but with more purpose, more intent, even refining the
song to greater clarity, so as to be understood, so his throat and its organs began to adapt,
generation by generation, to his needs. Thus speech, a truly desperate remedy, was born.

**********************
Speech, though, language, is as a remedy incomplete, like most desperate measures. This is
why Hegel says that all judgements are false, only seeming thereby to refute himself. In
judgement the subject and predicate, namely, are identified while remaining different,
identified, that is, in their difference. A variant upon this, of course, in the end stands for the
truth of his whole philosophy and not for falsity. Here though, in language, as analysed in
"formal logic" by the Understanding (Verstand), he sees falsity. The copula signifies identity
between the rose and its redness, which yet remain distinct, like the two parties in Action and
Reaction reciprocally. It is as if one initially assumes that there could be a rose without colour
or this rose even without this particular colour.

This, in general, is why the truth will be the Notion, the unitary continuum and not the
discrete continuum. This unity is more absolute by far than any organic union, than life. All is
in each, each in all, as is finally made explicit at just this point in the dialectic, in the
Encyclopaedia rather, on the threshold of the Notion. The Notion, however, is not an exterior
word, it could not be this. It is, therefore, the point at which language is transcended as no
longer serving, though we are forced to use language to express this self-negation. Language
thus stops precisely at this category of Action and Reaction, where causality is transcended
and one identifies two things or more, as in the syllogism, in their very separateness of
conception, such as cause and effect.

The remedy for abstraction has, all the same, to pass through language, as, Christians say, the
New Testament requires the Old in order to fulfil it. A careful preparation is needed and it is
indeed the promise of abstraction, as of Verstand, that is fulfilled in dialectical Vernünft,
Reason, the remedy being one suited to incompleteness merely, not to disease. Such a
remedy, however, we are indicating, passes properly beyond language, as the Notion is no
longer bound to time and space. In medieval terms, the vita contemplativa, which Aristotle
had identified with study simply, theoria, does not belong to this life but to eternity. This
makes of the scholar or "recluse", as monachos, an "eschatalogical icon". In Hegel's
conception, however, it is Mind itself which makes this journey, returning to where it had
ever abided, itself the path as the Orientals say. All subjecthood is thus absolute and the
principle of personality itself is universality. All this is the concern of these final pages of the
Doctrine of Essence.

**************************************************

On this progressive relation to or rather disentangling of the dialectic from language we can, I
think, usefully consider some positions taken by McTaggart in the course of his Studies in the
Hegelian Dialectic of 1897, where he as it were takes issue with himself in true dialectical
fashion.

Thus he says that Hegel "uses so many terms as names of particular categories that none are
left to be used more generally." These last two words beg some questions. But he goes on,
"For example, to what does the whole dialectic process apply?… Being or Reality…
Existence (another view)? But Hegel has already appropriated these names."

One might ask, why not just say with Hegel that "Logic is the science of the pure Idea", i.e. of
the whole or Absolute in as far as not alienated into nature, and not of Being, Reality or
Existence? These are indeed, when correctly viewed, categories within the Logic and not
names (mis)appropriated from their more normal (correct) use. That alone explains how
Hegel can dismiss "those theories, which ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the
existent thing and all the other categories which have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea"
(232).

Hegel's presentation of Existence, that is, is just how he understands existence. This might
seem more difficult to sustain in the case of mechanism or chemism (but whoever heard of
chemism anyway?), while Life we may take as Hegel's view of what life is, and why it cannot
stand for the pure Idea or Absolute, either in reality or as name.

McTaggart, that is, deviates interestingly from Hegel. Thus he criticises him in the opposite
sense over Being. For he seems to imply that Hegel had indeed here just taken the common
notion of Being, without "appropriating" it for any idea of his own (as he says of other
categories), and then made it more "comprehensive" than he had a "right" to do. A third
possibility, the true one, is that Hegel gives a deeper and original sense to Being thus
abstracted, which he regards as correct as against ordinary usage. This is not the same as a
stipulative appropriation. Thus he points out that Being simply is, is one with, the Beginning
of thinking. He does not make some "mediated" being philosophy's starting-point, as
McTaggart charges (cf. Enc. 86).

Of course there can only be a priori names for things in this way if there is Absolute Mind,
Absolute Knowledge. Perhaps McTaggart did not finally think this, but rather regarded
nature, sense, the immediate, as intrinsic to thought's intelligibility, even though he finally
denied reality to nature and sense, thus implying that thought too (at least as judgement) was
"misperception". In the Absolute theory and praxis, like cognition and will, are fused. We
may, that is, correct McTaggart as he wished to correct Hegel, though wishing also to
maintain, in 1910, that "no other philosopher has penetrated so deeply into reality." It would
be interesting here to investigate McTaggart's notion of "cosmology", as in his Studies in the
Hegelian Cosmology (1903, the year his Cambridge colleague G.E. Moore published
Principia Ethica, with its doctrine of "intrinsic value"). Is Hegel being "cosmological" if, as
we assert here, he ventures to say, in his Logic (either version of it) what life is, thereby
claiming to judge, or supersede, accounts in biology? What about analogy? On our view he is
saying what life and causality really are or ought to be, and hence ought to be seen as. These
two, he claims, being and ought-to-be, are the same, the most radical response to Hume
imaginable, though it is equally a concurrence. The supreme example of this is "I", where we
cannot say what we would mean or mean to say, in defiance of this most universal term.

Hegel is not then creating unique categories as steps in a pre-creational dialectic up to

absolute self-knowledge and nothing more. Or is he? This, perhaps, is what McTaggart
thought the Logic should be, even though language per se seeks to enmesh it in the Kosmos
and away from Necessity, to which we now return.

*****************************

When Hegel speaks of "another substance on which the effect takes place" he is not merely
referring to the convenient, as it were two-dimensional notion of a Substrate, the so to say
pre-existent matter or unformed chaos of earlier thought. The "dark materials" are truly "his",
in Milton's fine phrase, also finely appropriated by Philip Pullman yet here belonging to the
Notion itself. They belong entirely to the cause. At the same time their "existence", their
independence, "so long as effect is kept separate from cause", shows the nullity or finitude of
the causal relation along, therefore, with the idea of caused being. The immediacy of this is
suspended. The effect, again, is necessarily pre-constituted, i.e. before or anterior to any real
constitution of an effect, in that action of the cause in which cause as cause is anything at all
(154). Action supplants being as ultimate or absolute relation, "one and the same on both
sides" (155):
 The cause assumed to be first is on account of its immediacy passive, a
dependent being, and an effect.

We should not miss that when Hegel speaks of a first cause he will not here be abstracting
from a representation of the First Cause, since this above all is the notion that he here
deconstructs. Hegel goes much deeper than Kant, who stopped with the contradiction of the
constitution of intellect objectively causing our formation of a purely subjective or less than
valid notion of such causing. This was to fail to take Hume seriously (so Kant might just as
well have slumbered on thus far). Hegel does take him seriously, however, as a call to delving
deeper beyond the immediate than had hitherto been achieved. Thus when Einstein, in turn,
objected that "God does not play dice" he missed this profundity, as represented implicitly in
quantum thinking in physics (let us not fool ourselves that it belongs to some particular
"interpretation"). He missed that the alternative of dice-playing, of hazard, is conceived on the
same "two-dimensional" level, again, as causality itself, since it is enunciated as an intrinsic if
negative relation to it.

With causality is bound up also the notion of two "sides" as "pre-supposed", God and the
world as we say. But the world is a superstition, an unreflected immediacy, which thus makes
the cause itself a dependent being, which is a contradiction not to be got rid of as long as
causality, the category, is retained. Distinction between any two causes, such as cause and
effect become cause, "is accordingly void". The then unique cause, thus become substance as
suspending itself in its effect, is thus cause "in this operation only" of self-suspension, and
therefore never was as cause. Spinoza is taken as seriously as Hume, and therefore equally
supplemented and corrected. Substance too "never was", is not the final reality or,
alternatively, he will say, substance is subjectivity.

This "unity of the double cause is also actual", the actual relation where the doubleness is
overcome, the relation itself being the "substance", not "between" anything anterior. Properly
we have "the cause in act of constituting itself". In such constituting (better than
"constitution" as Wallace has it) "lies its being", which is not being but freedom, we shall see.

Reciprocal action just means that each characteristic we impose is also to be

suspended and inverted into its opposite, and that in this way the essential
nullity of the "moments" is explicitly stated. (156)

Reciprocity, as we have said, is the moment where the nullity of the moments, of the dialectic
as it develops to its final and enduring Result, becomes explicit. "An effect is introduced into
the primariness" (my stress), so "in other words, the primariness (of the cause) is abolished".

People "take shelter" merely in the reciprocal relation when they realise that "things can no
longer be studied satisfactorily from a causal point of view." This, in our society, is jocularly
discussed, or rather dismissed, as the "chicken and the egg" problem. Are feathers developed
in order to fly or does flight foster feathers? Reciprocity is "the proximate truth of the relation
of cause and effect and stands, so to say, on the threshold of the notion". But "we should not
rest content with applying this relation", "on that very ground". It does not give us "a
thoroughly comprehensive idea". Where A and B mutually cause one another, as it were
impossibly, they should be recognised as "factors of… the notion and nothing else". They
must, to put an end to the mere "turn and turn about", be "seen to be founded in this notion".
Now what is meant here?
"This pure self-reciprocation is therefore Necessity unveiled or realised." Therefore! The link
is "the identity of what are esteemed actual things", which they are not. Their very self-
subsistence, their separateness in being, "is the infinite negative self-relation" and "bound to
be necessity" as finally liberating from this condition. This is what "the circulation of
substance through causality and reciprocity… only expressly makes out or states", as we
discover in the breakdown of these categories. To be self-subsistent would be not to be
anything else, not finally even oneself. Reality is relational, all that is within is without, just as
all that is without is within. This negative relation is infinite self-relation, viewed as a kind of
nothingness, infinitely negating all otherness. In fact the independence of all things lies and
only lies in their identity. I am I because I am one with you, finding the universal in myself.

This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom; and the truth of substance is the
Notion", finally. This is "an independence which, though self-repulsive into
distinct elements, yet in that repulsion is self-identical, and in the movement of
reciprocity still at home and conversant only with itself. (158)

Infinity, that is, is necessarily differentiated, and infinitely so. Ultimately, since we are
speaking of Freedom, this will be an affair of persons, in whatever form. Persons though are
not then substances in the usual sense, but rather relations, while the relations are themselves
persons. These relations are absolute, linking nothing, we said already, that can be more
fundamental. This is why Aquinas had thought that the soul is only known in its knowing of
something, more properly someone, else, since there the knowledge is reciprocal, not veiled
by objectification in the very act of a necessarily failed perceiving. Man "is most independent
when he knows himself to be determined by the absolute idea throughout", by moral or
theoretical conviction or insight. Hegel indicates here, again, that it is Spinoza (and therefore
Leibniz) upon whom he leans, rather than Kant. In the other, one meets with one's self.
Thinking means this, and to think is to think necessity. This is liberation, from the infinitely
negative self-relation, at the same time as one confirms its negativity by going out from it,
which is really an entering within. It is not a case of having one's self as something (or
someone) else, ultimately (pace Aquinas), but of having one's own being truly and fully in the
other(s), "with which it is bound up by the force of necessity". This is what "is called I", free
Spirit, Love, Blessedness. It completes or realises "the great vision of substance in Spinoza"
(159).

Thinking ultimately, for Hegel, makes things to be what they are, that is, ultimately, not
"things" at all, nor even "moments" in Thought's process since we have acknowledged "the
essential nullity of the 'moments'". Thought, rather, is infinitely differentiated into the most
perfect unity imaginable, Absolute Unity indeed or the polar opposite of abstract simplicity.
As "self-repulsive" it is self-identical "in that repulsion", finding itself in otherness itself
which thus finds itself in the Notion. Such otherness is beyond the divide of One or Many, a
realised identity of elements whose "independence only lies in their identity" (157). For
having come so far we are entitled to say "whose", the truth of Necessity being, after all,
Freedom, as "the truth of substance is the Notion" and not something impersonal. "It is
evident that it is this man who thinks" (Aquinas). Indeed, and at many levels. Subjectivity,
that is, is absolute, as "I" is the universal of universals. This philosophy is all of a piece,
benignly circular, with neither beginning nor end, with no point of entry that will not later
suspend or cancel itself. This indeed is its only possible badge of authenticity as a
transcendence of finitude and falsity. In this reciprocal repulsion, as we have traced it, it, the
Notion, is "still at home and conversant only with itself". The Oracle, in commanding
philosophy, in its prime subject Socrates, to be exclusively busy with self-knowledge, thus
imposed no restriction or limit, moralistic or otherwise. It rather declared the prime truth, that
of absolute subjectivity, of I AM. Thus indeed, to come down for a moment from the
mountain of philosophical transfiguration, which is transfiguration into the perfect form
beyond all figures of Philosophy, consolatrix, we beget or conceive one another. We do that
in that ever-present action or activity we have been talking about (156), passive cognition
giving way to, as being absorbed into, active volition on the threshold of the Absolute Idea.
This, in turn, nullifies all such previous and finite moments, sharing nothing with them. They
are forgotten or drowned in that absolute drinking, as of Lethe, alternatively styled as
"thought thinking itself". This happens, however, not at the end, variously, of time or of Life,
as if what belonged to these could continue without them, in straight contradiction, but in that
eternal Result traced out and reconstructed in dialectical Reason, "setting all in order".

***********************************************

The physicist David Deutsch, who first devised a theory for quantum computers, rejects the
idea of "interpreting" quantum physics or its results. He likens such interpretations to the
backward step required of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition of that time, to qualify his results
as a mere "as if". What these results require is that we confess that the same things or
situations, or positions (of particles), "both are and are not" in Plato's words. There is no
"uncertainty" about this. Therefore, Deutsch says, it would have been more honest to assume
that there is no "objective reality" at all. He, however, abhors "the denial of physical reality",
which "has seriously hindered progress". His own discovery of quantum computer theory
would have been made thirty or even fifty years earlier without this incubus.2
So he goes both backward and forward at the same time. He rejects in principle the denial of
physical reality he sees as following upon quantum physics as now interpreted, in
Copenhagen or elsewhere indifferently. This leads him not so much to postulate as to assert
the reality ("existence") of "other universes", in a unity of action he calls the "multiverse". He
bases this empirically upon "all interference experiments", i.e. upon the observably deviant
behaviour of particles, such as photons. These experiments, however, merely assume the
absoluteness of the immediate, of "perception", such as Hegel, like Kant before him, calls in
question. If there is a result not caused by this photon, then there must be another photon or
other entity at work, which nonetheless behaves "exactly like" a photon, not from this
universe and therefore from another such. The assumption, that is, is that the experiment is
being interfered with.
Only upon the assumption of interacting parallel universes, it seems to follow, can we explain
"the fact" of the solidity of matter, deniable under the classical assumption of one universe of
discrete and separate atoms attracting one another. This then is his explanation of how one
gets from the "both and" world of quantum physics to the "either or" appearance of immediate
reality, effectively by refusing to accept the "uncertainties" of "both and" thinking, such as we
have found Hegel investigating.
The main objection to Deutsch's solution is that it is one of consistent objectification, of a
falling back upon Verstand alone. Thus, as regards the subject, he refers to copies of the self
in other universes. But how can the self have copies? While Deutsch "saves" the absolute
validity of a law of formal contradiction by asserting alternative physical realities, Hegel
shows how thinking is at home in its other, not merely contingently but as what it essentially
is. Thus the Doctrine of Essence is that of the straight denial of the immediate, that things are
not as they are without mediation presented, that the seen itself elicits its denial as the unseen,
as thought transcends perception. Thus Hegel would indeed dismiss "this otherworldly stuff",
2
I am quoting from the interview with Deutsch conducted by Johann Grolle and Rafaela von Bredow, editors of
Der Spiegel, 14 March 2005, see pp. 174-188, and given there auf deutsch.
on the principle he shares with Deutsch that all is explicable, including "contradictions" found
in reality. They are explicable though not by Verstand over again, as when one merely finds
something temporarily mislaid, but by Vernünft, Reason, as where one sees beyond "this
passing show" (Quine). It is the type of explanation that differs.
There is no need to see this, however, as the latest version of the "two cultures" dilemma.
Physicists are obliged to respect the findings of philosophy, which must indeed "interpret".
What Deutsch is rejecting is a Kantian interpretation of the quantum results, basing his own
account, however, merely upon an unexamined realist view of "physical reality". For this is
itself a philosophical view, one however which does not stand up to the Hegelian,
Parmenidean or Platonic critiques, under the last of which we can include Aristotle, who
states that the Mind, nous, anima intellectualis, "is in a manner all things". Conversely, by
Hegel's analysis, the possible is the necessary as included in Absolute Mind, idea, or, as
expressed under the figure of time, "what can happen at some time does happen" (Aquinas).
The "possible world" is, as Deutsch sees, necessary, the "multiverse" containing every
possibility.
So this is what Deutsch ends up by at least implicitly affirming, as if compelled by the truth.
The figure of other universes functions or should function as indication of the ideality of the
universe as such. "Universe" just means all, viewed cosmically or outside of Thought, das
Weltall. Hegel, however, has shown that the immediate opposition in our thought of Inside
and Outside resolves itself into a reciprocal identity of these two. Thought calls, that is, for the
abandonment of this dilemma, which is also "figure", of being in or out of the mind conceived
of as some sort of finite box. Deutsch is an absolute idealist unbeknown to himself. Or is he?
Later in the interview he asserts the possibility of mechanical time-travel, a development upon
mechanical quantum-computers. To that extent he seems wedded to the mechanical. But in so
far as these computers may be set to change our view of "the essence of reality" we will find,
according to Hegel's analysis, that the mechanical supersedes itself. Of itself it demands to be
taken up into the transcendent unity of Absolute Spirit and so negated in its very negativity.
This, indeed, is the true import and significance of Deutsch's courageous and insightful
speculations. They teach us to see the technological revolution as a further step towards this
perceptual and practical goal, cognition and then volition themselves giving way to the
Absolute Idea.