Monism and Dialectic
Abstract
This thesis, Monism and Dialectic, examines significant difficulties faced by contemporary approaches to the Logic, diagnoses them as rooted in neglect of two central historical references for Hegel’s arguments at the beginning of the Logic, and proposes an original solution. The result is a promising interpretation of Hegelian dialectic as grounded in the skeptical position of strict monism and a recentring of constitutive contradiction as the motor of the dialectic.
A basic antinomy between Kantian-formal and Parmenidean-material readings governs the reception of Hegel’s Logic both among its detractors and its greatest proponents. Hegel rejects both readings, or rather accepts both, insofar as each is importantly one-sided. What is required is a unification of the two incompatible positions. I demonstrate what such a unification must entail by tracing the progression from the phenomenal to pure thinking, then from the pure thought of indeterminate immediacy (Being) to a determinate indeterminate (Nothing), then finally to a mediated immediacy (Becoming). The first problem is how to advance from mere thinking to the pure thought of pure being; the second, how to advance from pure being to its determination. Kant’s surprising monism emerges from a close examination of his doctrine of noumenal ignorance. For Hegel, Kant has no grounds to reject that the absence of determinate knowledge of the thing in itself implies indeterminate knowledge of thing in itself; he is equally powerless to bar the way to a further move from indeterminate knowledge of things to knowledge of indeterminate things. The mere thought of the thing-in-itself thus becomes its positive cognition as a noumenon, or, equivalently, Parmenidean pure being. We then encounter the second problem: how to advance from the indeterminacy of pure being to its determination. I propose a solution to this problem grounded in an antinomical reading of the opening standpoint of the Logic.