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Hegel on Contingency, or, Fluidity And Multiplicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Jay Lampert
Jay Lampert*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Abstract

This piece presents some motifs concerning fluidity and multiplicity that arise from the Contingency chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic. I do not present it as a microcosm of an overall interpretation of Hegel. Still, emphasising Hegel's categories of fluidity and dissolution, and of multiplicity and its marks, obviously intensifies a certain version of the dialectic. One might call this ‘far left Hegelianism’. If it were to be generalised as a reading of Hegel, it might share something with Jean-Luc Nancy's polemical little book, Hegel: L'inquiétude du négatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997). A reading like this one is unlikely to have been written prior to Deleuze's ontology of multiplicity.

In undialectical philosophies, contingency, like desire, suggests themes of arbitrariness, unsystematic events, isolated moments of chance, and so on. In Hegel, of course, the roles played by desire and contingency are quite the contrary. Desire is part of Hegel's account of how a subject can in the movement of life find itself as part of the truth of objects, at the same time as it finds objects as part of its own truth — the direct contrary of arbitrary subjective preference. Contingency is part of Hegel's account of how the mark of a necessary totality is visible in every free actualisation of a possibility — the direct contrary of isolated events. The clue to the dialectic is the way the desubstantialising categories of fluidity and multiplicity are generated precisely through the apparently substantialising categories of actuality and necessity.

Type
Hegel on Contingency
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 26 , Issue 1-2: number 51/52 , 2005 , pp. 74 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2005

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References

Notes

1 While I make liberal use of Miller's, A. V. translation of The Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1969), especially pp. 542–53Google Scholar, the translations here are my own. Page numbers follow Hegel, G. W. F., Wissenschaft der Legik: Die Lebre vom Wesrn (1813) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 The best commentaries on these passages emphasise the necessity of contingency in Hegel. Houlgate's reading of the logic of contingency emphasises the eventual destruction of all finite things as part of their necessary structure. Stephen Houlgate, , ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel's Science of Logic ’, in The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 27, No. 1, Fall 1995, pp. 37–49, esp. p. 46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is no doubt correct, but emphasising it produces a somewhat artificial reading of the text. My own view is that there are many surprising features of Hegel's texts, and when one tries too hard to render Hegel's theses compatible widi conventional topics and theses, one misses some of what is avant-garde in Hegel.

Burbidge's article on this text exhibits more of a dialectical procedure. Burbidge shows (as I shall do in my own way) the necessary reversals whereby possibilities show themselves to be actual, and actualities show themselves to be merely contingent possibilities, to the point at which it becomes difficult to distinguish possibility and actuality at all. Burbidge then goes on to show how such difficulties are finally resolved, or at least expressed, in the ‘total complex’. Burbidge, John W., ‘The Necessity of Contingency: An Analysis of Hegel's Chapter on “Actuality” in the Science of Logic ’, in Steinkraus, , Schmitz, Warren E., and Schmitz, Kenneth I., Art and Logic in Hegel's Philosophy (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), pp. 201–217, esp. pp. 209–211 Google Scholar.

Neither Houlgate nor Burbidge discusses the role of ‘multiplicity’ in Hegel's account of contingency, though Burbidge's reference to the ‘total complex’ comes close.

3 See die ‘Perception’ chapter of the Phenomenology and the ‘Thing and its Properties’ sections of the Science of Logic.

4 Derrida, Jacques, Spurs, Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons, Les Styles de Nietzsche, translated by Hariow, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar.