The Moments and Movement of Thought

Or, when I finally break down and use a yin-yang metaphor.

Last time, I mentioned the apparently paradoxical nature of self-difference and tried to demonstrate a resolution to that paradox through a discussion of the nature of duality. The use of paradox and duality to try to convey the mysterious character of ultimate reality is a standard part of the teachings of mystical religions, but this kind of talk can be frustrating, perhaps especially for Westerners, because at times it may feel like the discussion is purely negative without offering anything positive to hold onto or serve as an explanation.

I also found this method to be of limited use until I spent more time with the work of Spinoza and Hegel—both of whom have been referred to as mystics, often derisively—and realized they were indeed arriving at the same mystical conclusions, but by way of methods and described by language much more compatible with a Western context.

I think, at root, the difference between mystical teachers on the one hand, for example Laozi or Meister Eckhart, and philosophers like Spinoza and Hegel on the other hand is that the former often found ordinary thought to be an obstacle to the experience of truth and so tried to confound that ordinary thought in such a way that the student’s mind would make a qualitative leap to a higher comprehension of reality. Spinoza and Hegel, however, sought to use ordinary thought as a ladder to that higher comprehension. In this way, their work does not disavow thought, but teaches it to overcome its own preconceptions.

While I think Spinoza tended to identify the ills of the world as a simple failure to think things through to their ultimate conclusions, that is, to fully exercise thought, Hegel showed how our misconceptions can arise from thought itself. Specifically, he showed how a particular mode of thought which he called “the understanding” would often be mistaken for—and take itself to be—the entirety of thought.

In this post, I’d like to describe Hegel’s model of how thought “moves,” and the various “moments” within that movement. This discussion might be a little more technical than previous posts, but it will hopefully provide some additional context for some of the more paradoxical or metaphorical things I’ve written here. I’ll also relate these moments of thought back to the concepts I’ve been calling pure difference and self-difference, which will hopefully more fully illustrate what I mean by them.

Hegel conceives of thought as a movement between three “moments,” each performed by a different kind, or mode, of thought. The first moment is when thought tries to grasp its object in isolation, and it is the work of the mode of thought Hegel calls “the understanding.” It is a moment of abstraction because it removes its object from its context, and it is a positive moment both in the sense that thought 1. posits, i.e. places, its object before itself for consideration and 2. considers it in terms of what it is and traits that it has (positively) instead of what it is not or does not have (negatively). Indeed, the understanding cannot conceive of things negatively, because, as we will see, negativity always entails either an implicit or explicit relationship between the things that the understanding keeps separate. 

To use the familiar example of yin and yang, the understanding views each as entirely positive and entirely separate; there is yin, and there is yang, and they are essentially different. For the understanding, “this” is only this, “that” is only that, and the interactions between any two things are only one (positively) pushing up against the other. This is the billiard ball model of classical physics which, while intuitive and mostly adequate for describing our experience of reality, nevertheless results in a number of apparently insoluble problems. I mentioned a couple of these in my introductory post, such as Hume’s claim that we never actually observe causality and that there doesn’t appear to be a mechanism by which the external world could cause us to take any kind of voluntary action (the Is-Ought Problem). 

But it also causes a much more dangerous and insidious problem, which I’ve been calling the belief in pure difference. This is the metaphysical claim that reality is and is only these separate things, and it amounts to the understanding mistaking its own activity for a reality independent of itself. The understanding can only “see” separate things, so it mistakenly believes that the universe is filled with separate things! As I’ve briefly introduced in previous posts, and will demonstrate further in future posts, this worldview has dire ethical and political consequences, and is in fact the very root of suffering.

“Ordinary” thought tends to stop at the level of the understanding, at least as far as it is explicitly aware. Arguably no thought would be possible at all without the following moments, but they are, at any rate, largely invisible to conscious thought that has not undertaken the task of self-examination. When it does so, however, it will arrive at the next moment, wherein thought realizes it cannot coherently grasp its object in isolation and must therefore turn to something else with which to compare and mediate it. 

Here is a gloss on Hegel’s own example to try to demonstrate what this looks like. Basically, the understanding selects an object and calls it “this.” “This” is purely positive, purely demonstrative, abstract, and immediate. But when the understanding tries to grasp what exactly “this” is, it realizes that everything is a “this,” and is forced to place its object in a contrastive, negative relationship with something else: “that.” The apprehension of this relationship, and indeed of all relationships, is the work of reason, in this case “dialectical reason,” as in a dialogue. To continue with the yin and yang example, dialectical reason understands that what it is to be yin is to not be yang, and vice versa.

This brings us to the third and final moment. It is not only the unity of its positive and negative moments, that yin is both yin and not yang; that is just the insight of the first two moments together. Rather, the insight of the third moment is that the two previous moments are reflective, that is, both yin and yang are not each other, and thus each moment 1. finds itself in and 2. constitutes its opposite. Notice also that positive and negative moments are no longer fixed (as in the understanding) or purely negatively related, flipping back and forth between each other (as in dialectical reason), but are now also positively related, each defining what it means to be the other in a kind of loop or spiral (as yin and yang are typically depicted). Each is and is not the other. Hegel calls this the moment of “speculative” reason, not in the sense of being in some way uncertain, but rather in the sense of the original Latin, meaning “to look at,” as in a mirror. In contrast to the abstraction of the understanding, this moment is concrete, actual, because it grasps both its object and its context. And this is what I have been calling the relationship of self-difference.

I hope this helps to clarify some of what I’ve been discussing in the last few posts without being too technical. I also recognize that most of what I’ve been writing about thus far has been quite abstract, so I appreciate you bearing with me while I lay the groundwork for the practical application of these concepts. As I hope I’ve at least begun to show, the concrete world we live in (and hope to save) is in no small part a result of—or a reflection of—what we believe it to be, so changing that world will ultimately require us to change our beliefs about what it is. Thanks for reading.