The Oneness of Thought and Being

Part 3 of a discussion of certainty and its importance.

Last time, we ended with the certainty that founds all certainty: thought is. This is a certainty because of the simple fact that there is no difference between the knowledge of the thing and the thing that is known. When thought thinks itself, there is no gap between subject and object into which doubt can slip, as there is with anything else. In other words, thought is is not only a certainty, it is the only possible certainty. Being is intelligible and real. It is not merely an appearance or an illusion. We know this because, at a minimum, intelligibility exists, our thought of what we encounter exists. Our thoughts and what they contain are indubitably real.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be worth very much in terms of telling us about the world and how we ought to live, but as I said last week, out of this one certainty will emerge everything that it means to be and to be known. It is a simple truth that contains absolutely everything, but in an undeveloped, embryonic form. This simple unity of thought and being will turn out to be the being of objects and of people and of space and time—all of this will be included in what it means to be. But being will also always maintain its character of intelligibility because it is nothing other than thought. So, this week, I want to talk about what this certainty, this unity of thought and being, actually is. Next week, I’ll walk through the first few stages of the Science of Logic to show how it begins to develop itself into the entire world of our experience.

With the Science of Logic, Hegel proposes to not only study the nature of thought, which would have been the typical understanding of the term “logic,” but also to study the nature of being. As I discussed last time, he believes he can do this because he can show how thought and being collapse into a unity such that the study of one is always the study of both. But what is this unity, this “simplest of all simples”? Hegel calls it “Being”—immediate, indeterminate, pure being—but he cautions that Being is both this immediate indeterminacy and also the thought of this empty immediacy. This is because, again, we are dealing with the unity of thought and being, and despite the ostensible first topic of the Logic being “Being,” we are always also talking about thought.

An important word of caution: we need to resist the idea that this is just some mental trick we’re performing that isn’t connected to the world “outside,” that we’re picturing the world inside our heads and manipulating that picture. What we’re talking about is the reality we encounter, but as the oneness that exists before we add labels or draw distinctions, even the distinction between subject and object. It’s the “this” that encompasses not only everything before us, but even our own awareness of it. What we are talking and thinking about is perhaps what meditators experience as the state of consciousness called samadhi—the felt extinction of the difference between subject and object.

But what does it mean that these two qualities—the subjective and objective, thought and being—can nevertheless always be discerned within this unity? For one thing, it means that there is no such thing as unintelligible being, nothing that can exist beyond the grasp of thought, as Kant believed. It also means that, in some sense, what is is thought. This would contradict our popular worldview (physicalism) that claims there is something “out there” that exists independently of thought. Contrary to physicalism, there is, for example, no such thing as a tree that falls in a forest without anyone around to hear it, or, at least, a falling tree is somehow also the thought of a falling tree. This may mean, mysteriously, that there is no tree until it is also the thought of a tree for someone or something (or perhaps even for the tree itself), but whatever the case may be, the thing and the thought of the thing are, from the most fundamental level of being to its most particular, the same.

There is something in our ordinary experience that has this quality of somehow both being something and being about something at the same time: consciousness. Consciousness is always of something, yet there is also always a kind of difference between consciousness per se and its object, despite the fact that, again, there is no such thing as objectless consciousness, even if its object is the pure, empty indeterminateness of its own self. So this unity with which Hegel proposes to begin the Logic can be thought of as this empty consciousness, but an infinite rather than a finite consciousness like mine or yours. It is a consciousness that is being: the universal mind. Hegel writes of his project:

Logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.

So, it is Being as universal mind, Being that is not different from thought, that is the starting point of Hegel’s Logic. And as he described in the introduction, the necessity to avoid presuppositions about the topic of study means that we cannot presuppose a method by which it can be studied, because method itself, the movement of thought as it encounters something, is a feature of our topic. We must therefore only observe Being and whatever it may reveal about itself.

Next week, we’ll see what it begins to reveal about itself in the first few chapters of the Logic and how it will turn out to contain everything there is. Thanks for reading.