The being of thought or Being as having a 'life of its own'?
Houlgate on Pippin in 'Hegel on Being'
This is the third essay dedicated to the difference between a Houlgatian and Pippinian reading of the start of the Science of Logic. The earlier essays can be read here and here.
In his latest book on Hegel, Houlgate devotes a section to Pippinโs reading of the Logic (Houlgate 2024:127โ32). In it, he writes much the same as in earlier work. One of the most striking and crucial ways in which Houlgateโs reading diverges from Pippinโs lies in the fact that, according to Houlgate, โwe can say that such logic is the direct thought, or intellectual intuition, of being and thus a metaphysics in a pre-Kantian, rationalist senseโ (2024:128), even โa post-Kantian Spinozismโ (2024:132). Importantly, Houlgate says that this direct thought of Being is not the thought of Being that purportedly lies beyond thought; rather, โit consists in direct consciousness of the being that pure thought itself isโ (2024:129). What is crucial here, is that Houlgate does not argue that at the start of the Logic we do after all talk about Being in the old-fashioned sense of the Being that is over against thought. Houlgate seems to be saying that by insisting on Being as the starting point this should not be read as saying there is a distinction between thought and Being. Instead, what is at issue at the beginning of the Logic is the being of thought itself. But framing it this way leads to a paradox. On the one hand, Houlgate wants to emphasise Being, and that the Logic is already โinitially ontologyโ (2024:129) by proposing the idea of the being of thought itself, thus avoiding any dualism between Being and thought, but on the other hand he keeps on saying things like this:
The reflection that [all the determinations] are categories of thought belongs ... to us and is not explicit in the determinations themselves; in themselves they are just ways of being: being something, being finite and so on. (2024:129)
There does seem to be some kind of dualism after all: the determinations of Being are on the one hand categories of thought, i.e. reflections done by a thinker who thinks the logic of the determinations; on the other hand, these determinations are just what they are, namely, determinations of Being itself. The qualification โin themselvesโ suggests a kind of dualism between the determinations as determinations of Being and the determinations insofar as they are thought. It is clear that Houlgate wants to deny the Pippinian idea that the determinations insofar as they are thought are all that the determinations of Being could be. They are just the same determinations. But does Houlgate suggest that the determinations of Being โin themselvesโ are somehow independent of the way these determinations are categories of thought too? It does seem so. Houlgateโs argument seems to be twofold:
1. The categories are ontological determinations of Being itself.
2. These same determinations are then also categories of thought insofar as the determinations of Being are reflected upon in the Logic.
But this appears to conflict with his earlier statement that the Being concerned at the start of the Logic is โthought as being itselfโ (2024:132) or, put differently, the โbeing that pure thought itself isโ (2024:129). Here, Houlgateโs claim is univocally the claim that
3. The Being with which the Logic starts out is the Being of pure thought itself.
Later on, Houlgate argues that โeven thought as a mode of self-conscious spiritโthe thought that undertakes the logicโis a mode of being: it is being-that-has-become-thoughtโ (2024:132). This amounts to the claim:
4. Thought is a mere mode of Being.
It is not clear if thought as โa mode of Beingโ (4) is equivalent to the โBeing of pure thought itselfโ (3). The former could also be construed as saying that thought is merely one mode among many modes in which Being manifests itself, whereas the latter stresses the fact that thinking itself exhibits Being in some predominant way, namely in its purest sense; that is, it stresses the ontological aspect of thinking, but thinking here is paramount. Houlgate appears to want to straddle both meanings. But there is a disparity. In one sense the Being concerned is much more than just the one mode, thought, whereas the other sense refers to Being in its purest manifestation, namely as thinking. In sense (3), Houlgate takes Being and thought as identical: Thought is Being and Being is Thought, as his mantra often was in personal discussion (the Identity Thesis).
Sense (4) seems to emphasise more the irreducibility of Being to thought that Houlgate is keen to point out in order to contrast his reading with Pippinโs. This is further confirmed by the claim that โthrough the categories thought understands such being to have an immediacy and a life of its own that is irreducible to what thought โcountsโ as beingโ (2024:131). Here, it is quite clear that Houlgate wants to keep Being, โwholly in its own rightโ (2024:131), and how thought understands Being firmly apart, i.e. not at all strictly identical, in the sense of Pippinโs claim that what thought conceives of Being is what Being could conceivably be. What is strange here is that the being of thought itself, with which, on Houlgateโs account, the Logic should be seen as starting out, is not wholly identical to the Being that purportedly has โa life of its ownโ and is irreducible to the very thinking with which the Logic starts out. The โirreducibilityโ claim and the Identity Thesis do not sit well together.
Furthermore, how does Houlgate square the contradiction that seems to lie in the fact that the very determinations of Being that are derived in the course of the Logic will have to be the determinations of the Being of thought itself, with which the Logic started out, when thought itself is just one of many modes of Being, that is, one among many determinations of Being? Are the determinations of Being as they are being derived determinations of Being โin itselfโ, as it has a life of its own, or are they the very determinations of the being of thought itself, i.e. of thought itself as Being? Houlgate wants both, but it is clear there is a tension here: do we start with Being as having a life on its own, independently of how thought thinks about it, or with the Being of thought itself? And if the latter, how does the Being of thought turn into the Being that during the course of the derivation of its determinations retains its independence from the thought that undertakes the derivation?
There are two strands in Houlgateโs reading that do not seem to be reconcilable: on the one hand, there is the starting-point of the ontology of pure thinking, concerning the pure Being of thought itself, thought just being there, and on the other, there is the conception of Being as irreducible to thought, as having โa life of its ownโ. If the determinations of Being as they are being derived in the course of the Logic were conceived in terms of the determinations of the pure Being of thought itself, of being pure thinking, then Houlgate would be much closer to a reading such as Pippinโs, which says that the determinations of Being just are the determinations of pure thought, self-thinkingโs own content developing out of itself. But Houlgate doesnโt want to endorse such an identitarian reading of thought and Being, for to him it reduces Being to thought too much. In Houlgateโs view, it doesnโt account for the fact that the Logic is an ontology first and foremost. But this emphasis comes at the cost of a lingering dualism, or at least the semblance of it, within the unity of Being and thought, which Houlgate does not really account for.
References:
Houlgate, S. (2024), Hegel on Being. Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegelโs โScience of Logicโ (London: Bloomsbury).
ยฉ Dennis Schulting, 2025.