ABSTRACT
What is difficult in reading Hegel is understanding what (for him) it is to think. He will not countenance a splitting of the world into active mind and passive matter, insides and outsides:1 thought as a process, thought as something that ‘falls upon’ a reality otherwise undiscovered. Thinking is what we do; we can’t think ourselves not thinking. And if we can’t think ourselves not thinking, we can’t think ourselves speechless and alone, engaged in or with or by nothing. In Hegelian terms, to think what is nothing but ‘identity’ is to think nothing-though if we grasp that we shall see that thinking nothing is importantly different from not thinking. This is where Hegel’s logic takes off:2 if, in trying to think what it-is-to-be, we recognise that we are thinking sheer emptiness, we encounter the most primitive of all contradictions, because we cannot think away what-it-is-to-be without thinking pure nonsense, yet we cannot think it as such. Shifting out of the purely Hegelian vocabulary, we should have to say that we can’t begin to think, decide to take up a ‘thinking’ stance towards something called The World, analysing it into primitive components like essence and predicates. If ‘thinking is what we do’, thinking is contemporary with our being around in the first place. Yet we cannot think that bare fact of ‘being around’ without thinking a context for it-which means we cannot think what it is to think in the abstract; we think our being and our thinking in their concrete, time-taking actuality. We think in relation to particulars; but we cannot, quite strictly cannot, think particulars simply as particulars, because we can’t concretely think a pure self-identity. To think a particular is to think ‘this, not that; here, not there; now, not then’: to map it on to a conceptual surface by way of exclusions or negations, yet in that act to affirm also its relatedness, its involvement; from empty identity, thinkable only as a kind of absence and indeterminacy, to the specific position, this not that, and by way of that ‘contradictory’ state to arrive at thinking the ‘individual’ as convergence of the universal and the particular.3 Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness-not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.
