ABSTRACT
In Chapter One, we have seen that any attempt to think essence (as opposed to merely intuit it in its immediacy) has to come to grips with the question of unity. Consider this: if an essence stands for the distinctive character of an entity, this entails that the determinate presence of something is also, some-how, the presence of the other. Kojève offers us an unforgettable image:
Let us consider a gold ring. There is a hole and this hole is just as essential to the ring as the gold is; without the gold, the ‘hole’ (which, moreover, would not exist) would not be a ring, but without the hole, the gold (which would none the less exist) would not be a ring either (Introduction to Hegel, p. 485; quoted from Descombes, 35).
The gold ring is an undeniable instance of how determinate presence (the ‘being-a-ring’ of the hole) hinges on the determinate presence of the other (the surrounding gold). Why not just accept the unity of the two dimensions as a fact? Hegel's desire to spell out the unitary structure of essence can strike one as perverse: if to explain is always to refer the explanandum to an other dimension, then it seems that an explanation of essence deprives it of the ‘rock bottom’ status it should enjoy by definition. Along the lines of current Derridean phenomenologies of the gift (and the cog-nate phenomenon of forgiveness) according to which one destroys the gift-essence by trying to explain it, one could say that the unity of essence is a miraculous gift which the ontologist should leave untouched. Hegel's confidence was exceptional even within its Idealist milieu. For instance, a Fichtean would simply wave off the question as unanswerable, and point us to the ad oculos exhibition taking place in intellectual intuition, where subject and object are one in their difference—the identity of opposites is accessible, but unexplainable.