ABSTRACT
In Sections 1-18 of the Shorter Logic Hegel has a number of different concerns. Apart from a general preoccupation with beginnings (Anfang) there is the attempt to articulate that concern within the more general strategy of differentiating philosophy from the ‘contingent’ (das Zufällige) while also trying to locate the necessity (Notwendigkeit) within the arbitrary. Again such moves locate ‘need’ (Bedürfnis), what Wallace in his translation dramatically and in the end misleadingly calls the the ‘cravings of thought’, as central. What is of interest here is how the attribution of necessity takes place; its positionality. The way it comes to be enacted will figure within Hegel’s attempt to deal with the existence of diff erent philosophical positions. The precise stakes of difference should not go unnoted. (There is no difference as such. Central to the procedure of this essay is the move away from the substantive and toward the actative which means here that what is of concern is the way difference figures and not the figure of difference. In other words the figuring of difference in continually displacing the figure lends itself to an active plurality, a variety of presence, which would be denied by the all too hasty import of the figure. What is thereby opened up is the possibility of a philosophy without either substance or essence.)
‘Necessity’ is posed in Section 1 of the Logic as part of the early strategy to diff erentiate the content of thought-the given content —from the necessity of that content. What this establishes is that necessity involves dealing with the content of thought as thought (hence the emergence of ‘Nachdenken’; the ‘after thought of thought’ on the way to reflection). This is a distinction that is mirrored in the capacity of ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) to differentiate between what is ‘only appearance’ (nur Erscheinung) and ‘actuality’ (Wirklichkeit). It is not surprising that it is in terms of this distinction that the contingent is introduced in order then to be distinguished from the actual. In Section 6 Hegel’s argument is defined in relation to the contingent. The contingent is presented as an inadequacy to be overcome; the improper returning to, though significantly from within it in potentia, its own state of propriety.
