ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter it was explained that Hegel rejected Kant's pluralistic model of the object, and so opposed his claim that objects can only be realized through the synthesis of the manifold of intuitions. As my analysis of the ‘Perception’ section of the Phenomenology should have revealed, Hegel held that Kant's view rested on the mistaken assumption that the object is nothing more than a collection of sensible properties, out of which it is compounded by the experiencing subject. In this chapter, it will be argued that Hegel develops an entirely different conception of the individual object, according to which it is the exemplification of an indivisible and irreducible substance-kind or universal essence, as a result of which it constitutes a single, indivisible totality; this enables Hegel to replace Kant's pluralistic account with his own holistic model of the object. In the following chapter it will be shown how Hegel's account of the individual as the exemplification of a substance-kind leads him to reject the atomistic and reductionist approach to nature adopted by the physicist and the chemist, arguing in his Philosophy of Nature, as in his Logic, that the concrete material object as a whole has an ontologically primary unity that cannot be further reduced. Understanding the metaphysical outlook put forward in the Logic is therefore vital if Hegel's subsequent account of nature in the second book of the Encyclopaedia is to be properly comprehended.
