THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

category of ontology helps to make sense of this nonsense. As essentially teleological, a
being is only what it is in its directedness towards its future, towards that which it is not
yet. A seed both is and is not a tree. As it exists now, it is not a tree. However, its
essential structures, the features that make it a seed, only exist in relation to that which it
will become, in relation to its future as a tree. Hegel endorses this claim in the strongest
possible sense. Not only does he argue that we will mischaracterize a thing if we simply
focus on what it is at present, but he also makes the much stronger claim that all
characterizations of a thing, as any kind of thing whatsoever, ultimately rely upon some
implicit claims or assumptions about the future. In other words, he doesn’t merely claim
that we fail to conceive the seed as a seed if we fail to consider what it will become. He
also makes the stronger claim that any conception of the seed – say a description of the
chemicals that comprise it – already makes some implicit reference to what these things
will be. 103
103 Here there are obvious parallels between Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, though while Heidegger
and Sartre limit their discussions to human existence, Hegel extends his analysis to all genuine things. In
his article, “Predication and Hegel’s Metaphysics,” Richard E. Aquila nicely emphasizes the similarities
between Hegel and Sartre on just this point. He says: “Many philosophers have, to be sure, viewed the self
as a kind of “thing” or substance. But there are others who, like the Existentialists, for example, hold a
radically different position. These maintain that the sense in which a thing or a substance is what it is (has
a certain property, nature, etc.) is very different from the sense in which a self, or a conscious being qua
conscious being, is what it is. A self is something only insofar as it is in the process of becoming, or at
least maintaining itself as, that something. Hence, on this view, what a self is (its essential being or nature)
is never merely present or “there” in the way that ordinary things and their natures are. But in the sense in
which a thing is not something, insofar as it is merely becoming or being made to be, that something, it
follows, on this conception of the self, that ‘human reality in its primitive relation to itself is not what it is.’
While a thing simply is what it is and not any other thing, human reality is what it is only in the sense that
‘it surpasses itself toward the particular being which it would be if it were what it is.’ We may compare
this characterization of conscious being with Hegel’s characterization of the being of reality as a whole.”
(The quotes embedded in this passage come from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, translated by
Hazel Barnes.) As Aquila points out, Existentialists like Sartre distinguish between the self and objects in
terms of the category of becoming, a category that introduces a kind of contradiction into basic nature of
the self. Hegel doesn’t accept this distinction. It isn’t that he views the self as a thing, but rather that he
views all things in terms of the categories of the self. In the terms of his slogan, he conceives the substance
as subject. Aquila holds that this applies only to Hegel’s conception of reality as a whole, to the absolute.
By contrast, I’ve argued that it applies to all genuine objects.
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