THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

even “naively metaphysical.” 4 Stated in a less prejudicial manner, we can say that
Hegel’s philosophy stands in a broad metaphysical tradition that includes Plato, Aristotle,
Plotinus, Leibniz, and Spinoza. 5 This claim requires two caveats or points of
4 My claim about the affinities between Hegel and the realism of pre-Kantian metaphysics might
seem strange in light of Hegel’s remarks about rationalism at the beginning of the Encyclopedia Logic, in
the section entitled, “First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity.” In this section, Hegel considers and rejects
certain tendencies of thought that he identifies with the position of “pre-Kantian metaphysic[s]” (paragraph
28Z) or the “metaphysicians before Kant,” (paragraph 35Z). Two things should be noted about this
criticism, however. First, Hegel does not mention any names. As we shall see in a moment, his negative
remarks about “metaphysicians before Kant” do not extend to Leibniz. Second, and more importantly,
Hegel does not criticize these metaphysicians for their ontological realism, for their belief that thought can
grasp the world. In fact, he praises them for their realism. At the beginning of the discussion, he says:
“This method of thought has never become aware of the antithesis of subjective and objective: and to that
extent there is nothing to prevent its statements from possessing a genuinely philosophical and speculative
character” (Paragraph 27). Here Hegel actually praises the rationalist metaphysicians for their failure to
distinguish between the subject and the object – i.e. between the categories of thought and the categories of
being. In Paragraph 28 he repeats this point: “This metaphysical system took the laws and forms of thought
to be the fundamental laws and forms of things. It assumed that to think a thing was the means of finding
its very self and nature: and to that extent it occupied a higher ground than the Critical Philosophy that
succeeded it.” So Hegel does not criticize pre-Kantian metaphysics for its commitment to the rational
perspicuity of the basic structures of reality. Instead, he criticizes certain anonymous pre-Kantian
metaphysicians for their reliance upon the understanding in opposition to reason (see Chapter Three,
Section 4). In other words, he criticizes them for their static and atomistic rather than dynamic and holistic
conception of the world and its objects. This conception can be seen in certain (non-Leibnizian) rationalist
conceptions of God and the soul as mere things rather than as unified processes. This criticism can be seen
most clearly in Hegel’s discussion of rational psychology, where he adopts Kant’s criticism in the
Paralogisms to his own end. Hegel says: “The pre-Kantian metaphysic, we say, viewed the soul as a thing”
(Paragraph 34Z). Hegel praises Kant for rejecting this conception of the soul, claiming: “Unquestionably
one good result of the Kantian criticism was that it emancipated mental philosophy from the ‘soul-thing’,
from the categories, and consequently, from questions about the simplicity, complexity, materiality, etc., of
the soul” (Paragraph 47). However, while Kant sees this failure to cognize the unified substance or thing
that grounds our mental life as a failure of finite cognitive thought, Hegel takes this “failure” as the
recognition of the true nature of the self. The self is its activity. Hegel makes this clear, when he says:
“Mind is essentially active in the same sense as the Schoolmen said that God is ‘absolute actuosity’. But if
the mind is active it must as it were utter itself. It is wrong therefore to take the mind for a processless ens,
as did the old metaphysicians” (Paragraph 34). So Hegel criticizes some pre-Kantian metaphysicians for
their failure to construe things – God, the mind, etc. – in terms of the categories of action. This criticism is
not directed against Leibniz. This becomes clear in Hegel’s account of Leibniz in his Lectures on the
History of Philosophy, where he repeatedly praises Leibniz for conceiving the monads as “the entelechies
of Aristotle taken as pure activity” (p. 331), for emphasizing that monads consist in “their own activity and
desire” (p. 345), and for recognizing the role that the “spontaneity of immanent development” (p. 345)
plays in the constitution of the monad. In the same work, Hegel’s account of Wolf (pp. 348 – 356) makes it
clear that the latter, with his “metaphysics of the understanding,” (p. 353), is a primary target of Hegel’s
criticisms in the first volume of the Encyclopedia. For a similar discussion of Hegel’s evaluation of the
strengths and weaknesses of traditional metaphysics in the opening sections of the Encyclopedia, see Rolf-
Peter Horstmann’s Wahrheit aus dem Begriff, pp. 23 – 26.
5 Recent metaphysical interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy can be found in Charles Taylor’s
Hegel and in Frederick Beiser’s introductory book by the same title. In many ways, my interpretation
follows the one set out by Beiser. However, in contrast to both Beiser and Taylor, I don’t place as much
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