THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

simply stem from his failure to draw a careful distinction between “connection” and
“identity.”
Second, the problems involved in conceiving the unity of these two moments
remain unclear. The meaningfulness of a judgment requires the difference between the
subject and the predicate term, and the truth of a judgment requires the identity or at least
connection of these two terms. At the moment, it isn’t clear that these two distinct
moments of judgment pose any conceptual problem. In other words, it isn’t yet clear
how the structure of judgment poses the problem designated by the phrase, “the unity of
identity and difference.”
We can begin to address both of these issues by considering Hegel’s claim that
the two moments of judgment present us with a contradiction. The judgment, he says,
presupposes that the “subject is the predicate,” and it also presupposes that the “predicate
is supposed not to be what the subject is.” As explained above, these two presuppositions
stem from the demand that a judgment be both true and meaningful. If we interpret
Hegel’s claim about the contradiction between these two moments in its most obvious
sense, Hegel seems to be saying that the structure of judgment implies both that “S is P”
(identity) and that “S is not P” (difference).
4.1) Russell’s Objection: The “Is” of Identity and the “Is” of Predication
At this point we might be tempted to accuse Hegel of mere sophistry. It seems
that the “contradiction” in the structure of judgment stems from Hegel’s failure to
distinguish between the “is” of identity and the “is” of predication. Or, as stated
previously, the contradiction seems to come from his failure to distinguish between
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