THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

emains unclear. However, it should be clear that this contradiction does not arise from a
conception of the copula as an expression of strict identity.
4.3) The Most General Meaning of Identity
Hegel claims that the copula never expresses strict identity. He holds that the
relation of strict identity presents an empty abstraction, one without any cognitive value.
However, Hegel often employs the term “identity,” presumably to express something
other than the relation of strict identity. In fact, on Hegel’s view, the term “identity”
expresses a range of meanings that corresponds to the range of meanings presented by the
copula.
In the following passage from the Differenzschrift, Hegel presents a general
account of the meaning of identity, one that can be further specified in terms of various
specific meanings the term may present. Hegel says:
Reflection must separate what is one in the absolute Identity; it must express
synthesis and antithesis separately, in two propositions, one containing identity,
the other dichotomy. In A = A, as principle of identity, it is connectedness that is
reflected on, and in this connecting, this being one, the equality, is contained in
this pure identity; reflection abstracts from all inequality. A = A, the expression
of absolute thought or Reason, has only one meaning for the formal reflection that
expresses itself in the propositions of the intellect. This is the meaning of pure
unity as conceived by the intellect, or in other words a unity in abstraction from
opposition. Reason, however, does not find itself expressed in this onesidedness
of abstract unity. It postulates also the positing of what in the pure equality had
been abstracted from, the positing of the opposite, of inequality. One A is subject,
the other object; and the expression of their difference is A ≠ A, or A = B. This
proposition contradicts the first. 129
129 Hegel: Selections, 105-6. Hegel says something that may seem peculiar in this passage. When
speaking of the second proposition, he speaks of the difference between “subject” and “object,” not of the
difference between subject and predicate. Judgment consists in the most basic acts of thought. These same
basic acts of thought determine the unity and the difference of subject and object. In other words, the
structures of judgment are the same as the structures that distinguish and unit the subject and the object.
This can be seen in the Science of Logic where Hegel proclaims that the unity of apperception is the notion,
and that the notion becomes articulate in the structures of judgment. Here Hegel speaks of these acts in
relation to the subject and the object, though the same basic points apply to the structure of judgment.
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