THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

5.5) Judgment Considered as a Series of Mental Acts: Thought as a Hermeneutic
Process
Judgment presents us with circle, with a hermeneutic process. 147 It begins with a
set of wholly implicit guiding assumptions about the whole. These implicit guiding
assumptions allow us to articulate and focus on the parts. This is where “immediate”
awareness starts: it starts with as an awareness of the parts as given. This starting point
for “immediate” awareness explains what Hegel describes as our naïve conception of
judgment, a conception that construes judgment as the synthesis of given distinctions.
The mind actively unifies or synthesizes the parts, which first appear as
“immediately” given, to arrive at some preliminary conception of the whole. This
preliminary conception of the whole allows the mind to begin to articulate the basic
assumptions or principles in terms of which it originally considered the parts. Sometimes
this leads to a rejection of the basic assumptions (principles or rules of division) and the
adoption of new assumptions. 148 At other times, it simply leads to the clarification of the
147 Hegel’s dialectical method presents a kind of hermeneutics that develops out of his conception
of judgment and his consideration of the nature of the relation between identity and difference. For a
further discussion of the hermeneutic nature of the Hegelian dialectic, see Section 5.7 of the Appendix to
Chapter Four as well as Section Four of Chapter Six. See also Paul Redding’s Hegel’s Hermeneutics,
particularly Chapter Two.
148 The adoption of new assumptions does not begin as an explicit or fully conscious process.
These new principles constitute break in the circle, since they imply a departure from (a) the prior rules of
synthesis which itself implies (b) a revision of the rules of synthesis and the conception of the whole. Since
these new rules of analysis depend upon a new and not yet articulated conception of the whole, these new
rules of analysis are themselves implicit. They are grasped, at first, by intuition or feeling. In the Preface
to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes this radical process as follows: “While the initial
appearance of the new world is, to begin with, only the whole veiled in its simplicity, or the general
foundation of the whole, the wealth of previous existence is still present to consciousness in memory.
Consciousness misses in the newly emerging shape its former range and specificity of content, and even
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