THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

Getting to know someone is a hermeneutic process, one that involves the
following circular relation: (a) implicit conception of person → (b) experience of the
things the person says or does → (c) tentative but explicit conception of who the person
is → (d) modified, clarified, or affirmed conception of the things the person said or did,
not seen in light of a tentative, but rather in the light of an explicit, conception of who the
person is. 154 This circular process bares a strong resemblance to the process of judgment
as described in Section 5.4, though of course the basic hermeneutic process described
here is far more basic than the overall process that occurs in philosophy. 155
Philosophy is not a positive process that deductively proceeds from premise to
conclusion. This is not to say that Hegel rejects traditional philosophical arguments.
Such arguments have an important role to play in philosophy. However, they do not
express the overall shape of philosophy. As Hegel construes it, philosophy is as much
about regress as progress. Thus he says:
Progress in philosophy is rather a regression and a grounding or establishing by
means of which we first obtain the result that what we began with is not
something merely arbitrarily assumed but is in fact the truth, and also the primary
truth. 156
154 Of course there is one important difference between the interpretive process we go through
when meeting a person and the process we go through in philosophy – namely, there are many people, but
there is only one reality. When we first meet a new person, we may have a relatively explicit sense of the
principles or conception of the whole that guide our interpretation of them. These explicit principles about
the whole stem from our experience with other people. In the case of our cognition of reality, however, we
cannot begin with a set of explicit principles about the whole, since we do not have prior experience of
another reality.
155 Compare with the account of hermeneutics presented in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und
Kritik. See specifically paragraph two of the second part. Here, Schleiermacher presents an account of the
hermeneutic process of interpretation that closely parallels Hegel’s conception of the overall structure of
thought. He says: “Das letzte Ziel der psychologischen (technischen) Auslegung ist auch nichts anders als
der entwickelte Anfang, nämlich, das Ganze der Tat in seinen Teilen und in jedem Teil wieder den Stoff als
das Bewegende und die Form als die durch den Stoff bewegete Natur anzuschauen” (p. 167). Here
Schleiermacher presents the “developed beginning” as the goal of interpretation. We must grasp the
entirety of the action that animates the works in its parts, and we must grasp the parts as they are
determined in the action. Here the action is the overall goal or principle that animates and guides the text.
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