THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

the unity of synthesis and analysis. Hegel argues that this same development follows
from a consideration of the contradiction in the structure of the object, a contradiction
that arises from the relation between the plurality and the unity in the object. In the same
way that our consideration of the structure of judgment led to the development of the
structures of thought as a hermeneutic process, so a consideration of the structure of the
object should, on Hegel’s view, lead us to a conception of the object as a notion, as a
dynamic process that unfolds in terms directly analogous to the structural moments of
thought itself. Thought consists in a dynamic process that moves from (1) wholly
implicit, undeveloped, and as such non-cognizable unity, to (2) the articulation and
division based upon an implicit awareness of this unity, and then to (3) the formation of
an explicit conception of the whole through the synthesis of this articulation and division.
Step three leads back to step two in a prolonged process of articulation, modification, and
– at times – radical reformulation.
Here we can see, among other things, the difference between the static orientation
of the understanding and the dynamic orientation of reason. Hegel characterizes the
understanding or reflection as a mode of thought that, “sticks to fixity of characters and
their distinctness from one another,” and that treats each abstracted character as though it
had “a subsistence and being of its own.” 159 The understanding fails to recognize the
dependence of the part upon the whole, and it fails to see the dependence of static or
fixed features on the essentially dynamic process from which they are abstracted. With
regards to the nature of thought, the understanding construes the dynamic process of
thought in terms of stable states. Thus the understanding construes thought in terms of
the given plurality with which thought begins and the unity that it produces. Or,
159 Encyclopedia Logic, paragraph 80.
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