THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

familiar from Chapter One, Hegel explicitly compares this developmental structure of the
object to the structure of judgment. He says:
The germ of a plant contains its particular, such as root, branches, leaves, etc.: but
these details are at first present only potentially, and are not realized till the germ
uncloses. This unclosing is, as it were, the judgment of the plant. 160
Like the general process of thought in judgment, the development of the plant moves
from implicit unity to plurality. The plurality arises from out of the unity through an act
of division, analysis, or articulation. Through an act of synthesis, the plant relates these
divisions to one another in terms of the original conception of the whole, or the telos
implicit in its immediate unity. As with judgment, this synthesis leads to an articulated
conception or presentation of the whole.
There is a second important similarity between the structure of thought and the
structure of the object. We can only resolve the contradiction in the structure of thought
if we come to grasp thought as a process. This means that we must construe the various
conceptions of unity (that result from synthesis) and plurality (that result from analysis)
as the products of, or the abstractions from, the more basic process or activity of thought.
The same holds true for objects. Objects constitute themselves through their own
activity, and the implicit and explicit telos of this process, as the implicit and the
developed unity, only exist as moments abstracted from the process itself.
160 Encyclopedia Logic, paragraph 166Z.
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