THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

the original tendencies of the parts (ultimately chemical compounds) that comprise this
body part reassert themselves. Thus if we fail to consider the heart in relation to the body
as a whole, Hegel holds that we will be unable to explain what the heart does. We will be
unable to explain the ways that the organizing principles of the body determine the heart
– its tissues, cells, and chemicals – in relation to its own ends. 179
So far we have explained the object as a plurality that is directed towards some
unified telos. This explanation begins to account for the relationship between the sense
in which the object is one and the sense in which it is many. However, as it stands, this
explanation of the object remains incomplete. This account explains the object in terms
of the relation between a plurality that fully instantiates a telos and the telos they
instantiate. At the very least, this account of the object in terms of a fully instantiated
telos does not apply to many (if any) objects in the world. 180 Most objects fail to
179 Of course we can conceive the matter that comprises the heart without relation to the functions
carried out by the heart. We can conceive the heart as a mass of tissues, cells, chemical reactions, or
simply as lump of matter. However, Hegel insists that such conceptions will fail to explain all of the things
that happen in the heart. This isn’t simply a matter of failing to see certain higher-level descriptions of
various functional capacities. If we simply grasp the heart as a lump of matter, for instance, we will not be
able to explain why it beats. This kind of repetitive self-movement violates the laws of matter qua matter.
Similarly, Hegel would claim that the laws of chemistry will not explain everything that the various kinds
of matter in the heart do. In the heart, the laws of chemistry are “violated’ when higher level biological
functions transform them for their own ends. Moreover, Hegel would also point out that these lower level
accounts of the “matter” that comprise the heart will always, when taken on their own terms, involve a
form/matter distinction. In other words, these lower levels of descriptions are still functional. Thus we can
never ultimately escape functional and holistic accounts of the world. There is no basic pre-teleological
stratum of the world.
180 It isn’t entirely clear that we can even make sense of a fully instantiated telos, particularly if we
accept Hegel’s overall metaphysical picture. The telos is not simply a state of an object. Instead, the telos
is the endpoint of some action that the object strives to complete. Moreover, on Hegel’s view at least, the
telos only exists as an abstraction from this action. It is fundamentally dependent upon the action. Action,
however, depends upon some opposition to the action. Action only continues as long as there is some
matter or feature of the world that is not yet conformed to the telos. When the telos is achieved, the action
ceases. However, if the telos is parasitic upon the action, it seems that the telos must cease with action.
There are times when Hegel seems to admit this point. Consider, for instance, the following passage from
the Science of Nature, which we discussed in Chapter Two: “Gravity is the predicate of matter, which
constitutes the substance of the subject. Its unity is a mere should, a yearning; this is the most afflicted of
efforts, and matter is damned to it eternally, for the unity does not fulfill itself, and is never reached. If
matter reached what it aspires to in gravity, it would fuse together into a single point. It is because
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