THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

inextricably entwined with its other. 182 This intimate relation stems from a number of
factors. First, the self is related to the other because it is the self, in the form of the telos,
that first determines what counts as the other. The other consists in those features that
impede the proper function of the telos, those features that must ultimately be assimilated
by the self. Second, the intimate relation between the self and its other arises from the
fact that the self can only fully become what it is by assimilating its other. The “other”
consists in the tendencies that exist in the lower levels of organization that comprise the
self, as well as in the environment that must be assimilated to, or controlled by, the self.
The self develops by taking those features that inhibit its proper function and organizing
them in relation to its telos. Thus the self both determines the other by distinguishing the
other from itself in light of its telos, and it then assimilates the other be transforming it.
Thus, to return to the passage from the “Introduction,” to the Phenomenology of
Spirit, we must grasp the self or the “Substance as subject,” not “as an original unity,” but
rather as “the self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself.” The
unity of the object does not consist in the telos, but rather it consists in the entire process
by which the object (1) determines itself and its other in light of the telos, and (2) then
assimilates the other to itself by subordinating the other to its telos. In the passage under
consideration, Hegel describes the first step as the “bifurcation of the simple,” and as the
“doubling which sets up opposition.” He describes the second step as the “negation of
this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity].”
182 The object consists both in what it is (as a self still entangled with its other) and what it ought
to be (as the telos). Hegel describes the object as the contradiction of the object as it is and as it ought to
be. He says: “Similarly, internal self-movement proper, instinctive urge in general, (the appetite or nisus of
the monad, the entelechy of absolutely simple essence), is nothing else but the fact that something is, in and
the same respect, self-contained and deficient, the negative of itself. Abstract self-identity is not as yet a
livingness, but the positive, being in its own self a negativity, goes outside of itself and undergoes
alteration” (Science of Logic, p. 440). In other words, it is only because the object is not yet its telos, that it
is alive.
184