THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

the claim that sentient awareness and emotional affection contain implicit conceptual
structure.
Quote 1: If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual
sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which
permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire,
need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even
though only formally human, into ideas and purposes. 186
Quote 2: If thought is the constitutive substance of external things, it is also the
universal substance of what is spiritual. In all human perception thought is
present; so too thought is universal in all the acts of conception and recollection;
in short, in every mental activity, in willing, wishing, and the like. When it is
presented in this light, thought has a different part to play from what it has if we
speak of a faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties, such as
perception, conception, and will, with which it stands on the same level [emphasis
added]. 187
These passages raise a number of different issues, though both of them clearly present
Hegel’s insistence that perception and feeling possess conceptual structure, a structure
that arises from the implicit cognitive activity of judgment. In the first passage, Hegel
speaks from a standpoint that distinguishes nature and mind in terms of the presence of
conceptual structure. Hegel argues that conceptual structure “permeates” all human
relationships to the world of nature, relationships that include “sensation, intuition,
desire, need,” and “instinct.” All human sensations, intuitions, desires, needs, and
instincts, as distinctly human or mental, possess logical or conceptual structure. This
manner of stating the point proves somewhat misleading, since it speaks of logic or
thought as something that “transforms” what would otherwise be our merely animal or
biological sensations – as well as intuitions, desires, needs, and instincts – into something
human.
186 Science of Logic, pp. 31-2.
187 Encyclopedia Logic, paragraph 24Z.
191