THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

So the unifying function of consciousness doesn’t replace diversity with unity. Instead, it
increases diversity and unity. To draw on terms from Chapter Two again, consciousness
makes mental life truer. 193
Our discussion of Quote 1 makes it clear that all mental phenomena – including
sensations, intuitions, desires, needs, and instincts – already contain logical or conceptual
structure. Stated differently, they already involve the structure and the activity of
judgment. While Quote 1 makes it seem as though only mental phenomena possess
conceptual structure, our careful examination of Quote 3 should make it clear that both
natural and mental phenomena possess logical structure. It is the conscious articulation
of conceptual structure, or at least the potential for conscious articulation of such
structure, that distinguishes mind from nature.
If the discussion of Quote 3 does not sufficiently establish the existence of
conceptual structures in the natural world, Quote 2 makes the point abundantly clear. 194
193 In the following passage, which will be discussed further in section 5.6, Hegel emphasizes the
relationship between unifying conceptual activity and the presence of diversity to the mind. Hegel says:
“This state of indifference is, to a certain extent, a relapse into a state of barbarism. The savage attends to
practically nothing; he lets everything pass him by without fixing his attention on it. Only by training the
mind does attention acquire strength and fulfill its function. The botanist, for example, observes
incomparably more in a plant than one ignorant of botany does in the same thing” (Philosophy of Mind,
448Z). In this passage, Hegel claims that an increase in the conceptual unity of experience is, at the same
time, a development and an enrichment of the diversity of experience. Thus Hegel rejects the common
Romantic opposition between the richness or diversity of immediate experience and the arid or empty
abstractions of thought. In response to such views, Hegel argues again and again that thought needn’t be
abstract. This Romantic dichotomy rests upon the mistaken notion that articulation or difference is
immediately given to us, that the mind simply unifies what is given as an articulated plurality. Contrary to
this, Hegel argues that prior to the basic conceptual activities involved in the act of attention, nothing is
given to us. Such minimal experience approximates a blur. Hegel contrasts this relatively “immediate”
experience of the world with the experience of the botanist. The conceptual activities of the botanist
actually allow her to perceive more diversity or detail. Conceptual articulation produces greater unity and
greater diversity, because it always consists in both articulation and unification. There can’t be unification
without articulation. Nor can there be articulation without unification.
194 Consider also the following passage from the Science of Logic. Speaking of “the Notion,” or
conceptual structure, Hegel says: “the Notion is to be regarded not as the act of the self-conscious
understanding, not as the subjective understanding, but as the Notion in its own absolute character which
constitutes a stage of nature as well as of spirit. Life, or organic nature, is the stage of nature at which the
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