THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

Ultimately, the misleading nature of this description simply points to the difficulty
of cognizing the original acts that divide the immediate unity. In Section 5.5 of Chapter
Three, we saw that our awareness begins with the distinctions produced by the act of
division, not with the act itself. We are “immediately” aware of the plurality the act
produces, but we are not “immediately” aware of the act of analysis that originally
produces this plurality. We can only cognize the act once we have synthesized the given
distinctions. We cannot describe or cognize the original acts of division as they exist in
their immediacy, for in their immediacy they depend upon an implicit grasp of the whole.
By contrast, our articulation of the division rests upon an articulated (divided and
synthesized) conception of the whole.
In various places, Hegel sees this inevitable distortion as a common source of
animosity against abstract and analytical thought. As we cognize it, analysis or
abstraction (an act that derives from distinction) take us away from the richness of the
whole to the relative poverty of some abstracted part. Again, this distorted conception of
analysis arises from the fact that we cannot cognize the act of analysis without cognizing
the unity it divides, and we cannot cognize the unity it divides without construing it as
already synthesized. Finally, we cannot construe the unity as synthesized unless we also
construe it as already analyzed. Thus our cognition of analysis fails to capture the
original conditions under which the act occurred.
If analysis really did consist in an isolation that moved the mind away from the
rich plurality of an immediately given experience, then thought would in fact impoverish
our experience. However, Hegel argues that this view rests upon a fundamental
distortion. In order to illustrate this distortion, he compares a “savage” with a botanist:
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