THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

analysis. In judgment, the copula presents the act of connection or synthesis, while the
difference between the subject and the predicate terms presents the disconnection or
analysis. In Sections 5.4 and 5.5 of Chapter Three, I argued that these two moments are
essentially related – i.e. that we cannot grasp or define either act in isolation from the
other. In the Systemfragment, Hegel defines life in similar terms as the unity of
distinction and connection, synthesis and analysis, unification and opposition. 243 As with
the case of judgment, he warns that we should not reduce life to the act or process of
unification alone. In the same way that judgment does not simply unify distinctions that
are given to it prior to all judgment, so life does not simply unify the distinctions
presented to it prior to the process of life. Like judgment, life involves both the act of
distinction and the act of unification. More importantly, it involves the essential relation
of these two acts. As Hegel states the point here, we must grasp both distinction and
connection at the same time.
In this early work Hegel also describes life as the “infinite finite,” as the
“indeterminate determinate,” and as the “unity of the finite and the infinite.” 244 These
particular characterizations of life provide significant support for some of the basic lines
of argument presented in Chapters One and Two. In these chapters, I examined Hegel’s
account of the structure of will as (a) the unity of the infinite and the finite, (b) the unity
of the indeterminate and the determinate, and (c) the unity of the universal and the
243 In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel emphasizes the isomorphism between the structure of the
judgment and the structure of life. In a passage already quoted in Chapter One, Hegel says: “the germ of a
plant contains its particular, such as root, branch, leaves, etc.: but these details are at first present only
potentially, and are not realized till the germ uncloses. This unclosing is, as it were, the judgment of the
plant” (paragraph 166Z). Life, here exemplified by a plant, presents the same basic paradoxical structures
that we already observed in the structure of judgment.
244 Werke 1, p. 420.
235