THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

with its productive imagination or even more with its synthetic unity – which,
construed in this fashion, is a formal unity of plurality – next to this we have an
infinity of impressions, and, if one will, a thing in itself, which domain, insofar as
it is left without the categories, can be nothing but a formless heap. 265
Jacobi claims to have struggled for eighteen years to conceive how unity comes to
plurality or how plurality comes to unity. This, on Jacobi’s view, is the central question
raised by the Kantian distinction between intuition (plurality) and understanding (unity).
In this passage, Hegel states a similar problem in similar terms. He asks how “formal
identity” can “coalesce” with the “infinite difference” that exists “against or next to it.”
He implies that if we begin with formal identity and difference as two distinct, separate,
or “non-mediated,” features, we cannot explain their relation or unity. Like Jacobi, Hegel
argues that we must begin with the unity or essential relatedness of identity and
difference, of unity and plurality, of the “I” and the manifold in which the “I” reveals or
constitutes itself through its acts of synthesis. Hegel argues that we cannot fully abstract
the “I” from the manifold of intuition. We cannot abstract the source of unity, presented
in the “I,” from the manifold material that is synthesized by the “I.”
Despite these terminological similarities between Jacobi’s critique of Kant and the
critical discussion of Kant presented by Hegel, it is important to note a crucial difference
between them. Jacobi holds that Kant fails to explain the relation between unity and
plurality – i.e. the relationship between understanding and intuition. Moreover, Jacobi
sees this failure as inevitable, since, on his view, this relation transcends the grasp of
reason. Hegel, by contrast, argues that we can conceive this relation through speculation
or reason. Moreover, he argues that Kant, in his conception of transcendental
265 Werke 2, p. 312. Note the use of the term “non-mediated” here in relation to the claim from the
discussion of the “Sense-Certainty,” that both the “I” and the “object” always exist as mediated (footnote
47). Here “mediated” means “in their essential relation,” while “unmediated” means “conceived as
distinct.”
249