THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

3.2) The Notion: Substance as Subject
The term “notion” designates Hegel’s alternative to certain traditional conceptions
of substance. 34 As early as the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel announces that
philosophy must conceive the substance as subject. This slogan proclaims his project of
re-conceiving the substance in terms of structures normally associated with consciousness
or subjectivity. In the Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel says “everything turns
on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.” 35 In
the same way that Leibniz employs mental categories such as perception and appetition
34 There is a certain degree of ambiguity in the way that Hegel uses the term “notion.” Sometimes
he uses it to express the telos or form that dwells in, but is still distinct from, the particularizing matter. In
this sense, the notion must be distinguished from the idea. In contrast to this first sense of the term
“notion,” Hegel uses the term “idea” to designate the concrete object as the unity of particularizing matter
and form. It is with regards to this first sense of the term “notion,” that Hegel says, “the Notion as such is
not yet complete, but must rise to the Idea which alone is the unity of the Notion and reality (Science of
Logic, 587). We can see the same sense of the term “notion” in the following passage: “The subject [of the
assertoric judgment] is a concrete individual in general, and the predicate expresses this same as the
relation of its actuality, determinateness, or constitution to its Notion (This house is bad, this action is
good.) More precisely, therefore, it involves (a) that the subject ought to be something; its universal nature
has posited itself as the self-subsistent Notion; and (b) on account of its express differentiation from its selfsubsistent
universal nature, appears as an external existence with such and such a constitution” (Science of
Logic, 659). Here we have three basic moments: (1) the object in its particular constitution, (2) the
universal instantiated in the object, and the (3) the object as an individual that unites the universal and the
particular. Hegel claims that in an assertoric judgment, the subject presents the individual as the unity of
the universal norm and the differentiating particulars, while the predicate expresses the relation between the
particulars and the notion using evaluative terms like “good,” or “bad.” In this passage Hegel links the
term “notion” with the term “universal.” In this context, the term “idea” would express the unity of the
notion and the particularizing matter in which it is instantiated. At other times, however, Hegel uses the
terms “notion” and “idea” interchangeably. In this second sense of the term “notion,” Hegel takes the
notion as the unity of the universal and the particular, or, more accurately, as the entirety of the universalparticular-individual
relation. This sense of the term can be seen in the following passages: “This universal
Notion, which have now to consider here, contains the three moments: universality, particularity and
individuality” (Science of Logic, p. 600). And: “Because the Notion is a totality, and therefore in its
universality or pure identical self-relation is essentially a determining and a distinguishing, it therefore
contains within itself the standard by which this form of its self-identity, in pervading and embracing all the
moments, no less immediately determines itself to be only the universal over against the distinguishedness
of the moments” (Science of Logic, 600). The first quote explains the notion as the totality of universality
(norm), particularity (differentiating matter), and individuality (unity of first two terms). In this
dissertation, I generally use the term “notion” in this second sense. In the second passage, which I find
somewhat opaque, Hegel explains the relation between these two senses of the notion. He explains how the
notion is both the “totality” of these three moments and the “universal” as one particular moment.
Presumably this explains the ambiguity in his use of the term “notion.”
35 Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 10.
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