THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

moments of the will. With regard to the first two moments of the “I,” Hegel says:
“neither the one nor the other can be truly comprehended unless the two indicated
moments are grasped at the same time both in their abstraction and also in their perfect
unity.” The third moment of the will does not merely aggregate or combine the first two
moments of the will. The will or the self is not an aggregate. It is a genuine unity. Thus
we must grasp the first two moments of the will in their “perfect unity.” However, the
unity of the will does not efface the distinction between the two moments. Thus we must
conceive the will as a genuine unity that contains plurality within it. 59 We must conceive
the moments of the will in terms of a unity that doesn’t efface plurality, or in terms of a
plurality that exists within a genuine unity. Only reason or speculation can grasp this
relation.
After presenting the difficulties involved in grasping the third moment of the will,
Hegel goes on to indicate the centrality of these difficulties for his entire philosophy, and
he alludes to the manner in which they must be resolved. Immediately after the quote
presented above, Hegel says:
It is the task of logic as purely speculative philosophy to prove and explain further
this innermost secret of speculation, of infinity as negativity relating to itself, this
ultimate spring of all activity, life, and consciousness. Here attention can only be
drawn to the fact that if you say, ‘the will is universal, the will determines itself’,
the words you use to describe the will presuppose it to be a subject or substratum
from the start. But the will is not something complete and universal prior to its
determining itself and prior to its superseding and idealizing this determination.
The will is not a will until it is this self-mediating activity, this return into itself. 60
59 Here we can see the relationship between the structure of the will and the more general structure
of all genuine objects. As discussed in Chapter Four, Hegel holds that all genuine objects must contain
plurality in a genuine unity. More specifically, he argues that there must be one sense in which an object is
one, and another sense in which the object is many. In order to grasp the structure of the object, we must
grasp the unity of these two senses.
60 Philosophy of Right, paragraph 7Z.
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