THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

evident in the processes of life. More importantly, it shows how the problem of uniting
identity and difference exists in thought and in nature. It is a problem facing living
objects in their process of self-constitution, not simply a problem facing thought.
In his description of life, Hegel states the telos of life. He speaks of life at its
“highest pitch of living energy” – i.e. in its most developed form. The highest
development of life consists in a unity or “totality,” that is “only possible through its own
re-establishment out of the deepest fission.” Life unites identity (totality as unity) and
difference (fission). The greater or deeper the fission and the more developed the unity
of the totality, the higher the form of life. Thus in the Differenzschrift, Hegel already
sees the unification of identity and difference as the core problem of philosophy and as
the basic telos or process that constitutes objects.
4) Hegel’s Concluding Remarks on the Various Modes of Unity And the General
Nature of Philosophy
In one of the final paragraphs of the Encyclopedia, Hegel presents an overall
picture of his philosophical system as it lies behind him, complete, clear, and explicit for
the first time. Hegel’s conceives philosophy as a hermeneutic and presuppositionless
enterprise (see Chapter Four, Sections). This means, among other things, that we begin
philosophy with a vague and largely implicit sense of what philosophy is actually about,
and only with the completion of philosophy do we arrive at a place where we can, for the
first time, determine accurately what the central problems of philosophy are (or were). In
this light, the following remarks merit careful attention. Hegel says:
The close of philosophy is not the place, even in a general exoteric discussion, to
waste a word on what a ‘notion’ means. But as the view taken of this relation is
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