BECOMING XX: THE NOTION

Hegel equates "the passage… from actuality into the notion" with that "from necessity to
freedom" (159). This passage is a matter of thinking. But thinking thinks "the true", thinks
itself. For Hegel this is as much as to say that it is true to itself, as against the realist
"correspondence" theory. What rather "corresponds" to the Notion is that Notion's very
embodiment (172) in the Idea. "truth in itself and for itself". Here, at 213, Hegel "declares the
Absolute to be the Idea". This "definition… is itself absolute." Here we see how the Logic,
this Logic, elicits Nature and Spirit and is not merely preliminary to them, as Absolute Mind
contains and "overlaps" any supposed other, on pain of not being infinite, which contradicts
absoluteness. "The Idea is the Truth", not the truth of anything else but the Truth, by
implication now placed prior to Being. In other terms, other philosophies, it is identified with
ultimate Being, so that for Aquinas Truth is nothing other than Being itself, or Reality taken
whole in all or any of its supposed parts qua present to Mind or any and every mind. Truth,
that is, is a mere ens rationis (QD De potentia VII). Here this is reversed without being
denied. The negation rather resides in the conception itself, as always.
The correspondence theory refers only to

the correspondence of external things with my conceptions… these are only

correct conceptions held by me, the individual person. In the Idea we have
nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate conceptions, nor with
external things" (213).

He means they are denied. "Everything actual, in so far as it is true, is the Idea… Every
individual being is some one aspect of the Idea". But it "is only in them altogether and in their
relation that the notion is realised." But this is a relation of Identity. The individual by itself,
herself, himself, is untrue, ruined in radice, in a word finite, finished as never having begun.
Yet the Idea is not "of something or other", as the Notion (of it) is not "specific" but Notion as
such, or the thought of thinking, what it is and what it implies. The Absolute, which the Idea
is, "by an act of 'judgment', particularises itself to the system of specific ideas." This should
not surprise; as Absolute it must be capable of such action, must be, inter alia, Activity itself,
unlike our finite thoughts and "intentions". Even for us, after all, the intention is the act of
intending. Yet such intention, though an act, is not yet the act, good or bad, intended. If it
were then there would be neither need nor place for this material world and we ourselves
would be other than we are.
Yet Hegel says "the passage" we began by mentioning "proposes that actuality shall be
thought as having all its substantiality in the passing over and identity with the other
independent actuality" (159). The notion, indeed, "is itself just this very identity", of God and
world, Logic and Nature, it seems plain. Thus Hegel writes of the other independent actuality,
as straight one to one opposition as of two "universes". Thus the Idea naturally, yet freely, as
it were of itself, "goes forth freely as Nature", in passage. Substance is this passage, one and
universal, and just as such, "in its developed and genuine actuality", is subject and hence
Mind (213).

Whatever is thoroughly bad or contrary to the notion, is for that very reason on
the way to ruin. It is by the notion alone that that the things in the world have
their subsistence; or as it is expressed in the language of religious conception,
things are what they are, only in virtue of the divine and thereby creative
thought which dwells within the. (213, Zus.)
One cannot miss the warmth or "at-homeness" with which Hegel repeatedly cites received
religious teaching. He might seem, in his repeated mention of God, to be untrue to his own
demand that philosophy avoid "figurate" conceptions. However, as is quite plain from his
semiological section in the Philosophy of Spirit, he recognised that all speech is based upon a
selection of figure and (eventually dead) metaphor. He must have thought, then, that whatever
figurateness is entailed in the idea, the word rather, of God, against which he himself warns
us, is not unambiguously more than is found even in "scientific" language taken on the whole.
To that extent he implicitly aligns himself with the Aristotelian logical doctrine of analogy,
whereby "being is said in many ways", though he never consents to rest in it, agreeing with
Wittgenstein that philosophy has to be a "battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by
language".
So "the actual substance as such", the Idea, "which in its exclusiveness resists all invasion" (is
"what we call God" in other words), is ipso facto "subjected" to a necessary "passing into
dependency" (159), i.e. this belongs to Infinity intrinsically. Without it Infinity would be
"only abstract", not concretely thought or therefore, as self-thought, active. God and world are
not two parts of some greater reality, as in eighteenth century Deism, since the Absolute as
such is and has to be Greatness itself. We have to see it in terms of the necessity which is
infinite freedom and not, therefore, imposed, not even self-imposed, as many theologians
persist in imagining (under the rubric or mantle of kenosis). This passage is rather what the
Absolute is, precisely as Hegel says.
Seeing the Absolute in terms of necessity means thinking necessity. It comes back to thought
and what thought is, viz. in the meeting with oneself in the other actuality, necessarily
"bound" to one because one is in essence (!) this passage, this contradiction of the immediate
or abstract conception, a mutual inherence even. This is nothing other than the necessity of
Substance to be what it is, namely or ultimately, Subject free from all limit, restriction or
particularity. This "is called I;… is free Spirit;… is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness"
(159). The notion, Hegel adds, is "pure play", as contemplation superseding all work and
active involvement, is yet, or just therefore, "the highest praxis" (Aristotle, Ethics, NE). This
Notion is "the truth of Being and Essence".

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So now, the "Notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised":

It is a systematic whole, in which each of its constituent functions is the very

total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it (160)

and that is the system, under or according to which the Absolute Idea will be seen, along with
the Absolute itself which it is (213), to contain everything. Of this, of each "constituent", we
can say "This also is thou; neither is this thou". If we agree with McTaggart that only persons
can be such constituents1 then we have here, mutatis mutandis, the Kantian "Kingdom of
Ends". This is then one in content with, in religion, the corpus mysticum. In the same Content
is expressed or comes out in the all-embracing Joy to which the last symphony of Hegel's
exact contemporary, Beethoven, or Dante's main poem or the Parthenon or Rembrandt's
portrait of Homer beside Aristotle or any number of other works is dedicated. The examples
are mine, the assertion is Hegel's.

1
Cf. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press 1903, Chapter 2.
"Is put"? By what? By whom? We can only refer back to the text of Eckhart Hegel liked to
quote, one of several such:

The eye with which God sees me, is the eye with which I see Him, my eye and
His eye are one… If God were not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too
would not be" (Phil. of Rel. I, 228).

Such depths are by no means "equivocal", as J.N. Findlay pretends, but the finest distillation
of philosophic and dialectical Reason. They are perfectly reflected, again, in the "atheistic"
system of McTaggart. Here each "has the unity" of all in each again (the infinitude of
"determinate correspondence", sic McTaggart) and the all is thus only realised concretely in
each of these supremely necessary persons, only born or dying under the "figure" of time.
McTaggart argues with rock-like consistency for this his reading of Hegel, at the same time as
he severely (too severely?) criticises him, rising continually above the so-called "British
idealists" surrounding him, as Aquinas above the Sschoolmen, Hegel above the "Romantics".

For if my eye is God's eye then I am at liberty to arrange things as I wish, am I not, as volition
succeeds upon cognition? Here though comes in Necessity as the Freedom which is Infinity,
both God and I, as here, identified with God. "Myself and God" said Newman, existentially,
without talk of the I. The much maligned "argument from natural desire" never found more
coherent expression than in Hegel, but as it were surpassing itself, since this is the desire, i.e.
the desiring, exercised by that which is desired, by Thought-thinking-itself. "The position
taken up by the notion", i.e. not merely by our account of the notion, "is that of absolute
idealism" (160, Zus.). Philosophy

sees that what on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being, and to be
naturally or immediately independent, is but a constituent stage in the Idea.

This "naturally or immediately" applies, clearly, also to Nature and History as a whole or as
such, as the natural and the immediate. They are rather the passing moments of an Absolute
dialectic, of a dialectic terminating in the Absolute which, qua Absolute, "in its exclusiveness
resists all invasion". "Everything finite is false", in other words of Hegel. Moments are
momentary, evanescent, passing over into their other and contrary.

The Idea, Hegel accordingly notes, "is frequently treated as a mere logical form" (213):

Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, which ascribe so-called reality
and genuine actuality to the existent thing and all the other categories which
have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea…. (cp. 162, final paragraph)

i.e. to the moments. It is clear that this is a critique, a marking of the finitude, of existence as a
notion. The Idea "has no Existence for starting-point". Its principle, which is the notion,
should be taken "as the subjectivity which it really is". The subject, as thinking, does not
particularly need to exist. This is the deeper meaning of the Cartesian cogito.

"In the logic of understanding the notion is generally reckoned a mere form of thought", we
noted. Yes, it is this same notion or concept that we are talking about here, and not some other
conceptio to which we have merely appropriated the name.