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CHAPTER THREE

The Movement of Return

When dawn came to the outskirts of Jena on October 14, 1806, it brought only a slight improvement in visibility. The previous night had begun clear and cold, tinged by frost. But as the hours passed, a dense fog had gradually settled over the entire area. By 6 a.m., daylight was barely discernible. Nevertheless, some 46,000 French troops lay massed in position on the heights of the Landgrafenberg (a steep ridge just beyond the town) and in the adjacent valleys. All through the night, they had worked feverishly to drag their artillery up the heavily wooded slope. Now, as dawn came to Jena, they prepared to attack the Prussian forces hidden in the mist.

Finally, at about 6 a.m., the attack got underway, led by two divisions under Marshal Lannes. Almost immediately, the advance columns ran into several battalions under the Prussian commander Tauenzien. Both sides now unleashed their artillery at almost point-blank range into the mist. Although neither could actually see the other, the flashes produced by gunfire served to indicate positions. As a result, casualties were heavy. Because of the fog and enemy artillery, the French pushed forward only slowly. So it wasn’t until 7:30 a.m. that Suchet’s lead brigade on the right could make out the ghostly forms of trees, which marked a wood near the village of Closwitz. Once oriented, however, Suchet’s forces quickly took Closwitz despite heavy losses, as the light infantry swept away all opposition. On the French left, meanwhile, Gazan ran into more serious trouble. His first attack was repulsed, and only heavy artillery fire enabled his troops to advance and eventually take the village of Cospeda. At this point, Tauenzien ordered his men to fall back on the more distant village of Vierzehnheiligen, where his Saxon reserves were stationed. From here, having rallied the 5,000 who had fled from the French advance, he counter-attacked. Stunned by his assault, the French reeled back in confusion. But Tauenzien was unable to exploit his opportunity, because another French division (under Marshal Augereau) had pushed up the Mühlbach/Mühltal valley and now posed a threat to his southern flank. So Tauenzien withdrew once more, to rejoin the main Prussian force under Prince Hohenlohe. As a result, Lannes was able to reoccupy the ground necessary for the deployment of the Grande Armée, a movement critical to Napoleon’s battle plan.

Meanwhile, on the French right, Marshal Soult found his forces pitted against 5,000 men under Holtzendorff. Shortly after 10 a.m., having run into enemy forces in the fog, Prussian skirmishers opened fire on one of Soult’s divisions (under St. Hilaire). Alerted by the sound of musketry, the rest of the Prussian force swung into echelon formation for a major assault. Hidden behind a reverse slope near Rodigen, however, St. Hilaire’s division was able to maneuver undetected around to the left of Holtzendorff, who suddenly had to face an unexpected onset against his left flank as French troops poured out from their concealed position. Under pressure, the Prussians fell back behind a stream near the village of Nerkwitz. At first, Prussian cavalry managed to cover their retreat, until Soult’s own cavalry burst upon it in the fog and overwhelmed it. Pursued by Soult’s hussars and chasseurs, the Prussian cavalry was driven upon the unprepared Prussian infantry. Carnage then ensued as one of the columns was massacred. Holtzendorff now threw all his energy into a stand behind Nerkwitz. Once more, however, French forces worked around to his left and launched a second cavalry attack. Faced with Soult’s thundering horsemen once more, the Prussian line collapsed and disintegrated. Remnants fled toward the distant village of Apolda. At this moment, only events elsewhere on the field kept Soult from the chance for a complete massacre.

In fact, the French center had been compromised by a rash attack under the fiery Marshal Ney, whose impatience to get into action had finally overcome all sense of restraint. At first, the Prussian line crumpled before his unexpected assault. But once over their initial surprise, the Prussians re-formed and attacked him with cavalry. Their attack compelled Ney to arrange his troops in square formation, which left them in an awkward, exposed position. Seeing the danger, Napoleon immediately rushed all available cavalry to the spot. In addition, he ordered Augereau and Lannes to support Ney.

But as Lannes’s troops pressed forward through Vierzehnheiligen, they collided with a substantial Prussian force under Gräuwert, drawn up in oblique formation. In response to the well-known command, “Advance in echelon from the left,” Gräuwert’s troops stepped smartly into position. Brought to a halt within short range of the French line, the Prussian formation now opened fire in measured volleys. After heavy losses on both sides, the French finally fell back on Vierzehnheiligen. Some houses in the village were already aflame, thanks to a Prussian howitzer battery. Faced with the opportunity offered by the French retreat, however, Prince Hohenlohe now made a fatal mistake. Without the “Freisehaaren” normally used to storm a village, he ordered Gräuwert to draw up his troops in formation just outside Vierzehnheiligen, there to await reinforcements from Weimar. Exposed in this way for two hours to withering enemy fire from behind stone walls and garden fences, Gräuwert’s line was brutally decimated. By the end, it presented a poignant spectacle: while all around their comrades lay dead or dying, isolated remnants of companies continued to load and fire mechanically.

It was now time, Lannes thought, to resolve the impasse. Against Hohenlohe’s main force he launched frontal and left flank attacks simultaneously. In response, Hohenlohe immediately drew back his left into a defensive posture. Nonetheless, by sheer weight of numbers, the French gradually began to push the Prussians back, until a counter-attack by fresh Saxon squadrons reversed the tide. Once more, Lannes’s troops fell back on Vierzehnheiligen, in some confusion. For the second time, Hohenlohe looked at a critical opportunity. But by now Ney’s infantry and part of Lannes’s force had pushed through Isserstadt wood onto the main road to Weimar, a move that cut off three Saxon brigades from the Prussian center. More ominously, as he looked toward Jena, Hohenlohe could discern the dark blue masses of new French formations on the move. Under these circumstances, he thought it best to reinforce rather than advance. Thus by 1 p.m. every body of Prussian troops had been committed.

With his own massive reserve of 42,000 in readiness, Napoleon could feel the moment had come. His plan was to attack the entire Prussian line: St. Hilaire against the remnants of Holtzendorff’s troops on the right, Augereau against the Saxons on the left. Ney and Lannes would assault the Prussian center, supported by Murat’s cavalry. Augereau was already engaged by 11:30 a.m., but it took St. Hilaire until 1 p.m. to get his troops into position. At that moment, Napoleon ordered his center to advance.

As formation after formation of the Grande Armée swept forward, the pressure on the Prussian line became unbearable. Officers screamed at and threatened their men, but slowly, inexorably, the regiments began to yield under fire. As waves of French infantry swirled around segments of Prussian cavalry and infantry that had come forward to meet their assault, they penetrated into gaps in the Prussian line. Hohenlohe’s entire formation now began to disintegrate. Reluctantly, the Prussian command gave the signal for retreat. At first it was orderly, despite the deafening artillery barrage ordered by Lannes to harass the Prussian withdrawal. But as Murat’s huge cavalry force thundered forward, the Prussian formations finally collapsed. Immediately behind Murat with the combined light cavalry of Augereau, Lannes, and Ney, the heavy cavalry plus two dragoon regiments flew over the ground in pursuit. Panic now spread rapidly among what was left of the Prussian forces. Abandoning guns and equipment, they fled in different directions. Many took the road to Weimar.

As pursuers and pursued moved in one confused torrent toward Weimar, however, they abruptly encountered a fresh contingent of 15,000 Prussian troops under Rüchel. These were the reinforcements Hohenlohe had so desperately summoned at 9 a.m. as he realized the magnitude of the French forces he had engaged. While the broken remnants of Hohenlohe’s command poured down the slope beyond Gröss-Romstedt into the Capellendorf valley, Rüchel deployed his men in attack formation, then turned over his command to Hohenlohe. Aided by some Saxon cavalry, they beat off Soult’s light cavalry, which had been in hot pursuit. Closely packed together, as if on parade-ground drill, Rüchel’s corps now marched in measured time up the hill from Capellendorf toward Gröss-Romstedt. As it neared the crest, artillery rushed up by Napoleon from various French corps began to tear wide gaps in the Prussian ranks. Nevertheless, Rüchel’s troops stood firm, and a French dragoon regiment that had charged downhill was driven off by Saxon cavalry. Similarly, French skirmishers were also pushed back. So it was only when Rüchel’s men reached the crest of the hill that they discovered a solid line of French infantry, stretching as far as the eye could see. For fifteen minutes the two sides engaged in a fierce firefight, marked by volley after volley of lethal flame. Then the French infantry charged, with irresistible force. At that moment the Prussian line wavered and finally broke. Once more a confused mass flowed down the hill, toward Capellendorf. And once more Murat’s cavalry began its assault, breaking up what remained of Rüchel’s corps. It was now 3 p.m. By 4 p.m., Murat had organized the pursuit of all detachments still left, and at around 5 p.m. the dashing cavalry chief rode into Weimar, “contemptuously wielding a riding whip instead of a saber.”1

By common consent, Jena counts as a classic example of Napoleonic strategy. It displays the Emperor’s favorite tactic: the so-called advance of envelopment, or what Napoleon himself termed the manoeuvre sur les derrières. Napoleon had always preferred a flank attack to a straightforward frontal assault: “It is by turning the enemy, by attacking his flank, that battles are won.” From his standpoint, a flank attack brings about a breach in the enemy line that ultimately leads to its collapse. This, then, is the critical moment of a conflict: “the breach once made, the equilibrium is broken and everything else is useless.”2

It all begins once the cavalry has sighted the enemy. As soon as he was informed of its position, Napoleon would order his nearest corps to engage and pin down the force opposed to it. His object: to establish a fixed point around which to maneuver. The flexibility of his own individual corps made such a move possible. Since each corps had its own complement of infantry, guns, and cavalry, it resembled a miniature army. Its balance allowed it to engage a much larger force for some time: its artillery would hinder any assault by the enemy, while its cavalry could easily force enemy troops into a defensive square formation. Meanwhile the corps’s infantry protected the other two contingents from being isolated or overwhelmed by superior forces. At the same time, a single, apparently isolated corps would also lure an enemy to attack by the prospect of an easy victory.

Once underway, the initial engagement would quickly escalate into a larger conflict. As soon as a single corps had managed to get involved, others would be rushed up by forced marches to its support. At the outset, these other troops would seem too far away to intervene decisively. Initially, only one corps might come to the aid of the first. As it moved into position, it would cause the enemy to extend its own line to avoid being outflanked. Subsequently, the arrival of other French corps would compel the enemy to extend its line farther. At this point, the enemy commander would probably feel some pressure to resolve the situation quickly, before any further French reinforcements could arrive. And that would mean the use of his own reserves to force a decision.

As the conflict continued to escalate at his front, Napoleon would meanwhile have dispatched another force to attack the enemy flank or rear. Hidden by cavalry and perhaps natural obstacles as well (at Jena, the reverse slope near Rodigen that concealed St. Hilaire’s division from Holtzendorff), its movement would be difficult to detect. Here speed was essential: the force must get into position before the enemy could alter its own disposition. Hence the peculiar composition of the corps involved, with a large complement of cavalry. Besides speed, timing was crucial as well: the corps must intervene at just the right moment for decisive effect. For Napoleon, that moment would come when the enemy had committed most or all of its reserve to the conflict at its front.

At the crucial moment, then, the attaque débordante would suddenly begin. The enemy commander would immediately feel the threat it posed, since any attack on an unprotected flank or rear could quickly sever his line of communication. He would now have only two options: (1) a general retreat, or (2) withdrawal of troops from his front line to create a new line at a right angle to the original one, so as to protect against the unexpected flank assault. But retreat wouldn’t be easy. As his hitherto-concealed troops burst on the enemy flank, Napoleon would also order a general frontal attack against the entire enemy army. Under these circumstances, withdrawal would expose the enemy force to heavy artillery fire, as well as confusion and even possible collapse in the event of a French assault. To create a new line at a right angle to his original one, however, would compel a commander to thin his formation at some point, since all reserve troops would already have been committed.

While the enemy thinned its front line to protect the flank under attack, Napoleon would prepare to assault the weakened “hinge” of its new formation. Earlier, in fact, he would already have secretly massed a reserve. It consisted of picked troops from all services, usually in square formation: artillery in front, infantry on either side, cavalry in the rear. Described by Napoleon as the masse de décision or masse de rupture, its function was to force a breakthrough at the weakened “hinge” and so split the enemy line.

When the right moment had arrived, the assembled artillery of the Guard Reserve would gallop forward to within 500 yards of the enemy and unleash a devastating barrage of case or cannister shot. Simultaneously, the infantry would press forward at the pas de charge. Meanwhile the cavalry would execute a series of assaults against the enemy infantry, so as to force it into square formation and thereby reduce the amount of musketry fire it could oppose to the French advance. As the infantry moved forward, the artillery would likewise push its guns closer and closer to the enemy. Together, the combined effect of all these measures on the enemy line would typically result in a wide gap. Napoleon would now throw unit after unit of infantry into the gap, in an effort to widen it as much as possible. At the same time, his heavy cavalry would thunder forward through the gap to break what was left of the enemy line, until the entire formation collapsed. With its collapse, victory per se had been achieved. What remained was merely to exploit that victory by relentless cavalry pursuit until all remnants of enemy resistance had been annihilated.

At the level of theory, the new autonomy of tactics becomes apparent in its ability to create its own narrative. From his Correspondence, we get this remark by Napoleon himself: “A battle is a theatrical piece, with a beginning, a middle and an end.” In tactical terms, then, Jena might be described as a story. It begins with an initial conflict on a relatively small scale that expands quickly as more forces become engaged and thereby extend a linear front. Its middle phase involves the surprise attack by St. Hilaire on the Prussian rear. Its end comes about when the massed French reserve splits the Prussian line in half at its most vulnerable point and so forces its collapse. The success of this story, at Jena and elsewhere, would depend on the extent to which Napoleon could draw the enemy into it. From a tactical standpoint, however, what stands out is the way he would invariably try, on each occasion, to re-create the same story, regardless of particular circumstances. It points to a belief in the story itself as somehow sufficient to ensure victory. And that would imply that tactics has managed to raise itself above the level of an analysis of the particular formations and circumstances of a given battlefield: as if it were possible to specify on a higher level of generality the conditions necessary to produce victory. And that, in turn, would suggest the kind of autonomy tactics had now achieved.3

But if tactics had in fact arrived at a new kind of autonomy with Napoleon, the extent of that autonomy would still ultimately depend on the internal logic of its narrative. Essentially, the story Napoleon wants to tell is one of extension and consequent return. More specifically, an initially extended enemy line becomes, at a crucial point, overextended. And the deployment of his own massed reserve against its weakest spot would cause its rupture, or what might be described as its movement of return. The logic of this sequence comes from the tactical necessity of what happens at each phase of the story. Once the conflict begins, the enemy commander can’t help but extend his own line as Napoleon himself introduces more corps into the fray. Likewise, once attacked on its flank or rear, the enemy simply has to pull troops from elsewhere in its own line so as to form a new front to meet the attack. And, finally, once its line has been thinned out to meet the attack on its flank or rear, the success of an assault by a massed reserve against its weakened line is bound to seem inevitable. Significantly, in the years after Jena Napoleon no longer even bothered to give his manoeuvre sur les derrières the element of surprise. We might attribute this to a decline in the quality of his troops. But it also reflects a belief that the intrinsic force of the move itself ought to yield the desired result.

At the same time, his belief in the force of a flank or rear attack shows how Napoleon saw tactics as a kind of “physics.” Earlier, I mentioned his tendency to speak of his reserve as a masse de décision or a masse de rupture. The terminological flavor is significant. It suggests that the capacity of an assault force to achieve a rupture in the enemy line has less to do with its cohesion than with its density, or mass. So we move from an emphasis on the strictness or tautness of line formations to a concern with mass, weight, massive force. But if the pressure a formation can exert is proportional to its density, presumably the amount of pressure exerted by a formation of vast numerical superiority must be more or less irresistible. To sum up, then, we might say that for Napoleon mass ⇒ rupture. Likewise, it seems useful to consider his remark about the effect of that rupture: “the breach once made, the equilibrium is broken and everything else is useless.” In other words, the cohesion of a line or formation is purely a matter of equilibrium. Obviously, an equilibrium can stand some amount of strain. As Napoleon realized, linear formations can in fact resist a significant amount of pressure from an attack. The trick, then, would be to increase the pressure until that equilibrium can no longer be sustained. And to determine when the crucial point is reached becomes the concern of a tactical “physics.”4

This description of tactics in terms of a “physics” points to an effort by Napoleon to look at tactical theory from a new perspective. It differed from earlier approaches insofar as it was less rational. In other words, it didn’t depend on a close analysis of the potential weaknesses of a specific enemy formation. Instead, its aim was to bring an irresistible force to bear on a given point in that formation. Under these circumstances, it wouldn’t matter how the enemy chose to dispose its troops. “Physics” or the weight of numbers plus firepower would overcome any possible artifice of rational disposition. At Jena, Napoleon had also relied on the element of surprise: the maneuver against the Prussian rear executed by St. Hilaire had benefited from the concealment of a reverse slope. To some extent, then, the tactical plan Napoleon employed in that conflict still displayed traces of a more traditional, rational style. It attempted to exploit a perceived weakness in the particular linear formation adopted by the Prussian command. But increasingly, in the years after Jena, his tendency would be to rely more and more exclusively on what might be described as the pure weight or mass of his own forces. It conveys, you might say, a desire to base his objective less on an external arrangement or disposition of troops than on what he perceived as internal to the very nature of the forces he sought to deploy.

What Napoleonic tactics did above all, however, was to sublimate individual moments of the sequence to a higher principle of development. In the initial phase, as we’ve seen, Napoleon reinforces an isolated corps once it’s managed to engage the enemy. Since his reinforcements come up by forced marches, he could easily have deployed a sufficient number to overcome the enemy on this front. But he doesn’t. Instead, he introduces his reinforcements only gradually, so that they merely extend the enemy line, rather than overwhelm it. At this stage, then, victory is deferred. In the next phase, he sends a corps on a wide sweep around to the enemy’s flank or rear. Carried out with sufficient force, its attack, helped by the element of surprise, could well have been made decisive. The kind of confusion such a move would have produced in the enemy’s ranks, the immediate losses, and the force of a determined charge on a weakened formation had proved their ability to resolve a conflict under other circumstances. Yet even here, Napoleon prefers to postpone the climax. It comes about only by means of the subsequent attack by his massed reserve. Thus, at all these earlier moments, a potential for victory is declined in favor of the final phase. In other words, the potential of each moment is subordinated to its role in a larger scheme where the result is achieved by an entire process or development.

For Napoleon, development is all about fulfillment, or fruition. From his standpoint, the sort of movement that marks tactical development is movement toward an end. If the initial phase defers victory by not rushing up distant corps too quickly, it’s only so that the final attack by the massed reserve will have an even more decisive effect. The gradual arrival of reinforcements on the initial front locks all the enemy troops on that front in place, so that they can’t be moved to support anyone else. Likewise, the attack on the enemy flank or rear acts to overextend a section of the enemy’s front line, so that it becomes even more vulnerable to the massed reserve. Because the enemy front line is thinned out in this fashion, because of the weight of the reserve in numbers and artillery, the success of the attack is virtually assured. And, because it can concentrate an irresistible force on the enemy’s weakest point, its success will be all the more complete, or total. As a result, it has the capacity to bring the entire process to fulfillment, or fruition. It takes up, you might say, the effects of every earlier phase of the conflict, and advances these to a decisive end.

The day before the battle of Jena, Napoleon was in the city itself. He must have passed through it rather quickly, on his way to the heights beyond, where he spent the hours just before dawn. Nonetheless, he was seen by at least one observer who thought the moment warranted a brief description in a letter to a friend. We don’t know much about how or why the observer happened to see the Emperor. No doubt there was some confusion in the city, as invariably happens when a place is occupied by an enemy army. And perhaps the disturbances might have prompted the observer to go out and have a look for himself. Most likely other people were out as well, many probably impelled by a desire to see the Emperor, who by this time had created quite a stir throughout Germany. Nor would the crowd have felt any particular loyalty to Prussia or, on the other hand, hostility either to the Emperor or to France. So we can imagine our observer as part of a crowd that might have gathered somewhere in the city to see the Emperor as he rode by. But if we don’t know much about the particular motive that might have induced our observer to try to catch a glimpse of the Emperor, we do at least know his name. He was G.W.F. Hegel, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Jena.

His letter to his friend Niethammer, written that same day, is curious in a number of ways. It begins with a very detailed specification of time and place: “Jena. Monday, 13 Oct. 1806, on the day Jena was occupied by the French, and the Emperor Napoleon arrived within its walls.” Given that Niethammer was a very good friend, and that Hegel had in fact written to him just five days before, it would hardly have been necessary to give him all this information. It’s as if Hegel really has some other audience in mind. Or perhaps the description is meant as a kind of memo to himself, to remember precisely the circumstances of what he sees as an event of historical significance. Interestingly, though, the crucial battle that will decide the campaign hasn’t yet taken place. Nor does Hegel necessarily know it will happen the next day, or even shortly thereafter. Yet he writes as if it’s already happened, and the outcome already known. Hegel then goes on to give a brief narrative of what he himself witnessed: “Yesterday evening toward sundown I saw the shots fired by the French patrols from both Gempenbachtal and Winzerla; the Prussians were driven from the latter in the night, the shots lasted until 12 o’clock, and today between 8 and 9 o’clock the French Tirailleurs [skirmishers] forced their way in [to the city]—and an hour later the regular troops … the Emperor—this world-soul—I saw riding through the city to reconnoiter;—it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such an individual, who here concentrated in a single point, sitting on a horse, reaches out over the world and dominates it” (Briefe I: 119–20).

Within this description, one motif seems to me especially suggestive. Hegel says it’s wonderful to see someone like Napoleon who “reaches out over the world and dominates it.” A movement, then, that passes over things and yet rules or governs (beherrscht) them at the same time. In the original, the sense that the movement is somehow over or above what it affects comes out even more explicitly: “über die Welt übergreift.” It looks almost like a paradox, really: we wonder how a movement can appear to pass over things and yet affect them in a way that’s absolutely central to their existence. Unless it were somehow present within them simultaneously. Hence, perhaps, the term “world-soul.” But the essence of this “world-soul” is a movement: it begins at a single point, from which it reaches out or extends itself over the entire world. And, in the process, dominates or governs it.

The fact that Hegel should see in Napoleon an example of a movement that reaches out over the world and yet dominates it might also point to his own concerns at that moment as well. We know that, at the very moment Napoleon was about the engage the Prussian army at Jena, Hegel himself was engaged in an effort to bring his own first book-length work to a close. And that meant the necessity of a preface of some kind.5 So it would be significant if, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, we could discern some trace of a similar movement. But for that we need to look at the Preface in detail.

In my view, which must justify itself through the exhibition of the system itself, everything depends on grasping and expressing the True not as Substance, but rather equally as Subject. At the same time, it is to be remarked that substantiality encompasses the universal, or the immediacy of knowing, just as much as that which is being or immediacy for knowing.—If to grasp God as the one Substance shocked the age in which this definition was proclaimed, the ground for it lay on the one hand in an instinctive feeling that therein self-consciousness was only submerged [or lost] and not preserved. On the other hand, the opposite view, which holds fast to thought as thought, to universality as such, is the same simplicity, is undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality. And if, thirdly, thought does unite itself with the being of Substance, and apprehends immediacy or intuition as thinking, the question is still whether this intellectual intuition does not again fall back into inert simplicity, and represent actuality itself in a non-actual manner. (18. 3–17)

We might wonder, first of all, about the emphasis: why so much should depend on our capacity to grasp and express the True not as Substance but rather equally as Subject. Other questions arise as well. Why the need, for instance, to both “grasp” and “express”—why the first isn’t sufficient by itself. And, finally, what the difference between Substance and Subject really is.

We get some sense of why both Substance and Subject are necessary from Hegel’s remark that what he says can only be justified by an exposition of the system itself. Substance and Subject, then, are only parts of a larger totality, one whose exposition will justify all its individual elements. Moreover, the rhetoric of the passage (“not as Substance, but rather equally as Subject”) hints at Substance as a point of departure and Subject as endpoint. So the Hegelian system would seem to consist of a movement from Substance to Subject.

Even if we admit the necessity for a movement from Substance to Subject, however, it isn’t immediately clear why we also need to worry about its expression. To put it another way, we might ask why we should need to express what we’ve grasped or understood. Yet Hegel distinctly considers the act of expression crucial to comprehension. Elsewhere in the Phenomenology, he says the same statement will take on a very different meaning when uttered by an older person as opposed to a child. For the older person, no doubt, the statement will evoke a host of experiences the child presumably doesn’t yet have. So expression leads to self-awareness, which Hegel seems to feel is necessary for the kind of philosophical enterprise he wants to propose.

Finally, we come to the question of what the difference between Substance and Subject really is. The fact that the text speaks of the “being of Substance” shows that Substance definitely has being as a property. But Hegel also talks about thought as united to the being of Substance. So Substance consists not only of being but thought as well. That in turn might lead one to ask how it could possibly differ in any fundamental way from Subject. After all, at the most basic level, everything is either being or thought. Thus if Subject differs from Substance, it can’t be in terms of composition. Presumably, then, it must be in terms of development: Subject presents a more developed version of what Substance displays in a less developed guise.

In this fashion, at the very outset, we get a glimpse of the movement that will govern our entire discussion of Hegel. Specifically, it will be a movement from Substance to Subject. Or, to put it another way, from a condition where being has the ascendancy to one where that ascendancy has passed over to thought. But if Substance is somehow supposed to become Subject, the movement by which it does that will inevitably have to involve its passage over to otherness, to a condition where it’s no longer itself. And that, presumably, will necessitate some sort of negativity. By means of negativity, as we’ve seen from Shelley, you deny what you were before. At the same time, if Subject isn’t entirely different from Substance, the movement from Substance to Subject will also be for Substance a return to itself. In order to come back to yourself from otherness, however, you need some sort of reflexivity, or movement of return. That, too, we’ve seen before, in Friedrich Schlegel. From Schlegel, moreover, we know that reflexivity doesn’t just involve a movement of return, that it’s also one of awareness. But now the awareness isn’t just of our own consciousness. Instead, since we observe our passage into otherness via negativity and our return to self, you might call it an awareness of narrative.6

Although we’ve now ascertained that both being and thought can be found in Substance, the specifics remain to be defined. On this point Hegel observes that “substantiality encompasses the universal, or the immediacy of knowing, just as much as that which is being or immediacy for knowing.” But what exactly does the “universal” mean, as a category in Hegel? As he sees it, the “universal” can apply equally to anything. Consequently, it lacks definition: only a category that doesn’t apply universally can give definition to a particular object. Its lack of definition makes the universal equivalent for Hegel to immediacy of knowing. Conceptually, the universal is where we begin, the broad base of generality from which we start in our quest to define specificity. Its immediacy comes precisely from the fact that we begin with it. Associated with knowledge, it takes on a conceptual quality. What the universal encompasses, then, isn’t the generality of things but rather that of a conceptual category. It is, you might say, thought at its vaguest, most undeveloped level, without internal content of any kind. But the universal is only one aspect of substantiality. The other is being, or “immediacy for knowing.” Since Hegel also associates it with immediacy, the sort of being he has in mind here must be the ontological equivalent of the universal: in other words, being in all its undeveloped generality, or the existential property itself. Being of this kind possesses immediacy for knowing since thought in its initial, undeveloped phase can only apprehend what’s equally undeveloped. So Substance has both conceptual and ontological aspects, but only in the most indefinite, undeveloped way.

As a comment on this situation, Hegel begins with a remark about why Spinoza’s system ultimately proved inadequate. He says it “shocked the age in which this definition was proclaimed” because it failed to notice an omission in its definition of the one Substance: “self-consciousness was only submerged and not preserved.” Earlier, Descartes had shown self-consciousness to be connected to thought: to think implied a capacity to recognize thought activity in oneself, and that capacity is a form of self-consciousness. Conversely, absence of self-consciousness would imply a lack of thought capacity, which it seemed unacceptable to attribute to divinity. What the God of Spinoza lacked, then, was the element of thought. As Substance, it seemed devoid of any thought capacity.

On the other hand, Hegel is equally concerned to expose the inadequacy of thought by itself. To him, thought by itself is equivalent to universality. Thus he characterizes it as “the same simplicity,” as “undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality.” Since he speaks of it as “unmoved,” he presumably thinks it has the capacity to move but hasn’t exercised it. And the reason it hasn’t is that it lacks an object to apprehend. When a capacity to apprehend attempts to apprehend its own apprehensive capacity, it finds only an empty potentiality, one that makes it perfectly “transparent” to itself. Hence its “undifferentiated” quality. In other words, it can’t find any way to differentiate itself from itself. And since it has only itself to apprehend, the result is a complete absence of distinction. So thought by itself turns out to exhibit the same sort of inadequacy being had shown before.

Despite the inadequacy of either element by itself, the mere notion of the two as combined doesn’t automatically yield what we want. Indeed, as Hegel points out, even if we supposed being and thought to be united, so that thought could apprehend immediacy or intuition as thinking, “the question is still whether this intellectual intuition does not again fall back into inert simplicity.” To say that intuition, as immediacy of knowing, is related to thought in some way doesn’t necessarily mean they’re identical. By its very nature, intuition (as immediacy) is bound to lack development. What it can convey is an immediate perception (Anschauen). As immediacy of knowing, perceptions of this kind act as a point of departure for the sort of intellectual development we associate with thought. To claim that intuition is thought, however, would be to short-circuit the development this assertion ought to involve. Because it embodies the immediacy of knowing (and so is related to thought in some way), and because it acts as a point of departure for thought, the assertion that intuition is thought can’t be dismissed as untrue. On the other hand, it clearly isn’t true in any immediate or self-evident way. Nor does it lend itself to further development. Instead, if we take it literally, it actually abolishes the possibility of any development at all. Since intuition is devoid of development, its identity with thought would imply that thought, too, needn’t entail any development. Moreover, if intuition = thought, any statement about thought must itself be purely intuitive, and hence incapable of either development or proof. Thus the only way to verify such statements would require that we perceive them as true intuitively. But even here the very nature of intuition gets in the way. Purely apprehensive, it resists any efforts to apprehend it intuitively. And, precisely because any effort to apprehend intuition comes up empty, it falls back into what Hegel terms “inert simplicity”: “simplicity” because of a lack of anything to apprehend, “inert” because such a condition can’t lead to anything else.

In addition to its inert simplicity, the notion that intuition is equivalent to thought displays another drawback as well: its tendency to “represent actuality itself in a non-actual manner.” If the non-actual is associated in the Phenomenology with “inert simplicity,” the actual must presumably involve a development of some kind. Since thought begins from simplicity, however, the existence of simplicity, at least, seems beyond dispute. Nevertheless, actuality and existence needn’t be exactly the same. Thus if actuality is connected to development, conditions that exist but that don’t involve any development could presumably figure as non-actual. In this way, we can explain how thought defined as intuition might appear to Hegel a case of actuality depicted “in a non-actual manner.” So the movement from Substance to Subject is for him a movement toward actuality. And development is the means by which he expects to get there.

The living Substance is furthermore being, which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself, or the mediation of its becoming-other with itself. It is as Subject pure simple Negativity, and even thereby the splitting into two [Entzweyung] of the simple, or the opposition-establishing doubling, which is, again, the negation of this indifferent disparity and its opposite; only this self-reestablishing sameness, or the reflection into otherness within oneself—not an original unity as such, or immediate as such—is the True. It is the becoming itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and that has its end as its beginning; and only through its being worked out and its end is it actual. (18.18–28)

“Living Substance”: face to face with this odd phrase, so manifestly unphilosophical, it seems only natural to ask what might be meant by it. Hegel says, first of all, that living Substance is being, and subsequently, that being is Subject. But we know being isn’t Subject straightaway, that it only becomes so by means of development. And the text remarks that the living Substance that is being or Subject “is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself.” So movement is necessary to living Substance. Moreover, movement of a particular kind: the movement of positing oneself. Anything, however, that posits itself (sich selbst Setzen) must have within itself a capacity for movement. It’s always possible, of course, to posit something else (A, for instance, or A = A). To posit oneself, on the other hand, requires a capacity for movement by what’s posited, since to posit oneself is ultimately a form of self-assertion. Living Substance, then, is defined by its capacity to posit itself by its own self-movement.

For Hegel, the capacity of Substance to move itself is crucial to his entire enterprise. From an Enlightenment standpoint, the essential problem for any theory lay in the knowability of external objects. Romantic philosophy (i.e., Kant’s immediate successors) tried to solve this by a bold stroke: assert that thought and the being of external objects are identical. Since being and thought in their pure forms are equally undefined, however, the assertion that they’re identical couldn’t really be demonstrated. Hence the need for a development of some kind. But not just of thought itself. A development of thought by itself would merely amount to analysis: it wouldn’t affect the being of external objects in any way, and as a result would be purely external. To avoid that pitfall, then, being itself must move as well. And so we come to the need for Substance, the fusion of being and thought, to move.

But if Substance moves, we want to know about the form of its movement. On this point, the text speaks of “the mediation of its becoming-other with itself.” So we have several significant “moments” in the process by which Substance posits itself: the moment of immediacy, becoming-other, and, finally, its mediation with Substance. Essentially, the movement is a circular one: it begins with immediacy, goes out to otherness, and then, by a sort of mediation, effects a “return” to the point where it began. Since the entire sequence is one of self-assertion, moreover, we need to understand its “moments” in a special way. When Substance becomes something other than itself, it would be a mistake to regard its new condition as wholly independent of what it originally was. Since its becoming-other is ultimately only a moment in its self-assertion, it obviously can’t lose all relation to what it was—otherwise it would no longer be self-assertion. Similarly, mediation between its becoming-other and itself shouldn’t be construed in an ordinary way either. Simply put, any mediation between these conditions can’t result merely in their “reconciliation” or synthesis. Likewise, mediation is part of the process by which Substance asserts itself. When it connects otherness to Substance, then, what mediation needs to show is how otherness can be perceived within a framework of self-assertion.

Given the sequence just described, the next step for Hegel is to talk about what makes it possible. The answer is negativity. The text tells us that Substance “is as Subject pure simple Negativity, and is even thereby the splitting into two [Entzweyung] of the simple, or the opposition-establishing doubling, which is, again, the negation of this indifferent disparity and its opposite.” Before we get into any specifics, a quick comment: what we have here amounts to the equivalent of a prolepsis. We know Substance eventually becomes Subject, but only by means of a long, drawn-out process. So if we try to posit Substance as Subject, the natural response would simply be: it isn’t. Substance is immediacy. Subject implies development. If we begin with Substance, the only way to arrive at Subject is by a denial of everything Substance is. From the standpoint of immediacy, Subject, as development, can’t exist. Similarly, from the standpoint of Subject, Substance in its immediacy marks a moment that can no longer exist if Subject is to be itself. The only way, then, to get from Substance to Subject must be via negativity.

For Hegel, negativity isn’t a rational principle. Pure negativity denies everything, even itself. Simple negativity can’t include the complexity of exceptions. It begins as negation of the simple, of Substance in its immediacy. Hegel employs the term Entzweyung (= Entzweiung), which “bifurcation” renders quite nicely, but without the sheerly destructive overtone present in the original. This sort of negativity wants to create dissension, or a breakup. Its breakup of the simple, or Substance in its immediacy, produces something double: Substance and what it isn’t. Yet Hegel speaks of the result as an “indifferent” disparity, by which he means one that doesn’t demand a resolution of some kind. Nevertheless, this “indifferent” disparity is itself swept away, by the negativity that created it in the first place. Because negativity isn’t rational, however, the negation of disparity doesn’t preclude the negation of its opposite. On the contrary: since pure negativity implies constant negation, it could only lead initially to a negation of Substance and, subsequently, to negation of the disparity between Substance and what it isn’t that the initial negation produces.

To some extent, we might describe negativity as the ultimate risk for Romantic theory. Inevitably, as we’ve seen from Shelley, the effect of any recessive movement is to create a powerful pull toward disbelief. The risk, then, is that once you introduce negativity into theory you won’t be able to stop it. For Shelley, the only way to stop it had been to frame negativity as a movement of inwardness, by which we get closer to what’s essential. But Shelley could only see how to retrieve negativity abstractly: the process of endless regress becomes a way to represent what we can’t otherwise specify. With Hegel, however, we arrive at a new insight. Negativity, as a movement of thought, was bound to remain purely negative. We know we can always negate whatever we posit, and that this process can go on endlessly. For that matter, we can even negate the very possibility of an end. What Hegel saw was how the situation would change if negativity were to come not from thought but from being or the existential. In other words, if negativity were to be equivalent to the process by which being or the existential becomes what it is, the very movement of negation by which existence is opposed would then be merely the means by which it would draw closer to what it’s finally supposed to be.

Yet the ultimate result of pure negativity isn’t indefinite negation but a “return” to the point where we began. In fact, Hegel doesn’t quite believe you can literally go home again. A “return” to immediacy would imply a lack of development. But to negate what is itself negative simply amounts to a negation of its negativity. It needn’t imply affirmation of what was originally negated. Thus Hegel speaks of negativity as “self-reestablishing sameness.” For sameness to reestablish itself (wiederherstellende Gleichheit) obviously isn’t the same as a simple return to itself. Its need to reestablish itself seems to imply that it’s no longer what it was previously. Hegel emphasizes the point when he says the present sameness is “not an original unity as such, or immediate.” Instead, self-reestablishing sameness is equivalent to “the reflection into otherness within oneself.” What’s crucial here is the fact that “reflection into otherness” occurs within oneself. If the move to what Substance isn’t takes place within a larger framework of self-assertion, then no matter what Substance does it will still remain itself.

Finally, what matters most isn’t any given moment but the entire process of development. After all, each “moment” of that development is already implied in its initial condition. As Hegel says, it is “the circle that presupposes its end as its goal.” Nevertheless, it isn’t enough just to have in mind a vague notion of development. Instead, the text insists that “only through its being worked out and its end is it actual.” Because it gets worked out, development becomes actual. And because development is crucial to self-definition, the effect must be to give primacy not to individual moments but to the development they exemplify.

Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be expressed as a disporting [or play] of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative. In itself that life is indeed untroubled equality and unity with itself, for which otherness and alienation, as well as the overcoming of this alienation, are not serious matters. But this in itself is abstract universality, in which the nature of the divine life to be for itself, and thereby above all the self-movement of the form, are neglected. If the form is declared to be the same as the essence, it is even for that very reason a mistake to suppose that cognition can be satisfied with the in-itself or the essence, but can do without the form;—that the absolute principle or absolute intuition makes the working-out of the first or the development of the latter superfluous. Precisely because the form is as essential to the essence as the essence is to itself, the essence is not to be grasped and expressed merely as essence, i.e., as immediate substance, or as the pure self-contemplation of the divine, but equally as form, and in the whole wealth of the developed form; only thereby is it first grasped and expressed as an actuality. (18.29–19.11)

Here we have, quite simply, the entire movement of the Phenomenology. It goes from in itself to for itself. In between, there is “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.” To explain the movement, then, we need to know what each condition involves. We need to know why we begin from in itself, and why it isn’t sufficient for Substance or God to stay there. Next, we need to know why negativity has to be expressed as the “self-movement of the form.” We need to find out what form really means here, and why its movement has to be self-movement rather than by means of some other agency. Finally, we need to know what for itself is all about: how it differs from in itself, and why it (rather than anything else) should be the necessary outcome of in itself. Only then can we begin to consider other questions the passage goes on to raise: what makes form and essence identical in the movement from in itself to for itself, and why form alone should be equivalent to actuality.

If not merely redundant, “untroubled” equality would seem to imply the possibility of a “troubled” equality. Later, the text goes on to mention “otherness and alienation, as well as the overcoming of this alienation.” The fact that alienation can be overcome hints at a return to some former condition, like that of equality. From this standpoint, “untroubled” equality would presumably indicate a relation that had never suffered alienation—in other words, one that had never known inequality. For alienation to be overcome, on the other hand, points to a development of some kind. So “troubled” equality implies development, “untroubled” equality the absence of any development.

The distinction between “troubled” and “untroubled” equality also helps to explain why the text has to specify equality as opposed to unity. In fact, it’s distinctly possible for a thing to be unequal to itself. That’s precisely what happens when it becomes something else. At that point, we no longer speak of it as equal to itself, which simply means it isn’t what it was. From its own standpoint, however, a thing is always the same. It is what it is, as we say. For it, to exist is to be itself. And what it was, presently considered, amounts only to what it isn’t. As it sees it, then, a thing always is, and hence always is itself. From that we get what Hegel terms its “unity with itself.” Unity: literally, oneness (Einheit). The fact that it invariably is itself precludes any lapse from that unity.

The capacity of a thing to be itself also shows why otherness, alienation, and the overcoming of alienation seem unnecessary. To be, after all, seems sufficient: nothing about it points to any kind of tangible lack or deficiency. Change doesn’t add to it, it merely alters it. Moreover, if to be what one is counts as equivalent to a direct or unmediated relation to oneself, anything that exists must invariably have this sort of self-relation, since to be is to be itself. For that reason, it seems at best dubious why it should ever become involved in otherness and/or alienation.

In fact, whether it actually does so turns out to depend largely on its initial condition. Of that condition, Hegel remarks: “this in itself is abstract universality.” What we have here, then, is a complete lack of definition of any kind, the sort of condition the existential property produces when considered by itself. Nevertheless, Hegel sees it as an unstable condition. Its instability is due to the element of thought associated with the existential property. While the existential property itself is to some extent inert, thought displays a tendency to activity. Every act of thought is, in effect, an act of creation. As such, it necessitates a development of some kind. But in itself, as a condition, offers no possibility for development, because of the lack of any object to apprehend. Ultimately, its lack of object comes from a lack of self-awareness: in itself has no sense of itself specifically, nor of anything else. What thought needs, then, is a different kind of relation to itself.

For Hegel, thought is equivalent to development. That’s why it would be a mistake “to suppose that cognition can be satisfied with the in-itself or the essence, but can do without the form;—that the absolute principle or absolute intuition makes the working-out of the first or the development of the latter superfluous.” To be satisfied with the in-itself or the essence is to care only about the final result. And if we focused on that exclusively, we wouldn’t know the particular form of alienation or otherness that had been assumed, nor how it was overcome. We wouldn’t know, in other words, the sequence of moments by which thought came to be. But the process by which thought comes to be is crucial to its present condition, and hence to any attempt we might make to understand it. Thus the emphasis the text gives to form. Here the form Hegel speaks of is simply that of development. If thought is a process, the only form it can possibly have is that of the sequence by which it comes to be. By the same token, we arrive at the reason for the self-movement of the form. If the form of thought is that of its development, the only source from which that form could come would have to be thought itself.

To give form to its own development, thought has to enter into a different kind of relation to itself, one whereby it adopts the standpoint Hegel terms for itself. The standpoint from which it began, the in itself, is merely the standpoint of what is. But thought can’t be simply about that. Because what is contains no provision for any possibility, no anticipation of the future, no sense of how things come to be. To get beyond the standpoint of what merely is, thought has to see itself in a different way, as a kind of project rather than an inert fact. For that, however, it needs the perspective of for itself. For itself doesn’t take what thought is at the present moment as everything it will ever be. It looks beyond that, to a moment when that which now exists only as possibility will have become actual. At the same time, it also knows it won’t get there simply by awareness of its own possibility. In that respect, for itself is also the expression of volition, of intentionality, of purposive will. Thought becomes actual, in other words, because it wants to become actual. And for itself is what gives it the capacity to move from possibility to actuality.

The True is the whole. But the whole is only essence that consummates itself through its development. It must be said of the Absolute that it is essentially a result, that it only at the end is what it truly is; and that herein even rests its nature, to be actual, subject, or self-becoming. Though it may seem contradictory that the Absolute should be grasped essentially as a result, a little deliberation sets this appearance of contradiction right. The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute, as it is initially and immediately expressed, is only the universal. Just as when I say “all animals,” this expression cannot pass for a zoology, so it is just as noticeable that the words “the Divine,” “the Absolute,” “the Eternal,” etc., do not express what is contained in them;—and only such words in fact express the intuition as something immediate. Whatever is more than such a word, even the transition to a mere proposition, is a becoming-other that has to be taken back, that is a mediation. But this is what is rejected with horror, as if thereby more were being made of it [mediation] than just this, that it is not absolute and is not in the Absolute at all, and that absolute cognition were thereby being surrendered. (19.12–27)

At best, we might construe what Hegel says here as a glimpse of what he later does, more fully, at 20.26–21.15. Essentially, the present passage tries to prove just one point: that the Absolute should be seen as a result, rather than as the sort of insight that might be arrived at purely intuitively. In fact, the only really new material has to do with what he terms the transition (Uebergang, lit., a going-over) from a single word to a proposition, which he describes as a “becoming-other” (Anderswerden). This “becoming-other,” he says, has to be “taken back” (zurückgenommen). Hegel calls it a mediation. Rather than explain what he means by that, however, he then goes on to remark that the notion of the Absolute as one that involves mediation is rejected with horror, presumably by those who feel that if mediation is allowed to enter into the Absolute at all, the prospect of absolute cognition must be relinquished. But then, rather than try to prove otherwise, Hegel breaks off abruptly. Here at least two possible explanations arise. First, consider the compositional circumstances. Even if Hegel didn’t literally finish his Preface the night before the Jena conflict, he obviously had to work under pressure. Pressure leads to haste and, often, oversight. So maybe Hegel started to prove his point, got distracted over a parenthetical remark, later returned to his original point and managed to address it more fully, but then forgot to delete his earlier discussion of it (no word processor). Maybe, too, he felt some reservation about examples, which can be risky when taken too literally. A second explanation. We’ve seen that the Preface repeatedly insists that the Absolute as end or result is already implicit in Substance. So the apparently abortive effort to prove that the Absolute is essentially a result might simply anticipate the later treatment of this issue (20.26–21.15). To a large extent, these anticipations are typical of the Phenomenology. To motivate the transition from each moment to the next, there has to be some sense of insufficiency. By its abortive quality, then, Hegel’s initial effort to prove his point reveals its own inadequacy. At the same time, it thereby helps to justify the direction the Preface will later take.

But this abhorrence [of mediation] stems in fact from ignorance of the nature of mediation and of absolute cognition itself. For mediation is nothing else than self-moving equality to oneself, or is reflection into itself, the moment of the I that is for itself, pure negativity, or, reduced to its pure abstraction, simple becoming. The I, or becoming in general, this mediation, on account of its simplicity, is just immediacy in the process of becoming, and is the immediate itself.—It is therefore a misunderstanding of Reason when reflection is excluded from the True and is not grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute. It [reflection] is that which makes the True a result, but it equally sublates this opposition to its becoming, for this becoming is just as simple and therefore not different from the form of the True which shows itself as simple in its result; it is rather just this return [Zurückgegangenseyn, lit., having returned] into simplicity.—Though the embryo is indeed in itself a human being, it is not so for itself; for itself it is only that as cultivated Reason, which has made itself into what it is in itself. Only then is it actual. But this result is itself simple immediacy, for it is self-conscious freedom at peace with itself, which has not set the opposition aside and left it lying there, but has been reconciled with it. (19.28–20.10)

At this stage, Hegel introduces the notion of reflection or, more precisely, reflection into oneself. Almost immediately, we encounter an ambiguity. In effect, “reflection” might mean either (1) to be thrown or turned back (i.e., reflected) from a point, which would amount to some form of return, or (2) thought, especially the kind that involves self-awareness. Nor does the German text decisively favor either: “Reflexion” = reflection. So we might want to look at it in the context of mediation. We’ve seen that what’s mediated doesn’t have to differ from what it is to achieve equality with itself. At the same time, it ultimately becomes itself when reflected on (hence its reflection into itself). But if reflection was necessary for that, it couldn’t simply have been itself already. Instead, it must really have differed from itself in some way, so that when it became itself by reflection it actually did “return” into itself. In sum, both definitions of reflection seem to apply. Still, the mere notion of reflection doesn’t quite suffice to explain what happens when a mediated entity is reflected on. It doesn’t, in other words, sufficiently motivate a “return” into oneself.

For that, we need “the moment of the I that is for itself.” Because the I is associated with reflection, it seems only natural to see it as related to the kind of thought that produces self-awareness. Indeed, the very notion of the I is based on self-awareness. But self-awareness, after all, is itself a process. So suppose a sequence of moments, by which the I comes to exist. Among these, one is especially important to Hegel: the “moment of the I that is for itself.” At that moment, the I perceives how it has to become itself. From then on, it turns into what Hegel terms pure negativity or simple becoming, for which the existential property is only another name for development. This connection to the I helps to explain why development has to consist of a movement of reflection into oneself. Because the I can only recognize what it already is. Otherwise, it would no longer be the notion of identity it supposedly is. Specifically, I come to a notion of identity by means of reflection, whereby I discover that my perception of my own transformation is precisely what my I consists of.

The key here is simplicity. A remark about the I shows why Hegel considers simplicity crucial to his position: “The I, or becoming in general, this mediation, on account of its simplicity, is just immediacy in the process of becoming [die werdende Unmittelbarkeit], and is the immediate itself.” What Hegel wants to maintain, then, is that the I can be an entire transformational cycle, as well as a given moment in that cycle. In order for this to be true, however, the I in its development would have to remain essentially what it was in its immediacy. Only in that way could we still describe it as simple: its fully developed form doesn’t differ at the essential level from what it was initially. But for that to be the case, we need a scenario whereby what the I does is to make manifest by its development what it already implicitly was. Under these circumstances Hegel can then say: “It is therefore a misunderstanding of Reason when reflection is excluded from the True and is not grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute.” From his standpoint, we misconstrue the Absolute when we suppose that anything by which its development is protracted must be opposed to it. Implied is a belief that delay points to an intrusion of otherness. So what Hegel has to show is that otherness or difference isn’t involved at any point.

The real issue here is whether we can equate a development with its end result. Presumably the end result must differ in some way from every earlier phase: otherwise, it couldn’t mark an end to development. But if distinct from the process that produces it, we might wonder how Hegel can equate it with that process. On this question the text observes: “It [reflection] is that which makes the True a result, but it equally sublates this opposition to its becoming, for this becoming is just as simple and therefore not different from the form of the True which shows itself as simple in its result; it is rather just this return [lit., having returned] into simplicity.” Development overcomes its antithesis (i.e., the result), then, by being just as simple. But how can it be just as simple, if it involves a movement into otherness of some kind? According to Hegel, by its return into simplicity. To speak of it, literally, as having returned into simplicity emphasizes a point: there never was a moment when it hadn’t returned into simplicity. But simplicity means that Substance or the I doesn’t cease to be what it was, so that as it passes over into otherness it remains itself, as it were. So a return to simplicity = a return into oneself. In this way, Hegel tries to overcome the opposition between development and its end result: if development is to become what one already is, the process of development is no different from the end result precisely because it already is that result.

The return into oneself that Hegel speaks of is produced by means of self-awareness. Although it always is itself, the I isn’t necessarily aware of itself. To pass over into otherness leads to self-awareness, because it forces the I to confront what it isn’t. Forced to face that, the I is then reflected back onto what it is. But in its return from a perception of what it isn’t, it also becomes aware of its own movement of return. And this awareness of its movement of return means it can’t go back to square one. Instead, its awareness pushes it on to a new concept, that of the I. In fact, what the I consists of is its return into itself and its simultaneous awareness of the movement of its return.

The example Hegel gives aptly conveys all of these points. The fact that the embryo is a human being in itself but not for itself shows the I in its immediacy, yet as about to become what it implicitly is. And since it only comes to be what it already is, otherness or difference doesn’t define it at any moment. So simplicity is preserved. When the embryo becomes in actuality what it was implicitly, moreover, we can say it really only returns into itself. Meanwhile, Hegel can also speak of its return into simplicity, because the fully developed human being isn’t opposed to the one about to become fully developed. Instead, Hegel terms the end result “self-conscious freedom at peace with itself, which has not set the opposition aside and left it lying there, but has been reconciled with it.” The opposition comes, of course, from the effort of the self to become fully developed. Yet the fully developed self is reconciled with it, because the effort to be for itself is precisely what leads to development. Thus Hegel’s remark about cultivated Reason, that is has “made itself into what it is in itself.” The effort to become developed also implies an awareness of the entire process of development. But this awareness of its own development is just what describes the fully developed self. In order to be fully developed, the self needs that awareness, since only by a knowledge of its own development, of how it has become what it is, can it ultimately arrive at the freedom to fulfill its own potentiality.

What Hegelian reflection does is to take Romantic reflexivity to a new level. For Shelley, reflexivity had been purely intuitive: a sense that if we could just manage to get outside our own narrative frame we might be able to understand what that narrative was all about. Friedrich Schlegel took it one step further, when he tried to direct attention to consciousness itself: in order to get outside the narrative frame, you need to trace it to its source. Where Hegel differed from his predecessors was in his perception of how reflexivity could simultaneously be aware of itself as a movement of return. What we have in Hegel, then, is a moment of pure transparency: a movement by which we become aware of what we are that’s aware of its own movement of awareness. As a result, we get what might be described as a whole new level of narrative. Instead of just the narrative itself, we now also have the narrative of how we’ve arrived at that narrative. For Hegel, moreover, the narrative of how we’ve arrived at our narrative not only lets us get outside the original narrative frame, but even lights up the significance of our narrative by its perception of how the process by which we construct a narrative has the same sequential quality as that of our narrative itself.

What has just been said can also be expressed by saying that Reason is purposive activity. The exaltation of a supposed Nature over a misconceived thinking, and especially the banishment of external teleology, has brought the form of purpose in general into discredit. Yet, in the sense in which Aristotle, too, defined Nature as purposive activity, purpose is immediate, at rest, the unmoved which is self-moving, and so is Subject. Its power to move, taken abstractly, is being-for-self or pure negativity. The result is therefore the same as the beginning, only because the beginning is the purpose;—or the actual is therefore the same as its Concept, only because the immediate, as purpose, contains the self or pure actuality within itself. Realized purpose or the existing actual is movement and unfolded becoming; but just this unrest is the self; and the self is therefore like that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result, that which has returned into itself,—but that which has returned into itself is just the self, and the self is self-relating equality and simplicity. (20.11–25)

If the text so far has focused largely on how we get from Substance to Subject, what Hegel wants to talk about now is the agency behind it, the reason why it happens at all. Clearly, a movement whose end is implied in its origin must be in some sense teleological. At the same time, Hegel is well aware of the tendency to resist any kind of external teleology. The solution would seem to be an internal teleology. To describe an internal teleology, however, is difficult. Normally, we talk about teleology from a rational perspective. But the movement from Substance to Subject is one of development. An internal teleology, then, should presumably fuse the rational and the developmental. And the only way to do that would be to show that the movement or development from Substance to Subject is rational. Prima facie, nevertheless, it isn’t clear what a rational development ought to involve. For Hegel, to say that a development is rational means that every moment of it has come to be in a necessary fashion. So what we find at the heart of internal teleology is a belief about the necessity of development.

Given this basic position, what Hegel initially says about purpose comes as a bit of a surprise. Since purpose is normally linked to movement of some kind, we might wonder why he considers it as at rest. His statement that purpose is immediate furnishes a clue. We know that immediacy is typical of Substance before its development. As such, immediacy pertains to Substance by its very nature, rather than simply by circumstances. But the nature of Substance in its immediacy is to be at rest. Similarly, the assertion that purpose is at rest looks like an attempt to assimilate it to Substance by analogy. Fully assimilated to Substance, purpose can’t then be dismissed merely as a consequence of rational analysis.

At the same time, Hegel says, purpose is Subject as well. Specifically, purpose is “the unmoved which is self-moving, and so is Subject.” Here it isn’t fully apparent why purpose should be “unmoved.” Since Hegel goes on to call it “self-moving,” he presumably means it isn’t moved by any external agency. Nor should it be: otherwise, it would lack the capacity to determine itself. And if it does in fact determine itself, it obviously will be self-moved. Still, there remains the question of how these conditions define purpose as Subject. Earlier, we saw that for Hegel self-movement and development are equivalent. Thus if purpose is self-moved, its movement would then be equivalent to its own development. In that way, since Subject is simply the end result of development, purpose ultimately comes to be Subject.

But perhaps the most important effect of purpose is to give us a whole new take on negativity as a means of development. Up to now, we’ve seen the downside of negativity, its purely destructive aspect. So far, negativity has meant the breakdown of Substance, its inability to remain what it is. The implication is that such an inability points to a deficiency of some kind. Negativity simply produces the exposure of that deficiency. But the treatment of negativity as purpose would imply that its breakdown is actually intentional. Substance breaks down, in other words, because it wants to break down. And the fact that its breakdown is intentional means that the negativity by which we perceive its deficiency isn’t just some sort of rational principle but rather an internal tendency.

Subsequently, Hegel takes this one step further. He asserts that the actual is the same as its Concept “only because the immediate, as purpose, contains the self or pure actuality within itself.” For pure actuality, read the end or result of development. So the immediate, as purpose, already contains the end or result of its own development within itself. Yet not just because it has some idea as to what that end will be. The mere fact that it has a notion doesn’t necessitate any particular outcome. Purpose, then, isn’t simply ideational. Instead, Hegel seems to think of it as an internal tendency within the immediate, which is thereby disposed to a particular end. As a result, Hegel can say that the actual is the same as its Concept. Because purpose, as internal tendency, links the Concept to the actual, the Concept of what is about to be already encompasses its own actuality.

A second consequence of the new take on negativity is that we get unrest as the very definition of what the self is. Before negativity was described as purpose, this wouldn’t have been possible. Prior to that moment, unrest evoked instability, prelude to a breakdown of some kind. Purpose, however, changes all that. From now on, unrest is only a tendency to movement, which in turn produces the actual. But Hegel doesn’t just want the actual, or even simply the movement that leads to the actual. He admits that “realized purpose or the existing actual is movement and unfolded becoming.” What he wants, though, is the tendency to movement, by which movement itself comes to be. Hence his assertion that “unrest is the self.” Unrest doesn’t stay anywhere. And the reason it doesn’t is that it isn’t movement, which comes to an end, but the tendency that produces it.

Finally, purpose shows why movement amounts to a return to oneself, why that which returns is already the self, and why the entire movement is one of self-relating equality and simplicity. Because the internal tendency of an entity is to be itself, the movement by which it comes to be can only comprise a return to itself. Because of its internal tendency to be itself, an entity that returns to itself is itself already. And if the internal tendency of an entity to be itself means that it only returns to what it already is, the movement by which it comes to be is one of self-relating equality because the tendency by which an entity comes to be is brought to actuality as itself. So it becomes related to itself, by its own movement. And that relation is one of equality because in the internal tendency by which it comes to be, it already is itself, which makes the two conditions equal.

The need to represent the Absolute as Subject makes use of the propositions: God is the eternal, or the moral world-order, or love, and so on. In such propositions the True is only posited straightforwardly as Subject, but not represented as the movement of that which reflects itself into itself. In a proposition of this kind one begins with the word “God.” This by itself is a meaningless sound, a mere name; it is only the predicate that says what he is, gives his content and meaning; only in this end does the empty beginning become actual knowing. To that extent it is not clear why one does not simply speak of the eternal, of the moral world-order, and so on, or as the ancients did, of pure concepts like Being, the One, and so on—in other words, of that which is the meaning, without adding the meaningless sound as well. But through this word it is precisely shown that what is posited is not a being or an essence or a universal above all, but rather something that is reflected into itself, a Subject. But at the same time this is only anticipated. The Subject is taken as a fixed point, to which, as their support, the predicates are affixed, by a movement belonging to the knower of this Subject, and which is not therefore regarded as belonging to the fixed point itself; yet it is only through this movement that the content could be represented as Subject. The way this movement has been brought about, it cannot belong to the fixed point; but after the presupposition of that point, it [the movement] cannot be constituted otherwise, it can only be external. The anticipation that the Absolute is Subject is therefore not only not the actuality of this Concept, but it even makes the actuality impossible, for it posits the subject as an inert point, whereas the actuality is self-movement. (20.26–21.15)

Here “is eternal” functions as a form of negativity: it says what Substance isn’t (since “God” doesn’t intrinsically contain the predicate “is eternal”). But “is eternal” is insufficient by itself. We have no idea what it’s supposed to describe. What we lack, then, is a Subject. But if “is eternal” can’t be the Subject itself, we need to apply it to one. Hence the “return” of “is eternal” to the “meaningless name” (i.e., “God”), to which, as Subject, it can now be applied. Yet initially “God” wasn’t the Subject at all, and became so only because “is eternal” was affixed to it. Likewise, “is eternal” wasn’t really a predicate until it was attached. Thus each becomes what it is only by the attachment of predicate to Subject.

Although the expression “God is eternal” has the form of a Hegelian return, it differs from the movement of Substance to Subject in one crucial respect. As Hegel himself points out, “God is eternal” merely posits the True as Subject in a simple, straightforward way (i.e., it makes a simple statement about the Subject). In other words, it doesn’t really exemplify the sort of movement by which Substance returns into itself. So we need to distinguish between that movement and those expressions where the Subject is simply described. For Hegel, only the movement of Substance itself is internal, or self-produced. But the same needn’t be true of those expressions that simply describe the Subject. After all, the term “God” that begins the proposition “God is eternal” has, by itself, no content whatsoever. The only way, then, for it to gain any is to have a predicate affixed to it. As a mere name, however, it can’t do that by itself. Hence the need for a knower of the Subject, who makes the requisite connection. The fact that this is done by a knower, rather than the Subject itself, is crucial. As Hegel puts it: “but after the presupposition of that point [i.e., the term “God”], it [the movement] cannot be constituted otherwise, it can only be external.” The movement is external, in other words, because it doesn’t arise from the Subject itself. And that hints at a deficiency.

Finally, Hegel complains about statements that say the Absolute is Subject without any effort to specify how it comes to be that. The problem with these, he seems to feel, is that they offer no capacity for development. Their bland assertion that the Absolute is Subject “is therefore not only not the actuality of this Concept, but it even makes the actuality impossible.” What this sort of assertion does, he says, is to posit the subject as an inert point. It simply equates the subject with the Absolute, or some other condition. But the actuality, Hegel goes on to insist, is self-movement. Thus we ought to be able to observe how the Absolute, or some other condition, becomes the subject by its own self-movement. What Hegel wants, then, is to specify the kind of self-movement or development by which the Concept gradually comes to be actual.

Among various consequences that flow from what has been said, this can be stressed, that knowledge is only actual, and can only be represented, as Science or as system. That furthermore a so-called basic thesis or principle of philosophy, if true, is therefore already false, to the extent that it is only a basic thesis or principle. It is for that reason easy to refute it. The refutation consists in showing its deficiency: but it is deficient because it is only the universal or principle, the beginning. If the refutation is fundamental, it is taken and developed from the principle itself—not achieved by counter-affirmations and random thoughts from outside. The refutation would thus properly be the development of the principle and the completion of its deficiency, if it doesn’t misunderstand itself by paying attention solely to its negative action, without being also aware of its progress and result on their positive side.—The genuinely positive exposition of the beginning is at the same time conversely just as much a negative attitude toward it, namely against its one-sided form of being initially immediate or purpose. It can accordingly be taken just as much as a refutation of the principle that constitutes the ground of the system, but better, as a demonstration that the ground or the principle of the system is in fact only its beginning. (21.16–22.2)

For Hegel, system or Science is equivalent to development. The text speaks of a point at which knowledge becomes actual. But that implies a time when it wasn’t yet actual, when it hadn’t yet come to be. So knowledge involves development. Hegel then goes on to talk about how knowledge gets represented. Yet if knowledge itself involves a development of some kind, we can hardly expect to convey it adequately by means of a form that’s purely propositional. Instead, any attempt to represent knowledge must show how that knowledge came to be. Which is to say: it has to show its development. Science or system, then, is all about development, the conceptual development by which knowledge becomes actual.

Subsequently, Hegel shows why Science or system has to be about development. Inevitably, philosophy begins with a number of basic principles. From a Hegelian standpoint, however, any basic thesis or principle (Grundsatz) is necessarily false. Nor does the text admit of any exceptions. So it isn’t about the specific content of a given thesis or principle. Its falseness comes, rather, from a more general deficiency. As Hegel puts it: “it is deficient because it is only the universal or principle, the beginning.” In other words, it isn’t that the thesis or principle isn’t true. But its converse is also true. Significantly, though, the fact that its converse is true doesn’t make the initial thesis or principle any less true. For that reason, it can’t be refuted by “counter-affirmations and random thoughts from outside.” The only way it can be refuted, then, is by exposure of its deficiency. But if the exposure of its deficiency doesn’t make it any less true, what this suggests is that we should consider it merely as our initial premise. And that points to a need for further elaboration. Or, to give it another name: development.

Even when viewed negatively, development still comes out as development rather than negativity. As Hegel points out, if we perceived the assertion of a thesis or principle negatively, our perception could be interpreted as “a refutation of the principle that constitutes the ground of the system.” Our perception would show that the thesis or principle taken as a ground of the system wasn’t in fact a ground at all. As a form of negativity, moreover, it would show only that. Because the refutation of a principle qua ground is purely negative: it makes no claim about any other principle, and might even militate against the validity of any principle whatsoever as ground. In fact, though, our perception doesn’t just show that a given thesis or principle can’t be taken as ground. It also shows that the thesis or principle that supposedly formed a ground is actually a beginning. But to show that, it has to go beyond negativity. And to do that, it has to have in mind a whole conception of how the development of a thesis or principle will turn out.

That the True is only actual as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation which gives the Absolute as Spirit—the most sublime Concept, and that which belongs to the modern age and its religion. The spiritual alone is the actual; it is essence, or the being-in-itself,—the self-relating and determinate, the being-other and being-for-itself—and in this determinateness or being external to itself remaining within itself;—in other words, it is in and for itself.—But this being-in-and-for-itself is initially only for us or in itself, it is spiritual Substance. It must also be this for itself,—it must be the knowledge of the spiritual and the knowledge of itself as Spirit; i.e., it must be an object to itself, but just as immediately a sublated object, reflected into itself. It is for itself only for us insofar as its spiritual content is produced by itself; but insofar as it is also for itself for its own self, so is this self-producing, the pure Concept, the objective element in which it has its existence; and it is in this way in its existence for itself an object reflected into itself.—The Spirit that, so developed, knows itself as Spirit, is Science. Science is its actuality and the realm it builds for itself in its own element. (22.3–20)

And so we come, at the end, to Spirit, by which Hegel means development that has become aware of itself. If system is equivalent to development, the perception that the True is actual only as system can itself only come from a development that knows how it came to be, and hence that what counts as True or essential about it is precisely its own development. Likewise, a Substance that is essentially Subject has of course undergone development. But, as Subject, it’s also aware of its own development, and its awareness of its development is exactly what makes it Subject. Hegel then retraces the moments by which Spirit comes to be: its being-in-itself or immediacy, its being-other by which it passes into otherness, and finally its being-for-itself. Throughout all the moments by which Spirit comes to be, however, Hegel insists that it invariably remains within itself. Yet the only way it can do so is by its awareness of its own development. Because of that awareness, it knows that the moment it passes into otherness is only a moment of its own development, and hence one that remains within itself. And because of its awareness of itself, finally, Spirit can also be for-itself, and by that means embrace its own development.

Clearly, the pivotal point of the entire development is the shift from in-itself to for-itself. Hegel makes the crucial role of that shift quite apparent when he says: “But this being-in-and-for-itself is initially only for us or in itself, it is spiritual Substance. It must also be this for itself.” If the spiritual is about development that has become aware of itself, presumably spiritual Substance must refer to a capacity for such awareness. As in-itself, however, it remains merely a capacity. From our external viewpoint, we see that capacity. But the development, as in-itself, doesn’t. So the shift from in-itself to for-itself marks a move to awareness. For-itself comes about when the development has become aware of itself.

Immediately after, Hegel goes on to specify what “for itself” consists of: “it must be the knowledge of the spiritual and the knowledge of itself as Spirit; i.e., it must be an object to itself.” Now to become an object to itself, Spirit has to find something within itself to externalize or objectify. Furthermore, the objectified element has to be essential to Spirit: otherwise, that element would no longer be Spirit itself, and so the relation (Spirit to itself) would lose its self-reflexive quality. What counts, though, as essential to Spirit? Above all, the act by which it posits itself: without that, it couldn’t exist. So the act by which it posits itself becomes an object for Spirit.

The sublation of Spirit as object, or, equivalently, of its self-positing act, necessitates a slightly different viewpoint. Although Spirit becomes an object to itself by focusing on its own self-positing act, it seems equally evident that in another respect the act isn’t really any different from Spirit itself. If it were, we should be able to formulate a description of what Spirit is that didn’t include its self-positing act. In fact, though, Spirit wouldn’t be what it is if it didn’t posit itself. So the sublation of the act by which Spirit posits itself comes about because that act is essentially identical to what Spirit is. For Spirit to sublate its own act, then, it simply has to perceive its act as equivalent to what Spirit itself is.

The process by which Spirit does that is one by which it becomes for itself. Hegel goes into all this in some detail: “It [Spirit] is for itself only for us insofar as its spiritual content is produced by itself; but insofar as it is also for itself for its own self, so is this self-producing, the pure Concept, the objective element in which it has its existence; and it is in this way in its existence for itself an object reflected into itself.” Here the “spiritual content” that Spirit produces consists of the act by which Spirit posits itself. Because it produces its own development, then, Spirit gets defined as for itself. At first, Hegel speaks of it as for itself for us only, since we alone perceive that Spirit produces its own development. Thus Spirit initially produces its own development without any self-awareness. When it finally does perceive its own development, however, Spirit becomes, as Hegel says, “for itself for its own self.” At that moment, Spirit focuses on its self-producing as an act distinct from itself. Hence Hegel’s description of its perception of itself as a pure Concept or objective element: it is, simply, the perception Spirit has of its own activity. But because Spirit is development that has become aware of itself, the objective element whereby it perceives itself is also that by which it comes to be. Finally, Hegel asserts that the perception of how it produces its own development is reflected back into Spirit itself. Until Spirit reflects the perception that it produces its own development back into itself, in other words, it doesn’t know that this is what it is. The perception remains purely objective, or external to its conception of itself. But once it sees how its very nature or identity is defined by the fact that it has produced itself, Spirit at last comes to recognize that its self-production is itself.

And so we come, finally, to metatheory, or theory that has become aware of itself as theory. Hegel called it Science: “The Spirit that, so developed, knows itself as Spirit.” But if the end result of its development consists of what the text refers to as pure Concept, the process by which we get there can only be one of theory. For Hegel, the moment at which Spirit or development becomes aware of itself was the moment it became actual. At the same time, he also speaks of its self-awareness as “the realm it builds for itself in its own element.” In this fashion, he appears to express a hope that the self-awareness of theory might ultimately form the basis for all theory. And if that were to occur, it would be because in its awareness of itself as metatheory, theory had at last recognized fully its capacity to create itself.

From here, we can go on to talk about the larger tendency apparent in the whole Hegelian trajectory we’ve just traced: the tendency toward what I would call a movement of return. For Hegel’s predecessors, it began as a movement of inwardness. Its form was that of reflexivity. To resolve a conceptual impasse, you turn back to the way by which you came to it. And that meant, ultimately, that you turned back into yourself. But if this was equivalent to a movement of inwardness, Hegel took it to its ultimate extreme, when he made the very process by which we turned back to the way we came to the impasse the source of our response. As a result, extreme inwardness becomes extreme outwardness or externality. Or, equivalently, extreme subjectivity = extreme objectivity. Yet Hegel didn’t just let it go at that. On some level, I suspect, he must have felt that this sort of inward movement by which we turn back on our own reflective process was one that possessed more than just subjective importance. Instead, I would argue, he probably felt how it might well apply to all forms of theory. And the reason was that all of these involved a theoretical development of some kind. But after development, there had to be some sort of reflection on that development, by which we become clear about what we’ve done. Which is to say: a movement of return. No doubt Hegel even saw how it might apply at the most fundamental, ontological level. After all, we become what we are. When he first introduced development, it was as if Hegel had deprived ontology of its primacy. But if we initially seem to move away from ontology by means of development, it’s only so that we can come back to it more richly, via his movement of return, at the end.

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And so we return, after the Phenomenology Preface, to the observer who watched Napoleon pass through Jena, and to what that observer might have seen in his mind’s eye as he witnessed this event. (1) He might have seen the triumph of theory over material circumstances. Somehow the Napoleonic will had managed to prevail in virtually every recent conflict. At Ulm, only a year before, the unfortunate General Mack had been forced to surrender an entire army without the chance to fire even a shot. Such had been the speed and brilliance of French tactical maneuvers that rendered his position hopeless. The newspapers were constantly full of the last Napoleonic advances. From his letters, moreover, we know that Hegel entirely expected Napoleon to prevail once again. But that presumably meant he had felt on some level the presence of a mind that understood how material circumstances could be made to yield a particular result, if employed rightly.

(2) The observer might have perceived traces of a development of some sort. Typically, the Napoleonic plan involved a sequence of tactical maneuvers. Probably the observer himself didn’t know exactly what they were. In fact, even experienced officers like Jomini or Clausewitz had failed to grasp exactly how the manoeuvre sur les derrières worked. So we can hardly expect more of a noncombatant. Yet the observer knew, from his own theoretical work, how powerful development was: that it offered a way to take up material circumstances, to assimilate these into itself. And the way it did that was to make them part of a story. Narrative had that kind of effect. Once you made material circumstances part of a story, people no longer thought of them as inert, unmovable facts. Instead, they came to pertain to a particular moment, to play a role in how a given sequence of events had come about. And once they became associated with a sequence of events, the typical question would no longer be what these circumstances were, but what role they had played in that sequence of events.

(3) In addition, the observer might have felt an awareness of development. Time and time again, Napoleon had deferred victory, passed up the easier win in order to make it more complete. The observer knew what a Napoleonic victory looked like. It wasn’t just victory by attrition. Instead, it usually involved the complete collapse of an enemy army. Such a collapse could only be engineered by a sequence of tactical moves, rather than a simple assault. The astute use of tactical maneuvers, however, would probably offer multiple chances to win. So if victory was deferred, its deferral pointed to an awareness of development within the tactical plan. In other words, Napoleon didn’t just take the first good opportunity that offered: he knew he had better stuff up his sleeve. Of course his observer couldn’t have known what was in the Emperor’s mind. Yet the evidence provided by victory after victory suggested that Napoleonic tactics didn’t simply display a development. Instead, there had to be a constant awareness of development at each phase of the plan. Informed by that sort of awareness, every phase would then be defined or shaped by the thought of how the affair should end. That was why the Emperor could look to his observer like the embodiment of the world-soul: his confidence seemed to come from a higher level of awareness, as if he literally saw tactics from a different vantage point than his opponent. To Hegel, that was the mark of objectivity. Objectivity meant you had reached a position where you could objectify your own thought movement, see it from an external perspective. If the tactical plan that had led to victory in a given conflict involved development of some kind, objectivity meant the capacity to perceive development, rather than any mere tactical consideration, as the essence of the plan.

For Hegel, awareness of our own thought movement led to (4) metatheory. Metatheory grew out of that sort of awareness within a given field. To Napoleon, metatheory lay in the perception that every battle or conflict could be compared to a drama or theatrical piece, composed as it was of a beginning, middle, and end. By means of that insight, he could look at a conflict without the need to attend to all of its material circumstances. Instead, he could see it solely for the way it enacted a particular sort of development. To see it in that way, however, was to see it purely as a formal construct. And once you see it as a formal construct, your perception itself takes on a distinct autonomy. Its autonomy comes from the fact that you can always define the shape of a conflict formally even if you don’t know its material circumstances. And that in turn meant that even if you didn’t know the relevant material circumstances, you could still know what was perhaps most important about any given conflict: how it would end. Made possible by a formal perspective on tactics, this autonomy was what marked metatheory. We arrive at metatheory as a result of our awareness of our own thought movement. But that awareness becomes metatheory only when we begin to see theory itself from a formal viewpoint.

Because of metatheory, Hegel could say (5) that theory has the capacity to create itself. In Napoleonic terms, this meant: because it could see battle as a theatrical piece, Napoleonic theory could create victory. More broadly, once you reach the point where you can see the formal element of theory, you’ve arrived at the capacity to create theory. In itself, theory is essentially formal. We know that because we know we can always define a theory formally, even if we don’t know what it’s about. But if the formal element of theory is likewise its essential element, it presumably also has to be the formative matrix of any new theory. To create theory, in other words, all we need is the formal perspective of metatheory. Once we arrive at the level of metatheory, theory is no longer primarily about material circumstances. What the observer saw, then, as he watched Napoleon ride by, was that theory had the capacity to create a world out of itself.

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