Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility by Rocío Zambrana (review)

This is a rich and thought-provoking study of Hegel’s all-too-often neglected masterpiece, the Science of Logic. Zambrana draws on commentators, such as Robert Pippin, Robert Brandom and Karin de Boer, to construct a highly original and challenging interpretation of the Logic. Her principal thesis is that, for Hegel, our conceptions of nature, self, and society are not simply given to us but are the “product of reason” (119). More precisely, such conceptions, through which we render the world and ourselves intelligible, are norms that have to be authorized by reason within a specific historical context or shape of “spirit.” Zambrana’s Hegel thus follows Kant in identifying reason as the source of authority in modernity, but he differs from Kant in understanding reason to be irreducibly historical and thus always open to future contestation and revision. He is not, however, a purely historical thinker, for in his Logic he provides an ahistorical demonstration of the necessary historicity of reason (89).

Some commentators, myself included, understand Hegel’s logic to be an ontology that discloses the nature of being through examining fundamental categories, such as quality and quantity. Zambrana argues, by contrast, that Hegelian logic is not an account of being at all, but rather a critical study of certain conceptions of determinacy (53). The first part of the Logic considers the “realist” idea that the determinacy of a thing is immediately given, and it shows that idea to founder on the concept of negation. For something to be determinate, on this conception, it must be itself but also have a “boundary” through which it is not something else. This means, however, that its identity is mediated by other things and so is not just immediate after all: “determinacy cannot be a matter of absolute self-identity” (60). Hegel’s critique of realism is not, however, purely negative, for by making explicit what is implicit in such realism Hegel reveals that a sustainable conception of determinacy must regard the “finite” as a “moment of a process that exceeds it” (63).

In the second part of the Logic, Zambrana’s Hegel considers the “dualist” view that determinacy can be established by “external reflection” that distinguishes between a thing’s essence and its inessential appearance. This conception is also shown to be deficient, but Hegel thereby reveals that determinacy actually depends on “existent conditions” that “can only be established after the fact” (69, 71). The “process” through which determinate things must be understood thus encompasses the existing conditions that give rise to them. In the third part of the Logic, Hegel then argues (to cut a long story short) that the determinacy of something not only is mediated by its conditions but cannot be known without reference to the concept of the thing or “what it should be” (88–89). This concept in turn is established as a norm by reason (which thus has “normative authority”) within a specific set of historical conditions (54, 88). Since, however, reason is historical and context-specific, the conceptions that it authorizes can change as conditions change and new contexts arise; reason thus has no final, stable form (133). Note that, for Zambrana, Hegel’s logic does not itself authorize any specific conception of being, nature, or spirit: it does not tell us what there is. It reveals the historical character of the conceptions through which we render the world intelligible, and so provides an ahistorical, critical theory of intelligibility, rather than an ontology (89, 132).

In setting out her main thesis Zambrana provides very interesting (though, in my view, not always convincing) discussions of Hegel’s conceptions of the true infinite, reflection, and the relation between logic and nature. My principal criticism, however, is that her interpretation of Hegel’s Logic rests on oppositions that Hegel is specifically concerned to undermine. First, Zambrana assumes that Hegelian logic cannot be ontological and critical, even though Hegel himself declares it to be both. (For Hegel, the disclosure of the true...