Abstract
This Epilogue considers the categorial status of ‘individuality,' and how it compares with syllogistic logic of universal, particular, or singular. ‘Individuality’ looks to go beyond the scope of their pragmatics: ‘beyond category.’ I ask what power the concept might be thought to exert over its object: whether comprehension or ‘over-gras**’ (Übergreifen) ends up subjecting the other to itself. Hegel claims it need not be so, but some who followed him balked. I survey the responses offered by Feuerbach, Stirner and Kierkegaard. The most complex engagement comes from Kierkegaard, who attends expressly to ‘individuality’ (in Danish, individualitet) as an aesthetic and social stance in the world. Either-Or considers the pragmatics of authorship, a problem Kierkegaard continued to struggle with even after renouncing the category of ‘individuality’ for ‘hiin Enkelte’ (that singular being).
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Notes
- 1.
See my essay, “Performing Hegel” (Donougho 2011).
- 2.
Political Categories: Marder 2019, 15. He cites the Phenomenology (¶344/Werke 3: 260) on the category as immediate unity of the I with being; unity of being (Seins) and its own (Seinen), Hegel adds. Marder advocates going beyond Aristotle and Kant so as to put the categories to work. He takes note (Marder, 19) of an etymological proximity to the agora of public discussion, and to the ‘bringing down’ (kata) of legal accusation. It’s a political matter, when all is said and done: the thing (Sache, res) adjudged to matter to us all.
- 3.
Werke, 6: 36/Hegel 2010, 355. Hegel decries the reduction of categories to abstract or quantitative determinacy, and equally the Kantian deduction of the categories as “pure concepts.” He seldom mentions ‘categories’ in the ‘Subjective’ Logic (Books 2 and 3); when he does, it is to challenge their singular status, mutually external. Thus, with respect to ‘Contradiction,’ Hegel writes: “The categories must rather be considered on their own, that is to say, it is their own reflection that must be considered …. Each is the reflective shining of itself in the other, and itself the positing of itself as the other” (6, 70/378). Categories engage in beating their own bounds, so to say—breaking the bounds too. Purification would undermine their very existence!
- 4.
Science of Logic, Hegel 1969: 6, 500/Hegel 2010, 698: “Thought determinations in general, the categories, the determinations of reflection, as well as the formal concept and its moments…”—these are said to have acquired with Kant merely finite status. Kant didn’t take the categories “in and for themselves” (6, 268-9/524, 525). Compare “thought determinations in and for themselves” (560/743) in the last chapter, “the absolute Idea.” The ensuing pages explore the deep paradox by which the concept negates itself, its second negative then becoming self-reference—hence the “turning point” of method.
- 5.
Hegel 6: 277/Hegel 2010, 532. He continues: “Just as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness, for it relates to what is distinguished [dem Unterschiedenen] solely as to itself; in that [the distinguished] it has returned to itself.”
- 6.
Walt Whitman, Song of myself, 51. From Leaves of Grass (1891-92), in Whitman 1982, 246: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
- 7.
Sonenscher 2022, 87-90, places Feuerbachian ‘individuality’ within the Romantic and theological tradition of early Schelling and Hegel. He finds (ibid., 89) a continuity with Luhmann’s idea of self-differentiation.
- 8.
Werke (1901) IV, 357-63, at 359. Letter and dissertation are analyzed in Warren Breckman (94-8), who takes his subtitle from the passage.
- 9.
Löwith 1965, 72. Löwith’s study originally appeared in 1941. Compare his habilitation (under Heidegger’s direction), Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (Löwith 1928). Löwith sees Feuerbach as the first to break with an older philosophical tradition rooted in subject-object relations, although Hegel too may be cast in that light: the “truth” of Hegelian dialectic is dialogue, a drive to communicate (Löwith 1928, 12).
- 10.
Feuerbach 1981, 18.
- 11.
Ibid., 90-91.
- 12.
Ibid., 163, note 54 to §17.
- 13.
Breckman 1999, 98.
- 14.
Breckman 1999, 303.
- 15.
See Frederick Beiser, in Moggach 2011, 281-99, at 282.
- 16.
Citations are to Leopold’s edition (Stirner 1995).
- 17.
Ibid., 129-35, 305-14. “If … I grasp the idea as my idea, then it is already realized, because I am its reality; its reality consists in the fact that I, the bodily [me?], have it” (314).
- 18.
Beiser, in Moggach 2011, 284-8.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
De Ridder 2011, 150-3.
- 22.
Ibid., 157. See http://www.lsr-projekt.de/msrec.html (accessed 26 September 2016) for the 1845 text, 149. Later we read: “der Einzige ist ein gedankenloser Wort, es hat keinen Gedankeninhalt …. Undankbar und unsagbar” (152).
- 23.
Löwith 1965, 318-21. Löwith obscures the difference between Stirner’s “singular being” and Kierkegaard’s hiin [or den] enkelte (‘that/the singular’), rendering the latter as “Einzeln” (translated as ‘individual”).
- 24.
George Pattison (1997) reveals Kierkegaard’s debt to Heiberg’s Hegelian dialectic of form/content, and its bearing on genre. See Pattison, 80-90, on Don Giovanni, Antigone, and Scribe.
- 25.
Kierkegaard 1987, Parts I & II. So does Hegel himself, one must add!
- 26.
The shapes expounded there all take their cue from Hegel’s ‘Unhappy Consciousness,’ obtaining their essential content elsewhere while also being shaped by—or responding to—that context. ‘Individuality’ recurs more than a dozen times (e.g., 223-5), epitomizing this stage, though not in a positive light.
- 27.
Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authorship and Revelation,” in Cavell 1969, 175-6, and 163. Compare “Music Discomposed” (ibid., 188-9, 198-200).
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Donougho, M. (2023). Epilogue. In: Hegel's 'Individuality'. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_10
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