When thought is, it cannot think, and when thought thinks, it cannot be.
This Lacanian refrain1 is where I would like to begin my exposition on dialectic. First, what is meant when I assert ‘positively-being’2 thought’s lack of thinking? In order to answer this question, one must interrogate the nature of purely-positive being. For a thing to be in a purely-positive manner it must be devoid of negativity. It cannot run into that which is not itself—that which posits either internal3 moments (plural) or an Outside4. More often than not, these two moments of being’s non-being are inextricably linked. If thought is, positively, it cannot presuppose alternative moments of being. All of being must be the being of thought as it is, and consequently, as it is in its indeterminacy. At this point in the exposition we run into an interesting antinomy: for thought to be, it cannot be articulated—cannot be determined—but for thought to be thought, it is necessarily determined insofar as it has both conceptual form and content. We cannot say that thought’s being is purely positive precisely because thought is not identical with indeterminacy. In fact, it cannot be identical with indeterminacy, for the moment we suppose identity, indeterminacy ruptures out of itself and posits that which is not itself—the determinate thing, or category.
On the other hand, if we were to disregard these categorical nuances and posit thought as pure indeterminacy, it would be logically barred from its practical self-activity: thinking. To be indeterminate is to be unnamed. Purely positive being can only be established if said being is not articulated by the name5. When thought apprehends its thought-object, however, it articulates itself by going outside of itself and establishing an External6 through which thought comes to name itself. This applies even when the operation of thought is purely reflexive—when thought thinks nothing but itself—for in thinking itself, it posits two articulations of itself: thought-as-subject and thought-as-object. Thinking is a process that inevitably discovers negation where it had been previously undiscovered. It scours itself relentlessly for that which is not it—for moments alien to its own being—and attempts to banish them into the Outside so that it may retain internal coherence, thereby generating the Outside which accordingly ruins the coherence of thought’s internality7. This disordering occurs because, for thought to posit an External, it must harbor that External within itself. The exile of thought’s negation from thought itself is always a failed operation due to the fact that said negation is a product of thought and will always exist in a state of subsumption by thought (even though it has simultaneously been liberated from thought).
This leads us into the second half of the aphorism. We cannot posit thought’s positive being insofar as it is thinking. It is necessarily a lack; a void. It is a negative that generates the world ex nihilo. It has been established that thought is necessarily bound up with the negative—that it is the discovery of the negative within a positive concept—but we can go further than this. Thinking, or the labor of thought, is the labor of the negative. Thinking is negation, and negation is thinking. The thinking ‘I’ negates itself out of indeterminacy, positing a fracture which is then projected outward. Thought figures itself as a lack within the structure of thought because it cancels its own positive content. It exists as the possibility of determination, yet it always remains a possibility. It is a potential for fullness that is never filled.
The object of thought, so long as it is thought, is imbued with the lack of the thinking, negating subject. It is articulated by thought, and its determination by thought exists internal to it. As has been elaborated, though, the thought immanent to the thought-object points outside of the thought-object to thought-as-external8; to the thought that determines its articulation as an object. It attempts to expunge itself of thought, but in this attempt it duplicates the same moment of thought. This is how the thought-object can constitute itself as such: by demarcating itself externally and limiting itself via immanent strings of logical necessity. It is in this movement that we arrive at the self-development of an object of thought on its own terms. It is only on these terms that we can develop a structure of logical necessity. Were we to presuppose multiple thought-objects immediately external to one another, we introduce purely contingent relations between categories. We have not derived them from one another—they do not exist within a system.
Because the thought-object is a thought-object, and more, because no object can not be a thought-object insofar as it is determined as an object, this process of immanent derivation is necessary to the self-development of the object. It is limited by thought, it is imbued with thought, and it moves according to the movement of thought. Were the object not limited by thought—were it an object outside of thought—it would not be an object. No thing escapes the labor of thought; the labor of the negative. Everything has to exist for thought and consequently appear to thought. Appearance is the truth of essence because essence must appear as essence. It is the formal quality of appearance that gives rise to essence. The essence that follows from the object’s appearance, however, exceeds that appearance except at the highest stage of concretion. In other words, the thought-object is not immediately identical with its concept—of thought’s concept of the object.
The essence of the thought-object, in contradistinction to its appearance, exceeds its appearance in its immediacy, but it is at the same time immediately integrated into thought by the faculty of the intellect—the figuring of categories in their external appearance9. Its mediation is necessarily immediate, i.e. it is its immediacy that determines it as mediate, and it is its mediacy that retroactively determines it as an immediate instance of its mediated content. Thought’s object necessarily exceeds its concept in its self-development, but its acquisition by thought is simultaneously total. To put it in simple terms, the entire movement of thought’s grasping and integration of its object is immediate. It is a movement of presupposition and position10. The immediate nonidentity of concept and object immediately presupposes a mediated, immediate identity of the two because their existence as abstract moments indicates that they are abstracted from a multifaceted, moment of concreteness. The labor of thought happens all at once, or, more accurately, has already happened. It is only at one level of abstraction that we find the excess of the object—an excess rooted in the fact that the object’s appearance has not yet been mediated by its essence; the fact that the object’s appearance has not been reflected by its essence and thus has not yet been raised to its higher level.
Thought, then, looks at the immediately-distinct object, finds it to be imbued with thought, and returns to itself insofar as it is thinking thought by thinking thought’s object. This reflection of thought into itself—this appearance of thought to itself—is the only way thought can constitute itself in the world. It is only by the analysis of the thought-object that thought can establish its negative existence. The object of thought is internal to thought in the same way that thought is internal to its object. Both are internal to one another. They negate one another, but are ultimately thought in their unity whenever we think of either pole, because to think one is to think the other.
This is the moment of sublation. We have discovered that the truth of the object is the appearance of thought (the object is thought as it appears to itself) and that the truth of thought is the appearance of its own object (thought is the object of thought as it appears in its own world). The two are united under a universal that has subsumed both thought and object under one name. The two are integrated into one another and constitute an organic totality, canceling their external negation while retaining their internal articulation. Both moments—thought and object—become absolutely internal to one another as one thing that has nothing external to it. At this point, all negation is internal—the totality does not point outside of itself when you think any of its moments. It points inward and exists in-and-for-itself. It contains every articulation of itself within itself. The object, at this level of concretion, no longer displaces its negation outside of itself. It retains it as a purely internal moment. This is the absolute Idea—the concrete universal. Of course, not all totalities are identical with the absolute Idea. Not all totalities exist in-and-for-themself. What we are dealing with here is an open totality that continues to points outside itself toward an other that recursively articulates it. In this case, the totality is not absolute, and the labor of thought carries on, beginning this process anew, but at a higher level of concretion.
The absolute Idea is not the telos of thought. Thought is not a linear process that attempts to realize absolute concretion. What we are dealing with at all times is retroactivity. We do not presuppose groundless one-sided abstract beginnings and then work our way up over time. Those abstract beginnings presuppose the absolute Idea. The beginning is grounded in the full development of its self-concept. Thought does not stop at the absolute Idea. It does not hit a wall at which point all things are unified. There is no gnosis to be had. Thought realizes the abstract and the concrete simultaneously. The beginning and the end can be substituted for one another seamlessly. The absolute Idea releases itself into the world. It alienates itself from itself and maintains the split in the subject: the negative relationship of subject and object—of spirit and nature. This act of releasing—of abrogation—exists concurrently with and immanently in the act of sublation. It is the truth of sublation, just as sublation is the truth of abrogation. They are absolutely identical. Thought realizes its identity with its object via sublation, but simultaneously releases its object and sublates itself via abrogation.
Thought is not a teleology. It is not the process of appropriating the absolute. The absolute has always been here. It is simultaneously the ground and product of the failed, abstract beginning.
Heaven exists and always has existed on Earth.
In Lacan’s fifteenth seminar he flips the Cartesian cogito on its head: “either I am not thinking or I am not” (quoted on page 45 of Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject). This conceptualization of the ‘I’ (the enunciating subject in Lacan; the thinking ‘I’ in Hegel) describes the ‘I’ as such. These two moments of the negative ‘I’ are absolutely separated. At the same time, both are subsumed and exist in tandem with one another under the the name of the ‘I’.
Here, “being” is used as a verb. One may replace this with “positively-existing thought” if one takes ‘existence’ to be equivalent to ‘being’, but this identity cannot be taken for granted. Existence is, strictly, a valence of being—being as it has been further developed into concretion. Existence implies existents (moments of existence). It is being in its determinacy, whereas being-qua-being remains undetermined and unarticulated at the present level of abstraction.
ᴇɴɢ: ‘internal’; ɢᴇʀᴍ: ‘innere’.
ᴇɴɢ: ‘Outside’; ɢᴇʀᴍ: ‘Äußeres’.
‘The name’ can also be substituted for ‘the Word’ as it is presented in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:1, KJV).
ᴇɴɢ: ‘External’; ɢᴇʀᴍ: ‘Äußeres’.
ᴇɴɢ: ‘internality’; ɢᴇʀᴍ: ‘Innerlichkeit’.
ᴇɴɢ: ‘thought-as-external’; ɢᴇʀᴍ: ‘Geist-als-äußerlich’.
ᴇɴɢ: ‘external appearance’; ɢᴇʀᴍ: ‘Dasein’.
“Position” is used in an idiosyncratic manner here. ‘Posit’ is to ‘position’ just as ‘presuppose’ is to ‘presupposition’.