BECOMING XXII: THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION AS NOTION

After explaining how the Notion develops out of its own germ, differently from the transitions
and contrasts found in Being and Essence, Hegel states that

The doctrine of the notion is divided into three parts. (1) The first is the doctrine
of the subjective or Formal Notion. (2) The second is the doctrine of the notion
invested with the character of immediacy, or of objectivity. (3) The third is the
doctrine of the Idea, the subject-object, the unity of notion and objectivity, the
absolute truth. (162)

The equation in (1) of "subjective" with "Formal" shows that for Hegel this term does not
mean pertaining restrictedly to the individual mind. It means contingent, rather, less than
entire or than necessary, and this is precisely the situation of "formal logic", from which the
names for the next categories will accordingly be taken. Thus in formal logic there is no
concern about the matter of the propositions and this fact is even seen as a virtue, a
sharpening of a defined focus. Sometimes however this situation is misconstrued to the point
of saying that the logical forms are without any content at all.1 They are forms in the sense of
mere schemata. Thus argument forms are not arguments, it would follow, but that by which
the validity of (other) arguments are judged.2 This however leaves entirely in the dark how we
are to think of the (analogous?) validity of these forms or how anyone is ever to judge
concerning their validity, even in terms of making them "immediate inferences" in the sense
of an immediate combination of two premises or more.

But how do these logical forms come to be considered as categories at all? For we can be
quite sure that it is not just a matter of "taking" the names from formal logic, as we take the
name of an animal for some human having such and such characteristics. Rather, formal logic
itself is here placed where Hegel considers that it belongs within the dialectic. Some
commentators seem to think that it does not rightfully belong there at all, as if Hegel merely
included it because he could think of no better way to exhibit the relation of his Logic to
traditional formal logic. Doubtless, indeed, he could not and this of itself might mean both
that there is no better way and that formal logical categories indeed belong at this point, just
as earlier philosophers subordinated logic to metaphysics, in logica docens (as contrasted with
logica utens) and not conversely.

Hegel tells us that just as the Absolute was earlier seen as Being, or as Variety, or as Inward
and Outward, so everything, the Absolute that is to say, is at a certain "moment" seen as (but
he says merely "is") a Judgement, the ultimate judgement overlapping all finite judgements.
The word "absolute" is of course preserved for the final "category" which transcends the
categories, viz. the Idea, so as not to repeat the definiendum in the definiens, even here where
we are characterising the Unlimited or, therefore, indefinable. The Absolute is seen at a
certain point as a Judgement and then, a little later, as a Syllogism, passing from the second to
the third operation of reason in Aristotle's threefold scheme in his On Interpretation.3 This
ultimate syllogism would, therefore, as it were "include" that Judgement, while that
1
Cf. Heny B. Veatch, "Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms", Review of Metaphysics, December
1948, pp. 40-64, and our own "Does Realism Make a Difference to Logic", The Monist, April 1986, Vol. 69,
Number 2, pp. 281-295, also included, slightly altered, in Philosophy or Dialectic, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1994,
pp. 47-61.
2
Cf. our "Argument forms and argument from analogy", Acta Philosophica, Rome, fasc. II, vol. 6, 1997, pp.
303-310.
everything, also these, is found to be a Notion (first and foundational operation) was to be
expected, here where everything is Notion because the Notion, the form of thought, is
everything. On Aquinas's view of things ultimate Being, viz. the ultimate simply, of itself
takes the form of Intellect precisely as not being limited to this or that successively. Non
aliquo modo est sed est, est (Augustine). Limited being itself cannot be ultimate because
nothing could limit it save Being over again. For Hegel it is rather that Being emerges from
Mind as Idea and even as the first Idea, thus making of the Logic a circle with no point of
entry, however this dilemma is later resolved in the Philosophy of Spirit. Mind as Freedom
needs no cause (that is what Freedom "is") as Being, as normally said, would seem to do.
Thus in Neoplatonic philosophy the One is placed above Existence, and Hegel takes a similar
view:

Because it has no existence for starting-point and point d'appui, the Idea is
frequently treated as a mere logical form. Such a view must be abandoned to
those theories, which ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the
existent thing and all the other categories which have not yet penetrated as far as
the Idea. (213)

So Hegel himself says,

The common logic covers only the matters which come before us here as a
portion of the third part of the whole system. (162)

So there is just no question of the logical names being used for something else, as McTaggart
comes close to suggesting in his Commentary of 1910. The matters discussed here are
"covered" in common formal logic. This, however, also includes "the so-called Laws of
Thought" discussed early in Essence, Hegel adds here. He finds that logic in his day has lost
some of its unity as a science, introducing extraneous non-logical material to bridge gaps in
the explanations. So what he will rather be doing here is setting logic upon a firmer and
deeper foundation, after the manner, again, of the older logica docens, taking explicit account
of the reality of logic itself as thinking about thinking, as the Notion or nous thinks itself, thus
founding everything. Thus dialectic can be seen as a step forward, in the sense of a fusion,
from the classical ordering things according to which logicus non considerat existentiam vel
naturam rei, i.e. he is not, qua logician, supposed to do that. In our day the "analytical" school
of philosophy has also by and large endorsed the view that logic is itself an ontology as being
the only way into ontology or "what there is" (Quine), always mutatis mutandis of course as
between these two schools of thinking. Yet nothing forbids transcending this category of
distinct schools, taking Hegel on board as an analytical philosopher or, conversely, bringing
the latter under the specifically Hegelian concept, the very method of his own History of
Philosophy lectures.
Dialectic, however, only becomes thinking about thinking specifically, rather than about
Being, say, or about causality and the like, in this third part, which is why consideration of
logical entities belong here as, negatively and qua logical, they begin at the beginning only of
this final part.
We might ask, all the same, why Logic is to be considered just under this first part of the third
part, the "subjective" notion, and not rather under the objective notion or the Idea, the two
subsequent sections of this final part. It has to do, Hegel implies, with the general supposition

3
Cf. Robert W. Schmidt, The Domain of Logic according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Hague 1966. Schmidt
considers these three operations identified by Aristotle in separate chapters as the intention(s) of universality, of
attribution and of consequence respectively.
that the traditional logical forms are "categories of conscious thought only" in the
psychologistic and subjectivist sense (rather than "subjective" in Hegel's understanding of the
term). In addition they are taken as "thought in the character of understanding, not reason".
Yet, he argues, just because they are "mere logical modes of entities", unlike Being or
Essence, they are more properly notions and so belong in this third part.
Thus the Subjective Notion or the "Notion as Notion" succeeds naturally to Reciprocity (159).
The preceding categories are "notions in their transition or their dialectical element" but they
are not notions knowing or thinking themselves as notions. Even Cause-and-Effect was
considered as a correlation of notions rather than as a notion (this would be considering as a
notion of a notion) of correlation, in J.N. Findlay's words. All that changes now and to the
situation with which we have, in a way, long been familiar in our formal logical studies.
These consider after all, in Aristotle's words, the acts or operations of the understanding.
These he identifies as concept-formation, judgement, syllogism, three which are yet one,
Hegel claims to show and even to show that this is implicit in and from the Aristotelian
analysis, all knowledge being after all an anamnesis (a term best not translated as
remembering simply, but as re-membering rather).

By comparison, that is to say, Being or Essence and their more specific categories "are only in
a modified form notions" (84, 112). Being, for example, is "the notion implicit only", while in
Essence "the actual unity of the notion is not realised." These strictures do not apply to the
logical categories of (subjective) notion itself, judgement and syllogism which, this is Hegel's
point, considered in their full amplitude are each of them identical with all things as thought.
That is, it is not merely that we can think all things "under" them, as with Being or Substance.

Hegel is serious about the active quality of notions. He says here of the earlier categories,
notions "for us" only, that their "freedom is not expressly stated: and all this because the
category is not universality" in the special sense of "the notion as notion" which will be
explained. The notion is not "form only". The logical forms are not mere canons of validity,
"without in the least touching the question whether anything is true", the answer to that being
"supposed to depend on the content only", conceived as material opposite of the formal
character of the logical entity or, rather, ens rationis merely.

These are not then mere dead and inert receptacles of thought, but rather shaped by it as its
own intrinsic instruments. As "forms of the notion" they are "the vital spirit of the actual
world". For all that is true "is true in virtue of these forms, through them and in them."
Through them and in them.

As touching Universality now as a "moment" or "functional part" of "the Notion as Notion",

Hegel considers it together with Particularity and Individuality, of which he says:

Individual and actual are the same thing: only the former has issued from the
notion, and is thus, as a universal, stated expressly as a negative identity with
itself (in-dividual). The actual, because it is at first no more than a potential or
immediate unity of essence and existence, may possibly have effect: but the
individuality of the notion is the very source of effectiveness, effective
moreover no longer as the cause is, with a show of effecting something else, but
effective of itself. (163, parenthesis added)

Just to recap, here within "the Subjective or Formal Notion", which as first part of the
doctrine of the Notion is itself a moment of it, we have, as first moment of this moment in
turn, "the Notion as Notion". This is to be followed (and superseded) by Judgement and the
Syllogism (which gives way to Objectivity, called sometimes "the objective notion"). Of
course Judgement and Syllogism are also notions, are also the Notion. The significance of this
coincidence of names is that Judgement and Syllogism are assimilated to this "first operation
of reason" (Aristotle, On Interpretation, who also calls them instruments, organa, of reason).
For they are themselves "mental words", verba interiora or verba cordis, "intentions" which
the mind makes in the course of understanding or apprehending anything. This takes place in
one of three ways, i., apprehending a nature simply, ii, reuniting or identifying two notions or
concepts (or simply names) formerly abstracted (the rose and its redness, God and existence)
or iii, taking the step, in a specifically triple identity, to new knowledge. For this reason the
expression verbum cordis is often mistakenly taken as having applied only to the formation of
the concept. Hegel rightly therefore assimilates the two more complex mental operations to
"the Notion", as if clearing up an ancient hesitation. There is nothing Procrustean, however, in
his innovation as one finds in some later theories of reference where it discards without
proper understanding some of the complexities of earlier theories of suppositio.4

Such is the Scholastic theory that Hegel inherits. His special angle upon it, again, stressing the
authentically Aristotelian, is to show that in fact all three operations are moments of just "the
Notion" and hence are assimilable to the first operation of reason as both foundational and
inclusive. They are not built up or composed of specifically notional steps but are themselves
unitary notions, thoughts. Thus the thought or notion that the pack of cards is on the table
(William James) is not divisible into separable parts. It is as unitary as the concept of a pack
of cards (as this is as that of a card simply). Hence subject and predicate are no more than
abstracted "functions" of it at best, not however in the Fregean sense exactly where just the
predicate is a function of the subject. Thus Aquinas says that the predicate signifies only
quasi formally, the subject only quasi materially. So anything and everything may be
predicated and not just "forms".5

In judgement, however, what, for Aquinas, is especially manifested, as distinct from the mere
notion in the mind, is the being of the unitary (united) entity, at least as an ens rationis. This
particular contrast is, so to say, not open to Hegel's absolute idealism. The latter is, though,
open to it inasmuch as the being or true actus (essendi) of anything whatever is, as an aspect
of the Notion or of absolute reality, in fact itself identical with the whole (160). This reality,
however, is the infinite array of Ideas into which the Absolute, itself Idea, necessarily and in
perfect freedom therefore differentiates itself, inclusive of the idea of being and its sheen.

Even this doctrine, however, is present in Aquinas under the rubric, found already in
Augustine and the Greeks before him, mutatis mutandis, of the divine ideas (Summa theol. Ia
15). This is arguably Aquinas's deepest layer of thought, his philosophical position as it were
sheltering behind the theological super-structure making esse or being actus actuum rather
than thought. This would be needed to suggest a realm absolutely other than God (as could
never be posited of the Notion, actively thinking itself only), which God in consequence
absolutely transcends as his "creation" without negating it. Such a presentation, however, true
as to content, is defective in form (of presentation specifically: see the section on "Absolute
Spirit" at the very end of the Encyclopaedia. See also David Burrell, "Aquinas's
4
See our "The Interdependence of Semantics, Logic and Metaphysics as Exemplified in the Aristotelian
Tradition", International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1, March 2002, pp. 63-92; also "Subject and
Predicate Logic", The Modern Schoolman, LXVI, January 1989, pp. 129-139, "The Supposition of the
Predicate", Ibid. LXXVII, November 1999, pp.73-77.
5
Cf. Henry Veatch, "St. Thomas's Doctrine of Subject and Predicate" in St. Thomas Aquinas (1274-1974),
Commemorative Studies, Vol. II, Toronto 1974.
Appropriation of Liber de Causis to Articulate the Creator as Cause-of-Being" in
Contemplating Aquinas, ed. Fergus Carr, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame
Indiana, 2003, pp. 75-85).

Even the syllogism (third operation) is thus assimilable as manifesting thought's primary and
sole product of the Notion in all its particular moments and aspects, each of them actual as
individuals and, as such, subjects, identical in their mutual othernesses. Here it emerges that
the Notion, as absoloutely actual, i.e. as absolute, is necessarily and indeed infinitely
differentiated. The resulting individuals or actualities, however, are

Not to be understood to mean the immediate or natural individuals, as when we

speak of individual things or individual men: for that special phase of
individuality does not appear till we come to the judgement.

It is indeed a special phase of what is more generally brought to light here, viz. individuality
as actual. Under this what is particular or specific can have any number of variations into
groupings articulated as individual unities, unities as tight or tighter and more absolute than
that of organic living bodies, for example. In general, again,

Every function and "moment" of the notion is itself the whole notion (§160); but
the individual or subject is the notion expressly put as a totality.

Therefore, whatever is thus "expressly put as a totality" itself becomes an individual or

subject, as in nature what is one individual can later become two or more (though Hegel,
remarkably, sees doubling as the "essential" development here. In this way "the principle of
personality is universality", as indeed it is of any individual actuality at this level which is
thinking or the dialectic become conscious of itself.