Against Definition

It’s little understood, even amongst professional philosophers, the degree to which Hegel’s thought is an inflection point in the history of philosophy. Within a decade of his death, most institutional thinkers in Germany had abandoned “the system” proper. However, that system had enormous influence amongst (a) political radicals throughout Germany (such as the “young Hegelians,” en route to Marx) and in Russia, (b) amongst American pragmatists, and (c) amongst the existentialists (particularly Kierkegaard). In a nutshell, all of them saw in Hegel the completion or solution of “philosophy” as such, yet still found something lacking. That is, they all saw Hegel’s system as successful, and yet totally inadequate. They all found Hegel’s system to be a more or less successful and complete development of the subject of philosophy– “the concept” or “the absolute”– but at the same time found it necessary to derogate the importance or meaning of this subject in human affairs. Marx and the Pragmatists both articulated a new relationship between concept and activity such that "thought" or "concept" was secondary to, dependent on, or an outcome of practice, or activity, rather than the other way around. Kierkegaard meanwhile found that Hegel’s scholastic derivation of "the Absolute" totally misunderstood the meaning of the divine and the corresponding role and calling of faith in a human life. Politcal radicals upended Hegel’s reconciliation of the actual to the rational with a new secular and revolutionary eschatology.

Nonetheless, they all took something from Hegel. If not in substance, then certainly in form. Regardless of his limitations, Hegel did make real discoveries. It is to one of the great formal insight of Hegel’s that I want to turn to and describe as briefly as possible.

It’s very simple. Here it is: essences cannot be defined.

The nature of a thing cannot be described by a set of self-consistent and exclusive conditions. Rather, just the opposite is true. The essence of any thing is always deeply contradictory. It contains multiple aspects (two primary ones, to be precise), and these aspects are in contradiction with one another. It is this contradiction and the way it plays out that makes the thing what it is and drives its motion. For example, the family is both the site of private life, and yet serves a public function. Motion itself is both potentiality and actuality. A commodity is both a use value and an exchange value. And so on.

Meanwhile, the anti- (not post, but anti) Hegelian tradition that came out of British empiricism has for the last 150 years still been trying to define things with sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. However, if reality is fundamentally contradictory, then this approach will never work. This is because definitions, by their very nature exclude contradiction.3

Consider something like this:

∀x(Px ^ Qx ^ Zx) —> Rx

You could read this as a definition: “if something is both P and Q and Z, then it is an R.” This could very well apply to many particulars, e.g. if Xanthippe and Xerxes are both bipedal, lack feathers, and have fingernails, then they are Homo Sapiens. But consider:

∀x(Ax ^ ~Ax) —> Bx

How many things could be a B?

That’s right. Nothing will be a B, because nothing can be both A and not A at the same time. This is why definitions cannot brook contradiction. A definition just is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, and if your conditions entail a contradiction then they either identify nothing or everything.

But what if that whole construct is just an anal-retentive projection of consistency and order where there is none? If reality itself is contradictory, definitions necessarily will not capture reality. In fact they will distort it. This is why definitions must always reduce their object to surface phenomena, to a pale reflection of, or shallow reference to, the thing itself. Hegel’s philosophy is the first western philosophy that gets us past this problem and gives us a conceptual machinery for understanding the contradictions that really make reality. That is, for really comprehending real essences.

But! I hear some you exclaim, I am prevaricating! By saying that, for example, the commodity is both an exchange value and a use value I have not really asserted something of the form “A and ~A,” I have simply predicated two different qualities of a.

But here’s the thing. When, for example, Marx says that a commodity is a use value and an exchange value, he is saying that a commodity is all and exclusively an exchange value AND that it is all and exclusively a use value. Considered from one perspective, it is an exchange value. Considered from another, it is a use value. These two categories are mutually exclusive; the logic of one excludes and annihilates that of the other.

Perhaps, then, what we have is in fact two things, and thus there is still no true contradiction. But no, these two aspects are one because they actually depend upon each other. A commodity only has an exchange value because it is a use value, and the use value is only made and circulated because it is an exchange value. The motion of the commodity through its circuit is the working out of this contradiction that lies in the unremarkable body of the commodity.

So anyway, that’s it. That, in a nutshell, is the big thing I take from Hegel. That essences, the real natures of things, are contradictory and that reality thus far surpasses the self-consistent logic of definition. Moreover, there is a kind of method for understanding these real contradictions, a new form of logic or thinking that surpasses the categories and procedures of formal logic and definitional thinking. That method is called “dialectics.”