Chapter 6

The finite

The four formulations of the effect connected with varying forms of consciousness, as I say, are just four different ways of stating what is actually the same problem. And since this effect is going to crop up all over the place, not just in consciousness (where we have seen three different types of finiteness already), it would be well to make a general definition of the effect we are talking about:

The finite is (a) That which is different from itself, or (b) That which contains what is not itself within it as not different from itself, or (c) That which leaves some of itself outside itself, or (d) That which is less than what it is to be itself.

We have already seen an example of something finite which was not consciousness: heat, with its limitation called "temperature," which is not the heat but is not anything but the heat.

Let me give another example, so that you can have something that at least seems concrete to hold onto: take a wooden ball with its surface.

Now what is the surface? Is it the wood or isn't it? Yes.

That is, if you were a termite inside the ball, and you were eating your way out, then you would find wood all around you, until you got to the surface; but when you got there, you would not find the surface to be anything but the wood; the air you would encounter is, of course, outside the surface (and it has its own surface touching the ball's surface); all you would find when you got to the surface would be that there was no more wood in front of you.

So the surface is nothing but the wood. It isn't a "something" added to the wood--which is easily seen from the fact that the ball was made by taking away wood from a block that was bigger than this one. That surface "was added" by taking away wood, or "came to be" simply because the carving-away process stopped, leaving only this size piece of wood. The point here is that precisely nothing was added to the wood to "make" this surface; what before was just wood and not a surface is now a surface without being any different from what it was; it just happens now to be "facing" the outside world.

Still, the surface is not the wood, because if it were, of course, you the termite would be at the surface before you got there. That is, if the surface meant the wood, then wherever there is wood, there is the surface, and so there would be a surface inside the surface, which is absurd.

To put this another way, when the larger block was found and it was decided to carve it into a ball, the surface which makes the wood a ball (and not a cube, say) was not there at the time. Say at that time the block was a cube; it didn't have a ball inside it, as if the surface were there; there was just wood inside it. So the spherical surface is not the same as the wood.

But still, as we said, it is not "something" different from the wood. What it is is the self-negation of the wood within the wood itself, making it "just this shape and size of wood" and not any other shape and size of wood.

So the wood with its surface is different from itself, because, though it is just wood, it is a ball and not a cube; but wood is wood whether it's a ball or a cube of wood. It is wood as containing non-wood within it as not different from itself, because the surface is not the wood, but is contained within the wood as non-wood but not anything else either (remember, the surface is not outside the wood, it is on it; it is the last of the wood). It is wood as leaving some of itself outside itself, or wood as being less than itself or its intelligibility as wood.

If you ask yourself, "What is the surface?" you get into a contradiction, because the surface isn't really a "what" at all; it's a "where": it's just where the wood stops being wood, not even a "something it does" to stop being the wood. The wood just leaves off, and the "leaving off" is the surface.

That's interesting, because when we look at a wooden ball, what we see is the surface, isn't it, not inside it; and so we see--nothing? No, we don't see the surface; we see the wood at the surface, because the surface itself is nothing at all. But on the other hand, because the surface is nothing, this is not another way of saying "There's no real surface there; all there is is wood." There is a real surface, because the wood really is a ball; but the surface is not a reality, because it's really nothing but wood. The surface is a real nothing.

That, of course, is nonsense. But the reason this is nonsense is that you are trying to consider the surface itself, and the surface itself is nothing at all; what you should be considering is the wooden ball, which "has" the surface (i.e. stops being wood in this configuration of "stopping"). It doesn't have anything; it really just stops being itself at this distance from its center.

But how can something stop being itself if it is itself? Ah, here you have something that doesn't make complete sense (the wood is--shall we say?-- partially itself), but at least makes some sense. The wood isn't a real nothing; it's just that it's nothing but wood but isn't all that it means to be wood. It's less than what it means to be itself, but not the opposite of what it means to be itself. It leaves some of its intelligibility (its "reality as wood") outside itself, but not all of it.

So it looks as if the more proper formulations of what is finite involve this "leaving some of itself outside itself" and "being less than what it is to be itself" rather than "containing what is not itself as identical with itself." The latter, which reifies the limit (makes it a "something") makes it a contradiction (a real non-reality); there isn't an "it" which is the limit; it's a negation of something else, not anything positive at all.

Those of you who have read any Hegel probably find what I am saying rather familiar. For instance, when he talks about the limited and its limit, the limit is the limited in its self-negation, and so on; but actually this sort of thing is all through the dialectic.

And since what I say owes something to Hegel, I think at this point I should discuss him briefly. What I have called the finite and stated as an effect, Hegel would refer to as something like "the dialectical nature of the Absolute," and as not something that belongs to the finite because it is finite, but as something that belongs to reality because it is real ("What is real is rational"; and rationality is a dialectical process).

So, since this "containing its own opposite within itself," which is another way of saying "negating itself," is assumed by him precisely to be rationality, then of course by Hegel's "definition" of rationality it makes sense--whereas with me, it precisely doesn't make sense. And Hegel's assertion that it does make sense (because it's a fact) is simply a gratuitous assertion of the fact that does not recognize what the problem is.

Hegel couldn't be said not to recognize that there is an unintelligibility here, because it is precisely this "negation of itself within itself" that drives reason by the dialectic beyond the stage it's at at the moment. But he thinks this unintelligibility is inherent to reality itself (which is somehow intelligible through the unintelligibility), while I am going on the assumption that reality ultimately is intelligible.

You might say that Hegel would agree with me; but when you get to Absolute Spirit as totally conscious of itself "in its otherness," the end of the dialectic, it still contains its "otherness," even though these "othernesses" are suspended by it; they are also suspended within it. So even if (a) the end of the dialectic ever could be reached (and there is some question of this), and (b) the whole is somehow completely intelligible, it still contains all these unintelligibilities suspended within it; in Hegel, they do not vanish in the "negation of the negation," but, though no longer true, they are suspended as "moments" of the Truth with a capital T.

So if you look closely at what is going on in Hegel's philosophy, you find that reality (= reason) has to be a process and a constant "advance" from one stage to the next, because reason cannot rest at any stage; it is driven beyond it by necessity. What necessity? That it sees that what it knows at this stage is necessarily incomplete, and it is positively repelled by this "incompleteness."

But what is the "incompleteness" of any given stage that forces reason to go on to the next one? The mere fact that not everything is known?

No, interestingly enough. Whenever the stage "And so on to infinity" is reached (the so-called "bad infinite"), reason finds no drive (according to Hegel) to go through each of the members of this infinite set and learn about all of them; it is quite content with not encompassing explicitly all the individuals and leaping from the fact that here we have a "bad infinite" to the next stage of the relation which ties them all together.

Now what does that imply? It implies that it is not the lack of information or "facts" that "drives" reason on to the next stage, but something about the (incomplete) stage that is arrived at that reason finds repugnant, so that it cannot rest there.

And it is clear from Hegel's description of each stage as forcing reason onward to the next one that what it is that is "repugnant" is precisely the fact that this stage contains its own opposite as identical with itself--or that the stage in question is recognized as being its own opposite. So you have to pass on to a further stage which contains these two "moments" as "suspended": that is as different and complementary aspects of a whole that makes sense.

Hence, it is the precise existing contradiction that drives reason to find something else that makes sense out of the contradiction as it exists; or in other words, it is the fact that this self-negation is unintelligible by itself--or in our terms is an effect--that forces reason beyond it into something which, when integrated with the effect into a larger whole makes the whole make sense--which is another way of saying that if you add the cause to the effect, then the whole (effect + cause) now makes sense.

In other words, Hegel's notion of something as containing its own negation within it is another way of saying "something which, taken by itself, contradicts itself" which is precisely our definition of an effect. His "negative moment" is precisely the spelling out of the contradictoriness as such, and so it is as such a "real non-reality." Further, his "negation of the negation" or the "in and for itself" is the effect made intelligible by its cause. So Hegel is actually using effect and cause for his reasoning process.

He adds to this, of course, two things: (1) the statement that, until absolutely everything is known (until the Absolute knows all about himself as such), then it is always possible to look at any real situation as an effect, and (2) these effects arrange themselves in a logical pattern from the most abstract (most incomplete, containing the least information) to the most concrete (containing in the limit--Absolute Spirit--absolutely all information), such that a given effect demands a given cause and that effect-cause intelligibility must be looked at as a very definite new effect and no other one, leading on to the next stage.

I would agree with statement (1) above; if not everything is known, then it is always possible to look on something as an effect (because some information is left out, and it is possible that the remainder could contradict itself without this information). But I can't see any necessity for statement (2), that there is an inexorable logic about which effect follows which solution; and I think Hegel's "bad infinite," which he just calls a stage to be passed over, indicates that there are things that just happen (the multitude of human beings, for instance) and don't have any particular reason for them (that is, he never gives a reason why these human beings have to be the ones that exist rather than all the ones that weren't born--why this set is the only possible one. This is just the "bad infinite" and isn't interesting to him).

Hence, Hegel doesn't actually fit everything into a logical scheme where everything is necessary, or he would have to account for the necessary presence of each member of the "bad infinite."

But it is further interesting to note that reason has the drive Hegel claims for it as long as knowledge is incomplete; if and when Absolute Spirit is attained and known in its fullness, history and so on stops, because everything is a "suspended moment" in Absolute Spirit; and finally all is at (dynamic) rest.

But that is another way of saying that reality is "rational" because knowledge is incomplete, and knowledge keeps going "beyond" itself because it contradicts itself because of its incompleteness. But to be incomplete, of course, is to be less than itself, and when knowledge finally reaches its full self, the process as process stops and becomes eternal act or something.

But of course "incomplete" is another way of saying "finite" or "limited." And so Hegel's dialectic is driven by the unintelligibility of reality as finite, not by the "necessity of reality as such."

What makes Hegel's philosophy so powerful is that he did hit upon the driving force that makes us investigate reality and not just "rest in the facts": the fact that the facts as we know them positively contradict each other, in such a way that it is known that additional facts are "out there" somewhere which will make sense of the situation.

But even people who are taken by the dialectic (like Marx, or Kierkegaard, or Peirce, or anyone, really, who is bright enough to see what Hegel was doing) have all had problems with why this progression (the one in the Phaenomenologie or the Logik) has to be the "right" one, and why this next stage as outlined in Hegel couldn't have been any other than the one he hit upon.

And, of course, if my approach is correct, this is precisely Hegel's Achilles heel. His critics are right; there's something about the dialectic that has to be on the right track; but the precise working out of it doesn't have to be what Hegel outlined.

All of which is by way of saying that Hegel misinterpreted the finite and its unintelligibility as if it were "reality" and "reasonableness." And (like Marx) I think I have at last stood Hegel on his feet, by stating the finite for what it is, and pointing out that what Hegel was really talking about was the finite.