Hegel's Speculative Sentence

Andrew Haas

Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 54, Number 3, 2021, pp. 213-239 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/810401

[ Access provided at 9 Nov 2021 07:50 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

 Hegel’s Speculative Sentence

Andrew Haas

a b s t r ac t

Almost all philosophers (and many non-philosophers) recognize the fundamental

importance of the Phenomenology of Spirit. But Hegel’s way of thinking and speak-
ing—which he names, “speculative”—needs explaining. The example of “the specu-
lative sentence” is helpful—for here, speculating means implying, that is, neither
bringing meaning to presence nor keeping it in absence; but rather, speaking and
thinking by implication. If the history of philosophy, however, overlooks what is
implied, then it cannot grasp what is, and what is thought and said in the specula-
tive sentence. Luckily, there is another way: implying that which can neither be said
nor left unsaid, neither thought nor unthought. Reinterpreting Hegel’s speculative
sentence, therefore, for implication, for what is implied—and neither present nor
absent—Haas demonstrates how to think and speak speculatively about thinking
and speaking, substance and subject, being and becoming, whether in philosophy
or not, even if we implicate ourselves thereby.

Keywords: being, Hegel, implication, Phenomenology of Spirit, speculative

sentence

This still: I have long doubted whether I should write to you because
everything, which one writes or speaks, again depends solely on
explanation; or because I feared explanation, which once embarked
upon is so dangerous to explain.
—Hegel’s letter to his fiancée, Marie, Nuremberg, Summer 1811
(1952, 368–69)

In the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel gives an example of

speculative thought and language: “Gott ist das Sein, das Prädikat das Sein”
doi: 10.5325/philrhet.54.3.0213
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2021
Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
 andrew haas

(1988, 9.44). Miller (1977, 38) translates: “‘God is being,’ the Predicate is
‘being.’” Pinkard (2018, 39): “God is being. The predicate is being.” Inwood
(2018, 29): “God is Being, the predicate is Being.”
The translations are not “wrong.” They are “right.” But being “right,”
they fail to translate what is being thought. And by speaking being, they
cannot speak the truth of what is being said—traduttore, traditore—not by
mistake or error, but by implication. In fact, the translations translate that
which is neither said nor unsaid, neither thought nor unthought; although,
to paraphrase Kant (1900, IV A51/III B75): thoughts without implications
are empty; speaking without implying is blind.1
Rather, the explanation explains everything. Hegel does not write: “the
predicate is being.” He simply writes: “the predicate being.” For being is not
there, not present—but this does not mean that it is absent or nowhere,
nor some combination or permutation of presence and absence, here and
there. On the contrary, being is implied, an implication—which is why the
“way-of-writing undergoes a change and acquires a form of appearance
demanding a perhaps painful effort” (2017, GW2, 558).2
If being, then, seems to be there, present in the speculative sentence—
whether as the predicate or subject or copula—it is because, as the explana-
tion demonstrates, it is already implied. And if it comes-to-presence and
presents itself to be thought or said, it is because of implication. For, in
truth, speculation seeks to speak and think neither God the subject, nor
being the predicate or copula, neither simply essence and existence, nor
merely universality and particularity, identity and difference, nor just gram-
matical form or logical structure—and certainly nothing merely anthro-
pological, psychological, or physiological. Rather, if speculation speaks and
thinks being, it is because it has spoken and thought of implication, as the
explanation implies. And if being comes-to-presence and is present, con-
tinuously or not, it is because speculating is implying that being is and has
been implied. In other words, implied being in the explanation explains the
(explicit or implicit) presence of being in the speculative sentence. Thus,
implication is what is speculative about the speculative sentence—hence:
“the predicate being.”3
And yet, the explanation still seems to need some explanation, at least
with regard to its implications for being and thinking and speaking. For, on
the one hand, without an explanation, both the explanation and that which
it explains (speculation) remain inexplicable—which is why non-speculative
philosophy (as well as the natural and human sciences, and the arts) is unable
to speak and think speculatively. But, on the other hand, with the explanation,

214
 hegel’s speculative sentence

the speculative sentence and speculative philosophy (phenomenology,

logic, the system of science)—even philosophy as a whole—should finally
become explicable; although, as Hegel warns: “everything written or
spoken again depends solely on the explanation . . . which once embarked
upon is so dangerous to explain” (1952, 368–69).
The “Preface” then, must be reread for what is being implied and how
so—and eventually, the entirety of the Phenomenology of Spirit (from the
certainty of the senses through perception and understanding, master
and slave, to reason and absolute knowledge; maybe even philosophy as a
whole), if the truth is that it must speak and think speculatively. For the text
not only explains—it exemplifies implication (in sensing and perceiving,
understanding and doing, making and knowing, speaking and thinking and
being); it shows and tells how to imply, even if we are implicated thereby;
and so, it neither simply says what it wants to say, explicitly or implicitly, nor
means what it appears to mean, nor merely presents or represents what it
knows or thinks. In other (Kantian) words, the text demonstrates that and
how it is neither “analytic” (which simply brings to presence that which was
already present—not new, but clarified as “what has been already actually
thought” as present, “though it was not expressed” [nicht ausdrücklich]), nor
“synthetic” (which merely brings to presence that which was absent—and
so, new, unknown, “not actually thought,” or “just obscurely,” “covertly”
[verstekterweise], like a “certain concealed secret”—implied “not directly,
but indirectly”); but speculative, that is, τρίτον τι, tertium datur, ein Drittes,
implying that which is neither brought to presence nor left in absence
(Kant 1900, III, 10, 138; IV, 6, 10, 177, 266, 271; Plato 1995, Soph., 250b8). Thus,
the task is to speak and think what is just implied—neither expressing the
presence of the unexpressed, nor revealing the absence of the concealed;
but suspending both, and remaining in suspense or suspension, suspended
before either, if only for an Augenblick, or at least for the time being.
In order to follow, however, where the text may lead, it is necessary,
here and now, to suspend judgment on such a reading—at least until the
deed is done. For it is only at the end that the truth of the beginning
may be judged—although insofar as implication is the end, it would be
already implied at the beginning, thus implicated in everything that is and
is said or thought.4 And if the history of philosophy—from beginning to
end—overlooks what is implied, if it maintains the privilege of, and prefer-
ence for, presence and/or absence; if it insists on translating implication
into the language and logic of what is, or can be expressed analytically or
revealed synthetically; then it cannot grasp what is implied by the speculative

215
 andrew haas

sentence, cannot think and speak speculatively about thinking and speak-
ing, being and becoming, substance and subject, whether in philosophy or
not, even if we implicate ourselves thereby. But the “Preface” might rather
imply:
(¶1.) If the Phenomenology, according to Hegel, is somehow science in
general, Wissenschaft, if it is to bring-to-presence and present philosophical
truth; then it must allow us to think and speak what is universal and the
universality of the universal, as well as the particular and particularity. In
other words, truth means: grasping the way in which, Art und Weise, the
universal is neither just in the particular (like fish in water), nor merely
belongs to particulars (like members of a club or set); but rather, how the
universal is particular, how its way of being is particular, and what its way
of being is—and so, how the particular is related to the universal, insofar
as truth lies in the absolute relation of universality and particularity. But if
this relation is one of implication, then how they imply each other, and are
implied by one another, is what is absolute about philosophical truth. Thus,
universal and particular are one because the being of their unity (and the
unity of their being) is implied, because relating absolutely means implying
(not just presenting or being present, or being present and non-present, and
certainly neither being-in nor belonging-to)—which is how each of them,
separately and together, as different and the same, can be presented or rep-
resented concretely as coming-to-presence and going-out-into-absence.
(¶2.) Ordinary opinions then, with regard to the fixed opposition or
simple antithesis of the true and the false, must be suspended—for the
truth is neither one nor the other, but their relation. Speculative philosophy,
therefore, rejects the dogmatic and idealistic either-or (“the world is either
finite or infinite, but only one of both”) in order to think the truth qua both-
and: “the soul is not only finite or only infinite, it is rather essentially as much
the one as also the other” (Hegel 1986, W8, 98–99). Further:

A speculative content can, therefore, also not be expressed in a

one-sided sentence. If, for example, we say that “the absolute is the
unity of the subjective and the objective,” that is certainly right;
but it is still one-sided in that it expresses only the unity, and puts
the emphasis on it, whereas in fact, of course, the subjective and
the objective are not only identical, but also different. (Hegel 1986,
W8, 178)

216
 hegel’s speculative sentence

For the separation of true from false is the result of a processes of abstrac-
tion, one in which abstractors would be implicated, not yet having grasped
philosophy as a system of relations, that is, implications. But the truth is
precisely not one-sided, einseitig; it is two-sided, the relation of reciprocal
moments in which each is implied by the other. There is no parent without
a child, or teacher without students; rather, they imply one another, which
is how they can be presented as being implied in each other’s lives, and
deaths—as we are now, in the present, not just living or dying, but both.
And if the truth of the relation is their way of being implied, then it can
only come-to-presence as becoming, that is, as the presenting and repre-
senting, unfolding and developing (with progressive aspect, fortschreitende
Entwicklung) of the whole. The plant lives and dies—like φύσις as a self-
moving, self-manifesting, self-unfolding organic unity—insofar as the bud
implies the blossom and the root is implied by the fruit; and an immortal
plant, which neither died nor lived, would truly be no plant at all (Aristotle
1950, 192b13–22; 1957, 1069a18–1069b2).5 Thus, the truth is the movement
implied by the way in which moments imply each other—and the task of
the Phenomenology is to do justice to implication.6
(¶¶3–4.) Truth does not, however, simply destroy or overcome the tra-
ditional fixation on the true and the false, on presence and absence, on what
is present here or there. On the contrary, the one-sidedness of such judg-
ments is implied by the movement of coming-to-know in a two-sided way.
The goal then, is not only to judge either true or false, present or absent, but
also to comprehend—or more precisely, both to judge and to comprehend.
For judgment and comprehension are themselves, like the true-false and
present-absent, two moments which imply one another.7 As Hegel notes:
“the etymological meaning of ‘Urteil’ in our language is more profound and
expresses the unity of the concept as what comes first, and its difference as
the original division, which is what, in truth, the judgment is” (1986, W8,
316). And this holds for many other terms, for example:

To sublate and being sublated (the idealized) constitute one of the

most important concepts of philosophy. . . . The German “aufheben”
[tollere, to sublate] has a twofold meaning in the language: it equally
means “to keep,” to “preserve,” and “to cause to cease,” “to put an
end to” . . . But it must strike one as remarkable that a language has
come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings.
For speculative thought it is gratifying to find words that have in
themselves a speculative meaning. (Hegel 2017, 39772–73)

217
 andrew haas

Thus, one-sided claims to what is true or false, present or absent, are not
merely to be forgotten or overlooked; rather, their truth—and so, their
proper place and useful employment in ordinary conversation and everyday
experience—is also to be remembered, both destroyed and preserved, auf-
gehoben, which is how they imply truth.
(¶5.) Science, however, is the form in which truth comes-to-presence
qua true or false, presents and represents itself in concrete existence qua
actual knowledge. And the history of science—and of philosophy as a sci-
ence, or knowing in the broadest possible sense—is the necessary move-
ment of its moments from inner to outer necessity; it is the presentation of
that which is implied and its representation in the form of the explicit (in
accordance with the schema of time, Zeit). Insofar as science brings truth
to presence (and presents and represents it as true) it demonstrates that
its τέλος is (and has always been) scientific—for the necessity of science
is the necessity of truth. But that which comes-to-presence betrays what
is implied, and explicating is the denial of implicating—for the explicit
cannot do justice to what is just implied, and making explicit is remak-
ing, a remake that puts an end to implying, which is why the task of the
Phenomenology is to develop another science, a science of implication.8
(¶¶6–9.) Traditionally, however, the form in which scientific truth
comes-to-presence is neither intuition (as in religion) nor feeling (as in
sensation or sense-certainty)—it is conceptual. For science is conscious that
other so-called ways-of-knowing are not knowledge, and it is conscious of
itself (self-conscious), that it must go beyond such superficial, insubstantial
reflection. Indeed, if science is to fulfill the needs of truth, which are the
needs of science—that is, the need to know what is (being qua implied,
the meaning of being as implication) and “what it is” (how science implies
being, is implied by being, and so implicated in the history of science which
is its own)—then it can accept neither the earthly pleasures of sensibility
nor the heavenly satisfactions of pure one-sided intelligibility.9
(¶¶10–11.) But this means that the spirit of science should neither
simply resign itself to ignorance, to the failures and impossibilities (or infi-
nitely unfulfilled promised possibilities) of knowing, to the limitations of
the power of its determinations, to the superficiality of wide or deep feeling;
nor that it should (actively or passively) hide the truth from itself, or dream
that it could (one day perhaps) receive truth as a gift from the gods, as if it
could be given, presented as some kind of present, as if nature might reveal
itself and allow us to discover, and to have unveiled to our gaze, its “true
modes of activity”—especially if it is only implied, neither given nor a gift,

218
 hegel’s speculative sentence

neither present nor a present (Kant 1900, III, 141; IV, 181). On the contrary,
insofar as science is “never at rest” (nie in Ruhe), but always in motion and
unrest, Unruhe; it must take a leap, a Sprung, out of the old and into the
new, make a change from the known to the unknown, from the same to the
other, a transition from what has been thought (and how so) to that which,
in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel names: the “still unthought” (noch unge-
dacht) (2017, GW14, §359).10 For science is always gripped, begriffen, by the
concept, Begriff—and the movement of conceptualization does not stop,
even when it stops, which is what the verb, “to stop,” implies. And the
essential difference between philosophical ways of knowing and other ways
of knowing in the human and natural sciences (and the arts) lies in specu-
lation’s ability to think and speak in a way that grasps and expresses the
“inward unrest” (Unruhe in sich) of two-sided truth, both identity and dif-
ference, which falls (granted, for a moment) into superficial one-sidedness,
but which then turns against itself, negates what it thinks and says and is
(Hegel 1986, W8, 191).
(¶¶12–14.) And yet, if this other way of doing science, of speaking and
knowing, and its new kind of concept, must come to presence and be devel-
oped concretely (as a child grows into an adult, an acorn into an oak, or like
a building constructed on a firm foundation); then the simple and imme-
diately present concept is not the truth. On the contrary, simplicity and
immediacy are clues which imply that the simply-immediate one-sided has
already been abstracted (distilled, condensed, reduced, extracted, and fixed)
from the two-sided. Thus, science—if it is to be scientific, that is univer-
sal, and so, open and equally intelligible to all—must show how ordinary
understanding can attain extraordinary rationality, how the unscientific can
become scientific; it must demonstrate how concrete consciousness (how-
ever bound to external content, or enthralled by the sensible or intelligible)
can be educated to the point of absolute knowledge of the absolute idea,
which is the work of the system of science of the Phenomenology.
(¶¶15–16.) But whatever this other system of science is to be, one thing
is certain: it cannot be merely more of the same. It cannot satisfy itself
with the boring repetition of monochromatic form and familiar content
which the history of science has already repeated. It cannot stop with the
security of today’s dominant science in which speaking and knowing is a
question of simply asserting and proving (the representation of the pres-
ence of what presents itself as true)—supported by the power and privilege
of rank, and the pleasure of mastery, perhaps especially in formal logic and
all the philosophies grounded thereon—that A=A, that the law of identity

219
 andrew haas

is true (which is the night in which “all cows are black”), that everything is
truly the same, and that the law of non-contradiction is inviolable. On the
contrary, as Hegel writes in the Logic:

Speculative thinking consists only in this, in holding firm to con-

tradiction and to itself in the contradiction, but not in the sense
that, as it happens in representational-thought, it would let itself
be ruled by it and allow it to dissolve its determinations into just
other determinations or into nothing . . . while non-speculative
(ordinary, trivial) thought abhors contradiction—as nature abhors
a vacuum—speculative thought sublates it, destroys and preserves
it qua truth. (2008, 791, 794)

Thus, what is needed, even demanded, is the richness, Reichtum, of a science

qua self-originating and self-differentiating system—if it is to take up the
task of doing-speaking-knowing-being by implication.
(¶¶17–18.) But, as Hegel insists: everything turns on grasping and
expressing the truth, “not as substance, but just as much as subject.” In other
words, this other science must be able to know and say both being (as “sub-
stance is, further, being”) and knowing as universal, das Allgemeine—and
how they can both be and be thought, that is, by implication. Or, as
Parmenides puts it—where (according to Hegel) “actual philosophy”
begins: “being and thinking are the same” (Hegel 1986, W18, 290; Diels
1960, 231). So, on the one hand, in the Phenomenology’s new science, being
cannot merely be thought as fixed and finished, dead and done; it must
also be grasped as alive and moving (which is why “being” is a verb, “to
be”)—and both the dead and the living are (“to be dead or alive,” like “to be
substance and subject”). On the other hand, thought cannot simply think
a being, the object, that which is other than thought. Rather, thought must
also think itself, the subject that thinks (ego cogito, which is as well), both as
itself and not itself (that is, as the negation of itself, but one which returns
itself to itself, circles back and begins again). For, in this way, thought thinks
the movement of thinking (again, a verb, “to think”).
(¶19.) And it is the negative, negation, which drives this other science,
which moves this new science to think and speak the truth, to seek to grasp
the whole. But then, as Hegel insists, Spinoza’s determinatio negatio est must
be rethought as omnis determinatio negatio est (1986, W18, 288; W8, 196n).11
The system of science demands that not only some, but all determination
is negation. And if “to be” means “to be determined as being” in one way

220
 hegel’s speculative sentence

or another; then negation too, if it is to be negation, must be negated. Or,

more precisely, being means: both being negated and not being negated. So,
all determining is negating—including that determination and that nega-
tion—but the self-referentiality of negation is not simply a logical paradox
or an irresolvable contradiction; on the contrary, it is the truth, the two-
sided truth that can only be thought (in the new science) as moving, as
being-in-motion, as the self-movement of truth itself (which the old sci-
ence can neither think nor say because it fails to grasp “to think” and “to
say” and “to negate” qua verbs). This is why the truth of the new science
can only be thought and said as gerunds (“thinking and speaking,” verbal
nouns) or participles (verbal adjectives)—precisely in order to express the
aspectual incompleteness of the verbality of these verbs.
(¶20.) The truth then, is moving, self-moving, becoming, determin-
ing, negating. Being cannot be understood as a being, a thing or object, a
substance or subject—for it is a verb, that which substances and subjects do,
how they are doing it, whether they are being or becoming (themselves or
others, present or absent), if they are in anyway whatsoever. In other words,
the essence of being is becoming. And becoming is neither an unmoving or
fixed-and-finished universal, nor simply some kind of unmoved or moved
being, nor nothing (that is nothing); on the contrary, becoming (again, a
verb, “to become”) is the how of being, being’s way of being—that is, how
being is. And this is why the new science can no longer just call being “a
universal”; but rather, names it “the absolute.”
(¶21.) If science, however, is to know and say the truth of being as moving,
as acting and making and doing, or as the activity of being what and how
it is, namely, as becoming; it must become other than itself. It must negate
itself, realize that it has been mistaking being for a being, or for something
unbecoming; and it must stop understanding being as a universal, and start
knowing it as absolute, which is why Hegel names it “absolute knowl-
edge” (¶808). For the knowing subject is (being) as well, which means it
is moving (becoming), not just dead and done; just as the Phenomenology’s
scientific spirit of reason is in motion, at least insofar as knowledge is actu-
ally (in the midst of, continuous aspect) knowing and being known. But
this does not mean that knowing is simply identical to (or different from)
being; on the contrary, being is implied by the absolute becoming of every-
thing that is—but knowing implies the coming-to-presence of the spirit
of science to itself, the self-implication of the subject qua knower, which
is how reason reconciles the presence of itself in reasoning, or thought in
thinking.

221
 andrew haas

(¶22.) Then, although this science is somehow new, it is also very old.
The Greeks, according to Hegel, already grasp knowledge as a deed being
done, as a moving (also a verb, “to know”); and the rational subject as
“self-moving,” as being in the midst of the purposive activity of knowing,
as being the one to do the knowing—a knowledge of that which is itself
self-moving, self-unfolding, self-reproducing, self-schematizing, growing,
φύσις—from the verb, φύειν. In this way, the subject’s way of being is like
nature’s—for reason is not apart from nature, and we are not over-and-
against nature qua object; on the contrary, the rational is natural, and both
are actual. And here, even non-movement, rest, lack of growth, death and
being dead—all these are movements too, as their verbality demonstrates:
to be not moving or unmoved, to be at rest, to be lacking in growth or not
to grow, to be dead and gone.12
(¶23.) Nevertheless, according to Hegel, the Greeks fail to grasp that
the subject—although natural and substantial—has its own equally essen-
tial way of being, of moving or self-moving, one that differentiates (while
not separating) us from the substance of nature. For only the subject can
know and reflect (that and how it knows and reflects), even know the abso-
lute absolutely, becoming thereby itself absolute in spirit or absolute spirit,
which is the ultimate theme of the Phenomenology. This actualization of
absolute knowledge, however, cannot be accomplished immediately, that is,
merely by making explicit the presence of what is to be known, substance
and subject, the other and itself. On the contrary, as the analysis of gram-
mar, the logic of language, shows: simple predicative judgments (S is P,
“God is the eternal”) begin with a meaningless sound, a mere name or word
(God), and end with a fixed point to which the knower affixes predicates,
which are themselves meaningless sounds (such as eternal); but speculative
judgments are actual concrete knowledge because they grasp the copula as
the self-movement of the subject, because they understand that being qua
verb is an act, a doing, a moving, and because they seek to illuminate how
the copula is implied, and so, how being is implying. For being is implied in
every sentence, every feeling or thought or deed, in everything that is: in the
simplest expression of sensibility, such as “this leaf is green” (like “this rose
is red,” or “this picture is beautiful”), being is mixed-in, eingemischt (1986,
W8, 45, 318). And if every predicative sentence takes the form, “the subject is
the predicate,” it is because “the copula ‘is’ comes from the nature of the con-
cept” (Hegel 1986, W8, 317). So, even sentences which do not use being—or
refuse to mark it, or claim to have no need of it—imply being. And every
use of the copula (in language and logic)—whether to indicate possession

222
 hegel’s speculative sentence

or existence (necessarily or unnecessarily, possibly or impossibly)—which

presents the subject in relation to the predicate, presupposes an understand-
ing of the meaning of being as presence. In other words, the old science is
a science of beings, subjects and predicates, a science of presence—but the
new science is a science of being, that is, of becoming, of what the subject
does and has been doing, its action and activity; it is a science of the copula
as implied copulation, a science of implication, of the implied verb “to be,”
and of the being of the “to be,” or how being and beings are.
(¶¶24–25.) The new science then, can be called systematic insofar as its
way of knowing, of moving or self-moving, is its own—for it is self-reflecting,
self-critiquing, self-negating, even self-correcting, and so, self-developing,
self-progressing, self-knowing. It begins with the immediate assertion of
principles and reasons, negates them, and exposes the positive side of its
negation. In this way, science shows itself to have its own spirit, the spirit of
science that is its essence; and its own knowledge, self-knowledge, knowl-
edge of the spirit of science and of itself as this spirit. For whatever science
studies, it always also studies science; but then, the object of science is the
subject of science, which is how the spirit of science knows and recognizes
itself qua science, and how it is what it is, which is actually what is scientific
(that is, systematic) about science. Thus, the being of science is its being
scientific, its way of doing science or acting scientifically; but insofar as
being means implying (whether the old science knows it and likes it or not),
science’s way of being implies self-criticism, self-negation, self-knowledge,
that is, self-recognition, even self-consciousness; and so, the spirit of sci-
ence is implicated in its own way of being, that is, becoming, which implies
that it must be systematic, at least if it is to be scientific, which implicates it
in how scientists—in the natural and human sciences—do science.
(¶26.) This way of being, however, is not just implied by science,
Wissenschaft; on the contrary, it is implied by any kind of knowing, Wissen,
whatsoever. For the spirit of scientific knowledge is not simply knowledge
of particulars (of life in biology, force in physics, capital in economics,
power in politics, even wood in carpentry or perspective in painting); it
is knowledge in general, im Allgemeinen, of the universal, das Allgemeine
(not understood as the negation of the particular, but as absolute, more
universal than any universal). But then, science needs scientists in order to
be scientific; although scientists—indeed everyone, insofar as science qua
universal knowledge is open to all—have a right to ask how individuals
can be (that is, become) scientific, which is the education provided by the
Phenomenology.

223
 andrew haas

(¶¶27–29.) Science’s way of being then, which is its way of becoming,

shows the individual how to move from immediate sensory-consciousness
to absolute knowledge, how work (again, a verb, “to work”) can transform
the uneducated (or half-educated) into those educated in universal truth.
But this means neither simply absorbing already known facts and figures,
nor waiting for inspiration or enlightenment from on high; on the contrary,
it means working through the length of the path of learning, enduring
the trials along the way, the failures and successes—for the being of the
student of science is, like the spirit of science itself, a becoming. In other
words, education is not a static end, but a process that ends in proceed-
ing, that is complete in being incomplete. And this is not just the task of
individuals, educated or not; it is the work of the world (in which the indi-
vidual works, alone and together), of world-history (of which individuals
and groups are a part), of the spirit of the whole world (thanks to which
individuals can be and become educated), as it seeks self-knowledge, that
is, scientific knowledge, whereby it is itself qua becoming. Thus (again, like
parent and child), the world and individuals, world-history and individual-
history, imply one another—so that scientists imply science and science is
implied by scientists.
(¶¶30–31.) But then, individuals (coming to know the truth of the
world and themselves) are implicated in the history of the world. We can
acquire the truth because, on the one hand, it is universally true for objects,
as logic is valid a priori; and, on the other hand, because it is universally
true for subjects, as negation is the moving principle of the self. In this way,
knowledge is neither simply accepting-or-asserting opinion, nor compar-
ing-and-contrasting personal experience and belief with what is common
and self-evident; it is recollection of absolute truth, that is, coming to know
that which is always already true about objects and individuals, substances
and subjects. In this way, the thoughts and deeds of one are implicated in
the thinking and doing of all (and of the universal self or absolute spirit).
(¶32.) And yet, if the history of the world—and so, of individuals, of
scientific and un-scientific communities—is always also just as much the
work of the spirit of world-history, then it is because the “force and work”
of negation, the “power of the negative,” works. In other words, the negative
is implied in the movements of history and the education of conscious-
ness; or the spirit of science and the labor of scientists imply negation—for
negating is the how of world-history; it is the way in which the world
works. But the negative is not just something that comes and goes, that
comes-to-presence at certain historical moments and goes-out-into-absence

224
 hegel’s speculative sentence

when history no longer needs it. On the contrary, the power and work of
negating is continuous: spirit does not simply negate; it is negating; its way
of being is becoming negatively—it stays with it, remains suspended in
and by negating. Thus, in suspension, by continuing to do what it does, by
negating (aspectually incomplete verbality), the negative shows itself to be
implied by the being of history, that is, how it is becoming; and work is the
working of the world that brings its works to presence, even if it implies the
negation of implication thereby.
(¶¶33–35.) The work of individuals then, is to learn to put up with the
continuous, to endure aspectual incompleteness—not to stop at the begin-
ning or end, nor to rest in the middle, but to maintain itself in the process
of negating, the doing of the deed, and to tolerate the suspense of implying.
So, education does not make educated individuals; it shows how education
implies continuing education—just as justice is not something done, but a
doing. In this way, education is implicated in freeing thinking from its fixa-
tion on fixity—for it shows how to suspend the fixed thought of conscious-
ness and self-consciousness, subject and object, how to give up the fixity
of the fixed thinker, how to be suspended by that which is only implied,
insofar as implication is the suspension of being qua presence.
(¶36.) But then, consciousness can no longer be the relation of a sub-
ject to itself, whereby it makes itself an object for itself, presents itself to
itself and knows itself as presence-to-self, and/or absent therefrom. On the
contrary, consciousness (and so, self-consciousness) is an experience, an
aspectually incomplete process or becoming, a continuous going-through
or under-going—for it is not simply another to itself, it is “this move-
ment of becoming another to itself.” But this means, nevertheless, that
conscious experience can—perhaps especially for the old science—always
be converted or constituted or re-constituted, transformed or transmuted
or translated, into a discontinuous object, so that it can be presented to
itself as self-presence. Thus, it is the experience of suspension, of being sus-
pended (neither simply here nor there), of continuous negating, of being
qua becoming, which the individual translates into the experience of being
conscious and self-conscious—and this is a movement whereby it moves
itself out of a situation in which it is suspended (a suspension in which
it is implicated) in order to bring itself down to earth, back to itself from
self-alienation, thereby reassuring itself of its completeness, at least for the
moment.
(¶37.) But then, not just consciousness or self-consciousness—the
spirit of the world, of world-history as a whole, can no longer be some kind

225
 andrew haas

of world-subject relating to a world-object, or to subjectivity qua object.

Rather, the history of the world, and of the spirit of the world, is the his-
tory of moving, of negating both itself and its object, a history in which
spirit and world imply one another. Although, at the moment the spirit
of the world knows this deed as its own doing, grasps how it is implied by
the movement as its own moving, negation as self-negating; it knows its
way of being implied as becoming. Thus, the knowledge with which the
Phenomenology ends can be called absolute knowing, just as its organization
into a systematic whole can be called absolute logic.13
(¶¶38–41.) If the truth of negating, however, is not just the negated
or the negative, but the movement, the being in motion; then, again, sci-
ence cannot spare itself the false—and so, again, it can be neither a revela-
tion of true ideas or essential essences, nor a dogmatic distribution of fixed
facts, common opinions, clear-cut answers, realized results (as taught in
the Schools). For truth is neither “a minted coin” which could be presented
and used as legal tender, nor the difference between real and fake; on the
contrary, it is “the process of differentiating in general,” and one which
continues to be implied in the differentiated, as well as in its negation as
the undifferentiated or identical; which is also why truth cannot simply be
objective, but must also be subjective—for it is the movement or process
through which subject and object imply one another. Thus, truth is the
identity in which difference is implied, and the difference in which identity
is implied—or more precisely, it is the identification of difference which
implies differentiating, and the differentiation of identity which implies
identifying.14
(¶¶42–46.) But then, speculative truth cannot accept mathematics as
paradigmatic—at least insofar as it is simply one-sided, and progresses by
separating objectivity from subjectivity, by abstracting universal from par-
ticular, and form from matter. For truth is a double process, the two-sided
movement in which “each side simultaneously posits the other” as identical
and different. In other words, mathematics represents “everything that is”
as representable in the language of mathematics; it transforms objects and
subjects into that which can be counted, transmutes being into number and
magnitude, makes the incommensurable commensurable, abstracts from all
facts, imposes quantification on qualification, translates the untranslatable,
explicates and represents implication as present or presentable, or as absent
and unpresentable. And although all this mathematization may be expe-
dient, even a sign of progress, and an indication that science is fulfilling
Descartes’ dream of becoming the master-and-possessor-of-nature—it

226
 hegel’s speculative sentence

comes at a cost: the dismemberment of wholes into parts, the reductive

formalization and alienation of the world from its material substance, the
separation of the subject from its particularity, the equalization of differ-
ence—all of which characterize the eradication of implication. Then the
success of mathematics (in remaking being in its own image) is its failure,
its poverty of purpose, its denial of truth, as well as the defect of its method
and the superficiality of its knowledge—for its understanding of motion is
motionless, its conception of life lifeless, its explication of implication full
of sound and fury implying nothing. And it is perhaps, therefore, unsurpris-
ing that, if pure mathematics is so impoverished, applied mathematics—so
determinative for the natural and human sciences and arts, for technology
and technocracy, culture and thought, economics and politics, even every-
day experience (as well as language and logic, epistemology and ethics and
aesthetics, while propping up the myth of the-best-and-the-brightest)—is
even further from the truth.
(¶¶47–49.) But if the Phenomenology seeks to grasp universal truth—
not just dead, but also living concepts; not only what is negative, but also
positive; not just being, but also becoming; not only the abstract, but also
the concrete—then it does so by thinking the two-sided truth that is and
is not both true and false. This is, perhaps obviously, not simply a matter
of providing reasons or rationalizations, grounds or causes, or legitimating
or self-legitimating arguments and counter-arguments; much less deploy-
ing the everyday conversational or sophistical modes of prophesy, pedantry,
pomposity. On the contrary, insofar as “truth is its own self-movement,” it
is a question of following where it leads—rather than leading, asserting,
claiming, proving, clarifying, explaining, deducing, concluding. In this way,
philosophy follows the movement of revel-and-repose: on the one hand,
the Bacchanalian revel in which everyone is drunk; on the other hand, the
repose in which everyone drops. Thus, thinking loses itself and recollects
itself; it is positive-permanence and negative-evanescence—for they imply
one another, or their truth is the way in which each is and is implied by
the other; which is why speaking-truth is implying, and why thinking-
truth is the thinking of implication, that is, picking-up on what is implied,
tweaking-to or cluing-into implied truth, not simply determining truth as
presence or the presence of the true.
(¶¶50–51.) But then, philosophy cannot simply apply pre-determined
schemas, lifeless logic, or triadic forms (like the universal recipes or pigeon-
holes of Kant’s table of judgments-categories, or Fichte’s thesis-antithesis-
synthesis) to thought. For if the goal is knowing, that is, grasping “what the

227
 andrew haas

thing itself is”; the Phenomenology cannot merely assign meaningless predi-
cates, tautological determinations, or external constructs, to being—whether
in the hope of hitting on truth by chance, or through intuition or inspiration.
On the contrary, being must be approached from the inside; its self-movement
must be understood as its self-movement. And just as it would be superficial
to reduce the flesh-and-blood of the body to its skeleton, the heart to a
muscle, or spirit to a bone—so too, would it be unjust to force implication
to sleep in the Procrustean bed of presence.
(¶¶52–54.) Philosophical concepts, therefore, if they are to be philo-
sophical—that is, absolute, both universal and particular—must express
their own inner necessity. But to do so, concepts must both become other
than themselves via differentiating (determinate) negation, and return to
become themselves via self-determining actualization. For in their move-
ment of being conceptual, such concepts must show themselves to be self-
conceptualizing, immersed in and advancing with living-knowledge of
their living-object—not merely the procedure of contingent predication.15
Then concepts and objects are one—not because they are simply identical,
not because they correspond or correlate, but because they always also lack
identity. In other words, “being is thinking”—not because each of them
is one, which they are, as everything is one, if it is at all (insofar as being
and unity imply one another); but because their relation is one—that is,
both one and not one, insofar as it is the movement of being-determined
and being-dissolved, coming-to-presence and going-out-into-absence.
And this is the “cunning” of knowledge: although the knowing-subject
appears self-identical over-and-against its (also self-identical) object, seems
to abstain from activity, claims to be just looking on and independently
watching the concrete movement of the object’s life, while pursuing the
immanent self-conscious movement of its own subjective life; in fact, the
subject is doing the very opposite, and is implied in every moment of look-
ing, watching, observing (or abstaining therefrom) the object. Thus, “being
is thinking” means that being and thought imply one another, insofar as
each is self-identical and different from the other, that their unity is implied
(which is why unity can be called an implication); and if they appear or
come-to-presence as being (or becoming) one, it is because, in truth, the
being of their unity is cunningly implied thereby.
(¶¶55–56.) But the way in which being and thinking imply one
another—insofar as “being is thinking”—also has implications for being.
Indeed, traditionally, being means οὐσία, substance, that is, the universal
essence of what is, was ist.16 For the Ancients, this essence is νοῦς, εἶδος,

228
 hegel’s speculative sentence

ἰδέα, etc.; for the Moderns, it is the beautiful, holy, eternal, etc. For Hegel,
however, this is too simple—for being is not just a fixed-and-finished uni-
versal. On the contrary, being is a verb, a movement or self-movement,
action or activity, that is, a becoming, ein Werden. In other words, it is logi-
cally necessary for that which is (beings and being), insofar as it is (itself ),
to be, sein, that is, to act, move, do, to become, werden. So being cannot
be understood as unmoving (as in formal logic), and the divine cannot
be thought as an unmoved mover (as in classical onto-theology)—for
movement (and the movement of non-movement) is the verbality of the
verb “to be,” or “to become” is the essence of existence; and it is the task
of philosophy to think the essence of concrete-existence, Dasein, as the
action of being present, here or there, da sein. But if being is implied, if its
way of becoming is implying—so that the verbs “to be” and “to become”
explain being’s way of presenting or representing being, or how being
comes-to-presence and presents itself, or is represented by another—then
implication explains the explanation, explains how being can act, do the
deed, how it comes to be as οὐσία or ἰδέα, unum, verum, bonum, the holy or
eternal, as what is, was or will be, a being or a becoming, as what is present
or is coming to presence.17
(¶57.) Philosophy then—if it is to do justice to how implied being is
(becomes)—can neither resort to the conventional ways of thinking and
speaking (such as picture-thinking and representational-speaking), nor
to simple formalism or materialism, nor to divine inspiration or passive
meditation. Rather, it must let being move freely, spontaneously, of its own
nature—and think and speak how it is moving, and how this movement
comes to be. Thus, speculative thinking and speaking must seek to let that
which is implied imply—even if it then moves to present or represent it,
in thought or speech, as that which it is not, namely present and/or absent.
(¶¶58–61.) But then, speculation is not simply argumentation: while
the former grasps how the negative implies the positive, so that thought
can come to presence, and knowledge can present the true or represent the
false; the latter seeks to refute and destroy the presence of the content it
apprehends, to show that something is not the case, not present, failing to
posit the positive, much less to illuminate the implications thereof. And
speculation is not merely predication: while the former implies the subject’s
being, its essence qua that without which the subject cannot be what it is, or
how it can be (that is move, move itself, become, actively, live and die); the
later judges by superficially attaching an accidental or arbitrary or external
predicate as present in a fixed or passive subject. And insofar as the logical

229
 andrew haas

form of thought (and its concepts and propositions) correlates to the gram-
matical form of language (and its words and sentences), speculation thinks
and speaks the implied unity of subject and object. For it is the thinking
and speaking of what is inseparable from the object and indivisible from
the subject, and of how they are both identical and different, implying one
another, that is, an harmonic unity; although one which must—if it is to be
one, submit to the principle that omnis determinatio est negatio—show itself
as non-unity, the dissolution of harmony, dissonance, which is the history
of speculation and the rhythmic movement of its moments. Thus, it is the
movement of implication qua suspension which “shakes” the subject and
“pushes against” the object, or the sublation that implies them both.18
(¶¶62–65.) And yet, Hegel still fears that speculation remains unex-
plained, perhaps even inexplicable—hence the common complaints about
“the unintelligibility of philosophical writings.” So, he illustrates: “God is
being, the predicate being.” On the one hand, the subject is lost, dissolved in
the predicate: if God is identical to being, to everything that is, then “God
ceases to be what he is,” namely, God. On the other hand, being is not simply
a predicate; it is the essence of the subject. Indeed,

the philosophical [that is, speculative] sentence, because it is a sen-

tence, evokes the opinion that the ordinary relationship between
subject and predicate, and the usual attitude of knowledge, obtain.
The philosophical content of the sentence destroys this attitude
and the opinion about it; opinion learns by experience that the
meaning is otherwise than it opined; and this correction of its
opinion compels knowledge to go back to the proposition and now
take it in another way [namely, speculatively]. (¶63)

In other words, there are two mutually exclusive ways of thinking and
speaking: non-speculatively, which is perfectly useful and valuable, and
expresses its validity as proof, but which demands presence and disregards
implication; and speculatively, which expresses being as an act or activity, a
becoming or doing, a movement exposed by the verb and its verbality—and
which can only be explained by implication, which is how being comes-to-
presence and is present, and goes-out-into-absence and is absent, specula-
tively or not, that is, by sublating being qua implied. Thus, the explanation
of the speculative sentence exposes what being is (an implication), and how
so (implied), while explaining why speculation can do that which the tradi-
tional arts and sciences cannot, namely, think and speak the truth of being

230
 hegel’s speculative sentence

by implying that which cannot (and should not) be said, and that which
cannot (and should not) be thought as presence, present and represented.
(¶¶66–70.) But this is not to say that the problem of implication has
been resolved once it is recognized. On the contrary, it recurs perpetually.
For it is in the very nature and habit of philosophical exposition to translate
and transform implication into presence, to speak of what is being implied
as if it were present, as if it must or must not be present, could or could
not be present; and to think that which comes-to-presence while avoid-
ing that which cannot be (necessarily or unnecessarily, possibly or impos-
sibly) present to thought—that is, to accept nothing that cannot be said or
thought because it is just implied. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that
the philosophical tradition is unable to admit speculation’s way of speaking
and thinking; or rather, not speaking or thinking, but implying—although
this prevents implication from being understood and evaluated, learned
and practiced; and reduces the language of implication to information, to
what can be presented as fact or fiction, true or false, subject or predi-
cate; and rearticulates implying qua what comes-to-presence as thought or
unthought, thinkable or unthinkable, as always already present or present-
able. But such procedures serve chicory for coffee. A Satz that implies being
is substituted for an Ersatz. An implied Begriff is translated into what can
be begriffen, while refusing that which cannot be kept im Griff. Presence
takes the place of implication, trivializes truth, and becomes the sole arbiter
of what may and must be thought and said. But when philosophy fails to
consider implication, thinking and speaking are leveled-down to modes of
production, to work which brings truth to presence, to argument for the
explicit or explicable—as long as one can present a cost-benefit analysis of
the value of the concepts or objects presented (which stands in for what can
only be implied, and so, does not work because it cannot work or produce
works which work). But the task of the Phenomenology is to make the prob-
lem of implication problematic, to allow others (perhaps even everyone) in
a community of minds to consider that which is being implied, to take up
the suggestion that being is implying, to reveal implication as “the source of
the essence” of being’s way of being—thus, as the origin of being as concept
and object, subject and substance, subject and predicate, and their relation,
as the presence of what is present and how it comes-to-presence.
(¶¶71–72.) Philosophy then, for Hegel, must seek truth in the
self-movement of the concept, a movement driven by negation, a negation
of what is present, that is, the presence of being understood as moving,
becoming—but one which is itself a negation of being qua implied, and of

231
 andrew haas

implying. In this way, implication shows itself to be the being of being. So,
the Phenomenology of Spirit follows the self-movement of the science of the
concept of the essence of being (from naïve sensibility to consciousness,
which is “indeed itself necessarily self-consciousness” (Hegel 1988, ¶164), a
self-consciousness which is reason, a reason which is spirit, a spirit which is
absolute spirit, and so, a knowing which is absolute knowing); but this only
comes to be, comes-to-presence, because that which is, and is to be thought
and said, is implied—which is why, if philosophy is to be a science, it must
be the science of implication.
Department of Philosophy
Higher School of Economics, Moscow

notes
1. Haas 2018, 47, 55–56. As we know, implied being is common in many languages,
not only German, where the right to implication (in the incomplete sentence, “predicate
being”) is grounded on the presence of being (in the complete sentence, “God is being”);
for example, sometimes in Greek (Kahn 2003, XIIn11) and English (Keats 1814–91, 3.2)—
and Russian (Wittgenstein 1958, §20), where sentences are complete (in the present tense),
and have the right to implication, without the presence of being. In “speculative sen-
tences”—as opposed to “logical judgements” (from Aristotle’s subject-substance to Kant’s
concept-object)—subject and predicate are both identical and different, which is why
“being is obviously not a real predicate” (Kant 1900, IV A598/III B626). But this does not
mean that Hegel is simply defending Anselm—to whom Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff remain
loyal—against Gaunilo (writing on behalf of the fool), or repeating Kant’s critique thereof.
Rather, as Hegel argues (1986, 17.224, 529; 20.560): being is not a predicate which could be
added or subtracted from God by representational understanding; being is “the absolute
essence” of God, that from which God is inseparable, indivisible, one—so, only accessible
by rational thought, insofar as it grasps the Aufhebung of the identity and difference of the
identity and difference of God and being. As Surber (2006, 12) claims: “Hegel wishes to
insist on the fundamental contrast between ‘judgment’ (Urteil, as employed in the tradition
and most proximately by Kant) and ‘sentence’ or ‘proposition’ (Satz).” So, Stekeler (2014,
226, 321–22) writes: “nothing appears to be as difficult as the logic of speculative sentences”;
the “readership splits,” and “the major error of almost all interpretations of Hegel is that
they do not understand at all the problem of the usual ‘sorts’ of interpretations of sen-
tences of the form ‘S is P’ and, thus, do not comprehend the particular form of ‘speculative’
sentences.” As Derrida (1972, XIV, emphasis added) puts it: “the whole is implied, in the
speculative mode of reflection and expression, in each part.” On the difference between
critical (Kantian) and speculative (Hegelian) philosophies of history, see O’Brien (1985,
174–76, 198). To those who would see only a rhetorical flourish here, not speculative

232
 hegel’s speculative sentence

thought, I can only say—to paraphrase Heidegger (Magnus 1970, 80): it may be very bad
Hegel, but it is very good very bad.
2. As Hegel (1988, 44) writes: “‘being’ is here not supposed to be a predicate, but
rather the essence; God appears, thereby, to cease to be what he is from his position in the
sentence, namely, a fixed subject.” So, Surber (1975, 217) argues, “Hegel’s discussion of the
‘speculative sentence’ is not dependent upon the example which he gives.” In other words,
the language and logic of speculation cannot be limited to a consideration of God and
being, that is, onto-theology. For Sass (1981, 68), speculation is “emancipatory” insofar as
it opposes itself to traditional predicative logic in the name of movement, dialogue, and
intercourse with language itself. It is well known that Hegel drops the use of the term
“speculative sentence” (or sentences)”—which occurs only twice, as far as I know (Preface
to the Phenomenology; Encyclopedia, para. 88.3)—for “speculative content”; and that it does
not occur in the Logic (Wohlfart 1981, xiii). But if being qua essence is not something that
could be separated from God, added or subtracted (like a predicate which God has or
does not have), this does not mean that God is simply identical with its essence, being, or
merely different therefrom. They are not “one-sided,” but two-sided, the “unity which is,
at the same time, in the present and posited diversity,” the “inward unrest” of what is irre-
ducibly both/and, of what is “in itself turned against itself ” (Hegel 1986, 8.178, 8.191; 2017,
39756). See Simon (1999, 146), for a consideration of the “grammar of constructing individual
sentences,” and the argument that Hegel “already criticized the ‘usual’ idea which dominates
thought and which interprets reality according to the categorial articulation of sentences
into an (existing, underlying) subject and a predicate (accorded to the subject accidentally),
thereby moving principally within the limits of sentences.” Derrida (1967b, 167) calls non-
speculative predicative language the locus of an “original and irreducible” equivocity—and
the speculative sentence would embody equivocity and inequivocity. So, difference is not
expressed; but it is present and posited qua unexpressed—for in truth, God and being
are the same and not. Thus, the speculative task is to grasp both the expressed and the
unexpressed which are preserved and destroyed, maintained and abandoned, thanks to the
Aufhebung of the identity and difference of subject and predicate (in speech and thought):
God is being means that God is and is not being; and that being is and is not God. But
speculative thought and language cannot be limited to talk of God and being. On the con-
trary, every sentence is always also speculative insofar as it has the simple form of subject-
predicate (or, if more complex, is grounded thereon). As Hegel (1986, 8.45) insists: “this
leaf is green” is a speculative sentence insofar as being is “there,” along with a particular
combination of subject and predicate.
3. Similarly, Hegel writes—perhaps apocryphally, as the Hegel-Archiv at Bochum
insists the original has been lost, which does not stop Heidegger from citing it at Le
Thor (1977, GA15, 288)—that “a mended sock is better than a torn one; not so with self-
consciousness” (ein geflickter Strumpf besser als ein zerrissener; nicht so das Selbstbewusstsein)
(1986, W2, 558). But the text should simply read: “a mended sock better than a torn one; not

233
 andrew haas

so with self-consciousness.” For, in addition to whatever else is being asserted about socks
and self-consciousness (that it is or is not like a sock, whether torn or mended, untorn
and untearable or un-mended and unmendable), Hegel is saying that being (and unity) is
implied, which is how beings can be better and worse, like and unlike, compared and evalu-
ated, privileged and preferred; and that unity is implied, which is how it can be divisible or
indivisible, split-in-itself, divided-from-itself, out-of-joint, self-separated, or repaired, put
back-into-joint, its separation aufgehoben, really or ideally, thanks to material stitches or
spiritual ones, or not at all. Another example of implied being, from the Philosophy of Right
(2017, GW14, 18) where Hegel cites Aesop’s fable, “The Braggart,” in Greek and Latin: ἰδοῦ
Ῥόδος, ἰδοὺ καὶ τὸ πήδημα; hic Rhodus, hic saltus. And Nisbet (1991, 391) translates: “here is
Rhodes, [jump here].” But the translation should read: “here Rhodes, so jump here”—even
though Hegel’s pun, “here is the rose, dance here [hier ist der Rose, hier tanze],” also fails to
imply being (2017, GW14, 18).
4. As Surber (1975, 212) notes: the speculative sentence “runs like a Leitmotiv through-
out the Preface to the Phenomenology”—and, in fact, colors the rest of the text, even Hegel’s
entire system of science. Thus, Hamacher (1978, 16) insists: the speculative sentence is
the “paradigm of the whole speculative movement of spirit.” For, as Hegel reminds us:
“the forms-of-thought [Denkformen] are first set-out and stored in human language” (2017,
39690).
5. For improvisation (understood as self-schematization) as the origin and cause of
nature’s self-movement, self-changing, self-becoming, indeed, of any making or doing
whatsoever, see Aristotle (1922, 1449a2–10); Haas (2015).
6. As Hegel insists in the Logic: “The commonest injustice done to a speculative con-
tent is to render it one-sidedly, that is, to give prominence only to one of the propositions
in which it can be resolved” (2017, 39756).
7. On the one hand, in non-speculative sentences (trivial judgments, which are
“not adept to express speculative truths”), subject and predicate are taken as independent
(Hegel 2017, 39756). The copula (“is,” being) attributes the predicate to the subject, whether
the determination is taken as universal-objective or particular-subjective, whether valid
for appearances (phenomena) or things-in-themselves (noumena). On the other hand, in
speculative sentences, the copula no longer merely marks having, haben—it expresses being,
sein (1986, W8, 317). In other words, trivial “judgment joins subject and object in a connec-
tion of identity; abstraction is therefore made from the fact that the subject has yet more
determinacies than the predicate has, just as that the predicate is wider than the subject.
Now, if the content is speculative, the non-identity of subject and predicate is also an essen-
tial moment; but this is not expressed in judgment” (2017, 39756). In this way, the “empty”
copula “fulfills itself ” by being that which brings-to-presence the identity and difference
of subject and predicate, which is the relational concept of both (1986, W8, 321, 331).
8. Unfortunately, for Aquila (1985, 79)—like Grice (1989) and Brandom (1994)—the
solution to the problem of implication is “a process of making explicit.” But such a solu-

234
 hegel’s speculative sentence

tion would be no solution at all; on the contrary, it would be the negation of implica-
tion, translation into the language of the explicit, transformation of what is being implied,
transmutation of the movement (or becoming) of implying—and so, precisely neither
present as said or unsaid—into the form of what can be made explicit, used or abused,
and exchanged (assuming it has use-value); as if speaking were a simple transaction, like
spending “money,” and conversation an exercise in maximizing profit by employing expres-
sions correctly or pragmatically, as if implying is merely “a special case or variety of purpo-
sive, indeed rational, behavior,” and as if the task of interpretation is just working out that
a particular meaning “is present,” thereby bringing a “kind of indeterminacy” to determi-
nation, or “making explicit what is implicit” (Grice 1989, 28, 31, 38, 40; Brandom 1994, xxi).
9. As Nancy (1973, 98–99, emphasis added) notes: “the being-concept implies some-
thing with respect to form . . . a certain form of writing . . . a transformation of form.”
10. As Heidegger writes (1977, GA8, 82–83; also, GA5, 37, 155, 177, 212, 265, 334, 370;
GA10, 105, 140): “The language of the thinker says that which is . . . [this] consists in letting
every thinker’s thought come to us as something in each case unique, never to be repeated,
inexhaustible—and being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his thought. What
is unthought in a thinker’s thought is not a lack inherent in his thought. The un-thought
is in each case only as the un-thought. The more original the thinking, the richer will be
what is unthought in it. The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow. But
to the commonplaces of sound common sense, what is unthought in any thinking always
remains merely the in-comprehensible. And to the common comprehension, the incom-
prehensible is never an occasion to stop and look at its own powers of comprehension,
still less to notice their limitations. To the common comprehension, what is incompre-
hensible remains forever merely offensive—proof enough to such comprehension, which
is convinced it was born comprehending everything, that it is now being imposed upon
with an untruth and sham. The one thing of which sound common sense is least capable
is acknowledgment and respect. For acknowledgment and respect call for a readiness to
let our own attempts at thinking be overturned, again and again, by what is unthought in
the thinkers’ thought.” Here, Heidegger’s “method” of re-reading or re-interpreting is “cre-
ative metamorphosis,” that is, he seeks to “creatively transform” the tradition, to suspend
“uncreative imitation” and simple scholarship, and to set out “into the un-said,” break “into
the un-thought”—for the goal is neither merely “historical comprehension,” nor accurate
reproduction of the facts, nor the production of more and more texts which make the
weaker argument the stronger and the stronger the weaker (1977, GA40, 8, 96, 123). Thus,
for example, “if we were to give out grades by the standards of the history of philosophy,
Kant’s historical comprehension of Aristotle and Plato would have to get a straight ‘F.’ Yet
Kant and only Kant has creatively transformed Plato’s doctrine of ideas” (1977, GA8, 83).
On the impensé, see Derrida 1967a, 27, 165; 1972, xxiv, 24, 77; 1987, 19, 25; 1998, 148, 393.
11. According to Inwood (1992, 272), “the central feature of Spekulation in Hegel’s
usage is that it unifies opposed, and apparently distinct, thoughts (and things).” But if

235
 andrew haas

such a distinction is to be determined as distinctive, then Spekulation must equally dis-

unify opposed (and apparently distinct) thoughts (and things). So, the central feature of
Spekulation in Hegel’s usage is that it both unifies and disunifies—which is the only way
not to fall into superficial one-sided thinking. Similarly, if the Hegelian (speculative) con-
cept is thought—again, according to Inwood (2007, 449)—as the one-sided “unification
of apparently contradictory features in a single, coherent whole”; then it must always also
be re-thought as the two-sided unification and disunification of features, contradiction
and non-contradiction, as the singular and multiple, coherent and incoherent whole and
non-whole.
12. For Hegel, Parmenidean being is present as unmoving, or the presence of what
essentially remains continuously at rest; while Heraclitan being is present as moving, or
the presence of what essentially continues in unrest, that is, being qua becoming. They
agree, however, that being means presence, the presence of what is, of alles dessen, was da
ist, of what is there or here, somewhere or everywhere, whether (being) at rest or (becom-
ing) in motion. As the Encyclopedia notes: “when Heraclitus says, ‘everything flows’ (πάντα
ῥεῖ), then it is becoming that is thereby pronounced to be the fundamental-determination
of everything that is there; whereas on the contrary, as we remarked earlier, the Eleatics took
being, rigid being, process-less being, to be what alone is true” (1986, W8, 193; emphasis
added). For Hegel’s comments on the eternity of unrest, see (2017, GW2, 487).
13. As Hegel insists: “with regard to its form, the logical has three sides: (a) the abstract
or understanding, (b) the dialectical or negative-rational, (c) the speculative or positive-ratio-
nal” (1986, W8, 168).
14. “Identity and difference sound poor,” Hegel writes, “but the poor, the gospels
preach, will inherit the earth and see God” (1986, W2, 561). And as Hegel writes in the
Logic: “now, if the content is speculative, the non-identity of subject and predicate [as well
as their identity] is also an essential moment; but this is not expressed in judgment” (2017,
39756)—for it is “in grasping opposites in their unity, or the positive in the negative, that
the speculative consists. It is the most important, but for the still unpracticed, unfree faculty
of thought, the most difficult” (Hegel 2017, 39718–19).
15. As the Encyclopedia clarifies: an objective judgment—about which there can be
no doubt—such as, “the rose is red,” or “gold is a metal,” cannot merely be a function of
an “I” which ascribes the predicate in a subjective judgment (however formally correct)
such as, “this wall is green,” or “this oven is hot” (1986, W8, 319, 322). But even an objective
judgment is not speculative—for although, in the former, the predicate touches the subject
“on only one point,” that is, with regard to the particular positive or negative attribution
(the rose is red, but not just red); in the latter, subject and predicate coincide, and speak in
one voice with each other, miteinander übereinstimmen (1986, W8, 324). And this is neither
to say that speculation is “trivial” (as in sentences such as “a lion is a lion”), nor that it is
simply repetitive (as in Anselm’s “defective” ontological proof, which unfortunately “entails
no contradiction,” says nothing new, adds nothing to knowledge, but merely proves that

236
 hegel’s speculative sentence

which was already presupposed, vorausgesetzt, namely, esse et in re, the unity of existence
and essence with respect to God)—for speculative judgment is non-trivial (insofar as sub-
ject and predicate are identical and different) and non-repetitive (insofar as God’s being is
becoming—not just existing) (1986, W8, 347–48).
16. As Heidegger (1977, GA40, 69) insists: “a definite, unitary trait runs through all
these meanings. It points our understanding of ‘being’ toward a definite horizon by which
the understanding is fulfilled. The boundary drawn around the sense of ‘being’ stays within
the sphere of presentness and presence [Anwesenheit].” Indeed, “beings, which show them-
selves in and for this making present and which are understood as genuine beings, are
accordingly interpreted with regard to—the present; that is to say, they are conceived as
presence (οὐσία)” (Heidegger 1977, GA2, 26). In other words, for the Greeks: “in the begin-
ning of its history, being illuminates itself as emerging (φύσις) and disclosure (ἀλήθεια).
From there it acquires the cast of presence [Anwesenheit] and permanence [Beständigkeit]
in the sense of enduring (οὐσία). Thus, begins metaphysics proper” (Heidegger 1977,
GA6.2, 403). And modern philosophy remains loyal to its ancient roots: “Descartes does
not allow the kind-of-being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes
to the world, so to speak, its ‘true’ being on the basis of an idea-of-being (being = con-
stant objective-presence [remanes capax mutationem]) the source of which has not been
revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated” (Heidegger 1977, GA2,
96). Thus, “being equals presence, praesens. At the same time, it thus turns out that Kant
interprets being and being-present exactly as ancient philosophy does, for which a being is
ὑποκείμενον, which has the character of οὐσία. In Aristotle’s time, οὐσία in its everyday
pre-philosophical sense is still equivalent to property [Anwesen], but as a philosophical
term, it signifies presence [Anwesenheit]” (Heidegger 1977, GA24, 448).
17. As Surber (2006, 12) notes: “Hegel often insists, at various points, that genuine
philosophical thinking (and indeed the whole of his version of logic) can only be articu-
lated ‘speculatively,’ that is, not in formal logical judgments but through the deployment of
the dynamics involved in ‘speculative sentences.’”
18. As Hegel writes in the Logic: “it is through grammar that the expression of spirit in
general, that is, logic, can be recognized” (2017, 39719). So, Nancy—having criticized Hegel
for failing to sublate grammar, or within grammar, or to sublate sublation—notes: “the
Satz belongs simultaneously to two registers: the logical and the grammatical” (1973, 101).

works cited
Aquila, Richard. 1985. “Predication and Hegel’s Metaphysics.” In Hegel, ed. Michael
Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. 1922. De arte poetica liber. Oxford: Clarendon.
———. 1950. Physica. Oxford: Clarendon.
———. 1957. Metaphysica. Oxford: Clarendon.
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

237
 andrew haas

Derrida, Jacques. 1967a. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.

———. 1967b. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: du Seuil.
———. 1972. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit.
———. 1987. De l’esprit. Paris: Galilée.
———. 1998. Psyché. Paris: Galilée.
Diels, Hermann. 1960. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Vol. 1. Hildesheim: Weidmannsche.
Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haas, Andrew. 2015. “On Aristotle’s Concept of Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and
Phenomenology 2 (1). doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2015.11428462.
———. 2018. Unity and Aspect. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Hamacher, Werner. 1978. “Pleroma—zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik
bei Hegel,” G. W. F. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums,” Schriften 1796–1800.
Frankfurt: Ulstein.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1812, 1813, 1816. Wissenschaft der Logik. 3 vols. Nürnberg: Schrag.
———. 1832. Wissenschaft der Logik. Stuttgart: Cotta.
———. 1920. Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band 171b. Leipzig: Meiner.
———. 1952. Briefe von und an Hegel. Band I: 1785–1812. Hamburg: Meiner.
———. 1977. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
———. 1986. Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
———. 1988. Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Meiner.
———. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 1994. Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band 171a. Hamburg: Meiner.
———. 2017. Gesammelte Werken. Philosophische Bibliotek. Hamburg: Meiner.
———. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1957. Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Neske.
———. 1977. Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
———. 2001. “Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik.” In La fête de la pensée, ed. France-
Lanord and Midal. Paris: Lettrage. Lecture held in the Wissenschaftlichen
Gesellschaft zu Amsterdam, 22 Mar. 1930, previously unpublished.
Inwood, Michael. 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2007. A Commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kahn, Charles. 2003. The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Kant, Immanuel. 1900. Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe. Berlin: Academy of
Sciences.
Keats, John. 1814–91. John Keats Collection. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard
University. Commonplace book of R. Woodhouse, transcripts of unpublished
poems.
Magnus, Bernd. 1970. Heidegger’s Metahistory of Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1973. La remarque spéculative. Paris: Galilée.
O’Brien, George. 1985. “Does Hegel Have a Philosophy of History?” In Hegel, ed. Michael
Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sass, Hans-Martin. 1981. “Speculative Logic (Dialectics) as Conflict Theory.” In Konzepte
der Dialektik. Frankfurt: Klostermann.

238
 hegel’s speculative sentence

Simon, Josef. 1999. “Grammar and Truth: On Nietzsche’s Relationship to the Speculative
Sentential Grammar of the Metaphysical Tradition.” In Nietzsche, Theories of
Knowledge, and Critical Theory, ed. Babette Babich. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Stekeler, Pirmin. 2014. Hegels Phänomenologies des Geistes. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag.
Surber, Jere. 1975. “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence.” Hegel-Studien 10.
———, ed. 2006. Hegel and Language. New York: SUNY Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wohlfart, Günter. 1981. Der spekulative Satz. Berlin: de Gruyter.

239