Ownness and Identity: Re-Thinking Hegel

Author(s): Albert Hofstadter

Source: The Review of Metaphysics , Jun., 1975, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Jun., 1975), pp. 681-697
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.

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 OWNNESS AND IDENTITY:
RE-THINKING HEGEL*
ALBERT HOFSTADTER

x he puepose of this statement is to point the way toward a

recovery of the truth in Hegel's thinking for our time. I shall
try to indicate what is Hegel's single fundamental thought, its
strength, its defect, and how it should be modified. The modifica
tion could be called a re-thinking. Because it involves an essential
metamorphosis of the thought, one might even venture to call it a
new-thinking.
Heraclitus said: "Wisdom is one thing: to know the gnome,
the thought, by which all things are guided through all."
Heidegger has said: "To think is to confine yourself to a single
thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky."
Hegel portrayed the history of philosophy as the development of
one single thought, which he expressed throughout a lifetime of
philosophical genius : the speculative concept of self-consciousness,
the identity of subject and object, of diff?rents and opposites.
Here is one of his descriptions of the unity of philosophy as
governed by this single thought :
Philosophy is constituted within itself in this way : there is a single
Idea in the whole and in all its members, just as in a living individual
a single life, a single pulse beats through all the members. All the
parts that emerge in philosophy, along with their systematization,
arise from a single Idea; they have their actual reality only in this
unity, and their differences, their diverse characteristics, are them
selves merely the expression and the form contained in the Idea. Thus
the Idea is the center which is at the same time the periphery, the
light-source which in all its expansions never gets beyond itself but
remains present and immanent within itself; in this way the Idea is
the system of necessity and of its own necessity, which is thus likewise
its freedom.1

* Written under a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment

for the Humanities. The author is grateful also to the Research Committee
of the University of California at Santa Cruz for funds supporting this
and other research.
1 Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie, edited by Johannes
Hoffmeister, 3rd edition shortened by Friedhelm Nicolin, Hamburg: 1959
(Philosophische Bibliothek Band 166), pp. 32-33.

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682 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

To think this thought requires for Hegel speculative reason

as contrasted with understanding. He derives the contrast be
tween understanding and reason from Kant and the post-Kantians.
My proposal for change would entail that the notion of speculative
reason as it occurs in Hegel should be set aside in favor of a new
way of thinking which is neither understanding nor reason in the
traditional senses but more like the Denken and Andenken which
Heidegger has been trying to reach in recent decades. It should
not however be identified with Heidegger's notion; rather, there
is perhaps a family likeness between the two. Because of the
brevity of today's statement I can only give hints regarding Hegel,
the difficulty in his thinking, and the new proposal. I hope to de
velop the matter at length elsewhere. Entailed by my proposal
also, incidentally, is that Hegel's image of philosophy as the or
ganic development of the Idea also would have to be changed.

I
According to Hegel philosophy is the consciousness of it
expressed in thought. His own philosophy exemplifies th
ciple : it was, above all, the consciousness of the great issue
age, that of freedom, which inspired the Enlightenment an
remained the world's permanent challenge since the French
olution. Hegel saw the issue of freedom as being constitutiv
the whole of human experience, even for the whole univer
single thought, the identity of diff?rents, is identical with
thought of freedom.
Philosophy is for him the science of reason : reason becom
conscious of itself as all reality.2 But, he says, it may al
regarded as the science of freedom, because in it all the fo
character of objects vanishes and only in philosophy is reason
itself.3 This Being-with-self is of the utmost significance.
for Hegel the meaning of freedom and it is the ultimate for
self-identity. Spirit's mode of existence is to have itself as o

2 Encyclopedia of 1817. In the edition by Hermann Glockner

Hegel's S?mtliche Werke, Volume 6, page 22. Henceforth all refere
the Glockner edition (Jubil?umsausgabe, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt
mann (G?nther Holzboog)) will be by volume and page number, a
for the present reference.
3 6.23.

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 683

Spirit objectifies itself to itself and overcomes the opposition be

tween itself and its object by recovering its identity in the object.
The final form of this self-recovery is philosophy, where spirit
comes to be solely with itself or, as Hegel says, it is free. Whereas
matter has its substance outside itself and is all externality, spirit
is Being-with-self, inwardness and intimacy, and this, says Hegel,
"precisely is freedom. For if I am dependent, then I relate my
self to an other which I am not and I cannot be without such an
external other. I am free if and when I am with myself. ' '4 This
freedom, or Being-with-self, is the substance and essence of spirit.
The development of spirit's consciousness of this its freedom is
the meaning of world history and the final purpose of the world.
Moreover freedom as Being-with-self is the ultimate truth of
Being. For Being is for Hegel nothing but self-relation, Be
ziehung-auf-sich, and spirit's freedom is the truest form of self
relation, spirit's consciousness of itself as spirit.
Freedom is true self-identity. For Hegel I am free or self
determined only when I am with myself, when what is other turns
out to be, for me, only me. The other ceases to restrict me. It
rather reaffirms me. Instead of being my barrier, it is now open
to me, for it is only me, the fulfillment of myself.
This freedom is not a mere abstraction, a mere Being-free on
the one side as contrasted on the other side with the being which is
free?an abstract universal over against a definite individual.
The understanding keeps such distinctions fixedly separate, but
speculative reason grasps their identity. Spirit is not just a
being which has Being-with-self. It is a being which is Being
with-self. Spirit and freedom are identical.5 Spirit is thinking
which thinks itself, but this precisely is freedom. The true in
dividual, the thinking spirit, is the universal spirit which has
differentiated itself into particularity and then resolved its dif
ferentiation into the unity of self-identical totality. Freedom is
the one living self-identity which develops itself throughout, start
ing from the stage of mere pure Being as self-relation and ending
in the stage of full spiritual self-knowledge. The one living being
is the one Life and the one Life the one living being.

4 Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister, 5th

edition, Hamburg : Meiner, 1970, pp. 54, 55.
519.12, 13, 528.

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684 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

Hegel's single thought of this one self-differentiating self

identifying being has for him the Heraclitean function : it is the
gnome by which all things are guided through all. That means
that the notion of Being as self-identifying has a thoroughgoing
systematic ambiguity in his system of thinking. Everything
covered by the system is in some particular manner an exemplifi
cation of the process of self-identification. Everything is a gestalt
and manifestation of the self-identifying entity which is freedom
or Being-with-self, whether in logic, nature, or mind. Being-with
self or self-identity cannot mean the same thing in each case. The
self-relation of pure Being is different from that of becoming,
even more so from that of measure ; it is far from that of organ
ism, which is itself far from that of the family or world history;
and only the self-identity of spirit in philosophy is the absolutely
true self-identity. The concept of Being-with-self, the Idea, self
identity, must in principle be systematically ambiguous.
This is not a negative criticism. On the contrary, in its at
tempt to interpret the total possibilities of human existence philos
ophy has to make use of systematically ambiguous terms, just as
language?which must speak of everything?has to use words like
"is," "not," "thing," etc. in systematic ambiguity. Hegel's suc
cess in making systematically ambiguous use of the concept of self
identity is impressive evidence of the truth contained in his ap
proach. Despite the limitations of his own personal life, which
were many, and of his age, which were also many, one finds every
where in his writings a deeply piercing discernment and compre
hension. That is why he remains a living force today.
Hegel's power of comprehension by the thought of self-identity
was not an accident. There is something pervading existence
which corresponds to his thought, even if in a refracted way.
There is a power of truth in it which enabled it to become the most
thorough grasp of the totality of possible experience in modern
times. Not Marxism nor existentialism nor naturalism nor posi
tivism nor analytic philosophy nor phenomenology has been able
to come up with an encompassing and deep-probing grasp of man,
nature, and history, of art, religion, and thought, which compares
with the Hegelian.
It is because of this power of truth that we are obliged to seek
to find it where it is in Hegel's thinking and to recover it in a way

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 685

that is credible for us. This means departing from Hegel in order
to eliminate the source of error, departing from him at the very
center of his thought, from the error contained in the very notion
of self-identity or Being-with-self, which is the basic notion of his
metaphysical idealism.
Philosophy seeks for the meaning of Being. Hegel inter
preted the meaning of Being by means of the idealistic metaphys
ical concept of self-identity, Being-with-self. Does this Hegelian
interpretation correctly answer the question of the meaning of
Being?
II
Hegel's philosophy is absolute idealism. The mind whi
thinks this idealism is speculative reason. The Phenomenolo
defines reason at the stage when it first appears: "Reason
consciousness's certainty of being all reality."6 This certain
announces the theme which Hegel develops to the very end. T
certainty is transformed into truth, and the furthest truth of it
spirit's self-knowledge. In its furthest unfolding, the knowle
of absolute idealism, spirit attains the final form of rational se
conscious identity : spirit is for spirit as spirit.
At the beginning reason is equivalent to a faith rather than
a comprehension. Consciousness's first declaration as reason
merely "this empty abstract phrase, that everything is its." O
could also translate this as "everything is its own" as Baill
does.7 The German is essential here :"dass alles sein ist." He
does not forgo the obvious pun: sein with a small-case "s" is n
only the adjective "his, its, his or its own," but also the ve
"to be." Capitalized it becomes the abstract noun Sein, "Bein
In its first opening into the shape of reason, consciousness
as yet only certain of being all reality but has not yet fully realize
that identity. It is an empty ego which has yet to fill itself wi
reality. Its first shape is therefore observational reason, becau

6 Ph?nomenologie des Geistes, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister, 6

edition 1952, Hamburg: Meiner (Philosophische Bibliothek Band 114
p. 176. In Baillie's translation, The Phenomenology of Mind, Torchb
edition introduced by George Lichtheim, New York and Evanston : Harpe
and Row, 1967, p. 273.
7 Baillie, p. 279 ; Hoffmeister, p. 180.

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686 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

it has first to search outside itself to find itself. For this con
sciousness, the pristine form of the metaphysics of idealism, Hegel
says "das Sein hat die Bedeutung des Seinen."8 That is, Being
has the meaning of Being-own.
Although it undergoes much development this meaning of
Being for idealism is never afterward surrendered. The purpose
of reason's movement is exactly to actualize this potentiality so
as to reach the ultimate fullness of Being-own, namely, Being
with-self. Hence the identification of Being with Being-own is
basic to Hegelianism as idealism. But it does not yet characterize
the ontology as idealistic. That the object is mine does not yet
make it into me. Hegel goes beyond identifying Being own.
He identifies it with Being-self. That is, he treats Being-own as
identical with Being-self or more simply he treats the own as the
self. He identifies what is my own with me. This is the root of his
idealism. Indeed it is the root of all metaphysical idealism and
the source of its philosophical error.
Idealism identifies what is own to a self with that self itself.
In its crude subjectivistic form it treats the object of my knowl
edge as a constituent item in and of my mind. If in knowledge I
appropriate the object by the forms and processes of knowing,
then idealism supposes this appropriation to be an assimilation.
It treats appropriation as though it were incorporation or diges
tion: making the other into one's very own Being. When idealism
reaches its definitive statement of the meaning of Being, in which
Being has become the final actuality of spirit, then spirit's Being
with-other-as-with-its-own turns into spirit's Being-with-other-as
itself : Being-with-self, Beisichselbstsein. This gives freedom the
peculiar distortion it undergoes in idealist philosophy.
There is a characteristic error in this transposition of ownness
into identity. Our task is to follow it and see it for what it is.
For this purpose I choose a phenomenon in which the crass
ness of the confusion of ownness with identity is strikingly vivid,
namely, the owning of private property. In possessing property
I am related to a thing as its owner. It is mine with the sanction
of the law. I own my house, my coat, the money in my savings
account, my dog. (In other times one also owned or was owned by

8 Hoffmeister, p. 182 ; Baillie, p. 281.

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 687

another human being as a slave.) I say "my" and "mine" about

many other things, however, which I do not own merely as legal
property. The ownness of my body already raises interesting ques
tions about Being-own. But consider further my wife, my son,
my friends, my profession, my mind, my character, my country,
my race, my world, my aspirations, my religious convictions, my
philosophy, my liberation, my life, my death. Roman law could
make a man's family into his private property but not even Roman
law could make his character, convictions, or gods into his private
property. We should never confuse ownness, Being-own, with the
specific ownness of private property. Private property is a special
ownness which comes about historically in special ways and has
special human and social significance.
The ontological meaning of property in Hegel is this: the
thing I own is an objectification of my will. The thing is here an
entity without will and right. It is made by a person with free
will into something that is his own, first by means of the judgment
of possession. Hegel defines this judgment in the Encyclopedia
as one whose logical subject is the thing and whose predicate is
mine : that thing is mine, this land is mine, this horse is mine, that
house is mine. What is the significance of this predicate "mine"!
Hegel's answer is : it means that I place my personal will in the
thing.9 He means this quite literally. He does not think, of course,
that I can bodily push my will into a thing, but he does mean that
I actually put my will into it?whatever that is supposed to mean.
Moreover he has to mean and say this. For him, property
owning is the first form of the objective existence of freedom:
personal self-consciousness in relation to what exists outside me.
In order for me to be free in possessing property I myself as a
person have to be in the thing; the thing has to show me myself
within it ; for, according to Hegel, freedom is self-identity in other
ness, Being-with-self-in-the-other. In property, he says, the per
son is united with himself, and he uses a strong word to express it :
mit sich selbst zusammengeschlossen, merged, integrated, consoli
dated, amalgamated, as well as linked, joined, and locked together.

9 The German reads: "dass ich meinen pers?nlichen Willen in (die

Sache) hineinlege," Encyclopedia of 1830, paragraph 489. One reads also:
(<dass ich in diese Sache meinen Willen lege," ibid., paragraph 492.

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688 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

This mode of reunion of self with self in possession is still

abstract for Hegel. It is not as intimate as the reunion in the
very next stage of law, namely contract, where for Hegel I as per
son have the existence of my personality in the being of the other
persons, so that I am with myself in them even more intimately
than I am with myself in my property.10 But what is without
question is that because Hegelian ontology is an identity-ontology
it has to treat the human being as the person finding himself (his
individual free will) in the owned thing. Property is the Dasein
(existence, determinate Being) of personality, and it is therefore
not merely a means but an end.11
That this way of interpreting private property is a piece of
ontology for Hegel, specifying the meaning of Being at this par
ticular standpoint, is clear from his description of appropriation
as a case of idealism :

To appropriate a thing means at bottom thus only to manifest the

sovereignty (Hoheit) of my will over the thing, and to demonstrate
that this thing is not in and for itself, is not autotelic. This mani
festation occurs by the fact that I place in the thing an end different
from what it immediately had: to the living being I give, as my
property, another soul than it had ; I give it my soul. The free will
is thus idealism which does not regard things as they are as being in
and for themselves, whereas realism declares them to be absolute,
even if they exist only in the form of finitude. Even the animal no
longer has this realistic philosophy, for it eats things and thereby
proves that they are not absolutely independent.12

Now the possession of property is but one stage of an ascend

ing series. As such it is still false : a false idealism. Not because
idealism is false but because property-owning is not idealistic
enough. There still remains a defect of self-identity in it. The
thing is still external to me even though it reflects my own per
sonal will within itself. Nevertheless property-owning is rep
resentative of Hegel's ontological thinking. Everywhere what
happens is analogous, by a systematic ambiguity, to what happens
in property. The advance is always toward a more perfectly self
identical identity. We are therefore entitled to ask whether our

10 The Philosophy of Right, paragraphs 41ff.

11 Encyclopedia of 1830, paragraph 489 ; Philosophy of Right, para
graph 45.
12 My italics. 7.981

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 689

actual experience of property confirms or disconfirms the given

ontological interpretation even at this stage.
Is it true that in appropriating a thing as property I am in
fact objectifying myself in it? Am I actually placing my personal
will in the thing? So far as my own experience goes, and I believe
so far as general human experience goes, while the connection
between the person's will and his property is close, it does not
reach self-identity.
Take a phenomenon to which Hegel alludes: property in a
living thing. I own my dog. I have a legal right to the possession
and use of him. I have a right to enjoy him and deal with him as
I please, within the limits of the law, and also within the limits of
morality and humanity. But there is nothing in my experience
which I can detect as replacing his soul with mine or his will
with mine.
True, I have taught him tricks, and some language, and he
has taught me things too?how to play, how to be friendly and
loyal and loving, and we have learned how to live together, tolerat
each other and being with each other just in order to be with each
other. He is indeed sometimes quite obedient to my will. But it
is of the very essence of the situation that I respect him for who
and what he is, that I regard him as being who and what he is, and
that I do not transform him into a mere vessel for containing me or
my will?even if I could.
But I cannot. Not even if I trained him to be a mere slave.
One can say something like "I place my soul or my will in my
dog" but one cannot do anything of the sort. One can be driven
to say such a thing because one is caught in a linguistic, intel
lectual, philosophical bind stemming from the state of philosophy
and social existence at one's time. But that does not contribute
to the credibility of the statement. The sentence "I place my
soul or my will in my dog in place of his own" articulates a content
which cannot be actual.
It expresses a thinking of a particularly insidious sort. Close
enough to truth to sound and feel like truth, it is not yet close
enough to be possible as truth. Is it hard to imagine how a thinker
as great as Hegel could have believed he was thinking such a
thought? Once one is caught within the language of post-Kantian
idealism there is hardly any way out. It is, as it were, a destiny

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690 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

that the thought of self-identity as act-product, Fichte 's Tathand

lung, should be carried to its fullest extent, objectified and ab
solutized; and Hegel was the bearer of this historical destiny.
For this we have to do him honor. To use his own terminology,
he was a world-historical individual. The task was the most diffi
cult in the history of modern thought and he achieved it with
incomparable mastery. Even his severest opponent, Karl Marx,
admitted as much.
But we do not honor Hegel by continuing to speak or continu
ing to try to think in this impossible way.

Ill

Hegel contrasted representational thinking (vorstellend

Denken) with true or speculative rational thinking. Repres
tion makes use of an image, figure, symbol in place of pure
ception. Thus religion is supposed by him to think in represe
tional form as contrasted with philosophy which thinks essent
the same thoughts as religion in content but in the pure form
speculative conceptual thought instead. Hegel believed that
threefold character of the thought of concrete self-identity was
philosophical counterpart of the Christian doctrine of the trin
He thought that modern thinking had in this way advanced bey
the religious myth of the Trinity, with its story of God the Fath
creating the world, sending his Son to reconcile the world to h
and reuniting himself with the Son and the world by the
identical union of the Holy Spirit, the mutual love of Father
Son. Philosophy conceptually comprehended John's vision t
God is spirit, Geist. Philosophy's advance was to the concept a
Idea?the logos surpassing the mythos?of the triune spirit.
What actually happens in Hegel's thinking, however, is t
it substitutes a peculiar form of representation for the relig
myth. It does not use a symbol or image to represent a concep
but rather uses one concept to take the place of another on
metonymy. And in addition it makes use of a personifica
(hypostatization) based on this metonymy. I shall be arguing,
that representation as such is illegitimate in ontological think
(for I believe that no thinking can occur in complete concept
abstraction) but that in the process of using its own partic

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 691

metonymy and personification Hegelian thinking suffered from its

central error precisely as ontological thinking.
Hegel makes a leap, we have seen, from my dog as mine to
my dog as me in external form. The same leap is made in regard
to all property living or nonliving. The statement "I place my
will in this house of mine" expresses an impossible content. There
is the same kind of leap from my house as mine to my house as me
in external form. Such a leap indicates a certain way of speaking,
the figure of speech called metonymy. In it, for the meaning of
mine something that is closely associated with it, the meaning of
me, is substituted.
In Hegel's style of thinking the leap from mine to me is made
without mediation, hence without justification. It was enforced
on him because of the idealistic framework within which his think
ing was formed. The mine had to be me because otherwise the
whole project of the post-Kantian Copernican revolution, the
counterpart of the French Revolution, would fall to the ground.
Fichte had led the way by first making the identification explicit
and developing it on the subjective side. Schelling had expanded
the road and cleared the country about on the objective side.
Hegel now had available the basic idea and method, the dialectic
of self-division and self-reunification of an absolute Ego turned
Geist, together with the indefeasible impulse to complete the ex
ploration. Out of this context the Hegelian identification of mine
with me came into being.
Hegel makes the same leap in every rhythm of the dialectic:
a self-identity must be re-established after a self-diremption. In
each case the mineness of the other is metamorphosed into the
me-ness of the other. This is the metonymy.
But there is the further personification, too. We saw how for
Hegel Being, which is ultimately Being-with-self, is identified with
the being which is free. Everywhere too, Being-with-self-as-other,
Being-with-other-as-own, is treated as a being which is Being in
process of self-development. Hence our Being-with-one-another
as-own is transformed into a being which is its own self-identical
Being. The we is made into a big Ego which, by being both ego
and other, has swallowed up the two and the we with them. This
big Ego, originally Fichte 's absolute Ego and now Hegel's spirit,
Geist, is represented as a big being which at the same time con

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692 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

stitutes the Being (essence, concept, Idea) of all beings. Being,

mistakenly thought as Being-self instead of Being-own, is at the
same time mistakenly identified as a being. The thinking here
proceeds by piling personification upon metonymy.
Once this m?tonymie personification is attained, this individ
ualized entity, this Being which is a, and finally the sole, being,
will exhibit through its story, its Geschichte, the truths that
Hegelian thinking arrived at in the course of its own realization.
Truth now, as for Fichte and Schelling, must be expressed in
the form of a story or history. For story is the imaginative form
needed to give an account of a being which is Being and all Being
beings. Hegel was therefore compelled to think his systematic
philosophy in the form of an epical myth or heroic novel. The
Phenomenology is the pedagogical narrative (novel of education)
of the ascent of spirit, the hero as youth maturing into wisdom,
rising from the virtual blindness of sensation to the pure insight
of absolute knowledge. The Logic is the saga of the struggle of
the concept, or the heroic spirit in its pure form as thinking, to
reach the height and light of the Idea or truth. The Philosophy
of Nature is the Odyssey of the struggle of the heroic spirit, self
fallen, self-released, self-exiled into externality, to find its way
back again to the homeland of inwardness in organism and man.
And the Philosophy of Mind or Spirit is the divine comedy of the
effort of the heroic spirit, beginning as soul immersed in the ex
ternalized material organic world of the body, to mount the ascend
ing levels of self-consciousness to the stage of the divine Absolute
once more. The whole of the system is the full-length three
volume lyrical-dramatical epic of the spirit coming around to itself
again in its end to its beginning. All the other systematic work on
right, history, aesthetics, religion, and the history of philosophy
tells the same story. Hegel's single thought is this Geschichte. The
single thought of concrete self-identical freedom is the single his
torical epic of the infinite self-departure and self-return of the
being whose name is Being-with-self.

IV

If philosophy is the consciousness of its age express

thought, then our philosophy can no longer take the form

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 693

an epic. And if Hegel is to be of use to us and the truth of his

thinking is to be rescued (annulling it, as it were, but at the same
time preserving it and raising it to a truer shape) then it is clear
that the m?tonymie leap from ownness to identity and the con
sequent personification by which Being is identified with a being
must be set aside. What, then, will our own thinking be like?
The topic is obviously deep and broad. All that can be done here
is to give a hint or two.
When Hegel leaped from mine to me, own to self, he leaped
away from the facts, the things?die Sachen?themselves. Our
thinking has to remain close to the things themselves everywhere.
With Hegel I believe that freedom, Being-with-other-as-with-own,
is the principal philosophical thought. It can be expressed in
other ways?as truth, love, life, measure, actuality, appropriation,
even as spirit and reconciliation?but all these expressions come
back to the same thing : Being as Being-own, ownness, and Being
with-other-as-with-own. What is entrusted to us and enjoined
upon us is just this : to think Being-own, letting it be what it is
and not making it into something else. Being-own, as Hegel
understood, is systematically ambiguous. Everywhere, Being
takes one shape or another of Being-own, of belonging. Just as he
made use of the systematic ambiguity of his own thought of self
identity, so?if we let Being-own be and do not violate its integrity
by transforming it into a condition of solution of a big Ego's
problem of its own self-identification?it is now open to us to put
to philosophical use the systematic ambiguity of ownness. This is
particularly important for the philosophy of mind, where the
greatest significance of modern philosophy emerges, in Hegel and
after him.
The re-thinking we are called on to do is a new-thinking. We
have to think ownness, Being-own, Being-with-own, Being-with
other-as-with-own, Being-as-belonging; and we have to think it in
its fitting shape at each level and in each direction: our Being in
and with our body, our conscious and unconscious relation to the
world and its contents, our relation to ourselves, the forms and
processes of knowledge, of practical activity both individual and
social, in law, morality, and ethicality, in history, art, religion, and
thinking itself. You will recognize, of course, that I have simply
outlined the contents of Hegel's philosophy of mind. One would

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 694 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

have to add, equally, the logic and the philosophy of nature, a very
large claim, hardly to be defended here, but one to which I would
myself adhere.
The main thing to realize is this : Being-own, ownness, belong
ing?these are not simple abstract concepts easily defined in terms
of clear and finite expressions. Being, as Aristotle already taught,
is thoroughly ambiguous (analogical). In each case it has its
correlative meaning. The ownness-relations between a Greek
master and his slave, on the one hand, and an 18th-century Amer
ican slave-owner and his slave on the other, are already deeply
different in human meaning. The ownness-relations between a
human being and his or her body differ in character and meaning
from poet to dancer. Imagine then the great difference in mean
ing of the ownness-relation between an individual and the food
for which he is hungry, between an aggressor nation and its
victim, and between a jury and an accused prisoner. These are
random illustrations. They come together because, and only be
cause, philosophy sees them together?that is, because philosophy
brings to them the thought of Being as Being-own, eventually as
freedom.
Philosophical thinking is: thinking ownness all the way
through. Because of its ambiguity, as the subject-matter changes
the meaning changes, and as the meaningful content changes the
form of the thinking changes. To think ownness one must be able
to get inside each shape and think it in terms of its own Being
as well as to think the different shapes in their interrelations,
grasping them in the comprehensive meaningful context of Being.
We can no more give a simple definition of the thinking of own
ness than we can of ownness itself : the activity of the thinking is
its own definition. It has to find itself in each case as it finds
its matter, its Sache.
Consider but one example, at which, too, I can only hint : that
of the philosophy of history. Is there anyone nowadays who
would wish to defend Hegel's philosophy of history in its original
condition? It is an epical myth, Hegel's secular substitute for the
Judaic-Christian vision of history as the eschatological adventure
of God with man. In it the spirit, now as providential w^orld
spirit which is freedom or the identity of Being-with-self mani
festing itself in mankind's individual peoples and their states,

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 695

goes through its adventure from prehistoric lostness in the mag

ical nature-existence of the Africans, to a beginning in the lostness
still of itself in nature and the consequent limitation of its freedom
to one alone in the East, through the transitions of the Persians,
Jews, Egyptians, and others to the harmony of itself with nature
in the Greeks and the Romans, with the accompanying expansion
of its freedom to some, until finally it is able to make its first clean
breakaway from nature in and through Christianity, which intro
duced the principle of true inwardness and subjectivity into the
world and with it the infinite claim of every individual subjective
will to freedom. The future still beckons in which these many
individual freedoms will be reconciled with the one universality
of spirit in the state?an element of eschatology less frequently
noticed in Hegel's view of history.
History became for Hegel the unfolding of the spirit's free
dom (consciousness of its own freedom) in time because there is
already the spirit which is proclaimed by his philosophy before it
comes to the investigation of history, a spirit which is identical
with its Being : freedom understood by the leap of metonymy as a
being which is Being-with-self and is personified as such. Hegel
says there is but one thought that philosophy brings with it to
history, and that is the thought that reason rules the world, that
the ruling principle is the self-conscious identity of mind with all,
the spirit which is the identity of itself with its own Being. How
could he have avoided casting history into the mold of the epical
Geschichte, the fabulous legend of the hero who climbs from the
dark depths of lostness to the bright light of self-possession in
truth? All the more because the idea of salvation had already
given way to the idea of human progress in the Enlightenment and
the way had been prepared by Voltaire, Lessing, Kant, and Herder.
If thinking does not lose itself in this m?tonymie personifica
tion but remains thinking which is in close touch with the reality
of the things themselves, then what becomes of the object of
philosophical history? The object of philosophy is, to be sure,
Being, truth, and?as we have learned so indelibly from Hegel?
above all, freedom: Being-with-other-as-with-own. Philosophy's
interest in history is its interest in the fortunes of freedom. It
does not make freedom into a being which is divinely identical
with its own essential Being as Being-with-self. It lets freedom

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696 ALBERT HOFSTADTER

be what and as it is: Being-with-other-as-with-own, ownness

rather than self-identity, Being as belonging, and it searches for
the past existence, the origins and distributions, the present con
ditions, the future possibilities of freedom wherever it occurs
and can occur?whether in Fars, or Athens, or Antioch, or Peking,
or Montgomery, Alabama. It has abandoned the drive toward
the epic of the being who is Being. Instead it now assumes
the responsibility of turning to history as history can be estab
lished by the responsible scientific historian. Hegel has often been
praised for the degree of empirical responsibility with which he
approached history among other subjects. That empirical re
sponsibility has to be maintained and strengthened. Philosophy
which has abandoned the epical, eschatological need no longer
feels the need to make itself into an a priori construction of his
tory. In its turn to letting things be how and what they are, it no
longer needs to make them be something else. What philosophy
brings to history, then, is no longer the thought that reason rules
the world but rather the concern for the fortunes and destiny of a
freedom that is allowed to be freedom and is not transformed into
an heroic being occupied solely with its own self-exhibition.
This means, for instance, abandoning the idea of a simple
unilinear scheme of history according to which Africa stands
altogether outside the door of history, China and India at its
threshold, the Middle and Near East in the vestibule, Greece and
Rome in the reception hall, and Germanic Europe in the royal
salon. It means abandoning the simplistic notions of a static
China, a historyless India, so-called Oriental despotism, and all
the rest of the importations into history of requirements from
the myth of reason ruling the world. It means giving up the easy
thought that there is a single sequence of stages and looking in
stead for the rise and fall of the levels of freedom here, there,
everywhere.
If we can really learn from Hegel, then the one philosophical
thought which has to function centrally in thinking is the thought
of freedom, but now properly understood as Being-own, not Being
self or Being-self-identical, and not at all as a being which would
be identical with Being-with-self.
The search through existence, whether in history or society,
or even in nature, which is philosophically motivated, is the search

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OWNNESS AND IDENTITY 697

for the systematically ambiguous shapes and interconnections of

Being-with-other-as-with-own as they show themselves in actuality.
This Being-own is not to be confused with some being, some ex
istent entity. It is, rather, what simply lets entities be and be
what they are, their presencing in ownness.

University of California, Santa Cruz.

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