Translation and Introduction - A - Doha Tazi

Cont Philos Rev (2018) 51:361–400
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9441-0
Translation and introduction: Alexandre Koyré’s

‘‘Hegel at Jena’’
Doha Tazi1
Published online: 7 April 2018

Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract This is a translation of Alexandre Koyré’s important, but overlooked

essay ‘‘Hegel à Iéna.’’ The essay originally appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Etudes
d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1961). A
contribution to the philosophy of time, this essay had a profound but generally
unrecognized influence on Alexander Kojève, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Derrida.
Keywords Alexandre Koyré Hegel Jena Logic Temporality Dialectics

of time L’avenir (the yet-to-come) Différance
In a 1971 interview, Jacques Derrida said, ‘‘We will never be finished with the
reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt
to explain myself on this point.’’1 In a similar gesture, Michel Foucault, in 1972,
while introducing his lectures at the Collège de France, noted that ‘‘all of our
époque, whether it be through logic or epistemology, whether it be through Marx or
Nietzsche, is trying to escape from Hegel.’’ To do so, however, Foucault warns us,
we have to become ‘‘aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is
1
Jacques Derrida, trans. Alan Bass, Positions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 77–8.
See Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), 10.
The essay originally appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d’Histoire de la Pensée Philosophique,
Librairie Armand Colin: Paris, 1961. Republished in: Alexandre Koyré, ‘‘Hegel à Iéna,’’ in Etudes
d’Histoire de la Pensée Philosophique, Editions Gallimard: Paris, 1971.
& Doha Tazi

dt2478@columbia.edu
1
Columbia University, New York, USA
123
362 D. Tazi
close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel,
of that which remains Hegelian’’.2 Twenty-five years earlier, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty claimed, perhaps hyperbolically, that ‘‘all the great philosophical ideas of the
past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German
existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who
started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason,
which remains the task of our century’’.3 As late as 1931 Alexandre Koyré
(1892–1964) reported that Hegelian studies were almost nonexistent in France, but
Merleau-Ponty was speaking two decades later in an intellectual milieu already
influenced and shaped by the intense study of Hegel through translations,
commentaries and lectures.4 Koyré was a crucial thinker in framing this new
interpretative tradition. Along with Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) and Jean
Hyppolite (1907–1968), he was one of the major figures marking a certain
‘‘Hegelian turn’’ in twentieth-century French philosophy.
Born into a Jewish family in Taganrog, Russia, Koyré emigrated first to
Göttingen, Germany, where he studied with Edmund Husserl, and then travelled to
Paris, where he continued his study of philosophy, theology, and German
mysticism. At the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he taught an important
seminar on Hegel’s religious philosophy from 1931 to 1933. The question of the
relation between religion and supposedly secular post-Kantian philosophy remained
central to Koyré’s larger philosophical inquiry throughout his life. He argued that
post-Kantian systems were primarily determined by religious positions and that
their philosophical claims were translations of theological positions. These systems
were, in an opposition that is irreducible to Kantianism, driven by the desire to
reconquer for man the central place that mystical theology provided him.5 It is then
not surprising that, in his seminar on Hegel’s religious philosophy, he chose the
concept of ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ as his starting point, and argued that it was a
substitution or a reconfiguration of the Christian idea of ‘‘consciousness of sin.’’6
It is perhaps this line of analysis that led to Koyré’s deep interest in Hegel’s early
writings—especially the Jenenser Logik (1802–6), which was not published in
German until the 1920s. Koyré’s essay ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’ appeared in the journal
Recherches Philosophiques, which he founded in 1931. As a preparation for his
course on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, he translated selections of the Jena
writings, which were the first translations of these texts to appear in French. The
focus of Koyré’s translation and commentary was Hegel’s early notion of time. Like
2
Foucault then adds that ‘‘we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one
of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.’’ Michel
Foucault, ‘‘The Discourse on Language,’’ in The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972),
235.
3
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H.L. and P.A. Dreyfus (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 63.
4
Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987), 61.
5
Paul Vignaux ‘‘Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964)’’ École Pratique des Hautes Etudes Section des Sciences
Religieuses 76, no. 72 (1963): 43–49.
6
ibid.
123
Translation and introduction: Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at… 363
Kojève, who read Hegel through Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, Koyré was
deeply influenced by Heidegger, but differed in his interpretation of Hegelian
temporality. Although Koyré considered it a mistake to think of the later ‘‘logician’’
Hegel as fully breaking from the early ‘‘existential’’ one, he sought to retrieve a
contemporary Hegel, who, ‘‘like us,’’7 was always restless, suffering and searching.8
1 Trajectories of Koyré’s Hegel
While the role of Kojève’s lectures for modern French intellectual history is widely
recognized, the importance of Koyré’s thought for both Kojève and Hyppolite, who
were his students, is less well-known. And although Koyré’s writings on the history
and epistemology of modern science, which he saw as intertwined with the history of
philosophy,9 are better known, his distinctive reading of Hegel was crucial for his
students and contemporaries, who shaped the subsequent course of critical theory.
When Koyré was called to teach in Cairo in 1933, he asked Kojève to teach his course
in his absence. Kojève’s lectures were attended by many of his contemporaries,
including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Henry Corbin, Jean Wahl, Eric Weil, André Breton, Raymond Aron, Raymond
Queneau, and Jean Hyppolite. These lectures became one of the most important
chapters in twentieth-century French intellectual history. Hyppolite, who was also
directly influenced by Koyré,10 proposed an alternative reading of Hegel in his two
books Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1947)11 and Logic
and Existence (1952).12 During the 1960s, his seminars at the École Normale
Supérieure shaped another generation of philosophers, most importantly Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida.13
7
I will be quoting the translation of Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’ from the section ‘‘Alexandre
Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’ of this article.
8
Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005), 59.
9
For Koyré’s books on the history and epistemology of science, see: Alexandre Koyré, Georgette
Vignaux and Jacques Tallec, Études Newtoniennes (Paris, Gallimard, 1968); Alexandre Koyré, From the
Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); Alexandre Koyré, Études
Galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1966); Alexandre Koyré, Études d’Histoire de la Pensée Scientifique
(Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
10
Hyppolite said that Koyré’s articles on Hegel were for him as important as Jean Wahl’s. He was also
particularly influenced by Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel à Iéna’’ and the ‘‘primacy of the future’’ in Hegelian time. Jean
Hyppolite, ‘‘Vie et prise de conscience de la vie dans la philosophie hégélienne d’Iéna,’’ RMM 45 (1938):
45–61.
11
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak
and John Heckamn (Vanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979).
12
Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997).
13
Hyppolite became Derrida’s supervisor for his thesis on ‘‘The ideality of the literary object,’’ as well as
for his second thesis on the Hegelian theory of sign. Derrida’s essay on ‘‘The Pit and the Pyramid’’ re-
reads themes from Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and was presented in Hyppolite’s seminar in 1968.
See: Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003),
187.
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364 D. Tazi
French philosophical movements of the twentieth century—phenomenology,

existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism—, as well as contemporary cultural
and literary criticism, can be traced to the alternative ‘‘Hegels’’ presented by Kojève
(atheistic, humanistic) and Hyppolite (post-structural, post-humanist). It is not too
much to say that, through these two streams of thought, Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel à Iéna’’
frames the issues that preoccupied generations of French writers and, by extension,
shaped critical discourse down to the present day.14 In his conclusion, Koyré
interprets the comprehension of time in terms of the ‘‘end of history’’ and the ‘‘end
of man,’’ which forms the heart of Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel:
Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (1947).15 This reading of Hegel influenced
neoliberal and neoconservative ideological successors such as Francis Fukuyama
and Samuel Huntington, who declared the death of man, the triumph of global
capitalism, and ‘‘Western values’’ after the Cold war, with the ‘‘clash of
civilizations’’ it presupposes.16
In fact, in his Introduction, Kojève himself writes that Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’
was ‘‘a conclusive article which [was] the source and basis of [his] interpretation of
the Phenomenology,’’.17 He expanded Koyré’s notion of time, emphasizing its
human character, by historicizing the Absolute and claiming that nothing exists
beyond man and beyond temporality: ‘‘Only Man is in Time, and Time does not
exist outside of Man, therefore Man is Time and Time is Man’’.18 Elaborating
Hegel’s account of man’s desire driving history, Kojève argues that man, through
his desire for an other’s desire, that is, the desire for recognition, ‘‘essentially
transforms the World by the negating Action of his Fights and Work;’’ he ‘‘creates
and destroys’’ in terms of the future he imagines.19 Man’s projects are guided by an
instrumental reason that seeks mastery over both others and the natural world.20
This reading of Hegel echoes the object of Heidegger’s critique of the ‘‘will-to-
power,’’ which fully realizes itself in modern technology insofar as it gives an
‘‘enframing’’ (Gestell) of the earth as a ‘‘standing-reserve’’ for man’s selfish and
destructive purposes.21
14
Mark C. Taylor, Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
forthcoming, 2018). I draw especially from chapter 9 called ‘‘French Hegels’’. See also: Butler, Subjects
of Desire, 61–100; Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-century
France (Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 1988).
15
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. by James H. Nichols (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980).
16
See: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992) and
Samuel P. Huntington ‘‘The Clash of Civilizations?,’’ Foreign Affairs. 72, no. 3 (1993).
17
Kojève, Introduction, 133–34.
18
Kojève, Introduction, 133.
19
Kojève, Introduction, 138.
20
Kojève claims that ‘‘work is what transforms the purely natural World into a technical World inhabited
by Man—that is, into a historical World.’’ Kojève, Introduction, 145, (emphasis added).
21
See ‘‘The Word of Nietzsche: ‘‘God is Dead’’’’ in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977),
53–115.
123
Hyppolite, on the other hand, suggests an alternative reading, also drawn from
Koyré’s argument, by emphasizing the logical structure that underlies the Hegelian
dialectical system. His main criticism of Kojève is directed towards his
anthropocentrism, in which human beings are autonomous subjects and constitute
the ultimate measure of all things. In a structuralist gesture, Hyppolite decenters this
human subject and subsumes it under a logical (linguistic) structure.22 He reads the
relation between logic and existence, reason and time, structure and event, through
the Saussurian distinction between la langue (language) and la parole (speech).
Hyppolite’s thought influenced Derrida, Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze as well as
Guy Debord, Georges Cannguilhelm, and Alain Badiou.23
2 A genealogy to Derrida’s Différance
In ‘‘Différance,’’ Derrida mentions that Koyré’s translation of eine/absolute

differente Beziehung [German] as ‘‘absolute differentiating relation’’ informed his
idea of différance. He goes so far as to argue that Koyré’s differente Beziehung,
along with Nietzsche’s ‘‘difference of forces,’’ Saussure’s ‘‘principle of semiolog-
ical difference,’’ Freud’s ‘‘delayed effect,’’ Levinas’ ‘‘difference as the irreducibility
of the trace of the other,’’ and Heidegger’s ‘‘ontic-ontological difference,’’ points
towards what has remained unthought by philosophy.24 Koyré stresses that different
has an active sense that portrays the present as divided against itself, and thus a
present constantly deferred. In ‘‘Différance,’’ Derrida calls attention to this:
Here, a remark in passing, which I owe to a recent reading of a text that Koyré (in
1934, in Revue d’histoire et de philosophic religieuse, and reprinted in his Etudes
d’histoire de la pensée philosophique) devoted to ‘‘Hegel in Jena.’’ In this text
Koyré gives long citations, in German, of the Jena Logic, and proposes their
translation. On two occasions he encounters the expression differente Beziehung
in Hegel’s text. This word (different), with its Latin root, is rare in German and, I
believe, in Hegel, who prefers verschieden or ungleich, calling difference
Unterschied and qualitative variety Verschiedenheit. In the Jena Logic he uses
the word different precisely where he treats of time and the present.25
Derrida directly draws from Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’ to hint at the concept of
différance. To differ, Derrida tells us, not only indicates distinction, difference or
discernibility, but also has the meaning of both differentiating (spacing) and
deferring (temporalizing). It is le devenir espace du temps et le devenir temps de
l’espace (the becoming space of time and the becoming time of space). This
différance subverts or deconstructs the metaphysics of presence/the present, which
Heidegger named the Western onto-theological tradition.
22
See: Taylor, Abiding Grace (forthcoming). I am drawing from chapter 9 called ‘‘French Hegels.’’.
23
Taylor, Abiding Grace (forthcoming). I am drawing from chapter 9 called ‘‘French Hegels.’’.
24
Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982a), 3–4.
25
Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ 3–4.
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366 D. Tazi
Echoing Hegel’s comparison of ‘‘the body of the sign’’ to an Egyptian pyramid,

Derrida’s image of the a (of différance) is the pyramid that remains silent within the
Hegelian system: it is a ‘‘silent mark,’’ a ‘‘tacit monument,’’ or ‘‘a tomb’’ that remains
unheard.26 Différance can never appear as such, it is always induced, indirect, and
unnamable. Neither present nor absent, différance, like Koyré’s temporality, is
always shattered, always à-venir, ‘‘yet-to-come,’’ and thus is never present. If
différance is ‘‘what makes the presentation of being-present possible’’ while never
‘‘present[ing] itself as such,’’27 Hegel’s ‘‘now’’ in Koyré’s translation is what makes
the presentation of all dimensions of time possible, though it is never itself present
and can never be grasped. If la différance threatens or deconstructs the ‘‘as such’’ of
‘‘la différance as such,’’28 this Hegelian ‘‘now’’ can never be a ‘‘now’’ as such.
2.1 A work of displacement
In Derrida’s reading of Koyré’s translation of the Jena Logic, the displacement of

Hegelian totalizing thinking is performed within a Hegelian text itself, which proves
further the relevance of Koyré’s essay. This is not fully surprising: Derrida always
believed that Hegel was both the culmination of the Western onto-theological
tradition and the beginning of its subversion. Hegel, for Derrida, ‘‘determined an
ontology as absolute logic; he assembled all the delimitations of philosophy as
presence; he assigned to presence the eschatology of parousia, of the self-proximity
of infinite subjectivity.’’29 In this sense, Hegel defined the contours of that which is
the object of deconstruction: If there was one definition of différance, Derrida tells
us, it would precisely be the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian
relève anywhere it operates. ‘‘What is at stake is enormous.’’30
And yet, he believed that Hegel’s text was fissured, that it was ‘‘something other
than the circular closure of its representation’’ and that one had to reexamine ‘‘the
movement by which the text exceeds what it wills to say, lets itself be deflected,
returned, repeated outside its identity to itself’’ [‘‘le mouvement par lequel il excède
son vouloir-dire, se laisse détourner, retourner, répeter hors de son identité à
soi’’].31 To read in a non-totalizing way is to discern the cracks or fissures of a
system, a text or a set of texts, that displace the structure they both enable and
26
Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ 5.
27
28
29
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1974), 24.
30
‘‘S’il y avait une définition de la différance, ce serait justement la limite; l’interruption, la destruction
de la relève hégélienne partout où elle opère. L’enjeu est énorme. Je dis bien l’Aufhebung hégélienne,
telle que l’interprète un certain discours hégélien, car il va de soi que le double sens de Aufhebung
pourrait s’écrire autrement. D’où sa proximité avec toutes les opérations qui sont conduites contre la
spéculation dialectique de Hegel.’’ Derrida, Positions, 55-4. See also: Jacques Derrida, ‘‘From a
Restrained to a General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,’’ in Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
31
Derrida tells us that Feuerbach was right to raise the problem of Hegel as a writer, of the
‘‘contradiction’’ between ‘‘Hegel’s writing and his ‘‘system.’’ Derrida, Positions, 103.
123
subvert. It is to work within the text of philosophy, finding in it the ‘‘undecidables,’’

the irreducible terms which do not fit in philosophy’s binary oppositions, aporias,
which absolutely resist the Hegelian dialectical sublation (relève, Aufhebung) of
contradiction, its internalization within self-presence. This difference, spacing,
supplement, does not constitute a third speculative term.32
This is why Derrida is drawn to Koyré’s reading of the expression ‘‘differente
Beziehung.’’ Although the word different is very rare in German as well as in
Hegel’s other writings, Hegel uses the term in the Jenenser Logik to discuss the
present and to expose the opening or clearing of a temporality without presence. By
suggesting that the distinction between différence and différance would have helped
Koyré translate Hegel on this decisive point, we could say that Derrida sees this
‘‘differente Beziehung’’ [different or différante relation] as performing ‘‘what in
Hegel resists the Hegelian dialectic,’’33 as enabling the displacement of Hegelian
speech, which is ‘‘both infinitesimal and radical.’’34
3 Philosophy of time; dialectics of time
While merely one sentence is devoted to Chronos in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, and

another one to the necessity of seeing the union of eternity and time, the Jenenser
Logik gives a profound analysis of time that is almost absent in Hegel’s other works.
Koyré opens this analysis to us through his translation and commentary on the Jena
text. His thought is deeply influenced by Heidegger, whom Koyré engaged with
very early on in his studies.35 According to Heidegger, the destruction of the
Western onto-theological tradition consists of understanding Being against its
meaning as ousia, as presence in ontologico-temporal terms. The definite mode of
32
Derrida, Positions, 59.
33
Stuart Barnett, ed, Hegel After Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 27 (emphasis
added).
34
Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ 13–14. In Positions, he reiterates that Heidegger himself recognized that one
always has to borrow, in a ‘‘strategic and economic way,’’ the ‘‘syntactic and lexical resources of the
language of metaphysics’’ while one is ‘‘deconstructing it.’’ Derrida, Positions, 19.
35
The French versions of Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?) and Vom Wesen des
Grundes (The Essence of Reason) were both translated by Koyré’s student, Henry Corbin and were
published with Koyré’s help. In a preface to the translation of ‘‘What is Metaphysics?,’’ Koyré wrote that
Heidegger was one of the ‘‘greatest metaphysical geniuses whose thought determines that of an entire
period.’’ Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 251. For Koyré’s writings on Heidegger, see: Alexandre Koyré,
‘‘L’évolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger,’’ in Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique
(Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), 217–304. Koyré thought that Heidegger’s undertaking had its value as
‘‘demolition’’ and ‘‘liberatory and destructive catharsis,’’ and that it was guiding us towards the ‘‘final
pyre of Nothingness where all false values disappear, all conventions, all lies, and where man remain
alone, in its tragic grandeur and solitary existence: ‘in truth’ and ‘towards death’.’’ This is quoted from
Koyré’s preface to Henry Corbin’s translation of Heidegger: Alexandre Koyré, ‘‘Qu’est ce que la
métaphysique? Introduction,’’ Bifur, no. 8 (1931): 1–27. We also know that Koyré heard very early of
Heidegger through his first teacher, Husserl. Koyré exchanged letters with Heidegger from 1923 onwards,
though we do not have access to the archives. The letters show that it is Koyré who announced to
Heidegger that Corbin was thinking of translating him. See: Sylvain Camilleri and Daniel Proulx, ‘‘Martin
Heidegger et Henry Corbin: lettres et documents (1930–1941),’’ in Bulletin heideggérien 4 (2014): 4–63.
123
368 D. Tazi
time of what has to be destroyed, as produced by the tradition which sees being as
entities to be grasped in their ‘‘presence,’’ is the ‘Present’ (die Gegenwart).36 The
inauthenticity of Dasein has as its temporalization this making-present which says
‘‘Now! Now!,’’ forgets awaiting, and never has time. On the other hand, Dasein’s
authenticity always ‘‘has time’’—it understands the present only as a ‘‘moment of
vision’’ (an unexpectable kairos, that arrives ‘‘like a thief in the night,’’ to quote St
Paul’s phrase in I Thess. 5:1–2). In authentic time, the present arises from the
future.37 Considering this Heideggerian view of time, how does Koyré read Hegel’s
lectures at Jena? And what notion of time does he interpret in them? If Hegelian
time in the Science of Logic is conceived as a process of infinite restless negation,
which is ultimately a ‘‘double negation’’ that finally reconciles opposites, unites the
finite and the infinite, and achieves the self-reflexive unity of identity and
difference, then one could say that these passages from Koyré’s translation of
Hegelian time in the Jenenser Logik re-conceptualize the ‘‘classical’’ Hegelian logic
of time through a Heideggerian prism.
According to Koyré, Hegel in the Jena Logic does not analyze the ‘‘abstract
notion of time’’ as presented in the modern sciences of physics, ‘‘Newtonian time,
Kantian time, time in the straight line of formulas and watches.’’38 Rather, Hegel
takes ‘‘the spiritual reality of time’’ as his object—time as spirit is a temporality that
‘‘does not flow in a uniform way’’ and is not ‘‘a homogenous medium through which
one would draw himself; it is neither a number of movement, nor an order of
phenomena. It is enrichment, life, victory. It is—let me say it right away—itself
spirit and concept’’.39 Elsewhere in the essay, Koyré quotes the Encyclopedia where
Hegel claims that time is not the empty frame ‘‘in which all is born and perishes,’’
but is rather itself ‘‘the becoming, the birth and disappearance, the all-generating
and all-destroying Chronos’’.40
3.1 Dialectics of time; dialectics of spirit
Hegel’s first discovery, according to Koyré, is that spirit, which is the highest reality
in Hegelian metaphysics, is ‘‘essentially historical’’ and develops in time.41 This
claim asserts the identity of logic and history, and of being and becoming, which
forms the basis of the Hegelian system. His other discovery is that time is essentially
dialectical, and, thus, the ‘‘dialectic of the spirit’’ is essentially temporal.42 For the
36
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper
& Row, Publishers, 2008), 47–8.
37
Heidegger, Being and Time, 463–78.
38
Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at Jena,’’ section ‘‘Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’.
39
40
41
42
Heidegger ends Being and Time by criticizing Hegel’s notion of time as a series of disconnected
‘‘nows.’’ He explains that Hegel makes spirit fall into time, and makes time take in spirit: they both share
the structure of double-negation. Spirit bring itself to the concept through double-negation and thus
accords with time and falls into it. Indeed, ‘‘spirit necessarily appears in time,’’ since it is its essence to do
so as long as it has not yet grasped its concept. Heidegger, Being and Time, 485.
123
spirit’s living eternity to realize itself, it needs to sublate itself and transcend its
‘‘abstractness,’’ which requires its other, the instant, time, to become concrete. In
this way, the dialectic of spirit realizes itself through time. It is in this sense that
Hegel’s philosophy, for Koyré, was a ‘‘philosophy of time, in its deepest intuitions.
And through it, a philosophy of man.’’43 Hegelian time is the time of man, the time
of this ‘‘strange being’’ who is not yet, who constantly denies the present, seeking to
realize himself in a yet-to-come. This philosophy makes finitude or time ‘‘enter
within eternity’’ and eternity enter finitude.44 Within this dialectic, nothing can be
known if it is not historically experienced by man. Philosophy, therefore, is nothing
other than ‘‘time captured in thought.’’45
In the Jena Logic, this dialectical movement consist of the mysterious relation
between the finite and the infinite, and the unrest involved in that relation. For
Hegel, Koyré tells us, l’inquiétude est le fond de l’être (unrest is the heart of
being).46 The true nature of ‘‘the finite’’ is the ‘‘infinite, sublating itself in its being,’’
tending immediately towards its nonbeing, which it always bears within it. Any
‘‘determinate’’ being has as its essence the ‘‘absolute unrest to be what it is not,’’ to
be the other itself, to sublate itself.47 Koyré explains,
Hegel strives to make us see the unrest of all finitude, of all determination, of
all limitation, which, negativity as such, sublates itself, necessarily posing that
toward which it is ‘‘de-fined,’’ ‘‘de-limited,’’ ‘‘de-termined,’’ ‘‘de-infinited’’
(‘‘dé-finie,’’ ‘‘dé-limitée,’’ ‘‘dé-terminée,’’ ‘‘dés-infinie’’), necessarily negating
this limit, this term, this edge, and thus transforming itself into the in-finite, the
un-limited, the in-de-termined.48
However, it is not only the infinite that is negated by the finite in restlessness, that is
being ‘‘de-infinited,’’ but the infinite itself is ‘‘as in-quiet (rest-less) as the finite.’’
This movement is reciprocal or dialectical. The infinite presupposes a limit (an end,
the finite), which it affirms ‘‘by negating it,’’49 and this is precisely what
differentiates the ‘good infinite’ from the ‘bad infinite’. For the infinite to truly be
infinite (to be ‘good’), it needs to include the finite by first negating it and then
sublating it. It can only exist through the constant process of negation of the finite.
Only through this oscillating movement back and forth, ‘‘this perpetual exchange’’
from the finite to the infinite, can these terms exist.50 The dialectic of the finite and
infinite is crucial since it does not only ‘‘announce’’ the dialectic of eternity and time
43
Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at Jena,’’ section ‘‘Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’. For Hegel, time is somehow
the ‘‘very fabric of becoming, and consequently, of being.’’ Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at Jena,’’ section ‘‘Alexandre
Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’.
44
45
46
Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at Jena,’’ section ‘‘Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’. See: Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel:
The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. by Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
47
48
49
50
123
370 D. Tazi
but it actually realizes itself in it.51 Thus, eternity (the infinite), rather than being
characterized by immobility, is the infinite process and restless movement of time
(the finite).
3.2 The ‘‘now’’ shattered by the future
The critical idea in Koyré’s interpretation of Hegelian time is that ‘‘the prevalent
‘dimension’ of time is the yet-to-come (future), which is, in some way, anterior to
the past.’’52 This reading informs the passage in the Jenenser Logik which
influences Derrida’s analysis in ‘‘Différance.’’
The infinite, in this simplicity, is—as moment equally opposed to itself—the
negative, and in its moments, while it is present to itself and in itself totality,
[it is] excluding it in general, the point or the limit, but in its action of
negating, it immediately relates itself to the other and negates itself. The limit
or the moment of the present,* the absolute ‘‘this’’ of time or the ‘‘now’’ is of
an absolutely negative simplicity, which absolutely excludes from itself any
multiplicity and, due to this, is absolutely determined; [it is] not a whole or a
quantum which would extend itself in itself [and] which, in itself, would also
have an undetermined moment, a diverse [un divers] which, indifferent or
outside in itself, would relate to an other, but there is here an absolutely
different** relation to ‘‘the simple’’ [un rapport absolument différent du
simple].53
Noting that ‘‘the German word Gegen-wart expresses an opposition, a contrariety
that the term ‘‘present’’ does not express,’’ Koyré adds: ‘‘‘Rapport different’:
differente Beziehung. We could say: differentiating relation.’’54 In his footnotes,
Koyré insists on giving an active sense to the verb ‘‘differ,’’ differentiate, in order to
indicate what he means by le rapport différent, which foreshadows Derrida’s
différance.
The doctrine of essence is the key to the dialectic in the Science of Logic. Here,
Hegel shows that contradiction, negativity, is at the heart of the thing, that the
essence of the thing is its internal contradiction, or in other words, that ‘‘each in its
very Notion contains the other.’’55 We see in the passage quoted above that the
Hegelian doctrine of self-contradiction, difference-in-identity/identity-in-difference,
is applied to time, to the ‘‘now.’’ The infinite ‘‘in its simplicity’’ initially affirms
itself (A) by negating its other (not-A): it first excludes all difference. To be
identical to itself, it needs to differentiate itself from its other through self-negation
(‘‘in its action of negating, it immediately relates itself to the other and negates
itself’’). The infinite only is as long as it is in relation to negation, as long as it
absolutely relates itself to its opposite.
51
52
53
54
55
G.F.W. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969), 440.
123
Similarly, the ‘‘now,’’ the abstract concept (Begriff) of time, is of ‘‘an absolutely
negative simplicity,’’ which means it is the ‘‘absolute’’ exclusion from itself of all
diversity or difference. However, in so far as the simple determines itself by
excluding multiplicity/difference, it includes it as a condition for its simplicity.
Thus, the simple is never fully self-identical to itself in the here and now—there is
no uncontaminated, proper, or simple term. Rather, the ‘‘moment of the present’’ (or
the absolute ‘‘this’’ of time, the ‘‘now’’) is a present immediately divided against
itself. It does not homogeneously form a ‘‘whole’’ or a ‘‘quantum,’’ but is of ‘‘an
absolutely negative simplicity.’’56
This is what Hegel—in Koyré’s translation—described as an ‘‘absolutely
different relation to ‘the simple’’’ (eine/absolute differente Beziehung).57 Koyré
identifies an absolutely irreducible difference that displaces the present. The ‘‘now,’’
by affirming/relating itself to itself through its opposite (‘‘the diverse’’) includes its
other through its very exclusion. It immediately loses its simplicity. Through its
self-negation (implied in this ‘‘absolute negative simplicity’’), the ‘‘now’’ has an
‘‘absolutely different relation’’ to ‘‘the simple:’’ therefore, it can never be itself and
is never here. The now that is itself an ‘‘absolute negative limit,’’ an end, will start
negating itself, sublating itself and will no longer be; ‘‘the now immediately is the
opposite of itself, the self-negation.’’58 Through this movement, Koyré comments,
‘‘the now is never now’’ and always ‘‘escapes from itself.’’59 The self-negating logic
(the being-in-itself which includes its opposite by negating/excluding it) of the
‘‘now’’ does not produce a fullness of time but opens a future (its non-being) that is
always already yet to come. The now ‘‘cannot resist’’ the ‘‘yet-to-come
(‘‘l’avenir’’)’’ because the yet-to-come is ‘‘the essence of the present.’’ It is the
essence of that which is ‘‘the nonbeing of itself.’’60
The absolutely differentiating relation to ‘‘the simple’’ is not simply a moment of
the dialectic, a moment posited within the infinite restless negation presented in
Hegel’s Science of Logic, which is followed by a sublation that finally reconciles
opposites (unity and multiplicity, infinite and finite, undetermined and determined).
If the now is never fully itself in itself, or present to itself, if it is always escaping
from itself into the yet-to-come, which is its truth, then the now never achieves
simplicity, full self-identity and harmony. It is always self-negating; it is always a
tearing, un déchirement. Here, we do not find a dialectic that culminates in
harmony, unity, totality, but a restless movement that does not allow the ‘‘now,’’ the
first moment, to ever be grasped or contained,—this is the infinite restlessness of a
now that is never now. The present cannot be without its non-being, the yet-to-
come. It sublates itself in a way that makes the yet-to-come ‘‘engendered in it,’’61 it
becomes itself a yet-to-come, which is its essence; this yet-to-come shatters the
unity of the ‘‘now’’ which cannot resist it. The yet-to-come becomes in the present,
56
57
58
59
60
61
123
372 D. Tazi
as it is both the condition of possibility and of impossibility of the present. The

‘‘now,’’ already negating itself, always impossible, destroys the metaphysics of
presence (in space) and of the present (in time).
Hegel goes even further,—in fact, neither the present nor the yet-to-come exists;
only the relation between the two does. The difference between them ‘‘reduces itself
in the rest of the past.’’62 The notion of the present proposed here is a ‘‘now’’ that
does not exist by itself and in itself. It is rather borne from ‘‘the present through the
yet-to-come;’’ it is a ‘‘now’’ ‘‘in which the yet-to-come and the present have equally
sublated and absorbed each other, a being that is a nonbeing of both, an activity,
overcome and absolutely in rest, of the one over the other.’’63 Later in the essay,
Koyré comments on the structure of this now: it is an ‘‘instant’’ which ‘‘mends and
melts again’’ the three different moments (the former-now, the now and the yet-to-
come) that constitute ‘‘in a living and restless unity’’ what Koyré, with Hegel, names
‘‘present.’’64 This ‘‘present’’ has a structure that makes it realize the ‘‘moments’’ of
the dialectic of spirit itself.65 The self-constitution of spirit not only leads to the self-
constitution of time but in fact realizes itself in it. Indeed, as Koyré tells us,
‘‘Hegelian spirit is time and Hegelian time is spirit.’’66
3.3 Heidegger and Koyré: two Hegels
If we compare Koyré’s Hegel, as conveyed so far, to Heidegger’s, two very different

views of time emerge. Heidegger sees Hegelian time to be a series of fully contained
‘‘nows,’’ without any relation to that which is yet to come. It is linear, teleological
and quantifiable; it shows itself as a sequence of ‘‘nows’’ constantly ‘‘present-at-
hand.’’ In fact, he ends Being and Time by arguing that, for Hegel, ‘‘time is
‘intuited’ becoming—that is to say, it is the transition which does not get thought
but which simply tenders itself in the sequence of ‘nows’ […] time is primarily
understood in terms of the ‘now.’’’67 Heidegger argues that Hegelian time is close to
inauthentic ordinary time and that it is the quintessential expression of the Western
onto-theology of presence by quoting his own words: ‘‘The ‘now’ is monstrously
privileged […] one can say of time that only the Present is; […] but the concrete
Present is the result of the past and is pregnant of the future [note the teleological
structure of time: it is expectable, one mode of time gives birth to the other]. Thus
the true Present is eternity.’’68
62
63
64
65
66
67
Heidegger, Being and Time, 483. One would follow Heidegger’s view if we were, for instance, to
focus solely on the Phenomenology’s description of the ‘‘Now’’: ‘‘a Now which is an absolute plurality of
Nows’’ is the ‘‘true genuine Now.’’ It is a Now that remains, that is a universal. G.W.F. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 60–64.
68
Heidegger, Being and Time, 483 (emphasis added). In ‘‘Ousia and Grammē,’’ Derrida reads
Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegelian time in the longest footnote of Being and Time, in which we find
that Hegel’s notion of time—monstrously privileging the present and presence (ousia)—is a paraphrase
123
Heidegger is accurately portraying a ‘paradigmatic Hegel’—in Hegel’s Philos-

ophy of Nature (§258 and §259), time grows out of space and is characterized by
self-externality. It is a serial succession of disconnected moments, analogous to the
spatial points.69 In the Phenomenology, for observed consciousness, time is also a
series of unconnected moments: the past and the future are ‘‘past nows’’ and ‘‘future
nows.’’ Thus, time is quantifiable. The phenomenological experience is precisely
what allows for the recollection of those moments: it reveals that the concrete
present is the result of the past and is pregnant of the future.70 This archeo-
teleological structure indeed privileges the present as a mode, and, according to
Heidegger, negates temporality.
As we have shown so far, Koyré’s reading differs radically from Heidegger’s
since he reads a notion of time, absent from the ‘paradigmatic Hegel,’ which begins
from a ‘‘now’’ that is always deferred and a present that is never fully present. What
is interesting is that the Koyrean notion of Hegelian time is closer to Heidegger’s
and Søren Kierkegaard’s temporality71 than to that of the Hegel of systems and
charts. Koyré’s translation continues as follows:
The past is this time re-turned (‘‘re-tourné’’) (returned, ‘‘retourné’’) in itself
which has absorbed in itself the two first dimensions. The limit or the now is
empty; for it is absolutely simple or [is] the notion of time [Koyré notes:
Begriff: here in the sense of an abstract notion]; it accomplishes itself in the
Footnote 68 continued
(‘ontological import’) from Aristotle’s Physics: Aristotle’s nun is Hegel’s ‘‘now’’ (jetzt), they both are
understood as boundary, point, ‘absolute this’. However, Derrida, in a way that is reminiscent to Koyré’s
reading of Hegelian time, displaces the text from within it, and finds an irreducible aporia in Aristotle’s
formulation of time: ‘‘In one sense it has been and is no longer, and in another sense it will be and is not
yet’’ (217b). In this definition, the now is, and yet is not. Thus, no now is in the present, time is composed
of multiple elements. It is both that which does not exist at all, and that which barely does: its full
presence is impossible. Indeed, the now is the impossibility of coexisting with itself and with another self;
it is the possibility of the impossible. Thus, what Aristotle ‘‘sets down’’ is both ‘‘traditional metaphysical
security, and, in its inaugural ambiguity, the critique of this security.’’ Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Ousia and
Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982b), 39–49 and 52–55.
69
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 34.
70
In §261 of the Phenomenology, we read: ‘‘However, this unity of universality and the activity does not
exist for this observing consciousness, because that unity is essentially the inner movement of the
organism and can only be grasped as Notion; but observation seeks the moments in the form of being, of
enduring being; and because the nature of what is organically a whole is such that the moments are not
contained in it nor can be found in it in that form, consciousness converts the antithesis into one that
conforms to its point of view.’’ Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 159.
71
In a footnote to the Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard refers to the Pauline kairological/messianic
conception of time and says there is a ‘‘poetical paraphrase of the instant’’ in which Paul says ‘‘that the
world will pass ‘in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye’.’’ Kierkegaardian time is futural and the future is
identical with eternity (cf. Koyré’s interpretation of the Jena Logic, Heidegger in Being and Time): in a
certain sense ‘‘the future signifies more than the present and the past; for the future is in a sense the whole
of which the past is a part, and is a sense the future may signify the whole.‘‘ This directly echoes Koyré’s
discussion of the Hegelian time in which the yet-to-come is anterior to the past. Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at Jena,’’
42. In Kierkegaard’s words ‘‘the instant and the future posit in turn the past.’’ Søren Kierkegaard, The
Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 79–80.
123
374 D. Tazi
yet-to-come (‘‘l’avenir’’). [Koyré notes: The yet-to-come is then the truth of

the present].72
The Jena Logic, as presented by Koyré, privileges a notion of the present, or of
the ‘‘moment,’’ as ‘‘empty,’’ it is that which is never present. It is a future always
deferred—that which immediately and essentially is the yet-to-come.73 On the basis
of these passages, Koyré argues that the Hegelian ‘‘now’’ is not an abstract limit
between two abstractions but a limit in itself, one which is ‘‘essentially unstable,
ungraspable, and perishable.’’ It is therefore ‘‘never here,’’ always transforming
itself ‘‘immediately into something else,’’ denying itself and sublating itself
‘‘towards the yet-to-come.’’74 It is, in this reading, far from being ‘‘intuited
becoming’’ as Heidegger argued, since it can never be sensed or fully present-at-
hand.
3.4 The past as a divided whole
Koyré’s translation of Hegel also discusses the notion of the past or the ‘‘former-
now’’ (jadis), and its relation to the ‘‘now’’ and the ‘‘yet-to-come.’’ The past is the
third moment, after the ‘‘now’’ and the ‘‘yet-to-come,’’ and is conceived as ‘‘time
reflected in itself’’ (in sich reflectiert).75 In a footnote, Koyré indicates that ‘‘time
soars [or starts] from the present to the yet-to-come and from the yet-to-come is
reflected, like a luminous ray, towards the past’’.76 Just like the ‘‘now,’’ the ‘‘former-
now is not itself for itself,’’ it is not an isolated category of time but ‘‘is equally the
now transforming itself through the yet-to-come in the opposite of itself and is
therefore not separated from either of them.’’77 This whole ‘‘circuit’’ and
movement—what Hegel calls ‘‘real time’’—becomes jadis, the past or the
‘‘former-now,’’ that is ‘‘returned in itself’’ by absorbing and sublating the two
other dimensions,78 the ‘‘now’’ and the ‘‘yet-to-come.’’
Through this sublation ‘‘as movement in itself,’’ the third moment becomes the
first one, making itself ‘‘a totality equal to itself’’, a totality that only represents ‘‘the
whole’’ as ‘‘a divided or a different whole’’.79 The ‘‘real time’’ described here as
‘‘the paralyzed unrest of the absolute concept’’ is not homogenous and present to
itself but ‘‘has made itself the absolutely other.’’ When time is accomplished, it is no
72
73
Elsewhere in the Jenenser Realphilosophie, we read: ‘‘The yet-to-come is thus immediately in the
present; for it is the moment of negation in the latter. The now is as much a being that disappears as it is a
nonbeing [that], immediately, transformed itself into its own opposite, into being.’’ Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at
Jena,’’ section ‘‘Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’.
74
Indeed, ‘‘the Hegelian now, despite it being instantaneous and involving no thickness, is indeed a
directed instant. But it is not towards the past that it is directed. It is, to the contrary, towards the yet-to-
come.’’ Koyré, ‘‘Hegel at Jena,’’ section ‘‘Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’’’.
75
76
77
78
79
123
longer restless in its movement and tension but becomes its own non-being, its
other, that is, space.80 Real time is no longer time because it is immediately not itself
in itself but its opposite. It becomes itself a thing, Koyré comments, and it can
merely be symbolized by the insufficient form of a ‘‘straight line’’ when it has in
fact become space.81 Inasmuch as spirit cannot be isolated from nature, time cannot
be ‘‘separated from space,’’ Koyré insists, since they can only exist in a dialectal
relation, in their union: ‘‘there is no un-spatial time as much as there is no timeless
space.’’82
3.5 Koyré’s conclusion
In the final pages, Koyré summarizes and concludes his argument. If time is
essentially dialectical, this dialectic is essentially temporal and historical. The
dialectic of time is a dialectic of spirit, that is of human spirit. It is ‘‘us,’’ i.e. human
beings, who negate the present and transform the present into a past, by projecting
the yet-to-come [Kojève will introduce desire as the drive for negation]. Time is
what constitutes man,—the claim that Time is Spirit also means that Time is human
Spirit. It is this projection into the yet-to-come that is man’s mode of being. In fact,
for Hegel, it is ‘‘in our life that the present of spirit realizes itself. The dialectic of
time is the dialectic of man.’’ And it is only because man is dialectical in essence
that history is possible.83 But does this dialectic actually make a philosophy of
history possible? Koyré argues it does not; rather, ‘‘the temporal character of the
dialectic’’ makes a philosophy of history ‘‘impossible’’ since the present always
escapes itself and, thus, can never be grasped.84 Only after the end of man, that is
the end of time, does history exist. Koyré concludes that Hegel might have believed
that the condition for the system was indeed achieved, when he wrote ‘‘it is only
with the falling of twilight that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings.’’ Hegel could
only finalize his system if ‘‘history was indeed completed.’’85
3.6 The method: destroying, clearing rather than constructing
For Koyré, Hegel does not describe the ‘‘notion’’ of time as such in the Jena Logic,
nor does he ‘‘deduce’’ it or ‘‘construct’’ it; rather, he attempts to ‘‘destroy’’ the
abstract and empty notion by showing ‘‘how time constitutes itself in the living
reality of the spirit’’ in the most concrete way, by ‘‘clearing and discovering
(dégager et découvrir)’’ it.86 This opening and clearing anticipates Heidegger’s
80
This is reminiscent of Derrida: le devenir espace du temps et le devenir temps de l’espace, the
becoming space of time and the becoming time of space—it is this constitution of the present that he calls
archi-trace, archi-écriture or différance, Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ 3–4.
81
82
83
84
85
86
123
376 D. Tazi
aletheia in the Greek sense of the unconcealment and disclosure that enable ‘‘the
opening up of beings in their being, and the happening of truth.’’87 Hegel’s language
is performative: his expressions are not only means to convey the movement and
actions of the spirit, but are themselves an enactment or performance of its
movement and actions. Hegel
thinks, or rather he sees in himself, an act that ‘‘places’’ something and another
that ‘‘opposes’’ something else to it, or that ‘‘opposes itself’’ to the former’s
action, an act that ‘‘says’’ something, something that is ‘‘contra-dicted’’
(‘‘contre-dit’’). And this is why ‘‘contra-diction’’ is an internal tension and
tearing (‘‘déchirement’’), a struggle in which the spirit ‘‘puts itself,’’ ‘‘negates
itself,’’—denies itself (‘‘se renie’’: re-negates itself)—‘‘sublates itself,’’
‘‘exceeds itself,’’ and ‘‘annihilates itself.’’ As for the ‘‘different’’ terms, they
are not terms which are different, statically, passively; they are terms which
‘‘differ,’’ that is, which repel each other and drift apart from each other;
moreover, ‘‘different’’ acts are acts that make ‘‘differ,’’ that render ‘‘different,’’
and similarly ‘‘others’’ the terms on which they bear, acts that differentiate and
that distinguish, and they are those that one finds at the heart of any
‘‘difference’’.88
Koyré explains the terms that differ do not do so in a static or passive way, but in an
active sense, in a restless movement, by ‘‘repelling each other,’’ by making different
and by othering—terms that are at the heart of all difference. This account echoes
the conception of the now as divided against itself and Koyré’s translation of the
now as having an ‘‘absolutely different relation to the simple,’’ which I have
summarized above. Again, Hegel’s expressive language is not simply discursive, it
enacts the movement of the spirit. In both cases, the meaning of ‘‘difference’’ is
conveyed by the movement of a tearing, un déchirement, which shatters the final
harmony of dialectics.
4 Note on translation
‘‘But to tell the truth, Hegel’s text itself, which I have cited in extenso and to which I
will be able to refer, is more or less as incomprehensible as our translation.’’89
According to Koyré, Hegel was ‘‘untranslatable’’ and ‘‘unconceivable.’’90 He
himself, when translating Hegel’s writings, insisted: ‘‘I do not pretend to have
translated these texts.’’91 This is precisely what should be said about this English
translation of Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena.’’ I have chosen to directly translate into
87
Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ in Off the Beaten Track, trans. by Julian Young
and Kenneth Haynes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18.
88
89
90
In Wahl, Jean. ‘‘Le Role de A. Koyré dans le Développement des Etudes Hégéliennes en France.’’
Archives de Philosophie 28, no. 3 (1965): 325.
91
ibid.
123
English the passages from Hegel as translated by Koyré from the original German to
French. Although translation always entails a re-creation of thought by the
translator, often an act of betrayal, using existing Hegel translations into English
would have further alienated the essay from itself by trespassing Koyré’s
‘‘sublation’’ of Hegel. Translation is always already a hermeneutical endeavor.
Indeed, Koyré’s commentary is embedded not only in the language, phrases, and
words of his translation but also in the choice not to translate,—to make transparent
or accessible in another medium—the hermeneutical obstacles of the Jena writings,
their lexical and syntactic obscurity and incomprehensibility.92 Perhaps, it is
precisely this hermeneutical opacity which enabled Koyré to draw a notion of time
that is far from the temporality so characteristic to Hegel’s Science of Logic.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Professor Mark C. Taylor whose generous help and support made
this introduction and translation possible. I am also grateful to Anthony Steinbock for all his help during
the editorial process. Finally, I want to thank Jeffrey Kosky, Etienne Balibar, Tara Menon, and Iván
Hofman whose insightful comments helped me sharpen this article.
Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’
[p.135] Hegel’s philosophy—this is a point on which all his historians and

commentators agree—is extraordinarily difficult. Hegel was curiously the uncon-
tested master of a whole generation; he trained many students; he even was—in a
way that the history of modern philosophy offers few examples, if it offers any at
all—the leader of a school. His influence was unparalleled throughout the
nineteenth century, in Germany as well as abroad; his work aroused countless
commentaries and unequalled admiration. It would be natural to expect one could
enter the edifice of Hegelian thought. And yet, this is not the case at all.
When we read Hegel, and I assume, at least inwardly, that all readers will prove
me right, we quite often have the impression of not understanding anything. We ask
ourselves: but what can this mean? And even sometimes, silently: does it mean
anything? Even when we understand or think we understand, we have an
uncomfortable impression that we are watching a sort of sorcery or spiritual magic.
We are amazed, struck, we do not follow.
I have stated elsewhere some of the reasons why Hegel is so difficult for us:
difficulties of language, of terminology, [p.136] of mental attitude… But there are
others, perhaps even more profound ones, more intimate ones. Hegel’s thought is
too abrupt, he moves in leaps, he sees relations where one is unable to glimpse them.
He passes through ways which, oftentimes, remain impracticable to us, without
making us see why he chooses some over others. Most often, moreover, he passes
through paths that remain unknown to us.
It is this impression of magic, of mystery, that made some speak of ‘‘the secret of
Hegel,’’ that made us say that Hegel did not reveal to us the principles of his method
and that, having masterfully practiced the dialectical method, he did not do anything
to teach it. Even that his thought generally had a rhythm different from ours; Hegel
92
Gilbert Gérard, Critique et Dialectique: L’itinéraire de Hegel à Iéna, 1801–1805 (Bruxelles:
Publications Fac St Louis, 1982), vii.
123
378 D. Tazi
thinks ‘‘in circles’’ (‘‘en cercle’’) whereas we think ‘‘in straight lines’’ (‘‘en ligne
droite’’).
To all these obstacles that need to be overcome to penetrate Hegelian thought is
added the fact that, until now at least, we were not, or were barely informed about
the formation of this thought. Hegel only comes on stage when already fully armed
(‘‘armé déja de pied en cap’’). For not only the Phenomenology of Spirit, but also
the articles and reports during his time at Jena—despite their intentional
misgivings—[p.137] give a glimpse of a thought already well on the way to the
system, and are in fact only entirely comprehensible in light of the contemporary
and later texts.
This at least partly explains the profound impression produced by the famous
mémoire of Dilthey and the publication by H. Nohl of Hegel’s Early Theological
Writings. We finally had access to the prehistory of Hegelian thought, we could
finally grasp it in statu nascendi rather than in the state of hopeless completion in
which it had been presented so far.
The Early Writings revealed to us a whole new Hegel, a quite unexpected Hegel,
a human Hegel, vibrant, suffering, a Hegel who found his place in the spiritual
movement of the age, not only in the chronological and systematic chart of systems.
Hegel scholarship was completely shattered by this, and one could say (without
exaggerating too much, at least one would like to think) that the modern
interpretation of Hegel in its entirety—until and including the great work of Jean
Wahl—was dominated by an impression produced by the Early Writings, by the
image of the young romantic Hegel, by the desire to retrieve, under the frozen steel
of dialectical formulas, a glimpse of the passionate ardor that animated the friend of
Hölderlin and Schelling. With a few exceptions, and in fact unfortunate ones, it is in
the Early Writings that one looks for the key to Hegelianism—or, at least, the true
Hegel. It is in light of these very writings that one looks for the interpretation of the
Logic and the Encyclopedia. This craze for the Early Writings, I easily understand.
The young Hegel, the Romantics’ friend, is certainly more attractive than [p.138]
the ideologue of the Prussian State. He is closer to us; he seeks, he is restless, like
us. And we understand him. Moreover, he is less difficult, more accessible, less
abrupt.
Now, to be sure, the Early Writings of the anticlerical and romantic Hegel, of the
Hegel smitten with ideas of community and life, smitten with Hellenistic antiquity
(false antiquity, but it barely matters), of the Hegel doubly negating his time, are of
invaluable importance for understanding the very personal sources of his
philosophy, ‘‘existential ones,’’ for measuring the inner tension, the superhuman
effort of his thought.
Nevertheless, by emphasizing his early works in so doing (by forgetting that they
only shape one side of the diptych, only one moment of the dialectical development)
and neglecting the mature works (a sort of curious Jugendbewegung from which I
could cite more than one example), one runs a great risk of misunderstanding and
misinterpreting the ‘‘Hegelian’’ Hegel, the Hegel of the Logic. More precisely, to
emphasize the early works already implies ipso facto scorning and misunderstand-
ing the Logic. Which would also mean a misunderstanding and scorning of the
philosopher-Hegel, and even of philosophy tout court. An effect of substituting—
123
the merit and the crime of the Diltheyan School—the ‘‘history of ideas’’ for that of
philosophy, of philosophy’s absorption by literature.
[p.139] Using the Early Works as basis for the interpretation of Hegelianism
would be dangerous from yet another point of view. Indeed, between the
Systemfragment of Frankfort (1800) and the Phenomenology (1807) is where the
whole work of Hegel at Jena stands, his lectures, his articles. A period of uniquely
intense and fertile intellectual labour, a period of definitive formation, a period in
which Hegel forges his arms. Doubtlessly a more important period for him than the
times at Berne or Frankfurt.
It is this very period, Hegel’s years of learning (whose unawareness [from our
part] was such a heavy burden on the interpretation of Hegelian thought), which,
thanks to the publications of the late G. Lasson and Johannes Hoffmeister, becomes
now entirely accessible to us. For the understanding of Hegelianism, this will have
an equally great importance, if not an even greater one, than the revelation of the
prehistory of his thought by H. Nohl.
Indeed, through the texts of the lectures taught by Hegel at Jena, one is in some
way admitted into the philosopher’s laboratory, one can follow step by step Hegel’s
efforts, renewed three times, to put order into the universe of his thought, one can
attend the elaboration of the Hegelian method, one sees it forming itself not in
abstracto, but rather in concreto, in and through the analysis of concrete issues that
he was faced with. On the road which, from the Systemfragment of Frankfurt, leads
to the Phenomenology of Spirit, one sees, actually realized, the coming to
consciousness (‘‘prise de conscience’’) that will form the dialectical engine of the
Phenomenology.
In these lectures, one sometimes sees Hegel thinking for himself, without taking
into account the outside world, without thinking about his listeners or readers
(preoccupations which are never absent in the Difference… and in Faith and
Knowledge). And some of these abrupt, incorrect, disordered texts belong—from
the point of view of the effort of the concept [p.140] (Anstrengung des Begriffs)—to
the most intense and most beautiful [parts] of what Hegel has ever written.
They also reveal to us a little-known Hegel, if not a completely unknown one: a
Hegel of visionary spirit. Also, by enabling us to compare two or three successive
‘‘states’’ of a text, they enable us to realize the duality in the steps (‘‘les
démarches’’) of Hegelian thought: first, the concrete application of a phenomeno-
logical method of analysis, then sublation, like a useless staging of his analyses
which yet underlie the construction. I will give a thematic example from this
‘‘method’’ later on.
The publications of Hegel’s Lectures did not have the same impact that the Early
Theological Writings once had. Perhaps because they went against already formed
habits, because they revealed a Hegel that the Early Theological Writings, or even
the articles, did not allow to be foreseen: a logical, dialectical Hegel. Concentrating
his effort as much on the philosophy of nature as on spirit, preoccupied above all by
the idea of the ‘‘system.’’ However, the Hegelian ‘‘system’’ is certainly dead. And
from all its pieces, the philosophy of nature is certainly the most outdated and hence
also the most arid and boring. Perhaps, therein lies the reason why the texts of
Hegel’s Lectures have been used so little by his most recent [p.141] interpreters.
123
380 D. Tazi
Perhaps here lies one reason, somehow a concomitant one, and the main reason
would be the fact that the Hegel of the Jena Lectures is already way too ‘‘Hegelian.’’
Between the Lectures and the Encyclopedia, there is indeed continuity. In contrast,
between the Lectures and the Systemfragment, there seems to be a break.
The first editor of the Jena Logic, H. Ehrenberg, frankly admits it. This break can
be explained, according to him, by the impression made on Hegel by the historical
events of his time. Hegel no longer believes in the possibility of action.
Furthermore, instead of reforming the world, he contents himself from now on
with explaining it.
Perhaps. It is highly possible, in fact, that Hegel, with such an acute historical
sense, had understood better than anyone else the significance of the events
unfolding in front of him; he certainly understood that he was attending the
crumbling of a world. Nonetheless, the idea of thought substituting for action, of
philosophy as, at worst, renunciation, seems to me as little Hegelian as possible.
[p.142] The break between the Systemfragment and the Lectures seems obvious.
Maybe it is still less than what it seems: Let us not forget that we only have one
fragment from the Frankfurt system; let us not forget either that it was already a
system and that it is because he already has one—to be able to teach it—that Hegel
decides to go to Jena. Maybe we are undergoing an optical illusion and are unduly
enlarging the hiatus.
But let us admit this hiatus. Why couldn’t one admit a somehow dialectical
continuity between Frankfurt and Jena? Philosophy—whose function and goal are,
according to Hegel, to explain ‘‘what is’’—arrive in a timely way in the spiritual
evolution of humanity. It also has its place in the spiritual history of man. It appears
when the need arises, when it becomes necessary. When the traditional forms of
civilization (Bildung), which founded and formed the unity of the spiritual life of a
people, crumble and disappear. More exactly, when dead and having lost their
value, they become false. Discarding them, destroying them, and leaving again,
recreating and reforming the content of this life then become the philosopher’s task.
The ‘‘organic’’ eras do not need philosophy. Civilization and faith are sufficient
to unite opposite terms among them, to effect spiritual synthesis, to realize totality.
It is only when these unifying forces lose their value, when harmony becomes
broken, ‘‘when the power of union disappears from the life of men and opposite
terms lose their living relations and their interaction, when they stand firm in their
independence, thus does the need for philosophy emerge’’ [Cf. Ueber die Differenz
des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Pholosophie]. It [philosophy] is the
daughter of ‘‘the living originality of spirit… which, in itself, restores, by itself, the
harmony torn apart;’’ it is also the daughter of the inner tearing (‘‘déchirement’’)
itself which is hence the source of the very need for philosophy. And that is why
philosophy, as a product and realization [p.143] of reason, always seeks to institute
itself as a totality, as a system. That is why its first and most profound interest
consists of destroying, overcoming fixed and rigid oppositions in which the
understanding revels: opposition between spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and
reason, liberty and necessity, infinite and finite… ‘‘Not that reason is opposed to
opposition and limitation in general; for necessary opposition is the factor of life
which, eternally, forms itself by opposing itself, and the most intensely living totality
123
is only possible through its restoration from out of the most profound separation.
But reason opposes itself to the absolute fixation of separation by the understanding,
all the more so as the [terms] which absolutely oppose each other are themselves
derived from reason.’’93
The time of philosophy had come for Hegel. The living union of opposites, the
reintegration of the living totality, he had sought first of all, like Schelling, like
Hölderlin, in Life, in Love, in religious Faith. He had written that ‘‘this Whole is not
contained in love as it is in the sum, the plurality of its particular, isolated,
elements; in it [love] life finds itself as a duplication of itself, and [as] its unity; life,
beginning from a non-developed unity has run through the circle towards perfect
unity. The world and the possibility of separation stood over against the non-
developed unity. While evolving, reflection had always produced more opposites so
as to reunify them by satisfying impulses [passion, Trieb] until it has set the Whole
of man in opposition to itself, until love transcends reflection in total inobjectivity,
until it deprives the opposite of all foreignness, until it discovers life itself without
anything missing to it.’’ It is love that accomplishes this miracle, because ‘‘in love,
the opposite does still remain, but as something united and no longer opposed
[separate], and the living senses the living.’’94
[p.144] Life, love, spirit: Hegel’s thought, just as that of his whole epoch,
revolves around these terms which, moreover, it tended to identify. For love is life,
and the life of life is spirit. ‘‘If we presuppose a living individual, namely ourselves,
and have this reflection, then the life that is posited outside of our limited life is an
infinite multiplicity, an infinite opposition of infinite relation. As a multiplicity, a
multiplicity of organizations, of individuals, as a unity it is a single separated and
unified Whole: Nature,’’95 which is itself nothing else than Life. For Hegel, the task
of speculation is also to think the pure life, that is to recapture it and recreate it [the
pure life] in itself.
Life itself realizes the synthesis of the one and the many, of the particular and the
general: ‘‘The concept of the individual implies opposition to an infinite multiplicity,
as well as union with it; a man is an individual life in so far as he is other than all
the elements and from the infinity of individual life outside himself. He is an
individual life only in so far as he is one with all the elements, with the infinity of life
outside himself; he is only inasmuch as the whole of life is divided, and that he
himself being one part and that all the rest be the other part; he is only inasmuch as
he is not a part and inasmuch as nothing is separated from him. If we presuppose
life undivided as fixed, living beings can be considered as expressions of life, as
manifestations of that life.’’96
93
Hegel, Ueber die Differenz, my own translation of Koyré’s quote. Translator’s note: I have chosen to
directly translate into English the passages from Hegel as translated by Koyré from German to French. All
the quotations from Hegel are therefore my translation of Koyré’s quotes. Throughout the essay, I have
italicized the translations of Hegel’s texts.
94
Hegel, Theologische Jugendscriften.
95
96
123
382 D. Tazi
Hegel, who in fact only expresses what everyone thinks around him, writes: ‘‘To
conceive pure life is the task, to abstract from all deeds, all that man was or will be;
character abstracts from activity alone, it expresses the universal behind
determined actions. Consciousness of pure life would be consciousness of what
man is, and in it there is no difference, no developed real multiplicity. This
simplicity is [p.145] not a negative simplicity, a unity [formed by] the abstraction of
any determination; the negatively indeterminate. Pure life is being.’’97 Life, indeed,
‘‘is an infinity of living beings, a finite infinite and an infinite finite. And life that is
conscious of the figure, of the mortal, the temporal, of that which opposes itself and
fights itself infinitely, raises that living being free from transience, [raises] a
relation with multiplicity without that which dead and killing, [a relation that is] not
a unity, a thoughtful relation, but is all-living, all-powerful, infinite and [this life]
calls it God.’’
‘‘This elevation of man, not from the finite to the infinite, for these terms are only
products of mere reflection, and as such their separation is absolute, but from finite
life to infinite life, is religion.’’98
Hegel continues: ‘‘This fact of being an isolated part of the living is transcended
in religion, finite life rises to infinite life, and it is only because the finite is itself life
that it carries in itself the possibility of raising itself to infinite life. That is why
philosophy too has to stop short of religion, because it is a thinking and, as such
contains an opposition; on the one hand, an opposition between thinking and non-
thinking, as well as an opposition between thinking and that which is thought.’’99
Philosophy has to reveal the finitude of all that is finite, to do the work of critique, of
negative theology, and to reject the truly infinite, the infinite of life outside the circle
of thought.
Thought, philosophy, is therefore incapable of realizing the absolute union of the
finite and the infinite, a union that implies that all opposition, all separation may be
removed and transcended. Religion alone is capable of effecting it. However, Hegel
continues, such an absolute union is not absolutely necessary. That is, it is not
absolutely necessary that such a union may be possible. For any given union,
religion is necessary, for everything in the spiritual life of man is conditioned by the
latter, but it [p.146] is not said that all men or even all human groups, all peoples,
may be capable of attaining the absolute degree. Happy peoples, that is peoples
whose life is barely divided, organic—and here, Hegel thinks about the peoples of
classical Antiquity—can draw near to it very closely. It is not the case with regards
to unhappy peoples: these have to remain in division, in opposition, in transcen-
dence. Their God remains infinitely remote, and religion does not give them this
intimate union to which it aspires and which philosophy announces by sublating
itself in front of its threshold.
Religion would then be salvation: but solely for happy peoples. It cannot be given
to unhappy peoples. And Hegel belongs to an unhappy people. There precisely lies
the reason why he is obliged to do philosophy.
97
98
99
123
Happy peoples—cannot we attempt to hypothetically reconstitute the follow-up

to Hegel’s mediations?—possess salvation in religion. But that is also why—and
here is precisely where their happiness lies—they do not feel all the atrocious
suffering of tearing, isolation, opposition, unresolved contradiction. Hence they do
not do philosophy because they do not feel the need for it, while Hegel, even when
he proclaims its insufficiency, does.
Love certainly suppresses and transcends duality. But it only realizes this union
de facto: those who are united by love do not know it. Their consciousness is not
transformed by it: they feel—when they are united—separated, isolated. They are
unaware of the earned victory. It is Hegel, it is the philosopher who knows.
Religion poses the solution to all contradictions, the union of all opposites in
God, but it poses this union, this solution, through faith. Hegel may have affirmed,
at some point, that one can only demonstrate the necessity for synthesis—opposition
presupposes union inside of which only contrary terms can oppose themselves—but
[one cannot demonstrate] this synthesis itself, which can only be believed: here
again is something he knows, he demonstrates.
Hence, on the one hand, the irrational, religious, mystical solution excludes
thought, it excludes reason, and therefore does not resolve the opposition, the
conflict that is inherent in it; it does not encompass it either in this [p.147] supreme
synthesis. And on the other hand, reason affirms—by negating itself—its character
of indestructible supremacy.
Cannot one admit that it would have been enough for Hegel to reflect upon
himself, to think about what he was doing, to actually recognize, without
understanding it, the superior act and even the supreme act of the spirit, to see that
he was dealing with one of the ‘‘traps’’ of the understanding which the philosopher
had precisely the duty to destroy, then to end up, naturally, with the attitude he
adopted at Jena and expressed in the beautiful texts I have quoted previously?
*
When Hegel arrives in Jena, his position is already established, at least grosso
modo. The discovery of the dialectic, the great merit of Fichte and Schelling, had not
borne the desired fruits for them. Hegel’s thought, formed by the meditation on
theological and historical themes, was quick to discover the true reasons behind the
insufficiency of his predecessors-contemporaries. In the case of Fichte, it was very
simple: his [p.148] narrow ‘‘Judaizing’’ moralism inflected theory towards practice.
Yet, it had already been a long time since Hegel had written: ‘‘Practical activity acts
freely, without uniting itself with the opposite, without being determined by the latter;
it does not bring unity to a given multiplicity, but is itself the unity that only saves
itself from the multiple opposite which, in relation to practical faculty, always
remains related [to it]. Practical unity is affirmed by the total sublation of the
opposite.’’100 The Fichtean dialectic therefore only has the appearance of a true
dialectic. In its heart, it negates itself: it seeks the total suppression of the opposite,
which means the total end of any dialectical movement. The opposition comes to it
100
123
384 D. Tazi
from outside: it is then always forced to confront new obstacles, new opposites that
can prevent it from attaining its goal. And it is solely because this goal is impossible
that the Fichtean dialectic can escape the immobility of death. But it is also the reason
it transforms itself into a dialectic of incompletion, an infinite pursuit of an Absolute
impossible to reach, of an Absolute become transcendent again. That is also why the
Fichtean dialectic, a finite dialectic, if ever there were one, does not know the true
notion of the infinite, and hence substitutes for it that of the indefinite. And this
substituting of the ‘‘bad infinite’’ for the ‘‘good’’ one (from the indefinite to the
infinite) takes its revenge, through a curious dialectic, within this very philosophy,
and produces in it a significant reversal: starting from the notion of freedom,
searching for freedom, Fichte arrives at its contrary, at slavery in a police state.
As for Schelling, he has remained precisely at the stage of the philosophy of life
and love. The dialectical rhythm leads, for him, to the balance of opposites within the
identical. It can immerse everything in the Absolute, but cannot bring anything out of
it. Hegel, who had already written in Frankfurt ‘‘union of union and non-union,’’ now
writes: ‘‘identity of identity and non-identity.’’ This would mean that if Fichte and
Schelling perceived well the positive value of the negative, the role of negation, of
the no as opposed to the yes, of the no which alone confers upon the yes, which
overcomes it, its sense of affirmation and position, if they [Fichte and Schelling] saw
that the true living, ‘‘organic’’ unity of life and spirit [p.149] does not lie in
abstraction but in the unification of the many, then neither of them knew how to place
the no in its true place: in the positive Absolute itself. In fact, the Fichtean Absolute
eliminates the no, the Schellingian Absolute ignores it. Both of them then remain
‘‘ab-solus,’’ separated, transcendent to being, to reason. They remain immobile and
unconscious. Hegel thinks that one needs to go further, higher. Placing the no within
the yes; making the many be seen within the one itself, making the finite be seen
within the infinite itself; in the eternal, time, movement, the unrest (‘‘l’inquiétude’’)
that is for him the very essence of the real. One must therefore start all over again.
Destroy all the fixed notions of the understanding, reforming concepts. Making a
system simultaneously complete and mobile, as complete and mobile as the Absolute
that it ought to represent and complete. This is the task Hegel attends to at Jena. Of
course, I cannot proceed here with the comparative analysis of the Hegelian system’s
three drafts. This task would far exceed the dimensions of one article. I will limit
myself to the attempt at demonstrating, through an example which, it is true, is a
particularly important one, the modus procedendi of Hegelian thought.
*
Everyone is aware of the primordial importance that notions related to history

and time play in Hegelian thought. One knows that for Hegel, spirit—the highest
reality of Hegelian metaphysics—is essentially historical and essentially develops
itself, [p.150] in time. On the other hand, one knows that for Hegel time is not the
empty frame ‘‘in which all is born and perishes’’ but rather is itself ‘‘the becoming,
the birth and disappearance, the all-generating and all-destroying Chronos.’’101
101
Hegel, Encyclopedia.
123
Everyone knows the famous texts in which Hegel proclaims that ‘‘nothing is
known or experienced that was not already given in the historical experience of
humanity,’’102 and that philosophy itself is only time captured in thought. It is
almost useless to insist on this: One knows well that Hegel’s main effort was to
‘‘understand becoming’’ and that the identity of logic and history has not only been
the foundation of the philosophy of history but also that of all the Hegelian system.
And yet, I may need to insist once more on this point. For it seems that the
revelation of the spirit’s historicity marked a decisive moment in the history of
Hegelian thought and that the other no less decisive moment was so because of the
discovery of time’s dialectical character. For it is only because spirit is temporal and
time dialectical that a dialectic of the spirit is possible. Hegel’s philosophy,
however, seems to have been a philosophy of time, in its deepest intuitions, and
through it, a philosophy of man. This is so despite the effort to link time to eternity,
or more exactly, thanks to the Boehmean notion of timeless becoming, of making
time enter within eternity and eternity within time.
Everyone knows that paragraphs 258 and 259 from the Encyclopedia are devoted
to the analysis and definition of time: ‘‘Time as the negative unity of externalized
being, is something absolutely abstract, ideal. It is that being which, insofar as it is,
is not, and insofar as it is not, is: the intuited becoming. This means that the
momentary differences, which sublate and preserve immediately are determined as
exterior, [p.151] yet as exterior to themselves.’’103 ‘‘The dimensions of time, the
present, the future and the past are the becoming of exteriority as such and its
dissolution in the differences of being seen as passing into nothingness, and of
nothingness viewed as passing into being. The immediate disappearance of these
differences in unity is the present as a now which, as unity, is exclusive, and yet
passes continually into other moments – being itself merely the disappearance of its
being into nothingness and of nothingness into its being.’’104
However, by reading these texts, which become enigmatic by dint of density and
focus, and even by meditating on the commentaries with which Hegel himself
enriched them—probably because he realized their esoteric character—one can
hardly be aware of the phenomenological substructure that underlies them, of the
real way by which Hegel came to write them.
*
Hegel had once written that the ‘‘relation of the finite and the infinite is… a
sacred mystery as this relation is life itself.’’105 Let us listen to what he will now tell
us: ‘‘The true nature of the finite is only this, that it is infinite, sublating itself in its
being. The determinate has no [p.152] other essence as such than this absolute
unrest not to be what it is. It is not nothing since it is the other itself and, similarly,
this other, the opposite of itself, is once again the first. For nothingness or the void
102
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.
103
Hegel, Encyclopedia, paragraph 258.
104
Hegel, Encyclopedia, paragraph 259.
105
123
386 D. Tazi
is equal to pure being, that is precisely this void and, because of this, both have
immediately in themselves the opposition of the something or the determined, and
for this same reason, they are not the true essence but are themselves part of the
opposition, and nothingness or being, the void in general, is only like the contrary of
itself, like determination, and the latter is once again the other of itself, or
nothingness. Infinity as this absolute contradiction is thus [by this very fact] the only
reality of the determined, not a hereafter but a simple relation, the pure absolute
movement, being outside the self within being in the self…’’106 ‘‘The simple and the
infinite, or the absolute contradiction, are not a contradiction to themselves except
that [the contradiction] of being absolutely in relation and, as they are opposed,
they are also absolutely one. There could be no question of an exit from the absolute
outside itself, because it is this alone that bears a contradiction that can appear as
an exit from itself. But the contradiction cannot maintain itself near its being, but its
essence is the absolute unrest of sublating itself.’’107
The source, the heart of the dialectic (Hegel tells us that the dialectic of
moments—quality, quantity and quantum—consists only in the fact that they were
posed as infinite), is in the relation of the finite and the infinite themselves. Hegel
strives to make us see the unrest of all finitude, of all determination, of all limitation,
which, negativity as such, sublates itself, necessarily posing that toward which it is
‘‘de-fined,’’ ‘‘de-limited,’’ ‘‘de-termined,’’ ‘‘de-infinited’’ (‘‘dé-finie,’’ ‘‘dé-limitée,’’
‘‘dé-terminée,’’ ‘‘dés-infinie’’), necessarily negating this limit, this term, this edge,
and thus transforming itself into the in-finite, the un-limited, the in-de-termined. Yet
Hegel does not content himself with showing a negation of the infinite in the finite.
The infinite is as ‘‘in-quiet’’ (rest-less) as the finite, and being ‘‘in-finite,’’ poses and
supposes a limit, an end, in relation to which it affirms itself by negating it [the end].
Double negation, position. All limitation says something like, not this, not a, not b,
not c…, and so on and so forth. It poses the ensemble of the a, b, c’s, the infinite
totality of being. That is why it expresses itself as an unrest. Finite being is not being
(‘‘être’’); it is movement; precisely because it is not what it pretends to be, precisely
because it is other than what it is not (‘‘justement par ce qu’il est autre qu’il n’est’’).
Any finite disavows itself in order to exceed itself. Any in-finite absorbs and
sublates the finite, while posing it [the finite], and disavows itself [p.153] in order to
grasp itself, to accomplish itself, to enter in itself. And it is only through this
movement, this perpetual exchange from one to the other, infinite reversal of terms,
that these terms exist in general. For one cannot think the infinite without opposing
the finite to it and thus de-infiniting it (‘‘le désinfinir’’), nor [can one think] the finite
without, simultaneously, infiniting it (‘‘l’infinir’’). Nor can one think nothingness,
the void, without opposing fullness and being to it, therefore without linking it to
being and conditioning it through the latter, nor [can one think] being without
opposing nothingness and the void, without it presenting itself to us as the very
negation of nothingness. A nothingness that it exceeds and that it therefore includes,
and which consequently implies it and watches over it.
106
Hegel, Jenenser Logik.
107
123
Unrest is the heart of being (‘‘l’inquiétude est le fond de l’être’’). The finite and
the infinite pursue each other and ruin each other [one in the other]; they are only
themselves in relation to each other. Hegel continues: ‘‘The annihilating unrest of
the infinite only is likewise through the being of what it annihilates; the sublated is
as absolute as it is sublated; it engenders itself in its annihilation, for annihilation
only is as long as there is something that is annihilated. What is, in truth, put in the
infinite is that it is the void in which everything is absorbed, and this void is at the
same time an opposite or a member of what is sublated, the relation of the one and
the many, which yet itself opposes itself to the non-relation of the one and the many,
and still is in the simplicity of this opposition resumed in an absolute instability, and
is only placed as this resumption, reflected.’’108
Formulated in another way, movement, unrest, annihilation, sublation and
engendering, being from nonbeing and nonbeing from being: aren’t these traits
already known? Doesn’t the dialectic of the finite and the infinite reproduce, or
rather [shall I say], announce, that of eternity and time? Or simply that of time?
Indeed, the dialectical analysis of the infinite and the finite sketches for us frames of
the instant and of time. When he reaches the analysis of time, of this mobile and
restless infinite that is not for him anymore – and here lies the importance of his
attitude—the ‘‘image of immobile eternity,’’ Hegel will say: ‘‘The infinite, in this
simplicity, is [p.154] – as moment equally opposed to itself—the negative, and in its
moments, while it is present to itself and in itself totality, [it is] excluding it in
general, the point or the limit, but in its action of negating, it immediately relates
itself to the other and negates itself. The limit or the moment of the present,*109 the
absolute ‘‘this’’ of time, or the ‘‘now’’ is of an absolute negative simplicity, which
absolutely excludes of itself any multiplicity and, due to this, is absolutely
determined; [it is] not a whole or a quantum which would extend itself in itself
[and] which, in itself, would also have an undetermined moment, a diversity (‘‘un
divers’’) which, indifferent or outside in itself, would relate to an other, but there is
here an absolutely different** relation to ‘‘the simple’’ (‘‘un rapport absolument
différent du simple’’).110 This ‘‘simple,’’ in its absolute negation, is the active, the
infinite opposed to itself as [to] an equal-to-itself; as negation it also absolutely
relates itself to its opposite, and its action, its simple negation, is a relation to its
opposite, and the now immediately is the opposite of itself,***111 the self-negation.
Whereas this limit, in its [action of] exclusion or in its activity, sublates itself by
itself, it is rather its nonbeing which is acting against itself and of which it is the
108
109
Koyré’s note: The German word Gegen-wart expresses an opposition, a contrariety that the term
‘‘present’’ does not express.
110
Koyré’s note: ‘‘Rapport different’’: differente Beziehung. One could say: differentiating relation.
Translator’s note: Koyre’s translation of Hegel’s ‘‘difference’’ as an ‘‘absolute differentiating relation’’
(eine/absolute differente Beziehung) is particularly relevant to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Hegel. Here,
différente is given an active sense, it portrays the present as divided against itself: this notion was adopted
by Derrida in his concept of différance.
111
Koyré’s note: The now, being simple, is negation of the diverse. But from this very fact it relates itself
to its opposite, the diverse, and is not simple anymore. The now, absolute negative limit itself, negates
itself, sublated itself, and is not. The now is never now. It escapes from itself.
123
388 D. Tazi
negation. However, since the limit in itself [and this] immediately is not, this
nonbeing opposed to itself as the active, or as what is rather the being-in-itself
[p.155], which excludes its opposite, is the yet-to-come (‘‘l’avenir’’), which the now
cannot resist because it is the essence of the present which is indeed the nonbeing of
itself. The present, sublating itself in such a way that it is rather the yet-to-come
which is engendered [becomes] in it, is itself this yet-to-come; or this yet-to-come
itself is not à venir (yet to come), it is what sublates the present, but insofar as it is
this, this [something] simple which is an action of absolute negation, it is rather the
present which is yet, in its essence, as much nonbeing of itself, or yet-to-come. In
fact, there is neither present nor yet-to-come but only this mutual relation between
the two, equally negative in relation to each other, and this negation of the present
self-negates itself as well; the difference between the two reduces itself*112 in the
rest of the past. The now has its own nonbeing in itself, and immediately becomes for
itself**113 an other, but this other, the yet-to-come in which the present transforms
itself, is immediately the other of itself for it is now present. But it is not this first
‘‘now,’’ this notion of the present, but a now that has engendered itself from the
present through the yet-to-come, a now in which the yet-to-come and the present
have equally sublated and absorbed each other, a being that is a nonbeing of both,
an activity, overcome and absolutely in rest, of the one over the other. The present is
only the simple limit, self-negating itself, which, in the separation of these negative
moments, is the relation of its [action of] exclusion to that which it excludes [itself].
This relation is [the] present, as a different***114 relation in which both are
conserved; but if they do not conserve each other, they just as well reduce
themselves to an [p.156] equality to itself in which both are not, and are absolutely
destroyed. The past is this time turned back (‘‘re-tourné’’) into itself which has
absorbed in itself the two first dimensions. The limit or the now is empty; for it is
absolutely simple or [is] the notion*115 of time; it accomplishes itself in the yet-to-
come**.116 The yet-to-come is its reality, for the now is, in its essence, an absolutely
negative relation. Possessing its essence or this interior in itself, existing as its
essence [it is] the being of this essence. Its essence is its nonbeing or the being of the
yet-to-come within the now, the reality of the now being in itself what it only has, as
notion of the now, only as its interior. This reality of the now, in which the being of
the yet-to-come is as much the immediate opposite of itself, [it is] now this opposite
in itself and the sublation of both, [sublation] posed, and [is] the former-now
(‘‘jadis’’),117 the time reflected in itself,***118 or real. But the former-now is not
112
Koyré’s note: Se réduit [reduces itself]: reduziert sich. One could say: absorbs itself or reduces itself
to zero.
113
Koyré’s note: Wird sich as Hegel writes, which is completely incorrect.
114
Koyré’s note: the term ‘‘different’’ is understood here in an active sense.
115
Koyré’s note: Begriff: here in the sense of an abstract notion.
116
Koyré’s note: The yet-to-come is then the truth of the present.
117
Translator’s note: jadis in French etymologically refers to the old French ‘‘ja a dis’’, ‘‘il y a [ja a]
maintenant des jours [dis]’’ (di being the word for ‘‘day’’ in lundi, mardi etc.), ‘‘many days ago’’.
118
Koyré’s note: Reflected in itself: in sich reflectiert; time soars [or starts] from the present to the yet-
to-come and from the yet-to-come is reflected, like a luminous ray, towards the past.
123
itself for itself, it is equally the now transforming itself through the yet-to-come in
the opposite of itself and is therefore not separated from either of them; in itself it is
only this whole circuit, that is to say the real time which, through the now and the
yet-to-come, becomes the former-now. The real time, opposed as the former-now to
the present and to the yet-to-come is itself only a moment of the entire reflection; it
is as [the] moment that expresses time returned in itself, [it expresses it] as the
equal-to-itself relating to itself, notably as the determination of relating to itself, or
it [real time] is its [that of the [p.157] determination] first moment; it is all the more
the now than the past which, as much as the other moments, sublates itself by itself,
as for the entire infinite, as self-relating itself, to be as such for itself immediately a
passive or first moment.
‘‘In this way, time is as infinite, in its totality, only its moment or in other words,
being its first [moment], it would indeed not be as totality, or else, it exists not as
what is the foundation of this infinity, which is only as simple infinity in itself, or
[else it] is not only the passage-transformation [of the one] into its opposite and
from the latter, again in the former, the repetition of a back-and-forth movement
which is infinitely numerous, that is, is not the real infinite; the infinitely frequent
repetition represents unity as the equality of the repeated one, an equality that is not
that of this repeated one (‘‘celle de ce repeté’’), but that is outside of it. That which
is repeated is indifferent towards that of which it is the repetition and is not, for
itself, a repetition (‘‘un répété’’).*119 Though the repetition of time’s reflection might
be a [repetition] such that each moment engenders itself from its opposite and is, in
this way, towards the ‘‘before’’ as much as towards the ‘‘after,’’ a member of this
absolutely different series, it is however only a member and [the fact] that, as this
determined member, it is immediately [its] opposite, constitutes the absolute unity of
opposite moments. The moment, as such, is yet not in itself what it was before or
what it will be later; this reflection is outside of them and [the fact] that it would
become once again what it was, is indeed a unity which is only like a repetition.
[p.158] However, the totality of the infinite is not truly a return to the first
moment; for the first moment is itself absorbed as one of the moments. The totality
falls back towards the first moment only as [to the moment] opposed to the one from
which it immediately proceeds. But the latter is in fact the first [moment] overcome,
and [the action of] overcoming itself; and the totality, as the opposite of the
different moment, only is so as the unity of both or as the in-itself of the second; it
finds itself, as second, only for us.*120 The third, however, is the expression of this
in-itself; and thus it is not the third, but the totality of the two, and real time is the
past only as opposed to the present and to the yet-to-come. But this third [moment]
is the reflection of time in itself, that is to say that it is in fact the present; and real
time, since ‘‘former-now’’ has become ‘‘now,’’ has made itself equally for itself the
first moment, as it has sublated and absorbed this now which, thereby, would only
present [p.159] itself as a moment turned back to itself; it is thus the sublation of
119
Koyré’s note: Repetition: Wiederholung. The reproduced identical to oneself, the reproduced is not
repeated for-itself, since the fact of being reproduced is not a moment belonging to it in its own right, but
is exterior to it.
120
Koyré’s note: The distinction between the in-itself and for us in phenomenological description is
Fichtean, as we know it well.
123
390 D. Tazi
these moments and the sublation [of the fact] that, in its reflection, it constitutes
itself only as moment. The sublation of this formal reflection makes of it a totality
equal to itself, which sublates itself as movement in itself, which [totality] is only, it
is true, a representation of the whole, but solely as a divided or a different whole.
‘‘The past which, through this, has sublated its relation to the ‘‘now’’ and
‘‘former-now,’’ and is therefore no longer ‘‘former-now,’’ this real time is the
paralyzed unrest of the absolute concept, time which, in its totality, has made itself
the absolutely other, which from the determination of the infinite whose time is
representation, has transformed itself into its opposite, the determination of
equality-in-itself and thus, as in-difference equal-to-itself, whose moments are
opposed in the form of the latter [this time] is space’’.121
I have tried to translate Hegel’s text as faithfully as possible, nonetheless without
wishful thinking as to the value of this ‘‘translation.’’ I apologize to the reader who
might very well find it incomprehensible: and indeed, it is so. But to tell the truth,
Hegel’s text itself, which I have cited in extenso and to which I will be able to refer,
is more or less as incomprehensible as our translation. It is so at least as far as one
does not realize its true character. For it seems that what Hegel strives to give us
here, or more exactly, strives to give himself, is by no means an analysis of the
‘‘notion’’ of time. Quite the contrary: it is the ‘‘notion’’ of time, abstract and empty
notion that Hegel undertakes to destroy by showing us, by describing to us, how
time constitutes itself in the living reality of the spirit. Deduction of time?
Construction? These terms, both of them, are inappropriate. For it is not about
‘‘deducing,’’ even dialectically, or about ‘‘constructing;’’ it is about clearing and
discovering—rather than hypothetically placing—in and for consciousness itself,
for the moments, steps, spiritual acts in which and through which the concept of
time constitutes itself, in and for the spirit. So the terms of Hegelian description—I
allow myself to point to the conclusion of a previous study—are the complete
opposite of abstract terms. They are, on the contrary, concrete to the highest degree.
One needs to take them, in some way à la lettre, in their most direct meaning, the
crudest. However, it is not things, objects, states that they designate. Chaotic and
struck sentences, Hegel’s often incorrect [p.160] expressions (sich werden, for
example, etc.) describe a movement, espouse articulations and a rhythm, designate
the acts, and even the actions, of spirit. When Hegel tells us about opposition and
contradiction, he does not think about a relation between two terms. He thinks, or
rather he sees in himself, an act that ‘‘places’’ something and another that ‘‘opposes’’
something else to it, or that ‘‘opposes itself’’ to the former’s action, an act that
‘‘says’’ something, something that is ‘‘contra-dicted’’ (‘‘contre-dit’’). And this is
why ‘‘contra-diction’’ is an internal tension and tearing (‘‘déchirement’’), a struggle
in which the spirit ‘‘puts itself,’’ ‘‘negates itself,’’—denies itself (‘‘se renie’’: re-
negates itself)—‘‘sublates itself,’’ ‘‘exceeds itself,’’ and ‘‘annihilates itself.’’ As for
the ‘‘different’’ terms, they are not terms which are different, statically, passively;
they are terms which ‘‘differ,’’ that is, which repel each other and drift apart from
each other; moreover, ‘‘different’’ acts are acts that make ‘‘differ,’’ that render
‘‘different,’’ and similarly ‘‘others’’ the terms on which they bear, acts that
121
123
differentiate and that distinguish, and they are those that one finds at the heart of any
‘‘difference.’’ One could say that, as opposed to the age old tradition of philosophy,
Hegel does not think in nouns but in verbs.
The fragment which I have just cited then describes, or at least attempts to
describe, the construction, or more exactly, the self-constitution of time or, shall I
say—while always meaning the same thing—the constitution or self-constitution of
the concept of time. Let me say it once more, it is by no means an analysis of the
notion of time, abstract notion of abstract time, of time as it presents itself in
physics, Newtonian time, Kantian time, time in the straight line of formulas and
watches. It is about something else. It is about time ‘‘itself,’’ the spiritual reality of
time. This very time does not flow in a uniform way; it is not either a homogenous
medium through which one would draw himself; it is neither a number of
movement, nor an order of phenomena. It is enrichment, life, victory. It is—let me
say it right away—itself spirit and concept.
[p.161] I have already indicated previously the importance that recurs in Hegel’s
thought given to the notion of the infinite intimately tied to that of spirit itself,
considering that (and I have just indicated how), in my opinion, the dialectic of the
infinite reproduces, or rather ‘‘corresponds’’ to the dialectic of time. I have said that
for Hegel, the dialectic of the infinite directly leads to the dialectic of time. I could
from now on say that it transforms itself or realizes itself in it. It is because the
dialectic of the infinite, as Hegel presented it to us, would still happen in the
abstract. It is that, to say the truth, it was not about the infinite but about infinity as it
were, still ‘‘equal-to-itself,’’ which opposes itself within itself to the finite which
limits it, negates and consolidates it, but which still does not oppose itself to
anything else, and does not oppose itself to anything that is other than itself. Yet, it
is an other that it needs to oppose itself to in order to absorb it in itself, to exceed it
and to reflect itself in it. The abstract infinity represents the abstract spirit which, it
is true, ‘‘is that which is found and which is in [the very act] of finding itself’’,122 but
which nonetheless has not truly retrieved itself, not having yet been actually
alienated and lost. Abstract infinity is abstract eternity, timeless, separated from the
concrete. For it to realize itself, to become the spirit’s living and present eternity,
there also needs for its other, its opposite, to realize itself. To tell you the truth, the
dialectic of eternity needs to re-present itself in that of the instant, that it constitutes
itself in and through time.
And yet, time—let me remark that Hegel does not take off from the analysis of
the notion of ‘‘instant,’’ timeless and punctual limit between the past and the yet-to-
come, abstract limit between two abstractions, but from the [p.162] concrete
apprehension that one has towards it,—time constitutes itself in us and for us from
the ‘‘now.’’ However, this ‘‘now,’’ again not a limit ‘‘between’’ something and
something else but somehow a limit in itself, and also a connection par excellence,
is essentially unstable, ungraspable, and perishable. This ‘‘now’’ is never here. It
transforms itself immediately into something else. It denies itself by itself and
sublates itself by itself. However—and here is the main point—, it transforms itself
and denies itself not by somehow falling again into the past, by perishing into what
122
123
392 D. Tazi
is not anymore ‘‘now.’’ The Hegelian now, despite it being instantaneous and
involving no thickness, is indeed a directed instant. But it is not towards the past
that it is directed. It is, to the contrary, towards the yet-to-come. It is this very yet-to-
come (‘‘avenir’’) which, first of all, presents itself to us as yet to come (‘‘à-venir’’),
which rejects towards the ‘‘is no longer’’ what was for us ‘‘now,’’ in order for it, in
its turn, through a new yet-to-come, to be rejected towards the ‘‘is no longer,’’ and
transform itself into the ‘‘former-now.’’ In this analysis, content and form are not
separated. Hegel describes the flux of concrete spiritual life rather than an abstract
image of becoming, and here is the reason why he will later say that it is not things
or processes that are in time, but time itself that is somehow the very fabric of
becoming, and consequently, of being.
But let me return to the Hegelian description. It is not ‘‘from the past’’ that time
comes to us, but from the yet-to-come (‘‘avenir’’, the future). Duration does not
extend from the past to the present. Time forms itself by extending itself, or better
by exteriorizing itself from the ‘‘now,’’ or better yet by prolonging itself, by lasting.
It is instead from the yet-to-come that it [time] comes to itself in the ‘‘now.’’ The
prevalent ‘‘dimension’’ of time is the yet-to-come (future), which is, in some way,
anterior to the past.
It is this insistence on the yet-to-come, the primacy given to the yet-to-come over
the past, which constitutes, I would say, Hegel’s greatest originality. And this makes
us understand why, in the additions to the Encyclopedia, Hegel speaks about
waiting, about hope, and about regret too. It is that Hegelian time is first and
foremost a human time, the time of man, himself this strange being who ‘‘is what he
is not and is not what he is,’’ a being who denies himself in that he is in favor of
what he is not, or that he is not yet, a being who, starting from the present, denies it,
seeking to realize himself in the yet-to-come, who leaves for the yet-to-come finding
in it, or at least seeking in it, its ‘‘truth’’; a being who only exists in this continuous
transformation of the yet-to-come in the now, and who ceases to be [as such] the day
he no longer has a yet-to-come (or a future), when nothing is any longer [p.163] to
come (‘‘à venir’’), when everything is already avenu (already void; ‘‘has already
come’’), when everything is already ‘‘accomplished.’’ And it is because Hegelian
time is human that it is also dialectical, in the same way as it is because it is both
human and dialectical that it is essentially a historical time.
But let me return once more to the Hegelian description. The now, the yet-to-
come, the former-now, these three ‘‘different’’ moments of time coordinate,
implicate and call for each other. They are never juxtaposed in ‘‘indifferent’’
equivalence as are the three dimensions of space. The instant is oriented, but it also
has a structure. The ‘‘now,’’ transformed into a ‘‘former-now’’ through ‘‘the yet-to-
come’’ become ‘‘now,’’ has not disappeared; opposing itself to the actual ‘‘now’’ it
has itself become ‘‘now’’ again, just as ‘‘now’’ is also the yet-to-come non-
actualized. The instant mends and melts again these three different moments which,
in their differentiation, expand and give place to a quantum of time, but which,
taken back into their unity and their differences, constitute in a living and restless
unity what, with Hegel, I will name ‘‘present.’’ The present instant, as I name it, is
not simple. It has this internal structure which alone allows it to be present for itself;
which alone allows it to realize the dialectic of the spirit, which, in the entirety of its
123
‘‘moments’’ (waiting for the yet-to-come (future), re-presentation of the past),

movements, and acts of negation, of sublation, of opposition and resumption into
itself and by itself, ‘‘becomes’’ more and more ‘‘present,’’ constitutive in, for and by
this presence to itself, a present vaster and vaster, richer and richer and less and less
‘‘equal-to-itself.’’ And it is because ‘‘the former-now,’’ becoming ‘‘now’’ again, is
absorbed and sublimated in the present that the self-constitution of the spirit
becomes possible as well as its enrichment in historical evolution, that is to say this
identity of history and logic in which we have rightly seen the essence of the
Hegelian system.
However, to stop this unceasing movement of the temporal dialectic, sublating
tension, the instant’s unrest: time then ‘‘accomplishes’’ itself, completes itself
(‘‘s’achève’’) and, as time is completed (‘‘achevé’’), naturally falls wholly into the
past. Indeed, the past alone is completed, and only that on which the yet-to-come no
longer has a grip is truly and effectively of the past. Accomplished time (‘‘le temps
accompli’’) expands, stops: instead of movement and tension we have ‘‘paralysis’’
and relaxation. ‘‘Time’’ relaxes, spreads out: instead of a living ‘‘difference’’ in
interiority, we have to deal with spread out indifference of an order of succession.
We are in front of the ‘‘real’’ time: the time of things, [p.164] exteriority, time
become itself a thing, a res. But this paralyzed and spread out time is no longer time;
the straight line that symbolized it does more than symbolizing it; it expresses its
nature. This time is indeed space.
*
The Hegelian ‘‘dialectic’’ is a phenomenology. Hegel, once more, only needed to

realize what he was actually doing in order to conceive the idea of Phenomenology
of Spirit which is, at least in its best parts, nothing else than a visionary description
of spiritual reality, an analysis of the essential structures of the human spirit, of the
constitution in and by the thought and activity of man of the human world in which
he lives.
It would have been interesting to be able to follow Hegelian analysis step by step.
Unfortunately, I have to make a jump. Indeed, the notebook comprising the 1803/4
lectures is incomplete. The whole first part is missing from it. And it was the latter
that contained the analysis of time. Only one sentence was preserved for us, written
in the margin of an analysis of spatial being: spirit is time, Geist ist Zeit.
J. Hoffmeister proposes a correction: spirit is in time, Geist ist IN DER Zeit. I do not
believe this ought to be done. Hegelian spirit is time and Hegelian time is spirit.
The lectures of 1805–1806 provide us once more with a long passage on time.
But the text’s character is no longer the same. It is way more correct, more careful,
more orderly, divided in paragraphs as will the Encyclopedia later be. Hegel no
longer writes for himself, for noting and fixing an intuition. He thinks of his
listeners; he also thinks of his readers; for if it had already been a long time that he
had the desire to do so, he then also had the hope of being able to finally publish his
System. The style is more dry, [p.165] more ‘‘abstract,’’ resembling further what one
is used to calling ‘‘dialectic.’’ The order of exposition—order of construction—
changes too: it is no longer leaving off from time that one finds space, paralyzed
123
394 D. Tazi
time. To the contrary, one leaves off from space and goes back to time. Time and
space are furthermore presented as mutually conditioning and engendering
themselves. Preoccupation of a ‘‘system’’? Moving from the more ‘‘abstract’’ to
the more ‘‘concrete,’’ from the more ‘‘simple’’ to the more ‘‘rich’’? One certainly
knows that Hegel has always thought the ‘‘system;’’ he could not have not seen that
presenting space as paralyzed time was, from the dialectical point of view, a serious
mistake. How could spirit indeed pursue its movement? On the other hand, how can
space, if it is indifference, pure exteriority, admit the distinctions and dimensions of
unity? It is us and time who introduce this unity, these distinctions, in it [space].
And it is in relation to the indifference of the pure multiple that, from now on, the
dialectical movement of time constitutes itself, in and through differentiation.
‘‘Space,’’ Hegel writes123 ‘‘is the existing immediate quantity, the concept in
itself or immediately, that is to say in the element of indifference and separation of
its moments. The distinction has left space: [which] means that it ceases to be this
indifference [equivalence], it is no longer, for itself, paralyzed in all its unrest.*124
It is the [p.166] self of opinion (‘‘Meinung’’), where we have seen it fall. This pure
quantity as pure existing difference for itself is the abstract infinite or the negative
in itself: time.
‘‘Provided that opposition has lost its indifference, it is the existing being who,
immediately, is not and [the] existing non-being who, equally immediately, is; it is
pure existing contradiction. The contradiction sublates itself by itself; it [time] is
precisely the existence of this continuous surpassing (‘‘dépassement’’) of itself.*125
These moments are the same pure abstractions as those of space; if the latter seem
more real as dimensions, it is only thanks to the form of indifferent subsistence.
‘‘The development of the negative applied to time represents well its dimensions,
but the latter does not have the diverse positions [that they have in space], but are
immediately their self-sublation. Likewise, space, as space in general, is the
substance of these moments, just like time [is for its own [moments]]**.126
‘‘Seen more closely (a), one of the spaces belongs, deep down, as one, ***127 to
time; for space, it is only its beyond; for [p.167] time it is, to the contrary,
immanent; for [this] ONE is this relating-to-oneself, being-equal-to-oneself which is
absolutely exclusive [of everything], which means: which negates the other. For this
reason, what is then absolute in its notion is negation, that is, it is in itself negation,
123
Hegel, Jeneser Realphilosophie.
124
Koyré’s note: Hegel means that the dimensions of space as space, being indifferent and
interchangeable (space being indeed, pure exteriority), their distinction which make directions out of
them, cannot have its source and seat in space itself. It is in us; it is us who distinguish, differentiate and
introduce the unrest of the dialectic and temporality of being. As much for the difference which has left
space, it is us once again; but since the homogeneity of space implies the equivalence of its dimensions-
directions, their distinction is something subjective, hence a matter of opinion (Meinung). Abstract,
Galilean or Newtonian space is then absolutely not what is most but what is least objective.
125
Koyré’s note: These are more or less the same terms used in the Encyclopedia.
126
Koyré’s note: Time is the ‘‘substance,’’ that is it is also the ‘‘truth’’ of its moments which only have
being and truth within already-constituted time. The construction of time is hence analytical: one
necessarily starts from constituted time (and spirit). One reproduces, one does not produce.
127
Koyré’s note: This one, it is the instant that is present, hence conscious.
123
it is this other which is negated by itself. This ONE is; it immediately is; for its
equality-to-itself is precisely immediacy. It is the present. The now absolutely
excludes from itself any other. It is perfectly simple. (b) But this simplicity and its
being is equally immediately the negation of its immediacy, its sublation of itself;
the limit which sublates itself and exceeds itself as limit and [which] is an other. Or
still, being what absolutely distinguishes itself, it sublates it, for it is pure equality.
The now is; there is the immediate determination of time or its first dimensions. Let
us firmly maintain nonbeing from its being by opposing it to the latter, put as
existing in such a way that this nonbeing sublates it: we put the yet-to-come; it is an
other which is the negation of this now: the second dimension. The yet-to-come will
be [means]: we present it to ourselves as something, we transfer ourselves to the
latter the being of the present, we do not represent it to ourselves as something
purely negative. But this being given to itself falls outside itself: it is a [being]
represented. Its true being is to be now. Like the positive, the now consists of
immediately sublating its being, likewise [the] negative [consists of] immediately
negating [p.168] its nonbeing and to being. It is itself now, as the surface, being the
limit of space, is itself spatial. The yet-to-come is thus immediately in the present;
for it is the moment of negation in the latter. The now is as much a being that
disappears as it is a nonbeing [that], immediately, transformed itself into its own
opposite, into being. By virtue of this immediacy, the being of their distinction falls
outside of them.
(c) ‘‘The yet-to-come, in opposition to the now, existing sublation of being, is
determined as the non-existing sublation [of being]. This nonbeing, sublating itself
immediately by itself, is indeed itself existing and now, but its notion is not that of
the immediate now proper: it is the now that has sublated and absorbed the now
[that is] denier of immediacy. As opposed to these other dimensions, the latter is the
past. We maintain it from other dimensions. But, thanks to its immediacy, [namely]
to be in its turn a negation directed against the denying-now (‘‘le maintenant
négateur’’), or to make of the yet-to-come the past, or [yet again] in relation to
itself, to sublate it as negation, it [the past] is itself the now; and, by virtue of the
indivisibility of the now, the three of them have one and the same now.’’
Is it necessary to insist on the agreements and differences presented by the text of
Realphilosophie, which I have just cited, and the Jenenser Logik, which I have analyzed
earlier? I have already stated how the most recent text appears more ordered, more
systematic, more ‘‘dialectical.’’ Note that the primitive terminology is not preserved: the
distinction, so important, between ‘‘the present’’ and the ‘‘now’’ is provisionally
abandoned. Perhaps this is because it could not be maintained everywhere, especially
since Hegel did not dispose of [p.169] a second term as to oppose it to ‘‘yet-to-come’’
(Zukunft), just as the ‘‘now’’ opposes itself to the ‘‘present’’ and the ‘‘former-now’’ to the
‘‘past.’’ Note as well that Hegelian analysis nowadays is less about the acts themselves
than about their correlata, their immanent objects, that it also takes an experimental
outlook, in some sense; it follows step by step the action of negation, the dialectic of the
‘‘no’’ applied to the now and to time. Note finally the insistence on the character of the
now’s immediacy. The now is, essentially. That is what gives the now—present
instant—its ontological primacy and what explains, on the other hand, that the dialectic
of the instant forms the necessary counterpart to that of the infinite. The now is
123
396 D. Tazi
immediately, and it is starting from this immediacy that the yet-to-come and the past
constitute themselves. The yet-to-come first, ‘‘then’’ the past—Hegel remains faithful to
his doctrine about the primacy of the yet-to-come (future) over the past—do not leave
the now, do not extend it, and [they] do not extend themselves in it as would a line
passing from a point do. The yet-to-come—what will be—draws its being from the now
which is, but by doing so it negates and replaces it, this way itself denying itself. And if it
is us who are now giving, or transferring, being from the ‘‘now’’ to the yet-to-come, one
only does it by negating the ‘‘now.’’ Further, it is the very negation of the now, negating it
and hence negating its being, that projects itself in the yet-to-come that it [the negation]
opposes to it [the now] and that it thus opposes to itself. Likewise, it is by negating
itself—as yet-to-come—that the yet-to-come becomes now and existing. By doing so, it
accomplishes the present that it sublates; it also accomplishes itself and opposes itself
once more to the future that it once was and is no longer, to the past that it will be and it is
not yet. However, the past, opposing itself to the ‘‘now,’’ is itself now, a second now, that
which Hegel had once named ‘‘present.’’
Hegel proceeds:
‘‘The past is time accomplished; on the one hand as past, that is as a dimension,
it is the pure result or the truth of time;*128 on the other hand, however, it is the time
of totality; the past itself [p.170] is only a dimension, a negation immediately
sublated in itself, or it is now. The now is only the unity of these dimensions. The
present is no more and no less than the past or the yet-to-come. What is absolutely
present or eternal is time itself as unity of the present, the yet-to-come and the past.
‘‘When we say of time that, from the viewpoint of the absolute, it is annihilated, we
blame it either for its instability [the fact that it is ephemeral and temporary], or for its
negative character. But this negativity is the absolute concept itself, the infinite, the
pure self of being for itself,*129 just as space is the pure self in itself, placed objectively.
It is therefore the highest power of all that is, and the true manner to envisage anything
is to envisage it in its time, that is to say in its concept, where everything is only a fading
moment. On the other hand, however, [we blame it] because the moments of the real
separate themselves in time, one is now, the other was, and yet another will be, [but] in
truth, everything inasmuch as it is separated, is immediately one unity. Yet, the fact of
being separated does not belong to time as time, but rather to the space which comes
with it, for, precisely, it is not the indifferent separation of moments, put outside each
other, but precisely this contradiction of possessing in an immediate unity what is
purely and completely opposite.
[p.171] This character of immediacy in which moments dissolve themselves is
what I just recalled, namely, that the distinction of its dimensions fall outside the
latter, that it is we who are the space where they [dimensions] are placed,
distinguished, as much as it is we who are the time that moves the negativities of
space [in such a way] that they are its dimensions and their different positions…
128
Koyré’s note: Time finds its truth in the yet-to-come, because it is the yet-to-come which completes
and accomplishes being. But this complete and accomplished being therefore belongs to the past.
129
Koyré’s note: Cf. Phänomenologie des Geistes (SW, II, p.36): ‘‘Time … is the existing concept
itself,’’ der daseyende Begriff selbst. Being for itself, the being conscious of itself is then essentially
negating and temporal.
123
‘‘Time casts itself into an abyss (‘‘s’abı̂me’’) by itself in its past as [forming] its
totality, that is this dimension is its explicit sublation.*130 Whether its truth is here
or not, this is founded on the immediacy of the self-sublation of moments, which
precisely means, their non-preservation. But time only is [this action of]
distinguishing; it is not there as long as its distinctions are not there either; and
they are not in this immediacy of self-sublation. It is rather pure mediation that falls
back into immediacy. Hence, as much as time [results] from space, it is also its
result.
‘‘This immediacy in which time has returned is however something other than the
first one from which we have started, for it is also the absolutely mediatized. It is
only the substance of both, which is their unity, their substance [maintains], as that
which has not yet been put, one of their moments always falling outside each one of
them, within the other.
‘‘It [substance] is duration; it is only in this way that space and time are.’’131
Is it necessary to extensively comment these texts in which Hegel poses the
necessary union, the dialectical identity of essence and existence, of eternity and
time, which form the basis of the whole edifice of Hegelianism, the basis of ‘‘the
identity of logic and history,’’ consequently the basis of the logic and philosophy of
history? Do I have to insist on the light [p.172] they throw on the texts of the
Encyclopedia which I have cited earlier?
But, thereby, what does one find in the Encyclopedia in the place of these
analyses and descriptions that are so profound and rich? Almost nothing: one
sentence on Chronos, another on the necessity of not separating eternity and time.
And this whole doctrine that is so curious of the prevalence of the yet-to-come over
the past is condensed in the order in which Hegel enumerates the moments or
dimensions of time: now, yet-to-come, past.
And one cannot but have a feeling of unease when pondering how little the texts
published by Hegel inform us on the real steps of his thought, when thinking about
the extent to which these exoteric texts are, deep down, esoteric and secretive; and a
feeling of admiration if one ponders precisely this secret work, which underlies and
bears the esoteric phrases of the Encyclopedia.
But let me come back one more to time, to this Hegelian time which is, as one
sees, neither a ‘‘mobile image of an immobile eternity,’’ nor a homogenous milieu,
nor the number of movement. To this time, which denying itself, soars to the yet-to-
come before falling back into the past; to this all-destroying Chronos, essentially
opposed to persistence and preservation, because [it is] essentially [the] principle of
creation, of the new, of time, which alone is eternal because it is spirit, and which
alone is real because it is essentially present. A dialectical present, tense, dramatic.
A present victorious over the past, encompassing it and rendering it present: this
time, once more, is not the time of formulas and watches. This time, it is historical
time, essentially human time. For, Hegel says, it is we who project ourselves in the
yet-to-come, by negating our present and by making it a past. And it is we who, in
our memory, take back and revivify this dead and accomplished past. It is in we, it is
130
Koyré’s note: Completed and accomplished time, then stopped, is space.
131
Hegel, Jeneser Realphilosophie.
123
398 D. Tazi
in our life that the present of spirit realizes itself. The dialectic of time is the
dialectic of man. It is because man is essentially dialectical, which means essentially
negating, that the dialectic of history, nay, that history itself, is possible. It is
because man says no to his now—or to himself—that he has a yet-to-come. It is
because he negates that he has a past. It is because he is time—and not only a
temporal [one]—that he also has a present, a present victorious of the past.
Victorious over the past; encompassing it without sublating it. For the past, the
death of time, time elapsed, stopped, must underlie every instant of spiritual
duration and must be overcome by the spirit. Hegel will say later, ‘‘It is not the spirit
which ignores death, it is the one which masters it and bears it in himself who is the
true spirit.’’ The instant of the present—[p.173] any instant of the present—the now
tended towards the yet-to-come, and encompassing the past, is already an instant of
eternity. Any nunc is a nunc aeternitatis, for eternity is time itself, the eternal
movement of the spirit.
However, although time may be the existing dialectic, and thus the existential
one, of the spirit, time cannot be separated from space inasmuch as spirit cannot be
separated from nature. It is only in their union, which is also dialectical, that they
realize themselves. And in the same way that time and space only truly exist in
duration and place, and that there is no un-spatial time as much as there is no
timeless space, there is also no nature [that is] non spiritualized, nor is there a spirit
[that is] non natured. For if spirit, as Hegel describes it in a striking formula, is
‘‘what finds itself’’ and what only exists in and through this act of recognizing itself,
for finding itself and recognizing itself, it needs to disperse and lose itself,
previously and simultaneously. If time in the real present meets the dead past and
infuses life in it, there also needs for it to be, in itself, always already to fall into it,
to be extinguished, to die, and for it to have done it already.
That is how, in the Hegelian conception, the dialectical nature of the instant
ensures the contact and co-penetration of Time and Eternity. But it is also what
explains in the last analysis the failure of the Hegelian effort. For, if time is
dialectical and if it constructs itself from the yet-to-come, it is, whatever Hegel says,
eternally incomplete. Furthermore, the present itself—which is already the yet-to-
come—, is not anything which can be grasped. For the spirit, indeed, can render the
present past. It can only do it, however, through the help of the yet-to-come.
Thus, only the dialectical character of time makes a philosophy of history
possible, but at the same time, the temporal character of the dialectic makes it
impossible. For the philosophy of history, whether one likes it or not, is its
interruption. One cannot foresee the yet-to-come, and the Hegelian dialectic does
not allow it to us, since the dialectic, the expression of the creative role of negation,
expresses its freedom at the same time. The synthesis is unpredictable: one cannot
construct it; one can only analyze it. Philosophy of history—and through it Hegelian
philosophy, the ‘‘system’’—, would only be possible if history ended, if there were
no longer any yet-to-come (future), only if time could stop.
It might be that Hegel believed this. It is possible that he believed that there lay
not only the essential condition of the system—it is only with the falling of twilight
that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings—but also that this essential condition was
123
already realized, that history was indeed completed, and that it is precisely for this
reason that he could and that he was able to accomplish it.
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Cont Philos Rev (2018) 51:361–400

Translation and introduction: Alexandre Koyré’s

Published online: 7 April 2018

Abstract This is a translation of Alexandre Koyré’s important, but overlooked

Keywords Alexandre Koyré Hegel Jena Logic Temporality Dialectics

& Doha Tazi

1 Trajectories of Koyré’s Hegel

French philosophical movements of the twentieth century—phenomenology,

2 A genealogy to Derrida’s Différance

In ‘‘Différance,’’ Derrida mentions that Koyré’s translation of eine/absolute

Echoing Hegel’s comparison of ‘‘the body of the sign’’ to an Egyptian pyramid,

2.1 A work of displacement

In Derrida’s reading of Koyré’s translation of the Jena Logic, the displacement of

subvert. It is to work within the text of philosophy, finding in it the ‘‘undecidables,’’

3 Philosophy of time; dialectics of time

While merely one sentence is devoted to Chronos in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, and

3.1 Dialectics of time; dialectics of spirit

3.2 The ‘‘now’’ shattered by the future

as it is both the condition of possibility and of impossibility of the present. The

3.3 Heidegger and Koyré: two Hegels

If we compare Koyré’s Hegel, as conveyed so far, to Heidegger’s, two very different

Heidegger is accurately portraying a ‘paradigmatic Hegel’—in Hegel’s Philos-

yet-to-come (‘‘l’avenir’’). [Koyré notes: The yet-to-come is then the truth of

3.4 The past as a divided whole

3.5 Koyré’s conclusion

3.6 The method: destroying, clearing rather than constructing

Alexandre Koyré’s ‘‘Hegel at Jena’’

[p.135] Hegel’s philosophy—this is a point on which all his historians and

Happy peoples—cannot we attempt to hypothetically reconstitute the follow-up

Everyone is aware of the primordial importance that notions related to history

‘‘moments’’ (waiting for the yet-to-come (future), re-presentation of the past),

The Hegelian ‘‘dialectic’’ is a phenomenology. Hegel, once more, only needed to

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