Simple Connection I: Categories
摘要
This chapter is the first of two devoted to Hegel’s discussion of Simple Connection in the Jena Logic. Hegel divides this section on Simple Connection into sections on the categories of Quality, Quantity, Quantum and Infinity, and this chapter discusses the first two of these. Hegel reverses the order of quality and quantity relative to their appearance in Kant’s Table of Categories, and this reversal is the first clue for understanding how Hegel revises the Kantian categories in a profound and even violent way. The section of the manuscript on quality is lacunary but can be reconstructed from what remains of a discussion of limit as a manifestation of qualitative unity. The treatment of quantity begins with numerical unity, which is followed by treatments of multiplicity and allness. At the end of this chapter I compare Hegel’s treatment of allness as totality with that which has been given by Werner Hamacher for Hölderlin, and particularly in his essay, Becoming in Dissolution. For the comparison of Hegel and Hölderlin I draw on the inferential semantics of James Garson.