Positing or ‘Absolute’ Reflection

3.1.1 Positing

Since it has no starting point outside itself and only is what it is in what we might call its ‘self-assertion,’ Hegel terms the first form of reflection he considers, ‘positing [setzende]

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reflection.’ In introducing this form of reflection, Hegel underscores its contradictory nature: the immediacy that the process of positing acquires through its self-relation, as the ‘going together’ (zusammengehen) with itself of negation (or the negative), is also a

negative relation to self.

This movement of self-negation is described by Hegel as a returning movement.35 As he writes, ‘The self-relation of the negative is, therefore, its return into itself; it is immediacy as the sublating of the negative, but immediacy simply and solely as this relation or as the return from a negative’ (SL 401/LW 15). Now Hegel’s use of the term ‘return’ [Rückkehr] may appear strange here, insofar as the premise of positing reflection is precisely that nothing precedes this movement. As I read him, however, Hegel is attempting to draw attention to the paradoxical character of reflection. Because the movement of self-relating negation acquires a certain immediacy in virtue of being a self- relation, it appears as a movement of return to the immediacy that ‘previously seemed to be the starting point of the reflective movement’ (SL 401/LW 15). In truth, however, we know from Hegel’s analysis of Schein that no such immediacy can precede the reflective movement: we know that the negation is always already in itself negated. Thus Hegel notes that, in truth, it is only in returning that reflection is ‘that which begins or returns’ (SL 401/LW 16, trans. modified).

The immediacy that is thus ‘posited’ in this movement, and which ‘previously seemed to be’ the origin of the movement, is called by Hegel positedness or posited being

[Gesetztsein]. Posited being is that which Schein has become now that it has proved to be

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Houlgate criticises Miller’s translation of Hegel’s Rückkehr as ‘return,’ since it is only in the ‘return’ itself that that which would be ‘returned to’ would be created. Houlgate thus prefers ‘turning back’ (Houlgate, ‘Essence, Reflexion, and Immediacy in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, p. 143). I retain ‘return’ here, however, in order to emphasise the paradoxical character of this movement.

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only the Schein of essence itself. Like Schein, posited being is then a form of determinate

immediacy. This is made clear by Hegel when he writes that it is ‘immediacy purely as determinacy’ (SL 401/LW 15, trans. modified), and ‘determinacy as negation in general [überhaupt]’ (SL 406/LW 22, trans. modified). Posited being is ‘negation,’ or the ‘negative,’ however, only insofar as the negative is only in already being negated. To this extent, its immediacy is ‘reflected,’ since posited being is only as a moment generated within the movement of reflection.

3.1.2. Presupposing

As we have seen, reflection has no starting point outside itself. At the same time, however, its movement is a ‘reflection-into-self’ only as the negation of the negative. In this movement, Hegel notes, reflection only comes to coincide with itself through its negation ‘of the negative as negative’ (SL 401/LW 16). But this suggests that it is not pure positing after all, and in fact has a presupposition. It has to presuppose this negative as

(immediately) negative in order for the movement to begin at all. Thus, contrary to how things initially seemed, reflection does indeed seem to have to presuppose ‘that from which it is the return’ in order to return (SL 401/LW 16).

In taking this presupposition of positing reflection, along with Houlgate,36 to be the very negative that is negated in positing reflection, my reading here again goes against Henrich’s. In line with his interpretation of seeming as positive immediacy, Henrich takes the presupposition of positing reflection to be a reconstruction, within essence, of the positive, not the determinate, immediacy of being. Henrich’s reasoning is the following: reflection, for Hegel, is the sublation of the negative. This negative is the

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other of reflection and so stands in an immediately negative relation to reflection. But in sublating this negative as negative, reflection also sublates the negative’s negative

relation to reflection,37 and leaves it as what we might call a ‘pure positive’ that is indifferent to reflection. The presupposition is then posited as not posited because the relation cancels itself as a relation in the relation itself. Though the presupposition is generated by reflection, it thus seems to fall outside the circle of reflection.38

Henrich’s reading, then, is based on a particular reading of Hegel’s statement that reflection is the negation of the negative as negative. For Henrich, the statement means here that reflection precisely negates the negative character of the negative, making it positive. Now Henrich’s reading is not ‘wrong’; the problem with it is rather that he is one step ahead of Hegel’s development. As Houlgate notes, this dimension of reflection only comes to the fore in Hegel’s discussion of the next form of reflection: external reflection.39 In positing reflection, another dimension of this structure is emphasised, namely, that reflection is the negation of the negative as that which must first of all be taken as immediately negative.

3.1.3 The Presupposition of the Presupposition, or the Origin of the Origin

In the final paragraphs of Hegel’s analysis of reflection, this seemingly immediate negative that positing reflection seems to have to presuppose is itself shown to have to presuppose positing reflection. This is because the very immediacy that the negative seems to possess has already been shown in the transition to essence to be self-sublating.

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Henrich, p. 278.

38 _{Henrich, p. 274.} 39

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As Houlgate puts this: ‘we know that the reflexive negative never is simply negative but is self-negating from the start.’40 Like Schein, the presupposition is only what it is— negative—in being negated or as a nullity. Like Schein too, it therefore does not precede its being negated, yet at the very moment that it is negated, it seems to be immediate because it flashes up momentarily as that which is negated. The presupposition, then, only seems to fall outside the circle of reflection, since it only falls outside the circle from within it.

We then return to the opening of positing reflection, since it has become clear that ‘what is thus found [Dieses Vorgefundene] only comes to be through being left behind; its immediacy is sublated immediacy’ (SL 402/LW 16). To this extent we might then say, following Houlgate, that that which is presupposed is in truth pre-posited

(Voraus-gesetzt).41 Indeed, Hegel states that reflection ‘setzt sich voraus.’ Ultimately, of course, this amounts to saying that the presupposition is in truth only posited being: ‘Reflection, as absolute reflection is essence that seems within itself and presupposes for itself only seeming, positedness’ (SL 402-3/LW 17).

This does not mean, however, that the presupposition simply vanishes and that reflection closes on itself. Rather, the presupposition itself has been found to presuppose positing. Yet positing will again come to presuppose it, and so on, ad infinitum. Reflection is therefore described by Hegel as an ‘absolute recoil [absoluter Gegenstoß]’ within itself insofar as it ceaselessly moves from positing to presupposing (SL 402/LW 17).

Furthermore, this ceaseless movement takes place because, due to the contradictory nature of essence as the self-relation of negation, each of the moments is

immediately the other in being itself, for each ‘is only itself, in that it is the negative of

40 _{Houlgate, ‘Essence, Reflexion, and Immediacy in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, pp. 144–5.} 41

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itself’ (SL 402/LW 17). Hegel thus writes of reflection that its ‘arrival at itself is the sublation of itself and self-repelling, presupposing reflection, and its self-repelling is its arrival at itself’ (SL 402/LW 17, trans. modified). It is this contradiction which gives rise to the Nachträglichkeit proper to essence that comes to the fore here. For the presupposition, as we have seen, does not precede positing, it only ‘will have been’ prior to positing through the movement of positing itself. As Houlgate writes, ‘The reflexive negative, one might say, thus comes to have been simply negative in the very movement in which it turns into affirmative immediacy.’42 Likewise, positing will have been prior to the presupposition.