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section, three long chapters, to its exposition? If at the end of Section 2, “Appearance,” the object was completely taken up in thought, if “exteriority” was the “manifestation of that which it is in itself,” why do we not go directly to the concept, with which this identity will be expressed as the dynamic unity of the general, the particular, and the singular? Let us refrain for now from the pleasure of making trite remarks about Hegel’s mania for mediations. Instead, let us give Hegel the floor. He will tell us that the unity of reflection and its object must still be taken on by reflection itself. The constitution of the object as a totality of thought-determinations must be recognized as the product of reflection, and not considered in turn as a given, a mere being-there, again the object of an external reflection. The reason Chapter 1 of Section 3, “The Absolute,” is devoted to Spinoza’s substance, is that according to Hegel Spinoza offers a good example of such an error. Having brought back the constitution of each determinate object to the absolute unity of the substance, Spinoza, according to Hegel, nevertheless considered the substance as given to an “external reflection.” He did not know how to think what he had discovered. He imagined he was defining a reality independent of reflection while he was defining the highest product of reflection. Spinoza expresses in his own way the externality of reflection with respect to its own product. So against Spinoza, Hegel wants to expound how reflection gives itself its own production process as what is, itself, to be reflected. Reflection must appropriate actuality as being produced by itself, as being nothing but itself. Then one reaches “actuality proper” (GW 11, 369; S. 6, 186; L. 529)15 or actuality reflected as actuality. Then any misinterpretation of a statement like “the actual is rational” will be warded off. For one will have answered the question: what is this “actual” I am talking about? What is it, for thought, to think actuality? Now, to answer such a question is to meet with the problem of modal categories. This is why Chapter 2 of Section 3 deals with modality: actuality (Wirklichkeit), possibility (as opposed to impossibility), and necessity (as opposed to contingency). But, as one would suspect, Hegel profoundly transforms the traditional meaning of these modal determinations. To understand this transformation, we must once again recall the result of Kant’s Copernican Revolution: actuality is not only the object of thought, it is its production. For classical metaphysics,16 the meaning of modal categories is at once logical and ontological. Modal categories characterize the degree of coincidence – or as the case may be, the distance – between the forms