twists and turns of hegel’s contradiction
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reflection, is the moment of empiricism in the dialectic of the Logic of Essence. The only resource thought has for identifying its objects at this stage is to submit them to a comparison that is as exhaustive as possible. One recalls Hume, for whom the first relation between ideas is that of resemblance.18 But the Hegelian mole is persistent. Even a thought as doomed to exteriority and dispersion as is “external reflection” must deal with the necessary transformation of the given into thought. The task is not only to note similarities and dissimilarities. These must be brought back to a principle. One cannot remain at a figure of thought in which diversity is given, and the distinction of objects is a fact irreducible to thought. If two terms are, in their existence as given, distinct for an external comparison, this distinction must originate in their complete determination by thought. Hegel finds this necessity expressed in Leibniz’s “principle of the identity of indiscernibles.” This principle is thus presented at once as the expression of an empiricist attitude, to which diversity belongs, and as expressing the demand to move beyond empiricism. This twofold evaluation of Leibniz’s principle is significant. For on the one hand, Hegel aligns himself with Kant in condemning the complicity of Leibnizian rationalism and empiricism. On the other hand, he aligns himself with Leibniz in expressing the demand for the complete determination of objects of thought. I will now examine in turn these two aspects of Hegel’s view. (1) Hegel thinks, like Kant does, that there is a deep complicity between dogmatic metaphysics and empiricism. For Hegel just as for Kant, identifying the object of perception with the object of thought leads Leibniz to think that one can bring back any numerical distinction to a distinction of essence, or (in Kant’s terms) a conceptual distinction. Hegel cites as a ludicrous illustration of Leibniz’s view the spectacle of noble court ladies claiming to put the principle of the identity of indiscernibles to the test by running all over their gardens in search of two identical leaves (GW 11, 271; S. 6, 53; L. 422).19 In the Preliminary Concept of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel characterizes the relationship between empiricism and rationalist metaphysics in the following terms: Empiricism has this source [experience as the source of truth], in common with metaphysics, which like empiricism takes as a warrant for the legitimation of its definitions – of their presuppositions as well as of their determinate content – the representations, i.e. the content that initially comes out of experience . . . (GW 20, 75; S. 8, 107; E .L. §38, 61)