I. Logic as ontology

We will begin by examining the key to Houlgate's reading, the ‘presuppositionless’ opening of the Logic. Houlgate argues that this methodological stricture requires that we understand ourselves as passive ‘spectators’ of the self-development of ‘thought as being’. This view gives rise to three core difficulties. First, I show that Houlgate's identification of thought as being runs together being (Sein) and existence (Dasein) and objectivizes thinking. Second, Houlgate thereby renders thinking an object of passive apprehension that develops ‘before our very eyes’. As a result, LAO voids thinking of its key distinguishing feature, the power of self-determination. Third, because pure thinking in Houlgate's account is an object of passive apprehension and not our own self-determining power, the categories it derives are powerless to bind either us or the world. Consequently, the LAO view generates a two-horned dilemma: either the categories are externally imposed constraints we are unable to justify (logical authoritarianism) or they are arbitrary results of intellectual acts that lack objective force (logical anarchy).

Broadly speaking, Hegel's Science of Logic is an account of the forms of being and the forms of thought in their identity. As Houlgate remarks in his landmark work The Opening of Hegel's Logic, ‘[Being exhibits] a logical form or structure that is intelligible to thought and is the same as the structure of our basic categories’ (Reference Houlgate2006: 117). Both the ontological and metaphysical readings hold that Hegel tasks himself with overcoming Kantian scepticism regarding the applicability of the categories of thought to things in themselves. For Hegel, ‘although the categories do belong to thinking as such, it does not follow at all from this that they should for that reason be ours alone’ (EL: §42A3).Footnote ⁵ As Hegel argues, the categories are not empty forms to be imposed on an exogenous content but are ‘thought-determinations’ that ‘must be exhibited in their necessity’ (that is, derived or deduced in their own right) (EL: §42). It is at this point that Houlgate's distinctive interpretation of the Logic begins to come into view.

Houlgate's account places a great deal of weight on the famous ‘presuppositionless’ opening of the Logic, which is said to stem from Kant's own principle of freedom, understood as the demand that thinking be ‘set free from all authority’ (EL: §60).Footnote ⁶ For Houlgate, if we are to think without presupposition, we can take nothing on authority and must give ourselves over to pure thinking as it is in itself. Because Hegel cannot assume from the outset the categories or the forms of judgment, he is said to follow and deepen Descartes's indubitability thesis, by starting not from the existence of the individual thinker (the ‘I think’) but rather from ‘the simple “is” of thinking’. Whereas Descartes understands thinking epistemologically as what we can know beyond any doubt, Houlgate's Hegel understands thinking ontologically as what there immediately is for us thinkers (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:15–16). In other words, Houlgate takes as his starting point ‘the sheer indeterminate being of thought’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:45). Such being is indeterminate because we cannot yet say—on pain of begging the question of thinking—what ‘pure thinking’ amounts to. In contrast to Hegel's Phenomenology, in which thought is confronted by a sensible object in empirical experience, in the Logic thought no longer presupposes an existent object but considers only itself. As Houlgate writes, ‘At the start of such logic, thought thinks its own pure simplicity, but such simplicity is precisely sheer indeterminate being; thought thinks being, therefore, in thinking nothing but itself’. Thought's awareness of itself is taken by Houlgate to consist in an ‘intellectual intuition’ or direct apprehension of ‘what there is’, being as such (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:129, 107). Houlgate thus infers from the being of thought to ‘thought as being itself’. Thought's awareness of itself as being has two key features, per Houlgate's account.

First, as the readers of the Logic, we are supposed to suspend ‘our’ own presupposition-laden thinking, the capacity for judgment and inference that—according to Kant—is constitutive of self-consciousness. ‘When thought is conceived as judgment or inference’, Houlgate writes, ‘it can also be conceived as our activity in contrast to what there is’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:107). This is the basis of Houlgate's dispute with Pippin and LAM more generally.Footnote ⁷ According to Houlgate, one of the deepest problems with the LAM view is that it is not fully presuppositionless because it takes for granted the Kantian understanding of judgment as the minimal unit of thought.Footnote ⁸ For Houlgate, pure thinking at the start of the Logic must abstract even from general-logical rules like the law of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle; self-conscious thought—Kant's ‘transcendental unity of apperception’—is a concrete determination that is said to arise at a derivative level of the system, in Hegel's Realphilosophie (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:53, 129). The thought that ‘is’ stands over against the judgmental activity of actual thinkers.

Second, if we are to avoid the Kantian error of taking judgment for granted, we must (according to Houlgate) resolve to ‘passively’ bear witness to the self-development of thought, in order to ascertain what being itself ‘proves’ to be. For Houlgate, we must give up any prior assumptions about the nature of thought in order to ‘discover’ what categories might be implicit in it. Such categories are said to develop by virtue of their own internal ‘logical, dialectical rhythm’. The subject thereby ‘surrenders’ herself to the ‘necessity inherent in thought’, a necessity that ‘has no source but thought's own indeterminate being’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:63, 75). It is not clear how Houlgate understands such ‘necessity’ (a point to which we will return below), but by locating such necessity in being itself, Houlgate hopes to show that the self-determination of thought is precisely not a derivation of epistemic constraints on a possible object (as in Kant), which may or may not be met with in experience. The self-determination of thought is rather held to be a robustly ontological determination of being itself and thus of what there really is. Once again, Houlgate attempts to distinguish the ‘pure thinking’ inherent in being from the merely conscious thought of those observing being/thought unfold. Because pure thinking itself is what is, the development of the categories of thought just is the development of the categories of being: the emergence of the thought-form ‘something’, for example, entails that being itself becomes ‘something’, that ‘something’ now is ‘what there is’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:169). This is the fundamental thought of logic conceived as ontology.

The first thing to note about Houlgate's reading is that, in taking the identity of thought and being to mean that thinking is, he initially assumes that being is an existential predicate attaching to thought. Houlgate ascends through a process of abstraction to the supposedly most general possible predicate, being, which is ostensibly the only predicate we can ‘presuppositionlessly’ ascribe to thought. We cannot say that thought has this or that determinate property, but we can say—just by virtue of thinking—that thought is. Yet Houlgate just thereby commits a cardinal philosophical sin, first identified by Aristotle: he treats being as ‘the highest genus’ (2016: 998b22–25).Footnote ⁹

One way of elaborating Aristotle's critique is to point out that the conception of being as a genus under which everything falls would beg the question of what it is for such being itself to be, since no higher-order concept would be available to determine it as being. And this hits on the first difficulty in Houlgate, who violates his own presuppositionless principle by assuming that pure being can be understood from the jump in terms of the ‘is’ of existence (‘thinking is’). At the start of the Logic, we do not yet have a functional notion of being, such that we know what it means to say of anything that it is.Footnote ¹⁰ While Houlgate is insistent that he adheres to Hegel's distinction between being (Sein) and existence (Dasein) (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:111), this claim is not borne out by his actual argumentation. The conflation of being and existence follows straight away from Houlgate's initial ascription of being to thinking. Houlgate might contend in response that being is not reducible to ‘the simple “is” of thinking’; indeed, as he emphasizes, ‘being is not the being of thought in particular but sheer being as such’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:129). Yet as we have seen, for Houlgate, it is because the being of thought just is ‘what is’ that it coincides with sheer being. ‘Sheer being’ on Houlgate's picture is thus indistinguishable from the existence of thinking. Accordingly, pure being functions as a determinate foundation on which to build. Houlgate thereby takes for granted the determinacy of both thought and being, whereas the Logic requires—as he himself repeatedly reminds us—that we start with pure being in its indeterminacy.

The decisive question, then, is what precisely it means to begin with pure being in its indeterminacy. Contra Houlgate, to think pure being truly without presupposition is to think not ‘the indeterminate being of thought’ but rather ‘the thought of indeterminate being’. Being is not a predicate of thinking but the wholly indeterminate, pure object of thought. Hegel (EL: §44) makes this especially clear when he notes that the Kantian thing-in-itself is a ‘complete abstractum’ void of determination and is precisely the ‘empty identity’ of thinking made ‘into an object for itself’. What Houlgate fails to acknowledge is that ‘the result of such an abstraction from everything existent’ is precisely ‘abstract being’, not being ‘in itself’, beyond thought (SL: 75/21.87, emphasis mine). This is to say that the abstraction from all determination with which the Logic begins is only conceivable as the thought of such an empty object, not an existent object that is thinking. Hegel could not be clearer: being is not thinking itself but ‘the first pure thought’ (EL: §86A2). As we will see, to think such a thought (‘pure being’) is not to think that ‘thinking is’ but to fail to think that anything is (SL: 74/21.86). While Houlgate insists that we are thinking successfully from the very beginning (namely, by thinking the being of thought), LAM will show that it is by virtue of this initial, necessary failure that we learn to think being consistently—and learn to think what it means to think per se.

We have seen that the ontological strategy rests on an illicit inference from the ‘being of thought’ to ‘thought as being itself’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2022: 1:132). According to Houlgate, because thinking alone ‘is’ at the start of the Logic, thinking just is ‘what there is’ and so is being. Houlgate's premise represents a violation of the presuppositionless principle by begging the question of being: LAO conflates being with existence (Dasein) and ascribes existence to thinking. Houlgate thereby conceives thought as something existent, as a determinate being, and precisely fails to think indeterminate being. While Houlgate claims that thinking is the ‘rationality in being itself’, we will now see that Houlgate's account of ‘thought as being’ contradicts his understanding of thinking as rational (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:3).

The second, corollary difficulty with LAO lies in the way it ‘objectivizes’ thinking, which results in the elimination of the subjectivity of thought. This is initially manifest in Houlgate's conflation of logical and chronological necessity. Houlgate explicitly acknowledges that his interpretation renders us, the readers of the Logic, mere spectators of the ‘necessity inherent in each category, that causes it to mutate before our very eyes’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:74). Houlgate argues that this is a ‘logical’ necessity, whereby being itself ‘proves’ to be some successor category (e.g. ‘becoming’). And as he notes in his analysis of the opening, the transitions in the Logic do not occur ‘in time’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:147–48), no more than the successive steps of an inference do. Yet Houlgate does not understand the necessity of the transitions as the kind of inferential ‘necessity […] that leads from judgments to further judgments’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:74). For Houlgate the transitions are not ‘logical’ in the standard sense but are precisely supposed to be ontological: they are supposed to follow from the being of thinking. The question is how such ‘ontological necessity’ is to be understood.

Houlgate is undoubtedly right that the transitions in the Logic are atemporal. His insistence on the atemporality of the transitions, however, is impossible to square with his own reading of the ‘passivity’ of thinking in passages like this one:

The problem with this picture is that the simple ‘being’ (the existence) of thinking is held to be responsible for the transition from one category to another. At best, this leaves the source of the necessity of the transitions unclear. In what sense does ‘thought's indeterminate being’ necessitate the transition to ‘nothing’? At worst, Houlgate's account of the passivity of thought treats being as somehow causally responsible for the transitions. If thinking is treated as existent, and if we are taken to be merely passively apprehending its development, then such ‘ontological’ transitions from one categorial form to another are virtually indistinguishable from ontic transitions in the external world. Likewise, if being is taken to ‘mutate’ ‘before our very eyes’, then logical necessity in Houlgate is no different from an external, chronological necessity whereby being changes state and causally gives rise to the form of what is (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:132). In so far as Houlgate holds that such necessity ‘coincides with thought's self-determination’, the autonomy of pure thinking is given no independent account and is reduced to the mechanical ‘mutation’ of pure being.

Houlgate's understanding of thought as ‘what is’, an object, leaves us unable to account for thinking in its distinctness from being. As noted, Houlgate understands the ‘principle of freedom’ which Hegel inherits from Kant as the requirement that thought be ‘set free from all authority’. Yet this restricts the post-Kantian notion of freedom to negative freedom (‘freedom from’) and fails to consider Kant's far more important and original conception of freedom as self-legislation.Footnote ¹¹ On this conception of freedom, rational agents are not ‘free from all authority’ but are themselves the sole source of normative authority. Pure practical reason itself establishes that, to be reason, it must be subject to no law it does not give to itself and must alone be responsible for determining what counts as an authoritative reason for performing an action or espousing a belief.Footnote ¹² As an exegetical matter, there is no question that Hegel accepts such a principle in the Logic: ‘When we consider thinking as it is in and for itself, it is not subject to any external laws, but is self-legislative’ (LL: §79).Footnote ¹³ Houlgate could argue that, in so far as being is said to determine itself, thought ‘gives itself’ such laws through its direct apprehension of itself as being. Yet on Houlgate's approach, the ‘conscious thought’ exhibited in the activity of any empirical knower ‘emerges only in the philosophy of spirit’ (that is, downstream from the Logic, in the Realphilosophie) and so does not give itself the categories of logic as its own self-legislated rules (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:129). Indeed, Houlgate's observational model of ‘our’ conscious thought introduces an opposition between pure and judgmental thinking that contradicts his claim that they will ‘prove to be’ identical in the Realphilosophie.

This brings us to the third difficulty with LAO. There are two ways to understand Houlgate's claim that being is directly apprehended by thinking. First, Houlgate argues that Hegel endorses an idea of ‘intellectual intuition’ according to which ‘thought by itself can know being directly’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:44). As Houlgate points out, this is not the Kantian idea of a thinking that spontaneously produces the objects it thinks but the pre-Kantian idea—shared by Anselm, Descartes, and Spinoza—of an ‘intellectual perceiving’ of being, the soul, and God by ‘the light of reason’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:34). Houlgate argues that thinking in the Logic must be intuitive rather than discursive if it is to apprehend being itself rather than the mere thought of being (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:44). Yet Hegel explicitly rejects the rationalist notion of intellectual intuition affirmed by Houlgate. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel targets intellectual intuition as an example of the epistemic paradigm of ‘immediate knowing’, which purports to sidestep concept-use in its knowledge of the absolute.Footnote ¹⁴ As Hegel argues, the problem with the rationalist idea is that it eliminates any sharable criterion of truth: ‘The basis for what is alleged to be true is subjective knowing and the assurance that I find a certain content in my conscience’ (EL: §71). Being, for example, is whatever one thinks that it is. Consequently, there is no determinate way in which being ought to be understood, by anyone trying to think it. Hegel thus makes clear that the ‘philosophising standpoint’ based on intellectual intuition would only have the arbitrary ‘authority of one's own subjective revelation’ (EL: §63). What Houlgate fails to see, then, is that if thinking were to ‘directly apprehend’ the process through which being ‘mutates’ into the categories, the categories of thought would have no specifiable content, let alone be binding on the world. The result would thus be tantamount to logical anarchy, since any claim about the nature of being would be as valid (or invalid) as any other. Houlgate's attempt to hold the private thoughts and opinions of the individual ‘I’ at bay would founder.

Second, Houlgate claims that the transitions in the Logic are driven by the indeterminate nature of pure being itself, which we passively apprehend in its unfolding. Yet as we saw above, Houlgate's notion of ‘mutation’ begs the question of the necessity of the transitions and is unable to account for the precise way they rule forms of being in and out. Indeed, the idea that categorial forms are directly manifest to an observing subject comes perilously close to rendering what is supposed to be absolute and unconditioned merely contingent and derivable from experience.Footnote ¹⁵ The ‘mutations’ of being that we supposedly perceive cannot themselves tell us how we ought to understand being, unless such mutations are in fact the self-determined transitions of any possible thinker. Houlgate is clear that the Logic is an attempt to derive and ground the categories that make possible the experience of any individual knower, but unless the transitions are rationally justifiable to thinkers, they will have no authoritative bearing on what counts for any thinker as the thought of being. In stark contrast to Houlgate's view that pure thinking and self-conscious thought stand opposed in the Logic, Hegel is emphatic that ‘the “I” and thought are the same […]. In the “I” pure thinking is wholly present’. For the categories to be binding, I in my reflective role as pure thinker must regard them as authoritative, must take them to have validity just in my acts of thinking. The ‘I’ on Hegel's view expresses that pure thinking (Denken) must always be the ‘thinking of someone [Denkendes]’ (EL: §24A1; translation mine). Otherwise, Hegel's program would be vulnerable to the charge of logical authoritarianism, since the categories would be an external imposition on our thinking.

As we will now see, this last point suggests that, unless Houlgate gives up his claim that thought is an independent object of passive apprehension, his attempt to establish the objective validity of the categories will run aground. By Houlgate's own lights, the apperceptive activity of pure thinking must be grasped as the only possible source of the transitions in the Logic. As I have shown, by objectivizing thinking, Houlgate violates the idealist thesis of the spontaneity of mind that his own account requires. If being is taken to be an object of immediate apprehension, then either logical authoritarianism or logical anarchy ensues. If being is held to exercise immediate authority over what we think, then the categories are an unjustified, external constraint on thought (logical authoritarianism). If the nature of being is taken to be immediately apprehended in an act of ‘intellectual intuition’, then the categories are an arbitrary result of thinking (logical anarchy). In either case, the effect is to render the deduction groundless, foiling Houlgate's broader attempt to provide an ‘ontological’ proof of the objectivity of the categories.

II. The role of apperception in the Logic

As we have seen, Houlgate sequesters ‘conscious thought’ in the extra-logical domain of Hegel's Realphilosophie. As Houlgate notes, conscious thought consists in thinking ‘on the basis of reasons’, which is ‘not the way in which speculative philosophy is to proceed’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:87). Accordingly, for Houlgate, the categories in the Logic unfold independently of our capacity for judgment and inference. This sequestration of judgmental thinking has a precedent: Frege's influential separation of the content of a proposition from its assertoric force. To better understand the failure of LAO, we will first consider a key claim underpinning recent articulations of LAM, the rejection of Frege's separation of force/content.Footnote ¹⁶ I will argue that Hegel overcomes this distinction through his appropriation of the Kantian notion of apperception, which grounds the idea of rational necessity to which Houlgate claims to be entitled but which his own reading effectively disavows. We will then sketch the LAM account of Hegel's derivation of the rules of pure thinking and consider Houlgate's most pointed objection to Pippin's elaboration of LAM.

For Frege, to secure the objectivity and truth-bearing function of propositions, their content must be abstracted from the psychological attitudes and dispositions of individual knowers—much in the way Houlgate sequesters ‘judgmental thinking’ (Frege Reference Frege, Geach, Stoothoff and Beaney1997: 329). The content of a proposition is thus regarded as intrinsically unasserted and as intelligible apart from its ‘force’, its empirical assertion as true. Force, then, is affixed to the content of a proposition in a second step, through an act of judgment. Yet as Rödl has recently argued, if force is understood as external to content, then we cannot say in virtue of what a proposition says p rather than ~p. Judgment loses all logical traction because the proposition is indifferent to its own possible denial or negation (Reference Rödl2018: 43). While Frege does hold that propositional content is constrained by the principle of non-contradiction, if force is divorced from content then there is no difference between thinking a proposition and thinking its contradictory. If the contradictory content is to be grasped as contradictory, it must be taken to be false rather than true (Rödl Reference Rödl2020a: 512). Otherwise, there are only two distinct—rather than opposed—propositional contents. The thought of p does not rationally necessitate the negation of ~p. This in turn voids propositional content of its determinacy (its necessarily being this and not that), since there is no rational requirement to deny what such content excludes or to affirm what it entails. The determinacy of conceptual content is inseparable from the modality of rational necessity—understood in terms of contradiction (~ (p • ~p)), incompatibility (~ (p • q)), and consequence (p ⊃ q)—by which such content is articulated. For such necessity to get a grip, force must be regarded as internal to content. In articulating that a square is not non-square; that a square is not a circle; that a square is a shape; one must take such propositions to be true, if their conceptual content is to be the determinate content it is.

In contrast to Frege, the apperceptive model overcomes the opposition of force/content. In a revolutionary departure from the Cartesian tradition, Kant understands judgment as the minimal unit of thought for which the subject is responsible.Footnote ¹⁷ This is because concepts for Kant are not self-standing senses but predicates of possible judgments that function as rules or norms for their own application. For Kant, judgment is apperceptive because to judge is to be conscious of oneself as judging. Such consciousness of oneself does not consist in observational knowledge of just another object, one that the judger happens to be. If self-consciousness were just ‘consciousness squared’, only now of one's own mental activity, a regress would be unavoidable: one would have to be conscious of that consciousness. According to the Kantian view, self-consciousness is intelligible not as a second-order mental activity but only as an implicit attentiveness to the conceptual proprieties involved in doing or believing anything. As Pippin puts it, apperception consists in ‘implicit subscription to the requirements of any such judging’ (Reference Pippin2019a: 263). To judge something to be the case is thus to be attentive to the warrants for believing what one does (and one's reasons for denying the truth of an opposed belief) and to thereby be conscious of one's judgment as true. In taking our judgments to be valid just in making them, we take it that there is some way things themselves are about which we can be right or wrong. Any ‘take’ is thus susceptible to mistakenness, to the rational need to be revised.

Force is thereby understood as internal to content, which only has the determinate shape it does by virtue of the status of judgment as the consciousness of (1) its opposition to its own contradictory and (2) the inferential bases for taking things to be thus and so.Footnote ¹⁸ The apperceptive concept of judgment is thus the condition of the unity of the contradictory pair, p and ~p, since p only is as the negation of ~p and vice versa. Apperception is the ground of the possible opposition to—or affirmation of—either term.Footnote ¹⁹ Consequently, only if judgment is the consciousness of its own validity (and thus of its opposition to its contradictory) can I feel the force of the necessity to exclude q in thinking p or to infer q in thinking p. The apperceptive concept of judgment is thus the ground of the principles of inference (Rödl Reference Rödl2018: 137ff.).

Hegel radicalizes Kant's notion of apperception by showing that—contrary to Houlgate's sharp separation of the categories and the I—the self does not just apply concepts but in a fundamental sense is the Concept: the self is the purposive drive to effect its own unity through attentiveness to the conceptual rules for judging things as the determinate things they are (SL: 516/12.18–19).Footnote ²⁰ If rain could turn into steel, fall upwards and then burst into flames, for example, one could not even so much as purport to take anything as what it is. The basis of the unity of the concept—and thus of the self—would be lost, because there would be no entailments and exclusions determining the content of our theoretical claims or of our practical commitments. For the perception that ‘it is raining’ to count as ‘mine’, I must take it that the world ought to be so judged and thereby be responsive to the possible negation of my judgment, its contestation by another. In abiding by the concept ‘rain’, I am committed to denying that conditions are dry and to counting the nimbus clouds up above and the droplets on my skin as reasons for taking my judgment to be true. To judge what is the case is to be conscious of such inferential grounds of one's judgment.Footnote ²¹ Yet this is not to manifest a separate, second-order commitment to inference as a form of proof (as Carroll shows in his essay on the Achilles and the tortoise paradox) but to manifest one's self-knowledge as a judger—one's knowledge of how it is one must judge, if one's activity is to count as judging (Rödl Reference Rödl2018: 141).

As we saw above, LAO begins with the attempt to think ‘thought as being’ and to thereby observe what being-cum-thinking will prove to be. LAM, by contrast, begins with the attempt to think the ‘thought of being’ and to thereby determine how being must be thought, if it is to (intelligibly) be being. The LAM conception of judgment enables us to articulate an alternative to Houlgate's reading of the opening of the Logic. According to the apperceptive model, in judging anything to be the case (p), I am just thereby committed to denying the possible negation (~p) of my judgment. The thought of pure being—whether understood on Parmenides's model or Kant's—is a thought-content void of all determinacy that, ipso facto, prevents the denial of its own negation. In the case of Kant's thing-in-itself, no determination is available whereby we could distinguish it from that which it is not; in the case of Parmenides's One, whatever is not cannot be, since non-being is nothing. Either way, in thinking pure being, I am tacitly committed to denying that ‘p is not ~p’ can be thought: we cannot say what the ‘thing-in-itself’ is not, because that would determine it via negativa; we cannot say what pure being is not, because ‘what is not’ cannot be. This, in effect, means that in thinking pure being I am just thereby committed to holding that the thought of pure being is that of nothing, since it is a wholly indeterminate thought. Contrary to Houlgate's view that being mutates ‘before our very eyes’, being has ‘always already’ passed over into nothing because the concept of pure being inferentially entails its own negation.Footnote ²²

If, however, as in Houlgate, first there is the derivation of the categories and then there is I who employ them in judgments, then the opposition of force/content is reestablished and the thought of the validity of the categories is assumed to be external to the categories themselves. As I have shown, Houlgate is committed to the idea that being is immediately apprehended by thinking through intellectual intuition. Houlgate believes that this opens up a non-discursive, non-judgmental route to the derivation of the categories, with the application of the categories in judgment following in the Realphilosophie. While it might seem far-fetched to interpret Houlgate's approach along Fregean lines, my reading finds support in Houlgate's own claim that one of the key similarities between Frege and Hegel lies in their shared understanding of the ‘objectivity of logic’. According to Houlgate's account of Frege, logical entities such as concepts have a ‘necessary structure of their own’ that ‘reason has to discover’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2022: 2:43, 44).Footnote ²³ The laws of logic are said to have objective validity apart from their possible assertion as true. Houlgate argues that this Fregean idea captures the sense in which Hegel's own logic is ‘objective’, with the caveat that the categories of thought also hold, for Hegel, for being itself.

Yet as LAM shows, the objectivity of the categories precisely evaporates if each category is not understood as the consciousness of its own validity. On Houlgate's account, that pure being cannot be anything determinate is not the thought of the invalidity of pure being; likewise, that pure being turns out to be nothing is not the thought of the correctness of the claim that pure being must be nothing. In effect, the categories in Houlgate's reading become entirely inert and without force: there is nothing to stop one from holding that pure being is not nothing because the category of pure being is not the thought of its own invalidity. As Houlgate helps us to see, Fregean objectivism is nothing other than the siren call leading Hegelian science to shipwreck.

By prying force apart from content, Houlgate undermines his own end of vindicating Hegel's deduction. The categories, therefore, must be first-person thoughts—and pure thinking must be self-conscious—if the aim of securing the objectivity of the categories is to be accomplished. That thought is self-conscious means that thinking just is the thought of what it is to think, and what it is to think is to think the object of thought per se: being. Being is the ‘object of thought per se’ because to think is to try to think things as they are,Footnote ²⁴ and the thought of ‘being’ is the thought of how things can be. This understanding of the identity of thought and being represents Hegel's overcoming of a crucial distinction in Kant, between general and transcendental logic.Footnote ²⁵ According to Kant's distinctive formulation of a general logic, it comprises the rules for thinking as such, for combining terms in a judgment, in abstraction from all content. Such rules are not norms one ought to follow but may not follow, since to not abide by them is not to think sloppily or badly but to simply fail to think at all.Footnote ²⁶ Transcendental logic, by contrast, articulates the rules that govern the thinking of a possible object in experience. For Kant, general logic is formal and empty; it is the syntax for an exogenous semantic content, determined by the material rules of transcendental logic (Reference Kant, Guyer and Wood1998a: A76/B102).Footnote ²⁷

Yet what Hegel sets out to show is that, in determining the possible forms of thought, Kant is already well on his way to determining the possible forms of the thought of objects.Footnote ²⁸ Just as it is impermissible to formulate a judgment in which ‘wholly red’ and ‘wholly blue’ are predicated of the same subject at the same time, so is it impossible for the same substance to bear the properties of ‘wholly red’ and ‘wholly blue’ simultaneously.Footnote ²⁹ This will amount neither to a determination of how objects appear ‘for us thinkers’ nor to a derivation of what there empirically is from general-logical rules, as in Leibniz and Wolff. Rather, it will amount to a metaphysical specification—along Aristotelian lines—of all that it could mean to be an object, the only sense the notion of objectivity could make. Hence Hegel's claim that logic and metaphysics ‘coincide’ (EL: §24).

To summarize the LAM view, the Logic begins with the resolve to think pure thought itself, which is a resolve to think not mechanisms in the brain or psychological laws but the conceptual norms to which any thinker holds herself just in thinking anything at all. Self-conscious thought is thus the thought of how one must think, if one's activity is to count as thinking: the self-conscious thought of pure being is the thought of the falsity of one's thought, which rationally necessitates commitment to the thought that pure being is nothing. We thereby begin to determine how being itself must be conceived, if it is to be intelligible as being. Hegel tells us that the transition to Dasein, or ‘determinate being’, allows us to grasp in retrospect ‘the very indeterminateness of being [as] its quality’ (SL: 58/21.68). What we learn, in other words, is that the thought of pure being merely conceptualizes the necessity of its own a priori determinability—if it is not to be nothing, a failed thought.

As Hegel emphasizes, being and nothing are ‘mere abstractions’ that do not yet constitute ‘true determination[s] of thought’ (EL: §88). The first such determination is the very concept of ‘determinateness’ itself, qualitative and quantitative specificity. If determinability is the meta-category that governs the Logic of Being, then ‘predicability’ or ‘articulability’ will prove to be the ‘truth’ of such determinability, the higher meta-category that governs the Logic of the Concept.Footnote ³⁰ This concept is ‘higher’ because it reflects a greater degree of explanatory adequacy: we have now begun to explain not just the structure of possible objects but the very idea of explanation in terms of which such objects are explicable. Pure thinking begins to recognize that the determination of the content of the pure concept ‘being’ is the self-determination of pure thought in its attentiveness to what it is to think. To be objectively determinate just is to be intelligible, discursively articulable by—in principle—any thinker.

For Houlgate, however, the LAM view reduces being to what it is for thought and fails to make room for what being is ‘in itself’, apart from (judgmental) thinking. Yet the thought of being as thought-independent, as independent of the determining activity of judgment, is precisely what at the outset of the Logic proves to be a ‘self-negating’ thought. In attempting to think pure being, we could not exclude the contrary and think what being is not; as a consequence, we could not think of such being what it is. Far from vindicating Houlgate's thesis that being positively is as thinking, the opening of the Logic is the self-repudiation of thought in its attempt to think purely ‘positive’ being, uncontaminated by (discursive) determination. Houlgate counters Pippin's claim that ‘to be is to be intelligible’ by asserting that being must not be reducible to intelligibility, if it is to be being and not just thinking (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:131). But here Houlgate pays the price for the mistake of separating judgmental thinking from pure thought.

First, Houlgate has argued that pure thought is ‘what is’ and that, in apprehending itself, it apprehends being as such. On this ‘conflationist’ view, it is impossible to understand how pure thought could be even notionally distinct from being. Second, Houlgate trades on his distinction between judgmental thinking and pure thought in order to (illicitly) argue that there is a distinction between ‘the necessary structure of being for thought’ and ‘irreducible being itself’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:131). On the one hand, Houlgate accepts Pippin's claim that thought determines what ‘counts’ as being; on the other hand, what being is ‘in itself’ is held to be ‘irreducible’ to thought. Houlgate's claim that thought ‘conceives’ of and determines what ‘counts as’ being does not cohere with his own prior claims that (1) thought in the Logic is non-judgmental and that (2) it has an intuitive relation to being. Houlgate writes as if the distinction between judgmental thinking and pure thought were sufficient to establish a distinction between pure thought and being, but this is not the case, since judgmental thinking plays no role in the Logic for Houlgate. Thinking for Houlgate is rather defined by its passive apprehension of being through intellectual intuition. What this does demonstrate, however, is the emptiness of Houlgate's notion of pure thought: the only way he can specify a difference between pure thought and being is by contradicting his own repudiation of thinking as constitutively judgmental, as in his telling invocation of judgmental thinking when faced with Pippin's challenge. As Houlgate's own rhetoric conveys, if being is to be distinguished from the activity of thinking, it must be ‘conceived simply as being’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:111). This is exactly right, but it means that pure thought must thus be grasped not as an intuitive intellect but as the judgmental activity of conceiving being as distinct from thinking.

As we have established, any such distinction—if it is to be authoritative—must be made by thought. What being proves to be in the apperceptive specification of the determinate thought of being is thought-independent by virtue of its status as existence (Dasein). The category of existence does not establish that anything in particular does exist or that being must ‘give rise’ to existent things. Contrary to Houlgate's claim, Hegel is not out to answer the traditional Leibnizian question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’Footnote ³¹ Rather, Hegel tells us not that ‘something’ (Etwas) must be but that whatever is must be ‘something’ to intelligibly be. For things to be determinate, they must be grasped as dependent for their existence on empirical conditions, relations and processes that are not themselves the result of pure thinking. A science of logic can tell us what must be true of any law qua law, or life-form qua life-form, but it cannot establish that, if brought to 100°C at sea level, water will boil, or that healthy horses have four legs. This is just to say that thought itself determines that it is not causally responsible for what exists, not that the category of existence is anything other than self-legislated by thought. To then ask, ‘But what is being on its own, conceived apart from its intelligibility?’ is not only to miss the force of what has just been demonstrated (what it means to be, period) but also to uncritically appeal to some other conception of being (‘being “conceived” on its own’).

III. Logic as metaphysics

I have shown that pure thought in the Logic is reflectively attentive to the categories required to authoritatively think the thought of anything at all and to specify being in its determinacy. We are now in a position to examine in greater detail the categorial structure of the ‘pure object’ of thought. This structure is at the heart of Hegel's distinctively Aristotelian metaphysics, which he defines as ‘the science of things captured in thoughts’ (EL: §24). Metaphysics so conceived poses the question of what must be true of the form of any particular, such that it can be intelligible as the determinate particular that it is. It is no coincidence that Houlgate passes over in silence Aristotle's central role in Hegel's project. As we will see, Hegel develops a ‘logical hylomorphism’ in which the form of a thing is the principle of its apperceptive determination. The way Hegel explicitly weaves his account of judgment (logic) into his account of thinghood (metaphysics) poses an enormous obstacle for LAO.

The ultimate horizon of the Logic is Hegel's notion of actuality (Wirklichkeit), which grasps things in light of their own ‘concept’, an internal norm or principle of adequacy that is the fundamental ground of their knowability.Footnote ³² The notion of actuality is Hegel's way of inheriting and radicalizing Aristotle's hylomorphic understanding of the form/matter relation.Footnote ³³ The matter (hylê) of a tool, its physical make-up, is its potentiality (dunamis) for being utilized in accord with its function (ergon). Form (morphê), then, is essentially active: it consists in the ‘being-at-work’ (energeia) of the purpose or final cause that prescribes the proper shape of a tool and the parts essential to it.Footnote ³⁴ The actuality (entelecheia) of a chair, for example, lies in the realization of its purpose through its active use. In sitting down to write, I am not just resting on an inert object but activating (energeia) its chair-form and letting it be a chair; there is a real sense in which an unused tool is such a tool only ‘potentially’. It follows that an unstable chair with a broken leg is ‘actual’ to a lesser degree because it fails to adhere to its own concept,Footnote ³⁵ the kind (eidos) that defines its purpose or ‘reason’ for being (‘sitting’). For Aristotle, a primary substance (this iconic Eames chair) always belongs to a secondary substance kind, a genus (‘furniture’) or a species (‘chair’). This is treated equally as a metaphysical delimitation of thinghood and a logical relation between a subject term (primary substance) and the predicate that defines it as the substance it is.Footnote ³⁶ Accordingly, this latter kind or ‘genus’ concept (Gattungsbegriff) is not only ‘in the head’ of an artificer or a sitter but is also constitutive of a chair as the sort of material thing that it is. In the total absence of its functional form, such matter does not just indifferently persist but assumes a ‘privative’ status, ceasing to be ‘chair-matter’ altogether.Footnote ³⁷

As Pippin in particular has argued, for things to determinately be what they are, they must be ‘for’ their concept in this manner (Reference Pippin2019a: 54–55). According to what I will call Hegel's logical hylomorphism,Footnote ³⁸ being itself is thereby taken to embody and be determined by the concepts applied in apperceptive judgment—specifically, what Hegel calls the ‘judgment of the concept’.Footnote ³⁹ If ‘the chair is brown and large’ is the judgment form specific to a Logic of Being, and ‘chairs have legs’ specifies the sort of essential attribute at issue in a Logic of Essence, then ‘this chair—the one with a broken leg—is a bad chair’ is the value-laden, normative form of judgment we derive in a Logic of the Concept. This last form of judgment (the ‘apodictic’, according to Hegel) is the form of judgment ‘proper’, because its subject term embodies the thought not of bare matter or of an indeterminate substrate but of an individual (a ‘this’) determined by the kind-concept (‘chair’) that enables it to be the determinate particular (‘the one with a broken leg’) that it is.Footnote ⁴⁰ Likewise, the predicate term (‘bad’) relays its own non-arbitrariness and even ‘apodicticity’ by expressing an evaluative criterion intrinsic to the type of the token under consideration (EL: §§178–80).

I have suggested that LAO is unable to accommodate Hegel's logical hylomorphism, but is there not room in Houlgate's ontological reading for a derivation of the judgmental form of things? Houlgate indeed makes room for the derivation of cognition in the Begriffslogik, but he is clear that it must be distinguished from judgmental thinking: ‘Only towards the very end of the logic does being itself prove to be cognition, though even here what emerges is the onto-logical structure of cognition, rather than cognition in the form of conscious [i.e. judgmental and inferential] thought’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:129). One immediate difficulty is that it is not clear what the ‘onto-logical structure of cognition’ is supposed to be; Houlgate offers no further account of this crucial category. Moreover, Hegel explicitly identifies cognition in the Logic with the ‘judgment of the concept’ described above, whereby the ‘knowing subject posits the concrete reality of the [objective world] as identical with the concept, and conversely posits the latter as identical with objectivity’ (SL: 697/12.200, 696/12.199). Houlgate's ontological understanding of ‘thought as being’ militates against this conception of the form of a thing as the principle of its self-conscious comprehension, by any possible knower. In contrast to Houlgate's interpretation of the Logic, the LAM view does not observe how matter ‘really’ emerges out of being-cum-thinking and how matter ultimately ‘mutates’ into cognition itself. Rather, it demonstrates that being can only be cogently conceived as matter, which must be thought in turn as the bearer of the form of the ‘thinkable’, Aristotle's logos or the Hegelian concept.Footnote ⁴¹

We have hinted at several points that the Logic is not just an account of the form of any possible what, the things of which we make sense (an Objective Logic), but also an account of the form of any possible who, the kind of being who makes sense (a Subjective Logic). In contrast, Houlgate holds that self-conscious, judgmental activity arises only at a derivative level in the Hegelian system and that the ‘concept’ in the Logic ‘neither is, nor is related to, self-conscious thought’ (Reference Houlgate2019: 766). One of Houlgate's most repeated criticisms of the LAM view is that Pippin illicitly presupposes apperception at the start of the Logic, which is supposed to be presuppositionless. The intent of Hegel's methodological stricture is to prevent us, the readers, from interjecting our own views and to prevent pure thinking from begging the question of its own starting point—the tragic flaw in every philosophical system prior to Hegel's.

Yet we need not presuppose that pure thinking has meta-knowledge of the apperceptive structure of thinking for it to implicitly be apperceptive in its logical activity—no more than any empirical thinker must have meta-knowledge of apperception to be thinking apperceptively. That this is Hegel's position is clear in a deeply important passage early in the greater Logic. Hegel writes that, ‘as science, truth is pure self-consciousness as it develops itself and has the shape of the self’ (SL: 29/21.34). This directly contradicts Houlgate's claim (1) that pure thought is not self-consciousness and (2) that pure thought does not have the shape of the self. While Houlgate acknowledges that the ‘science as a whole’ is self-conscious, he insists that ‘at the outset, thought does not take itself explicitly to be self-conscious’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:52). Yet this gives away the whole game: if thought later comes to grasp itself as self-conscious, as Houlgate concedes, then it becomes cognizant of the logical form of any thinking, which has thus been implicitly operative since the start of the Logic. Hence Hegel's pet image of the ‘circularity’ of the Logic, of thought ‘returning to itself’, and so on. In the final chapter, ‘The idea of cognition’, Hegel even points out that ‘the idea enters here into the shape of self-consciousness, and in this one respect coincides with its exposition’ (SL: 691/12.194, 731/12.233). This is to say that pure thinking becomes the overt object of its own exposition in the account of cognition, here unambiguously identified with self-consciousness.

This is not to say, however, that we presuppose the self-conscious self at the start of the Logic. It is only from the standpoint of the Absolute Idea that we retrospectively grasp the self-conscious structure of the Logic as a whole. Hegel thereby grounds the rational necessity of the logical transitions, in the judgmental activity of self-conscious thought. Yet as we have seen, Houlgate insists on separating the ‘reasons’ given by self-conscious knowers from the ‘reason as such’ innate in being, without providing any account of the activity distinctive of such non-reason-giving ‘reason’.Footnote ⁴² By driving a wedge between self-consciousness and the ‘self-determining concept’ that pure being purportedly becomes, Houlgate strips the Logic of its authority to make sense of actual acts of sense-making, including the reason-responsive, self-correcting acts by which the Logic progresses. If apperception is not understood as the logical specification of cognitive activity, there is no route to conceiving cognition in the Philosophy of Spirit as apperceptive. Houlgate thus renders unintelligible the relation of the science of logic to the Realphilosophie and undermines the very foundation of the Encyclopaedia project.

By contrast, LAM renders intelligible not only ‘what is’ but also the very activity of ‘rendering intelligible’.Footnote ⁴³ In the ‘Objectivity’ chapter of the Subjective Logic, Hegel establishes that the general-logical forms derived in the preceding ‘Subjectivity’ sequence are intelligible as such truth-bearers if and only if they are the forms of any possible objective content.Footnote ⁴⁴ Being itself must now be reflectively re-determined in the light of the forms of judgment and inference: the mechanical relation between cause and effect, for example, is the material ‘face’ of the ground-consequence relation of a hypothetical judgment. Reason, Hegel tells us, ‘is the soul of the world’ (EL: §24A). In the transition to the final chapter of the Logic, ‘The Idea’, pure thought begins to think the unity of the prior ‘Subjectivity’ and ‘Objectivity’ chapters as a condition of thinking being in its full determinacy—precisely by thinking the embodied, practical, context-dependent judgmental activity through which being is thought. Hegel thereby deduces the ‘Idea’, the notion of an object that constitutes itself in accordance with its concept (its constitutive norm). Such a ‘self-constituting’ object does not just embody judgment and inference but—in a sense to be explained—judges and infers: the living organism.

IV. Radicalizing LAM

While it is not often noted, Hegel's deepest critique of Kant unfolds in these final pages of the Science of Logic. Hegel establishes—against Kant—that the unity of apperception must not only unite theoretical and practical forms of reason but must itself be understood as a distinctive way of being a living being, if apperceptive judgment is to consist in genuine knowledge of being in its determinacy. I will now provide a brief sketch of Hegel's account of logical life and argue that Pippin's version of LAM is compromised by its one-sided, quasi-epistemic reading of this central episode. As I have shown thus far, LAM is far better equipped than LAO to make sense of the necessity of the transitions in the Logic as well as Hegel's hylomorphic account of substance. Yet LAM remains vulnerable to Houlgate's critique in this one key respect: it has hitherto grasped only the thought of being and not also the being of thinking. Without an account of the latter, LAM cannot properly ground its conception of thinking or of the thinkable. As I will show in conclusion, Hegel deduces life as the minimal objective form of subjective spontaneity. To make good on the promise of LAM, I will argue that the Logic culminates in a metaphysical deduction of rational life.

The account of life in the Logic derives three key ‘moments’ or aspects that render living subjectivity intelligible: organism, metabolism and species.Footnote ⁴⁵ (1) Organism: While the final cause of an artifact is ultimately relative to the ends of an external designer, the final cause of an organism lies in its own end of maintaining itself. Once again, Hegel follows Aristotle: just as the ‘soul’ of an axe is the activity (energeia) of cutting, so the soul of the organic body is the activity of living, which consists in realizing the potential (dunamis) of the body for life (Aristotle Reference Aristotle and Reeve2017: 412b11–17). Such self-maintenance consists not just in the negative end of avoiding death but in the positive purpose of realizing capacities—for movement, for perception, for play—constitutive of one's kind (Gattung). For example, the potentiality of my elderly cat (a ragdoll) lies in her eyes, whiskers, claws and tail, the cat-matter she ‘activates’ in feeding herself and in chasing toy mice across the floor. Her organs and members are means to the self-maintenance of the organic whole, but they are also the very end that she, the whole, is striving to maintain.

(2) Metabolism: Because the organism values itself as its own end, it relates to the objects in its environment as good-for or bad-for, instrumental or inhibitive. Organism and environment are co-constitutive.Footnote ⁴⁶ The organism enacts an environment comprised of objects of significance by desiring them as means to its end of well-functioning. Such desire is indexed in turn to specific material attributes that the organism must metabolize, if it is to successfully reproduce its own kind of matter. Desire is not a causal force in the organism but the original, embodied capacity of the organism for judgment (SL: 678/12.181). This is the logical point at which the ‘space of reason’ first arises. Pain, for example, is not just a passive sense response triggered by a stimulus but a way of taking something as injurious or threatening. Pain is a felt sense of deficiency whereby the organism takes itself to be otherwise than it ought to be and thus exhibits a sensitivity to a possible reason to act (to avoid the broken glass, say). Pain and pleasure are sensible ways of judging—in the light of one's purpose of self-maintenance—what in one's environment is worth pursuing or avoiding. By the same token, pain and pleasure are a minimal form of responsiveness to things as they determinately are—to glass as sharp rather than dull, to sunlight as cause and warmth as effect, to the mouse as alive rather than dead.

(3) Genus: As Hegel explains, the form of the organism lies in its activity of self-production. To be ‘actualized’ (entelecheia) as the sort of thing it is, just is to be actively (energeia) making itself into that thing—in accord with what its life-form or genus-concept requires. The organic individual is a product not only of the self with which it is numerically identical but also of the self with which it is formally identical (i.e. with which it shares the same form): it is produced via the life-activity of another member of its kind. This generic form of reproduction establishes species-specific criteria of ‘the good’: each ragdoll ought to exhibit the behaviour and possess the organs and faculties required for the self-maintenance of its kind, in both individual and species senses.Footnote ⁴⁷ Because the species good is always an individual's good, self-maintenance is not only a matter of self-preservation but also a matter of the fulfilment of ends—from feeding to playing—in which the organism feels itself satisfied. Inversely, the perceptual discriminations of good-for from bad-for prove to bear not only a judgmental form but also a syllogistic structure grounded in a species’ vital operations. On the one hand, when my cat walks into the bedroom and jumps onto the ottoman in order to rest, she confers unity on the steps of this sequence by intending them as means to her end of resting. On the other, the end in question functions as the norm-like major premise (‘frequent naps are good’) in a syllogism of action characteristic of her species per se.Footnote ⁴⁸

According to Pippin's articulation of LAM, Hegel's key achievement in ‘Life’ is to overcome the parochial Kantian view that the ‘inner purposiveness’ of the living is a merely ‘regulative’ rule for the subjective apprehension of nature, not an objective constraint ‘constitutive’ of certain natural entities themselves. For Pippin, the concept of life is logically required for ‘thought to be possibly truth-bearing, to be of an object’ (Reference Pippin2019a: 282), since the organism-as-species-member alone satisfies the apperceptive demand for a determinate notion of being, explicable in terms of an internal principle of intelligibility (i.e. the genus-concept). Yet Pippin's version of LAM fails to consider that life is required not only for thought to be of an object but for thought to be of a subject (and indeed to be of thought itself). For Hegel, life is not just a possible object of judgment but the logical determination of judgment in its living ‘actuality’—as the original purposive form of responsiveness to things as they are. It is in the face of life that things first show up as materially incompatible (predator as distinct from prey), as mechanical and chemical (chewing as the efficient cause of digestible food), as teleological (nesting as the final cause of a collection of twigs and leaves), and indeed as living (live prey as distinct from dead).

Thought's attempt to render itself intelligible as life ultimately fails, however, because the category of the genus is unable to account for its own possible discursive articulation.Footnote ⁴⁹ Life cannot know itself as life, but the exfoliation of the category does lay bare the genus—the living individual grasped in its generality—as an overt object of thinking. The apperceptive derivation of the genus-concept thus already reflects a shift in logical perspective: pure thinking has just thereby achieved knowledge of the genus as genus, which will prove to be the basic structure of ‘thought’ itself (SL: 688/12.191). Following the partial failure of the determination of the Idea as life, Hegel elaborates an account of ‘Cognition’ (Erkennen) in terms of ‘the Idea of the True’ and ‘the Idea of the Good’. Unlike the non-rational organism, cognition consists not just in responsiveness to means and obstacles in a circumscribed environment but in justifiable knowledge of things as they determinately are (the True). Likewise, cognition consists not in an embodied sensitivity to ‘given’ species ends but in a priori knowledge of agent-general rules that prescribe how one ought to act (the Good).

As Hegel shows, however, the understanding of thought as cognition proves to be vacuous and self-undermining, if cognition is not grasped in its unity with the prior category of life.Footnote ⁵⁰ Otherwise, as Hegel argues in several places against Kant, the good will be empty. First, the agent-general rules that comprise the good will have no purchase on actual embodied agents, since living desire will remain outside of and opposed to—and at best merely legally compliant with—practical rationality. Second, because such rules will lack any basis in organic sensibility, agents will lack the faculties for being affected by and for picking out the means for the fulfilment of reason's dictates.Footnote ⁵¹

My account thus sharply departs from Pippin's version of LAM. According to Pippin's long-held thesis, ‘rational agent’ is not ‘a metaphysical or natural kind’ but rather a social achievement, an ‘artificial status’ akin to ‘being a philosophy professor’. Pippin treats ‘spirit itself as a kind of norm’ we collectively institute while ‘remaining the natural organisms we ontologically are’ (Reference Pippin2008: 197, 62). Yet this view generates an irresolvable paradox. If we are ‘ontologically’ mere animals, in virtue of what are we equipped to acquire rational capacities?Footnote ⁵² If spirit is a norm certain animals give to themselves, would they not already have to be spirit to exhibit the self-legislative capacity for giving themselves such a norm? In the logical context, the problem is reflected in Pippin's restricted understanding of ‘the entire “Subjective Logic” [as] a reflective account of the subjectivity of the “Objective Logic”’ (Reference Pippin1989: 246–47). This reading can create the impression Pippin has worked hard to dispel that there is a problem in the Logic ‘of “returning” to the empirical world’ from out of the inner sanctum of ‘pure thinking’ (Reference Pippin1989: 259). Moreover, it ignores Hegel's complementary account of the objectivity of the subject, his account of what it means to be a thinking subject (SL: 672–73/12.175–76). Hegel establishes not only that any determination of being is a conceptual self-determination of thinking but also that thinking is itself a distinctive way of being, namely as a life-form.

This raises the question of how we should understand the idea of the ‘being of thinking’. We saw above that Houlgate's inference from the ‘being of thinking’ to ‘thinking as being’ results in a fateful conflation of being and thinking. If being were thinking in the way Houlgate suggests, then the consequence would follow that everything that is, is thinking. While Houlgate might contend that, for him, everything is thought rather than a thinker, the Logic culminates in an account of thought as the spontaneous activity of cognition, as Houlgate himself acknowledges (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:129). If all things were ‘thinking’, there would be no way to ground the distinction between the lawful and the normative on which the spontaneity of thinking depends. All forms of responsiveness would count as instances of ‘thinking’, such as the rusting of metal in a moist environment. Yet this begs the question of the meaning of thinking, which is unintelligible as causally elicited as in the case of rust. Rather, as Houlgate himself holds, ‘the being with which we begin proves in the end to be the “absolute Idea” or self-determining reason’ (Reference Houlgate2022: 1:90). As ‘self-determining’, thinking is a normative activity that can go wrong: in perceiving what is the case, I am trying to perceive things rightly and am thus open to the possibility of my misperceiving. Houlgate's view that thinking and being coincide has as a consequence the conflation of lawful responsiveness (rusting) and normative spontaneity (thinking). On the one hand, all instances of mechanism would be instances of thinking, which would contradict the lawful form of mechanical phenomena. On the other hand, thinking itself would be identical with mechanism, which would contradict the normative form of action and belief.

Houlgate's understanding of ‘thinking as being’ becomes especially insupportable in the light of Hegel's demonstration that thinking is a way of being a living being. Houlgate's identification of thinking and being thus collapses Hegel's own distinction between the living and the non-living, the organic and the mechanical, and ultimately undermines the very idea of rational life: if everything were alive, then nothing could die, since death presupposes the possibility of non-living matter.Footnote ⁵³ As the ‘immediate form’ of pure thought, life itself would lose its conceptual moorings by becoming indistinguishable from non-life: the rusting of a metal would bear the same form as a plant's growing toward the sun. Yet a metal will rust under the right conditions on account of natural laws, while a plant ought to grow towards the sun on account of internal species norms. If these two forms were conflated, there could be no life, since life is defined by the distinction the organism is always drawing between itself and the mechanical forces to which it is always at risk of succumbing. By Houlgate's own lights, this is an unacceptable consequence, since he upholds Hegel's view that the finitude of life consists in the possibility of its demise (Reference Houlgate2006: 432).

Houlgate's concept of the ‘being of thought’ commits him to an untenable view in which thinking and being cannot even be notionally distinguished. Yet the idea of a distinct ‘being of thought’ can be redeemed as a corrective to the existing LAM's neglect of the objectivity of thinking. If Hegel's own understanding of cognition as rational life is to be maintained, the ‘being of thinking’ must be rationally reinterpreted: the only intelligible conception of the being of thinking is the being of any possible thinker. As Hegel writes in a parting critique of Kant in his account of cognition:

Hegel is here arguing that the pure interrogation of the thought of being eventually requires of itself an account of the possible being of thought, or a formal concept of the material potential for thinking. What kind of being must a thinker be, if she is to be intelligible as a thinker? The ‘being of thought’ is a logical specification of the form of substance distinctive of rational agents. At issue is not which empirical kinds of substance (e.g. silicon) can bear neuronal activity but which metaphysical kinds of substance (i.e. the organism) can embody the normative activity of thinking.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Hegel shows, both justifiable belief about ‘what is’ (the True) and knowledge of what practical reason demands (the Good) prove to be the constitutive standards in light of which rational individuals actualize themselves as the kinds of living beings they are (SL: 733–34/12.235).

Accordingly, Hegel elaborates an account of cognition not as something ‘other than’ or ‘in addition to’ life but as a distinctive form of organic life.Footnote ⁵⁵ Hegel inherits and radicalizes Aristotle's distinction in De Anima between three ways of being an embodied life-form. Vegetative life is matter that bears the potential for the activity of feeding (threpsis); animal life is matter that bears the potential for the activity of perceiving (aisthesis); and rational life is matter that bears the potential for the activity of thinking (noesis). Each step in this ‘stepladder’ of life is not merely added to the prior capacity but transforms the way the prior capacity is actualized.Footnote ⁵⁶ A plant realizes its potential through a generic repertoire of metabolic activities—such as growing towards the sun and converting sunlight into nutrients—to sustain its growth and reproduce itself. Animal life also maintains itself through a process of feeding, but it does so by perceiving which things are worth consuming or avoiding and by moving toward them or away from them through spontaneous action in space. Finally, rational life encompasses both prior capacities, but in perceiving it is responsive to self-determined norms that specify objects and acts worthy of choice, including possible means of consumption and the manner in which to produce them. Just as the matter of non-rational organisms embodies the potential for feeding and perception, so does the matter of rational animals embody the potential for cognition. This is to say that rationality is a way of being and maintaining the body of an organism.

In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel refers to this last life-form as the ‘free genus’ (freie Gattung)—an idea later echoed in Marx's ‘genus-being’ (Gattungswesen) (EL: §222). It is a genus whose form of the good is only a form of the good because its members are conscious of it as one. Our life activities are the activities they are by virtue of our knowing what it is to perform them. We act in light not of the good distinctive of our species but of a shared conception of the good for which we are responsible. While my ragdoll acts on instincts that express species ends that she neither chooses nor can question, our actions embody our consciousness of our reasons for acting, which render us responsive to the demand for justification and to the potential need for self-correction.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether our notion of the good actually enables the successful realization of our bodily potential for agency cannot be decided in advance but is always a live question. For example, to be a teacher is to take oneself to be one, not through overt acts of self-assessment but through sensitivity to shared, institutional rules just in acting—sensitivity to the possible assessment of one's acts by other agents. Because our own ‘take’ on the meaning of our deeds is normative and thus liable to mistakenness, we are dependent on such recognitive authority to be who we take ourselves to be. By the same token, since to be a teacher is to be attentive to what success in teaching requires, our institutional standards themselves, as well as our very conceptions of Bildung and acculturation, are susceptible to rational re-assessment. Rational life thus exhibits the apperceptive structure examined above: to engage in the metabolic activity of labour, for example, is to know what it is to reproduce ourselves at a time and to be responsive to possible challenges to the rationality of how and what we produce.Footnote ⁵⁸

Hegel is thus developing the idea not of a possible ‘addition’ of Life and Cognition but of the form of embodied life not just appropriate or susceptible to but in need of a rational process of formation. In the absence of initiation into a language, acculturation and entrance into the social space of reasons, the body of a rational organism would not just be an animal body; it would be a defective, incomplete instance of a rational body, unable to effect its own unity through the consciousness of what it is to be unified.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Pippin, such an understanding of self-conscious thought as itself ‘life’ would, if true, relativize the Logic by reducing pure thinking to the parochial standpoint of a particular empirical species.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet Pippin here conflates the claim that thinking is a form of life with the claim that thinking is the activity of a specific living species. While rationality must always be instantiated by some particular species, there are logical constraints on the species-matter that can instantiate reason. Precisely what Hegel has accomplished in the Logic is the purification of ‘rational life’ of any empirical content, whether anthropological or biological, in order to specify a formal concept of the matter distinctive of the rationally alive.Footnote ⁶¹ Via the ‘transformative’ hypothesis, the matter of a rational body must be the potentiality (dunamis) for norm-governed self-organization, reason-responsive interchange with the environment, and self-conscious determination of one's kind. Apperceptive thought thus determines itself to be the consciousness of what it is to be the organism, metabolism, and the genus—namely the rational organism, work, and the free genus. This is the culminating account of what must be true of the ‘being of thought’ (LAO) if thought is to be intelligible as the thought of any possible being (LAM).