through many Heres into the universal Here which is a simple plurality of
Heres, just as the day is a simple plurality of Nows’.
20
On the basis of these passage s, one commentator has argued that Hegel is
guilty of just the same conflation between individual and universal that was
identified in the work of the British Idealists:
Hegel argues that the here and now, in having extension and duration, and
hence an indefinitely large number of subdivisions, are universals and thus not
particulars. But unless one conflates the notion of instances of a universal and
the parts of a whole (as Hegel seems to have done), all the arguments would
show, if they work at all, is that here and now are divisible wholes, not that they
are universals. It is in no way obvious that a whole having parts cannot be a
particular, and Hegel, not having made the distinction between wholes and
universals, does not even address himself to this issue.
21
On this reading of this part of the Phenomenology, then, it may seem that
Hegel is using ‘universal’ in a manner sim ilar to that for which the British
Idealists were later criticized.
It is not possible to enter here into a detailed interpretative analysis of this
highly complex and abstract section of the Phenomenology: but it doe s seem
to me that this way of reading Hegel’s position here is mistaken. As I would
read it, Hegel is arguing at this point that sense-certainty cannot claim to be
able to ‘apprehend’ things without ‘comprehending’ them, where sense-
certainty thinks this is possible because it believes it can have immediate
awareness of things in their unique individuality and so has no need for
general concepts: if there were only one ‘now’ and only one ‘here’ this might
make sense, but the fact that each ‘now’ and ‘here’ is always divisible into
further ‘nows’ and ‘heres’ means that sense-certainty cannot claim access to
just such a unique individual in its experience of a temporal or spatial
moment. Thus, even when it points and says ‘now’ or ‘here’, it is conscious
of many instances of the same kind, and thus individ uals that share the same
property or universal (the property of being ‘now’ or ‘here’). Hegel’s claim
in talking about temporal and spatial instants in terms of universals is thus
not that they are universals because they are complex individuals rather than
simple ‘atoms’ (in the man ner of the British Idealists); his claim is rather that
20
Ibid:
Das Hier, das gemeint wird, wa
¨
re der Punkt; er ist aber nicht; sondern indem er als
seiend aufgezeigt wird, zeigt sich das Aufzeigen, nicht unmittelbares Wissen, sondern
eine Bewegung von dem gremeinten Hier aus durch viele Hier in das allgemeine Hier
zu sein, welches, wie der Tag eine einfache Vielheit der Jetzt, so eine einfache Vielheit
der Hier ist.
(Werke, Vol. III, p. 90)
21
Ivan Soll, ‘Charles Taylor’s Hegel’, reprinted in Hegel, edited by Michael Inwood (Oxford,
1985) 54–66, esp. pp. 63–4. Cf. also Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, 1992) 303.
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 121
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