It can be considered to be one of the peculiar extravagances of German Idealism that Hegel developed his notion of self-consciousness or thinking out of a ‘logical’ reflection on the concept of life. By doing so, however, Hegel did not intend to give a non-circular explanation of thinking in terms of a logically independent notion of biological function: on the contrary, he always insists that thinking manifests itself as the ‘truth’ of life. Hegel is not primarily concerned with a biological concept of life, but with a logical one, namely, a concept that concerns the life and the activity of thought, or what Hegel calls the ‘Concept’ (der Begriff). This logical notion of life comes on the scene in the Science of Logic as the first, immediate form of what Hegel calls the ‘Idea’, that is, the appropriate kind of unity between concepts and reality, form and content, the subjective and the objective. Rather than a category to be externally applied to natural life, life represents a shape that thought itself assumes, and—more precisely—it is the first form of thought in its objectivity and truth. But what does it mean for thinking, and for the very form it takes, namely the Concept, to be living? Is Hegel here simply drawing on a metaphor in order to express the dynamic relation between form and content characteristic of the Idea? How could life be a logical concept constitutive of the development of thought?

Annette Sell’s book is remarkably successful in shedding light on this apparently esoteric topic of Hegel’s philosophy, offering original and often challenging answers to the bunch of questions that arise when one tries to spell out what it could mean to develop the notion of thinking out of the (logical) notion of life.

Sell’s strategy for answering the question of the relation between life and thought is to distinguish two fundamental senses according to which the Concept could be said to be living.

Firstly, thought is living insofar as it takes the shape of a speculative or dialectical identity between subject and object, form and content. What makes this identity speculative is the presence of inner negativity or Entzweiung (bifurcation, diremption, division) which the speculative must maintain along with the claims of identity. The Concept is the result of an internal diremption of its own universality into particular thought-determinations and the re-establishment of its own unity out of this division (12). Dialectically sublating the intellectual moment of judgment, the Concept represents an example of the dialectical syllogism, where the particularity of thought-determinations have become the forms in which the Concept is active in its own universality (14). This necessary Entzweiung, through which the activity of thought determines itself, is also definitive of all organic life: a living being divides itself into subject and object, a division expressed in the organism through desire, drives, self-movement, self-preservation, need, contradiction, and pain. In this sense, according to Sell, the specific logical form of life represents for Hegel a model or a basic guidance for the construction of the intrinsic dialectical movement of the Concept (15).

Secondly, thought is said to be living because it actualizes itself; it gives itself its own content through this negative process of internal diremption. The form of thinking is thus not dependent on merely ‘external’ objects for its content, since this content simply consists of the very movement of the Concept’s continual self-alienation and self-sublation. As internally purposive and self-organizing, the activity (or the life) of the Concept as it moves through its development of thought-determinations is one of self-determination. In the very same sense it can be said of a living organism that it is not completely a prisoner of natural circumstances. Instead, the animal exhibits a capacity to transform itself and its own environment through the active powers it acquires by developing within processes of adaptation. The animal is thus a genuine individual or a rudimentary form of subjectivity in the sense that it relates at the same time to itself and to an other as ‘its’ other. Therefore, the negative and autonomous movement of the logical Idea can be characterized as methodologically and systematically indebted to a logical reflection on the concept of life.

It is crucial to note, however, that such an account does not come down to a naturalistic claim about the origin of thought in natural life. Hegel always regards the notion of living nature as the ‘self-externalization’ of the Idea and understands all of the dimensions of nature within the overall teleology of the Concept’s attempt to understand itself. Only in the light of this basic metaphysical assumption, as Sell repeatedly claims, it is possible for Hegel to account for the distinct ‘interpenetration’ (Durchdringung) of (natural) life and conceptual categories: even if we are somehow forced to acknowledge a kind of rationality in the life of natural organisms, it always takes rational human beings to bring it out (81). Yet this does not mean that nature has been originally designed for the (cognitive) benefit of human beings. Hegel is clearly following Kant in denying the validity of such an ‘external’ teleology as a model for grasping the structure of living organisms. Hegel argues that living beings manifest true ‘internal’ purposiveness, that their structure and development is explicable in teleological terms, and that we can have—pace Kant—objective knowledge of this natural teleology. Nonetheless, even if living beings in a fundamental way already expose the logical structure of the Concept, they do it only ‘for us’ and not ‘for themselves’: it is only in the Idea that this structure comes to exist for itself.

In the first chapter of her book Sell offers an extremely detailed historical reconstruction of Hegel’s reflection on the concept of life, moving from the earliest text fragments (from the Bern and Frankfurt periods) up to the last edition of the Encyclopedia of 1830. Sell is perfectly aware of the plurality of meanings and occurrences of the concept of life throughout Hegel’s works. Nonetheless, her reconstruction is successful in stressing the logical dimensions of the notion of life and thus in highlighting the crucial contribution of a philosophical reflection on life to an understanding of the dialectical structure of the Idea. According to Sell, throughout the different phases of his thought, Hegel approaches life as a specific type of unity. Life is for Hegel the name of a unity of concept and reality, subject and object—or, to put it in terms more common to the field of the living: a unity of soul and body. Life has to be understood as the continuous activity of attaining and sustaining that unity and thus as a process which aims to realize a concept in its material existence. This dynamic unity of subject and object exhibits a dialectical connection between the particular and the general or universal. This is manifest at different levels of explanation, e.g. in the reciprocal determination of particular parts (organs) and overarching whole within an individual organism, or in the relation of living being and life-process, individual and genus.

Within Sell’s reconstruction, the concept of Gattung (genus, kind or species), which Hegel introduces in his Jena writings, deserves particular attention. What Hegel calls Gattung represents for Sell the ‘intersection between the realm of life and the realm of logic’ (50), given that the notion of natural kind seems to reflect the logical structure of the Concept in biological cases. Clearly the Gattung here is not a ‘concept’ in any ordinary sense, such as a mental content represented by a subject; it is rather what Hegel sometimes calls an ‘objective concept’. The genus is the concrete universal substance of the singular subjects, and a particular living being is inherently related to its genus: it exemplifies, maintains and reproduces its genus. The key here is that the life of the genus reproduces and gives shape to itself through the speculative process of double negation (55): the substance of life is nothing else than the process of continual internal self-diremption in a plurality of particular individuals, which in turn continually negate their own independence (literally: die) in order to preserve through reproduction the life of the species.

As Sell makes clear in her interpretation, the peculiar dialectical character of the living unity in all its different aspects is marked by two crucial features. Firstly, the unity of life is not the result of a mere subjection of one side to the other or the abstract elimination of the fundamental difference between concept and reality, subject and object, general and particular. It is rather a unity that contains and depends on the tension and the contradiction of the two sides unified in it. This is the speculative sense of Hegel’s famous phrase from the System-fragment of 1800, according to which life is not just unity, but rather the ‘union of union and non-union’ (39). Secondly, as Sell rightly shows, drawing on passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, this type of negative, speculative unity of life has a processual and self-constitutive character. It is not something simply ‘given’ as a biological property of living organism; it rather exists only as a purposive activity or process whereby the universal and the particular are at the same time differentiated and unified, unified in their difference and differentiated in their unity.

The historical reconstruction of Hegel’s speculative notion of life continues in Chapter 2 with an analysis of the philosophical background of Hegel’s view. Unfortunately, Sell does not go beyond the results of much existing scholarship on Hegel’s conception of natural teleology, simply stressing the unquestionable relevance of Aristotle’s psychology, of Kant’s conception of ‘internal’ teleology and of Schelling’s philosophy of organism for the development of Hegel’s own understanding of life. Furthermore, Sell misses here the opportunity to critically weigh up Hegel’s particular claims against his predecessors and his contemporaries. This has to a large extent to do with Sell’s historical-exegetical approach, whose central aim is to indicate what, in the development of his own notion of life, Hegel picks up from Aristotle, Kant and Schelling. Nonetheless, I think she should have been more critical with regard to Hegel’s comments on his contemporaries and predecessors.

Chapter 3 is intended to show the crucial systematic function of the concept of life in the transition from nature to spirit (175). Dealing with Hegel’s discussions of plant and animal biology in the encyclopaedic Philosophy of Nature and with the anthropological notion of ‘soul’ in the opening section of the Philosophy of Spirit, Sell convincingly explains how Geist can be considered to be the ‘truth’ of nature, without being at the same time a supernatural, metaphysical entity completely ‘other’ than nature. For Hegel, self-conscious or spiritual life appears to be at the same time identical and non-identical with life. On the one hand, the specific mode of self-relation of a living organism comes close to the logical mediation and self-organization characteristic of spirit. As Sell puts it: ‘both the living organism and the Concept are able to constitute themselves as living wholes’ (173). Since life and spirit seem to share the same form of logical organization, the purposive, self-organizing and self-relating unity of life is therefore not simply left behind by spirit in the process of its own constitution. Rather, the concept of life is in some sense a necessary condition for the actualization of spirit.

On the other hand, the notion of spirit is not itself a natural category. As Hegel at the very end of his Philosophy of Nature affirms, the transition from nature to spirit occurs only in and through the death of the particular living beings within the genus-process. Although Hegel points out that in animal life nature in fact reaches the level of subjectivity, he does not negate the basic difference between animal and spiritual subjectivity. While merely living beings are simply means or vehicles of the genus-process, since we do not find a living individual that is in and for itself the genus, a ‘spiritual’ or ‘self-conscious’ subject is able to transform the relations to its own life, at least in the sense that it knows itself to be alive and relates to itself as such. The life of spirit is a kind of ‘reflexive’ life, a life that knows itself as life.

On the basis of her philosophical reconstruction Sell is now able to answer the crucial question of her whole research, namely, why it is that Hegel includes the category of ‘life’ in his Science of Logic. In the final chapter of her book, Sell provides a formal outline of how to understand Hegel’s notion of thought as a theory of the living, self-actualizing Concept. Sell’s fundamental thesis is that the dialectical movement of the Concept in some sense reflects the dialectical, logical process characteristic of natural life. The activity or the life of the Concept proceeds through the organic, self-grounded and self-determining development of thought-forms or determinate concepts, ones that exhibit their own content due to the living self-diremption of the Concept within itself. Since the Concept, for Hegel, represents a necessary movement of negativity, self-generating, and self-developing, the activity of pure thinking is deeply related to the logic of life. According to Sell, this claim has to be understood literally, since the notion of life is not simply an arbitrary metaphor that we use to grasp the relation between form and content as internally related and reciprocally constituting. Just as the inner natural dialectic of the genus-process was necessary in order to explain the origin of spiritual self-consciousness, so life—as the immediate Idea—is a necessary presupposition of the very idea of cognition (185).

Without in the least detracting from the richness of Sell’s account, I think that her book is vulnerable to the tendency of many commentators to offer a very global perspective on Hegel’s philosophy without providing an impartial account of the philosophical arguments themselves. This makes it hard for any interested, unprejudiced reader to evaluate Hegel’s specific claims without implicitly accepting some other substantial claims of his idealism. For example, one could not understand Sell’s insistence on the anti-naturalistic character of Hegel’s account of the relations between life and Concept without sharing the basic metaphysical assumption of the epistemological and ontological priority of the Idea. Even if Sell does try to show the possible relevance of Hegel’s view for contemporary discussions in theoretical philosophy, she does not make any attempt to translate Hegel’s jargon in a language which could give up such demanding metaphysical premises, usually dismissed in present debates about the relations between life and cognition. As Sell admits, her interpretative account is entirely ‘Hegel-immanent’, i.e. an attempt to explain ‘Hegel with Hegel’ (204). Such an approach, while successful in showing the different steps of Hegel’s overall account, does not provide any independent argument to sustain the validity of his speculative project.

In consequence, it would be hard for any ‘non-Hegelian’ not to reject the whole picture sketched by Sell as an example of the peculiar idealistic pretence of finding a rational principle underlying reality in all its possible manifestations. Thus it proves difficult to understand Sell’s claim that the Hegelian conception of life shows itself as a practicable theoretical option within the contemporary philosophical landscape. These limitations are perhaps impossible to avoid in a book that addresses such a specific and highly specialized topic from a historical point of view. Most importantly, the book’s ambitious overall aim of reconstructing Hegel’s arguments for the necessary inclusion of the category of life in his speculative account of the Concept is well achieved. This makes Der lebendige Begriff a commendable piece of scholarship within the larger tradition of studies of the Science of Logic.