II. Derrida’s critique of Hegel: the gift of Being

In this section, I reconstruct Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas, through the notion of ‘the gift of Being’. At the climax of Glas’ sweeping reading of the whole of the Hegelian corpus, Derrida argues that Being itself is conditioned by the prior unconditional gift of Being. In order to appreciate the force of this argument, allow me first to offer what I hope to be a relatively uncontroversial reconstruction of the central thrust of Hegel’s mature Encyclopaedia system. Hegel’s system begins with the science of logic (i.e., the science of pure Thought), and the science of logic begins with the pure Thought of pure Being, wherein there is a speculative identity between this pure Thought and pure Being itself (WL: 21.68–69; EL: §86).⁵ The science of logic develops the science of pure Thought to its highest form, the Absolute Idea, which Hegel describes as the self-thinking Idea or ‘thought thinking itself’—identified with Aristotle’s God, nous as noesis noeseos noesis (‘thinking thinking thinking’). The self-thinking Thought of the Absolute Idea circles back to pure Being, completing its logical self-exposition (WL: 12.236–53; EL: §§236–44). But the Absolute Idea also releases itself into the externality of nature, which (after much further development) sublates itself in Spirit. The highest form of Spirit is Absolute Spirit, and the highest form of Absolute Spirit is philosophy itself. Hegel describes philosophy as Spirit’s activity of self-thinking thought, thus achieving a speculative identity with the Absolute Idea, and so with the whole of Being. (Hegel ends the Encyclopaedia with an untranslated quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics to this effect, on the identity between divine and human self-thinking thought (see Aristotle Reference Barnes1984: 12.7.1072b.)) The self-thinking Thought of Absolute Spirit thus completes the circle of circles of the Encyclopaedia system, the complete philosophical account of the whole of Being, with which it is speculatively identical (PG: §§574–77). In short, Hegel’s system is the complete systematic philosophical account of the speculative identity of Thought and Being.⁶

Now, Derrida claims that Hegel’s systematic circle of circles, as the absolute philosophical self-comprehension of Being itself, fails to account for the very gift of Being, without which this circle could not be. Let us first simply read some of Derrida’s general remarks to this effect (summarizing about eight to nine pages of tight argumentation):

Derrida is here claiming that the gift is logically and ontologically prior to every determinable being (étant or seiend), and indeed to Being (être or Sein) itself—while noting that logical or ontological priority cannot be strictly applied to the gift, since Derrida’s argument is precisely that the gift is the condition of possibility of logic and ontology (i.e., Thought and Being) themselves. The gift gives rise to dialectical Thought, but the gift itself cannot be thought by it; the gift gives rise to the history of Being, but the gift itself does not belong to it. (Derrida makes a passing reference to Heidegger’s late text ‘Time and Being’, where Heidegger argues that Sein (Being) is preceded by a prior es gibt (‘It gives’), which Derrida glosses as the gift of Being (Heidegger Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1972). But I will claim that the fundamental source for Derrida’s argument here is not Heidegger, but rather Neoplatonism—or, Derrida reads Heidegger as making a Neoplatonic point here.⁷)

Importantly, in this same section of Glas, Derrida locates a key example of the gift of Being in Hegel’s own work, namely the Phenomenology of Spirit’s first shape of Religion: ‘God as Light’ or ‘The Luminous Essence’ (Das Lichtwesen). Derrida argues that Hegel’s own account of God as Light inadvertently registers the fact that Being is conditioned by a prior gift of Being, while failing to give this fact its proper recognition and affirmation. In short, the first form of Religion is the pure indeterminate and undifferentiated Light of the Sun. (This is officially identified with Persian Zoroastrianism, but Hegel also refers to the Light as the ‘One’ and the ‘Good’, suggesting an affinity with Neoplatonism, as I will claim.⁸) Hegel writes that this indeterminate Light ‘must’ determine itself, and so it ‘offers up itself as a sacrifice to being-for-self’ (PhG: ¶688). Derrida simply asks: ‘why must it?’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 241a). Indeed, Derrida maintains that this self-sacrifice of the pure Light, its self-negation or self-abrogation, is not a movement of conceptual necessity, but rather the free giving of the gift of Being—a gift that necessarily lies outside the system of Thought and Being to which it gives rise. Of course, there are longstanding debates about the exact relationship between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s Encyclopaedia system proper (i.e., the circle of circles of Logic, Nature, and Spirit): whether the Phenomenology is merely the propaedeutic or ‘ladder’ to the system (albeit in such a way that this ‘outside’ may or may not ultimately be sublated within it), or whether it is rather the first part of the system itself (as Hegel’s original title seemed to suggest), the precise connection between the Phenomenology and the ‘Phenomenology’ section of the Encyclopaedia, and so on.⁹ As I see it, Derrida’s argument can remain agnostic about how exactly the intra-Hegelian details on the systematic role of the Phenomenology ought to be sorted out. This is because Derrida is simply saying that, whatever role the Phenomenology has, the Religion of Light reveals that systematic philosophy as such depends on something lying outside the system, and indeed even outside any possible propaedeutic for a system (if such a thing is necessary)—namely, a gift given beyond Thought and beyond Being. Therefore, in Derrida’s view, Hegel’s philosophical system cannot attain the kind of completion that it sets for itself. In other words, Derrida’s strategy is the following: by finding a moment within the Phenomenology where Hegel’s own argument for the conceptual necessity of a certain transition breaks down—namely, the transition from God as pure Light to the next shape of Religion (‘Plants and Animals’)—Derrida takes himself to have shown that Hegel needs something else to get his system going, something unthinkable by that very system. Specifically, Hegel needs the gift of Being, represented by the pure gift of the divine Light. As Derrida writes, once it is given, this gift indeed ‘must’ give rise to Being and Thought, it ‘must’ give rise to philosophy, it ‘must’ burn itself up in its own self-sacrificing flames—but this gift itself is forever irreducible and incomprehensible to philosophical thinking.¹⁰ The gift of Being must necessarily lie outside the philosophical system that it itself makes possible, thereby undermining Hegel’s claim to total and complete systematic philosophical comprehension. This, in a nutshell, is Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas.

III. Derrida’s Neoplatonism

In the previous section, I reconstructed Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas. In this section, I will show how Derrida’s critique of Hegel can be understood as a modified Neoplatonic critique. Above, we saw how Derrida argues that Being is itself conditioned by a prior unconditional gift of Being. On its own terms, Derrida’s argument in Glas can admittedly appear obscure or opaque at first blush. What exactly does Derrida mean by the ‘gift of Being’? What exactly is at stake in Derrida’s claim that this gift is the necessary condition of Being itself? Following recent scholarship on Derrida and Neoplatonism, I want to suggest that reading Derrida’s claims here in Neoplatonic terms illuminates their meaning in ways that are otherwise unavailable.¹¹

In various other texts, Derrida himself explicitly identifies Plotinus—the foremost Neoplatonist—as the forerunner of his own notion of the gift, specifically through the formula of ‘giving what one does not have.’¹² For Plotinus, the One ‘gives what it does not have’, in so far as it overflows into Being and Thought, though the One itself possesses neither Being nor Thought, in so far as it lies beyond both. A brief review of Plotinus’s metaphysics will be useful here. For Plotinus, there are three ‘hypostases’ of the divine, in descending order: the One (to hen), Intellect (nous), and Soul (psyche). Each hypostasis proceeds from and reverts to the prior hypostasis, in a process that is usually (somewhat misleadingly) dubbed ‘emanation’. Only the One is absolutely self-sufficient: it proceeds from nothing other than itself, and it is the source of the procession of all subsequent hypostases. The first procession from the One is Intellect (nous), which the Neoplatonists identify with Aristotle’s God: ‘thought thinking itself’, where this divine Thought is identical with Being as such (at least on one prevalent Neoplatonic schema of the hypostases¹³). Against Aristotle, Plotinus argues that the unity of Thought and Being in the divine nous cannot be the absolute first principle of all (as Aristotle held in his Metaphysics), since Thought contains a minimal ‘difference’ or ‘division’ within itself, even when Thought thinks only of itself.¹⁴ Only the One, which is absolutely unitary and therefore contains no differentiation or division, can serve as a true first principle. The One is identified with the Good in Book VI of Plato’s Republic, which Plato tells us lies ‘beyond Being’, and so also beyond Thought (1997: 509b). Thus the One is utterly transcendent, and therefore fundamentally ‘ineffable’, beyond the grasp of philosophical comprehension or intellection. It can only be spoken of through negation (i.e., through saying what the One is not), and it can only be experienced through a direct mystical union or ‘henosis’.¹⁵

A classical question for all the Neoplatonists, and especially Plotinus, is the following: Why does the One give up its own absolute unity, and give rise to the Many? One classical answer is that, in so far as the One is the Good, it does what is good: it is good to give Being to whatever can receive it—though of course, what ‘receives’ here does not and cannot pre-exist the giving of this gift, since it is the gift of Being itself, but rather comes into existence through the gift. Thus the One gives the gift of Being to all beings, as an overflowing expression of its own infinite and unbounded goodness. But in another sense (per Derrida’s reading of Neoplatonism), there cannot strictly speaking be a reason why the One gives the gift of Being—if there were, it would not be a gift worthy of the name. Perhaps this is why the Neoplatonic tradition found it so hard to account for this transition in philosophical terms, and why it is only rarely touched upon in great depth, instead more often having recourse to metaphors and images. Indeed, the Neoplatonists’ favourite image for this gift is an ‘overflowing’, especially the overflowing of divine Light—following Plato’s famous Analogy of the Sun in the Republic (Reference Cooper and Hutchinson1997: 507b–509c). Just as the Sun shines its light on all sensible things, giving them the gift of life and physical illumination, so the Good shines its light on all intelligible things, giving them the gift of Being and intelligibility. But by virtue of being the source of all intelligibility, the Good or the One lies beyond all intelligibility (i.e., beyond Thought); by virtue of being the source of all Being, the Good or the One lies beyond Being. Thus the Neoplatonists can affirm the unity of Thought and Being, while also holding that there is something beyond Thought and Being, viz. the One.

It seems quite clear to me that Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas is thus making a familiar Neoplatonic point: namely, that Thought and Being are not primary, but rather rely on a prior gift. Derrida’s choice of God as Light in the Phenomenology’s Religion chapter as the exemplification of this point is not coincidental: it seems to be clearly pointing to the Neoplatonic image of the One as pure divine Light, which gives the gift of Being to all beings. Whereas Hegel views the systematic account of the speculative identity of Thought and Being as philosophy’s unsurpassable horizon, Derrida is taking the opposing Neoplatonic position that there is something beyond Being, namely the gift of Being itself, which lies beyond philosophical intelligibility as such. As previously noted, the justification for identifying Derrida’s gift of Being with the Neoplatonic position comes from Derrida himself, specifically Derrida’s own identification of Plotinus as the precursor for his conception of the gift, via Plotinus’s claim that the One ‘gives what it does not have’, i.e., gives Being (Derrida Reference Derrida and Dutoit1995b: 71, 85; Reference Derrida2005: 11, 180; Plotinus Reference Gerson2018: 5.3.15). Admittedly, Derrida’s reading of Neoplatonism is a contentious one in this respect, and his claim that the overflowing of the One should be conceived as ‘giving’ or a ‘gift’ can certainly be disputed. I should therefore clarify that my purpose here is not to offer a first-order interpretive claim about the correct reading of the Neoplatonists (whether Plotinus, Proclus, etc.), but rather to use Derrida’s own reading of Neoplatonism to help illuminate his critique of Hegel.¹⁶

Though I have argued for a certain analogy between the Neoplatonic One and the Derridean gift, there is no doubt that, for Derrida, the exposure of the closure of metaphysics (e.g., Hegel’s system of Thought-Being) is achieved through a ‘trace’ that is neither inside nor outside, neither immanent nor transcendent, and so on. Yet Derrida himself suggests that perhaps the only way to get ‘beyond’ Hegel is to insist on the irreducibility of the ‘beyond’ (Jenseits) itself, e.g., in the figure of what Hegel dismisses as the bad, false, or spurious infinite (schlechte Unendlichkeit).¹⁷ On the other hand, one could read the Neoplatonic position in a more Derridean way, whereby the One is neither strictly inside nor outside, neither strictly immanent nor transcendent: one could perhaps say that the trace of the One is found in all beings (closer to each being than that being is to itself), in so far as all beings participate in unity. But this begins to take us into a consideration of the important differences between Derrida’s position and the Neoplatonic position.

Indeed, it seems to me that there are also important ways in which Derrida’s view is a modification of the Neoplatonic position (perhaps a radical one), rather than simply an endorsement of classical Neoplatonism. Firstly, Derrida has a critique of negative or apophatic theology, the favoured method of the Neoplatonists and those influenced by them (especially in the Abrahamic religious traditions). The Neoplatonists held that, by virtue of being beyond Thought, the One was ineffable: thus it could not be described or spoken of ‘positively’, but only through negations—i.e., saying what the One is not. For Derrida, in contrast, speaking through negations is not enough to transcend the bounds of Thought, since it still remains bound to that which it negates: rather, Derrida endorses the self-deconstruction of Thought itself—roughly put, the self-exposition of Thought’s own immanent contradictions, without any sublation or reconciliation of these contradictions (as in Hegel). By engaging in the self-deconstruction of Thought, we can catch a glimmer or ‘trace’ of that which lies beyond Thought and beyond Being.¹⁸ Secondly and relatedly, Derrida does not endorse anything like a direct experiential union (i.e., henosis) with a super-abundant transcendent divinity beyond Being (i.e., the One). Rather, again, the self-deconstruction of Thought would allow us to glimpse only the ‘trace’ of the gift of Being, since this gift has always already ‘burned itself up’ in the act of giving—leaving only its ‘trace’ or ‘remains’, as Derrida puts it (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 238–45a; see also Derrida Reference Derrida1991).¹⁹ As Derrida further insists, the goal of deconstruction is not to reach some determinate ‘entity’ beyond Thought and Being, since his notion of différance disqualifies any such entity from consideration.²⁰ Derrida’s gift of Being, then, cannot simply be equated with the Neoplatonic One, since (as per the above) Derrida goes to great lengths to distinguish his own view from Neoplatonic negative theology. Yet it is Derrida himself who also draws the parallels between the two (as I have traced above), and I believe this is no mistake: we can come to understand Derrida better by reading him through the Neoplatonic tradition that he both draws upon and modifies—in particular, the ways in which Derrida shares the Neoplatonic view of the limits of Thought and Being, and of a ‘gift’ that conditions them.

Thus, despite Derrida’s important divergences from classical Neoplatonism, I take it that my claim still stands: through his notion of the gift of Being in Glas, Derrida’s critique of Hegel can be productively understood as a modified Neoplatonic critique of Hegel.

IV. A Hegelian response to Derrida?

In §II, I reconstructed Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas via the gift of being. In §III, I showed how Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas can be understood as a modified Neoplatonic critique. In this final section, I evaluate Derrida’s critique of Hegel, considering possible Hegelian responses.

Of course, Hegel was certainly not unaware of the Neoplatonic view of the One as the prior ground of both Thought and Being. Indeed, Hegel himself considered Neoplatonism to be the highest achievement of ancient philosophy: as Hegel declares in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Neoplatonism was ‘the height and indeed the zenith’ of the philosophical development of the ancient world (VGP1: 52). The pioneering work of Jens Halfwassen has convincingly shown the depth of Hegel’s indebtedness to Neoplatonism from the beginning to the end of his philosophical career (Halfwassen Reference Halfwassen2005; Reference Halfwassen and Gersh2019). Halfwassen demonstrates that Hegel’s appropriation of the Aristotelian conception of nous as ‘thought thinking itself’ in the guise of the Absolute Idea clearly follows the Neoplatonic reading of Aristotle, in which nous thinks all that is thinkable (i.e., all intelligibles) by virtue of thinking itself, where this Thought is likewise identical to Being as such.²¹ Yet as Halfwassen further argues, Hegel thereby clearly offers an Aristotelian critique of Neoplatonism, in so far as Hegel holds Thought to be the absolute highest principle of all, as Aristotle did (Reference Halfwassen and Gersh2019: 226–28). Hegel’s Encyclopaedia system can be thought of as a rearrangement of the Neoplatonic hypostases that gives a Neo-Aristotelian priority to thinking: Logic (nous), Nature (phusis), and Spirit (psyche), where the highest form of Spirit, i.e., Absolute Spirit and its own highest form of philosophy, is the human equivalent of the divine nous, i.e., the Absolute Idea. Hegel directly opposes the Neoplatonic view that there is something ‘beyond’ Thought and ‘beyond’ Being (e.g., the One): indeed, Hegel’s basic philosophical impulse might be said to be the effort to overcome all pretensions towards the ‘Beyond’ (Jenseits) as such.²²

For Hegel, the Neoplatonic conception of the One lapses into unintelligibility in so far as it asserts that the One is totally ineffable. As Hegel sees it, if nothing positive can be said about the One, then the One just is nothing at all. Hegel would point out, of course, that the Neoplatonists in fact do say quite a lot of positive things about the One: that it is one, i.e., a unity, that it is beyond Being, etc. This would be one aspect of the apparent necessary self-contradiction of the Neoplatonic position. Against the negations of Neoplatonic negative theology, Hegel advocates the negation of negation, yielding a higher speculative positivity. Another of Hegel’s basic philosophical impulses is the effort to overcome all ineffability or inexpressibility: since language is ‘the most spiritual existence of Spirit’ (PR: §164), the unsayable is less, not more, than the sayable. The pretensions of the mystic to the direct experience or intuition of the ineffable and unsayable would really be nothing more than the abstract emptiness of mere feeling, mere ecstasy, which offers merely the illusion of depth. The absolute unity of the One, without differentiation or determination, is merely another iteration of ‘the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black’ (PhG: ¶16). For Hegel, to be is to be intelligible: since there can be nothing beyond Being—how could there be?—there can be nothing that is not ultimately unintelligible, nothing beyond the grasp of Thought.²³

A contemporary Hegelian could conceivably raise an analogous rejoinder to Derrida’s Neoplatonic critique of Hegel via the gift of Being: Derrida’s conception of the gift lapses into unintelligibility in so far as it asserts that the gift lies beyond all philosophical, conceptual or rational determinations—in other words, that the gift is unthinkable, incomprehensible or ineffable. Why is the gift unthinkable, for Derrida? First, because the gift is the prior ground of Thought and Being, and so it is beyond Thought and Being. Whatever is beyond Thought is unthinkable—i.e., incomprehensible or ineffable, even (or especially) by philosophical thinking. Second, because the gift as such does not admit of an answer to the question ‘why?’. In other words, one cannot explain why the gift is given. As Derrida argues, if there were a reason, cause, or explanation for the gift, then it would not be a gift worthy of the name. If the gift were given out of some conceptual, rational, or philosophical necessity, then it would not be a true gift.²⁴ The gift must lie beyond Reason, beyond the Concept, etc., while nevertheless making them possible. The Hegelian response is obvious: if nothing positive can be said about the gift itself, then it is nothing at all. To be is to be intelligible: if the gift neither has Being, nor intelligibility, then what exactly ‘is’ it? If the Derridean says that it ‘is’ not, since it is prior to Being itself, the Hegelian will respond that this locution has no meaning: it is just empty talk.²⁵

Yet Derrida would perhaps insist that this Hegelian rejoinder begs the question against his own position—just as the Neoplatonist surely would. The gift, like the One, is precisely unintelligible, since it lies beyond Thought as such. For Derrida, as for the Neoplatonist, this is a feature, not a bug, of their position. Hegel’s view of the unsurpassability of the Thought-Being pair seems to be just a bare assertion when placed side-by-side with the Neoplatonic-Derridean view that there is something beyond Thought and Being. At the very least, it is not immediately obvious whether Hegel is right, or Derrida is right. As we have seen, Derrida has specific arguments trying to show that Hegel’s systematic account of Thought and Being is not actually self-grounding and self-justifying in the way that Hegel needs it to be, on grounds internal to Hegel’s own system (via his reading of ‘God as Light’). At the very least, it is not obvious that these arguments are unsuccessful. Further work would need to be done to evaluate Derrida’s argument for the gift of Being, and to evaluate possible Hegelian responses. But perhaps the only true verification of the standpoint of the ‘Beyond’ would be (as per Plotinus) the direct experience of unity with the One, or (as per Derrida) catching a glimpse of what is left behind by the gift of Being—its trace, or its remains.

V. Conclusion

By way of conclusion, a very short summary of the path we have taken. In §II, I laid out Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas through the notion of the gift of Being: Derrida argues that Being is conditioned by the prior gift of Being, which necessarily remains inassimilable to Hegel’s systematic philosophical account of the speculative unity of Thought and Being. In §III, I argued that Derrida’s critique of Hegel can be understood as raising a modified Neoplatonic objection to Hegel’s system: just as the Neoplatonists hold that the One gives the gift of Thought and Being while remaining ‘beyond’ them both (and thus ‘ineffable’), Derrida holds that the gift makes Thought and Being possible while remaining ‘beyond’ them both (and thus philosophically ‘unthinkable’). In §IV, I considered possible Hegelian responses to Derrida’s critique: just as Hegel argues that the ineffability of the Neoplatonic One renders it utterly ‘empty’ or ‘vacuous’, so too could Hegel argue that the unthinkability of Derrida’s gift renders it utterly ‘empty’ or ‘vacuous’. But this Hegelian response seems to beg the question against the Neoplatonic and Derridean view: whatever lies beyond Thought and Being would indeed be ‘empty’ for Thought, but the question is precisely whether or not there is something beyond Thought and Being. Perhaps this question may not be definitively answerable within Thought, but only through contact with whatever lies beyond it—if there is indeed any such thing.

If nothing else, I hope this investigation may be of some help in rekindling the question with which Derrida’s Glas begins: ‘what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel? For us, here, now: from now on that is what one will not have been able to think without him. For us, here, now: these words are citations, already, always, we will have learned that from him’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 1a).²⁶