I. Being

We will begin by considering a peculiarity of Maraguat’s treatment of Hegel’s method in the Logic. As is well known, in Kant’s account of teleological judgment, the concept of purposiveness is taken to be not a condition for the possibility of objects of experience but a condition for our representation of nature as a unified system.Footnote ⁹ The concept of the organism thus does not only not apply to things in themselves; it also does not apply to the mere appearances of such things. But as Maraguat rightly notes, Hegel sets out to remedy this troubling situation in the Logic, which is concerned not with how we happen to represent things or with any sort of contingent ‘conceptual scheme’ but rather with which thought-determinations are themselves ‘true’ and thereby ‘objective, effective and actual’ (2023b: 5). As Hegel himself puts this point, Kant’s mistake is to ask whether the categories apply or not to an exogenous, sensible content rather than inquiring into the validity of the content of the categories themselves (EL: 88/§43).

Maraguat thus conceives of his project as in line with other so-called ‘metaphysical’ readings of Hegel.Footnote ¹⁰ While I question the utility and accuracy of this way of framing the longstanding debate in the literature, here it is worth noting that Maraguat resolves not to ‘directly refute “non-metaphysical” readings’ but rather to only draw general conclusions regarding the metaphysical nature of Hegel’s inquiry through the specific investigation into mechanism and teleology (2023b: 6). We can infer from this that, for Maraguat, the derivation of final ends in the Teleology chapter will suffice as an indirect demonstration of the objective, metaphysical status of the ‘concept’.

In the final chapters of True Purposes, we begin to get a sense of how this form of indirect demonstration is supposed to work. Maraguat argues that, in the section of Teleology on the ‘The Realized Purpose’, Hegel’s final argumentative step is to show that the means to realizing an end are not external to the end but constitute the actuality of the end. The paradigmatic teleological object, it turns out, is the self-producing being whose means (its organs, say) to achieving its end of producing itself are identical with that end itself. Such an end, according to Maraguat, is a concept that gives itself its own reality in so far as it objectifies itself in its own means, by way of those very means. And this, he argues, ‘shows that objective processes are those that carry out the end, and not processes that occur within subjectivity nor processes that connect something purely subjective to something merely objective’ (2023b: 151). Against Kant, Hegel is thus held to establish the objective reality of the concept.

Yet there is reason to question the success of such an ‘indirect demonstration’. It is of course important to recall that Kant himself understands final ends as concepts that are the cause of their own reality. As Kant writes, ‘The concept of an object insofar as it at the same time contains the ground of the reality of this object is called an end’ (CPJ: 68/5:180). Kant is, moreover, clear that when one judges ‘something that one cognizes as a product of nature as being at the same time an end’, it must be regarded as a natural end—that is, as ‘cause and effect of itself’ rather than as a product of either mechanical laws or art (CPJ: 242–43/5:370–71). An ‘objective process’ thus carries out the end, not a process that ‘occur[s] within subjectivity’. And yet this is perfectly compatible with Kant’s transcendental scepticism and merely ‘reflective’ use of the principle of purposiveness. This indicates that, despite Maraguat’s assertion to the contrary, we must understand what in general is motivating the transitions in the Logic and what kind of transitions they are, if the demonstrated objectivity of ends is not to be subject to the Kantian restriction.

In the limited space I have, I want to suggest that we cannot demonstrate the objective validity of Hegel’s concept of inner purposiveness and life without an account of what Hegel refers to in several places as the ‘absolute abstraction’, the movement from particular concepts to the highest and most abstract generality.Footnote ¹¹ Paradoxically, such absolute abstraction is said to be identical with ‘sensuous consciousness’ in the Phenomenology and with ‘pure being’ in the Logic. And this is because the immediate ‘this’ of sense-certainty and ‘being’ in the opening pages of the Logic constitute the pure thought of such an immediate object, freed from all empirical determinations, relations and constraints. The point can also be made as follows: ‘this’ and ‘I think “this”’ are one and the same thought; to perceive a singular ‘this’ is always to be conscious that one is perceiving it. ‘What is called sensuous consciousness’, Hegel writes, ‘is precisely this pure abstraction; it is this latter thinking for which being is the immediate’ (PS: 436/§760). Let me explain.

In the Science of Logic, Hegel tells us that the Logic is the ‘pure science’ and that it has the result of the Phenomenology of Spirit as its presupposition (SL: 29/21.33). In ‘Absolute Knowing’, the phenomenological actor comes to consciousness of the identity of the determinacy of the object with the conceptually determining activity of the subject (of itself). The content of knowing is now the ‘truth’ in so far as what thinking knows in knowing the object corresponds to what it (the object) has actually been all along, namely thought itself; the content now assumes ‘the shape of the self’ (PS: 460/§798). The Logic takes this achievement as its premise and proceeds to investigate objectivity in its identity with thought. To understand the proper object of Logic, consider the movement from lizard to reptile, from reptile to animal, and from animal to organism, until we reach ‘entity’ and eventually ‘being’. Only by performing such a movement do we rid thought of any given content, ‘for any content’, Hegel tells us, ‘would entail distinction and the reference of distinct moments to each other, and hence a mediation’ (SL: 48/21.56). In other words, our investigation of the object would assume determinations and constraints to which we have not yet entitled ourselves; hence the demand that the Logic avoid taking for granted this or that content and that it begin ‘presuppositionlessly’. The immediacy of the ‘this’ in the Phenomenology thus reflects the purity of the consciousness of the ‘this’ (the ‘absolute abstraction’), and the Logic takes this a step further: the immediate ‘this’ is no longer an (apparently) external object of consciousness but is now overtly grasped as the thought of such immediacy, pure being.

Yet Hegel’s argument, following Aristotle, is that the abstraction from all content to being as the highest and most-encompassing generality commits the ‘highest genus’ fallacy.Footnote ¹² As we have established, being is identical with the thought of being, just as ‘this’ is identical with ‘I think “this”’ or ‘the stone is warm’ is identical with ‘I think the stone is warm’. To pick out the stone is to think it under the concept warm, thereby distinguishing it from the not-warm or the cool; and to think it under the concept warm is to distinguish the concept itself from other concepts, like cool.Footnote ¹³ On the basis of ‘being’, however, one can neither mark off the objects that fall under it from those that do not nor distinguish the concept applied from those that are not. This is so because one cannot derive the different species of a genus without predicates that come from outside the genus, and in the case of the supposed highest genus, being, all possible differentiae ‘are’ and so are already subsumed. On the one hand, being is not a determinate generality over against other generalities, since it encompasses them all. On the other hand, a concept indeterminate in this way would be unable to distinguish the objects that fall under it from other objects. What is thought through this absolute abstraction is not only not any particular content or any particular being but nothing determinate at all. It is for this reason that, Hegel tells us, pure being proves precisely to be nothing (SL: 59/21.69).

The conception of being as a highest genus thus breaks down. Yet there is a positive result: Hegel claims that ‘the very indeterminateness of being constitutes its quality’ (SL: 58/21.68). This is to say that such indeterminacy or this ‘failure of sense’ is itself only intelligible in the context of a distinction between determinacy and indeterminacy—a distinction that thereby renders indeterminacy determinate: that is, we can say positively of indeterminacy that it is not the determinate. In thinking pure being, we learn that we cannot be thinking a highest empirical class but must rather be thinking how being is to be thought. And being is to be initially thought as the indeterminacy of things that merely are; such things are indeterminate because we cannot yet think them in their distinguishability from one another. What it means to be, in other words, must be further understood in terms of qualitative and quantitative determinations, whereby things can be thought as the distinct things they are. Being is not the empirical concept under which all beings fall but the pure concepts through which beings are originally thinkable. If thought were to stop at the highest empirical class, it would always be thinking something other than itself and could not, ironically, actually be thinking being (what it is to be). And this is because being proper is nothing but the thought of being.

Thought is, in thinking being, thinking only itself. If being cannot be the indeterminate highest genus, then it must be thought determinately as the ways in which beings can be. And the ‘indeterminate’ has precisely proven to be a way in which things can be; we might think here of Aristotle’s primary substances as indeterminate singulars (this horse) of which a secondary substance, a species-concept, must always be predicated (this horse). This is so because a singular ‘this’, a bit of matter not yet informed by a conceptual determination (‘horse’), proves to be indistinguishable from any such other bit of matter and is thus ‘nothing’. But that initial moment of indeterminacy (the ‘this’) remains an ineliminable aspect of anything that is (its contingent material existence at a unique point in space and time). We are thereby thinking the conceptual determinations through which beings can be—and be thought as—what they are: for example, quantity as a necessary form of things and as a necessary form of the predication of things. To think that ‘the surface of the stone is 150°F’ is to think the category of intensive magnitude as a condition for both the stone’s being so and its being so. Such determinations are not abstractions that all things have in common but the rules for so much as thinking things as they are.

Thought, in thinking itself, thereby thinks the object of thought, which is, therefore, what thought thinks in thinking anything at all. The transitions in the Logic constitute thought’s own sensitivity to its failure to adequately think the thought of being, not according to any external standard but according to the standard internal to what thought is thinking.Footnote ¹⁴ This is what Robert Pippin has called the apperceptive or self-conscious character of pure thinking in the Logic.Footnote ¹⁵ What it means to say that, in thinking being, thought thinks itself, is ultimately that thought is responsive to what the thought of pure being normatively requires of thinking—what contrary thoughts it excludes or indeed entails (that being is nothing, for instance). In so thinking the pure object of thought, thought is open to an internal, rational need to revise its own speculative judgment as to what counts as being.Footnote ¹⁶ Thought thereby progressively determines what must be true of such an object (that is, any possible object) and, as a consequence, how things themselves must actually be.

Hegel himself establishes this in an important passage early on in the Logic: ‘As science [i.e., as Logic], truth is pure self-consciousness as it develops itself and has the shape of the self, so that that which exists in and for itself is the conscious concept and the concept as such is that which exists in and for itself’ (SL: 29/21.33–34). As in the Phenomenology, thought must come to think being as the self-determined thought of being. This also means, then, that it is not enough to simply assert—as Maraguat does—that Hegel, unlike Kant, takes the concept of inner purpose to hold not just ‘for us’ but for the world (2023b: 181); it must be shown that we cannot think what it means to be without thinking the thought of inner purposiveness. In a note, Maraguat suggests that it is the ‘objective meaning of purpose’ demonstrated in Teleology that prevents an intellectual mystification of the object in the Logic, presumably by establishing the reality of purpose ‘outside’ of thinking (2023b: 151, n.11). But this understanding of the ‘objectivity’ of logic—its purported proof in Teleology—comes much too late. Purpose can only be grasped as a determination of ‘what is’ in so far as the Logic as a whole has been shown to be, from the beginning, the pure determination by self-conscious or apperceptive thought of what it is to be. Otherwise, Teleology would amount to nothing other than a bald insistence that purpose holds not just for our representations of things but for things themselves. As we have established, thought itself determines how being must be thought. It alone determines, for example, that the mechanical conception of being is insufficient to account for beings in their determinate individuality and that a higher-order account of purpose is needed to specify the principle of such individuation. It alone determines that purpose in turn would not be so much as intelligible unless conceived as realized not just by but in its means and that life is the conception of how things can be that satisfies this further conceptual requirement. The significance of this move for the philosophy of biology cannot be overstated: Hegel develops a logical account of life as a possible form of being that vindicates the contemporary intuition that purposiveness is neither merely the function of an ‘intentional stance’ nor a dispensable façon de parler but an objective determination of living beings without which they can neither be what they are nor be understood or explained.

II. Living

We have just seen that it is only by virtue of the absolute abstraction that we are entitled to an understanding of inner purposiveness, organism and the notion of end not as mere reflective principles for judgment but as robustly metaphysical determinations of being itself. Indeed, they are even more than that. In his lectures on logic, Hegel thus tells us that ‘substance, if it is to become true, must be apprehended as subject’ (LL: 212/§213). Because thought, in thinking pure being, thinks nothing but what it is to think such a thought, it determines how to properly think not only the thought of being but also the very being of thought itself. This will precisely turn out to be what Hegel calls the Idea, a concept that is the cause of its own existence, or an inner purpose.

According to Maraguat, the concept of inner purposiveness receives a ‘non-provisional’ or complete articulation in the chapter on Teleology. Rather than ending in a state of tension that would necessitate a further transition, the chapter is held to culminate in an account of inner purposiveness in which, as he tells us, ‘nothing else is required’ (2023b: 152). Teleology is interpreted as playing ‘the outstanding role of explaining how a concept can be given objectivity’ (2023b: 169). Yet Hegel explicitly contrasts the finite purpose of Teleology with the infinite purpose of the following section, the Idea (EL: 282/§212A). The notion of an end in Teleology remains external to the means required to fulfil it, as in the case of the wood and concrete utilized to build a house, which are initially taken to be ‘used up’ in the service of the end. Hegel identifies ‘this syllogism’—the relationship between realized end, materials and goal-directed activity—as ‘the true fundamental form of the whole teleological relationship’ (LL: 211/§211). And its inadequacy as an attempt to specify the form of Objectivity—the conceptually enriched notion of being distinctive of the Begriffslogik—lies in the externality of the principle of individuation (the ‘subjective purpose’) to the object individuated (the ‘means’).

Yet in the process of being realized, Hegel shows, the subjective purpose demonstrates the appropriateness of the means to the end and the realizability of the end in just those means. The parts—the threshold, the crossbeams, the walls and doors—can only be the parts they are through the realization of the purpose, and the purpose likewise only ‘is’ through the parts. This conception of the internality of the subjective purpose to the objective means constitutes the transition to a form of objectivity that is itself a subject and a form of purposiveness that ‘negates the subjectivity of activity on behalf of it’ by demonstrating its context-sensitivity and embeddedness within an environment (LL: 211/§212). The proper place for the elaboration of such a concept lies not in Teleology, Hegel insists, but rather in the Idea. On my view, accordingly, Teleology is not itself the account of how a concept can be given objectivity but the crucial demonstration of the necessity of such an account—an account we do not get until the Idea, specifically in the chapter on Life.

As we saw above, the absolute abstraction establishes the pure concept of being as the proper object of Logic. But it is not until the chapter on Life, I now want to claim, that thought begins to properly grasp the concept of being as concept and ultimately as the concept, which Maraguat rightly identifies with inner purposiveness. To recall, as Aristotle argues, to understand being qua being is to understand its paradigmatic instance, substance and substance proper—as the complete unity of matter and form—is life. Here I want to suggest that the final section of Life, the Genus, is an initial (and therefore partial) articulation of ‘being qua being’; it is the concept as the formal and final cause in light of which matter is individuated as the matter it is.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet on precisely this point, there is a profound difficulty in Maraguat’s account, which threatens to derail Hegel’s derivation of the concept proper. At the end of Chapter 8, in a striking set of passages, Maraguat contends that ‘in nature, for Hegel, there are no genera as such, in the zoological sense of the word’ (2023b: 200). A genus, on Maraguat’s reading, ‘is the abstraction of many individual lives’ and indeed is even said to be ‘based on induction’ (2023b: 201). At the same time, and confusingly, Maraguat claims that this is not a ‘subjective, epistemic defect’ but an ‘objective limitation’ (2023b: 201, n.34). This is confusing because a genus derived through a process of induction would of necessity constitute a subjective defect, since induction is a (subjective) form of reasoning. Even if Maraguat means to highlight the (objective) contingency of species members under such assumptions, the status of the genus as an abstraction derived through induction implies an epistemic defect on the part of the one doing the derivation. Nevertheless, the upshot is that the capacity of the living individual to maintain itself in accordance with its own internal purpose is ‘clearly superior’, for Maraguat’s Hegel, to the generic process by which the individual produces other instances of its kind (2023b: 201). This is to say that my cat has ontological superiority over the species to which it belongs; while my cat enjoys reality as a physical object with internal standards for its own flourishing, the same cannot be said of felis catus.

Before we turn to the problems with Maraguat’s view, let us first reconstruct Hegel’s logical account of life. The first category of life is the ‘Living Individual’, which articulates the idea of the organism as a being that has itself as its purpose. The organism organizes its parts into members which reciprocally produce one another; and its process of self-maintenance has three essential aspects: irritability, sensibility and reproduction. In sensibility, the organism feels itself as its own end through pleasure and pain; in irritability, it is susceptible to being affected by external stimuli, which show up in light of its capacity for pleasure and pain as good-for or bad-for; and reproduction is the overarching activity of self-maintenance in which sensibility and irritability are unified. Yet such reproductive activity itself is only intelligible with reference to ‘the objective world’, in relation to which its irritability and capacity for self-feeling are activated (SL: 683/12.186). This leads us to the second category of life, the Life-Process, through which the individual reproduces itself by metabolizing resources it obtains by learning to navigate external environmental conditions. And finally, the life-process has its ground in the Genus, through which the individual ‘brings itself forth out of actuality, whereas before it proceeded only from the concept’ (SL: 686/12.189–90).Footnote ¹⁸ What Hegel here means is that the living individual proceeds not only from its own ‘inner purpose’ of self-maintenance but also from the ‘actuality’ of other living individuals, whose parts enable the production of new members of the kind under the environmental conditions specific to the species. The part-whole relation articulated in the Living Individual finds its normative standard in the members characteristic of its kind.Footnote ¹⁹

As noted above, Maraguat argues that this notion of the genus is derived through induction, depriving it of its normative force. The claim is that species like felis catus do not determine how individual empirical cats ought to be but simply register what has, for the most part, been true of cats so far. Hegel, however, could not be clearer on this issue. As he notes in the Encyclopaedia, ‘The genus that is the universal belongs to the specific animal and constitutes its specific essentiality […] and is not to be construed merely as some common feature’ (EL: 89/§24A1). Here and elsewhere in the Logic, Hegel thus explicitly denies that the genus is ‘based on induction’. Maraguat is clearly motivated by a desire to avoid ‘biological essentialism’, as he himself remarks in a note (2023b: 201, n.35), but Hegel is unabashed in this regard: the genus constitutes the ‘essentiality’ of the individual.Footnote ²⁰

Now, in response, Maraguat could appeal to a distinction he draws between empirical and metaphysical kinds of genus; the former is the concept of an empirical species while the latter is the genus of ‘animality’ itself, as realized in an individual organism (2023b: 200). According to Maraguat, it is animality that exists as a concrete universal, exercising a very thin normative constraint on individuals, whereas species (e.g., felis catus) are mere abstractions. But again, this interpretation does not hold up under scrutiny. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel argues that the genus of animality ‘particularizes itself […] into species’ in accordance with contingent environmental circumstances (PN: 411/§367A). This is important because animality does not furnish determinate enough constraints to account for the characteristics required for self-maintenance in specific environmental contexts, nor therefore for the initial condition of any individual self-maintainer, namely a prior member of its kind. The species, on this view, is not a zoological abstraction but ‘establishes and preserves itself as an independent existence, that is, distinguishes itself from others’ (PN: 416/§370). Accordingly, species are themselves the ‘middle term’ through which the genus (e.g., animality) becomes determinate and, as Hegel says, ‘brings […] a harmony into all parts of the [individual] animal’ (PN: 421/§370A).

I want to consider one final—and in my view decisive—piece of exegetical evidence: in the opening of the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel notes that ‘defective forms’ and ‘monstrous births’ would be unintelligible without the ‘presupposition’ of a ‘fixed, invariable type’ (PN: 24/§250). Maraguat, in a related article on this topic, claims that this is a ‘working-hypothesis’ for the naturalist rather than a ‘necessary presupposition’ (2023a: 83). But Hegel is clear that such forms would not be so much as thinkable as what they are in the absence of such an invariable type, and if we read on, the idea that this is just a ‘working-hypothesis’ becomes completely untenable: ‘This type cannot be furnished by experience, for it is experience which also presents these so-called monstrosities, deformities, intermediate products, etc. The fixed type rather presupposes the self-subsistence and dignity of the determination stemming from the concept’ (2023a: 83).Footnote ²¹ That is, just as in Kant empirical laws inherit their necessity from the pure principle of causality, so for Hegel do empirical species inherit their normativity—their status as an evaluative measure—from the ‘self-subsistence and dignity of […] the concept’ (2023a: 83). In other words, species-concepts are precisely not subjective hypotheses or inductively derived types but objective determinations of life itself.

So much for the philological objections to Maraguat. Yet is the assertion of the reality of the species in itself a defensible claim? Is it even a necessary part of Hegel’s picture, or a pre-Darwinian extravagance we can safely dispense with? As we have established, the concept of the inner purpose is not given a complete articulation in Teleology but is first outlined in the account of the self-maintenance of the living individual. This account, however, remains incomplete, unfounded, until—Hegel tells us—the individual ceases to merely ‘presuppose’ its concept and ‘becomes its production’ (SL: 686/12.190). Inner purposiveness remains ‘unproven through itself’ until it is grounded in the ‘universal concept’, the genus. And this is an account that arguably remains indispensable.

As Michael Thompson has convincingly shown, the notion of a species or kind is a pure or a priori concept suitably applied in a distinctive kind of judgment, what he calls a ‘natural-historical judgment’.Footnote ²² The concept of a natural kind is not an empirical concept but, Thompson argues, a category expressing a possible form of being. In representing living beings, we employ non-statistical judgments of the type, ‘The bear has four legs’; even if it were factually the case that, due to some freak occurrence, all living bears had only three legs, the judgment would retain its force. Such judgments are not, in other words, ‘based on induction’ but based on knowledge of the form—a normative kind of generality—in view of which individual bears have the material features that they do. That ‘the bear has four legs’ expresses not our general view of things as observers but ‘conditions […] presupposed by the life-form itself’ (2008: 71). There is a tight connection, Thompson stresses, between the features a given life-form bears and the circumstances conducive to its reproduction; it is the non-accidental relationship between life-form and environment that makes apparent the irreducibly normative character of species concepts (2008: 52). It is the kind that furnishes the criteria for flourishing in such a context.Footnote ²³

Thompson’s aim is different than ours—namely, to recover forms of predication that cannot be accommodated within the existing framework of Fregean logic; ‘life’ is not just an empirical property some objects exhibit, while being still thinkable through Frege’s restricted categories of object/concept and the standard forms of predication (2008: 19). And the key to grasping the form of predication proper to life is precisely the concept of a life-form or kind, without which we could not so much as identify living beings as distinct objects of reference or distinguish the concept of the animate from that of the inanimate. Beyond the question of Hegel exegesis, this identification of the limits of the reigning logical paradigm speaks to the philosophical indispensability of such an account.

Yet it is also worth noting that Hegel himself had already identified and indeed deduced the same ‘form of predication’ (Thompson’s ‘natural-historical judgment’) in the Subjective Logic. This is important for our purposes because, in Hegel’s account of the Judgment of the Concept, he articulates an essentially Aristotelian view of the species-concept as the essence of the individual—contra Maraguat. The absolute abstraction examined above has the Judgment of the Concept as one of its points of culmination, in so far as this is the form of predication that specifies the logical form of substance, as we will now see.Footnote ²⁴

In the Subjectivity section of the Subjective Logic, Hegel derives four forms of judgment. In the Judgment of Existence, universals inhere in an existent individual (‘this rose is red’), while in the Judgment of Reflection, the predicate no longer inheres in a given individual but subsumes a conceptual class (‘some plants are curative’).Footnote ²⁵ The final two forms are the ones most relevant for our purposes. Judgments of Necessity concern neither inherent nor subsumptive predicates but essential predicates said of a species (‘the rose is a plant’). This form of predication is meant to say of some kind of thing what it is, or to ‘form the fixed and unchangeable foundation of [things]’ (EL: 251/§177A). And in the final section of Judgment, the Judgment of the Concept, the apodictic judgment is identified as the form in which the essence of an existent individual lies in its species-concept: ‘This bear with an injured leg is bad’. The indexical ‘this’ marks that this is a singular, perceptible object in the world (and not a conceptual class), but it is the singular matter it is by virtue of its form, its Gattung-concept (‘bear’). Its particularity is signalled by its constitution (‘with an injured leg’), which makes it an instance of a kind. Finally, that this is ‘bad’ is not a matter of a subjective evaluation; the predicate rather reflects or expresses the defective status of this particular bear, given what counts as normal for the kind (given the normality the kind codifies).Footnote ²⁶

It is thus wrong to say, as Maraguat does, that ‘individuals do not exist as cases of a genus; as such, they are only in the eye of the beholder’ (2023b: 222). Hegel makes clear that this account of judgment is not an account of our external ‘reflection’ on things but an account of objective form—the logical shape borne by the world (SL: 554/12.57). Accordingly, living individuals could not so much as be what they are in the absence of such species-concepts, which Hegel identifies with the concept as such in judgment (the ‘concrete universal’ or ‘this-such’ briefly analysed at the end of the previous paragraph). This is, of course, a certain kind of essentialism, and essentialism about species-concepts is, at present, a deeply unpopular position.Footnote ²⁷ But despite Hegel’s notorious anti-Lamarckian and anti-evolutionary leanings, it is important to emphasize again that Hegel consistently ties the species-concept to the environmental circumstances that condition it.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, this is an essential mark of the finitude of life, the dependence of a species’ good on contingent conditions. But rather than abandoning the species-concept to the flux of natural history or treating it as a mere abstraction or subjective ‘snapshot’ of a Heraclitean process of change, Hegel shows that there must always be some normative criteria for flourishing relative to one’s circumstances. And this in no way rules out the possibility of a change in such criteria, along Darwinian lines; it just specifies what it is that is susceptible to change.

I want to conclude our discussion of life by addressing a prominent recent account of species-concepts—James Kreines’s account in Reason in the World—that affirms their constitutive status but nevertheless exhibits its own form of one-sidedness, as Maraguat himself observes in True Purposes. Viewed side by side, their respective positions constitute an antinomy, which can be resolved by considering a final—and underappreciated—feature of Hegel’s account of the Genus, with deep significance for our final topic, ‘thinking’. ‘What Hegel shows’, Kreines writes, ‘is that the intimacy of type and token does all of the work needed to support teleology, given just reproduction’ (2015: 107). As Maraguat points out, Kreines locates the dynamic of self-generation strictly on the side of the genus: self-production consists in the production of a formally identical but numerically distinct member of the kind (2023b: 201–202, n.37).

To better understand Kreines’s view, consider the example of an infant born with a heart defect. For Kreines, the normative measure whereby the defect can be identified as a defect is solely the kind itself; the question at issue is whether a trait or property is conducive to species reproduction or not. Yet the problem with this view is that the badness of the defect stems not just from the non-exemplarity of the token; the defect is bad for the infant, given its inner purpose of self-maintenance. There is a question here not only of survival of the species but of individual flourishing. The infant is, after all, trying to be itself and maintain its form, which is conceptually distinct from the form of the species. Kreines, however, tends to run the two forms together: ‘The relation between the individual and the kind or concept is so intimate that the concept is the substance of a living being, allowing type and token to stand in for one another in meeting the requirements for self-organization’ (2015: 95, my emphasis). Meanwhile, as we have seen, Maraguat himself opts for the opposite extreme: self-production only consists in the individual activity of self-maintenance; the species is just an abstraction. But Hegel rejects both claims and follows Aristotle in identifying both generic and singular modes of self-production as necessary, inseparable, but not interchangeable moments of life.

The way that Hegel develops this point is through the intricate dialectic of the sexual relation, which, strikingly, Reason in the World does not address and True Purposes fails to see as central to Hegel’s realism about species.Footnote ²⁹ For Hegel, contrary to Kreines’s ‘interchangeability’ claim, each living individual is, as an individual, non-identical with its species; it is a logical point that s is not u, that the singular is not the universal. The individual ‘thus has the feeling of a defect’, a need to identify with itself (its own immanent species-form), which it fulfils by identifying with another member of its kind. ‘The [sexual] process consists in this’, Hegel writes, ‘that they become in reality what they are in themselves, namely, one genus, the same subjective vitality’ (PN: 412/§368A). Living individuals cannot even achieve identity with themselves—cannot effectively maintain themselves in their form—without seeking out another living individual of the opposite sex.Footnote ³⁰ It is in the product of their union that they achieve their purpose of making the species actual (that is, of achieving the identity of s and u) and thereby objectify their own respective drives to identity with the species. Contrary to Maraguat’s nominalism, Hegel thus shows that part of what it means for the individual to successfully reproduce itself as an individual is to participate in the self-production of the species as a whole through copulation.

At the same time, there is a crucial asymmetry in the genus-process which is a key reason that logical life proves inadequate as an account of its own notion of self-maintenance. The living individual is ultimately a mere means to the self-production of the species. Hegel’s key example is that of the butterfly that dies as soon as it mates. This shows that the species, ‘which produces itself through negation of its differences, does not, however, exist in and for itself but only in a series of single living beings: and thus the sublation of the contradiction is always the beginning of a fresh one’ (PN: 414/§369A). Organic individuals like the butterfly are not yet true individuals, on this account, precisely because they only achieve identity with their kind in death; the end of their self-maintenance always turns out to be the maintenance of another (the species, at the expense of the self). The genus-process thus exhibits the same ‘spurious infinite progress’ that constitutes the limitation of Teleology, in which the end is external to the means (PN: 414/§369). The result is the negation not just of this individual but of individuality per se in the genus-process, in so far as the death of the individual upon reproducing demonstrates the primacy of the genus in Life. This has the logical consequence of making ‘the universality of the idea […] explicitly for itself’ (SL: 688/12.191).Footnote ³¹ This is to say that pure thinking, in thinking the thought of the genus-process, is brought to consciousness of the genus as such, independently of any of its instances. And the genus as such, considered apart from its concrete tokens, is a universal. It is thus nothing other than ‘the concept’ itself, which is ultimately to be understood as the principle of intelligibility of substance. But this also means that thought has now entered the ‘native realm of truth’ and has, in effect, turned to itself.Footnote ³²

In the final stretch of the text, Hegel derives the higher, rational form of life, in which the living individual achieves her own self-identity but not, primarily, through procreation (that is, through the perpetual displacement of the possible identity of individual and genus on to a new individual). Rather, she achieves self-identity through recognition by another such living individual as an authoritative bearer of the species-concept, their reciprocally administered, shared normative horizon. The individual is no longer negated in the service of the genus but is now just as much the end of the genus-process as the means, since she herself is responsible for determining what counts as the genus, who it includes and excludes, what it prescribes and proscribes, and so on.Footnote ³³

In my view, by reducing Hegel’s notion of the species to a mere abstraction, Maraguat effectively rejects the ‘concept’ itself—since the species is pure thinking’s initial specification of the ‘concrete universal’, as we saw above. But as we have also seen, the point of the absolute abstraction with which the Logic begins is to articulate a reflexively conceptual or ‘thoughtful’ account of being, and the Genus is precisely a ‘first stab’ at such an account. The species-concept, in Aristotelian terms, articulates the essence of substance or the ‘being’ of things. Being is thus no longer conceived as the highest genus but rather as the category of the genus—the ‘focal’ way in which being can be said.Footnote ³⁴ Hegel’s term of art for the genus explicitly grasped as such is, of course, the concept, since the genus brought to consciousness or conceptual comprehension is precisely the concept grasping itself. What thus ‘goes missing’ in Maraguat’s interpretation of the genus as a mere abstraction, a result of induction, is precisely the concept itself.

III. Thinking

In this final section, on thinking, we will briefly outline some implications of my criticisms above for Maraguat’s account of Cognition. We began with the absolute abstraction and an account of the Logic as, in Hegel’s words, ‘the truth as pure self-consciousness [developing] itself’ (SL: 29/21.33). I then showed that the genus is thought’s first attempt to articulate the concept as the principle by which matter individuates itself in living beings. I now want to suggest in conclusion that, if the genus is not so understood, namely, as the normative standard constitutive of living individuals, then we will lose the notion of ‘the concept’ itself. What Hegel calls the free genus (freie Gattung) articulates being qua being or conceptually enriched being, precisely by actualizing an inner purpose in a distinctly self-conscious way (EL: 290/§222).

Now, according to Maraguat, the chapter on Cognition merely reiterates the earlier argument from Teleology that the ‘realized purpose’ of spiritual beings must be a self-actualizing, inner purpose. For Maraguat, the inner purpose of spirit is no different than that of life; indeed, as he puts it: ‘The only immanent end that can be conceived of is the end that something is for itself’ (2023b: 223). This claim largely follows from the argument that, in Teleology, we arrive at a complete and self-standing conception of inner purposiveness. To make sense, then, of the obvious difference between life and spirit, Maraguat contends that, while their ends are the same, they are actualized in two different mediums—an inorganic medium, in the case of life, and a living medium, in the case of spirit.

Yet this arguably violates the Aristotelian spirit of Hegel’s account. In his lectures on Aristotle, Hegel goes out of his way to affirm the view that ‘we ought not to seek One soul [or “purpose”] that would be common’ to all life-forms (LHP: 2:247). As in Aristotle, it is the form of a thing, for Hegel, that individuates it as the thing it is, and form is understood as ‘characteristic activity’ (ergon) in Aristotle or, in Hegel’s terms, ‘purposive activity’ (das zweckmäßige Tun) (PS: 14/§22). A wolf does not just have the general end of being ‘for itself’ but the end characteristic of its kind, namely, to do what the wolf does, as in Hegel’s Judgment of Necessity or Thompson’s natural-historical judgment. At the same time, by Hegel’s lights, the inner purpose of merely living individuals is not yet fully ‘internal’, in the sense that such individuals are not responsible for determining their own purpose. In the case of the free genus, or the genus that relates to itself as such, we do not just have an end in the way a wolf does but give ourselves our ends through our consciousness of their goodness. That is, in giving a lecture, I am conscious of myself as giving it and thus of the reasons I have for doing so. This is not a capacity for reflection added to a set of perceptual and desiderative capacities we share with other animals. Rather, as Hegel puts it, ‘Thinking in general belongs to the nature of human beings to such an extent that one is always thinking […]. In all forms of mind—in feeling, in intuition, as well as in representation—thinking remains the foundation’ (PM: 69/§398A). Hegel thereby specifies not a ‘medium’ in which we realize a generic end but the formally distinctive, self-conscious way we realize our inner purpose.Footnote ³⁵

The absolute abstraction with which we began culminates, in the Genus, in thought’s initial confrontation with itself. If Maraguat were right and the genus here were a mere abstraction, then the transition to Cognition would, in effect, amount to an articulation of being itself as the highest genus. It would consist in bringing to consciousness what everything that is ‘has in common’, being. Yet Hegel’s own view is that the free or self-conscious genus articulates not a set of statistical concepts derived through induction but the pure, a priori conditions of being a what and of being a who, an object of possible knowledge and a subject of possible beliefs and acts. The ‘inner purpose’ of spiritual life is thus specified as the Idea of the True and the Idea of the Good, where purpose is no longer understood as just the self-production of an individual or species. That is, in being conscious of the goodness of one’s acts just in acting and in the truth of one’s beliefs just in believing, one determines oneself what ought to be done and believed as such, by any rational agent similarly situated. Nothing else can decide on our behalf what we should do or believe, except the other who I also am, the I who is also the other. The ‘true purpose’, then, is not just the ‘inner purpose’ in contrast to the ‘external purpose’ but that form of inner purposiveness that can autonomously determine the generic requirements of the good life. Such a purpose is, Hegel tells us, the ‘final purpose of the world’, which lies in ‘spirit’s consciousness of its freedom, and hence also the actualization of that very freedom’ (EL: 298/§234A; IPH: 22).