Martin Donougho’s Hegel’s ‘Individuality’: Beyond Category already contains a provocation in its very subtitle. Can anything be ‘beyond category’ in Hegel’s system of pure reason? Individuality (Individualität), which Donougho is at pains to distinguish from other concepts like the singular (Einzahl) or individualism (Individualismus), is such a slippery (non)-category that we can never seem to pin down exactly what it is (25). However, such slipperiness is juxtaposed to the philological and exegetical rigour of this book, and Donougho’s exhaustive account does manage to trace the appearance of ‘individuality’ in Hegel’s overall corpus, and in other pre-Hegelian and post-Hegelian contexts. This simultaneous display of systematicity and ambiguity—of deduction and aporia—makes Donougho’s book a legatee of Jena Romanticism. Like the Romantics, Donougho collects all the fragments and statements Hegel makes about ‘individuality’ in various fields, but without truly integrating the collection into one whole. Such a unification would do violence to the heterogeneous quality of the ‘individual’ in question (whether in Hegel’s different texts or as a non-category in general), and this is what gives the book its distinctive non-Hegelian spirit.

Donougho starts his narrative with Hegel’s precursors from Jena Romanticism, i.e., those Romantics who forged this new idea/ideal of individuality. At the end of the book, Donougho returns full circle to what can be deemed a neo-Romantic revolt against Hegel, in the guise of Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and Søren Kierkegaard (348). But Donougho is no mere critic of Hegel, and he domesticates these anti-Hegelian revolts by putting them into a more scholarly and genteel mould that appreciates the accomplishments of speculative Reason. He finds the polemical furore of the ‘young Hegelians’ such as Feuerbach as one-sided (348) and ultimately sees Hegel’s failure of cognising individuality as ironically productive. Thus, Donougho’s effort is not an abstract negation of Hegel; his philological fidelity to Hegel’s text cannot be motivated by mere criticism. It is a deconstruction of him, one that embraces and problematizes the dialectic at the same time. Donougho presents the reader with the full powers of contemporary Hegelianism (continental and analytic) to make his case for a post-Romantic Hegelianism of ‘individuality’.

However, as more and more texts are impressively processed, commented on, and digested in this study—as the (non)-category of individuality seemingly gains determinacy—we eventually observe the same ‘individuality’ lose conceptual momentum, reverse itself, risk indeterminacy, and then inevitably crash, like an irrationally exuberant economic bubble. In this deconstructive reading, we witness the conceptual and hermeneutical meanings of ‘individuality’ inflate, bubble, and inevitably pop, making for an exciting, vertiginous, but inevitably entropic reading experience. The hero of Donougho’s narrative is not any stable vessel of the Absolute, but something that falls to the ground and crashes, like Humpty Dumpty. And it is not a coincidence that Donougho explicitly invokes Humpty Dumpty in the text, a creature that is not out of place as a bizarre literary fiction but is a central character in Donougho’s (non)-Hegelian narrative (142).

Thinking of ‘individuality’ in Donougho is a contradictory affair, and even using the phrase ‘individuality’ is occasionally too unitary a word for his taste, with Donougho sometimes toying with the notion of ‘dividual’ (18). As a non-category, ‘individuality’ is asserted (and reasserted) as determinate and indeterminate; a part of the system and yet outside of it. Contrary to Donougho, I am not sure this constitutes a dialectical contradiction, since a contradiction in Hegel is something that leans forward and resolves itself without remainder. Instead, Donougho’s notion of contradiction reveals itself as essentially antinomic in character. This is the type of contradiction that is closer to Walt Whitman’s statement in Leaves of Grass (which Donougho quotes): ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)’ (356). If such attempts at determinacy inevitably undermine themselves (and undermine the whole itself) one wonders why we should enter this Hegelian apparatus at all and just settle for the ineffable. This seems like a tempting option, and one of Donougho’s favourite epigrams comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: that the individual is ‘ineffable’ (58). But such a mere flight into the ineffable does not seem possible for Donougho’s deconstructive impulse; he might respond that as thinkers we cannot help but play this game between speculative reason and negative dialectics. As Friedrich Schlegel put it: ‘It is equally fatal to the spirit to have a system and not to have a system’ (cited 70), and Donougho’s book attests to this Romantic spirit of having systematic commitments without committing to a system.

While Donougho’s sympathies are of the Romantic and post-Romantic variety, he does not want to condemn Hegel outright as a monolithic or as a ‘teleological’ thinker, in any ham-fisted or ‘linear’ sense. For all of Hegel’s faults, his system tries to avoid the Charybdis of ‘Spinozism’—the monistic night where all cows are black (176)—and the Scylla of individualist nihilism, perhaps best represented in Donougho’s text by Max Stirner (351). But this attempt on Hegel’s part—or what Donougho takes as the admirable intention of the dialectic—is a productive failure that cannot always keep disintegrative forces at bay. This is why Donougho introduces the overlooked concept of Übergreifen, or over-grasping. To over-grasp is not reductionist or trying to subordinate the particular to the abstract universal. Instead, it ‘hints at comprehensiveness rather than dominance’, trying to be inclusive without doing violence to what is other (3). To avoid a totalizing night in which all cows are black, dialectics must accept humility and acknowledge its own limit before what is not reducible or subsumable to the rational, but without ever giving up on articulating the rational or the real.

If all this reminds one of Theodor W. Adorno, I do not think they would be mistaken. Even if Adorno (or Jacques Derrida for that matter) is not a frequent name in Donougho’s text, this understanding of dialectics as productive failure is rather Adornoian. In other words, it is a dialectics without closure, or an ironic apophatic (as opposed to cataphatic) Hegelianism. For Donougho, we must attempt to think the non-identical, or what remains beyond the mere concept, without abjuring the effort to conceptualize. The connection is fitting, since one can see Adorno and the Frankfurt School as the last episode of German Romanticism. One can even call Donougho’s Hegel ‘Benjaminian’, insofar as it sees the eternal emerging from the individual (or individual fragment), rather than treating the individual as just a moment/mode of the eternal (329). In emphasizing the individual, Donougho’s Romanticism avoids such neo-Platonic hypostases that would treat the individual as an emanation of a metaphysical principle.

What also links Donougho to the Frankfurt School is a historicist and limited kind of dialectics which refrains from universal ontological commitments. This is made clear in the epilogue to the book, in its discussion of Michael Marder (345), but Donougho’s Romantic Hegel puts him in opposition to Stephen Houlgate’s reading of Hegel as an ontological thinker. According to Houlgate, Hegel’s Logic is not just positing conditions of thinking, or situating things historically, but gives us intellectual intuition into Being itself (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 125). This pushes Hegel more in the direction of pre-critical rationalism à la Baruch Spinoza, but Donougho will not have much of that. Instead, he hybridizes neo-Hegelian thinkers from across the continental and analytic spectrums, from neo-Kantians like Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin to Derrideans such as Catherine Malabou. All these proper names are recruited to resist such a metaphysically rationalist conclusion, according to which Hegel really has achieved Absolute Knowledge of an Absolute Idea (an onto-theological Noun)—such that nothing remains outside of the substance of Reason. That is why if Hegel can hobnob with Jena Romantics and some elements of post-structuralism, the one thinker Donougho seems keen on separating these chastened dialectics from is Spinoza. Slavoj Žižek (another name that crops up in Donougho) once wrote in his book on Gilles Deleuze that everyone loves Spinoza (Reference Žižek2004: 33), but it seems clear that Donougho does not have much love for him in this book.

It is obvious then how Donougho rejects readings of Hegel as a mere pan-logicist, or just another metaphysical rationalist. But in his Romanticizing impulse, he downplays key differences between Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, or between Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder (4), making Hegel’s thinking much more distant from the concerns of the Enlightenment, or the older traditions of rationalism. While Donougho is keen on defending the Romantics from Hegelian polemics, he does not offer an equally nuanced defence of Spinoza and seems content with casting Spinozian substance as a-cosmic and hostile to individuality. Instead, the main continental rationalist that Donougho sees as Hegel’s precursor in individuality is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with his windowless monads treated as conceptually superior to the modes of substance. In this Romantic plane of consistency where Hegel is reconciled to philosophies of the individual, difference, and the non-identical, the monism of Spinoza is not invited. This might seem ironic, given the pride of place Spinoza, the ‘God-intoxicated man’, had among the Romantics, but Donougho knows the Romantics and Goethe are closer to monads than modes (58).

To be fair to Donougho, Hegel to some extent abandoned his earlier defence of Spinoza in Faith and Knowledge (1802), but the Spinozist aspects of Hegel are nevertheless worth highlighting and complicate this Leibnizian-Romanticizing approach. God for Hegel is still a causa sui, and as Friedrich Jacobi noted before his death, Hegel never liberated himself from the ‘pathway’ of Spinozism (see Hegel Reference Hegel, Bowman and Speight2009: 139). It is also not a coincidence that so many Romantics and existentialists will reject Hegel as too monistic, or as Spinozist. It would be good for Donougho to revisit those criticisms of the Spinozist sides of Hegel that do not sit so comfortably with his own Hegel of Leibnizian ‘individuality’.

Before grappling with Hegel proper, Donougho’s preliminary sections address ‘individuality’ in several contemporary discourses (social, political, literary, commercial) and then deal with how individuality appears in the German Romantic context. This is the same context that shaped Hegel’s own thinking and that he reacted polemically against. One can see the influence of Jeffrey Reid’s The Anti-Romantic (Reid Reference Reid2019) on Donougho’s treatment (63), but Donougho is not as harsh as Reid in siding with the Romantics against Hegel. Also, against monolithic stereotyping, Donougho is much more sensitive compared to previous scholarship on the uses of ‘individuality’ as a theoretical ‘pragmatics’ in Hegel (31). Donougho’s ‘pragmatics’ has some things in common with Robert Brandom’s reconstruction of Hegel and other post-metaphysical, deflationary treatments; but Donougho’s treatment nonetheless does not reduce Hegelian ‘pragmatics’ to a kind of pragmatism, or a Wittgensteinian language game. We know Donougho’s version of Hegel is not a deflated analytic empiricism, and has more Romantic pretensions. He is admirably comfortable in Romantic, analytic and continental camps, and equally at home with the (Parmenidean) British Idealism of Francis Herbert Bradley, all the while keeping a respectable deconstructive distance.

In tracing ‘individuality’ throughout Hegel’s work, we certainly notice the (non)-concept loaded with many semantic functions (pragmatics), but Hegel never brings himself to rigorously deduce ‘individuality’ as a moment of the system. As Donougho quotes Henry Silton Harris, ‘individuality’ would be accorded to the concrete thinker of the organic whole of the system (17), but it is true that the promiscuous word appears in other guises and assumes other functions. No major work of Hegel’s (early or mature) remains free from the concerns of how ‘individuals’ develop and find their place in the rational whole. Donougho makes a solid contribution to Hegelian scholarship by rigorously classifying the different meanings and functions of individuality in many of Hegel’s major philosophical contexts. This is a real accomplishment of the book, and his attempt to keep all these meanings together resembles how he appreciates Hegel’s system as trying to contain and yet respect all these different moments—while also admitting such an attempt is only an effort of one scholar. As Donougho puts it, he is not a hunter of ‘individuality’ as much as an explorer of it (21).

However, ‘individuality’ is not just a crowning achievement of a rational system; it can also have its negative sides, and designate elements that lack full development/intelligibility. For instance, something can be a ‘mere’ individual in Hegel and thus lack mediation. Individuality can also designate something reactionary, as in a relapse of an aristocratic mentality, where modern warfare needs to be purged of ‘individuality’ (247). In terms of bad forms of individuality, one could add bourgeois cynicism, or the abstract personhood of Roman Law that persists in modern capitalism (Rose Reference Rose2009: 71). But true individuality—something that is not reducible to a single planet revolving around the sun, or individual consumers in a bourgeois spiritual animal kingdom—emerges as something with a higher concentration of determinations. It is something more real and more rational relative to other mere ‘individuals’ or ‘singularities’. A true individual as it appears is something highly mediated, either as a form of autonomous organic life, or as a higher expression of historical being (‘objective spirit’), or as a higher manifestation of artistic creation. Donougho’s discussions of physics, geology, plant life, biology, anthropology, and aesthetics are not only rich in terms of how ‘individuality’ emerges but are illuminating of these overall subfields in Hegel’s system, and the non-specialist and the specialist can benefit from his clear expositions. Plant life for example well illustrates a liminal case of an individuality that is itself a collection of individuals, where each part of the plant can be said to constitute its own semi-autonomous part. Hegel’s treatment of plant life has immense consequences for his understanding of the development of life and organic systems (225).

The introduction of Niklas Luhmann (IX), Stanley Cavell (14), and so many others help retroactively illuminate what Hegel means by system and individuality. But too many proper names and perspectives risk overwhelming the book. Donougho’s lifetime of erudition is on full display, and while the reader will be impressed and appreciate his achievement, one wishes that this project could be executed as part of a series of books, instead of trying to pack so much under one roof. There is more than just an exploration of ‘individuality’ in Donougho’s chapters, and it would take another review to do justice to all the explorations and side quests. The entire discussion of mimesis and expressionism in pre-Classical, Classical and Romantic art is deserving of its own study, in dialogue with debates within Marxism between realism and modernism. These debates were best staged in encounters between Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, and the Frankfurt School, and one cannot help but be curious what Donougho thinks of those clashes between Hegelian (and Romantic) Marxists.

It is often difficult to distinguish the individual in Hegel from the truly singular, as Donougho is not shy in pointing out. Indeed, Donougho has a wonderful epigram from Bradley that complements his previous epigram from Goethe: that the individual ‘is the delusion of theory’ (147). Without necessarily subscribing to Bradley’s Parmenideanism, one cannot help but admit that the individual really is less than nothing without mediation. In fact, when it comes to the main Hegelian dictum of the truth being the whole, it does not seem God is simply individual in Hegel’s (or Donougho’s) sense, but perhaps closer to absolute singularity, as with the singularity of Christ (175). But does this mean only what is finite, or what is in a finite register, can enjoy individuality, while God—or ultimate reality—is what exceeds the merely individual, since it encompasses the whole? This seems strange considering Harris’s comment that the individual thinker is who can concretely grasp the whole in thought. For Hegel, is not the individual thinker’s (superlative) thinking identical (at some level) with God’s own? Does that mean God enjoys ‘individuality’ too, since God and humanity are identical, at least at the level of infinite cognition?

Nonetheless, if the individual only refers to the expression of finite beings (however well-mediated and developed those finite beings are) the individual cannot seem like the ultimate expression of the whole for Hegel. Strictly speaking, ‘individuality’ is not something deduced as its own definition or category, or moment of the whole. But Donougho insists that the individual is still something remaining, even after all the deductions are completed; it is what is unsaid (perhaps necessarily unsaid) after all is said and thought (284). As we stated above, this unsaying of the ‘individual’ is what makes Donougho’s brand of Hegelianism apophatic, while a Hegelianism of Houlgate’s variety might be labelled cataphatic. The apophatic Hegelian wants dialectics without resolution to make room for what is other; it cannot be deduced but only referred to via negativa. In contrast, the cataphatic Hegelian sees dialectics as a motor of producing a positive speculative result, where there is nothing outside the immanence of the system (including the ‘individual’).

For Donougho, individuality always seems in need of mediation, while also exceeding such attempts at mediation. Even though Donougho would probably take distance from Wilhelm Traugott Krug (212), such ‘individual’ excess reminds one of Krug’s challenge to Hegel and Schelling: that they could not deduce Krug’s pen from their own abstract, shadowy categories. The excess of the individual also represents the nominalist threat of any kind of empiricism that wants to overthrow universals (Platonic, Aristotelian or Hegelian) for the sake of the individual. Of course, any such revolt of the individual against the universal turns the individual into something merely particular, or even less than that, since the particular always comes mediated by universality and singularity. This is all laid out in Hegel’s syllogisms in the Subjective Logic, where nothing escapes mediation. Hence, the revolt of the individual is the conceptual equivalent of Humpty Dumpty crashing down from his wall, breaking into innumerable pieces.

But Donougho has a twist on Humpty Dumpty’s fate in Alice in Wonderland. In arguing with Alice—although reasoned argument might be too generous a term for Humpty Dumpty’s contrarianism—the monstrous anthropomorphic egg poses a challenge to Alice and to all would-be rationalist metaphysicians: will you let the ‘word’ master you, or will you be master of the ‘word’? (224). Because, as he puts it against all forms of universalism and realism: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more or less’ (cited 142). This is Humpty Dumpty at his most confident, as his sceptical voluntarism is an expression of his own proto-Nietzschean will-to-power. Nevertheless, as we know from The Phenomenology of Spirit, such sceptical confidence inevitably collapses, with Humpty Dumpty falling from his lofty perch, and shattering. He has entered what could be called his ‘unhappy consciousness’ phase. Instead of his exuberant will to negate all and sundry, he has disintegrated, and, as the rhyme goes, ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again’ (Schiller Reference Schiller2004: 105).

Nevertheless, Donougho does not think there is any need to patch Humpty Dumpty back together—at least, not to patch him up into an integrated whole. What could be taken as a moment of the unhappy consciousness in a Hegelian reading is thus given a positive, deconstructive spin. Instead of ham-fistedly reconciling his fractured parts, Humpty Dumpty comes to represent the non-identity of identity and non-identity. Perhaps the problem is trying to subordinate the fragment to the whole, and we can instead celebrate Humpty Dumpty as a unity of the fragmentary. ‘Inverting Humpty Dumpty: the question is, which is not to be master—that’s all. Speaking of “individuality” is a way of allowing him to survive his fall, and of putting him together again, holding the moments in a unity (or, as we’ll see, disunity, dividuality)’ (319).

Again, Donougho’s positive spin on hermeneutical entropy is not posed as an abstract negation of the Hegelian system. Like Adorno, he argues that such excess or the (non)-conceptual remainder is a result of Hegel’s own effort. ‘Individuality’ is something a pure speculative reason might have to disown, but it is still its own child, however illegitimate its birth. But one wonders what Donougho might think of treating Hegel’s project seriously as starting without any presuppositions—as starting with pure Being. This is Houlgate’s reading, which does not receive any sustained treatment from Donougho, although he does mention Houlgate briefly in the section on Hegelian physics (192). If Hegel can philosophize without presuppositions, then all essential moments can be traced back to that starting point, which Hegel in The Science of Logic argues is Being. Any notion of ‘individuality’ (if there is a satisfactory one) would have to be traced from that essential starting point, and no other. In following Hegel through various texts and moments of his system, Donougho has opened and illuminated many avenues, but a question arises: has he followed Hegel sufficiently at the level of method, from the very beginning? In saying there is something essentially left over from Hegel, i.e., ‘individuality’, we must ask what went wrong in the starting point. But if Hegel’s method succeeds in thinking pure Being; if he is able to achieve Absolute Knowledge and cognition of the Absolute Idea, then we will have to cast out such Romantic construal of ‘individuality’, along with the ‘thing-in-itself’ and other notions that simply do not exist, all because they cannot withstand the process of conceptual mediation.

That does not mean ‘individuality’ is a bogus pseudo-concept, but it could mean it does not make sense unless it is appreciated as a moment in the overall conceptual drama of the rational and the real. If Donougho insists that ‘individuality’ nonetheless exists without such a rational justification that Hegel provides—if he wants to assert the real without the rational—then one wonders why he remains attached to something ‘beyond category’. From a Hegelian perspective, if something is truly beyond what is rational, then any assertion that is made without rational justification risks unintelligibility. ‘Individuality’ would then be something taken for granted as a (non)-conceptual prejudice.

One can express these Hegelian (if not Spinozist) reservations without detracting from the overall accomplishment of Donougho’s study. In terms of detail, comprehensive scope, and provocative arguments, it rewards the reader and confronts them with a challenge that goes to the very core of Hegel’s system of pure reason. But it should also motivate the reader to answer that challenge. In avoiding the Parmenidean night where existence is merely indeterminate, we should not content ourselves with the smithereens of a broken Humpty Dumpty. In pushing Hegel scholarship forward, we ought to take a step back to the very beginning of his thinking and see what we can genuinely know from what is merely asserted. Rigorously going back to the beginning is the intention of any genuine presuppositionless philosophy, and this is what Hegel shares with Descartes and Spinoza, and rationalism in general. Such a presuppositionless approach is also what ultimately separates Hegel from the Romantics and the post-Romantics.