Hylomorphic Deep Dive

Hegel’s Science of Logic is very simple. It is a hylomorphism of thought.

Being is that something is. Essence is what it is. For example, consider a boat. Its being consists in that it is a boat, this boat. And its essence, ‘boat’ in general, is the iterabile, repeatable element in this existing boat. Now it can be seen that being is like matter, and essence is like form. Because the iterable, repeatable element of the boat is the blueprint of the boat, and this is the formal, structural aspect of the boat. And if I am given just the boat blueprint, the construction of an individual boat just consists in that the form on the blueprint is given to some matter, e.g. wood. So the wood is what makes it this boat, a boat, as opposed to the form or essence of ‘boat’ in general. This is the meaning of the traditional statement that ‘matter is the principle of individuation’. So in the same way that matter is the principle of individuation of form, so being is the principle of individuation of essence.

Now Hegel’s Logic concerns, not this or that being, but being in general. And not this or that essence, but essence in general. Now when we say ‘being in general’, the words ‘in general’ mean the essence of it, so ‘being in general’ means being as an essence. And when we say ‘essence in general’, we refer to the essence of essence, and thus of this essence as opposed to, e.g., the essence of duck or tree. So essence in general also has being in a way. And being in general is the essence of being. So being and essence are inseparable, just as matter and form are inseparable. Just as there is no existing thing which is not some combination of form and matter, even so there is nothing which is not a combination of being and essence. Put differently, being and essence dialectically interpenetrate each other, so that the thinking of pure being is its essentialization; and the thinking of pure essence is its realization.

Now essentialization and realization are clearly represented in ordinary human language. When we say, ‘this is a car’, we go from being to essence. Because the left side of the expression is an existing being, some entity or other, and the right side is its general, repeatable form, namely ‘car’. And we also make statements in the opposite direction, namely from essence to being. For example, when we say ‘God exists’, or ‘the car is here’ or ‘black holes are real’. In these cases, essence is in the subject position on the left, and its being is posited or affirmed in the predicate. Now when we go from being to essence, this is a reduction of the thing of manifold properties into its essential property. The move from being to essence is leading back or penetrating into the essential core of the thing. Whereas the move from essence to being is putting forth.

Now when we query into the essence of some existing being, we ask what it is in respect of itself. When we ask what something is in respect of something else, for example what something is in respect of color, we get back that response which is the color of the thing. For example, ‘the car is red’ says that the car has red for its color. We ask what something has for an X and get back that property or accident of it. But to query the essence we ask what it has or is for itself. Therefore ‘self’ means ‘essence’. The ‘self’ of some object, e.g. a car, is the form ‘car’ which the being has for a self. So the querying for the essence is a reduction or stripping away of externality, a drilling down into the core of the thing of existence. Now if the essence of something is the turning back of that thing into itself, the inwardizing movement which gets at the heart of the thing, then essence in general, i.e. the essence of essence i.e., would be just this pure turning back, this pure diving-into-self or reflection-into-self. That is the nature of essentializing movement, or the move from being to essence.

But it is not just this, because the move from being to essence is also an abstraction of one quality from a manifold, i.e. from quantity. If I’ve seen a hundred dogs, and every dog had a tail, I might induce that having a tail is essential to being a dog. So the move from being to essence is induction. ‘Induce’ means literally to ‘lead into’. The essence is the inwardness, the inside, which is led into by the movement which turns back inside, leads back into it by abstracting from the external crust of quantitative multiplicity of qualities and reduces them to a single quality which is their origin and source. And this is the form or essence.

Now how do we get at the reverse journey, from essence to being? There is a certain grammatical construction in which this transition is revealed. It is the conditional: if A then B. For example, ‘if you want to build a boat, you need some wood’. Or, ‘if it rains, then the grass will get wet’. What is expressed here is a connection between essence and being, in which the priority is on the essence, on possibility or hypothesis. This is clear in the hypothetical syllogism: if A is then B is; but A is; therefore, B is. We have a deduction through the hypothesis, i.e. through the essence. So something in being is deduced on the basis of the general form.

The movement from being to essence is a reduction or induction, a stripping away of mere being, of contingency and accident, and a reduction to necessity and substantial form. We peel away the transient and thereby reveal the eternal blueprint. The transition from essence to being must be the opposite: the eternal falls into transience, posits itself in contingency, loses itself in accidentality. The move from essence to being is an amplificaiton, but one which does not add anything of substance, but is only a degraded repetition of what is in the essential form. For example, a seed is the form or essence of the tree. The tree is the existence in being of what in the seed is unreal, only a hypothesis.

The movement from being to essence is reduction or induction, and the movement from essence to being is production. So we have a leading back, and a leading forward. Both of these together consitute reality as such, which is the intelligible, the concept.

How do we discover what is the content of the science of being and essence? In this way: the simple abstract opposites of being and essence are non-being and the inessential respectively. Non-being is usually called ‘nothing’, and the inessential is called ‘acciental’. Now we have the more precise characterization of being and essence: essence is non-being in the form of being, and being is essence in the form of the inessential. Therefore the content of the investigation of being consists in those forms of accidentality in general; these are principally quantities, because quantity is always an imprecise characterization of something, and things gain and lose in quantity without essentially altering what they are. And the content of the investigation of essence consists in the forms of unreality as set in relief of reality, e.g. possibility, potentiality, cause and effect, etc. Now we are have arrived at that distinction which Kant draws between ‘mathematical’ and ‘dynamical’ categories. The categories of being in general are the ‘mathematical’ ones, because they are the imprecise, even inadequate and reductive characterizations of the essence. And the categories of essence are the ‘dynamical’ ones, because they describe the form through which something necessary manifests itself in the world of contingency.

Say that we are going to create something, anything. For example, a statue. What do we need? First of all some clay, some material stuff, which will be formed into the statue. How do we characterize the clay, not as clay but as matter for the statue? We say it weighs so much, 5 lbs. It is this long, this wide, and so on. It has this consistency and texture. What do we have here? ‘5 lbs’ is a combination of a quality and a quantity. A pound is a unit or quality of measurement, and the quantity is 5. Likewise with the length and width and depth. These are the forms that matter is in as matter, and also of space and time: extension, extendedness.

Now suppose we go to form the clay into a statue. Now we need the essence, the blueprint for what the statue is going to be. This is a form, a shape, but also an instruction for moulding the clay into the form. The clay, its qualities and quantities, cannot tell us how it is to be shaped. The shaping and forming is instructed and led forth by the blueprint, the essence. The moulding and shaping are approximately the same even if the matter is different, whether it is wood or clay or metal or something else. But the moulding and shaping are entirely different if the form is different. So the form is the moulding and shaping, is cause in general. The essence thus contains the side of activity and causality in the true sense, and the matter is passively formed by the form. The form is first of all in my mind: this is the form as form. Then it is making its appearance in matter, being effective and going to work on the stuff. And finally it is the actual statue. So the side of being consists in quality and quantity and their combination in measurement, exemplified in statistical probability, which is on the cusp of essentiality. (Probability is essence as seen from the side of being.) And the side of essence consists in cause and effect, and their combination in actuality, effectuation, realization of the essential form.

Now thirdly in addition to this there must be the consideration of the unity of matter and form, being and essence. Because as we said before, being and essence are inseparable. There is nothing in reality which is not some combination of being and essence. Nothing is without form and no form without some degree of being. So there must be an original third, from which being and essence are derived as abstractions. What is this third thing? It must either be a matter with form implicit in it, which puts the form forth, and then brings the form into matter. Or else it is a form which has matter in it, which puts the matter forth and brings the matter into form. Now it cannot be the first of these, because as we said the form contains the principle of causality and of putting-forth in general. Therefore there must be a form which is so absolute, that it has the power to particularize itself first as matter, and then to bring the matter into itself, uniting itself with itself. What is this thing?

The only being which has the power to do this in the world is the human being. Man images a house, gathers the wood and glass, and brings them into the imagined form. So this third principle is to be sought as the essence of the human being. And this essence is reason. Man is the rational animal. Reason is not calculating or reckoning only, but is more truly the power of thinking and speaking in general. And the human being is also the being with meaning, the being who creates his purpose, his intention. This being is free, he knows himself, he creates his world rather than being thrown into it and at its mercy. Man makes his world according to himself, he forms his matter according to his own form. Whereas non-living things are accidental combinations of form and matter, and plants and animals are combinations which are subject to the accients of nature and contingent copulation and combination, man masters the form and the matter also, being and essence. He is because he is, his being is an end in itself. He will not be subject to external contingency or formal necessity, but rather makes himself the self-necessitation itself.

Thinking is the essence of man. The being of a thought is not anything different from its essence. In a sculpture, the form and matter are entirely indifferent to each other, they have no connection except that they are brought together by the sculptor. A plant is something higher, because its form, the seed, is its inrinsically connected to its being, its existence as the vegetative plant. But it is stuck in this endless dialectical oscillation between seed and plant. And so is man, but only to the extent that he is not thinking. That he is feeling, copulating, etc. In this he is removed from himself, like a plant or animal. But man has something higher than this, something which has no need or want of anything apart from itself, but is entirely satisfied and at home with itself. And this is man the philosopher. The philosopher is the thinker, the man who is man as man. His intention, his form, is turned back on himself, so that the object he intends is the intention itself, the form that informs is the form itself, the essence that is realized is the essence itself. Man actualizes himself within himself. He develops himself by thinking, by abiding with himself, by being at rest he is at work. His activity is his passivity, the act that acts by being acted on, the creation that creates by being created. He is the self-positing self-affirming self. And this is the Concept, thinking as such, the perfected harmony of form and matter, essence and being.