A. The Mechanical Object: Section 1

Section 1 opens with a paragraph that is a reflection on the mechanical object rather than a continuation of the immanent development of what the mechanical object is, as was the case in the previous paragraph. This is something that Hegel does often, and without any warning, and it is important to distinguish passages that add to the immanent development of a concept from passages that are reflections on that immanent development.

With that caveat made, we can now look at what Hegel writes in the first paragraph of Section 1. The paragraph is focused on making one point about the nature of the mechanical object: that one should not try to conceive of the mechanical object as being made up of two different things. The examples that Hegel gives are, form and matter, whole and parts, and, substance and accidents. In other words, one could try to distinguish the form of a mechanical object from its matter. One could say, what it is for that rock to be a mechanical object is for the form of rock-ness to be in unity with the matter of a rock. This unity of form and matter is what constitutes the rock as a mechanical object. Hegel, however, warns us against any such conceptions. When critiquing the form-matter distinction, he writes, “such an abstract difference of individuality and universality is excluded by the Notion of object” (Hegel 1991, 712). The difference between form (universality) and matter (individuality) is a kind of difference that is “excluded” (Hegel 1991, 712) by the very concept of a mechanical object. Why is that? To answer this question we need only to cast our minds back to the first paragraph of Mechanism, where the mechanical object is explained to be an “immediate identity” (Hegel 1991, 711) such that it is a “universality that pervades the particularity and in it is immediate individuality” (Hegel 1991, 711). In other words, it is incongruent with the concept of the mechanical object to conceive of it as having the difference of anything as the foundation for its being. What it is for it to be a mechanical object to be is for it to be an immediate identity. What is an immediate identity? The determinations of the Concept that constitute the mechanical object. One cannot conceptually distinguish the universal moment from the individual moment of the mechanical object because they are taken as identical to each other. The first sentence of the second paragraph of Section 1 attests to this clearly: “The object is therefore in the first instance indeterminate, in so far as it has no determinate opposition in it; for it is the mediation that has collapsed into immediate identity” (Hegel 1991, 712). The fact that the determinations of the Concept are immediately identical to each other and not mediated means that the mechanical object is indeterminate. In other words, it lacks determinacy because there is no difference within it for any determinacy to be established.

A natural question to arise from the above discussion that warns against any notion of difference within the mechanical object is the following: is it not a kind of difference if we can distinguish between the various determinations of the Concept, even if they are immediately identical? Isn’t the fact that we are to think of the universal as a universal that pervades the particular and is immediately individual a reason to conceive of them as different to each other? Hegel picks up on this point in the second paragraph of Section 1. Hegel writes: “Insofar as the Notion is essentially determinate, the object possesses determinateness as a manifoldness which though complete is otherwise indeterminate, that is, contains no relationships, and which constitutes a totality that at first is similarly no further determined; sides or parts that may be distinguished in it belong to an external reflection” (Hegel 1991, 712). Hegel is trying to square the circle of expressing the mechanical object as an indeterminate, immediate identity, on the one hand, and on the other hand, as being essentially a further development of the determinations of the Concept, which requires us to think of the mechanical object as the unity of the three determinations (universality, particularity, and individuality) of the Concept.

Hegel achieves this geometric feat by grasping the mechanical object as an “indeterminate difference” (Hegel 1991, 712). I think that we can treat “indeterminate difference” (Hegel 1991, 712) as equivalent to “the immediate identity” (Hegel 1991, 711) of the determinations of the Concept. Because it is the three determinations of the Concept that express the difference, and their immediate identity that expresses their indeterminacy. The reason why there can be difference and indeterminacy in the same breath is because the difference between the determinations of the Concept is a merely formal one. They are different insofar as one is the universal and the other is the particular but they are not different in relation to each other. This is what Hegel means when he refers to the difference as “only that there are a number of objects” (Hegel 1991, 712). In other words, they are different insofar as there are three different determinations of the Concept. Hegel goes on to write that each object (each of the determinations of the Concept) “contains its determinateness reflected into its universality and does not reflect itself outwards” (Hegel 1991, 712). This is one of those tricky turns of phrase that Hegel uses, and understanding it is crucial to understanding the logical structure of the mechanical object. The first thing to clarify is what Hegel means by “its determinateness” (Hegel 1991, 712). The moment of universality is the core of the object’s identity and that is a moment of self-relating negativity. When the determination of universality was examined in the beginning of the Doctrine of the Concept it was comprehended as being a self-relating negativity . This negativity that remains within the universal is the determinateness [Bestimmtheit] of the universal.

Next, we have to clarify what Hegel means by “its universality” (Hegel 1991, 712) because I have already stated that the mechanical object is not just a universal but is immediately all three determinations of the Concept. So what does Hegel mean by “its universality”. The “universality” of a determination is its core essence - it is what it is for that determination to be what it is. Just as the universal determination of a chair is that it has the capacity to support someone in a seated position, for example, so too do abstract determinations also refer to their moment of universality as the source of their identity. Thus, in the case of the mechanical object, when Hegel refers to “its universality” he is referring to its basic source of identity. Now that we have clarified what Hegel means by “its determinateness” and “its universality” (Hegel 1991, 712), we are in a good position to understand the rest of that sentence. The determinateness, i.e. the negativity, of the mechanical object does not reflect outwards. In other words, it does not relate to anything that is outside of itself. Rather, it is reflected into its universality, i.e. it is reflected into its own source of identity. One simplistic way to put this is that mechanical objects are narcissistic - they do not relate to anything outside of themselves and are only self-relating. It is in this sense that the mechanical object is both indeterminate and has difference within it. It has difference within it because of its determinateness, because of its negative relation to itself. In this moment of negative self-relation, the mechanical object is immediately identical to all three determinations of the Concept. It is indeterminate because it does not relate to anything outside of itself, it is only self-relating. In its self-relating it is, effectively, relating to itself as the immediate identity of the determinations of the Concept. It is for this reason that Hegel writes the following: “Because this indeterminate determinateness is essential to the object, the latter is within itself a plurality of this kind, and must therefore be regarded as a composite or aggregate” (Hegel 1991, 712). What it is for the mechanical object to be is for it to relate to itself as the immediate identity of other objects (the determinations of the Concept). In other words, what it is for it to be itself is for it to be itself through other objects that are taken to be identical to itself.

In a somewhat throwaway remark at the end of this conceptual discussion, Hegel writes that the mechanical object “does not consist of atoms, for these are not objects because they are not totalities” (Hegel 1991, 712). It is worth musing on this brief remark because it reveals a lot about how Hegel conceptualises the wider significance of his account of the mechanical object. Hegel clearly has some mechanistic, in particular atomistic, worldviews in his crosshairs when he goes out of his way to state that the mechanical object does not consist of atoms. Hegel’s target is those that theorise that the world is fundamentally made out of atoms and that since the world is made out of atoms that everything is really just atoms. In Hegel’s account of Mechanism, he goes out of his way to explicitly state that the mechanical object, the simplest kind of mechanical entity, is not reducible to atoms. There is not something more fundamental to the mechanical object that is the true reality of things. Moreover, and perhaps a stronger rebuke to the atomists, not only is the mechanical object not reducible to atoms, but it is also not the most fundamental thing. Hegel rejects this notion of fundamentality out of hand and it is this rejection that is his strongest argument against atomistic or atomistic-like conceptions of reality.

What follows from the last quotation is a long remark about how Hegel’s account of the mechanical object is akin to Leibniz’s conception of a monad. Hegel writes:

The Leibnizian monad would be more of an object since it is a total representation of the world, but confined within its intensive subjectivity it is supposed at least to be essentially one within itself. Nevertheless, the monad determined as an exclusive one is only a principle that reflection assumes. Yet the monad is an object, partly in that the ground of its manifold representations-of the developed, that is, the posited determinations of its merely implicit totality-lies outside it, and partly also in that it is indifferent to the monad that it constitutes an object along with others; it is thus in fact not exclusive or determined for itself (Hegel 1991, 712).

Bibliography

Authors
Ahilleas Rokni (2024)

Contributors
Filip Niklas (2024)