Abstract

I shall argue that Hegel’s concept [Begriff] has emancipatory power [Macht]. In the Science of Logic, Hegel rejects both essentialist conceptions of identity and historical necessity, and he shows that conceiving [begreifen] (or ‘grasping’) is an anticipatory self-movement of thought. The relation between ‘essence’ and ‘concept’ in Book II of the Science of Logic is unlike the relation between ‘essence’ and ‘form’ in Plato to Kant. I will defend this claim not by comparing Hegel’s ‘essence [Wesen]’ with similar categories in the texts of Plato or Kant but, rather, by focusing more narrowly on two transitions in the Logic that illustrate Hegel’s break from prior philosophy with respect to his account of essence. The transition in Book I from ‘the ought [das Sollen]’ to infinity, in combination with the transitions in Book II from Existenz (‘concrete existence’) and appearance to actuality [Wirklichkeit] compose the core of Hegel’s rejection of a Platonic/Kantian normative model of essence. The category of actuality is the turning point of the Logic and shows that Hegel rejects all essentialist conceptions of form. For Herbert Marcuse, actuality is the core of thought’s self-movement, its motility (or, referring to Aristotle as Marcuse does, Hegelian thought’s being qua being). I shall extend Marcuse’s interpretation of the Logic to treat the category of actuality in the context of recent feminism and political theory.