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Christopher Chiasera
Hegel II
Prof. Thompson

Hegel, Schelling, and the Nature of the Concept

​ In his famous lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy, F.W.J. Schelling confronts

what he regards as perhaps the greatest obstacle to 19th-century philosophical progress: the

absolute idealism of his former friend and intellectual pupil, G.W.F. Hegel. It is in these lectures

that he puts his antipathy for Hegelian philosophy on full display, lambasting it as “a good deal

more monstrous than the preceding philosophy ever was” (Schelling 136) and articulating his

influential critique of Hegel’s “double deception” (138). In this paper, I would like to reconsider

one prong of Schelling’s twofold critical effort vis-à-vis Hegel, which has since come to be

known as the critique from the “ineffable.”1 More specifically, I want to suggest that such a

critique proceeds from an inaccurate understanding of the nature of the Hegelian “concept” (der

Begriff). While Schelling’s objection is predicated upon a conceptualization of the concept as a

subsumptive abstraction of determinations of being, for Hegel it is emphatically not this—it is

rather what Hegel calls “concrete universality,” the process by which being becomes itself in

differentiating itself from itself. As a result of this misunderstanding on Schelling’s part, I argue

that his dismissal of Hegelian philosophy, at least on the grounds of its abstract nature, is

misguided.

​ In line with the objective of this paper, the analysis to follow will proceed in three main

sections. In the first, I will clarify the crucial distinction in Schelling’s thought, without which

the intent of his critique of Hegel cannot fully be grasped, between negative and positive

philosophy. In the second, I will explicate the critique itself, as Schelling formulates it in On the

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Much of what Schelling’s On the History of Modern Philosophy contains in the way of criticizing Hegel is later
reiterated, almost verbatim, in his famous 1841-2 Berlin lectures, The Philosophy of Revelation (Schelling 1).
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History of Modern Philosophy, and briefly attempt to illustrate its stakes. Finally, in the third, I

will seek to demonstrate why it fails by presenting a more faithful image of Hegel’s concept,

namely in terms of a concrete universality whose logic is disjunctively syllogistic.

I.​ Schelling on Negative and Positive Philosophy

​ The distinction between negative and positive philosophy plays a pivotal role specifically

in Schelling’s later thought. A helpful exegesis of these terms and their difference can be found

in Peter Dews’ Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel. Here, Dews describes

negative philosophy as Schelling’s name for those metaphysical projects which seek to

“elaborat[e] an a priori theory of the structures of being” (117). He concretizes this definition by

appealing to Platonic dialectics as a stereotypical example of negative philosophy (118). As is

well-known, the aim of the dialectical method, as Plato employs it in his dialogues, is to

demonstrate the ignorance of those whom it engages with regard to the things they take

themselves to be knowledgeable of. Socrates’ interlocutors purport to know what x is; through a

series of questioning and argumentation, Socrates helps them to see that x does not have the

nature they previously thought, that the features of the being or concept under discussion which

were assumed to be essential are in fact merely contingent; and in the end both Socrates and his

conversants are forced to admit that the true nature of x remains an open question. This

philosophical endeavor is negative, in that it helps to clarify what x essentially is not—or, what

means the same, it showcases what x contingently, or merely possibly, is. To use a linguistic

analogy, Plato’s dialectics, understood as a negative philosophy, is a systematic aggregation of

the predicates—the ontological possibilities—that the subject—the bearer of the totality of these

possibilities—can potentially instantiate.

​ Yet, as has already been intimated, negative philosophy in this sense necessarily reaches

its limit. For “it does not culminate in any positive theory”: Platonic dialectics “plays a

ground-clearing role, destroying the illusory knowledge of the Sophists and Eleatics,” but this

effort brings about an aporia in which the essential being of the thing under discussion is

admitted to be an issue “of which philosophical knowledge is yet to be attained” (Dews 118). For

Schelling, this is an essential characteristic of all negative philosophical projects, since they are

only capable of pointing to the possible ontological predicates of beings, and not what they

essentially or necessarily are. He suggests that, when all such predicates are faithfully abstracted

away, what remains is that which it is possible to predicate about—one sees a similar conclusion

reached in, for instance, the Aristotelian theory of substance. Yet for Schelling, unlike Aristotle,

the subject of ontological predicates is a unified whole, the simple being of which self and object

are each predicative determinations and which thus makes it possible for a self that is

fundamentally different from the world to nonetheless have knowledge of that world as it is in

itself. This “‘property-less, intransitive being’” is Schelling’s “‘being-ness itself’” (Dews 125).

Being-ness itself is, has always been, cannot but be, presupposed by negative philosophy, which

describes the immanent possibilities of being-ness itself, and thus cannot subject being-ness itself

as such to philosophical analysis. Being-ness itself is for this reason indescribable or ineffable:

all attempts to describe the nature of reality presuppose it, such that it constantly eludes the

philosopher’s grasp. The ineffability of being-ness itself is the motivation for Schelling’s positive

conception of philosophy.

​ Dews’ characterizes Schellingian positive philosophy as the task of “confront[ing] the

bare fact of the world’s existence, and … fram[ing] the most comprehensive explanation it can

for the inner dynamic of nature and the evolving history of human consciousness” (117). Positive
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philosophy begins with being-ness itself and seeks to give an account of it. Since being-ness

itself cannot be rendered discursively, however, non-conceptual means of presenting it must be

sought. In Schelling’s early philosophy, he maintained that this presentation could only work

intuitively: one must be able to, through spontaneous intellectual intuition alone, apprehend pure

being. Later in the development of his thought, however, he located a foothold for the

philosopher embarking on this endeavor in the narrative form of mythology and especially the

Christian notion of revelation. Fundamentally, however, the project of Schelling’s positive

philosophy always sought after the non-conceptual explication of the necessary ground of all

ontological potentialities.

II.​ Schelling’s Critique of Hegel from the Ineffable

​ In his On the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling considers, among those

contributions which he judges to have been influential in shaping the trajectory of philosophical

thought from the early modern period to the rise of German Idealism in the 18th- and

19th-centuries, Hegel’s absolute idealism. This text, which was originally given as a lecture in

the 1830s, sees Schelling hone in specifically on The Science of Logic, the work in which Hegel

is arguably at his most straightforward in explicating his philosophical system. Although a robust

account of Hegelian philosophy obviously cannot be undertaken here and a more thorough

discussion its content, especially its notion of the “concept,” will come later in this paper, it may

be said The Science of Logic construes reality as a progression of determinate negations that

culminates in a simple unity of being which is wholly rational and amenable to thought. Each

and every determination of the world—being, nothing, quality, quantity, etc.—can be shown,

according to Hegel, to “sublate” (aufheben) itself, to negate itself by passing over into its

opposite and thereby to posit itself in a further, more concrete, determination. On such a view,
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everything that is itself simultaneously is not itself, is only itself through a negative reference to

itself (to its other, to its own negativity). To give a passing example: every “something,” every

“this” (say, “this specific apple”), only obtains its signification by virtue of its not being “that”

(by being “this apple” as opposed to “that apple over there”). Every attempt to specify the “this”

winds up sliding over into a specification of the “that,” that which is “other” to the “something.”

Yet every “other” is just that which is other to the “something” (“that apple over there” is only

“that apple over there” insofar as it is distinguished from “this apple right here”). Every attempt

to specify the “that” winds up sliding over into a specification of the “this.” Hence, “that” and

“this,” “something” and “other,” belong to each other as a simple unity—Hegel will go on to call

this unity being-for-itself—out of which “something” and “other” can be designated in their

one-sidedness as abstractions. Ultimately, Hegel wants to argue that this process of self-negation

will spontaneously yield further and further determinations until the thoroughgoing reciprocity of

being, as the retrogressive ground of absolutely everything that exists, has been achieved. Hegel

calls this ultimate ground the “absolute idea” (die absolute Idee) or the “concept” (der Begriff).

​ Schelling does not oppose the general spirit of Hegel’s idealism. Indeed, he even praises

Hegel “for having seen the merely logical nature of the philosophy which he intended to work

on and promised to bring to its complete form” (134). Hegel’s method of determinate negation is

an example of Schellingian negative philosophy par excellence: it outlines the a priori logical

structure of being, the aggregate of possible ontological predications that one can make, via the

totality of determinations which constitute the concept. What Schelling takes issue with is

Hegel’s refusal to restrict his philosophy to the purely negative task of presenting the logical

possibilities of being. In light of his assertion that “the concept [is] everything and [leaves]

nothing outside of itself” (Schelling 134), he, in his presentation of the concept, clearly takes
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himself to be describing not just the sum total of the possibilities of being but “the thing itself

(Sache selbst)” (135), the actual bearer of this total. For Schelling, the absolute nature of this

claim far oversteps the proper bounds of an otherwise cogent negative philosophy, the objective

of which is to give a “merely” logical account of reality (Schelling 134, emphasis added).

Being-ness itself has been erroneously equated with the concept, the latter of which is in truth

only an umbrella term for all of the former’s potential determinations. The ineffability of

being-ness itself, as the subject of possible ways of being which remains distinct from them, is

thus completely lost on Hegel. He thinks he has achieved concrete being in the concept, but in

fact he has merely arrived at a laundry list, albeit a rather extensive one, of properties that it

could instantiate; he tries to make his negative philosophy into a positive one. This is the core

argument of Schelling’s critique of Hegel from the ineffable.

​ Schelling’s critique of Hegel from the ineffable has been massively influential throughout

the history of philosophy, its logic resonating in objections to Hegelianism made by figures as

diverse as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida. The major point

taken up by each of these canonical thinkers, and the major invention of Schelling’s critical

exegesis of Hegel, is that certain aspects of reality or subjective human experience simply cannot

be encompassed by the concept. The concept, as abstract, subsumptive totality, cannot help but

miss the concrete, existentially intense, intrinsically lived and dynamic phenomena which color

our existence: being (Heidegger), materiality (Marx), otherness (Derrida), faith and sin

(Kierkegaard), etc. Hegel’s concept reduces the whole of reality into a totality of ontological

determinations which can be held in thought, meanwhile it seems obvious that at least some of

its features are not amenable to rational cognition in this way.

​ It may very well be that Hegel, as many of his critics would contend, is a panlogicist;

such a characterization is not at issue in this paper. But what is certain is that the interpretation of

Hegelianism which, beginning with Schelling, gives impetus to this claim—that Hegel’s concept

is a subsumptive totality of possible ontological determinations—is far from definitive. For much

of Hegel’s explication of the nature of the concept in The Science of Logic, especially in its third

and final section (The Doctrine of the Concept), seems to tell strongly against the reduction of

the concept to a mere abstraction. What emerges here, I would argue, is a conceptualization of

conceptuality that is not a totality of determinations but a process of determination. The concept

does not gather up all possible ontological predicates and take them under itself; rather, it

generates these determinations through their mutual differentiation and so constitutes the real

movement of objective existence. The concept is therefore not the centerpiece of a negative

Hegelian philosophy which must presuppose something like Schellingian being-ness itself. It is

the destruction of the bifurcation of being into its determinations (possible predications) and its

subject (being-ness itself), its form and its content, such that each finds its own abstract

self-subsistence in the very process of its negative self-determining. In other words, it is what

Hegel calls “concrete universality.”

III.​ The Concept as Concrete Universality

​ In order to flesh out what Hegel means by the concept qua concrete universality, it is

crucial to consider Hegel’s schema for the different kinds of universality, which The Science of

Logic offers in its section on the logical forms of judgment in the Doctrine of the Concept. For

Hegel, each of the judgment forms operates on the basis of a unique signification of the

universal—as is borne out by the kind of judgments belonging to each judgment form, these

forms operate by representing “universality” as something different. Besides judgments of the

concept, which construe the universal as a mode of agreement (and so make it concrete), there

are also judgments of existence, according to which the universal is qualitative, and judgments of

reflection, according to which it is subsumptive.2 The remainder of this paper will attempt to

give an account of these kinds of universality, culminating in a discussion of the concrete

universality of the concept.

​ The first of Hegel’s judgment forms, the form of judgments of existence, construes

universality as “inherence” (Hegel 557). Judgments of existence are able to be made because

they implicitly treat the universal as a property which inheres in individual singularities. When,

for instance, one judges that “this bat is black”—which Hegel would categorize as a positive

judgment of existence, adhering to the schematic form this X is Y—one is regarding “black,” a

universal, as simply that which is instantiated by things which are black, e.g., “this bat.” Thus,

the judgment that “this bat is black” could alternatively be formulated as: “blackness is that

which inheres in this bat, which this bat, an individual, possesses as its property.” The universal

is here understood as lacking integrity over and above its singular instantiations; “the singular is

universal,” or essentially nominal (Hegel 558).

​ The second judgment form Hegel considers, judgments of reflection, is predicated upon

“a universal that has collected itself together into a unity through the connection of different

terms, or … as the coalescing of manifold properties and concrete existences” (568).

Universality is now a “coalescing” of singularities; it is subsumptive, the category which does the

work of sorting its members into a common group. An example of a judgment of reflection

would be: “some bats are black” (the particular judgment of reflection, some X are Y). Blackness

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Note that Hegel in fact presents four significations of universality in this section of the text, relational universality
falling between the subsumptive and conceptual kinds. However, given the borderline identity between Hegel’s
conceptions of relational and conceptual universality, I have chosen to omit a discussion of the former here for the
sake of brevity.
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is no longer a property that essentially inheres in individuals, existing only in its singular

instantiations. It, as “separated from the singulars which the reflected singularity has as its

basis,” acquires a level of ontological reality, a self-subsistence, of its own (Hegel 571).

Blackness exists over and above individual bats and subsumes them as a class concept. There are

bats, there is blackness, and there are black bats—bats that, to employ Platonic terminology,

“participate in blackness.”

​ The third form of judgment is the judgment of the concept, according to which

universality specifies a modal relation (Hegel 582). The highest manifestation of judgments of

this kind is the apodictic judgment, X is necessarily Y: “this animal is necessarily a bat.”

Judgments of apodicticity, all varieties of judgments of the concept, are possible because a modal

relationship has been posited between subject and predicate. “This animal” and “bat” have been

cashed out in such a way that they are mutually co-implicative, in this case necessarily

co-implying each other. With regard to apodictic judgments, then, Hegel is concerned with the

relationship of necessary co-implication they presuppose. How is it that “this animal” and “bat,”

X and Y, have become “fitted” to one another in this way? There must be, Hegel deduces, a

middle term uniting subject and predicate together. Thus, the apodictic judgment is not actually a

judgment, a relation between two terms via the copula, at all. It is in fact a kind of syllogism, a

relation of two terms through their intermediating middle; more specifically, it is a disjunctive

syllogism (Hegel 622).

​ Disjunctive syllogism has the logical form:

​ ​ x is either A or B or C or D or …

​ ​ But x is neither B nor C nor D nor …

​ ​ Therefore, x is A.
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The disjunctive syllogism, in Hegelese, unites a singular entity (x) to a particular species (A)

through the universal, the totality of particular species (A and B and C and D and …) which

forms a negative unity (A or B or C or D or …). But it is able to do this only through an

understanding of universality as concrete: that is, as completely exhausted in the mutual

differentiation of its species. The disjunctive syllogism only makes logical sense, is only able to

arrive at the conclusion linking a singular to a particular that it does, because there is nothing else

to universality other than the negative unity of its particularities which engenders singularities. It

is not the subsumption of judgments of reflection which coalesces singularities around itself, but

the principle or rule that produces its singularities along with its particularities. Since x is neither

B nor C nor D nor …, and—returning now to Schelling’s language—the entirety of x’s potential

ontological predications is circumscribed by A or B or C or D …, x is A by necessity, it cannot be

anything else. “That animal,” an indeterminate singularity, receives its determination as “a bat”

precisely because it is neither rat nor bird nor … and the universal genus “animal” is simply

identical with the aggregate of its species. Concrete universality, the condition of the validity of

disjunctive-syllogistic logic, is itself by way of not being itself, by disseminating itself entirely

into what it is not, i.e., its particularities. This universality is just the endless particularizing

(differentiating) process of singularity’s becoming itself.

​ It is thus clear how starkly opposed Hegel’s notion of the concept is to the Schellingian

one. The concept is not a subsumptive term for its particularities/species/determinations

(whatever one might want to call them)—it is, as Hegel himself puts it, “the substantial identity

of the genus … in which particularity is included … included as equal to it” (622). The universal

concept cannot be said to “subsume” its particularities because it is just them, is them as the

differentiating process immanent to singularity, singularity qua negative self-reference to the

whole of reality. Given this formulation, it is much less obvious that Hegel has presupposed

Schellingian being-ness itself. Thus, it would seem that Hegel’s astounding declaration of the

identity of the concept with literally everything that is, although perhaps remaining difficult to

fathom, is not so easily defeated by Schelling’s critique from the ineffable.

Works Cited

Dews, Peter. Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel. Oxford University Press,

2023.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Science of Logic. Translated by George di Giovanni, Cambridge University

Press, 2010.

Schelling, F.W.J. On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translated by Andrew Bowie,

Cambridge University Press, 1994.