BECOMING V: NUMBER

Quantity is, so to say, the midwife of finitude. Quantity is limited quantity, quantum, how
much, or, though Hegel does not say it, tantum, so much:

Quantum is, as it were, the determinate Being of quantity; where mere quantity
corresponds to abstract Being, and the Degree, which is next to be considered,
corresponds to Being-for-self (101, Zus.).

What is this correspondence? Why is it? The repeated form of this "advance" is that the
implicit is made explicit. At 239 we may note the Zusatz where Advance is paired with
Beginning as "steps or stages of the Speculative Method… in Being, an other and transition
into an other". "In the advance of the idea the beginning exhibits itself as what it is implicitly."
Furthermore, it "is only for the consciousness which is itself immediate, that Nature forms the
commencement or immediacy, and that Spirit appears as what is mediated by Nature. The
truth is that Nature is the creation of Spirit" but in the sense that "it is Spirit itself which gives
itself a presupposition in Nature", itself making itself, in infinite freedom, to be Result. This
does not contradict the more usual or orthodox view1, since infinite freedom "overlaps",
without denying or removing, our more immediate notion of the alternatives "could have" or
"was not forced to". It is one with as not less than necessity without being reduced to it. For
"necessity is transfigured into freedom" inasmuch as Essence gives way to the Notion as the
"truth of Being and Essence". This "truth of Necessity", in pure self-reciprocation, "is
Freedom" (158, 159). We advance into truth, as from Being-for-self, via Quantum and
Number, into Degree. It is this truth though that "presupposes" quantity. God, so to say, did
not just "make it up" or, if he did, he thereby constituted himself, as with all the other
"moments" of logic and nature. This agrees with the view of Augustine and Aquinas that each
and any divine idea is one with the divine essence. It also shows the sense in which Descartes
was right, and not merely "voluntarist", to say that God has dominion (the "could have") over
the laws of logic. For if the presupposition to Spirit in Nature is itself given by Spirit then this
applies a fortiori to Logic as, in Hegel's system but indeed universally (as the "reason in the
world"), presupposed to Nature.2 Reason itself is pure freedom, even though it constitutes
itself as the unbreakable laws of logic which thus become, in the necessities of eternity, its
own "nature" as Mind or Spirit.
Quantity-in-general "now appears as distinguished or limited." It is the principle of finitude
which infinity needs to have within itself as, again, overlapping it, in order to be or remain
itself infinite, the infinite or the absolute Idea. Infinity is idea, that is, as Being beyond
(transfigured) Being is the negation of the negation of itself, pure Mind minding only itself as
All.
The Idea has to be Idea, self-determiningly as it were, precisely as transcending quantity.
Quantity nonetheless belongs to the ideality of the finite specifically and is thus in itself an
antinomy or paradox, a "moment" therefore merely, as a finite category to be ultimately, i.e.
in itself and forever, "put by" or aufgehoben.
So any quantum, as any continuity, implies, we say, discreteness, "breaks up into an indefinite
multitude of Quanta or definite magnitudes." "Each of these… forms a unity while on the
other hand, viewed per se it is a many." This is precisely Number, where any unit whatever is
fractionally divisible or multipliable, as the numerals themselves are progressive "products"
1
Compare Cyril O'Regan's The Unorthodox Hegel.
2
Cf. G. Frege: "what are things independent of the reason? To answer that would be as much as to judge without
judging, or to wash the fur without wetting it" (The Foundations of Arithmetic, tr. J.L. Austin, Oxford, 1953, p.
36e.
of unity, as three is three times one, by coincidence of an addition or sum of one to one to
one, before "three" is given a sense. This, in fact, is the very principle of the dialectic,
according to which the categories are thought before and in independence of the names they
are then, more or less arbitrarily3, given. In this way number can be seen as the continuum
itself, in which capacity it is virtually the foundation and "secret" of absolute music, so-called,
"the sensuous set down as negated… This earliest inwardness of matter… furnishes the
medium for the mental inwardness… into which mind concentrates itself." By the same token
it "has within itself… a relation of quantity conformable to the understanding."4 Yet number,
of course (the integers), also founds discreteness itself, presupposed to any continuum.
Therefore Hegel says that Pythagoras went not "too far" but "not far enough" (104, Zus. 3).

****************************

The theory of number, the question "What are numbers?", the "philosophy of mathematics",
as of natural science in general, has occupied a dominant position in "professional" 5
philosophy both before and after Hegel, whether we think of Descartes or Frege. We must not
forget, however, that the same principles apply here as throughout the dialectic or the
development of logic at Hegel's hands. One of these, again, is that the names he gives to his
categories must not be simply presumed to match with what the same names may or may not
name in unreflective speech. Thus, we have seen, "being" or "becoming" have their own
meanings at the start of the dialectic, differing, whether by reduction or expansion or however
it may be, from their senses in, say, Aquinas or Heraclitus.
Another such principle, a further aspect, rather, of the same one, is that each category has no
other purpose or justification for its introduction than its emergence as a step towards
revealing the necessity of the final result of the dialectic as alone entirely true, initiating the
entire process. It is thus "kicked away" by "ungrateful" Reason in the sense that it only finds
its final truth in the result to which it leads.
There is thus a twofold aspect in that the matter or content of the category, admittedly
"taken" from experience in the sense that it is not considered in abstraction from it (this is not
the meaning of the a priori) is yet reshaped or worked upon, not so much with the end in view
as with a view to the end. Reason itself, that is, which is the end, corrects the common
conception or, in some cases, simply fashions an entirely unique dialectical tool. These two
strands of analysis (of the discrete elements of the dialectic, discrete in so far as named) are
woven inseparably into one another. Some genuine dialectical steps indeed have no name and,
if we wish to be subtle, we can even say that the notion of step itself or stage contradicts itself
as finite if taken absolutely. For there are indeed, in the thought and even, imperfectly, in the
language used, steps within steps ad infinitum. This is the truth Lewis Carroll had got hold of
in his claim, often taken as a mere joke, that it requires an infinite number of mental "steps" to
reach the conclusion of a syllogism. For p and q to imply r, namely, we need as a premise that
3
Cf. Enc. 458: "In signifying intelligence therefore manifests a will (Willkür: choice, free will) and a mastery
(Herrschaft) in the use of intuitions which are not manifest in symbolising" (quoted in Derrida, 1971, "The Pit
and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology", reprinted from Margins of Philosophy 1972, tr. Bass, in
G.W.F. Hegel, Critical Assessments, ed. Robert Stern, Routledge 1993. Also in Philosophy Today, 1985.
4
Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics III, 4c(2), my italics.
5
Of course philosophy, as perfecting art and religion, as perfect form of "the absolute content", can never be
professional as such, any more than religion could ever have been as if by right the exclusive "expertise" of
"professed" monks or nuns yet called, exclusively, the "religious" (as against "laymen"). Literal "training" may
find application still in becoming an artist, but the true "master", to which one subjects oneself as regards the
"content", in producing art, in praying, despite "techniques" of meditation, or in thinking, is always the present
world and culture where first is last, last first, where one "considers the lilies of the field", where "no man shall
teach another saying 'Know the Lord'", where discipline is nothing unless a prologue to an increasing degree of
self-discipline, viz. the dialectic as, actively, "thinking itself".
p and q imply r and so on ad infinitum. The truth, in fact, is that the continuous is implicit in
the discrete and vice versa, as Hegel has been claiming here.
We have to overcome our feeling that at least some categories "must mean exactly what they
say", apart from their harnessing to the dialectic. Thus we want to protest when causality is
"turned into" something reciprocal or is "put by" (aufgehoben) simply. The claim, however,
here too, is that this is what causality must really be, in view of the absoluteness of the result,
the freedom or necessarily unconditioned which is Reason. Hegel is at least as radical as
Hume, whose philosophy, like ancient scepticism or any other, he is not about to "set aside"
or ignore.
The same applies to Number. Even if we should find that Hegel is not only necessarily
ignorant but less than prescient of future development in mathematics, or even that he may be
less than an expert in the science of his own time, this would not per se invalidate this part of
the dialectic. Quantity, as a necessary stage or component in the self-actualisation of Spirit is,
in this light alone, necessary within nature. Pythagoras, he suggests, was, as it were discretely
considered, the "first" to realise this, going on to "conceive the essence of things as mere
number" (104, Zus.(3)). To the complaint that Pythagoras "went too far" Hegel replies, again,
that the "reverse" is nearer the mark. He "did not go far enough", or as far as his Eleatic
successors. The "bare thought of number is still insufficient to enunciate the definite notion or
essence of things." It is, however, the first step to metaphysics". Number is

The thought nearest the sensible, or, more precisely expressed, it is the thought
of the sensible itself, if we take the sensible to mean what is many, and in
reciprocal exclusion.

This is the nub of what Hegel is doing here, "tracing things back to thoughts" and ultimately
to Thought, nous.

While the former (sc. the Ionians), as Aristotle says, never get beyond viewing
the essence of things as material (hule), and the latter, especially Parmenides,
advanced as far as pure thought, in the shape of Being, the principle of the
Pythagorean philosophy forms, as it were, the bridge from the sensible to the
super-sensible.

Here we can see how the conspectus of the logic, its plan of development, namely to allow it
to develop itself, is essentially the same as that of The Phenomenology of Mind prefacing it in
the life of Hegel, this "new Aristotle". He offers us eternal method as the "thought of"
development as Number is the "thought of" the sensible. "It thus appears the the method is not
an extraneous from, but the soul and notion of the content… only one idea… the notion of
itself" (243). "This is the noesis noeseos which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form of
the idea" (236, Zus.), thought thinking itself. It is in this light that we should see the treatment,
the adumbration rather, of Number before us. It will not aim at being comprehensive, since
anyhow all comprehensiveness, all separateness "of substance" short of the idea, is illusory.
"Number is a thought, but thought in its complete self-externalisation" (104). Again, "to get a
species of calculation, it is necessary that what we count up should be numbers already, and
no longer a mere unit" (102). This appears to be the Hegelian variant upon the Fregean-
Pythagorean view that "numbers are objects".
McTaggart asks in his commentary of 1910 why "the whole Quantity" should not have a
number, whether we know it or not, in so far as "we now have a definite quantum" (cf. 101,
"Quantity… is Quantum: i.e. limited quantity." There is "an advance from mere quantity to
quantum... described as Number"). Hegel "does not seem to have considered the possibility
that there should be a finite number of Ones." McTaggart backs this up by saying we "must
remember that the Ones are not Somethings. The latter had to be infinite in number, since
each of them required a fresh Something beyond it. But the Ones have Being for Self, and so
avoided, as we saw, this infinite series… each One is a simple Quality, which is not
divisible." Of course this Number could not have a limit, since there is nothing outside it, but
as having Being for Self they, the Ones, "can reciprocally determine each other".
McTaggart here takes a leaf out of (the book of) Trinitarianism, perhaps unconsciously,
where, namely, the relations or persons are ultimately three, a definite or finite number, even
if numerus non ponitur in divinis (Aquinas). We would have an extended "Trinity" of
however many Ones there are. He reminds us that the categories "refer only to what is
existent", are not "purely abstract" conceptions as Hegel often slips into thinking. Is he right
about this? Is not Hegel rehearsing creation as it were prior to existence? Does he not rather
relate Being to necessary conceptions, not, even qua conceptions, "abstract"? Between the
necessary existence or, better, being (esse) of the scholastics and the necessities of logic there
is no mere equivocation but a real connection. As in Plato's philosophy so in Hegel's,
phenomenal things "both are and are not" (Republic V, VI), while the highest things more
than exist, merely.
Thus Hegel intimates that his "Being" is both the immediate and "the beginning", which he
merely calls being. McTaggart ought to have understood this, since, we have seen, he makes
the same point about the categories in general. Again, the question of a number for the Ones
loses point if we take to ourselves the unity of identity and difference, that we can be in one
another or, indeed, have our being in "the whole" or, better, Absolute. We can each be
identical with the whole Trinity as postulated if we have it in us, as Trinitarians have routinely
taught. The whole Hegelian philosophy might leave the question about being unresolved, or
make us stop asking it. "God is not being; God is freedom" (N. Berdyaev, in a Hegelian
moment).
Hegel's exaggeration, according to McTaggart in 1910, of the comprehensiveness of the
dialectic lies in the fact that

having secured, as he rightly believed, an absolute starting-point for the dialectic

process in the category of Being, he assumed that this was not only the absolute
starting-point of the dialectic, but of all philosophy… Nothing in philosophy
was prior to the dialectic process.

Here again there seems to be an error. For example, what is the subject-matter to which the
whole dialectic applies?

… Hegel regards it as applying to all reality… But… it becomes clear that he is

only speaking of what is existent, and that his results do not apply, and were not
meant to apply, to what is held by some… to be real but not existent - for
example, propositions, the terms of propositions, and possibilities… Hegel…
held nothing to be real but the existent… (Reality and Existence, as used by
Hegel, refers… to particular stages of the dialectic)… But the view… cannot be
asserted without discussion… Hegel has no right to take a dialectic of existence
as equivalent to a dialectic of reality (McTaggart: A Commentary on Hegel's
Logic, 1910, 6).

One could reply, we said, that Hegel rather relates Being to necessary conceptions which,
even as such, are real and existent (entia rationis, beings of reason). He has in fact a whole
section on the sign and on speech and writing in the third part of the Encyclopaedia (458, see
our note 3). Between the necessary existence or, better, being (esse) of the Scholastics and the
necessities of logic (rules of syllogistic etc. as in "The Doctrine of the Notion") there is, again,
real connection and progress between one and the other. As in Plato's thought, we noted,
phenomenal things "both are and are not", so that the highest things more than are. Thus when
Hegel speaks finally of existence (a category of Essence at 123) he seems to dismiss what
McTaggart later will attribute to him:

Because it has no existence for starting-point… the Idea is frequently treated as

a mere logical form. Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, which
ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the existent thing and all the
other categories which have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea. (213)

That is, Hegel does not do that. He rejects the dichotomy, existence or abstraction, like the
Neoplatonists before him (ouk on and me on). What "gives reality to itself" is more free than
existence, is not merely (me) that but transcends it. The notion is not "an abstract unity" but
"subjectivity". Even the stages themselves of Being and Essence are "not something
permanent" but "dialectical… dynamic elements of the Idea" (213, Zus.).
McTaggart's criticism applies more directly to the thought and terminology of Aquinas,
though even here it could be contested (see our reference above to entia rationis6). Hegel's
"Being", anyhow, is both the Immediate (as such) and "the beginning" (as such). These he
merely calls Being, in line with his praxis throughout the dialectic, as noted above (see our
discussion of "Becoming" in I). Implicit is a distinction between Thought and language, its
sign. This is taken up, again, in the philosophy of Spirit, where too the voice (sound) is given
priority over sight, e.g. of writing, as more immediate to thought. He takes a certain distance
from language even in the act of speaking, as we do not need to consider the process of
digestion when eating (his own example). This is not what we do but how we do it
"extensively" considered. The "intensive" reality is a step nearer to the Idea.
Again, the question of a number for the Ones loses point in so far as identity and difference
give way, as abstract, to identity in difference. We can be in one another or, indeed, have all
our being in the whole, as relational rather than "substantive". We can each be identical with
the whole Trinity as postulated if we have it, conversely, in us (taught, in much theology, to
be the "routine" effect of baptism!) as we have each other in one another.7 Where one receives
(the sacrament) a thousand receive indifferently, wrote Aquinas in the hymn he composed for
the then new feast of Corpus Christi, sumit unus sumunt mille. The whole Hegelian
philosophy might thus leave the "question" about Being unresolved or, more fundamentally,
make us stop asking it. He here, and in his making method absolute, anticipates Wittgenstein
who thus, contrariwise, is misinterpreted when taken as a tiredly reductionist "relativist"
merely. The truth as to relation is not relativist, as Thought thinking itself is so little self-
defeating that it is the highest and ultimate thought.
Hegel, then, presents number solely as a Pythagorean candidate for thinking Mind itself or the
essence of things, "so-called reality". He distinguishes Sum and Unity as corresponding to
repulsion and attraction in each of the Ones (102), "two qualitative factors or functions". The
nature of each One indeed, as in Leibniz, is "a simple and unique Quality". It is not clear,
again, that these Ones, any more than numbers, are to be thought of as existent just when or
because their abstractness is denied. A similar error occurs when people designate Plato's

6
See also our "Entia rationis I: Medieval Theories" in Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. Burkhardt
& Smith), Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990.
7
Cf. Kulic, op. cit., or the Biblical doctrine of the Body of Christ, only later called corpus mysticum specifically.
Totalitarian ideologies took over this notion, whether defectively or not.
forms as necessarily abstract (though, as they say, "reified"). This Procrustean fork of being or
non-being was dismissed at the very start of the dialectic.
One might relate Hegel's discussion of number to Frege's denial that numbers change as "the
number of the inhabitants of Berlin", which is not a number, changes. Yet, after all, pure
quantity has no limit and number is a rethinking, a more precise characterisation, of Quantity.
This number is never that number and that they necessarily form a series, are indeed the
principle of series as such, just means that they do not change. "They", therefore, is a most
inappropriate term. We consider number rather than numbers, the quality become quantity
become quantum and, firstly, discrete quantum, rooted, however, in the continuum inasmuch
as the Ones are, pace McTaggart, indistinguishable (as pure relation transcends "being related
to one another").
Number evokes arithmetic, and so Hegel must look for "necessity and meaning" in its
operations coming from a principle characteristic of number itself as constituted by sum and
unity (unit) together. Hegel speaks, not at first easily intelligibly, of the "equality" of
"empirical numbers" which is Unity. He seems to mean that the summation of units itself
makes a unity. Not only the number one, as first of the series merely, can be a unity. Rather, it
includes all the others to follow, ad infinitum one cannot avoid saying, as their type (at the
very least) and identity. Hence "the equality of these two modes", sum and unity.
Numbers are "indifferent towards each other". Well, in what sense? One goes on to the next
number. It becomes that just because one goes on, names apart. One counts. One adds one
(more). This indifference reflects, however, "the aspect of an external colligation", i.e. it is a
mere "aspect", less evident in a binary system, for example, or, why not, a unitary "system",
where one is simply added to one forever, like marks on a cell-wall. In this sense groups
count themselves, since elephants in a group do not differ relevantly from such marks,
whatever "intentions" are involved (or not). It is likewise with units and unitary "things". All
reckoning is therefore counting, says Hegel. The child's counting the names of numbers as he
has learned them is the same operation as our counting any other discrete quantum. He too
can break off at any point, as he anyhow must at some (point).
Numbers are thus both unequal (there are more than one) and equal. They "make one unity".
When I say "The ships on the horizon are three" I put them together, "colligate" them as a
unity. Hegel connects this with Multiplication in the general sense (of the term) as lying
behind the arithmetical sense. What is multiplied, e.g. a population, remains one. The same
population is now other, as sum and unity are "equal". "Either may be sum and either may be
unity."
This equality of Sum and Unity he connects with squaring, as exhibiting it. One may similarly
subtract, look for the square root, divide. Number may also be employed to "determine"
continuous magnitudes, as in geometry, by use of discrete units against these magnitudes, so
as to fix their reciprocal relations or "ratios", for example (as in measuring).