Hegel on Contingency, or, Fluidity And Multiplicity

Abstract

This piece presents some motifs concerning fluidity and multiplicity that arise from the Contingency chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic. I do not present it as a microcosm of an overall interpretation of Hegel. Still, emphasising Hegel's categories of fluidity and dissolution, and of multiplicity and its marks, obviously intensifies a certain version of the dialectic. One might call this ‘far left Hegelianism’. If it were to be generalised as a reading of Hegel, it might share something with Jean-Luc Nancy's polemical little book, Hegel: L'inquiétude du négatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997). A reading like this one is unlikely to have been written prior to Deleuze's ontology of multiplicity.In undialectical philosophies, contingency, like desire, suggests themes of arbitrariness, unsystematic events, isolated moments of chance, and so on. In Hegel, of course, the roles played by desire and contingency are quite the contrary. Desire is part of Hegel's account of how a subject can in the movement of life find itself as part of the truth of objects, at the same time as it finds objects as part of its own truth — the direct contrary of arbitrary subjective preference. Contingency is part of Hegel's account of how the mark of a necessary totality is visible in every free actualisation of a possibility — the direct contrary of isolated events. The clue to the dialectic is the way the desubstantialising categories of fluidity and multiplicity are generated precisely through the apparently substantialising categories of actuality and necessity.