Being, Living, Thinking: The Missing Concept in Maraguat’s True Purposes

This paper revolves around three topics (being, living and thinking), which correspond to three interconnected aspects of Edgar Maraguat’s recent attempt to establish Teleology as the definitive, ‘non-provisional’ derivation of the category of ‘purpose’ ( Zweck ) in the Logic . Because Maraguat reads Hegel’s derivation of purpose as the key to understanding the objective validity of the Logic (the bearing of the categories on the world), his project affords the commentator a rare opportunity to reflect on the issue of the systematic unity of the work. This paper identifies three problems with Maraguat’s approach as well as the crucial, unifying concept that I take to be missing from his account: however improbably, the concept ( Begriff ). By travelling this negative path, I attempt to illuminate an alternative approach to the Logic , which seeks to accomplish three interconnected goals: (1) to ground the objective validity of the categories in the opening account of pure being; (2) to interpret the notion of a species-concept or kind ( Gattung ) as the highest principle of being; and (3) to locate Hegel’s definitive derivation of purpose in his account of the self-conscious kind.