Hegel’s Concept of the Concept and the Original Emptiness of Pure Thinking

While Kantian readers consider Hegel’s discussion of the significance of Kant’s account of apperception as the key to understanding what he means by the concept of the concept, the so-called metaphysical readers have warned against identifying these accounts too swiftly, urging instead that the concept is an onto-logical structure which needs to be conceived through the genuinely Hegelian notion of absolute negativity. In this paper, I reject the problematic underlying assumption shared by both interpretative strands that Hegel’s notion of self-negation sits uncomfortably with conceiving Hegel’s concept of the concept in terms of the unity of apperception. Contrary to both one-sided readings, I seek to preserve their insights by arguing first that Hegel’s conception of the concept, or thinking only thinking itself, and its absolute negativity, can be understood as the radicalization of Kant’s account of apperception, or self-relation of thinking, and its original emptiness. Second, I will show that the absolute negation provides the conceptual resources to understand how pure thinking can determine itself and thus give itself concrete conceptual content.