HEGEL, HEIDEGGER AND OTHERS ON THE GROUND

The Category of the Ground arises in Hegels logic out of consideration of a necessary
identity holding between identity and difference. This at first sight contradictory
proposition, it becomes clear, derives from, as its proto-exemplification, the Trinitarian
relation, whereby, for example, the Father and the Son, or God and his Word, are both
equally the other of themselves in being themselves. The Ground is the unity of identity
and difference, the truth of what difference and identity have turned out to be (Hegel,
Enc. 121).
To this, however, Hegel immediately adds that the maxim of the Ground runs thus:
Everything has its sufficient Ground, which introduces a relating of his doctrine to that
of Leibniz. Here, however, Hegel explains this maxim as that the true essentiality of
anything is not the predication of it as identical with itself, or as different (various), or
merely positive, or merely negative, but as having its Being in an other, which, being its
self-same, is its essence, thus re-emphasising that unity of identity and difference we
first noted.
Basic to the argument is that Essence is what Being, in turn, has turned out to be (Enc.
110), as both, in turn, will turn out to be the Concept and this to be the Absolute Idea,
for itself the pure form of the notion or concept (237). The thrust of the whole
argument, therefore, is most directly instantiated in the idea of Beings being something
else or other, and not merely itself. In English we would not even use the distinguishing
capital letter here. This other, that being is, is itself. Being is to be other as what it was
to be (Aristotle) or its essence.
It is due to this that, as Hegel will say, all predication, all judgment, is false unless, so to
say, re-absorbed in the unitary concept, Aristotles first act (of the three) of the
understanding. It is though, for Hegel as for anyone, the third of these three acts, namely
syllogising or reasoning, that effects the return to the first.
To this Ground, first appearing here as a category of logic, corresponds, just therefore,
something in metaphysical or spiritual reality, just as there first corresponds something
in nature as the mediating truth of the logical Idea going forth in a freedom the Logic
itself has found to be one with the most final necessity as and of what happens in fact,
to anticipate the Heideggerian Ereignis. For here, Hegel concludes his account of the
Ground in the Logic, the ground is not an end or final cause; hence it is not active,
nor productive (122), i.e. not a cause at all. This negation, we must notice, is not a
putting of a limitation upon the ground, but merely a further specification. In terms of
value, it can as well be taken as a situating, to their disadvantage, so to say, of the
attributes of action and production he has just mentioned.
Yet it is from this ground, and not from some cause, that Existence in general or any
Existence proceeds. An Existence only proceeds from the ground (123). It is in this
way that a ground can be found or adduced for everything, while such a good ground
may effect something or it may not unless or until it is received into a will and thus
made a cause. What Hegel is discussing, he had earlier made clear, is (the principle of)
sufficient reason. Hegel interprets this Leibnizian principle, however, as more than this
formal law of the ground, as an absorbing, rather, of efficient into final causality as,
indeed, this comes to be mirrored in Hegels own dialectic (203, 204). By contrast this
procession of existence from the ground as determinate, i.e. it is only determined as a

ground, some ground or other, is therefore a formal matter, in correlation with

Existence as the immediately following category, whether or not, that is to say, any
existences are really or phenomenally produced. The having of a ground is merely how
any thing (next category) is to be thought and as such it turns out to be the basis of, the
ground for, the inter-relation of all existents in the unity by which they form a world of
reciprocal dependence. The grounds are themselves existences as any existence is a
ground. In this indefinite multitude of existents, this infinite inter-connexion between
grounds and consequents, it is not only useless but without meaning to attempt further
identification as of something in itself or underlying (substans).
Nevertheless it is from the ground that logical reasoning must commence. Insofar, even,
as this is an affair of the analytical understanding it stays there, at the ground or, rather,
says Hegel in a kind of despairing pun, falls to the ground (120). A chief aim of the
present essay is to determine how much more than this, if anything, is implied, after
Hegel, by the Heideggerian concept of Sein, of whom the latter says that our chief error
in philosophy has been the attempt to derive not merely this concept but Sein itself from
beings, esse from entia, instead of deriving these existents, the beings, from being itself.
This, however, is precisely what we find being done at this point of Hegels logic, which
we are considering. The question would then be, for Heidegger, presumably, whether
Hegel follows this order of procession, this way of proceeding, in reality as he does in his
thought. For Hegel himself, we should note in passing, for absolute idealism, the
alternative qua alternative hardly arises.
It is striking, anyhow, that Heidegger does not seem readily or explicitly to acknowledge
this Hegelian precedent for his own methodology. It is clearly implicit, however, as
appears from the very titles of the works dedicated to this question as, for example, Vom
Wesen des Grundes (1929) or Der Satz vom Grund (1957, reflecting a lecture-course
given eighteen months or so previously).
For this reason we will pause here to give a further summary of Hegels position on just
this question, this Satz rather in its essential meaning.
*
The Ground, Hegel points out in The Science of Logic, was interpreted in the whole of
the metaphysics before him either as cause or, in modern rationalism, as reason. Here
though it is important to remember that for Aristotle there were four types of cause, so
the Ground, called here God, is both efficient and final cause. Final causality, however,
was called in question in the modern period immediately prior to Hegel, first in relation
to nature, in physics. Finality survived isolated in the human world of morality. Thus
Kant distinguished between natural and free causality, namely rational, as the reason of
being. This change led to the enthronement of the Anselmian a priori ontological
argument over the five a posteriori ways of Aquinas for establishing the rationality of
the object, be it world or God, from Descartes on. With Leibniz this becomes the
principle of sufficient reason.
Thus the ground gets interpreted as reason. Hegel criticised the identification of ground
with efficient cause as mechanical, from outside only. He praises Leibniz for seeing
this. It is not, as we saw above, a matter of cause but of an intrinsic relation to all other
things as essential to any existence. This, we may note in passing, at once raises the
question of the applicability of the attribute of existence to God, or indeed the ground,
concerning whom Aquinas argued that as infinite he has no real relation to anything
outside himself. Instead, he is within himself a network of relations, thus including his
own otherness and, a fortiori, everything other.

Hegel, however, considered the Leibnizian theory, as it emerged in its treatment by Wolff
at least, of a dichotomy between the contingent thing and its necessary ground to be false.
Just therefore there is no sense in applying either the principle of causality or of sufficient
reason, he concludes. No such dualism can be thought. It denies itself, as he shows,
already in the Doctrine of Being. It is a question, rather, of reconciling creation with
infinite act, within which it is necessarily absorbed. Philosophy has to maintain and not
give up this its high ground, this identity, in the Aristotelian specific difference, of basis
and summit, which is the Concept and Absolute Idea.
It is at this point that from todays standpoint one naturally recalls the Heideggerian
utterance that, in effect, the truth of essence is the essence of truth. For it is essence that
Hegel is here expounding as mediating being and the Idea, as mediating the Idea from
being as the first or originating concept. Thus he says, still following Leibniz, that The
maxim of the Ground runs thus; everything has its sufficient Ground. This means that
anythings true essentiality is not its self-identity or lack of it, as merely positive, or
merely negative, recalling the proximately previous categories, but its having its Being
in an other, which, being its self-same, is its essence (121).
Here already everything is led back from what is now exposed as untrue abstraction and
particularisation to the Idea as only truth and final, essentially realised end. This process
will not stop at reabsorbing predication itself, even of this self-same truth, into the Idea,
in total agreement of the statement of the Tractatus after, it is often overlooked, having
spoken of the mystical (6.522-6.54), that it cannot be spoken of. All judgments are
false. This had to be said since it is Hegels recognition of his own, as later of
Wittgensteins, method. Thus the propositions of the dialectic, its categories for that
matter, serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me
eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb
up beyond them. This is precisely the Hegelian ungratefulness of spirit and, properly,
nothing new. Thought was and is ever a circle. And this we call God (Aquinas). It was
also called a highway of despair (Hegel). It is a rculer pour mieux sauter, but without
end or circular. What is despaired of, infinitely, is the finite.
It follows immediately, or to this extent, that the essence is not abstract reflection into
self, but into an other. One might want to ask though: how does this differ from
predications being of the subject, as it obviously does? The Ground is the essence in its
own inwardness; the essence is intrinsically a ground; and it is a ground only when it is a
ground of somewhat, of an other. This, though, is not convertible as subject and
predicate, whatever formal stipulations are set, are always convertible. Inasmuch as John
is wise the wise is John. This is in fact the basis of Hegels whole system, whereby the
universal is the individual and vice versa, along with the other five or so identifications
made in his account of formal logic as the Subjective Concept. Strict analysis there falls
together with the mystical This also is thou; neither is this thou. This is the truth which
is essence as infinite freedom, the insight that all, and not only God, speak only one
Word. Thus philosophy has ever consumed itself as condition for its survival as, thus,
every existence (or non-existence) is relation, is the whole as self-relating, every atom
attracting its other in self-constituting repulsion. This is indeed the collapse of the
finite or, put differently, the truth of finite reality consists in its ideality (95). This
means, however, in its turn, that the infinite, as the necessity of all possibility, cannot be
conceived without it without itself becoming finite.
This dynamic totality is in fact Spirit, mind, as true or final ground also an Abgrund
(Hegel is recalling Jakob Boehme) or abyss of nothingness, just inasmuch as its being the
self-consciousness of absolute mind or, simply, absolute self-consciousness. Ground is
essence as the whole, the negativity of all else, which just therefore negates itself as this

negativity. The negative is, becomes, the positive, in an infinity. This is infinity. It cannot
be either cause or reason taken now as reason of being. Reason, rather (Vernnft), is the
transcendent ground of all in immanence as holding it within itself.
*
Heidegger coincides with Hegel in this critique of cause as of reason-of-being, but not in
the identification of this ground with, for example, subjectivity. Hegel, he suggests,
travels in a closed circle as knowing in advance where he wants to go. That is, he could
not have gone there without knowing that. Thinking in itself, letting being be, does not
lead to that, namely. He relates, grounds, this criticism to and in a modern quest, unAristotelian, for absolute certainty in all things, as already instanced in Luthers stress
upon assurance in religion, in the Galilean quantification by mathematics of physics or,
supremely, in the Cartesian philosophical project; supremely, though, not because it is
philosophy but because there Descartes establishes an objective ground for truth upon his
existence as subject. Thus from there he argues to God as supreme, truth-guaranteeing
object from the subjects formation or, rather, possession of just this idea, thus forming a
basis for science.
Here, however, Heidegger seems to forget that it is just this that Hegel rejects in his
introductory essay to The Science of Logic, With What Must Science Begin?, where,
indeed, he has Descartes very much in mind. Science can only begin with being and not
with the subject. It is this being, rather, which reveals itself to be subject and absolute
subject, through the prior mediation of being as, first, essence, in Hegels sense of this.
Descartes, in fact, misses the import of his own, revolutionary discovery1, which is just
what Hegel develops, following in the path, but scientifically, of the mystics, of the
speculative proposition. This proposition though, of self in other and in all other, to the
ruin of all finite predication, such as we find also in Wittgenstein, both philosophers
finding a basis rather in the general form of a logical atomism, has nothing to do with
establishing assurance but is rather a highway of despair. This aspect Descartes, as
also Heidegger, turns almost immediately away from and it is that which is most striking,
that Descartes shows no interest whatever in the self he has just discovered. There is
nothing in him corresponding to Newmans repose in the universe of spirit as myself
and God.
Such self-awareness, reflection shows, has nothing to do with a quest for certainty. It is
no kind of means at all but, rather, realised end, and this, rather, is what Hegel must be
given credit for. At least in his discussions of the ground Heidegger shows no awareness
of, or chooses not to touch upon, this. Hegel does in fact discuss subjective certainty in
relation to knowledge but in order to argue positively that the two are finally identifiable
before either of them can be realised as itself. The truth into which certainty mutates is
the truth of the divine being in its absolute knowledge and nothing else. Certainty is thus
founded upon the ruin of the individual and so is not subjective in the Heideggerian
sense. This is indeed a philosophy of the One and why not? Here unification is the
business of philosophy, remarks Heidegger disparagingly, immediately before
embarking upon his supposedly more effective means of achieving this unity philosophy
needs to be itself. What both thinkers find, however, is that unity is the achievement of
spirit, of mind in its self-consciousness, which, as infinite, is the submergence of all
consciousness as we know it, the loss of self in the other as of the other in itself, in
having nothing possessing all things. Such subjectivity, in fact, is precisely what makes
1

See our Other Problems about the Self, Sophia (Australia), 1984.

religion, for Hegel, a form, though imperfect, of absolute spirit, of which, in turn,
philosophy is the absolute or final Gottesdienst.
Heidegger, however, claims to discern as condition for this way of reasoning an inability
to think, to account for, the ground of subjectivity, which, the latter, Heidegger equates
with just any particularised being. This ground Heidegger calls Being (with a capital b),
Sein, which, as accounting for beings, as ground of the ground, cannot itself be a being
as, thus, accounting for itself or causa sui. Just how or if it could not be this, however, is
the question itself which Hegel answers in the affirmative. It is a question of necessity
and therefore, first, logical. Heidegger must also show how his demurral, to be valid,
does not involve an infinite regress, of grounds of grounds of grounds, which are thus not
grounds at all. He has here in fact founded the post-modern dismissal of this quest as
foundationalism, fundamentalism, preferring the groundless. Against it all Hegel
affirms that non-being too is a being or, in the first instance, this Being with a capital b.
Nonetheless Heideggers project and his question are of the deepest interest. His not
finding his answer in Hegels system appears to be at least helped along by a certain
prejudice, however, one shared by that other culturally Catholic thinker. Descartes, and
which one finds also in Adorno. Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman had none of this
but that is precisely because Newman, a Catholic convert (1845) when more than forty
years of age, was a man of deeply Protestant culture, for which reason surely the newly
beatified (2014) Pope Paul VI Montini declared the Ecumenical Council (Vatican II) he
had recently (1965) closed to be Newmans Council. For Heidegger the norm, the way
of dogmatic theology, depends upon a rationalism on all fours with that of the
Enlightenment, upon a rejection of the mystical stretching back, at Rome, to at least the
days of Pope Nicholas the Great in the ninth century and reproduced institutionally, later,
in an inquisitorial tribunal based upon a rejection of precisely the speculative as such.
Heideggers project, though, is of interest because, like religion, it is nonetheless
mystical.
Being as such cannot be a being. But nor can it be non-being, as coinciding with just that
ignoring of it which has characterised the onto-theology Heidegger reprobates. The
question is that of how we heed the clearing (Lichtung) of Being. Hegel cannot ask
the question re the clearing as primal phenomenon, not so much a lighting up as that
which lights up, as the ground of all beings which itself has no trees and still less is
itself a tree. Yet it is necessarily in the forest. The forest, then, is the unity of all in all,
just as in Hegel. Thus, for Hegel, the ground too is in the end the Idea, everything coming
from and going to the ground. In itself, therefore, the ground supports or underpins
nothing, being essence put explicitly as a totality. The other it supports is necessarily
within it and not merely by foreseeing decree of Hegel himself expounding it.
*
The ground, then, as thematised after Hegel in a new phenomenology, proceeds from
Heidegger. For him, as for Hegel, being as foundation or ground is not a being. Rather,
and this Hegel shows more than Heidegger, being itself is shown to be at once non-being
and idea and this idea, ultimately the Absolute Idea, is itself not merely absolute qua idea
but is itself the absolute. Non-being, or a being of reason, is itself the final shape of
being, for which Existence, as emerging immediately from the ground, is not itself a
worthy predicate, Hegel says, echoing the Neoplatonic tradition merely, but as a result of
his own categories, which are yet not his own. God, or being, does not properly exist,
as we can see if we try to apply this predicate precisely to being, but nonetheless is.
Being is what it is not inasmuch as it is not what it is. It is important, however, not to

confuse being, das Sein, with the esse commune of Scholastic abstraction. It should rather
be identified, in difference, with that act of being proper to God alone, to which all other
being or beings indifferently is backwardly, or from the absolute viewpoint, analogical.
Hence we say that Gods being is analogical or, with Heidegger, that Being is not a being.
But this is precisely the error of onto-theology.
Hegel begins his consideration of the ground 2 by referring to Aristotles doctrine of
arche, of the four principles (archai) or causes. Aquinas had transmitted the definition of
a principle as that from which something proceeds in any manner whatever and in fact
Hegel says that Existence, as well as an existence, only proceeds from the ground as
a formal matter, as what can be adduced for anything, for any immediate existence
depending on it whatever, as we may ask always for what a persons grounds are for
what he says, in no way assuming either cause or especially valid reason. A ground can
always be found and any ground is good. Is not Heidegger then rather making a mountain
out of a molehill? The ground in Hegel is not connected with a will to conclude towards
absolute subjectivity, as he expressly there adds; there and there only it becomes active
and is made a cause (122).
Heidegger passes now to analysis of the Leibnizian sufficient reason. Not much or no
specific attention is paid to Hegels careful exegesis of this, for him, key thinker,
philosopher of contradiction perfected (194). For Hegel the ground is not phenomenal but
formal. The ground and the grounded merely differ in form as immediate and mediated.
This, the law of sufficient ground, merely asserts that things should essentially be
viewed as mediated. Yet logic lays down this law without exhibiting its mediation.
Thus we reach what Hegel has shown to be the true business of logic: it is to show all
our thoughts, appearing often as neither understood nor demonstrated, are really
grades in the self-determination of thought. Logic, in this way, finishes the inherent task
or riddle we call consciousness. In this process the individual is lost, ruined, in the
universal and contrariwise. As the Psalmist had it, In God alone is my soul at rest, any
soul, we might interpret.
Thus far the ground is yet without a definite content of its own. Yet a variety of
grounds may always be asserted for the same fact. This, following the logic of difference
(the ground is both the unity but also the difference of identity and difference: this is its
significance), we get an opposition of grounds pro and contra, always and necessarily.
Thus the phrase sufficient ground, Hegel now says (121 add.), is either otiose, or of
such a kind as to carry us past the mere category of ground. So because any ground
suffices no ground is identifiable as mere ground and this, says Hegel, is actually the
meaning of the Leibnizian law, namely that only a self-acting content suffices for the
ground, which without it is insufficient, mere formalism. This is the self-acting concept
with which everything actual or real is identical as a moment. The word sufficient
shows, for Hegel, that Leibniz was not offering a mere formal law of the ground. He
thus rejected efficient causes in favour of final causes as the principle of true explanation.
Light, heat and moisture may be the efficient causes of a plants growth but the final
cause is the notion or concept of the plant itself, its active and determining form, this
being that nature by which bodies in general heal themselves before any doctor gets
involved or by which minds grow in wisdom from within prior to determinate nudges by
any teacher. What is being prepared under Ground, we begin to see, is the later
reciprocity entailing quasi-Humean rejection of an inward core to appearances, of cause
to effect, of inside to outside, of God to nature, of invisible to visible. He that has seen
me has seen the Father could well be taken as Hegels guiding text or insight here. To
call this atheistic would be to miss the point and not merely to jump the gun. But neither
2

Vom Wesen des Grundes, 1944.

is it pantheistic, since what is first rejected is any idea of a composite whole (135) of
parts, in spatial as in temporal explanation, of history therefore as time-slices. This, the
immediate relation, is mediated, logically absorbed, as itself the whole (and not just a
whole) inasmuch as each diverse part possesses independent being and is thus not truly
part, not related to any abstract other, the other itself being the same or not other. If the
whole is the part and the part is the whole then there are neither parts nor wholes, just as
there is no ground otherwise than in pure or abstract formality, corresponding to the
childs indiscriminate Why? This, that being has no parts, is the ancient Parmenidean
insight, faithful to the Oracles principle that self-knowledge is universal of universals in
its final individuality. So in general the ground of the phenomenon is no less
phenomenal than itself, the appearance of analysis a merely inward, this itself though
the outward, phenomenon of thinking as it appears to us. Thus the mediation of
substance by means of form, and thus equally by non-subsistence is endless or without
result, since this truth is itself the result.
This, it seems to us, is the background to Heideggers independently initiated
discrimination of Being from Beings, of the Being that cannot itself be a being. By the
Hegelian logic it can and must be such, although the opposite of this is equally valid,
namely the difference in the identity as the identity in the difference. This also is thou,
neither is this thou is the formula for this, which, indeed only personality can support, as
McTaggart argues3, since here individuality is itself posited as principle of universality,
its opposite. So we will have a being that is not a being, in further sublation of the
category of Existence as it emerges or proceeds from the Ground. This though is in
consequence of the truth that being is, necessarily. So theology asked, anciently, if God
is, utrum Deus sit, and not whether God exists, this being an unworthy predicate for
Being itself, avers Hegel, making of God himself a part of a larger whole, in a
contradiction not in the least speculative. Thus in rejecting the Anselmian proof as proof
Aquinas conceded the Anselmian point as to the necessity of the Idea. So, too, the Being
as such sought by Heidegger is not merely necessary but necessity itself. This indeed is
the salt itself whereby or in which one tastes being, in Professor Caputos analogy,
again of the outside as inside merely.
*
To return, then, to Heidegger and the ground as precisely phenomenological, the warning
not to confuse the ontological with the ontic, necessarily converting God into an idol, a
being, not to employ the ontological categories of cause and sufficient reason here, is
also a call to disobjectify God.4 Recourse to the Ground, again, is free of reification.
For Leibniz, in contrast, truth is necessarily predicative or the giving of a reason,
Heidegger states. This leads him (in Vom Wesen des Grundes) to ask if there can or must
not be a more originary truth than that of the enunciation, a pre-predicative truth or
ground, of that which predication manifests and so is not itself predicative but a
primordial phenomenological experience. Heidegger calls this ontological truth, while,
he finds, the merely ontic and its beings need not be true, whether in the particular case
or in general, anxiety, Angst, being the acknowledgement of this (on the part of Dasein, a
term neither taking from nor referring, though it cannot but recall, its prior use in Hegel).
Thus is unveiled the truth of beings not manifested by them alone. This truth though is
not separate, is always of the being or beings. This alone is why it is called Being, being
3

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1901, ch.2.

Cf. Diego Garcia Guillen, El problema del fundamento, Zubiri ante Heidegger, Herder Editorial, Barcelona
2008.
4

as such, and not something else. Yet it is not a being. This is the same ground as that of
negative mysticism, of Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Augustine (non aliquo modo est, sed
est, est).
But since it is only Dasein, the particular being, and not merely consciousness, that
perceives this reciprocity of Being and beings, it follows (or is it just a guess?) that the
roots of this ontological difference are lodged precisely in the essence of this Dasein.
Heidegger calls this, in anticipation, he says, the transcendence of Dasein, who thus
consists in being a being in and as transcendence (sic). Well, this is a clear enough
recognition of reasons absolute character. What thus transcends itself, though, is being
itself (das Seiende, not Sein) transcended in its totality. This that is thus transcended we
call the world, such transcendence being in the world, making this concept, world,
itself transcendental. It is not the merely physical or cosmic conception, namely, of things
abstractly thus considered, but of what appears. Thus the world is not a being, but that
from which Dasein can be and has to be. This then is Heideggers version, coyly unidealist, of I that is the whole or universal of universals.