The “Climate Alarmists” are right - says Hegel

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Whenever floods are devastating swathes of land, wildfires burn through homes and droughts and heatwaves kill crops and people, a certain pattern of discourse repeats. One side says “This is the climate catastrophe, there we see it!”, the other side says “No that’s oversimplified, Climate change is a slow and global process, singular climate disasters have always existed”¹.

Two contradictory or contrary claims opposing each other in public discourse inevitably produce the old Aristotelian stupidity of the golden middle: “Both are somewhat correct, but one-sided. We need to see the problem nuanced!”. In the case of climate disasters that could mean: Climate disasters have always existed and it is too quick to yell “Climate catastrophe!” at every instance, but climate change does make those disasters a lot more likely.²

Hegelian dialectics is often subject to such an understanding of mediating two opposing claims: We have two one-sided claims and the solution is to get a grip on the whole that they form together, to see all sides – “synthesize” them. It is of course of no help that Hegel himself chose to put matters in this way every know and then, whenever he comes close to his romantic roots in a notion of the life of an “organic whole”. He calls I and II of the triad the “moments” of the “unity” that is III. But it is absolutely central to keep in mind that Hegel himself called “unity” an “unfortunate word”³ (unglückliches Wort).

My claim is: The proper Hegelian solution to the “antinomy” vis-à-vis climate disasters is unambiguously taking sides for the first claim – the brutal over-simplification of seeing a global catastrophe in a single, local disaster. That is the “unity” as “concrete totality” as Hegel would have put it.

Aufhebung and “true infinity”

What we see in the second claim is a version of “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense: an endless progression of local disasters. The “climate catastrophe” is just the totality of this progression that can never be reached as such: for no element of the progression are we allowed to claim it without transgressing the boundaries of legitimate knowledge.⁴

The first claim then, at least in the version that I would claim is the proper Hegelian Aufhebung, is a version of “true infinity”. Such is Hegel’s name for a certain contraction of the endless progression into a single notion that captures the contradiction driving the progression forward. I want to give some flesh to this notion in two variations and then come back to the climate disasters, but to give a first shot: the spurious infinity is the progression 1, 2, 3, 4, …, the true infinity is its contraction into the sublated contradiction of a finished progression: N.

Variation 1: A thing

Every thing as soon as it is considered a separate thing, something for-itself as Hegel would put it, is the result of such a contraction. Already being able to pronounce the simple claim S is P, implies the endless progression of negative determinations of P. Any predicate only has sense if I can say what it is not (omnis determinatio est negatio, as Hegel likes to quote Spinoza⁵) – and it is more precise, the more such negative determinations I can give. Ideally that progression is therefore infinite: S is not Q, is not R, and so on.

Exactly this “and so on” is the spurious infinity in Hegel’s sense and it is Derrida who is the master of this specific “and so on” (“meaning is always postponed” and all the etceteras – I called this “Delay” in my last essays). What Derrida is not able to accept is the contraction of this progression into the single name S. Using it, treating it as a determinate being is already presupposing this progression to be completed. The true notion of a thing is the contraction of this spurious infinity into one single expression – its name⁶, that is just the empty form of its having any predicates at all.

Variation 2: A (mathematical) limit

The mathematical notion of the limit of a progression is precisely such a contraction and perhaps the source of insight for Hegel’s notion of true infinity.⁷ But Hegel is, of course, writing before Cauchy, Weierstraß and the modern epsilon-delta definition of the notion of limit. His understanding can be illustrated with the high school, geometrical understanding of limits (of functions), which is not at all far from Hegel’s Newtonian/Leibnizian perspective.

Asking oneself about the rate of change of functions, one encounters a similar problem to the one’s appearing in Zeno’s paradoxes: The function f(x) = x² for example is surely changing its function value between x = 1 (where f(x) = 1) and x = 2 (where f(x) = 4). But at any given x the function value is not changing, of course, it is uniquely determined. But if it is not changing at any given point, how can it change in-between two points? There are only further points in between in which it is not changing, but even an infinite sum of zero change amounts to zero change.

The answer is not as straightforward as one might initially think and formulating it was an immense scientific achievement of generations of mathematicians, leading up to Newtonian/Leibnizian calculus and modern-day analysis. It involves treating an infinite progression (spurious infinity) as finished (true infinity) and the result is the sublated contradiction of the notion “change in an instant”.

Starting from the notion of the change between two points, geometrically embodied by the slope of a line in-between, one constructs the progression that results from moving one point further and further towards the other. This progression is infinite, since it can never reach the point in question: a single point does not uniquely determine a line. The limit of this progression now consists in treating this progression as completed, leaving only an infinitely small distance between the two points (Leibniz defined this line, the tangent, as the line determined by two infinitely close points).

This completed progression, this limit, is precisely the Hegelian true infinity to the spurious infinity of the progression itself. And one can see another key element of dialectics in this: From the initial perspective the notion of “change in an instant” is simply contradictory – one needs at least to points to see any change. This leads to the infinite progression of getting ever close to the point in question, which is just the same contradiction endlessly postponed. That forces one to change the notion one uses itself and consider “change” as something able to happen in an instant – the new notion of change sublates the contradiction, it does not destroy it (since from the old perspective it is and will always be contradictory to claim that there is change in an instant).

This variation is essentially the same for the notion of “motion” and the modern notion of velocity, defined as the derivative – the limit – of the space-time trajectory, resembling something like the “motion in an instant” demanded by Zeno’s paradoxes.

The One-Sidedness of Reason and Truth

So, the contraction of a spurious infinity into a seemingly finite, single unit is the true infinite for Hegel and the essence of Reason. That is why the triad Finite/Bad Infinite/Infinite is “not an official Hegelean triad”⁸, but rather an attempt at formulating the underlying, “dialectical” principle for all triads.⁹

If that is so, then the whole notion of Reason for Hegel – since spurious infinity corresponds to understanding (Verstand) and true infinity to Reason (Vernunft) – can be summarized as: Reason is necessarily one-sided, it consists in reducing an infinite complexity into its essential expression, capturing this infinity. Instead of getting stuck in the “correct” consideration of change only happening between two points, of meaning being realized only after an impossible-to-realize, infinite progression of determinations, Reason “jumps to conclusions”. From the standpoint of understanding it will for ever look contradictory.¹⁰

Coming back to climate disasters: That is why the “correct” consideration of all sides, the caution for over-simplification is wrong. The truth that Reason leads to is, in this situation¹¹, the “oversimplified” or “strictly speaking wrong” (there were always floods etc.) determination of “This flood is the climate catastrophe” – the true contradiction of a global catastrophe itself happening in a local event, an instant. An instant that sees people gasping for air in the floods or crying in desperation on dry fields.

1. There is also a progressive version of this: “Stop mixing thing’s up so easily, you make us all look like hysteric alarmists! You’re actually doing a disservice to the climate fight” ↩

2. There is, in the form of attribution science, of course a scientific endeavor to analyze the relation of global climate change to individual, local disasters and my polemic here in no means is meant to diminish the scientific status of it. My claim goes to the function such scientific findings can play in public, political discourse: Repressing the severity of the climate catastrophe, soothing oneself with little number games. ↩

3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Objective Logic. The Doctrine of Being,” in The Science of Logic, vol. 1, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 67. ↩

4. It is easily recognizable how his notion of “spurious infinity” is primarily aimed at Kant. Such a progression is exactly the Kantian progression of knowledge along a chain of partly justified elements that can never be completed – we can never claim something unconditional(ly), we are just endlessly striving towards this regulative Idea. ↩

5. A “proposition of infinite importance” he calls it, which gets another meaning in this context: A proposition of importance concerning the infinite. Hegel, “Logic I. Being,” 87. ↩

6. See also Žižek’s dealing with Kripke’s theory of naming: Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Polity, 2014), 212–17. ↩

7. It is astonishing that the absolute centrality of mathematics for the very idea of dialectics does not seem to have been seen often. The biggest part of the Logic of Being is dedicated to a discussion of mathematics (chapters on Quantity and Measure) and it is there that the notion of true infinity is first developed – which is “the fundamental concept of philosophy” (Encyclopedia, §95, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. Klaus Brinkmann (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 152). ↩

8. Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2002), 108. My understanding of Dialectics as centered around “true infinity” owes a lot to Priest’s brilliant reconstruction of Kant and Hegel in this book. ↩

9. This is, of course, somewhat at odds with Hegel’s own account of the second stage of any triad representing the finite, that he voices in several passages. ↩

10. One could also, perhaps better, say: Reason is precisely allowing oneself to come to true contradictions as conclusions and using them as new notions. ↩

11. One has to be more precise here: Of course Hegelian logic only gives arguments for the possible validity of “true infinities” as such - it does not at all deal with climate sciences. Hegelian logic can only justify that in general such a claim can be justified, but obviously the concrete justification must be done via the findings, notions and theories of climate sciences. I gladly admit that my essay is therefore really about Hegel, not about climate. I just use Hegel to rule out the counter-argument that such a move from an endless progression to a seemingly finite, contradictory (global/local) contraction is in itself unreasonable. As to the connections between Hegelian logic and concrete, empirical reasoning - that is another matter of infinity: of infinite problems. ↩