Review of Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Life and Value
Hegel famously declares that “Everything in my logic is indebted to Heraclitus” and “Everything is contradictory.” Songsuk Susan Hahn’s study is a thoughtful and unusual treatment of contradiction in Hegel. It illuminates crucial links between the logical, aesthetic and ethical aspects of Hegel’s system, and furthermore is a welcome departure from the prevailing approach to the dialectic as the public-communal constitution and recognition of rational norms, free of ontological claims, in a kind of historicized Kantianism. Hahn observes that Hegel’s concept of life is central to the Science of Logic and to the whole of the system, wherein it has undeniable ontological import. Her book, she tells the reader, began with wonder: “What does Hegel mean when he says we must regard concepts as ‘living’?” (195).