I have some thoughts about Karen Ng’s new book, Hegel’s Concept of Life, which I plan to incorporate in an upcoming article on the status of life in the Science of Logic. For those who are interested, I’ll mention a few key points here.

(1) Ng’s book is very good on what Hegel inherits from Fichte, Schelling, and Hölderlin and what he rejects. She is especially good on the role that the concept of life plays in Hegel’s critique of Fichte, which is almost entirely neglected in the post-Pippin tradition.

(2) For example, Ng masterfully shows how Hegel’s Hölderlin-inspired critique of judgment in Fichte leads him to conceive the power of self-organization as the basic form of living objectivity, which is a precondition for a consistent notion of the identity of subject and object

(3) Nevertheless, there is a deep problem with Ng’s account, which she frames as strictly opposed to “the apperception thesis” developed by Pippin, namely the thought that the Logic is the self-determination by thought of being in its thinkability.

(4) Ng accuses Pippin of too closely following Kant’s notion of apperception and, more or less, of succumbing to a version of “subjective idealism.” Accordingly, Ng thinks that Pippin reduces life in the Logic to a mere “thought determination,” along Kantian lines.

(5) There are problems with this (a) as a reading of Pippin and (b) for Ng’s own account. (a) Pippin’s Hegel does not merely espouse Kant’s view of apperceptive spontaneity but radicalizes Kant’s thesis by owing up to what a metaphysical deduction of the categories truly requires

(6) That is, Hegel shows that thought is empowered to determine not just the constraints on thinking but on being as such, in its thinkability. Indeed, to determine the former is already to determine the latter, since to get thought right is to get the thought of an object right.

(7.1) (b) One of the chief merits of Ng’s account is her claim that life is not just a category of judgment but the *original form of the activity of judging*. This is important, and Pippin indeed does not go there - whereas he should. But to fully make her own point...

(7.2) Ng would actually need Pippin’s account of the apperceptive, self-correcting dynamic of the Logic. That is, if thought must grasp itself as living to be intelligible as thought, the only thing that can explain such a “must” is the apperceptive drive to self-correction.

(8) Pippin may miss the significance of the point that life is the “immediate form of the Idea” (that life opens up the possibility of meaningful responsiveness to the world), but Ng is unable to fully entitle herself to her own insight, b/c of her one-sided rejection of Pippin.