Thought and context

Summarizing “logic and spirit” in Hegel, Rowan Williams describes the pressure toward relationality that is inherent in any act of thought: “We think in relation to particulars; but we cannot, quite strictly cannot, think particulars simply as particulars, because we can’t concretely think a pure self-identity.  To think a particular is to think ‘this, not that; here, not there; now, not then’: to map it on a conceptual surface by way of exclusions or negations, yet in that act to affirm also its relatedness, its involvement; from empty identity, thinkable only as a kind of absence and indeterminacy, to the specific position, this not that, and by way of that ‘contradictory’ state to arrive at thinking the ‘individual’ as convergence of the universal and the particular.  Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”