Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning appears, at first contact, to be a compact treatise on a familiar question in Hegel studies—the problem of how the system must begin and with what—but its distinctive contribution lies in the way it binds that question to an archeology of dialectic whose strata are not simply “historical influences” but operative sources, double springs from which the Hegelian movement endlessly rises and to which it returns.
The book is the opening volume of a triptych and situates itself explicitly as a reconsideration of Hegel through the two Greek matrices of dialectical thinking—logos and nous—understood as a constitutive tension internal to Hegel’s method rather than as an antiquarian context, and, correspondingly, as the key to the twofold sense of the beginning: the beginning of logic and the beginning of consciousness. This framing is not an extrinsic apparatus; it is Deng’s name for the inner polarity that drives Hegel’s dialectic and eventually gives it historical shape as “Western metaphysics,” so that the question of origin never abates into preface but continues to function as method. The volume is also the inaugural English presentation within Routledge’s China Perspectives series, with translation by Wu Lihuan and Chad Austin Meyers; its editorial paratext shows its double task: to reposition Hegel for international readers through a contemporary Chinese philosophical lens while remaining tightly keyed to Hegel’s own internal necessities.
The book declares its wager in an unnervingly simple thesis that proves progressively less simple the longer one pursues it: Hegel’s dialectic lives from two sources whose names are Greek but whose meanings in Deng’s usage index two structures of intelligibility—one linguistic-rational (logos), one existential-teleological (nous). In Deng’s rendering, these are neither separable channels nor an additive pair but a unity of opposites whose conflict furnishes the work of dialectic and the tonality of its movement. Logos speaks the forms and grammar of thinking; nous presses the life of the concept as purposive activity. To say that Hegel integrates both is still too external; the insistence is that Hegel’s method cannot so much as begin, cannot take up the demand of Anfang, without both a rational, linguistic medium and an existential impulse whose negativity gives the concept its gait. The “problem of beginning,” therefore, is only intelligible as a bifocal problem: logic’s presuppositionless start and consciousness’s empirical itinerary—immediacy and mediacy, the path of truth and the path of doubt, the linguistic lever and the existential lever—belong to a single structure divided against itself, which is the very structure of dialectical genesis.
Deng’s reconstruction of the linguistic origin proceeds by returning to the Greek awareness that the word is not an inert label but an activity in which thought stores, refines, and tests its own determinations. The speculative instinct of language, recovered by Hegel against the scholastic jargon he believed had estranged philosophy from its mother tongue, names that immediate presence of category in speech by which thinking is already disposed to move beyond any merely given content. Hence Hegel’s oft-cited observation that the forms of thought are first housed in language: the categories are neither imported from elsewhere nor applied afterward; language is the medium in which thought first knows itself as universal and thus begins its own work of negation and preservation. Deng reads this not as a trivial philological comment but as a methodological claim: in the Phenomenology language functions as an instrument of sublation, while in the Logic language becomes the very object of refinement—the concept at work on its own material—so that language is no longer means but end, no longer lever but medium already internal to the concept’s identity. The consequence is a crucial asymmetry: in the Phenomenology the linguistic universal relentlessly dissolves the pretensions of sensuous immediacy, whereas in the Logic the concept inhabits purified words whose mutual passage reveals identity-in-difference as the grammar of being.
To stop at logos would, however, leave the dialectic strangely bloodless, as if the concept only glided along surfaces pre-formed by grammar. Deng’s account of the existential origin insists that Hegel inherits another Greek line, obscure in its continuity but decisive in its effects, whose pivotal name is nous. Here it is not the sheer logical articulability of being that predominates, but the principle of self-movement, purposiveness, and teleology—life understood as an immanent cause. From this angle, Anaxagoras’s nous is not an abstract positing of mind but an attempt, halting and inconsistent as it remains, to think an originating activity that does not remain outside what it moves. Deng reads this tradition through a double refraction: on the one hand, older hylozoisms and atomisms never quite elaborate how motion could be internal to the being that moves; on the other hand, the Socratic and Platonic turn relocates the moving cause into the order of the good, making purposiveness the inner law of a living whole rather than the external push of mechanical collision. In this line, nous is the name for the inner deed of mind as world-reason, not of subjective caprice, and it is precisely this interiority of activity, now rendered as negativity, that later informs Hegel’s conception of the concept as active universal.
The strongest pages of Deng’s first part, accordingly, do not merely collect Greek dicta into a genealogy but re-translate them into methodological coordinates for Hegel’s own procedures. The point is not to canonize a Greek ancestry but to locate within that ancestry the two functions without which Hegel’s dialectic cannot perform its double labor: language as the site where universality first does its dissolving work, and purposive activity as the driving negativity that turns a universal from empty identity into a living movement. It is in this sense that Deng both acknowledges and criticizes interpretations that privilege the linguistic source (e.g., Gadamer’s emphasis on the speculative vocation of language) by arguing that the other source—nous as existential teleology—has been under-registered and must be restored if one is to account for the necessity of dialectical transitions beyond the resources of formal inference. The “logical instinct of language” can explain how determinations connect; it cannot, by itself, explain why they must negate themselves and return at a higher level unless one grants that the concept lives from a principle of inner purposiveness.
It is only once this polarity has been secured that Deng’s second part—his re-examination of the beginning of Hegel’s philosophy—can be understood as something more than an exegetical tour of the opening of the Logic and Phenomenology. Hegel’s own question, “what must be taken as the beginning of the sciences?”, is treated not as a procedural preface but as a crucible in which the two origins of dialectic converge. There is, on the one hand, the demand for a presuppositionless beginning: the beginning must be absolute, grounded only in itself, and cannot borrow from any prior science without violating its own claim. There is, on the other hand, the confession that a merely immediate ground is no ground, that any “beginning” posited as a static premise invites regress, and that the only way to rescue the beginning is to understand it as living—as impulse, an inward drive that returns into its own origin. Hegel thus conceives the beginning as causa sui, not because it requires no ground but because its ground lies within it as a process of self-retrieval: progression is a retreat to the ground, which is to say, the very movement that seems to leave the beginning behind is nothing other than the beginning showing itself as what it was always already. Deng makes this duality explicit: the logicist purity of the start and the existential dynamism of a seed coincide in the beginning, and only this coincidence prevents the beginning from collapsing into either dogmatic immediacy or external mediation.
From this standpoint, Deng’s analysis of pure being does not rest content with the familiar claim that being, because utterly indeterminate, passes over into nothing and thence into becoming. He re-situates that opening syllogism as the first place where the linguistic and existential sources intersect: as language, those words—being, nothing—are refined counters whose opposition can only be overcome by a speculative use of words that already exceeds ordinary semantics; as existential act, the passage is not a verbal trick but the concept’s first deed, the negativity by which it voids its own immediacy and so deepens its truth. The “word is the deed” here not by metaphorical license but by conceptual identity: the concept’s speaking is its self-movement, and its self-movement is the living grammar of logic itself. Deng thus internalizes the celebrated transition from being to becoming into his larger thesis: it is an instance of the existential lever working in and through the linguistic medium.
The same doubleness governs Deng’s reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit, except that there the levers are differently distributed. In the Phenomenology language is explicitly the lever over consciousness: the universal—the word—dissolves the claim of sensuous certainty by forcing the “this” of immediacy into the medium of meaning, whose universality is incompatible with the supposed uniqueness of the sensed object. The narrative of shapes of consciousness becomes, in Deng’s account, a long demonstration of language’s inverting power: what appears as immediate shows itself to have been mediated by a universal that consciousness at first disowns, and that disowning becomes the negative engine that propels the whole sequence forward. By contrast, in the Logic language no longer mediates; it is already interior to the concept’s identity, and the lever of movement is existential negativity itself, which drives the concept to negate its own determinate certainty in favor of richer truth. In the one case, the word mediates the “this” into concept; in the other, negativity deepens a concept into its truth by showing its insufficiency. This polarity also explains, for Deng, why the Phenomenology unfolds as a “path of doubt” and the Logic as a “path of truth.”
The “path of doubt,” in Deng’s exposition, is not Cartesian skepticism, which shakes isolated propositions but returns to them unaltered once the mood passes, nor Pyrrhonian suspension that culminates in an empty nothingness. It is rather an immanent pedagogy of spirit wherein each shape of consciousness is allowed to say what it means, only to discover that what it says contradicts what it intends, and this self-contradiction undoes it from within. The “doubt” is the work of the concept inside experience, and because that work is governed teleologically—the identity of concept and object as goal—the very negations count as determinate negations; their truth is already implicit in their failure. This is why Hegel can say that the Phenomenology is the science of the experience of consciousness and that what seems to happen “outside” the substance is its own doing: the path to science is already science in the mode of appearance. Deng’s contribution is to tie that claim explicitly back to the existential origin: what guides the succession of shapes is not external critique but an inner purposiveness that works under the cover of linguistic universality until the purified form of that inner work appears as logic itself.
By parity of argument, the “path of truth” that characterizes the Logic is not a serene exhibition of axioms but the self-verification of one and the same truth as it deepens itself by negating its earlier immediacy. Here again Deng reads Hegel’s encyclopedic architecture non-mystically: if the final category is the Absolute Idea, that culmination does not refute the beginning; it does not add a foreign content; it shows instead that the beginning was already what it later proves itself to be, and the later only clarifies the earlier by exhibiting the inner method by which the beginning unfolds. Hence the end “demonstrates” the beginning, not by external argument, but by showing that progression is the deepening of origin. Deng’s asymmetrical but unbroken line from being to absolute idea thus functions as the path of the concept in which truth verifies itself while richening itself, which is simply another way of saying that the existential lever (negativity) and the linguistic medium (conceptual universality) have reached the point where they coincide without remainder.
Deng’s methodological comparison becomes especially sharp when he sets the Phenomenology and the Logic against each other, not to contrast them as disparate “methods,” but to show that they are opposing halves of a single dialectical method whose unity depends on the very opposition. In the Phenomenology, the standard of judgment is abstract consciousness, presupposed and brought to bear upon the object; in the Logic, that former standard is no longer presupposed but becomes the very object, so that the old opposition between investigator and investigated dissolves into an immediate self-relation. The result is that the Phenomenology must proceed through mediation, while the Logic proceeds as immediate self-determination; the one is analytic, attenuating richly meaningful images to abstract determinations, the other synthetic, leading from abstract definitions to the reproduction of the concrete. In Deng’s hands, this well-known contrast is re-grounded: it is only because logos teaches the concept to speak with precision that the Phenomenology can destroy appearances, and it is only because nous provides the inner deed of negativity that the Logic can move from bare being to the life of the Idea. The “logical is consistent with the historical,” as Hegel says, because the same inner necessity that organizes the concept also drives the history of its empirical education; one cannot understand one path without the other.
A decisive thread in Deng’s argument is his treatment of Marx’s notorious remark that the Phenomenology is the true point of origin and the secret of Hegel’s philosophy. Rather than neutralize the remark into a benign acknowledgment that Hegel’s system exists in embryonic form in the Phenomenology, Deng insists that Marx intends a critique: by beginning the Encyclopedia with logic, Hegel places a veil over the human and historical labor that made the logic possible, and it is precisely the Phenomenology—as the empirical science of consciousness—that keeps in view the lived genesis of the categories. To call it the “true origin” is therefore to unmask the apparent presuppositionlessness of logic and to expose the system’s abstract ideality as the rearticulation of human consciousness dismembered and reassembled categorically. Deng does not adopt Marx’s critique as his own wholesale; he uses it to sharpen the two-beginnings thesis: the presuppositionless beginning of logic is structurally dependent on a history that must be both invoked and “forgotten,” remembered as the path of doubt but negated as the path of truth. This self-forgetting is not a simple error; it is the dialectical way in which origin becomes method.
Such claims, to be persuasive, require Deng to keep his two origins constantly in play at the level of textual detail rather than as macro-slogans. In the analysis of sensuous certainty, for instance, what is determinative is not a sheer appeal to “experience” but language’s universal medium which undoes the immediacy of the “this.” In the analysis of the Logic’s beginning, by contrast, what impels the concept is the negativity by which being empties itself into nothing and returns as becoming; to call that a linguistic operation would be to mistake medium for mover. Deng’s language for this difference—the linguistic lever and the existential lever—risks schematism, but he uses it sparingly to mark moments where the same dialectical structure manifests in different registers and with different engines. From this perspective, the dispute over whether the Phenomenology or the Logic “comes first” loses its polemical urgency: both are first in their own ways, because beginning is twofold by nature, and the two ways are internally coordinated by the same dialectical unity.
In its scholarly apparatus the book is compact, but Deng’s interpretive reach is wide. The chapters on the linguistic origin track the fate of logos from Heraclitus’s pregnant aphorisms (where logos is at once speech and law) through Aristotle’s identifications of form and definition, culminating in Hegel’s explicit declaration that philosophy must learn to speak its own native language—understood not as nationalist philology but as the demand that philosophy retrieve the speculative powers sedimented in ordinary words. Against the flattening of formal logic into rules of inference, language here is the repository of categories, and speculative grammar is exactly the field in which transitions like being–nothing–becoming can become intelligible. Deng neither quotes out of context nor embellishes; his point is that the linguistic medium is what allows Hegel to think identity as a movement of difference without sliding into contradiction as mere error.
The existential origin, in turn, is pursued along a different itinerary in which the Eleatics’ stress on being’s immobility provokes counter-movements touching upon Zeno’s paradoxes (negativity exposed as the inner impossibility of the indivisible unit), Empedocles’ Love and Strife (an anthropomorphic but indispensable early expression of purposive activity), Anaxagoras’s nous (the first declaration of mind as moving cause), and Socrates’ and Plato’s elevation of purposiveness into an explicit teleology of the good. Deng is careful to insist that the ancient materials are deeply mixed—mechanism and teleology interpenetrate and correct one another—and that Hegel’s reading always risks anachronism; yet, for Deng, the salient point remains that Hegel inherits from this long prehistory the thought that activity belongs to the concept itself. Thus when the Logic says that even in God quality bears the determination of the negative, it is not importing an alien voluntarism into logic; it is acknowledging that the concept’s doing is the inner form of its saying.
It would diminish Deng’s contribution, however, to treat his chapters as two compartments of reception history followed by a conventional Hegel commentary. The deeper unity is that his archeology of origins is always already a critique of method. If logos alone were to rule, Hegel’s dialectic would harden into a refined formalism incapable of explaining why any category should pass over into its other except by arbitrary stipulation. If nous alone were to rule, the dialectic would dissolve into an opaque vitalism, a mystique of creative deed lacking any intelligible articulation. The dialectic works only by the friction of both: the word negates immediacy by universalizing it; the deed negates immediacy by inner purposiveness; and the concept is the identity of the two, a linguistic deed whose intelligibility is its activity and whose activity is its intelligibility. Deng’s re-reading of Hegel’s beginning thus becomes a renewed proposal for how to read Hegel at all: not as logic without history, nor history without logic, but as the coincidence of linguistic rationality and existential negativity in a single path that can only be walked twice, once empirically (as doubt), once purely (as truth).
This re-orientation has concrete exegetical payoffs. It explains why Hegel can simultaneously demand a beginning that is absolute—neither mediated nor grounded by anything prior—and yet describe the entire method as a return to origin. The contradiction is only apparent if one treats “ground” externally; once ground is internal to the beginning as its own impulse, progression is neither a betrayal of origin nor an arbitrary excursus but the beginning’s immanent self-elaboration. It also clarifies why the Phenomenology must end where the Logic begins and why Hegel both presupposes and “forgets” the Phenomenology: the presupposition is the history of consciousness that educates the standard of judgment; the forgetting is the purification whereby that standard no longer stands over against the object but becomes the object’s own law. Deng is acute in showing how Hegel can both declare that logic has for its presupposition the science of spirit in its appearance and simultaneously insist that, at the new beginning, one must begin “as if all that had preceded were lost.” The “as if” does the work: the loss is methodological, not historical; the blood of history continues to circulate, but the body has changed form.
Finally, there is the question of Deng’s place within contemporary Hegel scholarship and why this book matters beyond its admirable clarity. Part of the answer lies in geography and language: by making available a sustained Chinese engagement with Hegel’s method—one that is neither derivative repetition nor purely polemical inversion—the volume widens the practical horizon within which Hegel can be read. Another part lies in its refusal to reduce Hegel either to a secure logicism or to an edifying historicism; Deng does not aim to reconcile Hegel with any currently fashionable theory so much as to insist on the inner tension that makes Hegel’s work still instructive for philosophy’s self-understanding. In an era when formal systems tempt us with promises of rigor while existential urgencies claim immediacy, Deng’s reading presses a harder lesson: rigor remains empty without the life that negates it; immediacy remains blind without the word that articulates it. Hegel’s beginning is the place where that lesson must be learned again.
If one were to compress the book’s achievement to a single problematic sentence, it might be this: Deng shows that origin in Hegel is not the mythic moment before method but the continuing duplicity that method must both expose and inhabit, and he does so by giving logos back its living depth and nous back its intelligible form. Read this way, the familiar oppositions—immediacy/mediation, doubt/truth, language/activity—are not philosophical options one chooses among; they are constitutive poles whose unresolved unity is the only medium in which Hegel’s dialectic can do its work. To emphasize one at the expense of the other is less an error than a symptom of the dialectic’s own temptations. Deng’s book, by treating origins as present necessities and beginnings as living grounds, exemplifies the very method it expounds: it is a description that moves because it is itself dialectical, a discourse that never ceases to return to its own start.
For readers of Hegel and of the after-Hegelian traditions—Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism—the payoff of Deng’s re-interpretation is definite. The dialectic becomes again what it was meant to be: not a tissue of puzzles and transitions to be memorized, nor a merely negative critique of what is, but the intelligible life of concepts whose history is their method. That intelligible life, Deng argues, is powered by a pair of Greek engines running on the same shaft: the word that universalizes and the deed that negates. The book is valuable because it makes those engines visible not as museum pieces but as working parts of Hegel’s own machine; and in so doing, it makes the machine available again—not only for reading Hegel but for thinking with him.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment