Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics II: Negation and Reflection presents itself as a treatise on the inner motor and the expressive articulation of Hegel’s system: negativity as the soul of movement and reflection as the form that renders that movement intelligible to itself. In this second volume of a projected triptych, Deng takes as basic the thesis that Hegel’s dialectics does not move because logic externally compels it to move, nor because ontology supplies a pre-logical content for logic to dress, but because negativity is the intrinsic, existential pulse of what there is—and reflection is the logical visibility of that pulse, the way in which negativity becomes a law-governed, self-consistent process of thought. In Deng’s presentation the two are asymmetrically paired: negation is the soul (the spirit of nous), and reflection is the form (the spirit of logos). The pairing is not decorative. It is methodological. It says, on the one hand, that Hegel’s dialectical subject only becomes subject by negating itself and, on the other hand, that “reflecting on reflection” is the only way the dialectic can be not only alive but also lawful, rational, and complete without being closed. The volume’s architecture already inscribes this thesis, with a Part I on negation (“the soul of the Hegelian dialectic”) and a Part II on reflection (“the form of the Hegelian dialectic”), thereby aligning content and method in a single arc.
Deng opens by confronting a powerful contemporary diagnosis: Dieter Henrich’s claim that Hegel’s Logic equivocates among heterogeneous senses of negation and, by sliding between logical and ontological registers, illegitimately constructs a “complete system.” Deng accepts Henrich’s starting point—that Hegel’s dialectic is inseparable from negativity—but rejects the conclusion, arguing that Henrich’s division of negation into a “substantivized” logical form and an ontological relation of exclusion presupposes precisely the separation of logic and ontology that Hegel criticized as the standpoint of the understanding. Deng’s counter-move is to relocate the unity of the logical and the ontological in negativity itself: the subjective statement of negation is an articulation of an objective, immanent power to act, an “inner soul of self-movement” inhabiting the object. Hence there is no equivocation to be “cleaned up” by distributing senses; rather, one must learn to see the sameness of negativity across strata—how the logical negativity of concept and the ontological negativity of process are internally continuous.
From that vantage point Deng isolates the basic stakes in the concept of the negative. If one starts from empirical opposition—light against darkness, for example—one will only ever retrieve negation as the mere absence of the opposed quality, a view Hegel treats as illustrative but not primary. What the example is meant to teach is not a picture of sensible contraries but the logical principle that makes any opposition possible: the immediate identity of being and non-being, that is, affirmation that is in itself negation and negation that is in itself affirmation. Deng seizes on Hegel’s recourse to Spinoza at exactly this juncture: omnis determinatio est negatio is not the banality that any positive trait implies the lack of its opposite, but the deeper thesis that determination itself is a negation—first, of indeterminacy, and eventually of negation as such. It is only from there that the form “the negation of negation is affirmation” acquires its proper generality: the dialectical law is not an empirical induction from contraries but the logical structure by which determinate being is possible at all.
The step is decisive because it disentangles Hegel’s negativity from a naïve dualism of opposed contents. In Deng’s reading, negation is not the external exclusion of one thing by another; it is the thing’s own movement beyond itself. The negative is self-relation as self-difference. If there were only exclusion, then negation would remain outside its object; it would never be reflexive; it would not return to itself as principle. But Hegel’s negativity is intrinsically reflexive. It turns on itself as on its other. This is why, Deng insists, self-negation and negation of negation are, in their essence, the same movement seen from different angles: the first names immediacy’s internal unrest, the second names the return in which this unrest becomes determinacy, subjectivity, and freedom. To call the latter “double negation” is misleading if one imagines two numerically distinct operations. It is one continuous act, which first estranges the identity of the positive and then posits that estrangement as the identity of the negative with itself. In that turn, negativity converts from abstract to absolute.
Negation in this absolute sense is a “turning point.” The phrase matters. If one remained with abstract negation, skepticism would be the unsurpassable horizon: everything given collapses into “shine,” and the only stability is the act of doubting itself. But as Deng reconstructs Hegel’s Logic, skepticism’s act is already more than an annihilation; it is an infinite movement that—by negating its immediacy and thereby positing its own act—becomes “posited being” and so can be tracked into its own determination. That is, in place of a formless negation, one finds a reflexive pattern of negation that both preserves and transforms, a process capable of carrying forward content under a new determination—as Hegel would later say, a process of sublating. The key is that this movement cannot stay “external.” It must pass through reflection, where its own form becomes the theme of its activity.
Hence the pivot from negation to reflection in Deng’s book is not a switch of topics but a deepening. Reflection is negation taking form. Deng follows Hegel’s famous triad of reflective modes—positing reflection, external (or presupposing) reflection, determining reflection—to show how negativity learns to bind itself. In positing reflection, the act of negating is made infinite, and so acquires a kind of positive being; yet it remains a mere act, without a determinate subject beyond the flicker of “I think.” Cartesian doubt is exemplary: it posits the “I” as substance, but only as the standing of the act; the act remains the essence. Deng parses Hegel’s reason for relocating the “purest” form of external reflection not in Descartes but in Kant: with the transcendental ego, reflection for the first time has a ground that is not empirical, and so can determine an other according to laws it gives itself—yet the determinacy still takes the form of presupposition, for the split between universal and particular persists as a fixed opposition. The process becomes fully “determining” only when reflection ceases to use an other as if it were given and instead recognizes that its object is its own negation-of-negation: the universal as the essence of the immediate and the immediate as the appearance of the universal.
Deng’s handling of this sequence is not a scholastic rehearsal of Hegel’s text but an interpretive wager: reflection is a name for negativity’s self-binding; the forms of reflection are the moments by which negativity becomes subject. Positing reflection corresponds to the still-formal autonomy of negation; external reflection corresponds to a still-external relation of law to content; determining reflection is the decisive step whereby the negative returns to itself in and as its other and thereby achieves the status of essence. The blind spots of skepticism and of a merely transcendental idealism are, in Deng’s construction, the very signs that the dialectic has not yet achieved itself as reflection.
This alignment of negation and reflection also frames Deng’s comparative undertaking. He argues that the story of nothingness in classical Chinese philosophies—Laozi, Zhuangzi, later xuanxue, and strands of Buddhist thought—indicates a speculative recognition of “nothing” as the most abstract category, even as, paradoxically, this very abstraction rendered it inert: a quiescent background rather than a principle of movement. “Nothing” (wu) is serenity; being is the transient film that bubbles up on its surface. In that picture, becoming is a superficial agitation, with rest as the truth to which things return. The conceptual acuity of sentences like “nothing as such is nothing”—which Deng singles out in Zhuangzi as approaching the pure concept—remains without self-movement because reflection never turns the negative into a principle. Chinese thought, on this account, discovers the abstractness of nothing but tends to interpret it as a state rather than as an act—an ontological quiescence rather than the self-transcending impulse of the thing. The contrast with the Western lineage, for Deng, is exact to this point: in Aristotle’s actuality as energeia there is already negation as the active determination of matter, in Böhme’s “Qual” there is negativity as inner torment; and in Hegel the negative finally takes center stage as the “absolute” moment of concept and world. What distinguishes Hegel, in other words, is not only that the negative moves, but that it moves itself.
Deng thus reads Hegel’s celebrated doctrine of determinate negation as a rigorous answer to two temptations: to reduce “nothing” to mere lack and to elevate “nothing” into a static absolute. Against the first, he stresses the logical universality of the form “the negative of the negative is positive,” which cannot be derived from empirical oppositions but grounds them. Against the second, he insists that the only “ultimate” consistent with Hegel’s method is the self-return of negation in reflection, that is, the movement in which negativity takes on form and thereby resolves the charge that speculative philosophy treats nothingness as an ultimate. The ultimate in Hegel is the concrete: immediacy that has passed through mediation and returns as concept. As Deng glosses Hegel, negation as such is “formless abstraction”; it demands the form that only reflection supplies, which itself is not an external addition but the immanent law of negation’s self-relation.
It follows that the dialectical “result” cannot be a rest. The result is the singular that is just as much immediacy as mediation, the subject whose unity is the very movement that produced it. Deng repeatedly underscores the point: if negation remains external—if it only negates others, if it only doubts what is given—it never rises to principle. If, conversely, the negation of negation is recognized as the principle that runs through every stage, then the dialectic no longer requires external “transitions”; its own negativity is the ground. Reflection, in turning negation back into immediacy, “posits” the affirmative not by arbitrarily declaring but by unfolding the negative into its law. The outcome is a conception of freedom as negativity’s highest form: not the arbitrariness of indifference but the self-articulation of a subject that, by negating its own immediacy, gives itself its law.
In that light Deng’s treatment of Henrich acquires a broader resonance. If one assumes a fixed opposition between ontological relations and logical forms, then Hegel’s conversions will always appear arbitrary. But if negation is the “thread” that renders the underlying substance one, then the logical analysis of negation is already an ontology; and the ontological experience of contradiction is already a logic. Deng does not deny that Hegel’s texts pass between these aspects; he denies that the passage is illicit. The movement of “force and its expression,” the reduction of external relations to inner self-difference, the conversion of thingly opposition into the process of self-negativity—these are not smuggled equations but the very object of Hegel’s demonstration, which modern physics’ non-classical intuitions (Deng briefly nods to Heisenberg) only make more intelligible to a contemporary reader.
Deng’s insistence on the existential character of negation also gives the book its distinctive tone. The negative is not a pale logical operator; it is the life of the concept. There is an existential impulse that Western thought, at its most incisive, never suppressed: the idea that movement is internal, that boundaries are broken from within. Deng’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s energeia and Böhme’s Qual is not antiquarian; it is designed to emphasize that, for Hegel, the unity of being and non-being is not a truth to be stated but a life to be lived by the concept as it breaks with itself, recovers itself, and gives itself form through reflection. The dialectic is therefore not a sequence of contraries to be inventoried; it is the subjectivity of reason as freedom.
In Part II Deng makes the same point in outright logical terms. He interrogates the Kantian notion of reflective judgment to show its indispensability and its limit. Reflection in Kant is the movement of judgment as a subjective power; “transcendental reflection” tells us which faculty a representation belongs to, which standpoint judgment occupies. Yet this presupposed reflection is, by Hegel’s lights, still external: it carries its distinctions into the object, and so never draws the object’s own reflection into view. Deng emphasizes that Hegel does not simply discard Kant’s discovery; he intensifies it. The very idea of an “inner teleology” in Kant—that the universal be the essence of the particular—already prefigures absolute reflection. But it remains a prefiguration so long as the universal is conceived as merely subjective. The breakthrough arrives with determining reflection: the universal is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which reflection started, and what reflection “does” to the immediate is not an imposition but the disclosure of its truth. With that step, negation and reflection are not only coordinated; they are identical as method.
The systematic consequence of this identity is, in Deng’s account, a resolutely non-foundational picture of Hegel’s science. There is no “first principle” that the dialectic then applies. The beginning as pure being is itself the most fragile immediacy whose truth is to become nothing and so to pass into becoming; but the lesson of the Doctrine of Being is not simply that such beginnings are unstable. It is that reflection is the very instability of beginnings as they convert into essence and concept. Deng’s verdict is that readers err whenever they look for an ultimate other than this movement itself. If the “ultimate” is sought in an abstract negation, the dialectic is empty; if it is sought in an abstract positivity, the dialectic congeals. The only ultimate consistent with Hegel’s own claim that truth is the whole is the negativity that, by reflecting on itself, binds itself as law.
Deng’s cross-cultural interlude returns here as more than comparison; it is diagnostic. The Chinese identification of nothingness as the most abstract category correctly surmises the precedence of “nothing” over “being” in the order of thought; but because this “nothing” remains a state rather than an act, the dialectic that would convert it into movement is stilled. Meanwhile, the Western insistence on being gives the dialectic movement, but risks depriving it of abstraction unless negativity is made principle. Deng’s point is not to fuse these heritages eclectically; it is to show how Hegel’s negativity and reflection together surpass their respective limitations: abstraction without movement and movement without abstraction. Only where nothingness is taken as self-negating action does reflection become the concept’s own life. Only where reflection is absolute does the movement cease to rely on subjective imposition.
It is in this sense that Deng reads the famous Hegelian maxim about determinate negation as an answer to both an ancient problem (how can there be motion?) and a modern one (how can there be normativity without an external given?). Negation, pursued to its end, is not the cancelation of content but the production of a new determination that preserves what it overcomes. In Deng’s interpretation, this is not a “moral” of the Logic but its method: each concept passes over into its contrary because it is already, in its truth, self-difference; and each result is richer than its beginning because the negative has returned to itself as form. The dialectic is thus an ever-densifying continuity in which the universal elevates the mass of its previous content without loss, and reflection is the procedure by which this elevation is rendered transparent. To criticize Hegel for “changing the subject” when he crosses from logic to ontology is, on this view, to miss the point: the subject is the change.
Deng’s book is exacting about the cognitive posture this method demands. It refuses both perspectival sophistry (which plays “contradiction” against itself by multiplying standpoints) and unreflective empiricism (which asks logic to follow facts). The name Hegel gives to the first is “fixed opposition” among the determinations of reflection; to the second, he gives the critique that empirical examples at most provoke the ascent to the logical. The logical movement is not deduced from sense; it is sensed in the inadequacy of sense to its own forms. Hence Deng’s examples—light and darkness, for instance—are exemplary only when they teach, not when they are multiplied. The lesson is the same in each case: the negative is the concept’s life, and reflection is how that life binds itself.
Negation and Reflection achieves something rarer than a faithful commentary and more rigorous than a comparative survey. It re-centers Hegel’s system on the very thing that keeps it from becoming a system in the pejorative sense: negativity as the inner principle that prevents closure by constituting every closure as an act of return. And it does so by showing that reflection is not the dialectic’s adornment but its truth: the method by which negativity is made intelligible as law without losing its character as life. In Deng’s treatment, the critique of Henrich gains force because it becomes a critique of the habit of separating logic from ontology; the survey of Chinese nothingness gains weight because it becomes a test of whether abstraction has learned to move. The payoff is a conception of freedom that is neither arbitrary nor heteronomous: freedom as the negation of negation, as the subject that, reflecting on its own negativity, gives itself its world and thereby gives the world its intelligibility.
If this reading is correct, then Deng has succeeded in articulating why Hegel still matters for any inquiry that seeks a method adequate to its objects. Dialectics, on this account, is not a set of rules to be applied, nor a history of positions to be mastered, but the living form of thinking that recognizes its own negativity and reflects it into law. In the first movement, the concept shows itself to be more than its immediacy; in the second, it shows that its becoming is lawful. Only from this dual insight can one understand how the dialectic is, at once, a logic and an ontology—how its inner law is the world’s form and how the world’s form is the inner law of thought.
All the while, Deng maintains fidelity to the architecture of Hegel’s text without allowing architecture to substitute for argument. The chapters on negation bring to clarity the distinction between abstract and absolute negativity; the chapters on reflection, in their analysis of positing, external, and determining reflection, display the transitions by which the negative becomes essence and the essence becomes concept. The result is a sustained meditation on Hegel’s claim that truth is the whole understood as the result—where “result” no longer means a terminal state but the subject’s return to itself through its own movement. In making that claim intelligible, Deng offers not only an interpretation of Hegel but a demonstration of how dialectical philosophy, in the strict sense, thinks.
If one wished to compress the contribution of this volume into a single sentence, one might venture the following: negation, as Hegel understands it, is an existential impulse that makes thought and being one by moving both from within, and reflection is the method by which that impulse becomes intelligible as law without ceasing to be life. Deng shows this not by assertion but by reenacting the movement—by letting negation show itself as soul and reflection as form, and by letting each moment expose the other as its truth. In doing so, his exploration does not simply comment on Hegel’s dialectic; it performs it.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment