Points of Contact in Deacon’s and Hegel’s Theories of Emergent Dynamics

This essay works to juxtapose elements of Terrence Deacon’s theory of emergence from Incomplete Nature with G. W. F. Hegel’s description of what might be understood as emergent teleodynamics in his examination of modality in the Science of Logic. Although Deacon’s link to Immanuel Kant’s conception of organisms in the third Critique has been profitably explored by Adrian Johnston, “Hegel’s name is entirely absent in the pages of Incomplete Nature.” In an attempt to fill in this lacuna, I work to sketch out what I perceive as the main point of contact between these two thinkers using a retrospective study of how Hegel presupposes specific elements of Deacon’s notion of ‘absentials’, a term of art that denotes what is essentially absent in something present. With specific focus on Hegel’s treatment of the modality of actuality, it is shown how he also puts forward an account of the power of absence in the emergence of the real insofar as his study of modality imagines not only the constitution of realized possibilities, but also their unrealized counterparts.