Hegel claimed that there was nothing anywhere that was only immediate or was simply given as a basis for something else. (Hegel 1969, 68 and 829) Everything attains its identity through its mediations, which are not the same as its relations. Relations are with other established things, mediations are in processes of establishment. Mediated wholes are more than assemblages of relations and they have their own becoming. Hegel called this process dialectic.
Hegel's unruly descendents and opponents fight against his wholes and his dialectics, but they do not return to immediacy. My descriptions borrow from but are unfaithful to him by not affirming the purity of the self-grasp of the logical patterns of the motion.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001