On Hegel's Logic

"I’ve included my next two choices not necessarily because I agree with them, but because of their importance, both generally and for me in particular. I’m not allowed to choose one of my own books for this interview, but my Opening of Hegel’s Logic is the one I recommend most as a guide to the Logic and I could not have written it without Burbidge’s important work. So I want people to read Burbidge as well. His book was one of the first in English to make the arguments in Hegel’s Logic really clear. It adopts a distinctive approach: what Burbidge emphasises is that the Logic is a study of what happens when we think. The Logic , for him, is not so much a study of categories in their own right, but it is a study of what is involved in understanding something and of the dialectical tensions we get caught up in in the activity of understanding. Due to this emphasis on the process of thinking, some people have accused Burbidge of being too psychologistic in his reading of the Logic , and I share that concern. But what is great about Burbidge’s book is its attention to detail, its clarity and accessibility, and its sensitivity to the nuances of Hegel’s argument. Burbidge explains (and embraces) the dialectical changes that occur, and he acknowledges that there isn’t just a single uniform method to Hegelian logic. In this way, he opened up the Logic to an English-speaking audience and showed it to be a work of serious, rigorous philosophy rather than obscure, impenetrable metaphysics. So, without picking my own book, this would always be the first one I would recommend. Burbidge bases a lot of his account on Hegel’s distinction between three forms of thinking: understanding, dialectic, and speculative thinking. He conceives of this distinction in the following way: understanding takes a concept and tries to clarify it, but in the clarifying of it the dialectic, as it were, takes over and moves understanding in a direction it doesn’t want to go in. Understanding wants to get a clear and distinct conception of a certain idea – for example, being – but dialectic takes over and turns that idea into its opposite – nothing. Speculative thinking then unifies those two thoughts into one, and so we get a new concept: becoming. And so it goes on. The process is aiming at clarity and so, against what Popper and Schopenhauer contend, Hegel, as Burbidge reads him, is not trying to be obscure. He is trying to think through what it means to get clear about a concept. And he shows that if you really understand what it is to get clear about a concept, you realise that you get involved in certain dialectical complexities that take you in directions you didn’t want to go in. And new categories emerge from that. So, in trying to get clear about categories, you are necessarily taken on to other categories. “ He opened up the Logic to an English-speaking audience and showed it to be a work of serious, rigorous philosophy rather than obscure, impenetrable metaphysics. ” I am mildly critical of Burbidge’s book because I think the Logic is not so much about what happens when we understand, but that it’s dealing more with categories and concepts in their own right. So I don’t think that, when you’ve worked your way through Hegel’s Logic , you will necessarily stay with Burbidge’s interpretation; but I certainly couldn’t have got to where I am now without what he’s done. His little book The Logic of Hegel’s ‘Logic’ is another gem. It’s really good and helpful, even though I disagree with parts of it. I’m writing another book on the Logic now and I go back to Burbidge and engage with his work regularly. I owe him a tremendous debt."