Science of Logic

"It’s going to sound hyperbolical, but my short answer is that I think it’s the greatest work of philosophy ever written by anybody anywhere. And I’ve worked on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes; I teach Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant – who I think is also one of the greats; and I have studied Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and others. These are all well worth studying, but Hegel’s Logic is quite stunningly insightful and profound, and in my view hugely important. The more expansive answer to your question is as follows. Let’s assume that Kant’s point is broadly right: that we don’t come unmediated to the world, but that our knowledge of the world is structured by certain categories. Hegel accepts that. In that sense, Hegel is a Kantian. These categories include causality, substance, quantity – the very idea of number, etc. And Hegel would say that even a bare thought such as ‘something’ is such a category. The fish in my fish tank at home don’t think in terms of ‘something’, or ‘if I do this, this will cause that’. They have various experiences but they don’t articulate them in that way. But we do articulate them in that way. Hegel thinks that these categories provide a ‘diamond network’ that suffuses everyday experience. These categories don’t just inform philosophical experience, they inform everybody’s experience. They are part of what it is to be human. They are Hegel’s and Kant’s version of a linguist’s idea of grammatical rules: they structure the way we think. Kant thinks that these categories are fixed; they have always been like that and have never changed. Hegel thinks that they haven’t been fixed, but they have developed. Part of philosophy’s task is to try and understand that development, and he thinks we have now come to the point at which we can finally understand their proper nature. This matters because if we don’t understand their proper nature, then we can actually be misled by the categories that structure our experience. In this case, we wouldn’t be committing empirical errors, but rather errors at the level of the categories we employ. “ The Logic is Hegel’s attempt to understand anew all the basic concepts of thought. They include very simple ones like ‘being’, ‘becoming’, ‘something’, ‘other’, but then also the concept of ‘being finite’. ” Let’s think about an idea like ‘something’. There’s something on the table now: your phone. Hegel’s claim is that if we didn’t have the idea of there being ‘something’ at all, then all you would experience would be unstructured perceptions. You need to have the very thought ‘something’ to think of what you see as a unified entity. Furthermore, Hegel thinks that being ‘something’ is a little more complicated than we normally take it to be. We usually think that things – whatever we take to be ‘something’ – are independent of other things and are simply what they are. But Hegel argues in the Logic that to be something is to be inextricably bound up with what’s other than it. So ‘being other than’ is part of being ‘something’. Indeed, it’s even more complicated than that: for being exposed to influence by what is other than you is also part of being something. Imagine that we now move up a gear and think about people rather than mere things. Let’s say we take the ordinary conception of ‘something’ and think of people as ‘somethings’. In Hegel’s view, this will build a structural individualism into our thought of people, and I think Hegel would claim that modernity is governed by such individualism in many ways. Many of the debates we’re having about identity at the moment amount to asserting ‘I am who I am, don’t challenge me. I am this individual. You have nothing to say to me’. That, one might argue, is the result of thinking of people in terms of the ordinary conception of ‘something’ (and of ‘identity’). But now let’s take Hegel’s conception of something. What would human life look like if this is the way to think of people? The Hegelian would say that being something has ‘being other than’ built into it and has interaction built into it. And so, in fact, we can’t just be who we are by ourselves. We are who we are in and through interactions with others. Those interactions will be personal, social, political and so on, and, Hegel argues, they will involve recognition. So, for Hegel, who I am is partly constituted by what others take me to be. I may not like this, but that’s tough, because it is made necessary by what it is to be ‘something’ at all, by the inherently relational character of every something. If this is the case, we of course have to make sure that we recognise one another in such a way that we do justice to one another. But we can’t think that we can live in a world in which what someone thinks about me makes no difference to me. It makes a lot of difference. For instance, I am defined as a university teacher. I couldn’t be that outside of university and I couldn’t be that without my students. My wife and I can’t be parents without having children, etc. So here we have an example of the way in which a simple concept like ‘something’ can affect the way we understand the world. If it is taken one way, things become isolated from another, but if you take it as Hegel thinks, then things are interrelated and integrated. “ So, for Hegel, who I am is partly constituted by what others take me to be. I may not like this, but that’s tough, because it is made necessary by what it is to be ‘something’ at all. ” The Logic is Hegel’s attempt to understand anew all the basic concepts of thought. They include very simple ones like ‘being’, ‘becoming’, ‘something’, ‘other’, but then also the concept of ‘being finite’. What does it mean to be finite? Well, it means to end. Is that the same as being limited? For some philosophers like Spinoza, being limited is just the same as being finite. But not for Hegel. For him, there’s a subtle distinction between the two: you are limited by something else, but you end through your own being. This is not to deny that other things can bring us to our end, but Hegel’s point is that, even without the action of other things, we will come to an end simply through being what we are. This, of course, has tragic implications, for it means that we bring ourselves to our own end whether we like it or not. Hegel also has a distinctive conception of infinity, which he understands to be immanent in the sphere of the finite itself, rather than a transcendent ‘beyond’. Hegel then goes on to consider ‘quantity’, ‘essence’ and other concepts. So it’s an extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging study of the basic categories of thought. Yet the Logic actually does two things, since it studies the basic categories of thought and the basic forms of being at the same time. This is because, in Hegel’s view, the two coincide. So, first, the Logic does again in a new form what Kant tried to do in the first Critique in his so called ‘metaphysical deduction’, namely it aims to discover the basic categories of thought. Kant seeks to derive the basic categories from the logical forms of judgement, but Hegel thinks that this is not good enough, that it is too question-begging. Why assume that thought is essentially judging? And why assume, as Kant does, that thought is discursive and has to unify intuitions? Hegel thinks that there is ultimately no satisfactory answer to these questions in Kant, but that Kant simply takes a certain conception of thought for granted – dogmatically. Hegel’s project, therefore, is to try to derive all the categories, and to understand them properly, without assuming in advance that we know what they are or what thought is. That’s crucial. Second, the task of the Logic is to think and understand pure being – the pure being with which absolute knowledge is left at the end of the Phenomenology . Since the Logic aims to discover the basic forms of being, as well as the basic categories of thought, it is a metaphysics as well as a logic. So you can say that Hegel is not only redoing Kant’s derivation of the categories, but also doing anew what Spinoza did, namely understand what there is . Spinoza, of course, begins with substance and then considers the relation between substance, attributes and modes. Hegel, however, thinks that this is to assume too much at the start of metaphysics and that all we are entitled to begin with is pure, indeterminate being. In the course of the Logic Hegel then shows that a host of other categories – that are both forms of being and forms of thought – can be derived from pure being, including the concepts of quantity, measure, essence, identity, difference, substance and causality. These categories are thus not just assumed by Hegel to belong to thought, but they are proven to do so by being derived from thought itself – from the thought of simple, indeterminate being. This new derivation of the categories also reveals the proper way to understand them. Hegel’s Logic is exhilarating to study and extraordinarily rich. It is abstract, there’s no doubt about that, and there are few examples. But the work is important even if you don’t end up being a Hegelian because of the fine and significant distinctions that Hegel thinks that thought and being make necessary. One of the best compliments paid to Hegel was from a student I taught twenty-five years ago in America. He said ‘ that I’ve never been exposed to more significant philosophical distinctions by any other philosopher I’ve studied’ . He’s not a Hegelian but that’s what he said. And I think that’s exactly right. They are not scholastic distinctions that you might think are meaningless. They are meaningful and significant. “ The ethical, social and political implications of this idea are enormous. These are the things that the Logic is full of: abstract ideas with dramatic implications for human life. ” I’m not going to review everything in the Logic but there are certain ideas that people who are not philosophers will find really interesting. I’ve already talked about interrelatedness. That is crucial. This is the fact that to be something at all is to be interrelated with a variety of different things. Secondly, there is the idea of an immanent dialectic to which we are subject. The idea of finitude expresses that really well: that we are born to die, not necessarily at the hands of somebody else but through our own being. Thirdly, Hegel is very interesting on the phenomenon of exclusion. In the course of the Logic there emerge various different kinds of difference. There is the immediate difference between being and nothingness; and there’s determinate difference which is when you say ‘this, not that’, ‘cold, not hot’. That is determinate oppositional difference. But then there is separateness – apartness – where things aren’t set at odds with one another but are just separate, like something and other. Then there is another kind of difference which is exclusion. Hegel examines this particularly in the logic of essence, where he argues that certain terms, such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, include one another within them as excluded. The positive has within itself the moment of not-being-negative, and the negative is the non-positive. Each, therefore, is included in the other, but as excluded by it. This idea by itself is rather abstract, but if we think of human identity in this way, the idea is very illuminating: for we see that if I define myself through exclusion – as not this, not that and so on – I build into my identity that which I exclude in order to be who I am, and so I bind myself to the very thing I seek to exclude. The ethical, social and political implications of this idea are enormous. These are the things that the Logic is full of: abstract ideas with dramatic implications for human life. Hegel’s logic is a discipline in its own right, but it also prepares the ground for an understanding of nature and spirit in the rest of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s Phenomenology gets you to the standpoint of philosophy, but Hegel sees philosophy itself as having three parts: (1) logic; (2) philosophy of nature; and (3) philosophy of spirit. Logic is an account of the basic categories that structure our experience and of the corresponding forms of being. But then we go to the philosophy of nature which, using these categories, examines what it is to be space, time, matter, and light, as well as physical, chemical and organic matter. And then we go on to the philosophy of spirit. This has three parts. The first part deals with ‘subjective spirit’ which includes the self in what Hegel calls its ‘anthropological’ dimension (that is, its sensations, feelings and habits), then consciousness, and then what he calls ‘intelligence’ (which includes imagination, language, memory, as well as drive and free will). Then you have the philosophy of ‘objective spirit’ which sets out how human freedom objectifies itself in the world, as right, action, family life, the economy, the state, and history. Then finally there is the philosophy of ‘absolute spirit’, which deals with art, religion and philosophy itself. Each stage of Hegel’s philosophy has its own immanent logic which is clearly derived from the Logic but is not just an application of the categories discovered in the latter. There is, therefore, a distinctive logic of nature, a distinctive logic of freedom, a distinctive logic of art and so on. But they are clearly derived from what he’s talking about in the Logic . So, yes, Hegel’s logic is preparatory as well as a discipline in its own right. Exactly, that’s right. It’s not that Hegel is working in a complete vacuum. Like Descartes, Hegel recognises the context in which he’s working but he wants to put that to the side and begin again from scratch. But it’s only from within a certain context that you can do that. This is a context that requires freedom of thought and demands that you don’t simply take things for granted on authority. That means you’ve got to set aside all your presuppositions. So freedom requires being ‘presuppositionless’, which is Hegel’s own word. The Logic thus begins from pure indeterminate, unspecified being. It then moves through ‘becoming’ to ‘determinacy’ which leads on to ‘something’ which generates ‘finitude’ and so on. Later in the Logic familiar principles and forms of judgement and inference are then also derived. Such principles and forms are thus not just taken for granted but are proven to belong to thought (and indeed to being). They are, however, also shown to be more dialectical than ordinary thought has recognized. Well, Kierkegaard writes about the Logic in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript . He knows that Hegel claims to provide a presuppositionless derivation of concepts and he argues explicitly that such a derivation is impossible. Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation on the Greek atomists draws heavily on Hegel’s logic of ‘being for self’ and the ‘one and the many’. Lenin read the Logic and made notes all the way through it. Heidegger and Gadamer also read parts of the Logic . So it was never completely neglected, but there’s no doubt that the great French writers of the 20th century like Sartre and Kojève who were interested in Hegel worked more on the Phenomenology . The other part of Hegel’s philosophy that eclipsed the Logic was the Philosophy of Right . So, yes, the Logic was neglected but it was never completely forgotten."