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| First English translation of Hegel's Science of Logic (1929). |
Introduction (Stephen Cowley)
In these final paragraphs of the book on the Absolute Idea, we are offered a general “orientation in thinking” that can accommodate come-what-may as content. The unitary standpoint from which we began and the capacity to incorporate content generate the idea of philosophical system. The Logic in its full development thus serves as a repository of concepts that apply to experience. These include the concept of personhood – a form which includes its own negation within its own positive unity. This leads to the famous paragraph justifying the movement to the philosophy of nature.
The Logic, as a “realm of shadows”, can be seen as a mere reflection of the concrete sciences of Nature and Mind. Hegel however, expounds the necessities present in the concrete sciences as an autonomous object of study. Hegel’s critic Rudolf Haym saw in the final transition a confession that the Logic is not the whole of philosophy, but requires to be supplemented by separate philosophies of nature and mind. Haym wrote:
“It is precisely this that puts an end to the duplicity of this whole philosophy relative to reality. If it wishes to persist in what recurs as the refrain of the Logic, namely that the concept is not simply true reality, but all reality, then logic must be the whole of philosophy and then the system must conclude with it.” (367)
Hegel’s Idea however, becomes “creator of nature”, it “releases itself freely outside itself” and “resolves to determine itself as outward idea”. Haym comments:
“It remains that these expressions through which the Idea personifies itself are visibly in contradiction with the whole character of the Logic. […] The true state of the question is that absolute knowledge in the Logic is exclusively occupied with abstract determinations, that the absolute Idea according to Hegels expression, is “enclosed in pure thoughts”, that the Logic is “the science of the divine concept alone” and that, to reach reality, we must proceed to a completely new start.” (368-69)
The last paragraph functions like the doctrine of Creation in Theology. This would explain the claim that it does not describe a “transition” (der Übergang) but an absolute “liberation” (die Befreiung). The terms Befreiung and Befreiungskrieg (“war of liberation”) were becoming popular as the book was written, following the military victories of the Holy Alliance in 1812-14, which overthrew the meritocratic bureaucracies of Napoleon in favour of the older hierarchies of Christian Europe.
The liberation of the concept is like the speech of God at the beginning of Genesis by which the world of nature is spoken into being. What seems to be happening, to speak plainly, is that Hegel has Biblical ideas in mind – of Creation (“God said, let there be...”), and in the concrete sciences of the Fall and Salvation. He then recurs to Greek philosophy (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato) to interpret them rationally. Religious imagery, he supposes, belongs to perception; philosophy to conception. Yet the two sets of ideas appear incongruent, incommensurable, irreducible one to the other. Hegel’s monism thus drives him to try to reconcile them. This leads to attempts such as this and his later Lectures on the Proofs of God’s Existence.
References
Haym, Rudolf. Hegel und seiner Zeit [Hegel and his Time]. 1857. French trans. by Pierre Osmo. Paris, 2004.
Hegel, G.W.F. Science of Logic. Ed. Glockner; English trans. Johnson & Struthers, 1929.
The Absolute Idea (continued)Summary and Discussion
On System
[19] We can now, Hegel says, contemplate the content of cognition, as it pertains to the method. By adding this moment, the method extends into a system. At first, the beginning (of methodical thought) was indeterminate as regards content. According to the form (of system and method), the beginning had to be immediate and universal. Through the movement, the object obtained a determinacy which is a content. This is because negativity, reduced to simplicity, is the form transcended. As a simple characteristic, it stands opposed to the development and, at first, to its very opposition to universality. [This illustrates Hegel’s manner of talking over what is already highly abstract. The idea of an absolute beginning, such as we find in Descartes, Locke and the epistemological tradition, is at issue. – SC]
[20] This determinateness is the next truth of the indeterminate beginning. It is thus a reproach by its incompleteness to the method and its beginning. The beginning may then be viewed as in fact mediated, which would lead to an infinite backwards reviewing of prior assumptions and presumed beginnings. Likewise, from the supposed beginning in its determinacy, progress would roll forward to infinity.
[21] We have already shown though, that progress to infinity is a form of thoughtless iteration or repetition. The absolute method, which has Reason for such a content, cannot lead us there. We have begun with Being, Essence and Universality. These might seem purely universal and formal and so lacking in content. But, says Hegel, their very indeterminateness is their determinateness. Their determinateness is their negativity as transcended mediation. This imparts to them a particularity by which Being, Essence and Universality are distinct from one another. [Universality carries with it an authority – being true of everything, or everyone, it allows its exponents to speak on behalf of all. Hence it can be read politically, as Lukács said. – SC]
These beginnings are self-related, immediate and undetermined, so there is no difference to posit with the beginning between universal form and real content. However, the indeterminacy that each logical beginning has contains negativity. This gives even indeterminacy a determinacy. This differentiates between Being, Essence and Universality. For method, it is indifferent whether the determinacy is taken as being of form or content. It doesn’t radically change the method that the first result has a content. It remains no more and no less formal as before. It is the absolute form, self-knowing reason, and so no content stands against it as something it can only impose an outward form on. No content draws it into an infinite progress or regress.
On the one hand, it is a determinacy that turns an immediate beginning into something mediated. Conversely though, its mediation passes through a content as through an apparent Other to itself, back to its beginning, transcending the determinacy and reconstituting the first indeterminacy. The method does this as a system of totality. [Whilst the mind retains a capacity to revisit its thoughts, I feel that openness to experience is under-rated here as a means of learning. Hence a system, whilst useful, can only be provisional. – SC]
Totality and Personality
[22] Hegel has shown that results are new beginnings by virtue of their simplicity. By adding determinacies, “cognition rolls forward from content to content”. (486) By the nature of its method, each step is richer and more concrete, because the result contains its own beginning, but also new content. [The natural scope of this is the history of philosophy. – SC] Hegel writes:
“The universal is the foundation, the progress therefore must not be taken as a flow from Other to Other. In the absolute method, the Concept (der Begriff) preserves itself in its otherness (Anderseyn), and the universal in its particularisation, in judgement and in reality; it [...] loses nothing and leaves nothing behind, but carries with it all that it has acquired, enriching and inscribing it within itself.” (483)
[23] This broadening, as the moment of content, can be taken as the first premiss. Hegel writes: “The universal is imparted to (mitgeteilt) the richness of content immediately contained in it.” (483) This relation though, has a second, dialectical side. Hegel writes: “The process of enriching proceeds by the necessity of the Concept; it is supported by it and each determinacy is a reflection on it (Reflexion in sich).” (G349, 483) Each movement outwards, each new level of outward initiative is also a reflection on ourselves. With broader extension comes deeper intensity. The highest and sharpest peak is pure personhood, which by its dialectical nature grasps everything in its bosom, because it makes itself the most free, into simplicity which is the first immediacy and universality.
The Incorporation of Content
[24] Each step forward to assimilate new material, Hegel observes, also involves a backwards step of self-comprehension. What appears like two processes – confirmation of the beginning and its progressive development – in fact coincide and are the same. Hegel concludes: “The method thus forms a circle but, in a temporal development, it cannot anticipate that the beginning as such shall already be derivative; it is sufficient for the beginning in its immediacy that it is simple universality.” (483) Hegel adds:
“It need not be objected that it should be allowed to count merely as provisional and hypothetical. Any objections which might be advanced – about the limits of human cognition, or the need of a critical investigation of the instrument of cognition before the problem is attacked – are themselves suppositions which, as concrete determinations, imply the needs of their mediation and proof.” (483)
Such beginnings are (formally) no better than the beginning against which they protest. Hegel adds: “It is sheer presumption to demand that they should have preferential consideration.” (483-84) This recapitulates the argument of the Introduction to the Phenomenology. Hegel continues: “Their content is untrue, for they make incontrovertible and absolute what is known to be finite and untrue (namely, a restricted cognition which is determined as form and instrument as against its content.” (484) The untrue knowledge here is a search for grounds that proceeds regressively. Hegel contrasts the epistemological standpoint to his own as follows:
“The method of truth also knows the beginning to be incomplete, because it is a beginning, but equally knows this incomplete [beginning] in general as necessary, because the truth is only what comes back to itself, through the negativity of immediacy.” (484, G350)
["Truth" here is truth in the sense of full nature – SC] Hegel criticises the “impatience” of wishing to see beyond the determinate and “to be immediately in the absolute” (484) Comprehension requires mediation, i.e. “cognition, of which the universal and immediate is a moment, while the truth itself is only in its extended course and at its end.” (484) Impatience may content itself with a “preliminary conspectus of the whole” (484). But this is foreign to “the true transition from universal to particular and to the whole which is determinate in and for itself.” (484)
The Circular Structure of Philosophical Science
[25] This method, Hegel argues, shows that philosophical science is a “circle which returns upon itself, for mediation bends its end back into its beginning or simple ground.” (484) This circle is also a circle of circles, for each return to the beginning is also the beginning of a new member (eines neuen Mitglied). Hegel comments: “The various sciences, of which each has a before and an after, are fragments (Bruckstücke) of this chain.” (484)
[26] Thus Logic, in the absolute Idea, has returned to the simple unity that is its beginning. Hegel says: “The pure immediacy of Being, in which at first all determination appears to be extinct or omitted by abstraction, is the Idea, which has reached its adequate self-equality (entsprechenden Gleichheit mit sich) through mediation – that is, through the transcendence of mediation.” (485) Hegel offers some sentences of explanation here that identify thought and being (at least at the point of pure Being). Hegel makes two concluding observations on the subject. Firstly:
“In the idea, logical science has first comprehended its own concept. In Being, logical cognition appeared as an external subjective reflection. Eventually though, in the Idea of absolute cognition, the concept of Logic has become its own content. The Idea is itself the pure concept that has itself as its object, while the concept as object runs through the totality of its determinations.”
In doing this, it constructs the whole of its reality for itself into the system of science. It ends by comprehending its conceiving of itself, thereby knowing the concept of science. Secondly, the Idea remains in a distinct logical sphere. Hegel writes:
“This Idea is still logical, it is locked up in pure thought, the science only of the divine Concept. The systematic elaboration is surely itself a realisation, but retained within the same sphere. Because the pure Idea of knowing thus far is confined to subjectivity, it is a drive to remove this, and the pure truth becomes as last result the beginning of another sphere of science.” (486, G352)
The nature of this "drive" is addressed in the concluding paragraph which immediately follows.
Conclusion
[27] Hegel begins: “While the Idea, so to say, posits itself as absolute unity of the pure concept and its reality, and therewith collects itself up into the immediacy of Being, it is thus, as the totality in this form – Nature.” (G352-53, J&S 485) What this says, if one weeds out the subordinate clauses, is “The Idea... is... Nature.” This then, is a recurrence of the Spinoza’s “Deus sive Natura”. It is we who see the Idea in this light and thus overlook the creative power of God. Hegel continues:
“This determination though, is not a result that has come about (ein Gewordenseyn) a transition, as above the subjective concept in its totality becomes objectivity and the subjective purpose (Zweck) becomes Life.” (G353, 485)
It is rather a matter of an “absolute liberation”. (485) The “Idea” is represented here as an Agent. Let us consider the contrasted concepts of transition and liberation. Firstly, we are not dealing with a transition or result. Hegel gives two examples from the Concept (the transitions to objectivity and Life), i.e. subsumption of a negative. Yet we are dealing not with these, but a liberation. Secondly then, we can address the concept of liberation. This presumably means then that the liberated being is free to realise its own nature and adopt its own order. This would appear to mean that a pre-existing Logos realises itself in the order of nature.
We are, in a sense, “liberated” from this circle of pure thought when we turn our attention to nature. Hegel has said as much when he says that pure thought is confined to subjectivity. This subjective meaning though appears to be secondary. There is an air of divine agency about it. Hegel writes:
“The pure Idea, in which the determinacy or reality of reason (Begriff) is itself raised to reason (zum Begriffe erhoben), is rather absolute liberation, for which no more immediate determination any more is, that is not just as much posited and is the concept, hence in this freedom no transition takes place. The simple Being, to which the Idea determines itself, remains wholly transparent to it, and is reason remaining at home in its determination.” (G353)
The meaning here is that reason is everywhere, even in seeming brute fact. In Kant, the intelligibility of nature is guaranteed by its relation to the subject. Hegel seems to be generalising the point by supposing that the subject is in possession of his categories which, he has argued, are those of reality. Hegel continues: “The transition here is rather to be understood as, that the Idea sets itself free in absolute security and at rest within itself.” Here too the Idea is identified as an Agent. This might appear to be a category mistake, as Ideas, however exalted, are objects of thought and not Agents, though to an Agent they may become a principle of motion. In the Logos tradition though, agency is attributed to the Word. Hegel continues:
“On account of this freedom (Um dieser Freiheit willen), the form of its determinacy is just as free – the absolute externality of space and time, being for itself without subjectivity. – Insofar as this is only according to the abstract immediacy of being and is grasped by consciousness, it is as mere objectivity and outward life; but in the Idea it remains in and for itself the totality of reason (Begriff) and the Science of Nature in relationship to divine knowledge (des göttlichen Erkennens). This next resolution of the pure Idea though, to determine itself as external Idea, thereby posits it as the mediation, from which reason as free rises up out of externality into its own existence, completes its liberation in the Science of Mind and finds the highest concept of itself in Logical Science, as pure reason (Begriff) conceiving itself.” (486, G353)
The final phrase echoes Aristotle and there is a recurrence of religious language ("divine knowledge"). There is an element of metaphysical extravagance about this project for the concrete sciences. We may warm to the prospect of a Science of Nature in relationship to theology: the idea of infinite purpose would add to our metaphysical armoury for the interpretation of natural phenomena and the history of the mind. Combined with this though, I remain dissatisfied with this Logic as a highest science. Without the distinction of created and uncreated being, matters of reason and matters of fact are confused. Our emotions are displaced as their proper objects are misrepresented – and reading the Logic is an emotional experience.
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