Hegel’s analysis of mind and world - the Science of Logic

 Hegel’s analysis of mind and world: the Science of Logic Hegel’s Phenomenology was completed, so Hegel liked to tell people, on the night of the battle of Jena.. Whereas the Ph

 

Hegel’s analysis of mind and world:

the Science of Logic

Hegel’s Phenomenology was completed, so Hegel liked to tell people, on the

night of the battle of Jena However, by the time he published the first

volume of his Science of Logic in  – the later two volumes appeared between and  – he had lost his job as a professor, fathered an il-legitimate son, run a newspaper, found a position teaching philosophy to high-school students in Nuremberg, and gotten married to a woman from

the Nuremberg patriciate (and, by the time the Logic was finished, had

fa-thered a daughter who did not survive and two other sons who did) The

period between the Phenomenology and the Logic covered Napoleon’s

tri-umphant destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian army, his disastrous invasion of Russia, his exile and comeback, the Congress

of Vienna, and the battle of Waterloo Whereas the Phenomenology was completed under the gaze of the Revolution triumphant, the Logic was

completed under the gaze of German monarchs seeking a restoration

of their powers and authority (but, in the case of the large kingdoms created in Napoleonic Germany, these monarchs also refusing to cede

an inch of the land or property Napoleon had in effect given them). While in Jena, Hegel had been working on his “system,” which was

to provide a unitary treatment of the philosophy of nature, the philoso-phy of mind, ethics and political philosophiloso-phy, and philosophiloso-phy of religion, along with a kind of “logic,” as he called it, that was intended to be the overall structure for the whole enterprise.In the post-Kantian context, Hegel’s ambition for his “system” was clear: he was trying to rewrite the

 Of course, it all depends on one’s notion of romance as to whether one judges the Logic to have

been completed in more prosaic circumstances than the Phenomenology Hegel noted in a letter

to his friend, Immanuel Niethammer, that “it is no small matter in the first half year of one’s

marriage to write a book of thirty proofsheets of the most abstruse contents,” Briefe,, no ;

Hegel: The Letters (trans Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler) (Bloomington: University of Indiana

Press, ), p .

 The development of Hegel’s views in Jena are, of course, much more complex and much less

linear than this sentence suggests For a more complete account, see Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography,

ch .



The Science of Logic 

three Kantian Critiques and the other parts of the Kantian system(such

as Kant’s philosophy of nature as it was developed in Kant’s philosophy

of science) in light of the various developments in the post-Kantian liter-ature and, just as important, in light of the rapidly changing social and political conditions in Europe

The Phenomenology was intended to be the introduction to that “sys-tem,” and the next work (the Logic) was supposed to provide the broad

outlines of what the “system” was about The link between the Jena

Phenomenology and the Nuremberg Logic has to do with how each in its

respective way takes up Hegel’s generalization of the “Kantian paradox” into a claimabout normative authority in general However, whereas the

Phenomenology treated that issue as historical and social, the Logic treated

it more as a problem of “thought” itself, asking: is there a “logic,” a normative structure, to the way we must think about ourselves and the world in light of Hegel’s post-Kantian claimthat our thought can be subject only to those norms of which it can regard itself as the author?

How can “thought,” to use Hegel’s colorful phrase in the Logic, be the

“other of itself,” both lawgiver and subordinate to the law?

One of Hegel’s main points in reformulating the “Kantian paradox”

in this way was his conviction that the “spirit” of Kant’s philosophy not only did not entail the dualismof concept and intuition that so many post-Kantians had found so unsatisfactory, it was in fact opposed to it For Hegel, it was Kant himself who had shown that this dualism was unten-able by virtue of having implicitly demonstrated in his “Transcendental Deduction” that the normative authority of both concepts and intuitions had to do with their place within the unity of inference (of reason) itself

essay, “Faith and Knowledge,” published in the journal he and Schelling edited together.Hegel was especially taken with Kant’s conception of a

 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p  (“Dies ist nun selbst der vorhin

bezeichnete Standpunkt, nach welchemein allgemeines Erstes, an und f ¨ur sich betrachtet, sich

als das Andere seiner selbst zeigt.” Italics added by me).

 “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? Reason alone is the possibility of this positing,

for Reason is nothing else but the identity of heterogeneous elements of this kind One can glimpse this Idea through the shallowness of the deduction of the categories With respect to space and time one can glimpse it too in the deduction of the categories, where the original synthetic

unity of apperception finally comes to the fore Here, the original synthetic unity of apperception

is recognized also as the principle of the figurative synthesis, i.e., of the forms of intuition; space and time are themselves conceived as synthetic unities, and spontaneity, the absolute synthetic activity of the productive imagination, is conceived as the principle of the very sensibility which

was previously characterized only as receptivity,” “Glauben und Wissen,” Werke,, pp –;

Faith and Knowledge, pp.–.

 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel

“figurative synthesis,” which transforms what would otherwise be non-normatively significant sensations into non-normatively significant intuitions;

it is in figurative synthesis that we generate the pure intuitions of space and time (as representations of possible objects) and thereby the form of the appearing world itself. Such a view, Hegel argued, indicated that

we could not isolate concepts fromintuitions except in terms of their

normative role within some larger whole The Logic was intended to be Hegel’s analysis of what was normatively in play in that “larger whole.”

Rejecting the Fichtean idea that the Kantian distinction between sub-jects and obsub-jects was itself a subjective distinction, Hegel intended the

first section of the Logic to be what he called a “reconstruction” of the

key concepts of pre-Kantian metaphysics – that is, the pre-Kantian at-tempt to think through the differences between agents and things only in terms of the categories of “things” in general Nonetheless, he intended

it not to be historical (as might have perhaps been expected, given the

Phenomenology that preceded it) but to be purely “logical,” that is, to be an analysis of the ways in which certain typical stances toward metaphysics

in the past have committed themselves to certain positions, such that

in the process of actualizing those concepts in practice and in systems

of thought the “truth” of what was really at play was revealed as being something quite different than what had originally been argued The

Logic, that is, was to be the “logic” of the metaphysics of the past that

would show that the various positions assumed in the history of philos-ophy were not just randommusings, but instead had a kind of internal drive, which lay in the way that holding ourselves to such-and-such a view of the world inevitably pushed us into the situation of acknowledg-ing that what was really normatively in play or at stake was somethacknowledg-ing else In that way, Hegel hoped to show that past philosophical positions were not so much false or illusory as “one-sided,” as attempts to make

 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: “But the figurative synthesis, if it be directed merely to the original

synthetic unity of apperception, that is, to the transcendental unity which is thought in the categories, must, in order to be distinguished from the merely intellectual combination, be called

the transcendental synthesis of imagination Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present But inasmuch as its synthesis is an expression of spontaneity,

which is determinative and not, like sense, determinable merely, and which is therefore able to determine sense a priori in respect of its form in accordance with the unity of apperception, imagination is to that extent a faculty which determines the sensibility a priori; and its synthesis

of intuitions, conforming as it does to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of imagination This synthesis is an action of the understanding on the sensibility; and is its first application – and thereby the ground of all its other applications – to the objects of our possible intuition As figurative, it is distinguished fromthe intellectual synthesis, which is carried out by the understanding alone, without the aid of the imagination,” –.

The Science of Logic  sense of mind and world in ways that contradicted what they were trying

to achieve in holding those views

To that end, Hegel broke up the Logic into three “books,” which

them-selves are divided into what Hegel calls “the objective logic” (comprised

of the first two “books”) and the “subjective logic.” In particular, the three

“books” of the Logic showed Hegel’s clearly post-Kantian take on

philos-ophy, and the Fichtean overtones to the division were clear: the first two books laid out the internal logic within pre-Kantian metaphysics as the attempt to make the distinction between agency and the natural world, between subject and object, into an objective distinction (As he put it, the “objective logic, takes the place of the former metaphysics.”) The

way in which the logic of pre-Kantian metaphysics pushes us ultimately into a Kantian, and then post-Kantian (that is, Hegelian) position is supposed to be the impulse that moves one from an “objective” to a

“subjective” logic – from“substance” to “subject,” as he had put it in

his Phenomenology.In terms of Hegel’s dialectical approach, the various

movements of the Logic lead up to the recognition that what had really

been normatively in play in all our thought about mind and world turned out to involve Kant’s critical turn, which, in turn, requires a conception

of the “space of reasons” (what Hegel calls the “absolute Idea” at a later

point in his Logic) as that which is really normatively in play in

establish-ing the Kantian, critical turn in the first place As Hegel put it, with his flair for the apparently paradoxical: “What is essential for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be purely immediate, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a cycle in which the first

is also the last and the last is the first.”One begins with what must be normatively in play in any thought about mind and world, and one ends with the “truth” of that commitment, what was really normatively in play all along

Hegel, at least at first, understood his Logic to presuppose his

Phenomenology The lesson of the Phenomenology was that the structure

of reason was social and was therefore a historical achievement, not

a metaphysical structure of things that our minds learned to reflect; and

the Logic was to be the “reconstruction” of our grasp of mind and world

that both presupposed that achievement and showed that it, while not

 Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p .

 As Hegel puts it, “Accordingly, logic should be divided primarily into the logic of the concept as

being and of the concept as concept – or, by employing the usual terms into objective and subjective

logic,” Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p  (“Cycle” translates “Kreislauf ”.)

 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel

foreordained or already (somehow) existent all along, nonetheless had

a developmental logic internal to itself such that the development of the pre-Kantian metaphysics of “substance” into the Kantian theory of

“subjectivity” was indeed the logical move to make, even if that move was not necessitated by any law of history.

   :   ¨

The Logic began with echoes of H¨olderlin’s thoughts about “being” as

expressing our sense of a kind of “orientation” in the world that precedes all our other orientations and thus as being more basic than any other concept, including that of “judgment” (and thus beginning with a con-ception of “truth” as an “immediate,” “primitive” concept) Hegel refers

to this as “being, pure being – without any further determination.”That is,

the Logic is to begin with something that is prior to and more basic than

any kind of division into “subject” and “object,” and is then to show how the tensions and contradictions that turn out to be at work in our holding onto that “thought” of a pre-reflective orientation (which is not yet even

a judgment) show more explicitly what is really normatively in play The tension inherent in the conception of “pure, indeterminate being” is that this “pure thought” has nothing within itself by which it could be distinguished from“nothing,” and yet the sense of the thought is

just that being is different fromnothing Thus, as soon as one tries to express

the so-called thought of “pure being,” to express the conception that the

world just “is” (even if we can say nothing about it), one thereby also

li-censes an inference to the judgment that being and nothing are the same Thus, what might seem as so obviously true – the claim that “being is” and “nothing is not,” as the pre-Socratic Greek, Parmenides had phrased

it – ends up instead licensing an inference to its own “opposite”; or, as Hegel put it: “Now insofar as the sentence: being and nothing are the same, expresses the identity of these determinations, but in fact equally contains themboth as distinguished, the proposition itself contradicts itself and dissolves itself.”

 Hegel calls it a “Rekonstruktion” in one place in the Logic, the “Preface to the Second Edition,”

Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p  He also notes that “logic, then, has for

its presupposition the science of appearing spirit, which contains and presents the necessity and, accordingly, the demonstration of the truth of the standpoint that is pure knowing and its mediation in logic, the presupposition is that which has proved itself to be the result of the

phenomenological survey – the Idea as pure knowledge,” Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der

Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , pp –; HeW, , p .

The Science of Logic  That proposition “dissolves itself ” by showing that what is really nor-matively in play in the distinction between “being” and “nothing” is a background understanding of the world as a whole consisting of “coming

to be” and “ceasing to be” (of “nothing” passing over into “being” and vice versa).That is, what we are really (normatively) doing in

distin-guishing being fromnothing is not comparing two distinct “things” in terms

of their properties (as we might think we were doing in distinguishing,

say, maples from oaks, or turtles from rabbits); we are actually making a

move in the normative space of reasons, specifically, working out the kinds

of inferences that are permissible in terms of a conception of the world

as a process of coming-to-be and passing-away, in which we recognize that what comes to be and what passes away is not nothing, after all, but

something; that this reliance on a conception of “becoming” in fact only

thereby makes explicit the necessity of recognizing that it is something, some one determinate thing or another, that comes to be or passes away.

Or, to put it more in Hegel’s own preferred idiom, the basic distinction between “what is” and “what is not” is itself an “abstraction,” a “mo-ment” of a more comprehensive whole, namely, a world of determinate things coming into being and passing away

, ,  “”

On the one hand, the beginning of the Logic does not establish anything

particularly controversial: it shows that our judgments about “being” and

“nothing” require us to speak of something as coming-to-be or passing-away, assertions which even Hegel himself admits are only “superficial.”

On the other hand, the beginning sections of the “Doctrine of Being”

 “It is the form of the simple judgment,” Hegel noted, “when it is used to express speculative

results, which is very often responsible for the paradoxical and bizarre light in which much of

recent philosophy appears to those who are not familiar with speculative thought,” Science of

Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p  (In saying that, unfortunately, Hegel laid

himself wide open for further misunderstanding by those who wished to see his philosophy in a

“paradoxical and bizarre light,” namely, that he was somehow endorsing the irrationalist view that “speculative truths” could not be expressed in language at all, something that was exactly

at odds with what he was trying to argue but of which he has been accused ever since.)

 As Hegel rather sarcastically puts it, in reference to the saying that “out of nothing, nothing

comes,” “Ex nihilo, nihil fit – is one of those propositions to which great importance was ascribed

in metaphysics In it is to be seen either only the empty tautology: Nothing is nothing; or, if

becoming is supposed to possess an actual meaning in it, then, since from nothing only nothing becomes, the proposition does not in fact contain becoming, for in it nothing remains nothing,” Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 “However, something is still a very superficial determination; just as reality and negation,

de-terminate being and its dede-terminateness, although no longer blank being and nothing, are still

quite abstract expressions,” Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p .

 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel

serve to bring out Hegel’s main point: what might look like a “reflective judgment,” in the sense of being a comparison between two items, turns

out to be not a comparison of things at all but a normative ascription of

entitlement, and, for that entitlement to work, it turns out that something else must be brought normatively into play (or must be revealed to be already normatively in play in it) In some ways, this is the point of the

Logic as a whole: to say that we know something is not to compare two

“things” at all (as we seemingly do when we match up, for example, a

photograph with what it is about); it is rather to make a normative ascription,

to say that the person making the claim is entitled to the claim That is, our ascriptions of knowledge are not comparisons of any kind of subjective

state with something non-subjective but instead are moves within a social

space structured by responsibilities, entitlements, attributions, and the

The “Doctrine of Being” goes on to develop notions of qualitative, quantitative, and “measured” distinctions to be made about the world that comes-to-be and passes-away (the details of which are not crucial here) Hegel’s discussion, though, is intended to extend his logical point

to what is really at issue for him: in making even such “superficial” judgments, we are moving in a kind of normative space in which much more turns out to be normatively required of us than we would have

at first imagined when we started out with such very general and very abstract conceptions of “something,” “qualitatively different items” and the like In particular, these are judgments about finite items, that is, any two “things” that can only be characterized by their distinction from something else that is external to them Such judgments about the

“finite,” so it would seem, also commit us to judgments about the infinite,

since a judgment about some finite thing, a, commits us to a judgment about another finite thing, b, which in turn commits us to another such judgment about some c, and so on to infinity.

 The language of undertaking and attributing commitments is best developed by Robert

Brandom, Making It Explicit, and in his “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism:

Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual

Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy, () (August ), –, and Tales of the Mighty Dead,

where the extension to Hegel’s conception of agency is explicitly made I developed a similar

view of Hegel’s conception of agency as a position in social space in Hegel’s Phenomenology See also Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, where he develops a conception of

Hegel’s view of agency that also draws on Sellarsian notions (which formthe core of Brandom’s later account) A reading of Hegel in terms of contemporary philosophical concerns, particularly those concerning the relation of inferentialist semantics to post-Kantian issues (and especially those having to do with subjective and objective points of view), is masterfully done in Paul

Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,).

The Science of Logic  The infinite, however, can never be conceived as a single itemitself For example, if we think of “the infinite” as the sum-total of all finite things, it always makes sense to ask whether there could be yet another finite thing added to the list, and the new infinite sum-total would be another infinite

in contrast to the first The infinite might thus seem to be the end of a

series of judgments, but it cannot itself be an end-point in the sense that it

is something that we actually reach by following out a series of judgments The infinite, that is, cannot be a “thing” that is to be contrasted with

or set alongside the set of all “finite” things Nor is the infinite some kind of grand “thing” that “swallows up” the finite and obliterates its distinctiveness or shows the pluralismof finite things to be some kind

of illusion. Hegel notes sarcastically that: “This determination of the

true infinite cannot be grasped in the formula of a unity of the finite

and infinite; unity is abstract, motionless identity-with-self, and, just as

Rather than being taken as a single “thing,” the infinite should instead

be taken as the expression of the world-process of things coming-to-be and passing-away taken as a whole This world-process of coming-to-be and passing-away is thus all that there is, and it is within this conception

of a “whole” that all of the various judgments about finite things are to

be legitimated and explained The world taken as a whole is truly infinite

because there is nothing external to the world with which the world as a

whole could be contrasted or explained The world as a whole is thus to

be explained in terms internal to the world itself, not in terms of anything

“infinite” and external to it that would supposedly ground the “finite” world (and especially not in terms of any supernatural infinite) Hegel applies the same sort of reasoning to judgments about quanti-tative features of objects, with the intent being to show that such quan-titative judgments are not comparisons of two things (say, an equation and some Platonic entities called numbers), but different ways in which

we ascribe entitlement in, for example, mathematics (such as when one has actually proved something, and so forth)

The guiding idea in the “Doctrine of Being” has to do with the transformation of the “Kantian paradox” into a thesis about normative

 In Hegel’s idiosyncratic way of putting it: “This sublation (Aufheben) is thus not the sublation of

the something,” Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , pp –.

 Hegel is clearly aiming at discrediting the idea of explaining the world by some supernatural

infinite – a conception of there being “two worlds, an infinite and a finite,” as he puts it, something that he thinks clearly contains a “contradiction” once the logic of such a conception is put into

more “explicit form,” Science of Logic, p ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel

authority in general: we must conceive of our thought as being sub-ject only to those “laws” (or reasons) of which it can regard itself as the author; and that requires that it begin with something that has the para-doxical look of something it has not authored (in this case, the thought

of “being”), which, in turn, generates out of itself a requirement that

we acknowledge that more has to be normatively in play than what we started out with – or, as Hegel puts it, the tensions that emerge as we try

to hold onto that kind of thought make it “inherently self-contradictory, because the determinations it unites within itself are opposed to each other; [and] such a union destroys itself.”

Very roughly, the moves from the “Doctrine of Being” to the “Doctrine

of Essence” in the Logic go something like this The section on “quantity”

is intended to show how the conceptual grasp of the “infinite” in the dif-ferential and integral calculus in effect answers the charges (made, among others, by Kant) that we can have no conceptual grasp of the infinite that

is not already founded in some kind of non-conceptual intuition of the infinite.The quantitative infinite is thus also ideal; it is not an object –

not even something like an “infinitesimal,” conceived as a quantity that

is greater than zero and smaller than any natural number, an idea that Hegel sarcastically dismissed, alluding to D’Alembert, with the remark,

“it seemed perfectly clear that such an intermediate state, as it was called,

be-tween being and nothing does not exist.”The quantitative infinite is to

be represented in the formulas of the calculus that express iterative oper-ations, not “infinitesimals.” In Hegel’s post-Kantian reformulation of the problem, there is simply nothing more to the quantitative infinite than what is expressed in such formulas, and the quantitative infinite is thus

ideal, since it is never grasped in some individual experience of things, but

is comprehended fully and truly only in thought, in the formulas of the

 Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

 Michael Friedman in his Kant and the Exact Sciences argues that Kant’s point about how space

and time had to be “pure intuitions” and not “concepts” was based on Kant’s understanding that traditional monadic logic could not generate a conception of an infinity of objects, whereas modern polyadic logic, with its use of quantifiers, can do so Although modern, post-Fregean polyadic logic allows us to formulate the idea of an iterative process formally, monadic logic could not do this, and, since our idea of space is infinite, Kant concluded (rightly) that it therefore could not be a (monadic) logical concept What Kant needed was a “new logic” to see how his argument might have gone otherwise, which was precisely Hegel’s point Hegel, though, thought that this required his own “dialectical” logic; although quite different fromanything like the Fregean

system, Hegel’s Logic thus shared some of its inspiration The most extensive comparison and critique of Hegel’s Logic fromthe standpoint of Fregean and post-Fregean formal logic is to

be found in Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Hegels analytische Philosophie: Die Wissenschaft der Logik als

kritische Theorie der Bedeutung (Paderborn: Ferdinand Sch¨onigh,).

 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. ; Wissenschaft der Logik, , p ; HeW, , p .

The Science of Logic  integral and differential calculus However, in making such qualitative and quantitative judgments about the world as a whole and uniting them

in judgments of “measure” ( judgments about when quantitative changes become qualitative changes, as when streams become rivers, and ponds become lakes), we find that the whole way of talking about the world exclusively in the terms of individuals coming-to-be and passing-away –

in other words, the “doctrine of being” itself – is too burdened with an internal, basic tension within itself for that conception to be able to sus-tain itself: taken on its own and as a whole, the outlook presented in the

“book” on “being” commits us to a conception of the world as seeming

to be the substrate of such qualitative and quantitative features of itself without itself being either qualitative or quantitative “in itself,” apart fromhow it is experienced or thought

       These kinds of tension-laden judgments are brought to the foreground

in the “Doctrine of Essence,” which concerns itself with the normative structures of judgments that have to do with our distinguishing how the

world appears to us fromthe way it really is Such judgments thus

al-ways presume a grasping together “in thought” of two distinguishable

elements, the appearance and that which is appearing That activity of

distin-guishing those two elements itself suggests both the skepticism embodied

in the idea that we cannot make true judgments about the way the world

is independent of the conditions under which we can experience it, and the ways in which such skepticismbreaks down: without such a grasp

of the “whole” in thought (a conception of the whole of “the world in

itself as appearing to us”), we could not even begin to make the kinds of

ordinary skeptical judgments that we do make (such as when we doubt whether something really is the way it looks)

Indeed, in Hegel’s diagnosis, modern post-Cartesian skepticism arises out of taking that “whole” and treating its constituents only as parts, as (in Hegel’s sense) independent, “finite” pieces of knowledge That is, such skepticism grows out of the temptation to understand making assertions

as comparing two “things,” an appearance (as a subjective experience) and

what is appearing (as something existing in-itself )

This move to “comparison” is paradigmatic of the “reflective” view-point: we stand outside of the “whole” in which we are making the judgments and “reflectively” (or, to use John McDowell’s nice metaphor, from“sideways on”) look at the pair of items that are distinguishable but