Hegel's Logic of Freedom

• Author: William Maker
• Position: Professor of philosophy at Clemson University and Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department
• Pages: 11-30

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Mind is active and conducts itself in its activity in a determinate manner; but this activity has no other ground than its freedom.¹ Reason is Thought conditioning itself with perfect freedom.²

What is the Science of Logic about? One account Hegel gives of it would not sound strange to today's logicians: it is about the "forms of thought" and the "laws of thinking."³ But in at least two decisive respects, Hegel's conception of a formal logic is different from contemporary versions. He insists that even as pure abstractions, logical forms are not divorced from content.⁴ He holds further that logic does not merelyPage 12provide rules for arriving at truth when some given, external content is added;⁵ rather, it affords truth itself-not just any old truth, but infinite absolute truth.⁶ "[T]he logical is the absolute form of the truth, and, even more than that, the pure truth itself . . . . "⁷ Further distancing himself from contemporary views, he notes that this truth is not a matter of the "correctness of the knowledge of facts, [for that is] not truth itself"⁸ Still other comments Hegel makes about logic may also seem sufficiently out of temper with our time to relegate the Science of Logic to the junk heap of error, where it has so long dwelled in desuetude.

Logic, he tells us, is "the colourless communion of the spirit with itsel⁹ .... the spirit which contemplates its own pure essence . . . . "¹⁰ But even as communing with itself, logic has special powers, for it "must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human .... "¹¹ This must be the case since "the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic."¹² "Thus logic coincides with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts that used to be taken to express the essentialities of the things"¹³ Explaining why truth is not the correctness of facts, he observes that, "[w]ith this introduction of the content into the logical treatment, the subject matter is not things [Dinge] but their import [Sache], the Notion of them."¹⁴ As such logic presents that which is "solely an object, a product and content of think-Page 13ing, and is the absolute self-subsistent object [die and und fur sich seiende Sache], the logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things . . . ."¹⁵ Perhaps most notoriously he tells us:

This objective thinking then, is the content of pure science. Consequently, far from it being formal, far from it standing in need of a matter to constitute an actual and true cognition, it is its content alone which has absolute truth or, if one still wanted to employ the word matter, it is the veritable [wahrhafte] matter-but a matter which is not external to the form, since this matter is rather pure thought and hence the absolute form itself. Accordingly, logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.

¹⁶

So for Hegel, logic marks the consummation of the history of philosophy and the completion of its ancient task of providing absolute comprehension of the absolute; that which is eternal, divine, infinite, unconditioned, and also, importantly, causa sui, the self-sufficient cause and ground of itself. For as "the silent region[s] of thought which has come to itself and communes only with itself'¹⁷ as the self-movement of thought, logic constitutes "spirit thinking its own essential nature" and in its immanent development logic "gives itself its own determinateness and in its determinateness its equality with itself."¹⁸ Logic is the "act ofPage 14 thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own object for itself thereby, and giving it to itself"¹⁹

Yet, logic's timelessness is qualified or mediated because Hegel repeatedly insists that his task has been to undertake the reform of logic which, unlike other domains of philosophy, had been thus far untouched by the indefatigable spirit of the age.²⁰ "Logic shows no traces so far of the new spirit which has arisen in the sciences no less than in the world of actuality."²¹ For "whatever may have been accomplished for the form and content of philosophy [Wissenschaft] in other directions, the science of logic which constitutes metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy, has hitherto still been much neglected."²² While referring in the 1812 Preface to this timeliness the spirit of the age Hegel does not explicitly state what he has in mind, but he does make this clear elsewhere. A glance at the Philosophy of History immediately discloses that the "new spirit" he is talking about is the spirit of freedom. He holds that this spirit not only pervades the other sciences and actuality but is most fundamentally philosophical in character:Page 15

All will readily assent to the doctrine that Spirit, among other properties, is also endowed with Freedom; but philosophy teaches that all the qualities of Spirit exist only through Freedom; that all are but means for attaining Freedom; that all seek and produce this and this alone. It is a result of speculative Philosophy that Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.

²³

How are the assertive events of the worldly actuality of modern freedom, the "substantial form of the spirit" that has pushed off "the forms of an earlier culture . . . like withered leaves,"²⁴ to be connected with the timeless communing of thought that comprises logic? Can logic have any plausible association with freedom beyond the Aristotelian notion that philosophy requires leisure?²⁵ Hegel certainly thinks so. In the History of Philosophy, he notes that central to the Enlightenment²⁶ is the critical spirit of modern philosophical thought, which is free to call everything into question;²⁷ he especially recognizes Kant as having made free subjectivity the center of philosophy and reason.²⁸ But a cru-Page 16cial step remains, since in the form left by Kant, the critical philosophy is still tied to experience. It thinks its concepts as empty and incomplete and in need of some given content in order to afford truth; because of this, Hegel tells us, metaphysics has been severed from logic.²⁹ This condition of thought's dependence on a given, alien other constitutes "self-renunciation on the part of reason, the Notion of truth is lost; it is limited to knowing only subjective truth, only phenomena, appearances, only something to which the nature of the object does not correspond; knowing has lapsed into opinion."³⁰ Since heteronomy-determinate dependency on an alien other is the problem holding philosophy back, what is to be done by way of infusing logic with the spirit of the age, of independence, thereby recapturing the lost concept of truth? When we have at last worked through to the consummating truth of the logic in the subjective logic, the timely dimension of the absolute, eternal logos-its relation to freedom is boldly and explicitly asserted: "With the Notion, therefore, we have entered the realm ofreedom"³¹ "In point of fact . . . the principle of philosophy is the infinite free Notion, and all its content rests on that alone.³² "[F]reedom, that is the Notion, and with it everything that is true .... "³³ We might paraphrase Keats for Hegel: Not beauty, but "freedom is truth, truth freedom / that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."³⁴

What can we make of Hegel's idea that there is a direct, intelligible, and substantive link between timeless, absolute truth, and freedom; that they are not merely externally and contingently connected (because attaining truth requires independent thought), but also internally and necessarily one; that truth and freedom are, in fact, inseparable, coeval, and coexistent? One way of understanding the connection is to seePage 17

Hegel's development of Kant's notion of free subjectivity as involving the absolutization of the subject, where the absolute subject produces objective reality from out of itself, and knows and is at one with itself therein. After all, Hegel asserts "that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion."³⁵ "In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject''³⁶ This reading would also seem to be confirmed by the very title subjective logic, and its opening, where Hegel delineates its relation to the culmination of objective logic in the logic of essence: "Accordingly the Notion is the truth of substance³⁷ . . . [b]ut this consummation is no longer substance itself but something higher, the Notion, the subject"³⁸.

I am going to argue however that the logic, and the subjective logic as its culmination, should not be read in this manner at all, despite the venerable tradition of doing so. Instead, Hegel's linkage of truth and freedom is more radical than may first appear if we simply take a conception of free subjectivity as substance, as the determinative basis for the system, as productive of the essentialities of things that the logic articulates, and ultimately, of reality itself. In the Phenomenology and in many other places, Hegel cautions us with remarks such as: "Hence the mere anticipation that the Absolute is Subject is not only not the actuality of this Notion, but it even makes the actuality impossible; for the anticipation posits the subject as an inert...