Introduction

• Author: David Gray Carlson
• Position: Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
• Pages: 1-10

Page 1

The Science of Logic¹ stands at the very center of Hegel's philosophy. Upon this work depends the rest of Hegel's prodigious work on nature, politics, aesthetics, and psychology. In Hegel's own words, the Science of Logic is nothing short of "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind."² "[S]trong stuff from a relatively unknown writer who was at the time still only a Gymnasium professor with unfulfilled aspirations for university employment."³

After a century of neglect, there is a great upsurge in interest in Hegel's Logic. Whereas the English speaking world produced only two comprehensive studies in the first three-fourths of the twentieth century,⁴ it has produced dozens since then.⁵ Without question, we are in the midst of a Hegelian renaissance.Page 2

Anyone familiar with this literature will have the correct impression that by far the greatest amount of work concerns the opening chapters of the Science of Logic. By the time the Logic reaches Essence, the amount of scholarship begins to wane. And by the time the last third of the Logic appears on the scene-the Subjective Logic-scholarly comment is rare indeed.

This symposium is our attempt to even out the balance. A dozen scholars have been invited to write essays on Hegel's subjective logic. These essays have been arranged according to Hegel's progression in the Science of Logic. The first three essays concern themselves with the transition from essence to concept. The next four concern themselves with the concept proper-the unity of the universal, particular, and individual. Thereafter, essays consider judgment, syllogism, objectivity, cognition, and idea.

Before I say more specifically what will be found in these essays, let me try to set the scene. Hegel's Science of Logic is, of course, an ontology-a theory of being. It is therefore radically not what Logic is for analytic philosophy-an exercise for clarifying mathematical or linguistic inferences. These are, Hegel says, the "dead bones of logic" that can be "quickened by spirit."⁶

What makes Hegelian philosophy so fundamentally different from analytic philosophy is Hegel's notion that no thing is self-identical. Before the dead bones of logic can be quickened by spirit, Hegel maintains that the following "quite simple insight"⁷ must be grasped: the negative is just as much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity . . . but essentially only into the negation of its particular content .... Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation it has a content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation ... of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite. It is in this way that the system ofPage 3 Notions as such has to be formed-and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in which nothing extraneous is introduced.⁸

Everything is constituted by negativity, and every concept is finite. This means that every concept ought to become its opposite, and out of the wreckage new concepts, logically derived, must emerge. Destruction is creative for Hegel. What passes away is preserved and becomes the stuff of new forms.

Method is key to (and the result of) Hegel's Logic. Method is why the Science of Logic can properly be called a logic. The "simple rhythm"⁹ of Hegel's method works as follows. First, the understanding makes a proposition about the universe and what it is. But its propositions are one-sided. They always leave something out. Dialectic reason recalls what the understanding has left out and opposes the proposition with its negation. Yet, dialectical reason is equally guilty of making propositions about what propositional understanding has left out. Its product is just as finite as the understanding's product. It is left for speculative reason to point out what the understanding and dialectical reasons have in common: their propositions are contradictory and cannot endure. The sequence of proposition, dialectic criticism, and reconciliation continues right through to the end of the Science of Logic.

Another thing should be said about Hegel's method. It begins with the understanding making stupid one-sided statements. But as the Logic progresses, the understanding gets smarter. By the time it reaches essence, the understanding makes oppositional propositions. That is to say, the understanding becomes dialectical reason. By the time it reaches the subjective logic, the understanding makes notional (or triune) propositions. In other words, the understanding becomes speculative reason. The Logic is very much a Bildungsroman in which the understanding comes to know itself as method and idea.

The first third of the Science of Logic concerns itself with being. Being is constituted by negativity; it is finite and so it must waft away. When it does, reality passes over to ideality, which can best be thought of as the memory of what once was but now is not.

Being is the realm of one-sided immediacy, and when it passes away (as it must), it points to the realm of essence. Essence is the negation of being, which is to say that essence is thinly defined as "not be-Page 4ing"-nothing more than this. Negation being a correlative term-you must negate something-essence is correlative. Everything essential comes in pairs-ground and grounded, form and content, whole and parts, cause and effect, etc.

Essence must appear. That is, the understanding must make a proposition of what essence is. And when it does so, essence traverses from the negative world of essence to the world of appearance. Since appearances must disappear-they are beings-this means that essence is for itself (or actual) when it disappears. As with being, essence disappears. The leftovers, after objectivity has disappeared, are what Hegel calls subjectivity.

Hegel's subjectivity is not exactly the same thing as human subjectivity. Humans are limited in time and space, but Hegel's logic of the subject concerns God's subjectivity-God here to be understood as the universe, as the absolute, as that beyond which there is nothing.

Hegel's logic of the subject is therefore quite different from the ordinary human experience. For instance, we humans are pretty sure that there is something beyond our thought; just because we think something does not make it so. We do not have what Kant called intellectual intuitions.¹⁰ But God does. What God thinks is; for Him thought and deed are one.¹¹ The subject of the Science of Logic is godly subjectivity, not limited by time and space.

Yet, having said this, it is also true that human subjects participate in the divine subjectivity; they are instances of the concrete spirit. All finite things are part of the infinite thing. Indeed, Stanley Rosen has promised that the study of Hegel's subjective logic "provides man with practical satisfaction by reconciling him to his earthly dwelling, and the mode of reconciliation is the theoretical resolution of alienation."¹² This prediction was made good in the summer of 2004 when the jour-Page 5nalist Micah Garen was taken hostage in Baghdad. Upon his unexpected release, Garen reported that Hegelian philosophy had consoled him during his dangerous...