While this termination in ‘absolute knowing’ is often taken as testifying to Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s critical project and his commitment to a substantial ‘monistic’ metaphysics,16 some interpreters have tended to see Hegel as furthering the Kantian critique of ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics. Thus rather than understand ‘absolute knowing’ as the achievement of some ultimate and substantive ‘God’s-eye view’ of everything—the philosophical analogue to the fusion with God sought in some religions—‘post-Kantian’ interpreters17 see it as the accession to a mode of self-critical thought in which the thinker becomes consciously aware of its own thought processes. This is the standpoint at which the reader of Hegel’s next book, the Science of Logic, is now meant to be situated. Philosophy proper starts here, although many of the ideas encountered will have been already seen in the Phenomenology.
3.3 LOGIC AS THE STANDPOINT OF PHILOSOPHY
It is common to start a discussion of Hegel’s ‘logic’ by pointing out that by ‘logic’ we cannot assume that Hegel means what the term means in contemporary philosophy. Hegel did not have in mind that type of formal approach to valid inference that we now think of as the subject matter of logic. Rather, in contrast to any formal consideration of the processes of thought, Hegel says that logic ‘constitutes metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy’.18 Thus many have taken Hegel’s logic to be primarily an account of the constitutive structures of ‘being’.19
Nevertheless, such claims that Hegel’s logic is ‘really’ a metaphysics can obscure both the degree to which it remains a ‘logic’ and the peculiarities of the type of ‘metaphysics’ that such a logic is meant to constitute.20 Hegel certainly resisted any attempt to reduce logic to what he described as a ‘logic of the understanding’, but nevertheless insisted that ‘the mere logic of the understanding is contained in the speculative logic’21 and considered the understanding as ‘the first form of logical thinking’.22 It was
an infinite step forward that the forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged in self-conscious intuition, figurate conception, and in our…ideational desiring and willing…and that these universalities have been brought into prominence for their own sake and made objects of contemplation as was done by Plato and after him especially by Aristotle.23
It is the ‘right’ and ‘merit’ of the understanding that it gives ‘fixity’ and ‘determinacy’ to the domains of theoretical and practical reasoning24 since in philosophy ‘each thought should be grasped in its full precision and…nothing should remain vague and indeterminate’.25
For Hegel, the restriction of logic to the fixed determinations in the ‘logic of the understanding’ is problematic, not because he embraced any ‘irrationalist’ conception of a world-process fundamentally outside the scope of conceptual capture. Rather, he is critical of the ‘logic of the understanding’ because it leaves out the two other essential moments of rational thinking: the negativity of ‘dialectic’, which, as we have seen, brings the fixed determinations of the understanding into contradiction,26 and the positivity of ‘speculation’, which ‘apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and in their transition’.27 It is only these three interconnected dimensions of ‘logic’ that give life to thought.
Despite Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s restrictedness to the understanding, we can still recognize in Hegel’s approach to the categories or ‘thought determinations’ elements of Kant’s ‘metaphysical deduction’ of the categories in the ‘Transcendental analytic, Book 1, Chapter I’ of the Critique of Pure Reason. For Hegel, Kant’s deduction of the categories had relied upon a taxonomy of judgment forms that he had simply accepted from the tradition and not deduced, thus allowing an external determination into a process that should have been one of immanent development. Hegel’s positive use of a dialectic that for Kant had only negative connotations supplies him, he thinks, with the means for expounding this rational development. Thus in the first chapter of Book 1, ‘Being’, we see how developments in the Science of Logic in many ways repeat those of the first chapters of the Phenomenology—now, however, at the level of the determinations of ‘thought’ itself, rather than within the oppositional structure of ‘consciousness’. ‘Being’ is the thought determination with which the work commences because it at first seems to be the most obvious and ‘immediate’: what everything has in common is that it is. ‘Being’ seems to have no presuppositions, but the effort of thought to make such a content determinate as a content for conscious awareness ultimately undermines it and brings about some new content. ‘Being’ seems to be both immediate and simple, but reflection reveals that it itself is, in fact, only determinate by standing in opposition to something else—‘nothing’. In fact, the attempt to think ‘being’ as immediate, and so as not mediated by its opposing concept ‘nothing’, has so deprived it of any determinacy or meaning at all that being has effectively become nothing. The way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, ‘becoming’—the concept that ‘apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition’. We now grasp that ‘being’ was not a self-sufficient concept as it had seemed, but a ‘moment’ of another more inclusive determination that is now affirmed.
The thought determinations of Book 1 lead eventually into those of Book 2, ‘The Doctrine of Essence’. Crucially, the contrasting pair ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ allow the thought of some underlying reality which manifests itself through a different overlying appearance—we are reminded of those ‘forces’ with which ‘the understanding’ in the Phenomenology had been concerned. But distinctions such as ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ will themselves instantiate the relation of determinate negation, and the metaphysical tendency to think of reality as made up of some underlying substrates or forces in contrast to the merely superficial appearance will itself come to grief with the discovery that the notion of an ‘essence’ is only meaningful in relation to the ‘appearance’ that it is meant to explain away.
Hegel is critical of Kant for presupposing an array of judgment forms when deducing the categories, but nevertheless, like Kant, he links these categorial structures to the structures of judgments and inferences they inform. But these must be deduced rather than assumed, and he attempts to do so in the course of Book 3, ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’, this ‘book’ also comprising ‘Volume Two’ of the work, the system of ‘Subjective Logic’.
The account of ‘the concept’ with which Book 3 commences is ‘in the first instance, formal’ and it is here, in chapters 2 (‘The Judgment’) and 3 (‘The Syllogism’) that we find Hegel’s account of formal logic. Clearly Hegel doesn’t mean by ‘concept’ (Begriff, sometimes translated as ‘notion’) what Kant standardly meant—the type of empirical conceptual representation applied in a judgment. Rather, Hegel’s model for ‘concept’ is the ‘transcendental’ concept or ‘idea’ that Kant thought of as ultimately presupposed by the application of any empirical concept—the concept ‘I’.28 We have mentioned Hegel’s innovative recognitive account of the conditions of self-conscious ‘I-hood’ in the Phenomenology, and, to be determinate, such recognitive acts must employ concepts in the way implied by the fact that a slave, for example, recognizes his or her master as a master, and in this affirms his or her own status as a slave. Hegel had made the ‘I’ one such concept, but the ‘I’ is not universal to human life, as Kant thought; rather, it emerges with developments of ‘spirit’ only found in history after the decline of the Greek polis. Possession of the concept ‘I’ will thereby be dependent on the possession of many other concepts, including ones with which an individual will recognize others and recognize the worldly things which mediate relation to others. Thus ‘I’ will be no self-sufficient atomic concept; it must ultimately be conceptually related to many other concepts, and Hegel purports to unpack this implicit content via an examination of the way concepts function in judgments and syllogisms. Thi
s will lead to the puzzling idea that the formal syllogism will generate a content from its own processes and thus give itself objective reality. This is one point on which disagreements as to the sense in which ‘logic’ constitutes a metaphysics will turn.
The concept, Hegel asserts, ‘contains three moments: universality, particularity and singularity (Einzelheit)’29 and these three categories will form the master categories structuring the rest of the exposition. Kant had contrasted the generality of concepts with the ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit) of the intuitive contents needed to make concepts determinate. Hegel also recognizes that merely universal concepts are indeterminate and must become determinate in order to function at all, but rather than indicating the need for the addition of something non-conceptual, he appeals to a different ‘moment’ of conceptuality—particularity. Hegel uses ‘particularity’ (Besonderheit) with the sense it had for the Greeks: a ‘particular’ is to be grasped in terms of the genus-concept specifying the kind instantiated, and is to be distinguished from something singular (Einzelnes)—commonly called a ‘bare particular’. We have in fact seen these crucial distinctions before, in Hegel’s critique of ‘sense-certainty’ in the Phenomenology. What sense-certainty had immediately grasped as singular turned out to be a concept-containing particular—a thing-kind instance. These distinctions will be crucial for Hegel’s account of judgments and inferences, which are taxonomized according to the different ways the concepts constituting them function as universals, particulars, or singulars.
When Hegel comes to discuss judgments in chapter 2 he contrasts two different approaches to the logical structure of judgment that might be taken: a term-first approach in which subject and predicate are ‘considered complete, each on its own account, apart from the other’,30 and an approach in which subject and predicate terms receive their determination ‘in the judgment first’.31 The former clearly reflects the approach of traditional term logics like that of Aristotle, while the latter seems to allude to the approach in which the components of the judgment are treated in terms of their contribution to what is usually thought of as their propositional content, such as in Stoic logic with which Hegel was familiar.32 The significance of these differences comes out clearly in Hegel’s treatment of inferences (‘syllogisms’) in chapter 3, but it also reflects on the differences in the structures of the doctrines of being and essence, as the negations found in being reflect the term negations of term logic, while those of essence reflect the external negations of propositional logics.
Hegel describes the syllogism as ‘the truth of the judgment’,33 a claim that might be read in terms of an ‘inferentialist’ account of judgment content.34 At a ‘formal’ level Hegel shows unexpected sophistication here, as what he has in mind with such a ‘proposition-first’ approach becomes explicit in his discussion of the ‘mathematical syllogism’—an approach to judgment introduced by Leibniz and developed by the Tübingen logician whose influence was felt during Hegel’s time there, Gottfried Ploucquet.35 Rather than, like Aristotle, thinking of the judgment as the joining of a universal-naming predicate to a substance-naming particular subject, Leibniz suggested treating the subject term as itself a predicate, such that ‘S is P’ could be read as identifying terms ‘S’ and ‘P’ in that both could be regarded as being predicated of some (singular) ‘third’ not named in the judgment.36 Treating this relation between subject and predicate as a type of identity—‘S = P’—allowed their mathematical representation. This transformation resulted in the traditional syllogistic being completely reconfigured into what Hegel describes as the ‘syllogism of reflection’, which becomes made up on singular judgments, which allow inductive inferences.
This change in attitude to judgments and syllogisms reflects deep metaphysical differences between ancient and modern thought. Thus, while the objects that the Aristotelian categorical judgments making up the ‘syllogisms of existence’ are about will be instances of thing-kinds to which contingent properties are predicated, this characterization will not hold for the objects of the constituent judgments of ‘syllogisms of reflection’. They are no longer perceivable substances but the abstract ‘posits’ of the understanding. It is clear that for Hegel, Leibniz’s logic, which he treats at the point of transition between these two syllogistic forms,37 actualizes the dialectical self-undermining potential that is implicit in Aristotle’s whole logical project. Leibniz is today championed as the instigator of the type of algebraicization of logic reinvented in the nineteenth century by Boole and others, as well as the type of mechanization of thought that blossomed in the second half of the twentieth century. Hegel treats Leibniz and Ploucquet more as representing the point of dialectical collapse of the traditional syllogistic, but his reasons here are similar to those championing such approaches today. In the judgments of the mathematical syllogism all distinctions between the ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ moments have been levelled as all concepts have been reduced to bare universal predicates applying to singular terms,38 but this undermines the intuitable (diagrammable) relations upon which Aristotelian inferential relations had initially been understood. Logical relations are now just a matter of ‘combinations and permutations’ among symbols and so can be conceived as carried out mechanically—that is, independently of consciousness.39 For Hegel, of course, loss of consciousness represents the death of what is essential for spirit and thought.
That something living—here reason—has to be brought to the point of its death before a proper resolution of the underlying problem is apparent is a recurring theme in Hegel from the Phenomenology’s ‘struggle for recognition’ onwards. Thus, Henry Harris has argued for the importance for Hegel of the example of the pseudo-science of phrenology, where ‘observing reason’ has been forced to the absurd identification of spirit with ‘a bone’.40 Harris’s description of phrenology as ‘the Calvary where singular Reason is crucified, and the spirit of “absolute knowledge” rises from the grave’41 reminds us of the significance of God’s very death in Hegel’s understanding of Christianity. Similarly, Leibniz’s logic represents the ‘ossification’ of thought42 as it reduces the life of thought to the operations of a dead mechanism—here too, thought must somehow ‘rise from the grave’. Clearly something of the Aristotelian speculative philosophy in which thought and existence were not abstractly opposed is called for, but equally clearly the solution must somehow incorporate the new rather than be a simple return to the old, as the negation of the old was already entailed by it.43
The reflective syllogism has provided a new type of inference for a distinctively modern conception of inductive reasoning which attempts to produce generalities from arrays of single instances, but Hegel points out that such reasoning must rely on analogies between individual things, such as when one reasons by analogy, hypothetically inferring properties of some thing on the basis of its similarity to another. One might understand the moon as an earth (each orbits another body), and infer (fallibly) by analogy possible properties of the moon. Like the Phenomenology’s ‘this’ that is also an instance of ‘a this’, here the earth is both a single thing and an instance of a kind. As such it plays the role of a model for the task of understanding other bodies, but it plays this role only because it has been given it by a reasoner in a process of reasoning with it.
Here relations between universals and particulars hold in as much as they are posited by a subject—the ‘I’ from which the determinations of the ‘Subjective Logic’ had started. The inherence of universals within particulars is not simply to be presupposed as in the objective logic, and Aristotelian realism about logical form has given place to a version of Kantian idealism about form. But this Kantian form of idealism must be stripped of the ‘formal’ concept of its presupposed ‘transcendental I’. The ‘I’ must be shown to be itself the product of an objective, historically developed, form of life. Hegel thus describes these processes which we have seen in the ‘ossified’ material of formal logic as ‘pregnant’ with content44—a cont
ent within which can be actualized the hitherto presupposed transcendental ‘I’ itself.
3.3.1 The Return to the Objectivity of Logic and the Transition to ‘Real-Philosophy’
The ‘Subjective Logic’ commenced with the discussion of ‘Subjectivity’ within which Hegel had sketched his historical account of the development of formal logic from Aristotle to Leibniz, but formal logic only presents the ossified material of thought, and so ‘the problem is to render this material fluid and to re-kindle the spontaneity of the Notion in such dead matter’.45 In the next section, ‘Objectivity’, logic regains the sort of objectivity that it had for the ancients before the separation of being and thought, but this objectivity must now accommodate a place for the ‘I’ which has been revealed as an essential component of the logical process. We now have to think of ‘judgments’ and ‘syllogisms’ not simply as subjective acts, but as processes running through the world such that elements of the world can be understood as configurations of thought’s articulation. This sounds like the ancient doctrine of ‘noûs’ or ‘logos’ permeating reality, but this can no longer be thought of independently of the presence of finite beings such as ourselves, through whose activities such processes unfold. And such beings have to be capable of the type of objectivity of thought that allows conceptual life to permeate nature. In this sense, Hegel’s treatment of ‘Objectivity’ in Section Two of Book 3 and, following this, in Section Three, ‘The Idea’, must be read as attempting to exhibit the ‘content’ able to function as objective conditions for this very type of thought.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 12
