Abstract
I argue that Hegel’s Science of Logic is not, as the tradition believes, a metaphysical treatise. Quite to the contrary, it is a highly original theory of semantics. It describes how logic, the categories of which are deposited in language, displays a deep bond with the latter. This entails that logic, rather than being simply concerned with the principles of proof, must also explain the conditions of the possibility of the universe of meaning that we, as linguistic beings, create. More than this, however, it also explains how we, in the very act of giving meaning to the world, place demands for intelligibility that the latter cannot meet. As such, it explains how spirit is driven to break from nature and produce a world of its own, thereby offering us as yet unexcavated resources for comprehending the relationship between first and second nature.
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Notes
- 1.
This tradition, today the most popular, largely goes without opposition. For two of its most popular contemporary expressions, see Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafyette: Purdue University Press, 2006) and Friedrich Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005).
- 2.
Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. This is, at least, Pinkard’s old position.
- 3.
Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- 4.
Klaus Hartmann, ‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,’ Hegel: A Collection of Essays, ed. A. MacIntyre (New York: Double Day, 1972).
- 5.
Cf. Hartmann, who explicitly says: ‘we do not come to “know” things we did not know when we read through Hegel’s categorial arrangement; we merely learn about the rational explanation of categories. From this angle, Hegel’s position in the Logic is an innocuous one, as it cannot possibly conflict with knowledge’ (‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,’ 109). This is because Hartmann argues it is a reconstruction of established discourses.
- 6.
See H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1997), in particular chapters 12 and 13 of vol. 2, and ‘Lecture Notes on Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic [1830], prepared by H.S. Harris for a course during the academic year 1993–1994 at Glendon College, York University, Toronto,’ Manuscripts of H.S. Harris, http://hdl.handle.net/10315/943.
- 7.
George di Giovanni, introduction to Science of Logic, by G.W.F. Hegel, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 8.
di Giovanni, introduction, xliv. This position, however, should be differentiated from that of John Burbidge, who likewise argues that the Logic is a work of logic and that the categories have speculative reach. Burbidge asserts that the categories, because they are historical productions of spirit, have been able to come to reflect the underlying structure of reality as thinking methodologically revised them over time. See The Logic of Hegel’s Logic: An Introduction (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006), 34 f. I argue that the categories are simply logical categories.
- 9.
G.W.F Hegel, Science of Logic [hereinafter cited parenthetically as SL], ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12; GW, 21: 10. Citations of Hegel provide the pagination of the English translation followed by that of the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968). References to the critical edition are given by the abbreviation GW, volume and page number.
- 10.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part l: Science of Logic [hereinafter cited parenthetically as EL], ed. and trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 97, §50 Remark; GW, 20: 87.
- 11.
On this important distinction, which is a central thematic of the Logic, see di Giovanni, introduction, xxxvi.
- 12.
Here I disagree with Pippin, who argues that only with ‘essence’ do we see the beginning of conceptual mediation. It is conceptualization all the way down. Cf. Hegel’s Idealism, 201 ff.
- 13.
In this paragraph, I paraphrase di Giovanni, introduction, xxxv.
- 14.
G.R.G. Mure says something similar when he speaks of the triad, which is first displayed in ‘becoming,’ as the ‘minimale rationale’ (A Study of Hegel’s Logic [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950], 34).
- 15.
di Giovanni, introduction, liii.
- 16.
Mure, A Study of Hegel’s Logic, 79.
- 17.
George di Giovanni, ‘Hegel’s Anti-Sponzism: The Transition to Subjective Logic and the End of Classical Metaphysics,’ in Hegel’s Theory of the Subject, ed. David Gray Carlson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34.
- 18.
Cf. Harris, ‘Lecture Notes,’ 152.
- 19.
Harris makes a similar point: ‘Compared with it [the concept], ordinary concrete things are only abstractions (just like their representative concepts ‘in our minds’[)]’ (‘Lecture Notes,’ 172).
- 20.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, trans. M. J. Petry (London: Humanities Press, 1970) 215, §250 Remark; GW, 20: 240.
- 21.
Most metaphysical readings are, in my opinion, unable to give an adequate explanation of the status of the ‘impotence of nature.’ How can being, as self-determining reason, lead to what is irrational? Houlgate dodges the dilemma in The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. For his part, Beiser recognizes the difficulty, arguing that Hegel has run into an intractable problem concerning the proposed objective status of contingency (see Hegel, 76 ff.): If there are truly things unexplainable by self-determining reason, then there is an outside to the absolute. Interestingly, no such issues arise as soon as if it is our rationality that leads to contingency: While nature may be largely irrational for us, this in no way affects the ‘absolute’ status of the logical forms of human rationality.
- 22.
Harris makes the same point: ‘The human community lives in the world of its own interpretation, and this decides even what counts as “fact” (Dasein) for it’ (Hegel’s Ladder, vol. 2, 726).
- 23.
Of course, for Hegel spirit, as a form of nature that transcends nature, does not emerge in an evolutionary sense.
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Carew, J. (2016). Hegel on the Universe of Meaning: Logic, Language, and Spirit’s Break from Nature. In: McGrath, S., Carew, J. (eds) Rethinking German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53514-6_8
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