Cognition and Finite Spirit

Abstract

If for Hegel the subjective logic completes the study of pure thought, how can he then include discussions of nature and spirit in his philosophy? Why does thought, which includes mechanism, chemism and the idea of life, have to extend its range to what we can call the philosophy of the real? To answer this question I have already compared what he says in the chapters on chemism and life with the chemical and organic sections of his philosophy of nature.1 But the real world includes the realm of spirit; and in the introduction to his chapter on ‘The Idea of Cognition’ Hegel himself mentions his anthropology, phenomenology and psychology:

[T]he Idea of spirit as the subject matter of logic already stands within the pure science; it has not therefore to watch spirit progressing through its entanglement with nature, with immediate determinateness and material things, or with representation; this is dealt with in the three sciences mentioned above [anthropology, phenomenology and psychology].