Hegel’s Logic Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of The Philosophical Sciences (1830) Translated by William Wallace with a Foreword by Andy Blunden and published by the Marxists Internet Archive, 2008 Marxists Internet Archive P.O. Box 1541; Pacifica, CA 94044; USA. CC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) 2008 by Marxists Internet Archive Printed in Pakistan by Khalid Saleem Blunden, Andy Hegel’s Logic: philosophy, Hegel ISBN: 978-0-9805428-1-6 Contents Hegel’s Logic.........................................................................1 Foreword 1. The Young Hegel and what drove him............................................5 2. The Phenomenology and ‘formations of consciousness’..........16 3. The Subject Matter of the Logic....................................................30 4. The three divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence & Notion....43 5. The Doctrine of Being, or Ontology.............................................57 6. The Doctrine of Essence: Mediation or the Truth of Being.....66 7. The Subject: Universal, Particular and Individual........................76 8. Subject, Object and Idea..................................................................90 9. The Subject and culture: logic and ontology..............................101 10. Critique of the Hegelian dialectic...............................................111 Note on the Text................................................................................119 The Logic I. Introduction.....................................................................................121 II: Preliminary Notion........................................................................144 III. First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity..................................173 IV. Empiricism....................................................................................188 IV. The Critical Philosophy...............................................................195 III. Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge...........................................231 VI. Logic Defined & Divided...........................................................251 VII. BEING........................................................................................264 VIII. ESSENCE.................................................................................313 IX. THE NOTION...........................................................................388 Foreword 1. The Young Hegel and what drove him Germany was fragmented and socially and economically backward In order to understand what Hegel was doing in his Logic, we should first look at the circumstances of his life and the situation in Germany at the time. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, just 620 km from Paris. So he was 18 at the time of the storming of the Bastille and his earliest writing, an essay on the prospects for advancing the Enlightenment by launching a “folk religion,” were penned while a seminary student in 1793, shortly before Robespierre launched his own manufactured religion of the “Supreme Being.” This project fell flat and Robespierre was himself sent to the guillotine shortly afterwards. Mainly under the influence of his friend, the poet Hölderin, Hegel abandoned his youthful disdain for the Christian religion and came to the conviction that, for all its faults, it was Christianity which had ultimately opened the way for the Enlightenment and modernity. He completed his first published book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, in Jena, just as the town was occupied by his hero Napoleon Bonaparte – “The World Spirit on horseback” in Hegel’s words. Napoleon was born the same year as Hegel, but died in 1821 shortly after the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which culminates in the section on World History where Hegel describes the role of world-historic heroes, “living instruments of the world mind.” Napoleon introduced the code civile into Germany, and smashed up its feudal structures. But the first uprisings of the French proletariat against the misery of bourgeois development in France, all took place after Hegel’s death, in the 1830s. 5 HEGEL’S LOGIC The industrial revolution in Britain roughly coincides with Hegel’s lifetime, 1770-1830, but the Chartist Uprisings took place in the 1830s shortly after Hegel’s death. So Hegel saw the revolutionary impact of capitalism and the misery it brought with it, but he never knew a movement of the oppressed, a modern social movement. Also, some of the most brilliant women of the first wave of feminism were amongst his circle of friends, and included his mother and sister, but Hegel himself never accepted the claims of feminism. In fact, he had a dreadfully misogynist, essentialist position on women. Germany did not have a state. Until 1815, Germany was part of what was still called the Holy Roman Empire, which stretched from Nice up the French border to Calais, across to Gdansk, bordering the Russian Empire down through Prague to Rome. It was made up of a patchwork of over 300 small principalities, some Catholic some Protestant, each with their own class structure and traditions and with no solidarity between each other or from their own subjects. England to the North, Revolutionary France to the West, Imperial Russia to the East and Austria-Hungary to the South. The armies of these great powers marched back and forth across Germany, pushing the German princes around as pawns in a power game in which the Germans had no say whatsoever. None of the princes of these little states could count on their citizens to take up arms in their defence. Germany was helpless alongside its powerful neighbors, and wallowed in social and economic backwardness as Revolutionary France made history with its armies and its politicians, and the English built an empire with their money and their new inventions, whilst Germany remained spectators in history. But this was the Germany of Goethe, and Schiller and Beethoven. Hegel drew the conclusion that the German Revolution would have to be made with philosophy rather than with guns and mobs. And it was only relatively late in life (aged 28 in fact) that Hegel resolved to become a professor of philosophy and build his own system. It was the fate of his own country, the problem of 6 FOREWORD modernization and freedom for his native Germany, which was his concern. The Holy Roman Empire was brought to a close in 1815, just as the last volume of the Science of Logic went to press. And at the Congress of Vienna, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s eventual military defeat, the German Federation was created with just 38 components. This situation suited Hegel, and generally speaking, the most creative period of Hegel’s life was the period of the Napoleonic Wars, 1804-1815. We should also remember that Hegel never knew Darwin. The Origin of Species was published almost thirty years after he died. But he was familiar with the theory of Lamarck, and he positively rejected the idea that human beings had evolved out of animals. He knew of Lyell’s theory of geological formation and accepted that the continents were products of a process of formation. But he insisted that there was change but no development in Nature. He actually knew nothing of the pre-history of humanity and as surprising as it may seem for the historical thinker par excellence, he claimed that: “even if the earth was once in a state where it had no living things but only the chemical process, and so on, yet the moment the lightning of life strikes into matter, at once there is present a determinate, complete creature, as Minerva fully armed springs forth from the head of Jupiter.... Man has not developed himself out of the animal, nor the animal out of the plant; each is at a single stroke what it is.” At the time, natural science offered no rational explanation for the appearance of organic life out of inorganic life or of the origins of the human form, language and human history. It is to Hegel’s credit that he did not try to resolve the problem of what he knew little about by appealing to what no-one knew absolutely anything about. He relied almost entirely on the intelligibility of human life as it could be observed: no foundation myths or appeals to a natural order beyond human society or appeals to Eternal Reason or Laws of Nature. In that sense, Hegel’s is a supremely rational philosophy. 7 HEGEL’S LOGIC His misogyny and racism, which led him to exclude women and the peoples of uncivilized nations from being creators of culture, derived from his blindness to the fact of the cultural construction of the human form itself. Although this is a limitation in his philosophy, it is one which is very easy to correct for given all that we know today, 200 years later, and has had little impact on his Logic. Hegel was a modernist opponent of liberalism Hegel presents a contradictory figure. He was an enthusiastic proponent of the Enlightenment, indeed before his career as a professor of philosophy took off, he was briefly a newspaper editor and then for seven years, headmaster of a high school in Nuremberg and more or less dedicated to the ideal of Bildung – a German word usually translated as ‘education’, but carrying a much stronger connotation of personal development and acquisition of culture. So he saw himself much as a foot soldier for the Enlightenment. But it was the combination of witnessing what Kant in particular, but also Fichte and Schelling, achieved as proponents of philosophical systems and as university professors, and the increasing awareness of the unsatisfactory nature of the systems of these, his predecessors in German philosophy, which impelled him to construct a philosophical system of his own. The Enlightenment essentially entailed the expansion of individual freedom, but unlike other proponents of the Enlightenment Hegel was not a liberal. Hegel did not identify freedom with the freedom of individuals from constraint, rooted in an individualist conception of the subject. Now it is true that Hegel’s communitarianism was to an extent sustained by an unwarranted idealization of the ancient Greek polis, somewhat of a fashion of the time. But more importantly, it was his experience of life in Germany which led him to a far deeper conception of freedom. At best, an individual only has the power of the whole community of which they are a part. A citizen of a nation like Germany, which had no state, has no freedom. 8 FOREWORD So in order to understand Hegel we have to let go of the conception of the state as an instrument of oppression or as a limitation on individual freedom, and see the sense in which the state is also an instrument of its citizens and a protector of their freedom. Hegel did not know of the idea of the state as an instrument of class rule, and he conducted a life-long struggle against all those theories which promoted a liberal, or ‘negative’ idea of freedom. For him, the state occupied the space that it occupied for the people of Vietnam and other nations which emerged from the national liberation struggles of the post-World War Two period: that of a social movement. What he describes in his Philosophy of Right, for example, is not of course a social movement, but a state, complete with hereditary monarchy and a public service, but at the deepest level, the level which we find in the Logic, his philosophy is the philosophy of a social movement, of a people who has organised itself around a common cause as a social movement, or at least as a ‘project’. But Hegel wasn’t simply a communitarian; he was deeply concerned with individuality and how the self-determination of an individual person could be realised in and through the acquisition of the culture of the whole community. His central concern was what later came to be called ‘social solidarity’, but his was a far deeper and more nuanced conception than that of Durkheim, for example. What Durkheim called ‘organic’ rather than ‘mechanical’ social solidarity was for Hegel only the first moment in the development of that kind of social solidarity in which individuality could flourish. The real limitation on Hegel’s conception of a social movement is that, as remarked above, he never saw nor ever conceived of, a social movement of the oppressed. He saw no reason to believe that the ‘rabble’ could liberate themselves. Modern theories of self- emancipation are all presaged on the formation of collective self- consciousness and the state is the material expression of collective self-consciousness par excellence. Hegel well understood that the agency of individual human beings can only be constituted in and 9 HEGEL’S LOGIC through social movements and the institutions such movements create. One could go further than that. Hegel was deeply concerned with the role of individuals in bringing about social change, but the conception of the individual which he developed was a radical break from those which had gone before. Even being a world- historical figure did not necessarily mean that you were conscious of what you were doing or that others would be grateful for what you achieved. But it was this concern to find a route to modernity for Germany which led Hegel to an investigation of the source of the differing spirit of peoples and the fate of each nation. Hegel did not invent this study. Before him Kant and in particular Johann Gottfried Herder, who coined the terms Volksgeist and Zeitgeist, had made investigations into the problem. By studying the history of a people, Hegel hoped to discover why one people would make revolution or build an empire, while another people would wallow in disunity and slavery. Now this study of the “psychology of peoples” itself led to a dead end. Modern nations are not subjects in that sense, and Hegel, whose interest was in the fostering of both social solidarity and individuality, realised this. At best the concept could be useful in characterization of an ancient city state or of an isolated community perhaps, or to explain particular aspects of the character of different nations. In today’s context such a project would be seen as reactionary, firstly because it tends to erase differences of class, gender and so on within a people, and secondly because it reeks of a kind of “cultural racism.” But remember firstly that the question was posed from the point of view of the excluded, in this case, the German people who were being ridden roughshod over by the European powers and denied a say over their own affairs; it does make a difference when the question is asked from below, so to speak. But secondly, it asks a legitimate question, and it was a first step towards understanding the specific nature of modern social life and its relation to the psychology of the individuals who constitute a 10