Part One: The Science of Logic

Introduction

Philosophy lacks the advantage which the other sciences enjoy: it cannot presuppose its objects as immediately given by representation, nor can it presuppose an accepted method of knowing, for starting and going further. (§1)

Its objects are those of religion: truth, in the highest sense — that God, and God alone, is the truth. Both deal with the finite realm of nature and the human spirit, and with their relation to God. Philosophy, however, has to think what religion represents in images and feelings.

The content of philosophy is nothing other than the content that has been produced in the realm of living spirit, originally and spontaneously, and has made itself into a world — the outer and inner world of consciousness; its content is actuality. When I said, in the Preface to my "Philosophy of Right," that what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational, these simple propositions seemed shocking to many, and were attacked even by those who do not wish to renounce philosophy, and certainly religion. But not everything that exists is actual: the contingent, a mere existence, does not deserve the emphatic name of actuality. (§6)

This sentence — "Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig" — was taken by some as a defence of the Prussian state as it was. Hegel explains here that "actual" means what fully realises its rational concept, not whatever happens to exist.

Philosophy is a circle. Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself; but the philosophical idea is in it in a particular determinacy or element. The single circle, because it is in itself a totality, bursts through the limits of its element, and grounds a further sphere. The whole presents itself therefore as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its peculiar elements constitutes the whole idea — which equally appears in each single one. (§15)

The science is divided into three parts: the Logic, the science of the idea in and for itself; the Philosophy of Nature, the science of the idea in its otherness; and the Philosophy of Spirit, the science of the idea as it returns into itself out of its otherness. (§18)

Preliminary Conception: Three Attitudes of Thought towards Objectivity

Before the logic proper, Hegel sets out three ways in which thought has understood its relation to reality.

The first attitude is that of the old metaphysics, which simply trusted thought to grasp things as they are. It applied fixed predicates to God, the soul and the world — "the world is finite or infinite," "the soul is simple" — without asking whether such one-sided determinations could hold of the infinite. It was dogmatic: it took one side of an opposition as true and the other as false.

The second attitude has two forms. Empiricism turned from abstract thought to experience, to what is present here and now, and so gained a great deal; but it cannot reach the universal and necessary, and when it is consistent it ends in Hume's scepticism. The critical philosophy of Kant took up this result: our concepts are valid only of appearances; things in themselves cannot be known. Kant's great merit is to have shown that the categories of the understanding are finite, and that reason, when it applies them to the infinite, falls into contradictions — the "antinomies." But Kant's mistake was his tenderness for the things of the world: contradiction, he thought, cannot belong to the world, but only to our reason. The truth is that there is no object, of any kind, in which no contradiction is to be found.

Hegel's ironical phrase about "tenderness for things" (Zärtlichkeit für die Dinge) appears in his discussion of Kant's antinomies.

The third attitude is that of immediate knowledge — faith or intuition, as taught by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: that God and the truth are known only immediately, by feeling, and that all mediation, all proof, leads only to the finite. Hegel answers that there is nothing, in heaven or in nature or in spirit, that does not contain both immediacy and mediation; and that immediate knowledge, made into a principle, can justify any content whatever — superstition and idolatry as much as the highest truth.

The Logic

The Logic of the Encyclopaedia follows the same course as the larger "Science of Logic," in shorter form. It has three parts.

The Doctrine of Being: being, nothing, becoming; determinate being, something and other, finitude and infinity; being-for-self, the one and the many. Then quantity — continuous and discrete magnitude, number, degree — and measure, in which quality and quantity are united, and in which, at certain nodal points, a quantitative change becomes a leap into a new quality.

The Doctrine of Essence: essence as the ground of existence, with its determinations of identity, difference and contradiction; existence, the thing and its properties; appearance, law, whole and parts, force and expression, inner and outer; then actuality, possibility and necessity, substance, causality and reciprocity, in which necessity is revealed as freedom.

The Doctrine of the Concept: the subjective concept, with its moments of universal, particular and individual, judgement and syllogism; the object, as mechanism, chemism and teleology; and the idea, as life, cognition and the absolute idea.

The absolute idea is the idea that thinks itself. Its content is the system of the logical, which we have now passed through; its form is the method, which is not an external form but the soul and the concept of the content. (§237)

The idea, which is for itself, considered in this its unity with itself, is intuition; and the intuiting idea is nature. But as intuiting, the idea is posited in the one-sided determination of immediacy or negation, through external reflection. The absolute freedom of the idea, however, is that it resolves to release out of itself, freely, the moment of its particularity — its immediate idea as its reflection — as nature. (§244)

So the Logic ends, here as in the larger work, with the passage to nature.