Book One: The Doctrine of Being

Prefaces

The complete transformation which philosophical thinking in Germany has undergone in the last twenty-five years has had little effect on the form of logic. What was formerly called metaphysics has been, so to speak, extirpated root and branch, and has vanished from the ranks of the sciences. A cultured people without metaphysics is like a temple richly ornamented in other respects, but without its holy of holies.

Hegel is writing after Kant, whose "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781) had argued that the old metaphysics — proofs of God, the soul and the world as a whole — was impossible.

Logic, as it has been taught, is a collection of dead forms: concepts, judgements and syllogisms, put together without connection, as an empty framework. These forms have long been fixed and handed down like old bones. The task is to bring them back to life — to show that the forms of thought are not empty containers into which a content must be poured, but that they themselves move, and develop, and have their content in themselves.

In the Preface to the second edition, written in November 1831, a week before his death, Hegel remarked that Plato is said to have revised his "Republic" seven times; a modern work, dealing with a deeper principle and more difficult material, would need to be revised seventy-seven times — but its author is pressed by the many-sided interests of the age.

Introduction: The General Concept of Logic

Logic is the science of pure thought. Its content is not something given from outside, but thought itself; and its form is not separate from its content, for in pure thought, form and content are one.

Logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is, without veil, in and for itself. One can therefore express it thus: that this content is the presentation of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.

One of Hegel's most famous and most argued-over sentences. He does not mean that logic describes a God who existed in time before the world, but that logic is the study of the pure structure of reason, which is at work in nature and in history and is what religion pictures as God.

Logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed from all sensuous concreteness. To study this science, to dwell and labour in this realm of shadows, is the absolute education and discipline of consciousness.

The method of logic is nothing other than the awareness of the form of the inner self-movement of its content. What drives the concept forward is the negative which it has within itself. The one thing needed to achieve scientific progress is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a zero, an abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; that such a negation is not an all-round negation, but the negation of a definite thing which dissolves itself, and is therefore a definite negation. Because the result, the negation, is a definite negation, it has a content. It is a new concept, but a higher, richer concept than the preceding one; for it has been enriched by the negation of that preceding concept, or its opposite; it contains it, and more than it, and is the unity of it and its opposite.

This is Hegel's clearest statement of the "dialectical" method: each concept, thought through, turns into its opposite, and the unity of the two is a new, richer concept.

With What Must Science Begin?

The beginning of philosophy must be either something mediated or something immediate; and it is easy to show that it can be neither the one nor the other. Yet the beginning must be made.

The beginning must be an absolute — or, what here means the same, an abstract — beginning. It may not presuppose anything; it must be mediated by nothing, nor have a ground. It must rather itself be the ground of the entire science. It must therefore be simply an immediacy, or rather only immediacy itself. And so the beginning is pure being.

Hegel answers the old problem of where philosophy should start: not with a principle such as God, the I, or a fact of experience, all of which presuppose too much, but with the emptiest possible thought.

Section One: Quality

Being, Nothing, Becoming

Being, pure being — without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself, and also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no difference within itself, nor any outwardly. If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would not be held fast in its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure, empty intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it; or, it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

Nothing, pure nothing: it is simple equality with itself, complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness in itself. To intuit or think nothing has a meaning; we distinguish between something and nothing; thus nothing is in our intuiting or thinking; or rather, it is empty intuiting and thinking itself, and the same empty intuiting or thinking as pure being. Nothing is therefore the same determination, or rather the same absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as what pure being is.

Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But equally the truth is not their undifferentiatedness, but that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet unseparated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one in the other: becoming — a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately dissolved itself.

These three paragraphs are the most famous in the book. Being and nothing are both completely empty thoughts; thought tries to hold them apart and cannot; what it actually thinks is the passing of one into the other — becoming.

In a long Remark, Hegel answers the objection that it is absurd to say being and nothing are the same — that by this reasoning it would be the same whether my house, my property, the air I breathe, this town, the sun, the law, spirit, God, are or are not. He replies that these are not pure being and pure nothing, but determinate things with a content; and he takes up Kant's example: that a hundred possible thalers are no less, in concept, than a hundred actual ones, though for my financial state it makes all the difference whether I have them. That is true, Hegel says — but it concerns the content of the hundred thalers, not pure being.

Kant had used the hundred thalers to argue against the "ontological proof" of God's existence: existence, he said, is not a property of a concept. Hegel thinks the example is a crude one when the subject is God.

Becoming has two directions: coming-to-be, in which nothing passes into being; and ceasing-to-be, in which being passes into nothing. They balance each other, and becoming collapses into a stable unity: something that has become, that is. This is determinate being — being with a determination: Dasein.

Here Hegel adds his Remark on the word "aufheben" — to sublate — which means both to cancel and to preserve. "What is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy, but is not on that account annihilated." It is, he says, a joy for speculative thought to find words with opposite meanings in its own language.

Determinate Being: Something and Other; Finitude; Infinity

Determinate being is being with a quality: it is a something. But a something is something only in contrast with an other. Each is the other of the other. A something is limited by its other; its limit is what makes it what it is, and at the same time what it is not. Something with its limit is finite.

Finite things are; but their relation to themselves is that they are related to themselves as negative, and in this very self-relation send themselves away beyond themselves, beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their end. The finite not only alters, like something in general, but it ceases to be; and its ceasing to be is not merely a possibility, but it is the nature of finite things that they have the germ of passing away as their being-within-self: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

The finite has a limit, which it is ordered to transcend: it ought to go beyond itself. And so we are led to the infinite. But the infinite, as first conceived, is simply the not-finite — the beyond of the finite. It is set over against the finite, and thus is itself limited by it; it is itself a finite. This is the spurious infinite — the "bad" infinite: the endless progress, in which the finite is always passed beyond, and always arises again. Its image is the straight line, going on to infinity at both ends, and never reaching it.

The true infinite is not a beyond. It is the movement of the finite transcending itself and returning into itself. Its image is the circle — the line that has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning and end.

The distinction between the "bad" (schlechte) infinite of endless succession and the "true" infinite of self-relation is one of Hegel's most important ideas.

The finite, sublated in the true infinite, is ideal: it is preserved, but as a moment, not as something independent. The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism.

Being-for-Self: The One and the Many

Being that has returned into itself, that relates only to itself, is being-for-self. Its simplest form is the One. But the One, relating itself negatively to itself, repels itself from itself, and so posits many Ones. The Many Ones repel each other; but in repelling they are related, and so they also attract each other. Repulsion and attraction are the two sides of one process.

Here Hegel engages with the ancient atomists, for whom the world is made of atoms in the void, and with Kant's account of matter as attractive and repulsive forces.

The Ones, all alike, have lost their quality: one One is just like another. Quality has become indifferent. What remains is pure quantity.

Section Two: Quantity

Quantity is being in which determinateness has become indifferent: a thing remains what it is, whether it is greater or smaller. A house remains a house, red remains red, whether larger or smaller. Quantity is sublated quality.

Pure quantity is both continuous and discrete: a continuous magnitude, like space or time, which can be divided at any point; and a discrete magnitude, made of separate units. Each is both: the continuous contains the possibility of division, and the discrete is held together by the unit.

Quantity, limited, becomes a quantum — a determinate amount. Its complete determination is number: the unity of amount and unit. Quantum is either extensive — a magnitude made of many parts, like a length — or intensive — a degree, like a temperature, which is a single, simple magnitude, though measured by a scale.

Quantum, like the finite, drives beyond itself: every quantum can be increased or diminished; there is always a greater. This is the quantitative infinite — again, in its "bad" form, the endless progression of number. In a long series of Remarks, Hegel examines the mathematical infinite — the infinitesimals of the differential and integral calculus of Newton and Leibniz — and argues that the infinitely small is to be grasped not as a tiny amount, but as a vanishing magnitude, a ratio whose terms have lost their independent value.

These Remarks on the calculus take up a large part of Book One; they are summarised here in a sentence. Hegel's views on the mathematics of his time have been much debated.

The truth of quantum is quantitative ratio: a relation of two quanta to each other, in which the quantum has its determinateness not in itself, but in its relation to another. In the ratio of powers — the square, for example — quantity relates itself to itself. And with this, quantity returns to quality.

Section Three: Measure

Measure is the unity of quality and quantity: a qualitative quantum, a quantity on which a quality depends. Everything that is has a measure. Every existing thing has a magnitude, and this magnitude belongs to the nature of the thing itself. Within a certain range, a thing's quantity can change without its quality changing; beyond that range, the quality changes.

The ancient Greeks honoured measure as divine: Nemesis, says Hegel, is the power that punishes whatever exceeds its measure.

So water, as its temperature is gradually lowered, does not grow gradually harder until it becomes ice; it suddenly hardens all at once. It has already sunk to freezing point; then at a certain point it turns into ice. Here a merely quantitative change passes suddenly into a qualitative one. This is a "nodal line of measure-relations": a scale of quantity, along which, at certain points, a leap occurs into a new quality.

This passage — "the transformation of quantity into quality" — was taken up by Marx and especially by Engels, and became a "law of dialectics" in Marxist philosophy.

All birth and death, instead of being a continued gradualness, are rather a breaking-off of gradualness, a leap out of quantitative change into qualitative change. It is said that there is no leap in nature; and ordinary thinking, when it has to grasp a coming-to-be or a passing away, thinks it has done so by representing it as a gradual emergence or disappearance. But the changes of being are not only a transition of one magnitude into another, but a transition from the qualitative into the quantitative, and vice versa — a becoming-other which breaks off gradualness.

Beyond every measure lies the measureless — the excess in which a thing passes into another. But the measureless is itself a measure, a new one. And so, beneath all this changing of measures, there persists a single substrate, indifferent to its determinations: absolute indifference. In it, being has become the movement by which it repels its determinations from itself and takes them back. Being has gone into itself. Its truth is essence.