Hegel’s analysis of mind and world - the Science of Logic

 
Hegel’s analysis of mind and world:
the Science of Logic
Hegel’s Phenomenology was completed, so Hegel liked to tell people, on the
night of the battle of Jena. However, by the time he published the first
volume of his Science of Logic in  – the later two volumes appeared
between  and  – he had lost his job as a professor, fathered an il-
legitimate son, run a newspaper, found a position teaching philosophy to
high-school students in Nuremberg, and gotten married to a womanfrom
the Nuremberg patriciate (and, by the time the Logic was finished, had fa-
thered a daughter who did not survive and two other sons who did). The
period between the Phenomenology and the Logic covered Napoleon’s tri-
umphant destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian army,
his disastrous invasion of Russia, his exile and comeback, the Congress
of Vienna, and the battle of Waterloo. Whereas the Phenomenology was
completed under the gaze of the Revolution triumphant, the Logic was
completed under the gaze of German monarchs seeking a restoration
of their powers and authority (but, in the case of the large kingdoms
created in Napoleonic Germany, these monarchs also refusing to cede
an inch of the land or property Napoleon had in effect given them).

While in Jena, Hegel had been working on his “system,” which was
to provide a unitary treatment of the philosophy of nature, the philoso-
phy of mind, ethics and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion,
along with a kind of “logic,” as he called it, that was intended to be the
overall structure for the whole enterprise.

In the post-Kantian context,
Hegel’s ambition for his “system” was clear: he was trying to rewrite the

Of course, it all depends on one’s notion of romance as to whether one judges the Logic to have

been completed in more prosaic circumstances than the Phenomenology. Hegel noted in a letter
to his friend, Immanuel Niethammer, that “it is no small matter in the first half year of one’s
marriage to write a book of thirty proofsheets of the most abstruse contents,” Briefe, ,no.;
Hegel: The Letters (trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler) (Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, ), p. .

The development of Hegel’s views in Jena are, of course, much more complex and much less
linear than this sentence suggests. For a more complete account, see Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography,
ch. .

The Science of Logic 
three Kantian Critiques and the other parts of the Kantian system(such
as Kant’s philosophy of nature as it was developed in Kant’s philosophy
of science) in light of the various developments in the post-Kantian liter-
ature and, just as important, in light of the rapidly changing social and
political conditions in Europe.
The Phenomenology was intended to be the introduction to that “sys-
tem,” and the next work (the Logic) was supposed to provide the broad
outlines of what the “system” was about. The link between the Jena
Phenomenology and the Nuremberg Logic has to do with how each in its
respective way takes up Hegel’s generalization of the “Kantian paradox”
into a claimabout normative authority in general. However, whereas the
Phenomenology treated that issue as historical and social, the Logic treated
it more as a problem of “thought” itself, asking: is there a “logic,” a
normative structure, to the way we must think about ourselves and the
world in light of Hegel’s post-Kantian claimthat our thought can be
subject only to those norms of which it can regard itself as the author?
How can “thought,” to use Hegel’s colorful phrase in the Logic,bethe
“other of itself,” both lawgiver and subordinate to the law?


One of Hegel’s main points in reformulating the “Kantian paradox”
in this way was his conviction that the “spirit” of Kant’s philosophy not
only did not entail the dualismof concept and intuition that so many
post-Kantians had found so unsatisfactory, it was in fact opposed to it. For
Hegel, it was Kant himself who had shown that this dualism was unten-
able by virtue of having implicitly demonstrated in his “Transcendental
Deduction” that the normative authority of both concepts and intuitions
had to do with their place within the unity of inference (of reason) itself.
This was a point Hegel had made quite explicitly in an earlier 
essay, “Faith and Knowledge,” published in the journal he and Schelling
edited together.

Hegel was especially taken with Kant’s conception of a

Hegel, Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p. (“Dies ist nun selbst der vorhin
bezeichnete Standpunkt, nach welchemein allgemeines Erstes, an und f¨ur sich betrachtet, sich
als das Andere seiner selbst zeigt.” Italics added by me).

“How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? ...Reason alone is the possibility of this positing,
for Reason is nothing else but the identity of heterogeneous elements of this kind. One can glimpse
this Idea through the shallowness of the deduction of the categories. With respect to space and
time one can glimpse it too ...in the deduction of the categories, where the original synthetic
unity of apperception finally comes to the fore. Here, the original synthetic unity of apperception
is recognized also as the principle of the figurative synthesis, i.e., of the forms of intuition; space
and time are themselves conceived as synthetic unities, and spontaneity, the absolute synthetic
activity of the productive imagination, is conceived as the principle of the very sensibility which
was previously characterized only as receptivity,” “Glauben und Wissen,” Werke, ,pp.–;
Faith and Knowledge,pp.–.
 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel
“figurative synthesis,” which transforms what would otherwise be non-

normatively significant sensations into normatively significant intuitions;
it is in figurative synthesis that we generate the pure intuitions of space
and time (as representations of possible objects) and thereby the form of
the appearing world itself.

Such a view, Hegel argued, indicated that
we could not isolate concepts fromintuitions except in terms of their
normative role within some larger whole. The Logic was intended to be
Hegel’s analysis of what was normatively in play in that “larger whole.”
Rejecting the Fichtean idea that the Kantian distinction between sub-
jects and objects was itself a subjective distinction, Hegel intended the
first section of the Logic to be what he called a “reconstruction” of the
key concepts of pre-Kantian metaphysics – that is, the pre-Kantian at-
tempt to think through the differences between agents and things only in
terms of the categories of “things” in general. Nonetheless, he intended
it not to be historical (as might have perhaps been expected, given the
Phenomenology that preceded it) but to be purely “logical,” that is, to be an
analysis of the ways in which certain typical stances toward metaphysics
in the past have committed themselves to certain positions, such that
in the process of actualizing those concepts in practice and in systems
of thought the “truth” of what was really at play was revealed as being
something quite different than what had originally been argued. The
Logic, that is, was to be the “logic” of the metaphysics of the past that
would show that the various positions assumed in the history of philos-
ophy were not just randommusings, but instead had a kind of internal
drive, which lay in the way that holding ourselves to such-and-such a
view of the world inevitably pushed us into the situation of acknowledg-
ing that what was really normatively in play or at stake was something
else. In that way, Hegel hoped to show that past philosophical positions
were not so much false or illusory as “one-sided,” as attempts to make


Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: “But the figurative synthesis, if it be directed merely to the original
synthetic unity of apperception, that is, to the transcendental unity which is thought in the
categories, must, in order to be distinguished from the merely intellectual combination, be called
the transcendental synthesis of imagination. Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an
object that is not itself present ...But inasmuch as its synthesis is an expression of spontaneity,
which is determinative and not, like sense, determinable merely, and which is therefore able to
determine sense a priori in respect of its form in accordance with the unity of apperception,
imagination is to that extent a faculty which determines the sensibility a priori; and its synthesis
of intuitions, conforming as it does to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of
imagination. This synthesis is an action of the understanding on the sensibility; and is its first
application – and thereby the ground of all its other applications – to the objects of our possible
intuition. As figurative, it is distinguished fromthe intellectual synthesis, which is carried out by
the understanding alone, without the aid of the imagination,” –.
The Science of Logic 
sense of mind and world in ways that contradicted what they were trying
to achieve in holding those views.
To that end, Hegel broke up the Logic into three “books,” which them-
selves are divided into what Hegel calls “the objective logic” (comprised
of the first two “books”) and the “subjective logic.” In particular, the three
“books” of the Logic showed Hegel’s clearly post-Kantian take on philos-
ophy, and the Fichtean overtones to the division were clear: the first two
books laid out the internal logic within pre-Kantian metaphysics as the
attempt to make the distinction between agency and the natural world,
between subject and object, into an objective distinction. (As he put it,
the “objective logic, takes the place ...of the former metaphysics.”

)The
way in which the logic of pre-Kantian metaphysics pushes us ultimately
into a Kantian, and then post-Kantian (that is, Hegelian) position is

supposed to be the impulse that moves one from an “objective” to a
“subjective” logic – from“substance” to “subject,” as he had put it in
his Phenomenology.

In terms of Hegel’s dialectical approach, the various
movements of the Logic lead up to the recognition that what had really
been normatively in play in all our thought about mind and world turned
out to involve Kant’s critical turn, which, in turn, requires a conception
of the “space of reasons” (what Hegel calls the “absolute Idea” at a later
point in his Logic) as that which is really normatively in play in establish-
ing the Kantian, critical turn in the first place. As Hegel put it, with his
flair for the apparently paradoxical: “What is essential for the science of
logic is not so much that the beginning be purely immediate, but rather
that the whole of the science be within itself a cycle in which the first
is also the last and the last is the first.”

One begins with what must be
normatively in play in any thought about mind and world, and one ends
with the “truth” of that commitment, what was really normatively in
play all along.
Hegel, at least at first, understood his Logic to presuppose his
Phenomenology. The lesson of the Phenomenology was that the structure
of reason was social and was therefore a historical achievement, not
a metaphysical structure of things that our minds learned to reflect; and
the Logic was to be the “reconstruction” of our grasp of mind and world
that both presupposed that achievement and showed that it, while not

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p..

As Hegel puts it, “Accordingly, logic should be divided primarily into the logic of the concept as

being and of the concept as concept – or, by employing the usual terms ...into objective and subjective
logic,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p.. (“Cycle” translates “Kreislauf ”.)
 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel
foreordained or already (somehow) existent all along, nonetheless had
a developmental logic internal to itself such that the development of
the pre-Kantian metaphysics of “substance” into the Kantian theory of
“subjectivity” was indeed the logical move to make, even if that move
was not necessitated by any law of history.

   :  ¨
The Logic began with echoes of H¨olderlin’s thoughts about “being” as
expressing our sense of a kind of “orientation” in the world that precedes
all our other orientations and thus as being more basic than any other
concept, including that of “judgment” (and thus beginning with a con-
ception of “truth” as an “immediate,” “primitive” concept). Hegel refers
to this as “being, pure being – without any further determination.”

That is,
the Logic is to begin with something that is prior to and more basic than
any kind of division into “subject” and “object,” and is then to show how
the tensions and contradictions that turn out to be at work in our holding
onto that “thought” of a pre-reflective orientation (which is not yet even
a judgment) show more explicitly what is really normatively in play.
The tension inherent in the conception of “pure, indeterminate
being” is that this “pure thought” has nothing within itself by which it
could be distinguished from“nothing,” and yet the sense of the thought is
just that being is different fromnothing. Thus, as soon as one tries to express
the so-called thought of “pure being,” to express the conception that the

world just “is” (even if we can say nothing about it), one thereby also li-
censes an inference to the judgment that being and nothing are the same.
Thus, what might seem as so obviously true – the claim that “being is”
and “nothing is not,” as the pre-Socratic Greek, Parmenides had phrased
it – ends up instead licensing an inference to its own “opposite”; or, as
Hegel put it: “Now insofar as the sentence: being and nothing are the
same, expresses the identity of these determinations, but in fact equally
contains themboth as distinguished, the proposition itself contradicts
itself and dissolves itself.”


Hegel calls it a “Rekonstruktion” in one place in the Logic, the “Preface to the Second Edition,”
Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.. He also notes that “logic, then, has for
its presupposition the science of appearing spirit, which contains and presents the necessity
and, accordingly, the demonstration of the truth of the standpoint that is pure knowing and its
mediation ...in logic, the presupposition is that which has proved itself to be the result of the
phenomenological survey – the Idea as pure knowledge,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der
Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,pp.–; HeW, ,p..
The Science of Logic 
That proposition “dissolves itself ” by showing that what is really nor-
matively in play in the distinction between “being” and “nothing” is a
background understanding of the world as a whole consisting of “coming
to be” and “ceasing to be” (of “nothing” passing over into “being” and
vice versa).

That is, what we are really (normatively) doing in distin-

guishing being fromnothing is not comparing two distinct “things” in terms
of their properties (as we might think we were doing in distinguishing,
say, maples from oaks, or turtles from rabbits); we are actually making a
move in the normative space of reasons, specifically, working out the kinds
of inferences that are permissible in terms of a conception of the world
as a process of coming-to-be and passing-away, in which we recognize
that what comes to be and what passes away is not nothing, after all, but
something; that this reliance on a conception of “becoming” in fact only
thereby makes explicit the necessity of recognizing that it is something,
some one determinate thing or another, that comes to be or passes away.

Or, to put it more in Hegel’s own preferred idiom, the basic distinction
between “what is” and “what is not” is itself an “abstraction,” a “mo-
ment” of a more comprehensive whole, namely, a world of determinate
things coming into being and passing away.
, ,  “”
On the one hand, the beginning of the Logic does not establish anything
particularly controversial: it shows that our judgments about “being” and
“nothing” require us to speak of something as coming-to-be or passing-
away, assertions which even Hegel himself admits are only “superficial.”

On the other hand, the beginning sections of the “Doctrine of Being”

“It is the form of the simple judgment,” Hegel noted, “when it is used to express speculative
results, which is very often responsible for the paradoxical and bizarre light in which much of
recent philosophy appears to those who are not familiar with speculative thought,” Science of
Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p.. (In saying that, unfortunately, Hegel laid
himself wide open for further misunderstanding by those who wished to see his philosophy in a
“paradoxical and bizarre light,” namely, that he was somehow endorsing the irrationalist view
that “speculative truths” could not be expressed in language at all, something that was exactly

at odds with what he was trying to argue but of which he has been accused ever since.)

As Hegel rather sarcastically puts it, in reference to the saying that “out of nothing, nothing
comes,” “Ex nihilo, nihil fit – is one of those propositions to which great importance was ascribed
in metaphysics. In it is to be seen either only the empty tautology: Nothing is nothing; or, if
becoming is supposed to possess an actual meaning in it, then, since from nothing only nothing
becomes, the proposition does not in fact contain becoming, for in it nothing remains nothing,”
Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

“However, something is still a very superficial determination; just as reality and negation, de-
terminate being and its determinateness, although no longer blank being and nothing, are still
quite abstract expressions,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p..
 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel
serve to bring out Hegel’s main point: what might look like a “reflective
judgment,” in the sense of being a comparison between two items, turns
out to be not a comparison of things at all but a normative ascription of
entitlement, and, for that entitlement to work, it turns out that something
else must be brought normatively into play (or must be revealed to be
already normatively in play in it). In some ways, this is the point of the
Logic as a whole: to say that we know something is not to compare two
“things” at all (as we seemingly do when we match up, for example, a
photograph with what it is about); it is rather to make a normative ascription,
to say that the person making the claim is entitled to the claim. That is, our
ascriptions of knowledge are not comparisons of any kind of subjective
state with something non-subjective but instead are moves within a social
space structured by responsibilities, entitlements, attributions, and the
undertakings of commitments.

The “Doctrine of Being” goes on to develop notions of qualitative,
quantitative, and “measured” distinctions to be made about the world

that comes-to-be and passes-away (the details of which are not crucial
here). Hegel’s discussion, though, is intended to extend his logical point
to what is really at issue for him: in making even such “superficial”
judgments, we are moving in a kind of normative space in which much
more turns out to be normatively required of us than we would have
at first imagined when we started out with such very general and very
abstract conceptions of “something,” “qualitatively different items” and
the like. In particular, these are judgments about finite items, that is,
any two “things” that can only be characterized by their distinction
from something else that is external to them. Such judgments about the
“finite,” so it would seem, also commit us to judgments about the infinite,
since a judgment about some finite thing, a, commits us to a judgment
about another finite thing, b, which in turn commits us to another such
judgment about some c, and so on to infinity.

The language of undertaking and attributing commitments is best developed by Robert
Brandom, Making It Explicit, and in his “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism:
Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual
Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy, () (August ), –, and Tales of the Mighty Dead,
where the extension to Hegel’s conception of agency is explicitly made. I developed a similar
view of Hegel’s conception of agency as a position in social space in Hegel’s Phenomenology. See also
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, where he develops a conception of
Hegel’s view of agency that also draws on Sellarsian notions (which formthe core of Brandom’s
later account). A reading of Hegel in terms of contemporary philosophical concerns, particularly
those concerning the relation of inferentialist semantics to post-Kantian issues (and especially
those having to do with subjective and objective points of view), is masterfully done in Paul
Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ).
The Science of Logic 
The infinite, however, can never be conceived as a single itemitself. For
example, if we think of “the infinite” as the sum-total of all finite things, it

always makes sense to ask whether there could be yet another finite thing
added to the list, and the new infinite sum-total would be another infinite
in contrast to the first. The infinite might thus seem to be the end of a
series of judgments, but it cannot itself be an end-point in the sense that it
is something that we actually reach by following out a series of judgments.
The infinite, that is, cannot be a “thing” that is to be contrasted with
or set alongside the set of all “finite” things. Nor is the infinite some
kind of grand “thing” that “swallows up” the finite and obliterates its
distinctiveness or shows the pluralismof finite things to be some kind
of illusion.

Hegel notes sarcastically that: “This determination of the
true infinite cannot be grasped in the formula ...of a unity of the finite
and infinite; unity is abstract, motionless identity-with-self, and, just as
much, the moments are only unmoved existents.”

Rather than being taken as a single “thing,” the infinite should instead
be taken as the expression of the world-process of things coming-to-be
and passing-away taken as a whole. This world-process of coming-to-be
and passing-away is thus all that there is, and it is within this conception
of a “whole” that all of the various judgments about finite things are to
be legitimated and explained. The world taken as a whole is truly infinite
because there is nothing external to the world with which the world as a
whole could be contrasted or explained. The world as a whole is thus to
be explained in terms internal to the world itself, not in terms of anything
“infinite” and external to it that would supposedly ground the “finite”
world (and especially not in terms of any supernatural infinite

).
Hegel applies the same sort of reasoning to judgments about quanti-

tative features of objects, with the intent being to show that such quan-
titative judgments are not comparisons of two things (say, an equation
and some Platonic entities called numbers), but different ways in which
we ascribe entitlement in, for example, mathematics (such as when one
has actually proved something, and so forth).
The guiding idea in the “Doctrine of Being” has to do with the
transformation of the “Kantian paradox” into a thesis about normative

In Hegel’s idiosyncratic way of putting it: “This sublation (Aufheben) is thus not the sublation of
the something,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,pp.–.

Hegel is clearly aiming at discrediting the idea of explaining the world by some supernatural
infinite – a conception of there being “two worlds, an infinite and a finite,” as he puts it, something
that he thinks clearly contains a “contradiction” once the logic of such a conception is put into
more “explicit form,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..