SCIENCE OF LOGIC
IN THIRTEEN WEBPAGE PARTS

PART ONE

Translated by A. V. Miller George Allen & Unwin, 1969

Born in Stuttgart and educated in Tübingen, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel devoted his life wholly to academic pursuits, teaching at Jena, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and Berlin. His Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) (1812-1816) attributes the unfolding of concepts of reality in terms of the pattern of dialectical reasoning (thesis — antithesis — synthesis) that Hegel believed to be the only method of progress in human thought, and  Die Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences) (1817) describes the application of this dialectic to all areas of human knowledge. Hegel's Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse and Gundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right) (1820) provide an intellectual foundation for modern nationalism.

Hegel’s Science of Logic

Preface to the First Edition

§ 1

The complete transformation which philosophical thought in Germany has undergone in the last twenty-five years and the higher standpoint reached by spirit in its awareness of itself, have had but little influence as yet on the structure of logic.

§ 2

That which, prior to this period, was called metaphysics has been, so to speak, extirpated root and branch and has vanished from the ranks of the sciences. The ontology, rational psychology, cosmology, yes even natural theology, of former times - where is now to be heard any mention of them, or who would venture to mention them? Inquiries, for instance, into the immateriality of the soul, into efficient and final causes, where should these still arouse any interest? Even the former proofs of the existence of God are cited only for their historical interest or for purposes of edification and uplifting the emotions. The fact is that there no longer exists any interest either in the form or the content of metaphysics or in both together. If it is remarkable when a nation has become indifferent to its constitutional theory, to its national sentiments, its ethical customs and virtues, it is certainly no less remarkable when a nation loses its metaphysics, when the spirit which contemplates its own pure essence is no longer a present reality in the life of the nation.

§ 3

The exoteric teaching of the Kantian philosophy - that the understanding ought not to go beyond experience, else the cognitive faculty will become a theoretical reason which itself generates nothing but fantasies of the brain - this was a justification from a philosophical quarter for the renunciation of speculative thought. In support of this popular teaching came the cry of modern educationists that the needs of the time demanded attention to immediate requirements, that just as experience was the primary factor for knowledge, so for skill in public and private life, practice and practical training generally were essential and alone necessary, theoretical insight being harmful even. Philosophy [Wissenschaft] and ordinary common sense thus co-operating to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, there was seen the strange spectacle of a cultured nation without metaphysics - like a temple richly ornamented in other respects but without a holy of holies. Theology, which in former times was the guardian of the speculative mysteries and of metaphysics (although this was subordinate to it) had given up this science in exchange for feelings, for what was popularly matter-of-fact, and for historical erudition. In keeping with this change, there vanished from the world those solitary souls who were sacrificed by their people and exiled from the world to the end that the eternal should be contemplated and served by lives devoted solely thereto - not for any practical gain but for the sake of blessedness; a disappearance which, in another context, can be regarded as essentially the same phenomenon as that previously mentioned. So that having got rid of the dark utterances of metaphysics, of the colourless communion of the spirit with itself, outer existence seemed to be transformed into the bright world of flowers - and there are no black flowers, as we know.

§ 4

Logic did not fare quite so badly as metaphysics. That one learns from logic how to think (the usefulness of logic and hence its purpose, were held to consist in this - just as if one could only learn how to digest and move about by studying anatomy and physiology) this prejudice has long since vanished, and the spirit of practicality certainly did not intend for logic a better fate than was suffered by the sister science.

§ 5

Nevertheless, probably for the sake of a certain formal utility, it was still left a place among the sciences, and indeed was even retained as a subject of public instruction. However, this better lot concerns only the outer fate of logic, for its structure and contents have remained the same throughout a long inherited tradition, although in the course of being passed on the contents have become ever more diluted and attenuated; logic shows no traces so far of the new spirit which has arisen in the sciences no less than in the world of actuality. However, once the substantial form of the spirit has inwardly reconstituted itself, all attempts to preserve the forms of an earlier culture are utterly in vain; like withered leaves they are pushed off by the new buds already growing at their roots.

§ 6

Even in the philosophical sphere this ignoring of the general change is beginning gradually to come to an end. Imperceptibly, even those who are opposed to the new ideas have become familiar with them and have appropriated them, and if they continue to speak slightingly of the source and principles of those ideas and to dispute them, still they have accepted their consequences and have been unable to defend themselves from their influence; the only way in which they can give a positive significance and a content to their negative attitude which is becoming less and less important, is to fall in with the new ways of thinking.

§ 7

On the other hand, it seems that the period of fermentation with which a new creative idea begins is past. In its first manifestation, such an idea usually displays a fanatical hostility toward the entrenched systematisation of the older principle; usually too, it is fearful of losing itself in the ramifications of the particular and again it shuns the labour required for a scientific elaboration of the new principle and in its need for such, it grasps to begin with at an empty formalism. The challenge to elaborate and systematise the material now becomes all the more pressing. There is a period in the culture of an epoch as in the culture of the individual, when the primary concern is the acquisition and assertion of the principle in its undeveloped intensity. But the higher demand is that it should become systematised knowledge.

§ 8

Now whatever may have been accomplished for the form and content of philosophy in other directions, the science of logic which constitutes metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy, has hitherto still been much neglected. What it is exactly that I understand by this science and its standpoint, I have stated provisionally in the Introduction.

The fact that it has been necessary to make a completely fresh start with this science, the very nature of the subject matter and the absence of any previous works which might have been utilised for the projected reconstruction of logic, may be taken into account by fair-minded critics, even though a labour covering many years has been unable to give this effort a greater perfection. The essential point of view is that what is involved is an altogether new concept of scientific procedure.

Philosophy, if it would be a science, cannot, as I have remarked elsewhere, borrow its method from a subordinate science like mathematics, any more than it can remain satisfied with categorical assurances of inner intuition, or employ arguments based on grounds adduced by external reflection. On the contrary, it can be only the nature of the content itself which spontaneously develops itself in a scientific method of knowing, since it is at the same time the reflection of the content itself which first posits and generates its determinate character.

§ 9

The understanding determines, and holds the determinations fixed; reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive because it generates the universal and comprehends the particular therein.

Just as the understanding is usually taken to be something separate from reason as such, so too dialectical reason is usually taken to be something distinct from positive reason. But reason in its truth is spirit which is higher than either merely positive reason, or merely intuitive understanding.

It is the negative, that which constitutes the quality alike of dialectical reason and of understanding; it negates what is simple, thus positing the specific difference of the understanding; it equally resolves it and is thus dialectical.

But it does not stay in the nothing of this result but in the result is no less positive, and in this way it has restored what was at first simple, but as a universal which is within itself concrete; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal but in this determining, this positing of a difference, and the resolving of it, the particular has at the same time already determined itself. This spiritual movement which, in its simple undifferentiatedness, gives itself its own determinateness and in its determinateness its equality with itself, which therefore is the immanent development of the Notion, this movement is the absolute method of knowing and at the same time is the immanent soul of the content itself.

I maintain that it is this self-construing method alone which enables philosophy to be an objective, demonstrated science.

§ 10

It is in this way that I have tried to expound consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as a concrete knowing, a knowing too, in which externality is involved; but the development of this object, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic.

Consciousness, as spirit in its manifestation which in its progress frees itself from its immediacy and external concretion, attains to the pure knowing which takes as its object those same pure essentialities as they are in and for themselves. They are pure thoughts, spirit thinking its own essential nature. Their self-movement is their spiritual life and is that through which philosophy constitutes itself and of which it is the exposition.

§ 11

In the foregoing there is indicated the relation of the science which I call the Phenomenology of Spirit, to logic. As regards the external relation, it was intended that the first part of the System of Science which contains the Phenomenology should be followed by a second part containing logic and the two concrete [realen] sciences, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit, which would complete the System of Philosophy. But the necessary expansion which logic itself has demanded has induced me to have this part published separately; it thus forms the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit in an expanded arrangement of the system. It will later be followed by an exposition of the two concrete philosophical sciences mentioned. This first volume of the Logic contains as Book One the Doctrine of Being; Book Two, the Doctrine of Essence, which forms the second part of the first volume, is already in the press; the second volume will contain Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion.

Nuremberg, March 22, 1812.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Preface to the Second Edition § 12

When I undertook this fresh elaboration of the Science of Logic of which this is the first volume, I was fully conscious - not only of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and of its exposition, but also of the imperfection of its treatment in the first edition; earnestly as I have tried after many years of further occupation with this science to remedy this imperfection, I feel I still have reason enough to claim the indulgence of the reader. One title to such claim in the first instance may well be based on the fact that in the main there was available for the contents of the science only external material in the older metaphysics and logic. Though these two sciences have been universally and abundantly cultivated, the latter even up to our own day, the interest taken in the speculative side has been only slight; in fact, on the whole, the same material has been just repeated over and over again, sometimes being thinned out to the point of being trivial and superficial and sometimes more of the old ballast has been hauled out afresh and trailed along with logic. From such efforts, often purely mechanical, the philosophical import of the science could gain nothing.

§ 13

To exhibit the realm of thought philosophically, that is, in its own immanent activity or what is the same, in its necessary development, had therefore to be a fresh undertaking, one that had to be started right from the beginning; but this traditional material, the familiar forms of thought, must be regarded as an extremely important source, indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offers is only here and there a meagre shred or a disordered heap of dead bones

§ 14

The forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored as human language. Nowadays we cannot be too often reminded that it is thinking which distinguishes man from the beasts. Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated, and everything that he has transformed into language and expresses in it contains a category - concealed, mixed with other forms or clearly determined as such, so much is Logic his natural element, indeed his own peculiar nature. If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes. It is an advantage when a language possesses an abundance of logical expressions, that is, specific and separate expressions for the thought determinations themselves; many prepositions and articles denote relationships based on thought; the Chinese language is supposed not to have developed to this stage or only to an inadequate extent. These particles, however, play quite a subordinate part having only a slightly more independent form than the prefixes and suffixes, inflections and the like. It is much more important that in a language the categories should appear in the form of substantives and verbs and thus be stamped with the form of objectivity. In this respect German has many advantages over other modern languages; some of its words even possess the further peculiarity of having not only different but opposite meanings so that one cannot fail to recognise a speculative spirit of the language in them: it can delight a thinker to come across such words and to find the union of opposites naively shown in the dictionary as one word with opposite meanings, although this result of speculative thinking is nonsensical to the understanding. Philosophy therefore stands in no need of a special terminology; true, some words have to be taken from foreign languages but these have already acquired through usage the right of citizenship in the philosophical realm - and an affected purism would be most inappropriate where it was the distinctive meaning which was of decisive importance. The advance of culture generally, and of the sciences in particular, gradually brings into use higher relationships of thought, or at least raises them to greater universality and they have thus attracted increased attention. This applies even to the empirical and natural sciences which in general employ the commonest categories, for example, whole and parts, a thing and its properties, and the like.

§ 15

In physics, for example, the category of force has become predominant, but more recently the category of polarity which is the determination of a difference in which the different terms are inseparably conjoined, has played the leading part although it has been used inordinately in connection with all phenomena, even with light.

It is a matter of infinite importance that in this way an advance has been made beyond the form of abstraction, of identity, by which a specific concept, as, for example, force, acquires an independent self-subsistence, and that prominence and currency have been given to the determinate form, the difference, which is at the same time an inseparable element in the identity. Because of the fixed reality of natural objects the study of nature compels us to fix the categories which can no longer be ignored in her, although with complete inconsistency towards other categories which are also allowed to remain valid; and such study does not permit the further step of abstracting from the opposition and indulging in generalities as so easily happens in the intellectual sphere.

§ 16

But while logical objects and their expressions may be thoroughly familiar to educated people it does not follow, as I have said elsewhere, that they are intelligently apprehended; and to have to occupy oneself with what is familiar can even arouse impatience - and what is more familiar than just those determinations of thought which we employ on every occasion, which pass our lips in every sentence we speak?

It is the purpose of this foreword to indicate the general features of the course followed by knowing in its advance beyond a mere acquaintance with its objects, of the relation of philosophical [wissenschaftlichen] thinking to this natural thinking. This much, together with what was contained in the earlier Introduction, will be sufficient to give a general idea of what is meant by logical cognition, the kind of preliminary general idea which is demanded in the case of any science prior to its exposition, that is, prior to the import of the science itself.

§ 17

In the first place, we must regard it as an infinite step forward that the forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged in self- conscious intuition, figurate conception, and in our desiring and willing, or rather in ideational desiring and willing - and there is no human desiring or willing without ideation - and that these universalities have been brought into prominence for their own sake and made objects of contemplation as was done by Plato and after him especially by Aristotle; this constitutes the beginning of the intelligent apprehension of them.

'It was only', says Aristotle, 'after almost everything necessary and everything requisite for human comfort and intercourse was available, that man began to concern himself with philosophical knowledge' 'In Egypt', he had previously remarked, 'there was an early development of the mathematical sciences because there the priestly caste at an early stage were in a position to have leisure'.

§ 18

As a matter of fact, the need to occupy oneself with pure thought presupposes that the human spirit must already have travelled a long road.

In the silent regions of thought which has come to itself and communes only with itself, the interests which move the lives of races and individuals are hushed. it is, one may say, the need of the already satisfied need for the necessities to which it must have attained, the need of a condition free from needs, of abstraction from the material of intuition, imagination, and so on, of the concrete interests of desire, instinct, will, in which material the determinations of thought are veiled and hidden. In the silent regions of thought which has come to itself and communes only with itself, the interests which move the lives of races and individuals are hushed.

§ 19

'In so many respects', says Aristotle in the same context, 'the nature of man is in bondage; but this science, which is not studied for its utility, is the only absolutely free science and seems therefore to be a more than human possession.' Philosophical thinking in general is still concerned with concrete objects
- God, nature, spirit; but logic is concerned only and solely with these thoughts as thoughts, in their complete abstraction. For this reason it is customary, to include logic in the curriculum of youth, for youth is not yet involved in the practical affairs of life, living at leisure so far as they are concerned; and it is only for its own subjective ends that it has to busy itself with acquiring the means to enable it to become actively engaged with the objects of those practical interests - and still theoretically even with these. Contrary to Aristotle's view just mentioned, the science of logic is included in these means; the study of logic is a preliminary labour to be carried out in school and it is not until later that the serious business of life and the pursuit of substantial ends begins.

§ 20

In life, the categories are used; from the honour of being contemplated for their own sakes they are degraded to the position where they serve in the creation and exchange of ideas involved in intellectual exercise on a living content. First they serve as abbreviations through their universality (for what a host of particulars of outer existence and actions is embraced by a conception - battle, war, nation, ocean or animal, for example - and in the conception of God or of love there is epitomised in the simplicity of such ideating an infinite host of ideas, actions, states, etc.!).

Secondly, the categories serve for the more exact determination and discovery of objective relations; but in this process the import and purpose, the correctness and truth of the thought involved, are made to depend entirely on the subject matter itself and the thought determinations are not themselves credited with any active part in determining the content. Such a use of categories, which above was called natural logic, is unconscious; and when in philosophical reflection the categories are assigned the role of serving as means, then thinking as such is treated as something subordinate to the other activities of mind. We do not indeed say of our feelings, impulses or interests that they serve us, rather do they count as independent forces and powers, so that to have this particular feeling, to desire this, is what we are. But probably we are more conscious of obeying our feelings, impulses, passions, interests, not to mention habits, than of having them in our possession, still less, in view of our intimate union with them, of their being at our disposal. Such determinations of feeling and mind soon show themselves as particular in contrast to the universality which we are conscious ourselves of being and in which we have our freedom; and we are disposed to regard ourselves as caught up in these particular states and dominated by them.

§ 21

Consequently it is much more difficult to believe that the forms of thought which permeate all our ideas - whether these are purely theoretical or contain a matter belonging to feeling, impulse, will - are means for us, rather than that we serve them, that in fact they have us in their possession; what is there more in us as against them, how shall we, how shall I, set myself up as more universal than they, which are universal as such?

When we give ourselves up to a sensation, a purpose, an interest, and in it feel ourselves confined and unfree, the place into which we can withdraw ourselves back into freedom is this region of self-certainty, of pure abstraction, of thought. Or again, to speak of things, we call the nature or the essence of things their notion, and this is only for thought; but still less shall we say of the notions of things that we dominate them, or that the determinations of thought of which they are the complex are at our service; on the contrary, it is our thinking that must accommodate itself to them and our caprice or freedom ought not to want to mould them to suit itself.

§ 22

Since, therefore, subjective thought is our very own, innermost, act, and the objective notion of things constitutes their essential import, we cannot go outside this our act, we cannot stand above it, and just as little can we go beyond the nature of things. We can however disregard the latter determination; in so far as it coincides with the first it would yield a relation of our thoughts to the object, but this would be a valueless result because it would imply that the thing, the object, would be set up as a criterion for our notions and yet for us the object can be nothing else but our notions of it. The way in which the critical philosophy understands the relationship of these three terms is that we place our thoughts as a medium instead of connecting us with the objects rather cuts us off from them. But this view can be countered by the simple observation that these very things which are supposed to stand beyond us, and at the other extreme, beyond the thoughts referring to them, are themselves figments of subjective thought, and as wholly indeterminate they are only a single thought-thing - the so-called thing-in-itself of empty abstraction.

§ 23

Still, sufficient has been said of the point of view which no longer takes the determinations of thought to be only an instrument and a means; more important is the further point connected with it, namely that it is usual to regard them as an external form. The activity of thought which is at work in all our ideas, purposes, interests and actions is, as we have said, unconsciously busy (natural logic); what we consciously attend to is the contents, the objects of our ideas, that in which we are interested; on this basis, the determinations of thought have the significance of forms which are only attached to the content, but are not the content itself. But if the truth of the matter is what we have already stated and also is generally admitted, namely that the nature, the peculiar essence, that which is genuinely permanent and substantial in the complexity and contingency of appearance and fleeting manifestation, is the notion of the thing, the immanent universal, and that each human being though infinitely unique is so primarily because he is a man, and each individual animal is such individual primarily because it is an animal: if this is true, then it would be impossible to say what such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed, no matter how richly endowed the individual might be with other predicates, if, that is, this foundation can equally be called a predicate like the others. The indispensable foundation, the notion, the universal which is the thought itself, in so far as one can make abstraction from the general idea expressed by the word 'thought', cannot be regarded as only an indifferent form attached to a content. But these thoughts of everything natural and spiritual, even the substantial content , still contain a variety of determinatenesses and are still charged with the difference of a soul and a body, of the notion and a relative reality; the profounder basis is the soul itself, the pure Notion which is the very heart of things, their simple life-pulse, even of subjective thinking of them.

To focus attention on this logical nature which animates mind, moves and works in it, this is the task. The broad distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free act is that the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done; when the content of the interest in which one is absorbed is drawn out of its immediate unity with oneself and becomes an independent object of one's thinking, then it is that spirit begins to be free, whereas when thinking is an instinctive activity, spirit is enmeshed in the bonds of its categories and is broken up into an infinitely varied material.

§ 24

Here and there in this mesh there are firm knots which give stability and direction to the life and consciousness of spirit; these knots or nodes owe their fixity and power to the simple fact that having been brought before consciousness, they are independent, self-existent Notions of its essential nature. The most important point for the nature of spirit is not only the relation of what it is in itself to what it is actually, but the relation of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is; because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a fundamental determination of its actuality.

§ 25

As impulses the categories are only instinctively active. At first they enter consciousness separately and so are variable and mutually confusing; consequently they afford to mind only a fragmentary and uncertain actuality; the loftier business of logic therefore is to clarify these categories and in them to raise mind to freedom and truth.

§ 26

What we indicated as the beginning of the science [of logic] - a beginning which we have already recognised as having a high value both on its own account and as a condition of genuine knowledge - namely, the treatment of Notions generally and the moments of the Notion, that is, the determinations of thought, primarily as forms which are distinct from the matter of thought and only attached to it, this attitude directly reveals itself as intrinsically inadequate for the attainment of truth - and the truth is the declared object of and aim of logic. For, as such mere forms, as distinct from the content, they are assumed to be standing in a determination which stamps them as finite and makes them incapable of holding the truth which is in its own self infinite. In whatever respect the true may be associated with limitation and finitude, this is the aspect of its negation, of its untruth and unreality, that is, of its end, not of the affirmation which, as the true, it is.

§ 27

Faced with the baldness of the merely formal categories, the instinct of healthy common sense has, in the end, felt itself to be so much in the right that it has contemptuously abandoned acquaintanceship with them to the domain of school logic and metaphysics; at the same time, common sense fails to appreciate the value even of a proper awareness of these fragments and is quite unaware that in the instinctive thinking of natural logic, and still more in the deliberate rejection of any acquaintance with or knowledge of the thought determinations themselves, it is in bondage to unclarified and therefore unfree thinking. The simple basic determination or common form of the collection of such forms is identity which, in the logic of this collection, is asserted as the law of identity, as A = A, and as the principle of contradiction. Healthy common sense has so much lost its respect for the school which claims possession of such laws of truth and still busies itself with them that it ridicules it and its laws and regards anyone as insufferable who can utter truths in accordance with such laws: the plant is - a plant, science is - science. It has also formed an equally just estimate of the significance of the formulas which constitute the rules of syllogising which in fact is a cardinal function of the understanding (although it would be a mistake not to recognise that these have their place in cognition where they must be obeyed); it knows that the formulas quite as well serve impartially error and sophistry and that however truth may be defined, they cannot serve higher, for example, religious truth - that generally speaking they concern only the correctness of the knowledge of facts, not truth itself.

§ 28

The inadequacy of this way of regarding thought which leaves truth on one side can only be made good by including in our conception of thought not only that which is usually reckoned as belonging to the external form but the content as well. It is soon evident that what at first to ordinary reflection is, as content, divorced from form, cannot in fact be formless, cannot be devoid of inner determination; if it were, then it would be only vacuity, the abstraction of the thing-in- itself; that, on the contrary, the content in its own self possesses form, in fact it is through form alone that it has soul and meaning, and that it is form itself which is transformed only into the semblance of a content, hence into the semblance of something external to this semblance. With this introduction of the content into the logical treatment, the subject matter is not things but their import, the Notion of them. But in this connection we can be reminded that there is a multitude of Notions, a multitude of objects [Sache]. We have, however, already said how it is that restrictions are imposed on this multitude, that the Notion, simply as thought, as a universal, is the immeasurable abbreviation of the multitudes of particular things which are vaguely present to intuition and pictorial thought; but also a Notion is, first, in its own self the Notion, and this is only one and is the substantial foundation; secondly, a Notion is determinate and it is this determinateness in it which appears as content: but the determinateness of the Notion is a specific form of this substantial oneness, a moment of the form as totality, of that same Notion which is the foundation of the specific Notions.

This Notion is not sensuously intuited or represented; it is solely an object, a product and content of thinking, and is the absolute, self-subsistent object, the logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things; it is least of all the logos which should be left outside of the science of logic.

Therefore its inclusion in or omission from this science must not be simply a matter of choice. When those determinations of thought which are only external forms are truly considered in themselves, this can only result in demonstrating their finitude and the untruth of their supposed independent self-subsistence, that their truth is the Notion. Consequently, the science of logic in dealing with the thought determinations which in general run through our mind instinctively and unconsciously - and even when they become part of the language do not become objects of our attention - will also be a reconstruction of those which are singled out by reflection and are fixed by it as subjective forms external to the matter and import of the determinations of thought.

§ 29

No subject matter is so absolutely capable of being expounded with a strict immanent plasticity as is thought in its own necessary development; no other brings with it this demand in such a degree; in this respect the Science of Logic must surpass even mathematics, for no subject matter has in its own self this freedom and independence. Such an exposition would demand that at no stage of the development should any thought-determination or reflection occur which does not immediately emerge at this stage and that has not entered this stage from the one preceding it - a requirement which is satisfied, after its fashion, in the process of mathematical reasoning. However, such an abstract perfection of exposition must, I admit, in general be dispensed with; the very fact that the science must begin with what is absolutely simple, that is, with what is most general and of least import, would restrict the exposition solely to these same quite simple expressions of the simple without any further addition of a single word; all that could properly be admitted would be negative considerations intended to ward off and banish any heterogeneous elements which otherwise might be introduced by pictorial thought or unregulated thinking. However, such intrusive elements in the simple immanent course of the development are themselves contingent, so that the effort to ward them off is itself tainted with this contingency; besides which it is futile to try to deal with all of them, lying as they do outside the subject matter, and in any case, any demand for a systematic disposal of such random reflections could only be partially satisfied. But the peculiar restlessness and distraction of our modern consciousness compel us to take some account of the more readily suggested reflections and opinions. A plastic discourse demands, too, a plastic receptivity and understanding on the part of the listener; but youths and men of such a temper who would calmly suppress their own reflections and opinions in which original thought is so impatient to manifest itself, listeners such as Plato feigned, who would attend only to the matter in hand, could have no place in a modern dialogue; still less could one count on readers of such a disposition. On the contrary, I have been only too often and too vehemently attacked by opponents who were incapable of making the simple reflection that their opinions and objections contain categories which are presuppositions and which themselves need to be criticised first before they are employed. Ignorance in this matter reaches incredible lengths; it is guilty of, the fundamental misunderstanding, the uncouth and uneducated behaviour of taking a category which is under consideration for something other than the category itself. This ignorance is the less justifiable because this 'something other' consists of determinate thoughts and concepts, and in a system of logic these other categories must likewise have been assigned their own place and must themselves have been subjected to critical examination within the system. This ignorance is most obvious in the great majority of the objections and attacks on the first Notions of logic, being and nothing, and becoming which, itself a simple determination - the simplest analysis shows it to be so - contains the two other determinations as moments. Thoroughness seems to require that the beginning, as the foundation on which everything is built, should be examined before anything else, in fact that we should not go any further until it has been firmly established and if, on the other hand, it is not, that we should reject all that follows.

§ 30

This thoroughness at the same time has the advantage of guaranteeing that the labour of thinking shall be reduced to a minimum; it has before it, enclosed in this germ, the entire development and reckons that it has settled the whole business when it has disposed of the beginning which is the easiest part of the business, for it is the simplest, the simple itself; it is the trifling effort of thought required to do this which really recommends this 'thoroughness' which is so satisfied with itself.

This restriction to what is simple gives scope for the free play of caprice which does not want to remain simple but brings in its own reflections on the subject matter. Having good right to occupy itself at first only with the principle and in doing so not to concern itself with what lies beyond it, this thoroughness actually proceeds to do the opposite of this, for it does bring in what lies beyond, that is, categories other than those which constitute the principle itself, other presuppositions and prejudices. Such presuppositions as that infinite is different from finitude, that content is other than form, that the inner is other than the outer, also that mediation is no immediacy (as if anyone did not know such things), are brought forward by way of information and narrated and asserted rather than proved. But there is something stupid - I can find no other word for it - about this didactic behaviour; technically it is unjustifiable simply to presuppose and straightway assume such propositions; and, still more, it reveals ignorance of the fact that it is the requirement and the business of logical thinking to enquire into just this, whether such a finite without infinity is something true, or whether such an abstract infinity, also a content without form and a form without content, an inner by itself which has no outer expression, an externality without an inwardness, whether any of these is something true or something actual. But this education and discipline of thinking by which it acquires plasticity and by which the impatience of casual reflection is overcome, is procured solely by going further, by study and by carrying out to its conclusion the entire development.

§ 31

Anyone who labours at presenting anew an independent structure of philosophical science may, when referring to the Platonic exposition, be reminded of the story that Plato revised his Republic seven times over. The remembrance of this, the comparison, so far as such may seem to be implied in it, should only urge one all the more to wish that for a work which, as belonging to the modern world, is confronted by a profounder principle, a more difficult subject matter and a material richer in compass, leisure had been afforded to revise it seven and seventy times.

§ 32

However, the author, in face of the magnitude of the task, has had to content himself with what it was possible to achieve in circumstances of external necessity, of the inevitable distractions caused by the magnitude and many-sidedness of contemporary affairs, even under the doubt whether the noisy clamour of current affairs and the deafening chatter of a conceit which prides itself on confining itself to such matters leave any room for participation in the passionless calm of a knowledge which is in the element of pure thought alone.

Berlin, November 7, 1831

Hegel's Science of Logic

Highlighted text is Lenin's underlining. The access his annotations.

Introduction General Notion of Logic § 33

In no science is the need to begin with the subject matter itself, without preliminary reflections, felt more strongly than in the science of logic. In every other science the subject matter and the scientific method are distinguished from each other; also the content does not make an absolute beginning but is dependent on other concepts and is connected on all sides with other material. These other sciences are, therefore, permitted to speak of their ground and its context and also of their method, only as premises taken for granted which, as forms of definitions and such-like presupposed as familiar and accepted, are to be applied straight-way, and also to employ the usual kind of reasoning for the establishment of their general concepts and fundamental determinations.

§ 34

Logic on the contrary, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection and laws of thinking, for these constitute part of its own content and have first to be established within the science. But not only the account of scientific method, but even the Notion itself of the science as such belongs to its content, and in fact constitutes its final result; what logic is cannot be stated beforehand, rather does this knowledge of what it is first emerge as the final outcome and consummation of the whole exposition. Similarly, it is essentially within the science that the subject matter of logic, namely, thinking or more specifically comprehensive thinking is considered; the Notion of logic has its genesis in the course of exposition and cannot therefore be premised. Consequently, what is premised in this Introduction is not intended, as it were, to establish the Notion of Logic or to justify its method scientifically in advance, but rather by the aid of some reasoned and historical explanations and reflections to make more accessible to ordinary thinking the point of view from which this science is to be considered.

§ 35

When logic is taken as the science of thinking in general, it is understood that this thinking constitutes the mere form of a cognition that logic abstracts from all content and that the so-called second constituent belonging to cognition, namely its matter, must come from somewhere else; and that since this matter is absolutely independent of logic, this latter can provide only the formal conditions of genuine cognition and cannot in its own self contain any real truth, not even be the pathway to real truth because just that which is essential in truth, its content, lies outside logic.

§ 36

But in the first place, it is quite inept to say that logic abstracts from all content, that it teaches only the rules of thinking without any reference to what is thought or without being able to consider its nature. For as thinking and the rules of thinking are supposed to be the subject matter of logic, these directly constitute its peculiar content; in them, logic has that second constituent, a matter, about the nature of which it is concerned.

§ 37

But secondly, the conceptions on which the Notion of logic has rested hitherto have in part already been discarded, and for the rest, it is time that they disappeared entirely and that this science were grasped from a higher standpoint and received a completely changed shape.

§ 38

Hitherto, the Notion of logic has rested on the separation, presupposed once and for all in the ordinary consciousness, of the content of cognition and its form, or of truth and certainty. First, it is assumed that the material of knowing is present on its own account as a ready-made world apart from thought, that thinking on its own is empty and comes as an external form to the said material, fills itself with it and only thus acquires a content and so becomes real knowing.

§ 39

Further, these two constituents - for they are supposed to be related to each other as constituents, and cognition is compounded from them in a mechanical or at best chemical fashion - are appraised as follows: the object is regarded as something complete and finished on its own account, something which can entirely dispense with thought for its actuality, while thought on the other hand is regarded as defective because it has to complete itself with a material and moreover, as a pliable indeterminate form, has to adapt itself to its material. Truth is the agreement of thought with the object, and in order to bring about this agreement - for it does not exist on its own account - thinking is supposed to adapt and accommodate itself to the object.

§ 40

Thirdly, when the difference of matter and form, of object and thought is not left in that nebulous indeterminateness but is taken more definitely, then each is regarded as a sphere divorced from the other. Thinking therefore in its reception and formation of material does not go outside itself; its reception of the material and the conforming of itself to it remains a modification of its own self, it does not result in thought becoming the other of itself; and self-conscious determining moreover belongs only to thinking. In its relation to the object, therefore, thinking does not go out of itself to the object; this, as a thing-in-itself, remains a sheer beyond of thought.

§ 41

These views on the relation of subject and object to each other express the determinations which constitute the nature of our ordinary, phenomenal consciousness; but when these prejudices are carried out into the sphere of reason as if the same relation obtained there, as if this relation were something true in its own self, then they are errors - the refutation of which throughout every part of the spiritual and natural universe is philosophy, or rather, as they bar the entrance to philosophy, must be discarded at its portals.

§ 42

Ancient metaphysics had in this respect a higher conception of thinking than is current today. For it based itself on the fact that the knowledge of things obtained through thinking is alone what is really true in them, that is, things not in their immediacy but as first raised into the form of thought, as things thought. Thus this metaphysics believed that thinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature, or that things and the thinking of them - our language too expresses their kinship - are explicitly in full agreement, thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things forming one and the same content.

§ 43

But reflective understanding took possession of philosophy. We must know exactly what is meant by this expression which moreover is often used as a slogan; in general it stands for the understanding as abstracting, and hence as separating and remaining fixed in its separations. Directed against reason, it behaves as ordinary common sense and imposes its view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, meaning that it is sense perception which first gives them filling and reality and that reason left to its own resources engenders only figments of the brain. In this self-renunciation on the part of reason, the Notion of truth is lost; it is limited to knowing only subjective truth, only phenomena, appearances, only something to which the nature of the object itself does not correspond: knowing has lapsed into opinion.

§ 44

However, this turn taken by cognition, which appears as a loss and a retrograde step, is based on something more profound on which rests the elevation of reason into the loftier spirit of modern philosophy. The basis of that universally held conception is, namely, to be sought in the insight into the necessary conflict of the determinations of the understanding with themselves. The reflection already referred to is this, to transcend the concrete immediate object and to determine it and separate it. But equally it must transcend these its separating determinations and straightway connect them. It is at the stage of this connecting of the determinations that their conflict emerges. This connecting activity of reflection belongs in itself to reason and the rising above those determinations which attains to an insight into their conflict is the great negative step towards the true Notion of reason. But the insight, when not thorough- going, commits the mistake of thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself; it does not recognise that the contradiction is precisely the rising of reason above the limitations of the understanding and the resolving of them, Cognition, instead of taking from this stage the final step into the heights, has fled from the unsatisfactoriness of the categories of the understanding to sensuous existence, imagining that in this it possesses what is solid and self-consistent. But on the other hand, since this knowledge is self-confessedly knowledge only of appearances, the unsatisfactoriness of the latter is admitted, but at the same time presupposed: as much as to say that admittedly, we have no proper knowledge of things-in-themselves but we do have a proper knowledge of them within the sphere of appearances, as if, so to speak, only the kind of objects were different, and one kind, namely things-in-themselves, did not fall within the scope of our knowledge but the other kind, phenomena, did. This is like attributing to someone a correct perception, with the rider that nevertheless he is incapable of perceiving what is true but only what is false. Absurd as this would be, it would not be more so than a true knowledge which did not know the object as it is in itself.

§ 45

The criticism of the forms of the understanding has had the result already mentioned, that these forms do not apply to things-in-themselves. This can have no other meaning than that these forms are in themselves something untrue. But then if they are allowed to remain valid for subjective reason and experience, the criticism has not produced any alteration in them: they are left in the same shape for the subject knower as they formerly possessed for the object. If, however, they are inadequate for the thing-in-itself, still less must the understanding to which they are supposed to belong put up with them and rest content with them. If they cannot be determinations of the thing-in-itself, still less can they be determinations of the understanding to which one ought at least to concede the dignity of a thing-in-itself. The determinations of finite and infinite conflict in the same way, whether they are applied to time and space, to the world, or are determinations within the mind - just as black and white produce grey whether they are mixed on a canvas or on the palette. If our conception of the world is dissolved by the transference to it of the determinations of infinite and finite, still more is spirit itself, which contains both of them, inwardly self- contradictory and self-dissolving: it is not the nature of the material or the object to which they are applied or in which they occur that can make a difference for it is only through those determinations and in accordance with them that the object contains the contradiction.

§ 46

The forms of objective thinking, therefore, have been removed by this criticism only from the thing; but they have been left in the subject just as they were originally. That is to say, this criticism did not consider these forms on their own merits and according to their own peculiar content, but simply took them as accepted starting points from subjective logic: so that there was no question of an immanent deduction of them as forms of subjective logic, still less of a dialectical consideration of them.

§ 47

Transcendental idealism in its more consistent development, recognised the nothingness of the spectral thing-in-itself left over by the Kantian philosophy, this abstract shadow divorced from all content, and intended to destroy it completely. This philosophy also made a start at letting reason itself exhibit its own determinations. But this attempt, because it proceeded from a subjective standpoint, could not be brought to a successful conclusion. Later this standpoint, and with it too the attempt to develop the content of pure science, was abandoned.

§ 48

But what is commonly understood by logic is considered without any reference whatever to metaphysical significance. This science in its present state has, it must be admitted, no content of a kind which the ordinary consciousness would regard as a reality and as a genuine subject matter. But it is not for this reason a formal science lacking significant truth. Moreover, the region of truth is not to be sought in that matter which is missing in logic, a deficiency to which the unsatisfactoriness of the science is usually attributed. The truth is rather that the insubstantial nature of logical forms originates solely in the way in which they are considered and dealt with. When they are taken as fixed determinations and consequently in their separation from each other and not as held together in an organic unity, then they are dead forms and the spirit which is their living, concrete unity does not dwell in them. As thus taken, they lack a substantial content - a matter which would be substantial in itself. The content which is missing in the logical forms is nothing else than a solid foundation and a concretion of these abstract determinations; and such a substantial being for them is usually sought outside them.

But logical reason itself is the substantial or real being which holds together within itself every abstract determination and is their substantial, absolutely concrete unity. One need not therefore look far for what is commonly called a matter; if logic is supposed to lack a substantial content, then the fault does not lie with its subject matter but solely with the way in which this subject matter is grasped.

§ 49

This reflection leads up to the statement of the point of view from which logic is to be considered, how it differs from previous modes of treatment of this science which in future must always be based on this, the only true standpoint.

§ 50

In the Phenomenology of Mind, I have exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing. The path of this movement goes through every form of the relation of consciousness to the object and has the Notion of science of its result.

This Notion therefore (apart from the fact that it emerges within logic itself) needs no justification here because it has received it in that work; and it cannot be justified in any other way than by this emergence in consciousness, all the forms of which are resolved into this Notion as into their truth. To establish or explain the Notion of science ratiocinatively can at most achieve this, that a general idea of the Notion is presented to our thinking and a historical knowledge of it is produced; but a definition of science - or more precisely of logic - has its proof solely in the already mentioned necessity of its emergence in consciousness. The definition with which any science makes an absolute beginning. cannot contain anything other than the precise and correct expression of what is imagined to be the accepted and familiar subject matter and aim of the science. That precisely this is what is imagined is an historical asseveration in respect of which one can only appeal to such and such as recognised facts; or rather the plea can be advanced that such and such could be accepted as recognised facts. There will always be someone who will adduce a case, an instance, according to which something more and different is to be understood by certain terms the definition of which must therefore be made more precise or more general and the science too, must be accommodated thereto. This again involves argumentation about what should be admitted or excluded and within what limits and to what extent; but argumentation is open to the most manifold and various opinions, on which a decision can finally be determined only arbitrarily. In this method of beginning a science with its definition, no mention is made of the need to demonstrate the necessity of its subject matter and therefore of the science itself.

§ 51

The Notion of pure science and its deduction is therefore presupposed in the present work in so far as the Phenomenology of Spirit is nothing other than the deduction of it. Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because, as the course of the Phenomenology showed, it is only in absolute knowing that separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and this certainty with truth.

§ 52

Thus pure science presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness. It contains thought in so far as this is just as much the object in its own self, or the object in its own self in so far as it is equally pure thought. As science, truth is pure self-consciousness in its self-development and has the shape of the self, so that the absolute truth of being is the known Notion and the Notion as such is the absolute truth of being.

§ 53

This objective thinking then, is the content of pure science. Consequently, far from it being formal, far from it standing in need of a matter to constitute an actual and true cognition, it is its content alone which has absolute truth, or, if one still wanted to employ the word matter, it is the veritable matter - but a matter which is not external to the form, since this matter is rather pure thought and hence the absolute form itself. Accordingly, 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 and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.

§ 54

Anaxagoras is praised as the man who first declared that Nous, thought, is the principle of the world, that the essence of the world is to be defined as thought. In so doing he laid the foundation for an intellectual view of the universe, the pure form of which must be logic.

What we are dealing with in logic is not a thinking about something which exists independently as a base for our thinking and apart from it, nor forms which are supposed to provide mere signs or distinguishing marks of truth; on the contrary, the necessary forms and self-consciousness of thought are the content and the ultimate truth itself.

§ 55

To get some idea of this one must discard the prejudice that truth must be something tangible. Such tangibility is, for example, imported even into the Platonic Ideas which are in God's thinking, as if they are, as it were, existing things but in another world or region; while the world of actuality exists outside that region and has a substantial existence distinct from those Ideas and only through this distinction is a substantial reality. The Platonic Idea is the universal, or more definitely the Notion of an object; only in its Notion does something possess actuality and to the extent that it is distinct from its Notion it ceases to be actual and is a non-entity; the side of tangibility and sensuous self-externality belongs to this null aspect. But on the other side, one can appeal to the conceptions of ordinary logic itself; for it is assumed, for example, that the determinations contained in definitions do not belong only to the knower, but are determinations of the object, constituting its innermost essence and its very own nature. Or, if from given determinations others are inferred, it is assumed that what is inferred is not something external and alien to the object, but rather that it belongs to the object itself, that to the thought there is a correspondent being.

§ 56

It is implied generally in the use of forms of the Notion, of judgment, syllogism, definition, division, etc., that they are not merely forms of self-conscious thinking but also of the objective understanding.

Thought is an expression which attributes the determination contained therein primarily to consciousness. But inasmuch as it is said that understanding, reason, is in the objective world, that mind and nature have universal laws to which their life and changes conform, then it is conceded that the determinations of thought equally have objective value and existence.

§ 57

The critical philosophy had, it is true, already turned metaphysics into logic but it, like the later idealism, as previously remarked, was overawed by the object, and so the logical determinations were given an essentially subjective significance with the result that these philosophies remained burdened with the object they had avoided and were left with the residue of a thing-in-itself, an infinite obstacle, as a beyond. But the liberation from the opposition of consciousness which the science of logic must be able to presuppose lifts the determinations of thought above this timid, incomplete standpoint and demands that they be considered not with any such limitation and reference but as they are in their own proper character, as logic, as pure reason.

§ 58

Kant moreover considers logic, that is, the aggregate of definitions and propositions which ordinarily passes for logic, to be fortunate in having attained so early to completion before the other sciences; since Aristotle, it has not lost any ground, but neither has it gained any, the latter because to all appearances it seems to be finished and complete. Now if logic has not undergone any change since Aristotle - and in fact, judging by modern compendiums of logic the changes frequently consist mainly in omissions - then surely the conclusion which should be drawn is that it is all the more in need of a total reconstruction; for spirit, after its labours over two thousand years, must have attained to a higher consciousness about its thinking and about its own pure, essential nature.

A comparison of the forms to which spirit has raised itself in the practical and religious sphere and in every branch of science both physical and mental, with the form presented by logic which is spirit's consciousness of its own pure essence, reveals so vast a difference that the utter inadequacy and unworthiness of the latter consciousness in comparison with the higher consciousness displayed in those other spheres cannot fail to strike the most superficial observer.

§ 59

In point of fact the need for a reconstruction of logic has long since been felt. In form and in content, logic, as exhibited in the text-books, may be said to have fallen into contempt. It is still dragged in, but more from a feeling that one cannot dispense with logic altogether and because the tradition of its importance still survives, rather than from a conviction that such commonplace content and occupation with such empty forms is valuable and useful.

§ 60

The additions of psychological, pedagogic and even physiological material which logic received in the past have subsequently been recognised almost universally as disfigurements. A great part of these psychological, pedagogic and physiological observations, laws and rules, whether they occur in logic or anywhere else, must appear very shallow and trivial in themselves; and without exception all those rules such as, for example, that one must think out and test what one reads in books or hears by word of mouth, that when one's sight is not good one should help one's eyes by wearing spectacles - rules which in textbooks of so-called applied logic were solemnly set out in paragraphs and put forward as aids to the attainment of truth - these must strike everyone as superfluous - except only the writer or teacher who finds difficulty in expanding by some means or other the otherwise scanty and life-less content of logic.'

§ 61

Regarding this content, the reason why logic is so dull and spiritless has already been given above. Its determinations are accepted in their unmoved fixity and are brought only into external relation with each other. In judgments and syllogisms the operations are in the main reduced to and founded on the quantitative aspect of the determinations; consequently everything rests on an external difference, on mere comparison and becomes a completely analytical procedure and mechanical calculation. The deduction of the so-called rules and laws, chiefly of inference, is not much better than a manipulation of rods of unequal length in order to sort and group them according to size - than a childish game of fitting together the pieces of a coloured picture puzzle.

Consequently, this thinking has been equated, not incorrectly, with reckoning, and reckoning again with this thinking. In arithmetic, numbers are regarded as devoid of any concrete conceptual content, so apart from their wholly external relationship they have no meaning, and neither in themselves nor in their interrelationships are thoughts. When it is calculated in mechanical fashion that three-fourths multiplied by two-thirds makes one-half, this operation contains about as much and as little thought as calculating whether in a logical figure this or that kind of syllogism is valid.

§ 62

Before these dead bones of logic can be quickened by spirit, and so become possessed of a substantial, significant content, its method must be that which alone can enable it to be pure science. In the present state of logic one can scarcely recognise even a trace of scientific method. It has roughly the form of an empirical science. The empirical sciences have found for their own appropriate purposes their own peculiar method, such as it is, of defining and classifying their material. Pure mathematics, too, has its method which is appropriate for its abstract objects and for the quantitative form in which alone it considers them. I have said what is essential in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit about this method and, in general, the subordinate form of scientific method which can be employed in mathematics; but it will also be considered in more detail in the logic itself. Spinoza, Wolff and others have let themselves be misled in applying it also to philosophy and in making the external course followed by Notion-less quantity, the course of the Notion, a procedure which is absolutely contradictory.

Hitherto philosophy had not found its method; it regarded with envy the systematic structure of mathematics, and, as we have said, borrowed it or had recourse to the method of sciences which are only amalgams of given material, empirical propositions and thoughts - or even resorted to crude rejection of all method.

However, the exposition of what alone can be the true method of philosophical science falls within the treatment of logic itself; for the method is the consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of the content of logic.

In the Phenomenology of Mind I have expounded an example of this method in application to a more concrete object, namely to consciousness. Here we are dealing with forms of consciousness each of which in realising itself at the same time resolves itself, has for its result its own negation - and so passes into a higher form . All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress - and it is essential to strive to gain this quite simple insight - 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 nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results; which strictly speaking is a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediacy, not a result. Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation, it has content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite. It is in this way that the system of Notions as such has to be formed - and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in which nothing extraneous is introduced.

§ 63

I could not pretend that the method which I follow in this system of logic - or rather which this system in its own self follows - is not capable of greater completeness, of much elaboration in detail; but at the same time I know that it is the only true method. This is self-evident simply from the fact that it is not something distinct from its object and content; for it is the inwardness of the content, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which is the mainspring of its advance. It is clear that no expositions can be accepted as scientifically valid which do not pursue the course of this method and do not conform to its simple rhythm, for this is the course of the subject matter itself.

§ 64

In conformity with this method, I would point out that the divisions and headings of the books, sections and chapters given in this work as well as the explanations associated with them, are made to facilitate a preliminary survey and strictly are only of historical value. They do not belong to the content and body of the science but are compilations of an external reflection which has already run through the whole of the exposition and consequently knows and indicates in advance the sequence of its moments before these are brought forward by the subject matter itself.

§ 65

Similarly in the other sciences, such preliminary definitions and divisions are in themselves nothing else but such external indications; but even within the particular science they are not raised above this status. Even in logic, for example, we may be told perhaps that 'logic has two main parts, the theory of elements and methodology', then under the former there straightway follows perhaps the superscription, Laws of Thought; and then, Chapter I: Concepts. First Section: Of the Clearness of Concepts, and so on. These definitions and divisions, made without any deduction or justification, constitute the systematic framework and the entire connectedness of such sciences. Such a logic regards it as its vocation to talk about the necessity of deducing concepts and truths from principles; but as regards what it calls method, the thought of a deduction of it simply does not occur to it. The procedure consists, perhaps, in grouping together what is similar and making what is simple precede what is complex, and other external considerations.

But as regards any inner, necessary connectedness, there is nothing more than the list of headings of the various parts and the transition is effected simply by saying Chapter II, or We come now to the judgments, and the like.

§ 66

The superscriptions and divisions, too, which appear in this system are not themselves intended to have any other significance than that of a list of contents. Besides, the immanent coming-to-be of the distinctions and the necessity of their connection with each other must present themselves in the exposition of the subject matter itself for it falls within the spontaneous progressive determination of the Notion.

§ 67

That which enables the Notion to advance itself is the already mentioned negative which it possesses within itself; it is this which constitutes the genuine dialectical moment. Dialectic in this way acquires an entirely different significance from what it had when it was considered as a separate part of Logic and when its aim and standpoint were, one may say, completely misunderstood. Even the Platonic dialectic, in the Parmenides itself and elsewhere even more directly, on the one hand, aims only at abolishing and refuting assertions through themselves and on the other hand, has for its result simply nothingness.

Dialectic is commonly regarded as an external, negative activity which does not pertain to the subject matter itself, having its ground in mere conceit as a subjective itch for unsettling and destroying what is fixed and substantial, or at least having for its result nothing but the worthlessness of the object dialectically considered.

§ 68

Kant rated dialectic higher - and this is among his greatest merits - for he freed it from the seeming arbitrariness which it possesses from the standpoint of ordinary thought and exhibited it as a necessary function of reason. Because dialectic was held to be merely the art of practising deceptions and producing illusions, the assumption was made forthwith that it is only a spurious game, the whole of its power resting solely on concealment of the deceit and that its results are obtained only surreptitiously and are a subjective illusion. True, Kant's expositions in the antinomies of pure reason, when closely examined as they will be at length in the course of this work, do not indeed deserve any great praise; but the general idea on which he based his expositions and which he vindicated, is the objectivity of the illusion and the necessity of the contradiction which belongs to the nature of thought determinations: primarily, it is true, with the significance that these determinations are applied by reason to things in themselves; but their nature is precisely what they are in reason and with reference to what is intrinsic or in itself.

This result, grasped in its positive aspect, is nothing else but the inner negativity of the determinations as their self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual life.

But if no advance is made beyond the abstract negative aspect of dialectic, the result is only the familiar one that reason is incapable of knowing the infinite; a strange result for - since the infinite is the Reasonable - it asserts that reason is incapable of knowing the Reasonable.

§ 69

It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists.

It is the most important aspect of dialectic, but for thinking which is as yet unpractised and unfree it is the most difficult. Such thinking, if it is still engaged in breaking itself of the habit of employing sensuously concrete terms and of ratiocination, must first practise abstract thinking, hold fast Notions in their determinateness and learn to cognise by means of them. An exposition of logic to this end would, in its method, have to keep to the division of the subject above-mentioned and with regard to the more detailed contents, to the definitions given for the particular Notions without touching on the dialectical aspect. As regards its external structure, such an exposition would resemble the usual presentation of this science, but it would also be distinguished from it with respect to the content and still would serve for practice in abstract thinking, though not in speculative thinking, a purpose which can never be realised by the logic which has become popular through the addition of psychological and anthropological material. It would give to mind the picture of a methodically ordered whole, although the soul of the structure, the method (which dwells in the dialectical aspect) would not itself appear in it.

§ 70

Finally, with respect to education and the relation of the individual to logic, I would further remark that this science, like grammar, appears in two different aspects or values. It is one thing for him who comes to it and the sciences generally for the first time, but it is another thing for him who comes back to it from these sciences. He who begins the study of grammar finds in its forms and laws dry abstractions, arbitrary rules, in general an isolated collection of definitions and terms which exhibit only the value and significance of what is implied in their immediate meaning; there is nothing to be known in them other than themselves. On the other hand, he who has mastered a language and at the same time has a comparative knowledge of other languages, he alone can make contact with the spirit and culture of a people through the grammar of its language; the same rules and forms now have a substantial, living value. Similarly, he who approaches this science at first finds in logic an isolated system of abstractions which, confined within itself, does not embrace within its scope the other knowledges and sciences.

On the contrary, when contrasted with the wealth of the world as pictorially conceived, with the apparently real content of the other sciences, and compared with the promise of absolute science to unveil the essential being of this wealth, the inner nature of mind and the world, the truth, then this science in its abstract shape, in the colourless, cold simplicity of its pure determinations looks as if it could achieve anything sooner than the fulfilment of its promise and seems to confront that richness as an empty, insubstantial form. The first acquaintance with logic confines its significance to itself alone; its content passes only for a detached occupation with the determinations of thought, alongside which other scientific activities possess on their own account a matter and content of their own, on which logic may perhaps have a formal influence, though an influence which comes only from itself and which if necessary can of course also be dispensed with so far as the scientific structure and its study are concerned.

The other sciences have on the whole discarded the correct method, that is, a sequence of definitions, axioms, theorems and their proofs, etc.; so-called natural logic now has its own validity in the sciences and manages to get along without any special knowledge of the nature of thought itself. But the matter and content of these sciences is held to be completely independent of logic and also has more appeal for sense, feeling, figurate conception, and practical interest of any kind.

§ 71

At first, therefore, logic must indeed be learnt as something which one understands and sees into quite well but in which, at the beginning, one feels the lack of scope and depth and a wider significance. It is only after profounder acquaintance with the other sciences that logic ceases to be for subjective spirit a merely abstract universal and reveals itself as the universal which embraces within itself the wealth of the particular - just as the same proverb, in the mouth of a youth who understands it quite well, does not possess the wide range of meaning which it has in the mind of a man with the experience of a lifetime behind him, for whom the meaning is expressed in all its power. Thus the value of logic is only apprehended when it is preceded by experience of the sciences; it then displays itself to mind as the universal truth, not as a particular knowledge alongside other matters and realities, but as the essential being of all these latter.

§ 72

Now although the mind is not conscious of this power of logic at the beginning of its study, it none the less receives within itself through such study the power which leads it into all truth. The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities freed from all sensuous concreteness. The study of this science, to dwell and labour in this shadowy realm, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness. In logic, consciousness is busy with something remote from sensuous intuitions and aims, from feelings, from the merely imagined world of figurate conception. Considered from its negative aspect, this business consists in holding off the contingency of ordinary thinking and the arbitrary selection of particular grounds - or their opposites - as valid.

§ 73

But above all, thought acquires thereby self-reliance and independence. It becomes at home in abstractions and in progressing by means of Notions free from sensuous substrata, develops an unsuspected power of assimilating in rational form all the various knowledges and sciences in their complex variety, of grasping and retaining them in their essential character, stripping them of their external features and in this way extracting from them the logical element, or what is the same thing, filling the abstract basis of Logic acquired by study with the substantial content of absolute truth and giving it the value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but includes them all within its grasp and is their essence, the absolutely True.

General Division of Logic § 74

From what has been said about the Notion of this science and where its justification is to be found, it follows that the general division of it here can only be provisional, can be given, as it were, only in so far as the author is already familiar with the science and consequently is historically in a position to state here in advance the main distinctions which will emerge in the development of the Notion.

§ 75

Still, the attempt can be made to promote an understanding beforehand of what is requisite for such a division, even though in doing so we must have recourse to an application of the method which will only be fully understood and justified within the science itself. We must therefore point out at the start that we are presupposing that the division must be connected with the Notion, or rather must be implicit in the Notion itself. The Notion is not indeterminate but is in its own self determinate; the division, however, expresses this its determinateness as developed; it is the judgment of the Notion, not a judgment about some object or other picked up from outside, but the judging, that is, determining, of the Notion in its own self.

§ 76

The quality of being right-angled, acute-angled or equilateral, according to which triangles are classified, is not implicit in the determinateness of the triangle itself, that is, not in what is usually called the Notion of the triangle, just as little as there is implicit in what passes for the Notion of animal as such, or of the mammal, bird, etc. the determinations governing the classification into mammal, bird, etc., and the subdivision of these classes into other species. Such determinations are taken from elsewhere and are annexed to such so-called Notion from outside. In the philosophical treatment of classification or division, the Notion itself must show that it is itself the course of those determinations.

§ 77

But in the Introduction, the Notion of logic was itself stated to be the result of a preceding science, and so here, too, it is a presupposition. In accordance with that result logic was defined as the science of pure thought, the principle of which is pure knowing, the unity which is not abstract but a living, concrete unity in virtue of the fact that in it the opposition in consciousness between a self-determined entity, a subject, and a second such entity, an object, is known to be overcome; being is known to be the pure Notion in its own self, and the pure Notion to be the true being. These, then, are the two moments contained in logic. But now they are known to be inseparable, not as in consciousness where each also has a separate being of its own; it is solely because they are at the same time known as distinct (yet not with an independent being) that their unity is not abstract, dead and inert, but concrete.

§ 78

This unity also constitutes the logical principle as element, so that the development of the difference directly present in that principle proceeds only within this element. For since the division is, as we have said, the judgment of the Notion, the positing of the determination already immanent in it, and therefore of the difference, we must not understand this positing as a resolving of that concrete unity back into its determinations as if these had an independent self- subsistence, for this would be an empty return to the previous standpoint, to the opposition of consciousness. This however has vanished; the said unity remains the element, and the distinctions of the division and of the development no longer originate outside that element. Consequently the earlier determinations (those used on the pathway to truth) such as subjectivity and objectivity, or even thought and being, or Notion and reality, no matter from what standpoint they were determined, have lost their independent and purely affirmative character and are now in their truth, that is, in their unity, reduced to forms. In their difference, therefore, they themselves remain implicitly the whole Notion, and this, in the division, is posited only under its own specifications.

§ 79

Thus what is to be considered is the whole Notion, firstly as the Notion in the form of being, secondly, as the Notion; in the first case, the Notion is only in itself, the Notion of reality or being; in the second case, it is the Notion as such, the Notion existing for itself (as it is, to name concrete forms, in thinking man, and even in the sentient animal and in organic individuality generally, although, of course, in these it is not conscious, still less known; it is only in inorganic nature that it is in itself). Accordingly, logic should be divided primarily into the logic of the Notion as being and of the Notion as Notion - or, by employing the usual terms (although these as least definite are most ambiguous) into 'objective' and 'subjective' logic.

§ 80

But in accordance with the fundamental element of the immanent unity of the Notion, and hence with the inseparability of its determinations, these latter, when distinguished from each other in the positing of the Notion in its difference, must at least also stand in relation to each other. There results a sphere of mediation, the Notion as a system of reflected determinations, that is, of being in process of transition into the being-within-self or inwardness of the Notion. In this way, the Notion is not yet posited as such for itself, but is still fettered by the externality of immediate being. This is the doctrine of essence which stands midway between the doctrine of being and that of the Notion. In the general division of logic in the present work it has been included in objective logic because although essence is already the inwardness of being, the character of subject is to be expressly reserved for the Notion.

§ 81

Recently Kant has opposed to what has usually been called logic another, namely, a transcendental logic. What has here been called objective logic would correspond in part to what with him is transcendental logic. He distinguishes it from what he calls general logic in this way, [a] that it treats of the notions which refer a priori to objects, and consequently does not abstract from the whole content of objective cognition, or, in other words, it contains the rules of the pure thinking of an object, and [b] at the same time it treats of the origin of our cognition so far as this cognition cannot be ascribed to the objects. It is to this second aspect that Kant's philosophical interest is exclusively directed.

§ 82

His chief thought is to vindicate the categories for self-consciousness as the subjective ego. By virtue of this determination the point of view remains confined within consciousness and its opposition; and besides the empirical element of feeling and intuition it has something else left over which is not posited and determined by thinking self-consciousness, a thing-in-itself, something alien and external to thought - although it is easy to perceive that such an abstraction as the thing-in-itself is itself only a product of thought, and of merely abstractive thought at that. If other disciples of Kant have expressed themselves concerning the determining of the object by the ego in this way, that the objectifying of the ego is to be regarded as an original and necessary act of consciousness, so that in this original act there is not yet the idea of the ego itself - which would be a consciousness of that consciousness or even an objectifying of it - then this objectifying act, in its freedom from the opposition of consciousness, is nearer to what may be taken simply for thought as such. [2]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote

1. I would mention that in this work I frequently refer to the Kantian philosophy (which to many may seem superfluous) because whatever may be said, both in this work and elsewhere, about the precise character of this philosophy and about particular parts of its exposition, it constitutes the base and the starting point of recent German philosophy and that its merit remains unaffected by whatever faults may be found in it. The reason too why reference must often be made to it in the objective logic is that it enters into detailed consideration of important, more specific aspects of logic, whereas later philosophical works have paid little attention to these and in some instances have only displayed a crude - not unavenged - contempt for them. The philosophising which is most widespread among us does not go beyond the Kantian results, that Reason cannot acquire knowledge of any true content or subject matter and in regard to absolute truth must be directed to faith. But what with Kant is a result, forms the immediate starting-point in this philosophising, so that the preceding exposition from which that result issued and which is a philosophical cognition, is cut away beforehand. The Kantian philosophy thus serves as a cushion for intellectual indolence which soothes itself with the conviction that everything is already proved and settled. Consequently for genuine knowledge, for a specific content of thought which is not to be found in such barren and arid complacency, one must turn to that preceding exposition.

2. If the expression 'objectifying act of the ego' suggests other products of spirit, e. g. fantasy, it is to be observed that we are speaking of a determining of an object in so far as the elements of its content do not belong to feeling and intuition. Such an object is a thought, and to determine it means partly, first to produce it, partly, in so far as it is something presupposed, to have further thoughts about it, to develop it further by thought.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

§ 83

But this act should no longer be called consciousness; consciousness embraces within itself the opposition of the ego and its object which is not present in that original act. The name consciousness gives it a semblance of subjectivity even more than does the term thought, which here, however, is to be taken simply in the absolute sense as infinite thought untainted by the finitude of consciousness, in short, thought as such.

§ 84

Now because the interest of the Kantian philosophy was directed to the so-called transcendental aspect of the categories, the treatment of the categories themselves yielded a blank result; what they are in themselves without the abstract relation to the ego common to all, what is their specific nature relatively to each other and their relationship to each other, this has not been made an object of consideration. Hence this philosophy has not contributed in the slightest to a knowledge of their nature; what alone is of interest in this connection occurs in the Critique of Ideas. But if philosophy was to make any real progress, it was necessary that the interest of thought should be drawn to a consideration of the formal side, to a consideration of the ego, of consciousness as such, i. e. of the abstract relation of a subjective knowing to an object, so that in this way the cognition of the infinite form, that is, of the Notion, would be introduced. But in order that this cognition may be reached, that form has still to be relieved of the finite determinateness in which it is ego, or consciousness. The form, when thus thought out into its purity, will have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content, and that a necessarily explicated content in the form of a system of determinations of thought.

§ 85

The objective logic, then, takes the place rather of the former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construction of the world in terms of thoughts alone. If we have regard to the final shape of this science, then it is first and immediately ontology whose place is taken by objective logic - that part of this metaphysics which was supposed to investigate the nature of ens in general; ens comprises both being and essence, a distinction for which the German language has fortunately preserved different terms. But further, objective logic also comprises the rest of metaphysics in so far as this attempted to comprehend with the forms of pure thought particular substrata taken primarily from figurate conception, namely the soul, the world and God; and the determinations of thought constituted what was essential in the mode of consideration. Logic, however, considers these forms free from those substrata, from the subjects of figurate conception; it considers them, their nature and worth, in their own proper character. Former metaphysics omitted to do this and consequently incurred the just reproach of having employed these forms uncritically without a preliminary investigation as to whether and how they were capable of being determinations of the thing-in-itself, to use the Kantian expression - or rather of the Reasonable. Objective logic is therefore the genuine critique of them - a critique which does not consider them as contrasted under the abstract forms of the a priori and the a posteriori, but considers the determinations themselves according to their specific content.

§ 86

The subjective logic is the logic of the Notion, of essence which has sublated its relation to being or its illusory being [Schein], and in its determination is no longer external but is subjective free, self-subsistent and self-determining, or rather it is the subject itself. Since subjectivity brings with it the misconception of contingency and caprice and, in general, characteristics belonging to the form of consciousness, no particular importance is to be attached here to the distinction of subjective and objective; these determinations will be more precisely developed later on in the logic itself.

§ 87

Logic thus falls generally into objective and subjective logic, but more specifically it has three parts:

I The logic of being II The logic of essence, and III The logic of the Notion

With What must Science Begin? - Next Section

Volume One: The Objective Logic Book One: The Doctrine of Being With What must Science Begin?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

§ 88

It is only in recent times that thinkers have become aware of the difficulty of finding a beginning in philosophy, and the reason for this difficulty and also the possibility of resolving it has been much discussed. What philosophy begins with must be either mediated or immediate, and it is easy to show that it can be neither the one nor the other; thus either way of beginning is refuted.

§ 89

The principle of a philosophy does, of course, also express a beginning, but not so much a subjective as an objective one, the beginning of everything. The principle is a particular determinate content - water, the one, nous, idea, substance, monad, etc. Or, if it refers to the nature of cognition and consequently is supposed to be only a criterion rather than an objective determination - thought, intuition, sensation, ego, subjectivity itself. Then here too it is the nature of the content which is the point of interest. The beginning as such, on the other hand, as something subjective in the sense of being a particular, inessential way of introducing the discourse, remains unconsidered, a matter of indifference, and so too the need to find an answer to the question, With what should the beginning be made? remains of no importance in face of the need for a principle in which alone the interest of the matter in hand seems to lie, the interest as to what is the truth, the absolute ground.

§ 90

But the modern perplexity about a beginning proceeds from a further requirement of which those who are concerned with the dogmatic demonstration of a principle or who are sceptical about finding a subjective criterion against dogmatic philosophising, are not yet aware, and which is completely denied by those who begin, like a shot from a pistol, from their inner revelation, from faith, intellectual Intuition, etc., and who would be exempt from method and logic. If earlier abstract thought was interested in the principle only as content, but in the course of philosophical development has been impelled to pay attention to the other side, to the behaviour of the cognitive process, this implies that the subjective act has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and this brings with it the need to unite the method with the content, the form with the principle. Thus the principle ought also to be the beginning, and what is the first for thought ought also to be the first in the process of thinking.

§ 91

Here we have only to consider how the logical beginning appears; the two sides from which it can be taken have already been named, to wit, either as a mediated result or as a beginning proper, as an immediacy.

§ 92

This is not the place to deal with the question apparently so important in present-day thought, whether the knowledge of truth is an immediate knowledge having a pure beginning, a faith, or whether it is a mediated knowledge . In so far as this can be dealt with preliminarily it has been done elsewhere. Here we need only quote from it this, there is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them to be a nullity. But as regards the philosophical discussion of this, it is to be found in every logical proposition in which occur the determinations of immediacy and mediation and consequently also the discussion of their opposition and their truth. Inasmuch as this opposition, as related to thinking, to knowing, to cognition, acquires the more concrete form of immediate or mediated knowledge, it is the nature of cognition as such which is considered within the science of logic, while the more concrete form of cognition falls to be considered in the philosophy of spirit. But to want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science is to demand that it be considered outside the science; outside the science this cannot be accomplished, at least not in a scientific manner and such a manner is alone here in place.

§ 93

The beginning is logical in that it is to be made in the element of thought that is free and for itself, in pure knowing. It is mediated because pure knowing is the ultimate, absolute truth of consciousness. In the Introduction it was remarked that the phenomenology of spirit is the science of consciousness, the exposition of it, and that consciousness has for result the Notion of science, i. e. pure knowing. Logic, then, has for its presupposition the science of manifested spirit, which contains and demonstrates the necessity, and so the truth, of the standpoint occupied by pure knowing and of its mediation. In this science of manifested spirit the beginning is made from empirical, sensuous consciousness and this is immediate knowledge in the strict sense of the word; in that work there is discussed the significance of this immediate knowledge. Other forms of consciousness such as belief in divine truths, inner experience, knowledge through inner revelation, etc., are very ill-fitted to be quoted as examples of immediate knowledge as a little reflection will show. In the work just mentioned immediate consciousness is also the first and that which is immediate in the science itself, and therefore the presupposition; but in logic, the presupposition is that which has proved itself to be the result of that phenomenological consideration - the Idea as pure knowledge.

§ 94

Logic is pure science, that is, pure knowledge in the entire range of its development. But in the said result, this Idea has determined itself to be the certainty which has become truth, the certainty which, on the one hand, no longer has the object over against it but has internalised it, knows it as its own self - and, on the other hand, has given up the knowledge of itself as of something confronting the object of which it is only the annihilation, has divested itself of this subjectivity and is at one with its self-alienation.

§ 95

Now starting from this, determination of pure knowledge, all that is needed to ensure that the beginning remains immanent in its scientific development is to consider, or rather, ridding oneself of all other reflections and opinions whatever, simply to take up, what is there before us.

§ 96

Pure knowing as concentrated into this unity has sublated all reference to an other and to mediation; it is without any distinction and as thus distinctionless, ceases itself to be knowledge; what is present is only simple immediacy.

§ 97

Simple immediacy is itself an expression of reflection and contains a reference to its distinction from what is mediated. This simple immediacy, therefore, in its true expression is pure being. Just as pure knowing is to mean knowing as such, quite abstractly, so too pure being is to mean nothing but being in general: being, and nothing else, without any further specification and filling.

§ 98

Here the beginning is made with being which is represented as having come to be through mediation, a mediation which is also a sublating of itself; and there is presupposed pure knowing as the outcome of finite knowing, of consciousness. But if no presupposition is to be made and the beginning itself is taken immediately, then its only determination is that it is to be the beginning of logic, of thought as such. All that is present is simply the resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary, that we propose to consider thought as such.

§ 99

Thus the beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous here, an abstract beginning; and so it may not suppose anything, must not be mediated by anything nor have a ground; rather it is to be itself the ground of the entire science. Consequently, it must be purely and simply an immediacy, or rather merely immediacy itself. Just as it cannot possess any determination relatively to anything else, so too it cannot contain within itself any determination, any content; for any such would be a distinguishing and an inter-relationship of distinct moments, and consequently a mediation. The beginning therefore is pure being

§ 100

To this simple exposition of what is only directly involved in the simplest of all things, the logical beginning, we may add the following further reflections; yet these cannot be meant to serve as elucidations and confirmations of that exposition - this is complete in itself - since they are occasioned by preconceived ideas and reflections and these, like all other preliminary prejudices, must be disposed of within the science itself where their treatment should be awaited with patience.

§ 101

The insight that absolute truth must be a result, and conversely, that a result presupposes a prior truth which, however, because it is a first, objectively considered is unnecessary and from the subjective side is not known - this insight has recently given rise to the thought that philosophy can only begin with a hypothetical and problematical truth and therefore philosophising can at first be only a quest. This view was much stressed by Reinhold in his later philosophical work and one must give it credit for the genuine interest on which it is based, an interest which concerns the speculative nature of the philosophical beginning. The detailed discussion of this view is at the same time an occasion for introducing a preliminary understanding of the meaning of progress in logic generally; for that view has a direct bearing on the advance; this it conceives to be such that progress in philosophy is rather a retrogression and a grounding or establishing by means of which we first obtain the result that what we began with is not something merely arbitrarily assumed but is in fact the truth, and also the primary truth.

§ 102

It must be admitted that it is an important consideration - one which will be found in more detail in the logic itself - that the advance is a retreat into the ground, to what is primary and true, on which depends and, in fact, from which originates, that with which the beginning is made. Thus consciousness on its onward path from the immediacy with which it began is led back to absolute knowledge as its innermost truth. This last, the ground, is then also that from which the first proceeds, that which at first appeared as an immediacy. This is true in still greater measure of absolute spirit which reveals itself as the concrete and final supreme truth of all being, and which at the end of the development is known as freely externalising itself, abandoning itself to the shape of an immediate being -opening or unfolding itself [sich entschliessend] into the creation of a world which contains all that fell into the development which preceded that result and which through this reversal of its position relatively to its beginning is transformed into something dependent on the result as principle. The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.

§ 103

We see therefore that, on the other hand, it is equally necessary to consider as result that into which the movement returns as into its ground. In this respect the first is equally the ground, and the last a derivative; since the movement starts from the first and by correct inferences arrives at the last as the ground, this latter is a result. Further, the progress from that which forms the beginning is to be regarded as only a further determination of it, hence that which forms the starting point of the development remains at the base of all that follows and does not vanish from it. The progress does not consist merely in the derivation of an other, or in the effected transition into a genuine other; and in so far as this transition does occur it is equally sublated again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is the foundation which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.

§ 104

Through this progress, then, the beginning loses the one-sidedness which attaches to it as something simply immediate and abstract; it becomes something mediated, and hence the line of the scientific advance becomes a circle. It also follows that because that which forms the beginning is still undeveloped, devoid of content, it is not truly known in the beginning; it is the science of logic in its whole compass which first constitutes the completed knowledge of it with its developed content and first truly grounds that knowledge.

§ 105

But because it is the result which appears as the absolute ground, this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content.

§ 106

The said beginning is neither an arbitrary and merely provisional assumption, nor is it something which appears to be arbitrarily and tentatively presupposed, but which is subsequently shown to have been properly made the beginning; not as is the case with the constructions one is directed to make in connection with the proof of a theorem in geometry, where it becomes apparent only afterwards in the proof that one took the right course in drawing just those lines and then, in the proof itself, in beginning with the comparison of those lines or angles; drawing such lines and comparing them are not an essential part of the proof itself.

§ 107

Thus the ground, the reason, why the beginning is made with pure being in the pure science [of logic] is directly given in the science itself. This pure being is the unity into which pure knowing withdraws, or, if this itself is still to be distinguished as form from its unity, then being is also the content of pure knowing. It is when taken in this way that this pure being, this absolute immediacy has equally the character of something absolutely mediated. But it is equally essential that it be taken only in the one-sided character in which it is pure immediacy, precisely because here it is the beginning. If it were not this pure indeterminateness, if it were determinate, it would have been taken as something mediated, something already carried a stage further: what is determinate implies an other to a first. Therefore, it lies in the very nature of a beginning that it must be being and nothing else. To enter into philosophy, therefore, calls for no other preparations, no further reflections or points of connection.

§ 108

We cannot really extract any further determination or positive content for the beginning from the fact that it is the beginning of philosophy. For here at the start, where the subject matter itself is not yet to hand, philosophy is an empty word or some assumed, unjustified conception. Pure knowing yields only this negative determination, that the beginning is to be abstract. If pure being is taken as the content of pure knowing, then the latter must stand back from its content, allowing it to have free play and not determining it further. Or again, if pure being is to be considered as the unity into which knowing has collapsed at the extreme point of its union with the object, then knowing itself has vanished in that unity, leaving behind no difference from the unity and hence nothing by which the latter could be determined. Nor is there anything else present, any content which could be used to make the beginning more determinate.

§ 109

But the determination of being so far adopted for the beginning could also be omitted, so that the only demand would be that a pure beginning be made. In that case, we have nothing but the beginning itself, and it remains to be seen what this is. This position could also be suggested for the benefit of those who, on the one hand, are dissatisfied for one reason or another with the beginning with being and still more so with the resulting transition of being into nothing, and, on the other hand, simply know no other way of beginning a science than by presupposing some general idea, which is then analysed, the result of such analysis yielding the first specific concept in the science. If we too were to observe this method, then we should be without a particular object, because the beginning, as the beginning of thought, is supposed to be quite abstract, quite general, wholly form without any content; thus we should have nothing at all beyond the general idea of a mere beginning as such. We have therefore only to see what is contained in such an idea.

§ 110

As yet there is nothing and there is to become something the beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning therefore contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing; or is non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.

§ 111

Further, in the beginning, being and nothing are present as distinguished from each other; for the beginning points to something else - it is a non-being which carries a reference to being as to an other; that which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being.

That which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being. The being contained in the beginning is, therefore, a being which removed itself from non-being or sublates it as something opposed to it.

But again, that which begins already is, but equally, too, is not as yet. The opposites, being and non-being are therefore directly united in it, or, otherwise expressed, it is their undifferentiated unity.

§ 112

The analysis of the beginning would thus yield the notion of the unity of being and nothing - or, in a more reflected form, the unity of differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness, or the identity of identity and non-identity. This concept could be regarded as the first, purest, that is, most abstract definition of the absolute - as it would in fact be if we were at all concerned with the form of definitions and with the name of the absolute. In this sense, that abstract concept would be the first definition of this absolute and all further determinations and developments only more specific and richer definitions of it. But let those who are dissatisfied with being as a beginning because it passes over into nothing and so gives rise to the unity of being and nothing, let them see whether they find this beginning which begins with the general idea of a beginning and with its analysis (which, though of course correct, likewise leads to the unity of being and nothing), more satisfactory than the beginning with being.

§ 113

But there is a still further observation to be made about this procedure. The said analysis presupposes as familiar the idea of a beginning, thus following the example of other sciences. These presuppose their subject-matter and take it for granted that everyone has roughly the same general idea of it and can find in it the same determinations as those indicated by the sciences which have obtained them in one way or another through analysis, comparison and other kinds of reasoning. But that which forms the absolute beginning must likewise be something otherwise known; now if it is something concrete and hence is variously determined within itself, then this internal relation is presupposed as something known; it is thus put forward as an immediacy which, however, it is not; for it is a relation only as a relation of distinct moments, and it therefore contains mediation within itself. Further, with a concrete object, the analysis and the ways in which it is determined are affected by contingency and arbitrariness. Which determinations are brought out depends on what each person just finds in his own immediate, contingent idea. The relation contained in something concrete, in a synthetic unity, is necessary only in so far as it is not just given but is produced by the spontaneous return of the moments back into this unity - a movement which is the opposite of the analytical procedure, which is an activity belonging to the subject-thinker and external to the subject matter itself.

§ 114

The foregoing shows quite clearly the reason why the beginning cannot be made with anything concrete, anything containing a relation within itself. For such presupposes an internal process of mediation and transition of which the concrete, now become simple, would be the result. But the beginning ought not itself to be already a first and an other; for anything which is in its own self a first and an other implies that an advance has already been made. Consequently, that which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy, and therefore as being, as the completely empty being.

§ 115

If impatience with the consideration of the abstract beginning should provoke anyone to say that the beginning should be made not with the beginning, but straightway with the subject matter itself, well then, this subject matter is nothing else but the said empty being; for what this subject matter is, that will be explicated only in the development of the science and cannot be presupposed by it as known beforehand.

§ 116

Whatever other form the beginning takes in the attempt to begin with something other than empty being, it will suffer from the defects already specified. Let those who are still dissatisfied with this beginning tackle the problem of avoiding these defects by beginning in some other way.

§ 117

But we cannot leave entirely unmentioned an original beginning of philosophy which has recently become famous, the beginning with the ego. It came partly from the reflection that from the first truth the entire sequel must be derived, and partly from the requirement that the first truth must be something with which we are acquainted, and still more, something of which we are immediately certain. This beginning is, in general, not a contingent idea which can be differently constituted in different subjects. For the ego, this immediate consciousness of self, at first appears to be itself both an immediacy and also something much more familiar to us than any other idea; anything else known belongs to the ego, it is true, but is still a content distinguished from it and therefore contingent; the ego, on the contrary, is the simple certainty of its own self.

§ 118

But the ego as such is at the same time also concrete, or rather, the ego is the most concrete of all things - the consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world. Before the ego, this concrete Being, can be made the beginning and ground of philosophy, it must be disrupted - this is the absolute act through which the ego purges itself of its content and becomes aware of itself as an abstract ego. Only this pure ego now is not immediate, is not the familiar, ordinary ego of our consciousness to which the science of logic could be directly linked for everyone. That act, strictly speaking, would be nothing else but the elevation to the standpoint of pure knowing where the distinction of subject and object has vanished. But as thus immediately demanded, this elevation is a subjective postulate; to prove itself a genuine demand, the progression of the concrete ego from immediate consciousness to pure knowing must have been indicated and exhibited through the necessity of the ego itself. Without this objective movement pure knowing, even in the shape of intellectual intuition, appears as an arbitrary standpoint, or even as one of the empirical states of consciousness with respect to which everything turns on whether or not it is found or can be produced in each and every individual. But inasmuch as this pure ego must be essential, pure knowing, and pure knowing is not immediately present in the individual consciousness but only as posited through the absolute act of the ego in raising itself to that stand-point, we lose the very advantage which is supposed to come from this beginning of philosophy namely that it is something thoroughly familiar, something everyone finds in himself which can form the starting point for further reflection; that pure ego, on the contrary, in its abstract, essential nature, is something unknown to the ordinary consciousness, something it does not find therein. Instead, such a beginning brings with it the disadvantage of the illusion that whereas the thing under discussion is supposed to be something familiar, the ego of empirical self-consciousness, it is in fact something far removed from it. When pure knowing is characterised as ego, it acts as a perpetual reminder of the subjective ego whose limitations should be forgotten, and it fosters the idea that the propositions and relations resulting from the further development of the ego are present and can already be found in the ordinary consciousness - for in fact it is this of which they are asserted. This confusion, far from clarifying the problem of a beginning, only adds to the difficulties involved and tends completely to mislead; among- the uninitiated it has given rise to the crudest misunderstandings.

§ 119

Further, as regards the subjective determinateness of the ego in general, it is true that pure knowing frees the ego from the restricted meaning imposed on it by the insuperable opposition of its object; but for this reason it would be superfluous at least to retain this subjective attitude and the determination of pure knowing as ego. This determination, however, not only introduces the disturbing ambiguity mentioned, but closely examined it also remains a subjective ego. The actual development of the science which starts from the ego shows that in that development the object has and retains the perennial character of an other for the ego, and that the ego which formed the starting point is, therefore, still entangled in the world of appearance and is not the pure knowing which has in truth overcome the opposition of consciousness.

§ 120

In this connection a further essential observation must be made, namely that although the ego could in itself or in principle [an sich] be characterised as pure knowing or as intellectual intuition and asserted as the beginning, we are not concerned in the science of logic with what is present only in principle or as something inner, but rather with the determinate reality in thought of what is inner and with the determinateness possessed by such an inner in this reality. But what, at the beginning of the science, is actually present of intellectual intuition-or of the eternal, the divine, the absolute, if its object be so named-cannot be anything else than a first, immediate, simple determination. Whatever richer name be given to it than is expressed by mere being, the consideration of such absolute must be restricted solely to the way in which it enters into our knowing as thought and is enunciated as such. True, intellectual intuition is the forcible rejection of mediation and the ratiocinative, external reflection; but what it enunciates above and beyond simple immediacy is something concrete, something which contains within itself diverse determinations. However, as we have remarked, the enunciation and exposition of such concrete beginning is a process of mediation which starts from one of the determinations and advances to the other, even though the latter returns to the first; it is a movement which at the same time may not be arbitrary or assertoric. Consequently, it is not the concrete something itself with which that exposition begins but only the simple immediacy from which the movement starts. And further, if something concrete is taken as the beginning, the conjunction of the determinations contained in it demand proof, and this is lacking.

§ 121

If, therefore, in the expression of the absolute, or eternal, or God (and God has the absolutely undisputed right that the beginning be made with him) - if in the intuition or thought of these there is implied more than pure being - then this more must make its appearance in our knowing only as something thought, not as something imagined or figurately conceived; let what is present in intuition or figurate conception be as rich as it may, the determination which first emerges in knowing is simple, for only in what is simple is there nothing more than the pure beginning; only the immediate is simple, for only in the immediate has no advance yet been made from a one to an other. Consequently, whatever is intended to be expressed or implied beyond being, in the richer forms of representing the absolute or God, this is in the beginning only an empty word and only being; this simple determination which has no other meaning of any kind, this emptiness, is therefore simply as such the beginning of philosophy.

§ 122

This insight is itself so simple that this beginning as such requires no preparation or further introduction; and, indeed, these preliminary, external reflections about it were not so much intended to lead up to it as rather to eliminate all preliminaries.

General Division of Being § 123

Being is determined, first, as against another in general; Secondly, as immanently self-determining; Thirdly, setting aside the preliminary character of this division, it is the abstract indeterminateness and immediacy in which it must be the beginning.

§ 124

According to the first determination, being is classified as distinct from essence, for later in its development it proves to be in its totality only one sphere of the Notion and to this sphere as moment, it opposes another sphere.

§ 125

According to the second determination, it is the sphere within which fall the determinations and the entire movement of its reflection. Here, being will posit itself in three determinations:

I as determinateness as such: quality II as sublated determinateness: magnitude, quantity III as qualitatively determined quantity: measure.

§ 126

At this stage, this division is, as was remarked of these divisions generally in the Introduction, a preliminary statement; its determinations have first to arise from the movement of being itself and in so doing define and justify themselves. As regards the divergence of this classification from the usual presentation of the categories, namely, as quantity, quality, relation and modality - these moreover with Kant are supposed to be only titles for his categories though they are, in fact, themselves categories, only more general ones - this calls for no special comment here, as the entire exposition will show a complete divergence from the usual arrangement and significance of the categories.

§ 127

This only perhaps can be remarked, that hitherto the determination of quantity has been made to precede quality and this as is mostly the case - for no given reason. It has already been shown that the beginning is made with being as such, therefore, with qualitative being. It is easily seen from a comparison of quality with quantity that the former by its nature is first. For quantity is quality which has already become negative; magnitude is the determinateness which is no longer one with being but is already differentiated from it, sublated quality which has become indifferent. It includes the alterableness of being, although the category itself, namely Being, of which it is the determination, is not altered by it. The qualitative determinateness, on the other hand, is one with its being: it neither goes beyond it nor is internal to it, but is its immediate limitedness. Quality therefore, as the immediate determinateness, is primary and it is with it that the beginning must be made.

§ 128

Measure is a relation, but not relation in general, for it is the specific relation between quality and quantity; the categories which Kant includes under relation will come up for consideration in quite another place. Measure can also, if one wishes, be regarded as a modality; but since with Kant modality is supposed no longer to constitute a determination of the content, but to concern only the relation of the content to thought, to the subjective element, it is a quite heterogeneous relation and is not pertinent here.

§ 129

The third determination of being falls within the section Quality, for as abstract immediacy it reduces itself to a single determinateness in relation to its other determinatenesses within its sphere.

Quality - Next Section