Introduction_part3_of_Hegel_The_Science_of_Logic.mp3

Finally, with respect to the 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 one who comes to it and to the sciences generally for the first time, and something else for one who returns to it from these sciences. He who is beginning to make his acquaintance with grammar finds in its forms and laws dry abstractions, arbitrary rules, quite in general a disconnected aggregate of definitions that have no other value or meaning than what they immediately signify; at the start, there is nothing to be known in them except themselves. On the other hand, he who has mastered a language and is also acquainted with other languages with which to compare it, to such is given the capacity to feel in the grammar of the language the spirit and culture of a people; the same rules and forms now have an enriched, living value. In the medium of the language, he can recognize the expression of spirit as spirit, and this is logic. So, he who first comes to this science, at first finds in logic an isolated system of abstractions which, confined to itself, does not reach over to embrace other forms of cognition and of science. On the contrary, when held against the riches of the world-scenario, against the apparently real content of the other sciences; when compared with the promise of the absolute science to unveil the essence of these riches, to unveil the inner nature of spirit and of the world, the truth, then in the abstractness of its shape, in the colorlessness and stark simplicity of its pure determinations; this science has rather the look of one who can sooner afford anything than any such promise but stands penniless before those riches. The first acquaintance with logic restricts its significance to it alone; its content passes only for an isolated occupation with thought determinations, next to which the other scientific endeavors constitute a material and content of their own, one over which logical thought may indeed have some formal influence, but an influence which is more of their own making and which, if need be, scientific form and the study of this form can at any rate also dispense with. The other sciences have on the whole discarded the well-regulated method of proceeding by way of definitions, axioms, theorems and their proofs, and so on; so-called natural logic has become their accepted norm and this manages to do its work without any specialized knowledge of thought itself. All in all, the matter and the content of these sciences stand totally independent of logic and are also better suited to the senses, to feeling, the imagination, and any kind of practical interest. So logic must indeed at first be learned as something which one may well understand and penetrate into but in which, at the beginning, one misses the scope, depth, and broader significance. Only after a more profound acquaintance with the other sciences does logic rise for subjective spirit from a merely abstract universal to a universal that encompasses within itself the riches of the particular: in the same way a moral maxim does not possess in the mouth of a youngster who otherwise understands it quite well the meaning and scope that it has in the spirit of a man with a lifetime of experience, to whom therefore the weight of its content is expressed in full force. Thus logic receives full appreciation of its value only when it comes as the result of the experience of the sciences; then it displays itself to spirit as the universal truth, not as a particular cognition alongside another material and other realities, but as the essence rather of this further content. Now although this power of logic is not consciously present to spirit at the beginning of its study, such a study will nevertheless impart to it the inward power which will lead it to the truth. The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness. Its task is one which is remote from the intuitions and the goals of the senses, remote from feelings and from the world of merely fancied representation. Considered from its negative side, this task consists in holding off the accidentality of ratiocinative thought and the arbitrariness in the choice to accept one ground as valid rather than its opposite. But above all, thought thereby gains self-subsistence and independence. It will make itself at home in abstractions and in the ways of working with concepts without sensuous substrata, will develop an unconscious power to assimilate in rational form the otherwise dispersed manifold of cognitions and sciences, the power to grasp and hold them in their essentiality, to strip them of every externality and in this way to abstract from them the logical element or what is the same thing, the power to fill the abstract groundwork of logic previously acquired through study with the content of every truth, and to bestow upon this content the value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but embraces them all in its grasp and is their essence, the absolutely true. general division of the logic It follows from what has been said regarding the concept of this science and where its justification lies that the general division of it can be only provisional here can be given, as it were, only in so far as the author is already acquainted with the science and is consequently historically in a position to indicate in advance the main distinctions in which the concept assumes determination as it develops. Still, the attempt can be made to elicit in advance some general understanding of what is required for performing the division, although even here recourse must be made to a procedural method which will attain full disclosure and justification only within the science. One must thus be reminded, first and foremost, that presupposed here is that the division must be connected with the concept, or rather must lie in the concept itself. The concept is not indeterminate but is determinate within; the division, however, expresses this determinateness of the concept in developed form; it is the parting of the concept in judgment, not a judgment about some subject matter or other picked out externally, but the judging, that is, the determining, of the concept within it. Right-angularity, acute-angularity, etc., or equilaterality, which are the determinations according to which triangles are divided, do not lie in the determinateness of the triangle itself, that is, not in what is usually called the concept of a triangle, no more than in the concept of animal in general, or of mammal, bird, etc., one can find the determinations according to which animal in general is divided into mammal, bird, etc., and these classes are then divided into further genera. Such determinations are taken from elsewhere, from empirical intuition; they come to those so-called concepts from without. In the philosophical treatment of division, the concept must show that it itself holds the source of the determinations. But in the Introduction, the concept of logic was itself presented as the result of a science that transcends it, and hence as equally a presupposition here. Accordingly, logic was defined as the science of pure thought the science that has pure knowledge for its principle and is a unity which is not abstract but living and concrete, so that the opposition of consciousness between a being subjectively existing for itself, and another but objectively existing such being, has been overcome in it, and being is known to be in itself a pure concept and the pure concept to be true being. These, then, are the two moments contained in logic. But they are now known to exist inseparably, not as in consciousness, where each exists for itself; it is for this reason and this reason alone, because they are at the same time known to be distinct (yet not to exist for themselves), that their unity is not abstract, dead and inert, but concrete. This unity also constitutes the logical principle as element, so that the development of the distinction which is from the start present in it proceeds only inside this element. For since the division is, as we said, the parting or the judgment of the concept is the positing of the determination which is already immanent in it and therefore the positing of its distinction this positing must not be understood as resolving that concrete unity back into its determinations, as if these were to exist on their own, for this would be here a vacuous return to the previous standpoint, to the opposition of consciousness. But this opposition has vanished; the unity remains the element, and the distinctions of the division and of the development in general no longer transgress that unity. Therefore the earlier determinations which (on the pathway to truth) existed for themselves, as for instance that of subjective and objective, or also of thought and being, of concept and reality, no matter from what standpoint they were determined, are now in their truth, that is, in their unity, reduced to forms. In their difference they therefore implicitly remain, in themselves, the whole concept, and this concept is posited in the division only under its own determinations. Thus it is the whole concept which we must consider, first as existent concept, and then as concept; in the one case it is concept only implicitly, in itself, the concept of reality or being; in the other, it is the concept as such, the concept that exists for itself (in more concrete forms, the concept as it is in the human being, who is endowed with thought, and also in the sentient animal and in general in organic individuality, although, of course, in these last it is not conscious and still less known; it is concept in itself only in inorganic nature). Accordingly, the first division must be between the logic of the concept as being and of the concept as concept, or (if we want to avail ourselves of otherwise familiar, but very indeterminate and therefore very ambiguous expressions) in objective and subjective logic. Element has classical connotations here. Like water, fire, or air, this unity is a pervasive element that embraces differences. However, in accordance with the elemental unity which is immanent in the concept as basis, and hence in accordance with the inseparability of the concepts determinations, such determinations, even as differentiated (the concept is posited in their difference), must also stand at least in reference to each another. There results a sphere of mediation, the concept as a system of reflected determinations, that is, of being as it passes over into the in-itselfness of the concept a concept which is in this way not yet posited for itself as such but is also fettered by an immediate being still external to it. This sphere is the doctrine of essence that stands between the doctrine of being and of the concept. In the general division of logic in this work, it has been included in objective logic because, although essence is indeed already inwardness, the character of subject is to be reserved nominatim for the concept. Recently Kante has opposed to what has usually been called logic another, namely a transcendental logic. What has been called objective logic here would correspond in part to what for him is transcendental logic. Kant distinguishes it from what he calls general logic because (a) it deals with concepts that refer to intended objects a priori, and hence does not abstract from all the content of objective cognition, or in that it contains the rules of the pure thinking of an intended object; and because (b) it thereby goes to the source of our cognition so far as this cogni- tion cannot be attributed to the intended objects. It is to this second aspect that Kants philosophical interest is exclusively directed. His principal idea is to vindicate the categories for self-consciousness understood as the subjective I. Because of this determination, his point of view remains confined within consciousness and its opposition, and, besides the empirical element of feeling and intuition, is left with something else not posited or determined by thinking self-consciousness, a thing-in-itself, something alien and external to thinking although it is easy to see that such an abstract entity as the thing-in-itself is itself only the product of thought, and of merely abstractive thought at that. If other Kantians have expanded on the determining of the intended object by the I by saying that the objectifying of the I is to be regarded as an original and necessary deed of consciousness, so that in this original deed there is not yet the representation of the I which would be only a consciousness of that consciousness, or itself an objectifying of that consciousness then this objectifying deed, liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such.f But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the I and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name consciousness gives it more of a sem- blance of subjectivity than does the term thought, which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not as encumbered by the finitude of consciousness; in short, thought as such. Now because the interest of the Kantian philosophy was directed to the so-called transcendental nature of the categories, the treatment itself of such categories came up empty. What they are in themselves apart from their abstract relation to the I, a relation which is the same for all, how they are determined and related to each other, this was not made a subject of consideration, and therefore knowledge of their nature was not in the least advanced by this philosophy. What alone is of interest in this connection comes only in the Critique of Ideas. However, if there was to be a real progress in philosophy, it was necessary that the interest of thought should be drawn to the consideration of the formal side, of the I, of consciousness as such, that is, of the abstract reference of a subjective awareness to an object, and that in this way the path should be opened for the cognition of the infinite form, that is, of the concept. Yet, in order to arrive at this cognition, the finite determinateness in which that form is as I, as consciousness, must be shed. The form, when thought out in its purity, will then have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content, and to give it as a necessary content as a system of thought-determinations. The objective logic thus takes the place rather of the former metaphysics which was supposed to be the scientific edifice of the world as constructed by thoughts alone. If we look at the final shape in the elaboration of this science, then it is ontology which objective logic most directly replaces in the first instance, that is, that part of metaphysics intended to investigate the nature of ens in general (and ens comprises within itself both being and essence, a distinction for which the German language has fortunately pre- served different expressions). But objective logic comprises within itself also the rest of metaphysics, the metaphysics which sought to comprehend with the pure forms of thought such particular substrata, originally drawn from the imagination, as the soul, the world, and God, and in this type of consideration the determinations of thought constituted the essential factor. Logic, however, considers these forms free of those substrata, which are the subjects of figurative representation, considers their nature and value in and for themselves. That metaphysics neglected to do this, and it therefore incurred the just reproach that it employed the pure forms of thought uncritically, without previously investigating whether and how they could be the determinations of the thing-in-itself, to use Kants expression or more precisely, of the rational. The objective logic is therefore the true critique of such determinations a critique that considers them, not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in themselves according to their particular content. The subjective logic is the logic of the concept of essence which has sublated its reference to a being or to its reflective shine, and in its determination is no longer external but something subjective, freely self-subsisting, self-determining, or rather the subject itself. Since subjective brings with it the misconception of accidental and arbitrary and also, in general, of determinations that belong to the form of consciousness, no particular weight is to be attached here to the distinction of subjective and objective. This is a distinction which will be more precisely developed later in the logic itself. Logic thus divides overall 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 Concept.