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The Idea of Hegel's "Science of Logic"
Although Hegel considered Science of Logic essential to his philosophy, it has received scant commentary compared with the other three books he published in his lifetime. Here philosopher Stanley Rosen rescues the Science of Logic from obscurity, arguing that its neglect is responsible for contemporary philosophy’s fracture into many different and opposed schools of thought. Through deep and careful analysis, Rosen sheds new light on the precise problems that animate Hegel’s overlooked book and their tremendous significance to philosophical conceptions of logic and reason.
Rosen’s overarching question is how, if at all, rationalism can overcome the split between monism and dualism. Monism—which claims a singular essence for all things—ultimately leads to nihilism, while dualism, which claims multiple, irreducible essences, leads to what Rosen calls “the endless chatter of the history of philosophy.” The Science of Logic , he argues, is the fundamental text to offer a new conception of rationalism that might overcome this philosophical split. Leading readers through Hegel’s book from beginning to end, Rosen’s argument culminates in a masterful chapter on the Idea in Hegel. By fully appreciating the Science of Logic and situating it properly within Hegel’s oeuvre, Rosen in turn provides new tools for wrangling with the conceptual puzzles that have brought so many other philosophers to disaster.
Rosen’s overarching question is how, if at all, rationalism can overcome the split between monism and dualism. Monism—which claims a singular essence for all things—ultimately leads to nihilism, while dualism, which claims multiple, irreducible essences, leads to what Rosen calls “the endless chatter of the history of philosophy.” The Science of Logic , he argues, is the fundamental text to offer a new conception of rationalism that might overcome this philosophical split. Leading readers through Hegel’s book from beginning to end, Rosen’s argument culminates in a masterful chapter on the Idea in Hegel. By fully appreciating the Science of Logic and situating it properly within Hegel’s oeuvre, Rosen in turn provides new tools for wrangling with the conceptual puzzles that have brought so many other philosophers to disaster.
- GenresPhilosophyMetaphysics
517 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
7 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
About the author
Stanley Rosen
66 books33 followersStanley Rosen was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.
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February 4, 2022
A few years ago, I finished reading Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic – and thought I would jump into his Science of Logic. It went badly, I’m happy to admit it. I found it much harder to read than I was expecting and have started it a couple of times since. And so, I thought it might be a good idea to have someone hold my hand before I started reading it again. And that is where this book came in. This book starts by saying that after Hegel died his followers split into the Right and Left Hegelians. Neither of whom, according to the author, represented what Hegel himself thought. Since this book is engaging with the text itself, I sort of hope that it isn’t so influenced by its own prejudices and priorities that it overlooks Hegel’s in the same way that the left and right Hegelians did – there were times while reading this when I almost felt that might be the case, but all the same, this book is clear in explaining a book that is generally anything but.
This isn’t so much a review, and more me talking about what I think I have gotten out of reading this book – if that makes sense. The book itself is a close reading of Hegel’s text, explaining the bits you are likely to get lost in as you go.
Much of this book focuses on (and refers back to repeatedly) how Hegel begins his Science of Logic. And that is, with the idea that absolute being and absolute nothing are identical. That feels like the sort of thing a lecturer might say in the first couple of weeks of a new course when he hopes to weed out stragglers. Hegel’s point is that both absolute nothing and absolute being are without predicates. You know, normally we say things like ‘the apple is red’ or ‘Venus is the god of love’ and these are things with predicates, with what comes after the ‘is’ being the predicate – but the 'being' Hegel wants to begin his logic with is absolute being, and this can’t have definite characteristics - he isn't saying, 'in the beginning there was darkness' - he is saying, 'in the beginning there was being - pure being - without characteristics - and that was identical to pure nothing'. There are a few reasons why Hegel would want to start here. Not least since this is more or less where he wants to end up with his absolute idea – or with god. A being with all the predicates, I guess, and so similar to one having none at all. If god is all things, then god is also nothing – being and nothing, in their purest senses are identical.
Hegel is trying to create a system of logic able to stand on its own – that is, so as not rely on anything outside pure thought acting as a foundation for that system. Hegel is a rationalist. He wants to overcome Kant’s dualism. He wants to avoid subjective idealism. He wants to show that rationalism provides a stronger foundation to logic than empiricism. So, the foundation of his logic must be a pure idea. For Hegel, the identity of being and nothingness is that idea.
I’m not going to pretend that I understand. Or how it is possible to move forward from that nothingness or pure being to what I take to be Hegel’s method. But, like so many before me, here we go anyway.
The next main idea I took from this book is something, in fact, I turned to the Science of Logic for recently anyway. It was something I’d been thinking about the relationship between quality and quantity – and I wanted to see what Hegel had to say about it. Recently, it dawned on me that quality needs be prior to quantity. Before you can start counting stuff, you need to categories that stuff – define it by its qualities. It is fine to count apples, but before you can do that you to have defined what apples are. So, quality is primary. I needed to talk to some research students recently on the difference between quantitative and qualitative research – and people tend to think quantitative is primary, and qualitative research is what people who aren’t particularly good with numbers do and as such is always secondary. I figured Hegel would have something interesting to say on this.
I’m not going to pretend that I can lead you through all of Hegel’s twists and turns through essence, contradiction, ground and so on – if I ever review The Science of Logic itself, I will try to do that. But I do want to mention some of the things discussed in this book that stopped me.
One was the reason why Hegel needed to move beyond the mathematical law of non-contradiction as a basis for his logic. The author here points out that mathematics is fundamentally outside philosophy and so it cannot provide a satisfactory basis for a philosophical logic that needs to be self-contained and whole. The major reason, however, is that Hegel says mathematical logic is based on the idea of non-contradiction, the law of identity, where A = A. For Hegel this has a couple of problems. The first is that this is a tautology. As such, it can only relate to the beginning of a science of logic – since logic needs to explain the development of all thought and, since the real world is ‘rational’ and develops, both 'the logic of the real world' and 'the logic of thought' must mirror each other. And what is impossible to not notice about the real world is that things change. Change means A becomes not-A – acorns become oak trees, children become adults, water becomes steam. And change looks a hell of a lot like a contradiction. The very opposite of the law of identity.
This doesn’t mean that Hegel’s logic is full of ‘logical contradictions’ – but that it recognises that if things are going to develop, then the law of identity is going to have a limited application in his logic.
This is a key to Hegel’s logic. It provides the basis of his ‘dialectic’. This might be clearer if we jump back to Socrates for a minute. Socrates was once told by a Sibyl (long story, I’m going to give a short version of) that he was the wisest man alive. And so Socrates said, ‘well that can’t be right, all I know is I know nothing’. So Socrates went around trying to find someone wiser than himself. But what he actually found was people fooling themselves into believing that they knew stuff when they basically didn’t – and so, Socrates knowing he knew nothing meant he was wiser than those pretending to know what they didn’t really know.
There are a couple of things worth noticing here – one is we are sort of back at the identity of being and nothing again. The other is that the task Socrates set himself was essentially negative. He wasn't trying to definitely prove he knew nothing, he is trying to prove other people knew nothing, despite them thinking they knew lots.
Hegel’s dialectic is like this too – well, in part, at least. That is, it is essentially negative. It negates.
We need to come back to predicates. When we define something as having qualities, we provide it with predicates. And when something changes, it is the predicates that do the changing. Hegel maintains that all predicates turn into their opposite, that this is the essential nature of change and that this ‘negative’ process is the key to the dialectical process. Or perhaps ‘a key’, rather than ‘the key’ – since negation in itself, if left at that, would lead to the eclecticism of the post-structuralists – a constant negation of all positive predication leading only to chaos. Hegel believes he has discovered the secret of the universe – a universal method that applies to all thinking – but also, since this method is rational, to all being and development too, both in thought and in nature. That is, that while the dialectical method progresses through negation – the stress here needs to be on ‘progresses’. Hegel overcomes the problem of chaotic endless negation, the eternal negative (of constant negation seeming to take the ground away from any determination) by seeing development as a kind of return to where we began, but at a higher level. And he calls this return at a higher level the ‘negation of the negation’. It is, as the author points out, Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, but with a positive development.
What’s interesting here is that the only thing that anyone generally knows of Hegel’s dialectical method – his ‘triad’ or ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’ –is hardly mentioned once in this entire book, other than for the author to note Hegel saying you can have more than three steps here – something the author shrugs his shoulders over. Hegel’s point was never to assert a kind of magical and logical ‘trinity’ in this triad, but rather to stress unity and development through opposition leading to development, showing how change happens, through negation. All of which means that while the dialectic is essentially negative, ultimately it leads to the negation of the negation, and so, the negation in turn becomes positive, raising to a new and higher level.
I think I almost understood what Hegel had to say about the relationship between the individual, particular and universal here for the first time. Again, this comes back to predicates. Predication is a feature of the universal – ‘this apple is red’ applies the universal category of ‘redness’ to the individual ‘apple’ and therefore helps to define the individual apple as a particular kind of ‘apple’ – one that is red (you know, not a Granny Smith, then). More predicates will further associate the apple with the universal categories and therefore, and at the same time, link it more firmly to a particular kind of apple. So, predication is a way of linking the individual to the universal via the particular.
I am going to need to read Hegel now, although, god only knows when I will get time to, now that the year has started in earnest. All the same, I needed this hand-holding and will, if I do get a chance to read the Science of Logic anytime soon, flick back to this book for another hand-holding. This book is clear where Hegel himself can be anything but.
This isn’t so much a review, and more me talking about what I think I have gotten out of reading this book – if that makes sense. The book itself is a close reading of Hegel’s text, explaining the bits you are likely to get lost in as you go.
Much of this book focuses on (and refers back to repeatedly) how Hegel begins his Science of Logic. And that is, with the idea that absolute being and absolute nothing are identical. That feels like the sort of thing a lecturer might say in the first couple of weeks of a new course when he hopes to weed out stragglers. Hegel’s point is that both absolute nothing and absolute being are without predicates. You know, normally we say things like ‘the apple is red’ or ‘Venus is the god of love’ and these are things with predicates, with what comes after the ‘is’ being the predicate – but the 'being' Hegel wants to begin his logic with is absolute being, and this can’t have definite characteristics - he isn't saying, 'in the beginning there was darkness' - he is saying, 'in the beginning there was being - pure being - without characteristics - and that was identical to pure nothing'. There are a few reasons why Hegel would want to start here. Not least since this is more or less where he wants to end up with his absolute idea – or with god. A being with all the predicates, I guess, and so similar to one having none at all. If god is all things, then god is also nothing – being and nothing, in their purest senses are identical.
Hegel is trying to create a system of logic able to stand on its own – that is, so as not rely on anything outside pure thought acting as a foundation for that system. Hegel is a rationalist. He wants to overcome Kant’s dualism. He wants to avoid subjective idealism. He wants to show that rationalism provides a stronger foundation to logic than empiricism. So, the foundation of his logic must be a pure idea. For Hegel, the identity of being and nothingness is that idea.
I’m not going to pretend that I understand. Or how it is possible to move forward from that nothingness or pure being to what I take to be Hegel’s method. But, like so many before me, here we go anyway.
The next main idea I took from this book is something, in fact, I turned to the Science of Logic for recently anyway. It was something I’d been thinking about the relationship between quality and quantity – and I wanted to see what Hegel had to say about it. Recently, it dawned on me that quality needs be prior to quantity. Before you can start counting stuff, you need to categories that stuff – define it by its qualities. It is fine to count apples, but before you can do that you to have defined what apples are. So, quality is primary. I needed to talk to some research students recently on the difference between quantitative and qualitative research – and people tend to think quantitative is primary, and qualitative research is what people who aren’t particularly good with numbers do and as such is always secondary. I figured Hegel would have something interesting to say on this.
I’m not going to pretend that I can lead you through all of Hegel’s twists and turns through essence, contradiction, ground and so on – if I ever review The Science of Logic itself, I will try to do that. But I do want to mention some of the things discussed in this book that stopped me.
One was the reason why Hegel needed to move beyond the mathematical law of non-contradiction as a basis for his logic. The author here points out that mathematics is fundamentally outside philosophy and so it cannot provide a satisfactory basis for a philosophical logic that needs to be self-contained and whole. The major reason, however, is that Hegel says mathematical logic is based on the idea of non-contradiction, the law of identity, where A = A. For Hegel this has a couple of problems. The first is that this is a tautology. As such, it can only relate to the beginning of a science of logic – since logic needs to explain the development of all thought and, since the real world is ‘rational’ and develops, both 'the logic of the real world' and 'the logic of thought' must mirror each other. And what is impossible to not notice about the real world is that things change. Change means A becomes not-A – acorns become oak trees, children become adults, water becomes steam. And change looks a hell of a lot like a contradiction. The very opposite of the law of identity.
This doesn’t mean that Hegel’s logic is full of ‘logical contradictions’ – but that it recognises that if things are going to develop, then the law of identity is going to have a limited application in his logic.
This is a key to Hegel’s logic. It provides the basis of his ‘dialectic’. This might be clearer if we jump back to Socrates for a minute. Socrates was once told by a Sibyl (long story, I’m going to give a short version of) that he was the wisest man alive. And so Socrates said, ‘well that can’t be right, all I know is I know nothing’. So Socrates went around trying to find someone wiser than himself. But what he actually found was people fooling themselves into believing that they knew stuff when they basically didn’t – and so, Socrates knowing he knew nothing meant he was wiser than those pretending to know what they didn’t really know.
There are a couple of things worth noticing here – one is we are sort of back at the identity of being and nothing again. The other is that the task Socrates set himself was essentially negative. He wasn't trying to definitely prove he knew nothing, he is trying to prove other people knew nothing, despite them thinking they knew lots.
Hegel’s dialectic is like this too – well, in part, at least. That is, it is essentially negative. It negates.
We need to come back to predicates. When we define something as having qualities, we provide it with predicates. And when something changes, it is the predicates that do the changing. Hegel maintains that all predicates turn into their opposite, that this is the essential nature of change and that this ‘negative’ process is the key to the dialectical process. Or perhaps ‘a key’, rather than ‘the key’ – since negation in itself, if left at that, would lead to the eclecticism of the post-structuralists – a constant negation of all positive predication leading only to chaos. Hegel believes he has discovered the secret of the universe – a universal method that applies to all thinking – but also, since this method is rational, to all being and development too, both in thought and in nature. That is, that while the dialectical method progresses through negation – the stress here needs to be on ‘progresses’. Hegel overcomes the problem of chaotic endless negation, the eternal negative (of constant negation seeming to take the ground away from any determination) by seeing development as a kind of return to where we began, but at a higher level. And he calls this return at a higher level the ‘negation of the negation’. It is, as the author points out, Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, but with a positive development.
What’s interesting here is that the only thing that anyone generally knows of Hegel’s dialectical method – his ‘triad’ or ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’ –is hardly mentioned once in this entire book, other than for the author to note Hegel saying you can have more than three steps here – something the author shrugs his shoulders over. Hegel’s point was never to assert a kind of magical and logical ‘trinity’ in this triad, but rather to stress unity and development through opposition leading to development, showing how change happens, through negation. All of which means that while the dialectic is essentially negative, ultimately it leads to the negation of the negation, and so, the negation in turn becomes positive, raising to a new and higher level.
I think I almost understood what Hegel had to say about the relationship between the individual, particular and universal here for the first time. Again, this comes back to predicates. Predication is a feature of the universal – ‘this apple is red’ applies the universal category of ‘redness’ to the individual ‘apple’ and therefore helps to define the individual apple as a particular kind of ‘apple’ – one that is red (you know, not a Granny Smith, then). More predicates will further associate the apple with the universal categories and therefore, and at the same time, link it more firmly to a particular kind of apple. So, predication is a way of linking the individual to the universal via the particular.
I am going to need to read Hegel now, although, god only knows when I will get time to, now that the year has started in earnest. All the same, I needed this hand-holding and will, if I do get a chance to read the Science of Logic anytime soon, flick back to this book for another hand-holding. This book is clear where Hegel himself can be anything but.
April 17, 2018
Stanley Rosen approaches Hegel from an unusual and, I believe, a productive angle. As an authority in Greek philosophy as well as in Heidegger, he has more distance from Hegel than do most interpreters and a more comprehensive view of Hegel's relation to the philosophical tradition. In the spirit of his teacher Leo Strauss, Rosen is quite tendentious not only about Hegel but towards modern philosophy in general, yet his quarrel produces insights that others who are friendlier to Hegel will most likely miss. This is a frustrating and prickly book but it's still worth reading.
March 7, 2021
A valid question in sitting down to write this review is why I read this book, a detailed analysis of Hegel’s Science of Logic, a book I have not read. The simple answer is that I was given it several years ago and have been trying to work down my unread booklist. But once I got going, this book reminded me why I thought to put this book on my wishlist in the first place. While I have not read the Science of Logic (SL) itself, I have read the Encyclopaedia Logic (Hegel’s lecture-course version of the same), as well as the more famous Phenomenology of Spirit (PS) and the extremely influential Philosophy of History.
All of which illustrate Hegel’s interesting thought alongside his frustratingly difficult (verging on impossible to read without a guidebook) style. I followed the PS as well as any non-philosopher I suppose, but I always felt that, unlike Kant say, I couldn’t easily say to myself what Hegel’s philosophy was about (even in a broad-brush manner). I could outline the dialectical ‘ladder’ whereby consciousness comes to awareness of the importance of philosophy (specifically Hegel’s of course) as the means to understand what is, i.e. the absolute (everything). But I couldn’t really say more: what is the absolute? What is the concept (about which so much in the Encyclopaedia Logic)? Why did Hegel consider the SL central, over and above the PS? What is the ‘idea’ of Stanley Rosen’s book’s title?
These were all questions that I wanted, if not an academically rigorous answer to, then at least a sense of what Hegel thought. This is what made me ask for in-depth look at an abstruse book by a difficult author that I’ve never read.
So, to review this book I will try and summarise whether Stanley Rosen’s ‘The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic’ helped me answer these questions and get a better understanding of the great but always obtuse 19th century German philosopher. To cut a long story short, yes, Rosen did. I feel I have a much better understanding of Hegel. This is in large part due to Rosen’s exceptionally helpful glossing, paraphrasing and repetition of difficult Hegelian ideas, alongside re-casting them in clearer, often analogical language.
As the ‘idea’ of Hegel’s Science of Logic features in the title, let’s start with this one of my questions: what is the ‘idea’? In Hegel’s words: “The absolute idea alone is being, perpetual life, self-knowing truth, and it is all truth”. So much, so Hegel. In Rosen’s useful gloss, the idea is described as the logical (thought-out) version of absolute spirit, which is “God … This is why the subject finds itself at home in thinking the object; there is no alienation, no gap between the sage and the impulse to wisdom. Once we see that the world is permeated with spirit, and so that we ourselves, as spirit, permeate or appropriate the world by thinking it, we have thought the whole.” Hegel frames the absolute idea as the “word” in the sense of the “word” of God, but he means by this the logical form underpinning everything that is, somewhat in the manner of Genesis.
The absolute idea (the conceptualised absolute spirit in the more psychological language of the PS) is the culmination of Hegel, the point at which we, as pupils of Hegel’s logic, think totality. The Absolute Idea really is just God, but not a simple religious picture of God as separate to the universe. It is rather God as this totality, not an abstract ‘everything’, but rather as the fully worked out version of Hegel’s philosophy (yes, this is rather a big claim!). By so being, we can think this idea of course.
Instead of some unknowable (e.g. Christian) God or whole, “Hegel contend[s] … that the whole is alive; and it is the life-pulse of the formation process that is the sign of this life.” This life pulse – the famous dialectic of Hegel’s philosophy – is the driver that pushed us from the abstract being of the first pages of the logic to the absolute idea at its close. As Rosen goes on to say “[there is] the problem of the relation between God and his creation. Some have accused Hegel of pantheism, some of atheism. I doubt he would accept either designation … The world is the externalisation of God, or the object that corresponds to the divine subject. Neither could exist without the other (since to be a God is to create), and the two together are the two sides of absolute spirit.”
This is the crux of Hegel’s philosophy. For him, philosophy had been dogged by fights over the reality of the world, how human subject and object come to be related. Hegel starts his project with abstract being – the simplest conception possible – and follows through this concept���s inner workings to arrive at an absolute idea (God) which is both subject and object. These are not related in some dualistic manner, or hopelessly sundered (think: Kant’s thing in itself). As a consequence, Hegel arrives at a unified version of thinking and being (or God and created world) in which everything is integrated and the issues of metaphysics and philosophy are resolved.
This summary of the project of the SL, incidentally, answers another question: why did Hegel view the SL as so central as against (say) the PS? While the PS seems to go through similar moves, from the most simple attempt to conceptualise consciousness (not being, as in the SL) to the arrival at absolute spirit (not the absolute idea), I now understand that the PS was seen by Hegel as a propaedeutic to the SL, a teaching device to ready the world for Hegel. As a phenomenological (in the Husserlian sense) approach to philosophy, it was Hegel’s attempt to arrive at his final view of philosophy from within the bounds of consciousness. As Rosen describes it: “the idea … can be characterised … as the logical version of absolute spirit, a term to which no section of the SL corresponds. As is obvious from its role in the PS, “spirit” conveys the experience of self-consciousness rather than the logical structure of intelligibility [as concept per the SL].” For Hegel, abstracting from the experience of consciousness to attempt a ‘pure’ philosophy was always paramount, even if the SL ends with a very human description of the relation of human subject (or soul in the final wash) to the spirit-infused world around it (life).
Hegel’s absolute idea is clearly central, and Rosen has helped me grasp this notion much more firmly in a manner that most books on Hegel, focussed as they are on the movements of dialectic or the very early moves in the SL have not. But how does Hegel get to this destination of his work? “The logos [attempt to understand] begins with the concept of pure, empty, abstract being”. In other words, Hegel begins with what is pure, abstract, formless being and, by thinking this initial concept, discovers nothing there. But nothing, as concept, then has being. In short, he has started with being and nothing (or the concepts of the same). This leads to the notion of becoming.
And from this simple starting point the SL sets off from determinateness, “the first moment of the development of the structure of the concept” as Rosen describes it. Each ‘moment’ evolves out of the moment before. For example, the moment ‘Dasein’ emerges as a momentary ‘being there’ within the flux of becoming. We now have (some sort of) determinate being rather than abstract being (sein, in the German). But a Dasein (determinate being of some kind, so emphasising the ‘being’ of becoming) is identified by what it is not (the ‘nothing’ of becoming) so through this ‘negating’ of Dasein we arrive at the category of quality (yet another category of the concept). But the “opposition of Dasein and its quality, which opposition is a separation of the two, but second, the opposition is overcome and thus we are raised to ‘something’ or ‘another’.”
In this brief illustration of Hegel’s dialectical journey through categories, starting from the bare concept of being, we arrive at interrelatedness of determinate beings and their qualities in the concepts of something and its other. This illustrates the process of opposing categorial determinations (like Dasein and quality) only to ‘sublate’ them (raise them up) to some higher conceptual level (or richness of categories). In this case, that was the movement up from bare being through to something and another. The analysis continues in the Science of Logic through the categories of quantity and quality, both of which have rich sub-structures that are worked out in Hegel’s relentless voyage of comparing, contrasting and opposing of logical categories – the process of the dialectic – to find some unified new concept that both retains the differences of the underlying ‘moments’ while bringing them together. This is helpfully paraphrased by Rosen as an “identity within difference” to label these new conceptual moments: the higher concepts contain within them (as moments) the previous categories, neither cancelling the contradiction into nothingness nor unifying them so that their difference is neglected.
At the larger level of the SL as a whole, being overall is sublated into “essence”, another major conceptual category for Hegel. Very loosely speaking, while being can be considered to be the outside of things, essence can be considered the defining features of things (the answer to the question: what are a thing’s essential properties?). As with being and its many facets of quantity and quality and so on, essence reveals itself at once as illusion, then as appearance, then as actuality and so on, all different categories within essence. This all leads along the trajectory to the concept, which is the sublation - or the unity within difference - of being and essence.
Believe it or not, this almost mystical evolution of logical categories culminates in the absolute idea, or the unified subject/object, God/world discussed above, rendered intelligible in thinking via the concept. The workings through of all these myriad steps is what makes Hegel so hard and represents perhaps the worst aspect of Rosen’s book. To be clear: I could not remotely have given what is hopefully a passable interpretation of Hegel above without Rosen. That is the book’s great strength. But most of what I’ve quoted and made use of above is found in the paragraphs where Rosen summarises, where he steps back from the text.
But the text itself is long and technical and, perhaps as academic philosopher, Rosen cannot resist diving into the detail too much. This is, no doubt, of use to the specialist or the student studying Hegel, for whom a ‘passable interpretation’ won’t cut it. Unfortunately for the enterprising amateur, the lengthy discussions of this or that facet of Hegel’s dialectico-speculative logic is very onerous and occludes the comparatively illuminating passages that made this book worth reading. To give just one example, Rosen discusses in painful detail Hegel’s treatment of the essence-attribute problem. This, and related discussions on propositions (think syllogisms, middle terms and all that stuff) goes on for several chapters and was just a plain drag to read.
A second criticism (perhaps implicitly a complement) is that the book desperately needed a conclusion chapter. It simply finishes with a cursory discussion of the absolute idea as it features at the end of Hegel’s book. The whole book builds towards this point, which perhaps explains the lack of detail at the end itself. But for what was quite an epic read I really wanted a bit of a bow tied on the whole thing. Just one chapter, an epilogue or something, summarising the journey we had gone on with Rosen would have gone a long way to feeling like the book actually finished and that I had understood it as Rosen wanted me to.
But to return to the positive and my last, unanswered question above, fully answered in Rosen’s book: what is the concept? This highly amorphous term is littered throughout Hegel and was a source of constant confusion for me. It seemed to be both used in its casual, everyday sense, but to have an extremely deep import for Hegel too. As Rosen describes, the Concept is humankind’s means of ‘grasping’ things (the word literally means grasp in German): it is “a reflexive or self-conscious grasping by subjectivity of itself as the unity within difference of subject and object”. This is the unified subject-object of the absolute idea – unified but not equivalent.
For me, something Rosen got across persuasively throughout the book was what Hegel did with regards the ‘conceptual’ that made him innovative in philosophy and reflects his attempts to save philosophy from the “endless chatter” of metaphysical debates he believed the discipline to be mired in (and Rosen certainly believes to still be the case). “Hegel starts from the deceptively simple insight that the world in and for itself is itself a product of thought. The structure of that world is thus conceptual structure. The Concept is the manifestation of what substance is in itself … the Concept has been present from the outset as the concept of abstract being … what remains [in the book] is to study the structure of the activity of thinking itself.”
In other words: “This is why we are able to think or grasp beings in their intelligibility; there is no separation of being and thinking. Their unification is the Concept, and it is the same Concept in the order of actuality as in our thinking of it.” There should, therefore, be no surprise for us that being takes a conceptual form: we cannot think being without, you know, thinking. Hegel, building on this from the most abstract starting point of the concept of being, works out the consequences of this insight, which is (inevitably) that subject and object are one, the absolute spirit (i.e. God for Hegel).
What this all shows me is that my general questions about Hegel (what is the concept? What is the absolute? What is the idea? Why is the SL central to Hegel) are all interrelated. The concept, in the final wash, is the unification of being and essence, the “totality of the logic; it is the structure of thought”. This Concept is “generated from the dialectical excitation of substance” – which is where Hegel’s dialectic fits in, a dialectic (self-excitation or life-pulse) “that is the negative activity of the absolute”. The absolute, in turn, is “the concept that divides itself into its subjective and objective sides”, or the fully worked out concept at the highest stage of Hegel’s logic, an expression for the totality rather than some partial (e.g. only subjective or only objective) side of things. This leads up to the absolute idea – “being, perpetual life, self-knowing truth … all truth”, or as Rosen put it: God. In short, Rosen helped me better understand Hegel and for that reason I recommend this book. It is not perfect, but there is likely no easier introduction to this challenging, yet in Rosen’s telling, excitingly ambitious tour-de-force.
All of which illustrate Hegel’s interesting thought alongside his frustratingly difficult (verging on impossible to read without a guidebook) style. I followed the PS as well as any non-philosopher I suppose, but I always felt that, unlike Kant say, I couldn’t easily say to myself what Hegel’s philosophy was about (even in a broad-brush manner). I could outline the dialectical ‘ladder’ whereby consciousness comes to awareness of the importance of philosophy (specifically Hegel’s of course) as the means to understand what is, i.e. the absolute (everything). But I couldn’t really say more: what is the absolute? What is the concept (about which so much in the Encyclopaedia Logic)? Why did Hegel consider the SL central, over and above the PS? What is the ‘idea’ of Stanley Rosen’s book’s title?
These were all questions that I wanted, if not an academically rigorous answer to, then at least a sense of what Hegel thought. This is what made me ask for in-depth look at an abstruse book by a difficult author that I’ve never read.
So, to review this book I will try and summarise whether Stanley Rosen’s ‘The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic’ helped me answer these questions and get a better understanding of the great but always obtuse 19th century German philosopher. To cut a long story short, yes, Rosen did. I feel I have a much better understanding of Hegel. This is in large part due to Rosen’s exceptionally helpful glossing, paraphrasing and repetition of difficult Hegelian ideas, alongside re-casting them in clearer, often analogical language.
As the ‘idea’ of Hegel’s Science of Logic features in the title, let’s start with this one of my questions: what is the ‘idea’? In Hegel’s words: “The absolute idea alone is being, perpetual life, self-knowing truth, and it is all truth”. So much, so Hegel. In Rosen’s useful gloss, the idea is described as the logical (thought-out) version of absolute spirit, which is “God … This is why the subject finds itself at home in thinking the object; there is no alienation, no gap between the sage and the impulse to wisdom. Once we see that the world is permeated with spirit, and so that we ourselves, as spirit, permeate or appropriate the world by thinking it, we have thought the whole.” Hegel frames the absolute idea as the “word” in the sense of the “word” of God, but he means by this the logical form underpinning everything that is, somewhat in the manner of Genesis.
The absolute idea (the conceptualised absolute spirit in the more psychological language of the PS) is the culmination of Hegel, the point at which we, as pupils of Hegel’s logic, think totality. The Absolute Idea really is just God, but not a simple religious picture of God as separate to the universe. It is rather God as this totality, not an abstract ‘everything’, but rather as the fully worked out version of Hegel’s philosophy (yes, this is rather a big claim!). By so being, we can think this idea of course.
Instead of some unknowable (e.g. Christian) God or whole, “Hegel contend[s] … that the whole is alive; and it is the life-pulse of the formation process that is the sign of this life.” This life pulse – the famous dialectic of Hegel’s philosophy – is the driver that pushed us from the abstract being of the first pages of the logic to the absolute idea at its close. As Rosen goes on to say “[there is] the problem of the relation between God and his creation. Some have accused Hegel of pantheism, some of atheism. I doubt he would accept either designation … The world is the externalisation of God, or the object that corresponds to the divine subject. Neither could exist without the other (since to be a God is to create), and the two together are the two sides of absolute spirit.”
This is the crux of Hegel’s philosophy. For him, philosophy had been dogged by fights over the reality of the world, how human subject and object come to be related. Hegel starts his project with abstract being – the simplest conception possible – and follows through this concept���s inner workings to arrive at an absolute idea (God) which is both subject and object. These are not related in some dualistic manner, or hopelessly sundered (think: Kant’s thing in itself). As a consequence, Hegel arrives at a unified version of thinking and being (or God and created world) in which everything is integrated and the issues of metaphysics and philosophy are resolved.
This summary of the project of the SL, incidentally, answers another question: why did Hegel view the SL as so central as against (say) the PS? While the PS seems to go through similar moves, from the most simple attempt to conceptualise consciousness (not being, as in the SL) to the arrival at absolute spirit (not the absolute idea), I now understand that the PS was seen by Hegel as a propaedeutic to the SL, a teaching device to ready the world for Hegel. As a phenomenological (in the Husserlian sense) approach to philosophy, it was Hegel’s attempt to arrive at his final view of philosophy from within the bounds of consciousness. As Rosen describes it: “the idea … can be characterised … as the logical version of absolute spirit, a term to which no section of the SL corresponds. As is obvious from its role in the PS, “spirit” conveys the experience of self-consciousness rather than the logical structure of intelligibility [as concept per the SL].” For Hegel, abstracting from the experience of consciousness to attempt a ‘pure’ philosophy was always paramount, even if the SL ends with a very human description of the relation of human subject (or soul in the final wash) to the spirit-infused world around it (life).
Hegel’s absolute idea is clearly central, and Rosen has helped me grasp this notion much more firmly in a manner that most books on Hegel, focussed as they are on the movements of dialectic or the very early moves in the SL have not. But how does Hegel get to this destination of his work? “The logos [attempt to understand] begins with the concept of pure, empty, abstract being”. In other words, Hegel begins with what is pure, abstract, formless being and, by thinking this initial concept, discovers nothing there. But nothing, as concept, then has being. In short, he has started with being and nothing (or the concepts of the same). This leads to the notion of becoming.
And from this simple starting point the SL sets off from determinateness, “the first moment of the development of the structure of the concept” as Rosen describes it. Each ‘moment’ evolves out of the moment before. For example, the moment ‘Dasein’ emerges as a momentary ‘being there’ within the flux of becoming. We now have (some sort of) determinate being rather than abstract being (sein, in the German). But a Dasein (determinate being of some kind, so emphasising the ‘being’ of becoming) is identified by what it is not (the ‘nothing’ of becoming) so through this ‘negating’ of Dasein we arrive at the category of quality (yet another category of the concept). But the “opposition of Dasein and its quality, which opposition is a separation of the two, but second, the opposition is overcome and thus we are raised to ‘something’ or ‘another’.”
In this brief illustration of Hegel’s dialectical journey through categories, starting from the bare concept of being, we arrive at interrelatedness of determinate beings and their qualities in the concepts of something and its other. This illustrates the process of opposing categorial determinations (like Dasein and quality) only to ‘sublate’ them (raise them up) to some higher conceptual level (or richness of categories). In this case, that was the movement up from bare being through to something and another. The analysis continues in the Science of Logic through the categories of quantity and quality, both of which have rich sub-structures that are worked out in Hegel’s relentless voyage of comparing, contrasting and opposing of logical categories – the process of the dialectic – to find some unified new concept that both retains the differences of the underlying ‘moments’ while bringing them together. This is helpfully paraphrased by Rosen as an “identity within difference” to label these new conceptual moments: the higher concepts contain within them (as moments) the previous categories, neither cancelling the contradiction into nothingness nor unifying them so that their difference is neglected.
At the larger level of the SL as a whole, being overall is sublated into “essence”, another major conceptual category for Hegel. Very loosely speaking, while being can be considered to be the outside of things, essence can be considered the defining features of things (the answer to the question: what are a thing’s essential properties?). As with being and its many facets of quantity and quality and so on, essence reveals itself at once as illusion, then as appearance, then as actuality and so on, all different categories within essence. This all leads along the trajectory to the concept, which is the sublation - or the unity within difference - of being and essence.
Believe it or not, this almost mystical evolution of logical categories culminates in the absolute idea, or the unified subject/object, God/world discussed above, rendered intelligible in thinking via the concept. The workings through of all these myriad steps is what makes Hegel so hard and represents perhaps the worst aspect of Rosen’s book. To be clear: I could not remotely have given what is hopefully a passable interpretation of Hegel above without Rosen. That is the book’s great strength. But most of what I’ve quoted and made use of above is found in the paragraphs where Rosen summarises, where he steps back from the text.
But the text itself is long and technical and, perhaps as academic philosopher, Rosen cannot resist diving into the detail too much. This is, no doubt, of use to the specialist or the student studying Hegel, for whom a ‘passable interpretation’ won’t cut it. Unfortunately for the enterprising amateur, the lengthy discussions of this or that facet of Hegel’s dialectico-speculative logic is very onerous and occludes the comparatively illuminating passages that made this book worth reading. To give just one example, Rosen discusses in painful detail Hegel’s treatment of the essence-attribute problem. This, and related discussions on propositions (think syllogisms, middle terms and all that stuff) goes on for several chapters and was just a plain drag to read.
A second criticism (perhaps implicitly a complement) is that the book desperately needed a conclusion chapter. It simply finishes with a cursory discussion of the absolute idea as it features at the end of Hegel’s book. The whole book builds towards this point, which perhaps explains the lack of detail at the end itself. But for what was quite an epic read I really wanted a bit of a bow tied on the whole thing. Just one chapter, an epilogue or something, summarising the journey we had gone on with Rosen would have gone a long way to feeling like the book actually finished and that I had understood it as Rosen wanted me to.
But to return to the positive and my last, unanswered question above, fully answered in Rosen’s book: what is the concept? This highly amorphous term is littered throughout Hegel and was a source of constant confusion for me. It seemed to be both used in its casual, everyday sense, but to have an extremely deep import for Hegel too. As Rosen describes, the Concept is humankind’s means of ‘grasping’ things (the word literally means grasp in German): it is “a reflexive or self-conscious grasping by subjectivity of itself as the unity within difference of subject and object”. This is the unified subject-object of the absolute idea – unified but not equivalent.
For me, something Rosen got across persuasively throughout the book was what Hegel did with regards the ‘conceptual’ that made him innovative in philosophy and reflects his attempts to save philosophy from the “endless chatter” of metaphysical debates he believed the discipline to be mired in (and Rosen certainly believes to still be the case). “Hegel starts from the deceptively simple insight that the world in and for itself is itself a product of thought. The structure of that world is thus conceptual structure. The Concept is the manifestation of what substance is in itself … the Concept has been present from the outset as the concept of abstract being … what remains [in the book] is to study the structure of the activity of thinking itself.”
In other words: “This is why we are able to think or grasp beings in their intelligibility; there is no separation of being and thinking. Their unification is the Concept, and it is the same Concept in the order of actuality as in our thinking of it.” There should, therefore, be no surprise for us that being takes a conceptual form: we cannot think being without, you know, thinking. Hegel, building on this from the most abstract starting point of the concept of being, works out the consequences of this insight, which is (inevitably) that subject and object are one, the absolute spirit (i.e. God for Hegel).
What this all shows me is that my general questions about Hegel (what is the concept? What is the absolute? What is the idea? Why is the SL central to Hegel) are all interrelated. The concept, in the final wash, is the unification of being and essence, the “totality of the logic; it is the structure of thought”. This Concept is “generated from the dialectical excitation of substance” – which is where Hegel’s dialectic fits in, a dialectic (self-excitation or life-pulse) “that is the negative activity of the absolute”. The absolute, in turn, is “the concept that divides itself into its subjective and objective sides”, or the fully worked out concept at the highest stage of Hegel’s logic, an expression for the totality rather than some partial (e.g. only subjective or only objective) side of things. This leads up to the absolute idea – “being, perpetual life, self-knowing truth … all truth”, or as Rosen put it: God. In short, Rosen helped me better understand Hegel and for that reason I recommend this book. It is not perfect, but there is likely no easier introduction to this challenging, yet in Rosen’s telling, excitingly ambitious tour-de-force.
November 5, 2020
Out of all the English commentaries I've read thus far on Hegel's Science of Logic, Rosen's is in a league of its own (though I am still of the mind that Hegel's Lectures on Logic and his own Lesser Logic provide the best elucidation). I'm currently working my way through it for a second time alongside certain sections of Hegel's text and remain amazed at Rosen's command of the material. Chapters I find particularly impressive include "The Nature of Essence," "Contradiction," and "Actuality," as well as "The Fichtean Background" directly preceding his exegesis of essence. Rosen consistently places Hegel in dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, formal logic, and (occasionally) Heidegger, though he very rarely refers to any secondary literature. Unlike many other commentaries on the Logic, Rosen's does not simply aim to defend Hegel, but to critically examine the efficacy of each category and transition. Rosen finds shortcomings, for instance, in the Logic's opening moves, the reflexion-determination of identity, and the transition from essence to Concept; but his commentary aims in all such cases towards an immanent reconstruction of the ideas in question. To whatever extent his diagnoses remain decisive, his critical engagement with Hegel's text pushes the reader (or at least this reader) to do the same. Some might find Rosen's style a bit "lofty" at times, but there's at once a sort of comfortability and precision with which Rosen writes generally that I find to be very inspiring. On the whole, I cannot recommend this book enough!
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