Hegel's Science of Logic

When we encounter a sentence from the main exposition of logic in Hegel’s Science of Logic, what exactly are we encountering? In order to understand anything about the work, and much of Hegel’s philosophical endeavor more generally, we must ask this question. Committing an error in answering this question—which inevitably will happen if, first and foremost, the work is just simply read and this question remains unasked—committing an error in answering this is fatal for knowledge of anything in this work, and much of Hegel becomes closed off. Attesting to the treachery of dealing in any way with this work’s subject matter—let alone the quest to define the essence of its content—is the admission by Hegel himself that logic is “the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness” (58). So we should proceed carefully, first by looking deeper into our question.
In the first chapter of the first book of the Science of Logic, entitled simply “Being,” we read: “A. BEING: Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself” (82). Our question comes before us: of what is all this asserted? What is “being” here asserted to be? What are we talking about here? It is obvious that being is here something “indeterminate,” “immediate,” and “equal only to itself” (whatever these terms mean), but we do not know what element is being determined in rendering itself this way. This is the fundamental question we will answer—that needs to be answered. To put it in perhaps its best form, we must answer the question as to what is the matter of thinking within the Science of Logic? What is getting thought?
This answer seems quite simple at first. Heidegger, who believed the Science of Logic to be the best and most crucial of Hegel’s works, put it this way whenever our question came up in his seminars, lectures or texts: “For Hegel, the matter of thinking is: thinking as such” (“The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, 42). In other words, what is getting thought in the Science of Logic is thinking as such. Preliminarily, we may assert of the passage on being we cited, then, that the being that is said to be indeterminate, immediate, etc. when it is in its purity is the being of thought. In other words, what gets defined through the exposition of being in this portion of the Science of Logic is the being of thought.
And Heidegger is not deviating from what Hegel says in asserting this. In his introduction to the work, Hegel himself says the following: “the subject matter of logic [is] … thinking” (43). But by phrasing it this way, Hegel has already stolen away from us the simplicity of our answer. For here Hegel qualifies thinking by situating it under the title of his book: thinking is a definition or clarification for the real matter of what a book entitled Science of Logic should contain, namely, logic. The matter of the Science of Logic, then, might be said to be logic and (therefore) thinking. But what does this mean? How is thinking logical? According to traditional definitions of logic, logic is only a type of thinking. Here logic and thinking seem to be identical, such that the matter of thinking in the Science of Logic can be both logic and thinking; be logical insofar as it is thought, and vice versa. How can this be? If we return to how we have preliminarily interpreted the passage on being, can we still say that what gets defined in this portion of the text is the being of thought? Could it not be just as easily the being of logic? And what does that mean?
It was said we normally think of logic as a type or species of thought. Let us elaborate this conception, because Hegel himself addresses it and sees his conception of logic as related to it, even if it might not look like this is so. Now, the “normal” conception of logic Hegel was addressing was essentially that which Aristotle outlined. For Aristotle, logic is a language or a set of rules for the production of truth, given a content to which the rules can be applied. In other words, logic is set of rules that are indifferent for the most part to the content upon which logic as this set of rules applies. The main problem for this logic, then, is to devise a system of articulating rules that can represent every conceivable content and apply rules to them successfully. Hegel puts it this way: “hitherto, the conception of logic has rested on the separation… of the content… and its form” (44).
Now, when we say that Hegel himself addresses this view of logic, what do we mean? Fundamentally, as we have already seen, he addresses this view of logic by conceiving it as identical to thought. This, then, would mean that thought would be what is specified by the content and (especially) by the form of this rule-based conception of logic. The set of rules that constitute logic would be, in their essence or make-up, thought: specifying them would be specifying what thought is.
But this makes no sense. Of course, insofar as the logical form is constituted, it is considered by Aristotelian logic as, indeed, thought. When we say of something that it is a part of a logical construct like a syllogism, i.e. when we represent it as a part of a syllogism, we are representing it essentially (Aristotle would say) as in thought. A logical sentence in a syllogism is a thought: tracing out its coherence within the syllogism--i.e. by seeing whether, in the syllogism, it as a premise produces truth or not--is a tracing out of the coherence of a thought. There is no problem there. But where Hegel does not seem to make any sense is in asserting that the logical content addressed by this sentence, insofar as it too makes up logic, is also thought.
Let’s make this clear According to Aristotelian logic, if I represent a person as part of a syllogism by saying, for example, that “This person is the teacher of Plato,” Socrates (i.e. the person) is obviously not a thought. He is something other than thought, namely, an object of thought, a content on which a logical rule or form is applied. It is only as an object of thought, as a thing, that Socrates can have thought in the form of a logical statement applied to him. But Hegel disagrees with this Aristotelian view. Thus, we must ask, how would the content of a logical statement like Socrates in this example be thought for Hegel just as much as the rule or form?
(To be continued in another post...)