The Logic of Hegel
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 738 passages
Cite this work
- APAHegel. (n.d.). The Logic of Hegel. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-logic-of-hegel
- MLAHegel. "The Logic of Hegel." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-logic-of-hegel.
- ChicagoHegel. The Logic of Hegel. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-logic-of-hegel.
What it is about
Wallace's translation of the first part of Hegel's Encyclopaedia: the short version of his logic, written for his students.
Context and history
It should not be confused with the 'Science of Logic', which is a different and far longer work. This is the 'lesser logic': numbered, concise paragraphs meant to be expounded by the lecturer in class, and for that reason the usual way in. Nor does 'logic' here mean what it means today: it is not the theory of valid inference but the examination of the categories with which we think — being, nothing, becoming, quality, quantity, essence, cause, concept — and of how each of them, under pressure, contradicts itself and leads on to the next. There is the criticism of the logic of the understanding, which wants to fix determinations separately, and the famous transition from being and nothing to becoming with which the book opens.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
1.] PHILOSOPHY misses an advantage enjoyed by the other sciences. It cannot like them rest the existence of its objects on the natural admissions of consciousness, nor can it assume that its method of cognition, either for starting or for continuing, is one already accepted. The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. Both in like manner go on to treat of the finite worlds of Nature and the human Mind, with their relation to each other and to their truth in God. Some _acquaintance_ with its objects, therefore, philosophy may and even must presume, that and a certain interest in them to boot, were it for no other reason than this: that in point of time the mind makes general _images_ of objects, long before it makes _notions_ of them, and that it is only through these mental images, and by recourse to them, that the thinking mind rises to know and comprehend _thinkingly._ But with the rise of this thinking study of things, it soon becomes evident that thought will be satisfied with nothing short of showing the _necessity_ of its facts, of demonstrating the existence of its objects, as well as their nature and qualities. Our original acquaintance with them is thus discovered to be inadequate. We can assume nothing, and assert nothing dogmatically; nor can we accept the assertions and assumptions of others. And yet we must make a beginning: and a beginning, as primary and underived, makes an assumption, or rather is an assumption. It seems as if it were impossible to make a beginning at all. 2.] This _thinking study of things_ may serve, in a general way, as a description of philosophy. But the description is too wide. If it be correct to say, that thought makes the distinction between man and the lower animals, then everything human is human, for the sole and simple reason that i