The Logic of Hegel
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 738 passages
Cite this work
- APAHegel. (n.d.). The Logic of Hegel. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-logic-of-hegel
- MLAHegel. The Logic of Hegel. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-logic-of-hegel.
- ChicagoHegel. The Logic of Hegel. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-logic-of-hegel.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
Those who insist on this separation of religion from thinking usually have before their minds the sort of thought that may be styled _after-thought._ They mean 'reflective' thinking, which has to deal with thoughts as thoughts, and brings them into consciousness. Slackness to perceive and keep in view this distinction which philosophy definitely draws in respect of thinking is the source of the crudest objections and reproaches against philosophy. Man,--and that just because it is his nature to think,--is the only being that possesses law, religion, and morality. In these spheres of human life, therefore, thinking, under the guise of feeling, faith, or generalised image, has not been inactive: its action and its productions are there present and therein contained. But it is one thing to have such feelings and generalised images that have been moulded and permeated by thought, and another thing to have thoughts about them. The thoughts, to which after-thought upon those modes of consciousness gives rise, are what is comprised under reflection, general reasoning, and the like, as well as under philosophy itself. The neglect of this distinction between thought in general and the reflective thought of philosophy has also led to another and more frequent misunderstanding. Reflection of this kind has been often maintained to be the condition, or even the only way, of attaining a consciousness and certitude of the Eternal and True. The (now somewhat antiquated) metaphysical proofs of God's existence, for example, have been treated, as if a knowledge of them and a conviction of their truth were the only and essential means of producing a belief and conviction that there is a God.…