Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures

by Richard Dien Winfield

This text provides a truly comprehensive guide to one of the most important and challenging works of modern philosophy. The systematic complexity of Hegel's radical project in the Science of Logic prevents many from understanding and appreciating its value. By independently and critically working through Hegel's argument, this book offers an enlightening aid for study and anchors the Science of Logic at a central position in the philosophical canon.

Genres: Philosophy

390 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Richard Dien Winfield (PhD Yale) is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1982. Winfield has served as president of the Society for Systematic Philosophy, the Hegel Society of America, and the Metaphysical Society of America.

Reviews

[Georgi Boychev · Rating 3 out of 5]

The treatment of Hegel in the nearly two centuries after his death has been baffling. While there were some dedicated acolytes such as the British Idealists in the 19th century, the majority of this particular thinker's reception has been to not read his texts in their entirety (or at all) and then to pronounce judgment on his philosophy. Schelling in his lectures on modern philosophy cemented in the minds of generations of philosophers the idea of Hegel's system as this totalizing monstrosity that refuses to engage with existence as such instead swallowing everything in its conceptual machinery and regurgitating it as dialectical obscurity. Engels, and then following Engels - Lenin, and then following Lenin - the Soviet orthodoxy promoted a caricature of Hegel as this idiot who, in thinking he was talking to God himself, accidentally discovered the three-step dialectical shuffle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that all reality follows, and was then too stupid to even realize what he had stumbled upon, though thankfully Marx and Engels read him and took the rational kernel from his philosophy, the rest of which philosophy could now be safely discarded as the reactionary, petty-bourgeois, mystifying nonsense that it was. Anglo-American analytic philosophy went even further and just pretended that philosophy skipped some 70-80 years after Kant, though cursory mentions of Hegel and the other German Idealists would be made here and there just as a warning that this is the kind of stupidity that instantly disqualifies you from being taken seriously. Even worse have been more favourable responses to Hegel which have been to appropriate bits and pieces of his philosophy here and there - such as the Master-Slave dialectic - and then pretend the rest of Hegel's philosophy does not exist, or - even worse, I would argue - to read Hegel as engaging in something not too dissimilar from Kant's transcendental idealism. Why this hostility to just reading the damn texts? Hegel is no more obscure than Kant once you get past the superficial characteristics of his style of expression. As metaphysics, his Logic is no more difficult than Aristotle's Metaphysics or Spinoza's Ethics, even if it is much longer as a text. A much more difficult and confusing philosopher like Heidegger has received much more attention from both continentals and analytics alike. A moch more incoherent, temperamental, and pretentious philosopher like Nietzsche has been so much more widely read. Why?

I write all this because Richard Dien Winfield along with someone like Stephen Houlgate are contemporary Anglo-American philosophers who strive to really take all of Hegel's writings by the letter. Thus, in Winfield's "Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures" you will not find much in the way of "critical rethinking" at all. Instead, the book is a concise running through the argument of the work from start to finish without any deviations or any real attempts at critique. Furthermore, Winfield, like Houlgate, takes absolutely seriously and uncritically the idea that Hegel is perpetuating a philosophy free of any foundations and presuppositions. I cannot help but be sympathetic at the very least to Winfield's commitment to sticking to what Hegel actually said and for that reason and given the horrid tendency of Hegel commentators to not read, misread, misrepresent, or misappropriate Hegel's actual texts, Winfield is to be commended for his work.

What this book represents then is a great scholastic tool that summarizes the often very long-winded categorial analyses in the Science of Logic, which is great because for all its exhaustiveness, the Science of Logic really suffers from how difficult it is to follow the main argument. In the original text Hegel diverts a lot, enters into extended commentaries of other thinkers, and most confusingly - often tends to comment on earlier sections of the work from the standpoint of later sections, which has provided a major instrument in the hands of those who like Schelling have insisted that the Logic is completely arbitrary and following a predefined course from the beginning. In reading Winfield you will get the main arguments distilled into their key points and then hammered into your head until you get them. Each lecture being some 12-13 pages at that!

Also of note is that the focus here is on the Logic of Being and the Logic of the Concept (being parts I and III of the Science of Logic, respectively), while the Logic of Essence is somewhat breezed through in a few lectures. Again, I think this is to counter those readings of Hegel who see the Logic of Essence as not just the centerpiece of the Logic, but of the entire Hegelian philosophy.

What this leaves you with is the burden of actually making up your mind about the text for yourself. Thus, there is real danger in just taking Winfield's uncritical retelling of the text as all there is to the Logic and leaving it at that: Hegel was right, he completed a presuppositionless logico-metaphysical system, truth and beauty and goodness can finally be rescued from the hands of those nasty analytics and those devious postmoderns, we can all sleep soundly now. I think Winfield's own intentions are noble though and even if he provides no good commentary and critique here, he does great justice to this great and so often bastardized and so uncritically dismissed philosopher, and for that reason this text deserves your attention.

[Pundapog · Rating 5 out of 5]

The entirety of classical philosophy hinges upon the success or failure of Hegel's beginning. Hegel's method of immanent critique progresses through, and develops, the formal structure of reality via the sublative necessity internal to the terms (beginning with pure indeterminacy) themselves.

If Hegel is correct he has identified the proper, and only, procedure for philosophical thought. If Hegel has identified the manner by which we emerge from the "absolute", then he was refuted definitively skepticism and solved the problem of criterion. In my own view, Hegel's cognition of pure indeterminacy is irrefutable. It's hard to describe but the rejection of presuppositions, includes the rejection of the reasons for the rejection of presuppositions. That rejection does not give us the right to make determinate claims, but it leaves intelligibility with only its simply immediacy. But even immediacy is too much to say, hence why we 'begin' with pure indeterminacy. Hegel's beginning is resistant to all critiques for the critiques will always presume something.

My critique of Hegel however concerns the immediate subsequent developments, which in my view, may smuggle concepts not yet available to it. Feuerbach may be right in suggesting Hegel provides the image, but not content of thought (although where Feuerbach elects to direct this critique is misplaced).

The Science of Logic is the greatest, most comprehensive, and rigorous treatment of pure metaphysics performed in the history of thought. A brief and incomplete list of its accomplishments
1. Proof of the analyticity of math
2. Detailed and defined the categories of thought and their relations to each other (thus relating Aristotle's precategories and categories, a goal of Scholastic thought)
3. Proof of the reality of infinity
4. Defense of the Ontological Proof
5. Outlined the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity
6. Refutation of Transcendental Idealism, overcoming of rationalism and empiricism
7. Proof of causality (against Hume)

The book itself is an immensely challenging read, Winfield writes in a challenging way, but the challenge is part of the experience.

A proper engagement with Hegel is necessary for a proper engagement with philosophy at all.

[Callie M · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. I read this up to the discussion of Essence. I found the book incredibly useful in introducing and explaining the first sections of the Science of Logic. However, once I was more comfortable with Hegel's way of writing, I no longer found the lectures that useful.

[Alexander Asay · Rating 3 out of 5]

UGA: Hegel