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Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Series #1
Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
A translation of Hegel's German text. It includes a bilingual annotated glossary, bibliographic and interpretive notes to Hegel's text, an Index of References for works cited in the notes, a select Bibliography of various works on Hegel's logic, and an Index."
386 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1812
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About the author
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2,165 books2,489 followersGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
November 23, 2017
I haven’t read this book in the way it needs to be read. Really, you would need to sit down with a pen and paper and map out how he makes his way through his logic. I think it would also help to have a kind of guide book alongside me while I was reading this to explain what is going on and to make his allusions to other philosophers and philosophies clearer (and not as ‘taken for granted’). I read this for the first time in my mid-twenties. God knows what I got out of it then. I’m not sure I’ve gotten too much more out of it now, either, I’m afraid.
One of the things that people know about Hegel is that he develops all of his ideas according to the ‘triad’ – you posit a thesis, it is somehow related to an antithesis, and in their mutual interaction you end up with a synthesis, which then becomes your new thesis and the process continues. Given this is generally understood as the Hegelian method and since this book is him explaining how logic works, you might expect a long and involved (Hegel likes to be both long and involved – that is certainly true) discussion of this triadic process. However, this thesis and antithesis idea is mentioned only once in the book, and in that case he is discussing it in relation to Kantian philosophy. And here he is anything but complimentary, “However, the proofs that Kant proposes for his theses and antitheses must indeed be regarded as mere pseudo-proofs, since what is supposed to be proved is always already contained in the presuppositions that form the starting-point and only through the long-winded, apagogic process is the semblance of mediation produced.” p. 95 I’ve read other people say exactly the same thing about Hegel’s triad.
Still, it is clear that Hegel builds his system using something like this three-part process – although, it is also clear that this is not all he is doing. Key to what is going on here is the idea that our understanding of the world (and philosophy is nothing if not people thinking deeply about what it means to understand the world) has grown and become richer over time. As such, Hegel spends about a third of the Logic on the ‘preliminary conception’ – I guess, a kind of introduction. And here he spends a lot of time discussing the nature of God and the implications of this nature of God to the possibilities for humans to understand that nature. As someone raised an atheist, I found this part of the book hard work, even more hard work than some of the later parts of the book, as I have nothing to hook many of these ideas onto. Still, there was enough ‘philosophy’ mixed in here with the ‘theology’ for me to only feel somewhat lost.
His logic proper is in three subdivisions: the doctrine of being, the doctrine of essence and the doctrine of concept. You might think that with each of these subdivisions we are moving further and further away from the ‘real’ world and more into the realm of the abstract. But Hegel’s point is the exact opposite. While we think of ‘being’ as concrete existence, where our being is immediate and rich, our ‘concepts’ are thought of as being abstract and distant from our lived experience. Hegel says that it is the concepts that are rich in their power to help us understand how the world really is and therefore it is these seemingly abstract concepts that prove to be ‘more concrete’ than the ‘merely real’ world of being. Having tools and lenses to view the world with helps us understand the richness of the world and as such it also allows us to see how the world sits in the richness of its interconnectedness. Those interconnections are, for Hegel, the truly concrete necessity of the world.
I want to play with these ideas for a minute, not least because they are pretty close to the opposite of how we generally think. His doctrine of being comes in three parts – virtually all divisions and subdivisions in this book are in triplets, as I hinted before – being is divided into quality, quantity and measure. For Hegel, we move from one to the other, but only can understand any of these three by seeing how they interpenetrate each other.
Plato is said to be the first really dialectical thinker – Plato, that is, and not Socrates. Hegel points out that for Socrates dialectics was mostly subjective and negative – that is, what he calls irony (p.130). This is important. Socrates was told he was the wisest person alive, but he believed this was a kind of joke, since all he knew was that he knew nothing at all. For Socrates to really be the wisest person alive he needed to show that his ‘wisdom’ lay in the fact that at least he KNEW he didn’t know anything – whereas everyone else thought they were experts, but really didn’t know anything (as the Irish say, their arse from their elbow). It is that which makes Socrates’s dialectic negative. He spent his life asking people to say what they believed to be true, then he would ask them a series of questions and show that they actually believed the opposite of what they started off saying they believed.
The dialectic proper is this idea of getting to the truth through understanding that every idea contains in itself its own opposite. But since Socrates was only doing dialectics for the purely negative purpose of showing that he (and everyone else) knew nothing – it was left to Plato to show that the dialectic had a positive side.
The example Hegel gives is from the Parmenides where Plato shows that to understand the One you need to understand the Many and vice versa. This isn’t just showing that people are confused, or that knowledge itself is impossible, but rather that in understanding complex ideas you need to understand them in their richness – and that means, in their contradictoriness. That if these ideas are living then they grow and become what they are not from what they are – and therefore had to also have in themselves that opposition. The seed (as he more or less says at one point) isn’t a plant, but to become a plant it needs to have the concept of the plant – its opposite – contained within itself. And this is why Hegel’s system progresses in these three stepped processes – where his discussion of quality necessarily then moves to a discussion of quantity and then onto measure as the unity of quality and quantity.
Let’s do that more slowly. Let’s imagine that the world wasn’t created by the Christian God, but by the Greek ones. For the Greeks, the universe prior to creation wasn’t a void like in the Christian universe, but rather it was a chaos. What the gods did was to give form to that chaos. So, how do you do that? Well, a chaos is without form because it has no things in it that you can pick out. To be able to pick things out from the chaos you need to know what qualities those things have. Once you have defined quality you are then able to consider quantity – initially this is as a kind of mathematical counting of how many of one thing there is when compared with something else. But quantity and quality interpenetrate each other too. The example he gives is on p.170 where he talks about the phases of water and therefore the differences that are wrought when you change the quantity of heat in the water and force phase changes – for a long time changing the amount of heat hardly does anything at all, but eventually the liquid either turns to solid or to gas. This idea of quantitative changes making qualitative ones is a key idea here – he also talks of the idea of a man losing a single hair not thinking of himself as necessarily going bald, but he must get to a point where to lose enough hairs baldness is the necessary result.
For Plato dialectics was used to show that the world we live in is a world of appearances. That is, Plato noticed the contradictions in the world, and he knew that those contradictions were ‘in the world’ and not just in our understanding – that is, it wasn’t just that our reason wasn’t up to the task of understanding the world, but rather that the world itself actually contained contradictions – as I said before, that the one is the many, for instance. But if that was true, and if the world ought to be ‘perfect’ (and perfect can’t be self-contradictory) then Plato was forced to conclude that the world we live in can’t be the ‘real’ world, but rather one of appearances.
Hegel goes a step further than this – the contradictions that exist in the world aren’t just due to our limited understanding, nor to the world being ‘merely of appearances’, but that these contradictions of things (and in things) are how we need to go about understanding the world – to understand the world is to understand those contradictions. That is, the contradictions aren’t mistakes or accidents, but real and provide the actual path to truth.
So, one of the parts of this that particularly stood out for me was his discussion of the relationship between freedom and necessity. We generally think of these as being opposites – if I NEED to do something, I can’t really say I’m all that free, and if I freely choose to do something, then surely that can’t have been the same as being under the compulsion of necessity. Ok, even with that said, there are probably times when the two can be brought close together – I need to eat something, or I will die, but what I eat is up to my free will to decide. For Hegel, this example isn’t going far enough. Freedom and necessity are not only opposites, but they interpenetrate each other and so understanding one involves getting a truer understanding of the other. By seeking to understand our own essence those things that seemed open to our free choice and will become increasingly necessary and the things that might have been enforced upon us, if they are true, increasingly become those things that we will freely choose.
I had thought that with this three part system that when he got to discussing the syllogism that he would be all praise – but he certainly wasn’t – and that this would be the clear culmination of his philosophy, which I guess it was in a way, even while he also calls it something that is pedantically followed and therefore has mostly fallen out of use. The section on the syllogism (you know, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal) is probably the hardest part of this book – well, for me anyway – and I’m still not sure I understood it at all.
This book was hard work, and I’ve started his Science of Logic now too (which, from the looks of things, is pretty much exactly the same book all over again, but hopefully will be written differently enough so as to explain bits I’ve not really understood in ways that will make them a bit clearer). I wanted to talk about difference too – how the world is a kind of kingdom of differences (and how this idea seems to have been used by linguisitics and semiotics in interesting ways), but perhaps that will give me something to talk about when I finish his Science of Logic.
One of the things that people know about Hegel is that he develops all of his ideas according to the ‘triad’ – you posit a thesis, it is somehow related to an antithesis, and in their mutual interaction you end up with a synthesis, which then becomes your new thesis and the process continues. Given this is generally understood as the Hegelian method and since this book is him explaining how logic works, you might expect a long and involved (Hegel likes to be both long and involved – that is certainly true) discussion of this triadic process. However, this thesis and antithesis idea is mentioned only once in the book, and in that case he is discussing it in relation to Kantian philosophy. And here he is anything but complimentary, “However, the proofs that Kant proposes for his theses and antitheses must indeed be regarded as mere pseudo-proofs, since what is supposed to be proved is always already contained in the presuppositions that form the starting-point and only through the long-winded, apagogic process is the semblance of mediation produced.” p. 95 I’ve read other people say exactly the same thing about Hegel’s triad.
Still, it is clear that Hegel builds his system using something like this three-part process – although, it is also clear that this is not all he is doing. Key to what is going on here is the idea that our understanding of the world (and philosophy is nothing if not people thinking deeply about what it means to understand the world) has grown and become richer over time. As such, Hegel spends about a third of the Logic on the ‘preliminary conception’ – I guess, a kind of introduction. And here he spends a lot of time discussing the nature of God and the implications of this nature of God to the possibilities for humans to understand that nature. As someone raised an atheist, I found this part of the book hard work, even more hard work than some of the later parts of the book, as I have nothing to hook many of these ideas onto. Still, there was enough ‘philosophy’ mixed in here with the ‘theology’ for me to only feel somewhat lost.
His logic proper is in three subdivisions: the doctrine of being, the doctrine of essence and the doctrine of concept. You might think that with each of these subdivisions we are moving further and further away from the ‘real’ world and more into the realm of the abstract. But Hegel’s point is the exact opposite. While we think of ‘being’ as concrete existence, where our being is immediate and rich, our ‘concepts’ are thought of as being abstract and distant from our lived experience. Hegel says that it is the concepts that are rich in their power to help us understand how the world really is and therefore it is these seemingly abstract concepts that prove to be ‘more concrete’ than the ‘merely real’ world of being. Having tools and lenses to view the world with helps us understand the richness of the world and as such it also allows us to see how the world sits in the richness of its interconnectedness. Those interconnections are, for Hegel, the truly concrete necessity of the world.
I want to play with these ideas for a minute, not least because they are pretty close to the opposite of how we generally think. His doctrine of being comes in three parts – virtually all divisions and subdivisions in this book are in triplets, as I hinted before – being is divided into quality, quantity and measure. For Hegel, we move from one to the other, but only can understand any of these three by seeing how they interpenetrate each other.
Plato is said to be the first really dialectical thinker – Plato, that is, and not Socrates. Hegel points out that for Socrates dialectics was mostly subjective and negative – that is, what he calls irony (p.130). This is important. Socrates was told he was the wisest person alive, but he believed this was a kind of joke, since all he knew was that he knew nothing at all. For Socrates to really be the wisest person alive he needed to show that his ‘wisdom’ lay in the fact that at least he KNEW he didn’t know anything – whereas everyone else thought they were experts, but really didn’t know anything (as the Irish say, their arse from their elbow). It is that which makes Socrates’s dialectic negative. He spent his life asking people to say what they believed to be true, then he would ask them a series of questions and show that they actually believed the opposite of what they started off saying they believed.
The dialectic proper is this idea of getting to the truth through understanding that every idea contains in itself its own opposite. But since Socrates was only doing dialectics for the purely negative purpose of showing that he (and everyone else) knew nothing – it was left to Plato to show that the dialectic had a positive side.
The example Hegel gives is from the Parmenides where Plato shows that to understand the One you need to understand the Many and vice versa. This isn’t just showing that people are confused, or that knowledge itself is impossible, but rather that in understanding complex ideas you need to understand them in their richness – and that means, in their contradictoriness. That if these ideas are living then they grow and become what they are not from what they are – and therefore had to also have in themselves that opposition. The seed (as he more or less says at one point) isn’t a plant, but to become a plant it needs to have the concept of the plant – its opposite – contained within itself. And this is why Hegel’s system progresses in these three stepped processes – where his discussion of quality necessarily then moves to a discussion of quantity and then onto measure as the unity of quality and quantity.
Let’s do that more slowly. Let’s imagine that the world wasn’t created by the Christian God, but by the Greek ones. For the Greeks, the universe prior to creation wasn’t a void like in the Christian universe, but rather it was a chaos. What the gods did was to give form to that chaos. So, how do you do that? Well, a chaos is without form because it has no things in it that you can pick out. To be able to pick things out from the chaos you need to know what qualities those things have. Once you have defined quality you are then able to consider quantity – initially this is as a kind of mathematical counting of how many of one thing there is when compared with something else. But quantity and quality interpenetrate each other too. The example he gives is on p.170 where he talks about the phases of water and therefore the differences that are wrought when you change the quantity of heat in the water and force phase changes – for a long time changing the amount of heat hardly does anything at all, but eventually the liquid either turns to solid or to gas. This idea of quantitative changes making qualitative ones is a key idea here – he also talks of the idea of a man losing a single hair not thinking of himself as necessarily going bald, but he must get to a point where to lose enough hairs baldness is the necessary result.
For Plato dialectics was used to show that the world we live in is a world of appearances. That is, Plato noticed the contradictions in the world, and he knew that those contradictions were ‘in the world’ and not just in our understanding – that is, it wasn’t just that our reason wasn’t up to the task of understanding the world, but rather that the world itself actually contained contradictions – as I said before, that the one is the many, for instance. But if that was true, and if the world ought to be ‘perfect’ (and perfect can’t be self-contradictory) then Plato was forced to conclude that the world we live in can’t be the ‘real’ world, but rather one of appearances.
Hegel goes a step further than this – the contradictions that exist in the world aren’t just due to our limited understanding, nor to the world being ‘merely of appearances’, but that these contradictions of things (and in things) are how we need to go about understanding the world – to understand the world is to understand those contradictions. That is, the contradictions aren’t mistakes or accidents, but real and provide the actual path to truth.
So, one of the parts of this that particularly stood out for me was his discussion of the relationship between freedom and necessity. We generally think of these as being opposites – if I NEED to do something, I can’t really say I’m all that free, and if I freely choose to do something, then surely that can’t have been the same as being under the compulsion of necessity. Ok, even with that said, there are probably times when the two can be brought close together – I need to eat something, or I will die, but what I eat is up to my free will to decide. For Hegel, this example isn’t going far enough. Freedom and necessity are not only opposites, but they interpenetrate each other and so understanding one involves getting a truer understanding of the other. By seeking to understand our own essence those things that seemed open to our free choice and will become increasingly necessary and the things that might have been enforced upon us, if they are true, increasingly become those things that we will freely choose.
I had thought that with this three part system that when he got to discussing the syllogism that he would be all praise – but he certainly wasn’t – and that this would be the clear culmination of his philosophy, which I guess it was in a way, even while he also calls it something that is pedantically followed and therefore has mostly fallen out of use. The section on the syllogism (you know, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal) is probably the hardest part of this book – well, for me anyway – and I’m still not sure I understood it at all.
This book was hard work, and I’ve started his Science of Logic now too (which, from the looks of things, is pretty much exactly the same book all over again, but hopefully will be written differently enough so as to explain bits I’ve not really understood in ways that will make them a bit clearer). I wanted to talk about difference too – how the world is a kind of kingdom of differences (and how this idea seems to have been used by linguisitics and semiotics in interesting ways), but perhaps that will give me something to talk about when I finish his Science of Logic.
February 4, 2010
This is comparatively clear, and I mean 'compared to the Science of Logic,' which is the most opaque, worst written book of all time. And the actual 'logic' parts of it are really still pretty opaque. But the prefaces and introduction and 'position of thought' stuff are fantastic background for understanding what Hegel was trying to do in general, and it should be mandatory to read it before starting on the Phenomenology or philosophy of history and so on. Unfortunately, vita brevis, and most people have probably got better things to do. If you are interested in Hegel, though, get this edition of this book, and plunge in.
July 9, 2015
I've taken two courses specifically focused on the work of Hegel. The first was taught by a visiting French-Swiss professor at Union Theological Seminary, Henri Matuse. The primary focus of that class was on The Phenomenology of Geist while a secondary focus was on the Kojeve's analysis of its description of the Master-Slave dialectic, presenting, as it does, access to Marx's appropriation of Hegel.
The seminary course was excellent primarily because of the composition of the class which, while small, had students of various ages, nationalities and backgrounds. Matuse was very good at facilitating conversation. My own background was in Kant while others had much more Marxist and contemporary European backgrounds. While the importance they placed on Kojeve rather escaped me, the close reading of the Phenomenology was quite exciting.
What Hegel offers and Kant lacks is commonly said to be the application of dialectic to history. In fact, the real difference is, in my opinion, more along the lines of religion than along those of history. Hegel's Phenomenology, and his later Philosophy of Right, represents thinking in several dimensions, all of which are treated as having teleological implications. Thinking is at once (a) the thinking of philosophers as in the history of philosophy, (b) the thinking of whole civilizations as in their cultural manifestations and histories, & (c) the thinking of the Logos which stands behind both phenomenal domains as both their beginning and their end. In all three dimensions there is progress towards an omega point, an end, which is the Spirit realizing itself in its fulness. Philosophers naturally have a certain pride of place because they comprehend the history and can, to some extent, prefigure its culmination.
This is, of course, an enormously conceited view of things and an almost incredibly optimistic one. It assumes, for one thing, that nothing important is lost despite such setbacks, say, as the genocidal extermination of certain cultures or the not-entirely-misnamed Dark Ages in Europe. It also employs, rather sneakily I think, all the emotions associated with certain sanguine traditions of Judaeo-Christianity to support its faith in progress towards some great good.
In essence, Hegel is a mystic and a gnostic, seeing the macrocosm (god, the ground of being) embodied in the microcosm (the minds of individuals, particularly philosophers). Kant was mystical too, but his mysticism is of a different sort, not so much the incorporatist via positiva as the via negativa. So, too, were their respective appropriations of Christianity. With Hegel, the divine plan can be seen reflected in the creation of the Prussian state and its elevation of such a one as Hegel to fullest academic honors. With Kant, the divine is more to be seen as a very private thing: a solitary in prayer or meditation, as the haunting image of the Good crucified.
I found Hegel's very conceit to be fascinating, fascinating enough to go on to read Stace's approving study of him; to reread the Phenomenology in a different translation and in a different, and far inferior, course; and to proceed to read a number of his other books such as this, the first part of his Encylopaedia.
Although I started the Logic in Norway upon graduation from seminary, I only finished it upon return to the States. It was much tougher going than the Phenomenology because it was at a much higher level of abstraction and was far more dense. The Phenomenology abounds in examples. The Logic is a series of logical--or one might say, critically, linguistic--expositions. I wouldn't recommend it to any except those truly interested in Hegel.
The seminary course was excellent primarily because of the composition of the class which, while small, had students of various ages, nationalities and backgrounds. Matuse was very good at facilitating conversation. My own background was in Kant while others had much more Marxist and contemporary European backgrounds. While the importance they placed on Kojeve rather escaped me, the close reading of the Phenomenology was quite exciting.
What Hegel offers and Kant lacks is commonly said to be the application of dialectic to history. In fact, the real difference is, in my opinion, more along the lines of religion than along those of history. Hegel's Phenomenology, and his later Philosophy of Right, represents thinking in several dimensions, all of which are treated as having teleological implications. Thinking is at once (a) the thinking of philosophers as in the history of philosophy, (b) the thinking of whole civilizations as in their cultural manifestations and histories, & (c) the thinking of the Logos which stands behind both phenomenal domains as both their beginning and their end. In all three dimensions there is progress towards an omega point, an end, which is the Spirit realizing itself in its fulness. Philosophers naturally have a certain pride of place because they comprehend the history and can, to some extent, prefigure its culmination.
This is, of course, an enormously conceited view of things and an almost incredibly optimistic one. It assumes, for one thing, that nothing important is lost despite such setbacks, say, as the genocidal extermination of certain cultures or the not-entirely-misnamed Dark Ages in Europe. It also employs, rather sneakily I think, all the emotions associated with certain sanguine traditions of Judaeo-Christianity to support its faith in progress towards some great good.
In essence, Hegel is a mystic and a gnostic, seeing the macrocosm (god, the ground of being) embodied in the microcosm (the minds of individuals, particularly philosophers). Kant was mystical too, but his mysticism is of a different sort, not so much the incorporatist via positiva as the via negativa. So, too, were their respective appropriations of Christianity. With Hegel, the divine plan can be seen reflected in the creation of the Prussian state and its elevation of such a one as Hegel to fullest academic honors. With Kant, the divine is more to be seen as a very private thing: a solitary in prayer or meditation, as the haunting image of the Good crucified.
I found Hegel's very conceit to be fascinating, fascinating enough to go on to read Stace's approving study of him; to reread the Phenomenology in a different translation and in a different, and far inferior, course; and to proceed to read a number of his other books such as this, the first part of his Encylopaedia.
Although I started the Logic in Norway upon graduation from seminary, I only finished it upon return to the States. It was much tougher going than the Phenomenology because it was at a much higher level of abstraction and was far more dense. The Phenomenology abounds in examples. The Logic is a series of logical--or one might say, critically, linguistic--expositions. I wouldn't recommend it to any except those truly interested in Hegel.
April 22, 2016
Read this book as poetry. Open to any line, read it a few times, swish it around in your brain, then spit it out - if you can! Kick this book, throw it against the wall, pick it up and cry over it. A life changer, a mind-buster. The great Hegel at his best, his deepest, and his most profound. Go for it - if you dare!
October 24, 2024
More like an extremely long treatise on Logic. The book is dense, dry, and often feels overly abstract, making it difficult to maintain interest. Hegel’s intricate exploration of dialectical logic can feel long-winded, requiring significant effort to grasp and keep your concentration. Great for going to sleep though 😴
June 25, 2025
It is no wonder Hegel was a high school teacher when he wrote the science of logic. Only a high school teacher could spot what he spotted in his talk of the One, the Many, and the object of repulsion/attraction. Very good.
November 9, 2013
"When, as now, the notion is called the truth of Being and Essence, we must expect to be asked, why we do not begin with the notion? The answer is that, where knowledge by thought is our aim, we cannot begin with the truth, because the truth, when it forms the beginning, must rest on mere assertion. The truth when it is thought must as such verify itself to thought. If the notion were put at the head of Logic, and defined, quite correctly in point of content, as the unity of Being and Essence, the following question would come up: What are we to think under the terms ‘Being’ and ‘Essence’, and how do they come to be embraced in the unity of the Notion? But if we answered these questions, then our beginning with the notion would be merely nominal. The real start would be made with Being, as we have here done: with this difference, that the characteristics of Being as well as those of Essence would have to be accepted uncritically from figurate conception, whereas we have observed Being and Essence in their own dialectical development and learnt how they lose themselves in the unity of the notion." pp.222
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November 3, 2014An excelent book for insomniacs. I read it once, grasped little, read it again, and had glimpses of an understanding. Then I looked at my notes two or three months later... Think it needs another read. I bought this book when I was studying logic as part of a degree course in pure mathematics. It has no connection with mathematical logic. Or even logic? I think it's more about God than anything else, but I would have to look at my notes again. Meanwhile, I've read god-knows-how-many novels and non-fiction in the interim...
February 10, 2013
Um livro muito frustrante e impenetrável, exceto, possivelmente, para leitores muito bem preparados, que já passaram por uma introdução adequada aos pensamentos de Hegel. Essa edição apresenta apenas excertos, e embora tenham sido provavelmente bem selecionados, talvez não sejam uma boa idéia para esse tipo de obra que, pela importância e complexidade, merece uma edição completa, com uma apresentação aprofundada.
December 31, 2021
o livro mais difícil de se ler (sério, confia)
August 29, 2008
I went and told everyone that this was "relatively easy, for Hegel." Then they started reading it. Uh-oh
January 3, 2011
I read this as an independent study at Villanova. This was a good introduction to Hegel's philosophy and his evaluation of the fundamental concepts of philsophy through the dialectical prism.
September 12, 2016
Relatively easy, for Hegel. Uh-oh ...
June 25, 2014
Hegel is difficult to understand, but I once I got into this book I found it illuminating. There is no doubt that he was one of the greatest philosophers of all time.
March 24, 2017
Just wonderful.
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August 30, 2012Read sections 79-89 for seminar. Would love to go back to the beginning.
October 30, 2023
First complete Hegel in the bag.
I think his description of the Dialectic is clearer here than in the Phenomenology. I think his critiques of prior systems of metaphysics are salient and compelling. The Being, Essence, Concept stuff (where Hegel properly introduces his system) gets a little more difficult to follow in my opinion.
I think the Being, Nothing, Becoming triad is super useful, and I'm interested in how it connects to Heraclitus' use of fire in something like Fragment B65 or the 'road up and down' metaphor in B60.
I attended a presentation last week where the presenter outlined the Abstract, Dialectical, and Speculative moves in the dialectic, which was also a helpful framing.
Lastly, where this book was difficult to read, it helped immensely to (1) compare across translations to find different phrasing and translation choices that made more sense to me and (2) read this alongside Hegel's Lectures on Logic, a small book of Hegel's spoken lectures which are meant to accompany this volume (used as more of a textbook for his courses on Logic). Now that I'm finished with this, I'm going to dive into the Lectures volume to hopefully make sense of what I didn't trace in the Logic itself.
I think his description of the Dialectic is clearer here than in the Phenomenology. I think his critiques of prior systems of metaphysics are salient and compelling. The Being, Essence, Concept stuff (where Hegel properly introduces his system) gets a little more difficult to follow in my opinion.
I think the Being, Nothing, Becoming triad is super useful, and I'm interested in how it connects to Heraclitus' use of fire in something like Fragment B65 or the 'road up and down' metaphor in B60.
I attended a presentation last week where the presenter outlined the Abstract, Dialectical, and Speculative moves in the dialectic, which was also a helpful framing.
Lastly, where this book was difficult to read, it helped immensely to (1) compare across translations to find different phrasing and translation choices that made more sense to me and (2) read this alongside Hegel's Lectures on Logic, a small book of Hegel's spoken lectures which are meant to accompany this volume (used as more of a textbook for his courses on Logic). Now that I'm finished with this, I'm going to dive into the Lectures volume to hopefully make sense of what I didn't trace in the Logic itself.
July 15, 2022
Wer sich mit dem Buch beschäftigt, hat bestimmt schon einige Kritik dazu mitbekommen, der ich mich auch in einiger Hinsicht anschließen kann. Ich spare mir mal die weiteren Erläuterungen, sonst schreibe ich hier noch ewig.
Bei aller Kritik muss ich sagen, dass das Buch wohl ungemein klug ist. Der dialektische Ansatz eröffnet einen wohltuenden, ungewohnten Blick auf die Welt, aus dem sich viel schöpfen lässt; sicherlich auch denn, wenn man nicht überall der Argumentation Hegels folgt.
Nach einer gewissen Zeit der "Anstrengung" beim Lesen gewöhnt man sich an den Stil und erwartet schon förmlich den nächsten Bgriff, die nächste "Aufhebung" bzw. die nächste "Wahrheit", die sich hier so wie eine Perlenschnur entwickeln. Dennoch ist die Lektüre anstrengend, allein schon wegen dem Umfang. Aber es lohnt sich!
Als Mathematiker fand ich die Einlassungen zur Mathematik sehr interessant. Eigentlich ist Hegel ja nicht gerade für seine mathematische oder mathematikphilosophische Arbeit bekannt, aber ich fand die Passagen hierzu interessant und habe dabei etwas neues gelernt oder zumindest eine neue Sicht auf die mathematische Arbeit kennengelernt.
Bei aller Kritik muss ich sagen, dass das Buch wohl ungemein klug ist. Der dialektische Ansatz eröffnet einen wohltuenden, ungewohnten Blick auf die Welt, aus dem sich viel schöpfen lässt; sicherlich auch denn, wenn man nicht überall der Argumentation Hegels folgt.
Nach einer gewissen Zeit der "Anstrengung" beim Lesen gewöhnt man sich an den Stil und erwartet schon förmlich den nächsten Bgriff, die nächste "Aufhebung" bzw. die nächste "Wahrheit", die sich hier so wie eine Perlenschnur entwickeln. Dennoch ist die Lektüre anstrengend, allein schon wegen dem Umfang. Aber es lohnt sich!
Als Mathematiker fand ich die Einlassungen zur Mathematik sehr interessant. Eigentlich ist Hegel ja nicht gerade für seine mathematische oder mathematikphilosophische Arbeit bekannt, aber ich fand die Passagen hierzu interessant und habe dabei etwas neues gelernt oder zumindest eine neue Sicht auf die mathematische Arbeit kennengelernt.
March 25, 2025
This book is about logic, objectivity, empiricism, the critical philosophy, immediate or intuitive knowledge, being, essence, actuality, substantiality, causality, reciprocity, chemism, teleology, life, cognition, and the absolute idea. It is a boring and hard to read book, and the only reason I am not giving it fewer stars is because I retained one idea that makes sense to me: philosophy teaches how we get freed from the endless crowd of finite aims by making us insensible to them. I like this this very much and I hope it sticks to me.
January 24, 2021
“What is Hegel trying to do? He is talking about new ideas. His dialectic is new, a new way of organizing thought. Not of thinking. But of knowing what you do when you think.” -CLR James
September 18, 2021
Banger
April 11, 2022
German edition is difficult to read for non-native speakers.
November 18, 2022
"Believe it or not, the Science of Logic has a sex scene."
"Elaborate on that."
"No."
"Elaborate on that."
"No."
March 24, 2023
νόησις νοήσεως moment
March 20, 2024
This is more a book about history and humility more than anything.
December 6, 2023
You think you know Logic?
you (probably):
"Yay Modens Ponens! Oh my excluded middle!
Wowzas I sure love Symbols! Math is reality and everything is just numbers.
Nothing changes and there are no contradictions and if I saw one, I would cry and run away"
me (just read this book, looking very hot):
"Never reflected inward huh? What makes a thing? What happens when that thing changes?
Never thought about, didn't ya....
Hey don't run away....get back here! I have yet to tell you about all the necessary contradictions!!!"
ok in all seriousness this is an important read for me and I am still developing thoughts on it. Would be 5 stars if Hegel relied less on his self made terminology and actually provided us with examples.
-----------
Sat of this for awhile and gave it some more thought. It really does become more clear the more I meditate on what was provided.
The book details the dialectical process itself and how concepts are thus dialectically conceived. Thought applied onto thought.
This is not your standard mathematical logic which only partakes in the static and perfect but a more encompassing logic which details the inherent relationship between contradiction and its temporality (I.e. movement). The creation and understanding of an object, not merely its manipulation under modens ponens.
Being (The immediate) and its dialectics:
Being <-> Nothingness
Quality <-> Quantity
Being passes into the negation of Being: Essence.
Essence, unlike being, does not transform, but instead it 'reflects'
Essence is mediated.
Dialectics of Essence:
identity <-> difference
content <-> form
Cause <-> Effect
Essence passes into its own negation.
The negation of the negation of Being;
thus Being reaches a higher form: The Notion
Instead of transforming or reflecting, the Notion progresses.
Dialectics of Notion:
Subject <-> Object
you (probably):
"Yay Modens Ponens! Oh my excluded middle!
Wowzas I sure love Symbols! Math is reality and everything is just numbers.
Nothing changes and there are no contradictions and if I saw one, I would cry and run away"
me (just read this book, looking very hot):
"Never reflected inward huh? What makes a thing? What happens when that thing changes?
Never thought about, didn't ya....
Hey don't run away....get back here! I have yet to tell you about all the necessary contradictions!!!"
ok in all seriousness this is an important read for me and I am still developing thoughts on it. Would be 5 stars if Hegel relied less on his self made terminology and actually provided us with examples.
-----------
Sat of this for awhile and gave it some more thought. It really does become more clear the more I meditate on what was provided.
The book details the dialectical process itself and how concepts are thus dialectically conceived. Thought applied onto thought.
This is not your standard mathematical logic which only partakes in the static and perfect but a more encompassing logic which details the inherent relationship between contradiction and its temporality (I.e. movement). The creation and understanding of an object, not merely its manipulation under modens ponens.
Being (The immediate) and its dialectics:
Being <-> Nothingness
Quality <-> Quantity
Being passes into the negation of Being: Essence.
Essence, unlike being, does not transform, but instead it 'reflects'
Essence is mediated.
Dialectics of Essence:
identity <-> difference
content <-> form
Cause <-> Effect
Essence passes into its own negation.
The negation of the negation of Being;
thus Being reaches a higher form: The Notion
Instead of transforming or reflecting, the Notion progresses.
Dialectics of Notion:
Subject <-> Object
September 24, 2018
The book is very dificult to understand
April 17, 2024
How could two books be more synchronous ? I simultaneously read Iris Murdoch's book Existentialist and Mystics, in which she says that Sartre's Being and Nothingness is just a footnote to Hegel and Hegel's Science of Logic, in which he details the relationship between Being, Nothingness and Freedom. Just when I thought I was reading on two distinct paths, God leads me to their convergence, it appears. It was a further revelation that, in Murdoch's book, which I did not review separately, she mentions in one of the early chapters the character of Jo, the street-sweeper of Dickens' novel Bleak House, which I had just finished earlier this month, December 4th, 2021.
I'm not sure if this is the precise book by Hegel that I read, but it appears to be from what I can tell. I may have in fact read the lesser Logic, but there is not a title given by that name according to Goodreads. I read the Science of Logic contained in the Delphi edition of the collected works of G.W.F. Hegel, purchased through the Amazon Kindle. My ambition is to be among the people who know, understand and love the writings of Hegel and call him the Master of German philosophical thought.
It appears that Hegel's conception of the person of the philosopher, like Plato's conception of the Poet, a person who is so deranged by his conceptions of Being and Nonbeing that he becomes insensible of his own very life and his existence or non-existence becomes a matter of sheer indifference to him; this must be what Marcus Aurelius meant when he said that Philosophy was intended as a preparation for death.
I'm not sure if this is the precise book by Hegel that I read, but it appears to be from what I can tell. I may have in fact read the lesser Logic, but there is not a title given by that name according to Goodreads. I read the Science of Logic contained in the Delphi edition of the collected works of G.W.F. Hegel, purchased through the Amazon Kindle. My ambition is to be among the people who know, understand and love the writings of Hegel and call him the Master of German philosophical thought.
It appears that Hegel's conception of the person of the philosopher, like Plato's conception of the Poet, a person who is so deranged by his conceptions of Being and Nonbeing that he becomes insensible of his own very life and his existence or non-existence becomes a matter of sheer indifference to him; this must be what Marcus Aurelius meant when he said that Philosophy was intended as a preparation for death.
February 22, 2024
این پاراگراف را تقریبن همان موقع که اثر را بالاخره به پایان رساندم نوشته بودم و اکنون دربارهی اینکه چقدر برداشت خود من را بازتاب میدهد و اینکه میخواستم در ادامه به کدام مسیر بروم و نیمهکاره رهایش کردم مطمئن نیستم:
آیا برای نوشتن از اثری که آغازگاهش را «بیآغازگاهی» میداند؛ آنجا که پیشفرض نتواند خود را براندیشهورزی تحمیل نماید، میتوان به آغازگاهی دلبخواهی چنگ زد؟ اما اگر تا «پایان» سوار بر این چرخ و فلکی که به جای بالا رفتن نسبت به چیزهای اطرافش، با این حرکاتِ مدوّر است که اساسن به چیزها که دیگر در اطراف قرار ندارند نزدیک و نزدیکتر میشود بمانیم، درمییابیم که از ابتدا در پایان قرار داشتیم و در پایان به 'رأیالعقل' میبینیم که در همان آغازگاهیم؛ آغازگاهی همواره معهود. البته، تاب آوردنِ این بیزمینشدگیِ مدام آسان نیست، مثل تردمیلی که دکمهی ایستادن ندارد؛ «ما در طلبِ تصوری آشنا و رایج از چیزها هستیم؛ آگاهی احساس میکند که همراه با محروم شدن از صورتِ تصور، زمینی را که استوار و محکم بر آن ایستاده و در آن احساس آرامش داشت، از زیر پایش کشیدهاند. آگاهی در قلمروِ مفهومِ محض، دیگر نمیداند در کجای جهان قرار دارد.» کلّ این بازی، روشن شدنِ «کل» است با زدونِ سایههای «خیالهای ناصواب» دربارهی آنچه که در نامیدنش با مقولاتِ «هستیاندیشانه» به مشکل برمیخوریم و میتوان با تعبیرِ نحوهی حضورِ عقلانیِ «کل» صدایش زد؛ چنین حضورِ فراگیر اندر فرگیری، جایی برای امکانهای بیفعلیّت باقی نمیگذارد و شناختِ فلسفیِ ما نیز تا جایی که فلسفی است با چنین چیزی سر و کار دارد: « علمِ فلسفی فقط به ایده میپردازد که آنقدر عقیم نیست که درخواست کند صرفاً بالفعل باشد، بدون اینکه بالفعل باشد، و در نتیجه با فعلیتی سر و کار دارد که ابژهها، ترتیبات و موقعیتها، فقط ظاهر بیرونی و سطحیترِ آن هستند».
آیا برای نوشتن از اثری که آغازگاهش را «بیآغازگاهی» میداند؛ آنجا که پیشفرض نتواند خود را براندیشهورزی تحمیل نماید، میتوان به آغازگاهی دلبخواهی چنگ زد؟ اما اگر تا «پایان» سوار بر این چرخ و فلکی که به جای بالا رفتن نسبت به چیزهای اطرافش، با این حرکاتِ مدوّر است که اساسن به چیزها که دیگر در اطراف قرار ندارند نزدیک و نزدیکتر میشود بمانیم، درمییابیم که از ابتدا در پایان قرار داشتیم و در پایان به 'رأیالعقل' میبینیم که در همان آغازگاهیم؛ آغازگاهی همواره معهود. البته، تاب آوردنِ این بیزمینشدگیِ مدام آسان نیست، مثل تردمیلی که دکمهی ایستادن ندارد؛ «ما در طلبِ تصوری آشنا و رایج از چیزها هستیم؛ آگاهی احساس میکند که همراه با محروم شدن از صورتِ تصور، زمینی را که استوار و محکم بر آن ایستاده و در آن احساس آرامش داشت، از زیر پایش کشیدهاند. آگاهی در قلمروِ مفهومِ محض، دیگر نمیداند در کجای جهان قرار دارد.» کلّ این بازی، روشن شدنِ «کل» است با زدونِ سایههای «خیالهای ناصواب» دربارهی آنچه که در نامیدنش با مقولاتِ «هستیاندیشانه» به مشکل برمیخوریم و میتوان با تعبیرِ نحوهی حضورِ عقلانیِ «کل» صدایش زد؛ چنین حضورِ فراگیر اندر فرگیری، جایی برای امکانهای بیفعلیّت باقی نمیگذارد و شناختِ فلسفیِ ما نیز تا جایی که فلسفی است با چنین چیزی سر و کار دارد: « علمِ فلسفی فقط به ایده میپردازد که آنقدر عقیم نیست که درخواست کند صرفاً بالفعل باشد، بدون اینکه بالفعل باشد، و در نتیجه با فعلیتی سر و کار دارد که ابژهها، ترتیبات و موقعیتها، فقط ظاهر بیرونی و سطحیترِ آن هستند».
June 14, 2020
Read about a third of it. Man is a thinking creature; and because of that, thesis, antithesis, synthesis makes sense- according to Hegel. Also, how is thesis, antithesis, synthesis a mischaracterization of his ideas when that’s the main point? It’s a shame I got bored with it before he even got into his views on history- why I came to this party anyway.
Update: I picked it back up and finished it about a year later as I was bored out of my mind but basically, it went from the point where I left it, to dissing Kant, to referencing Fichte and Aristotle, to references to Leibniz and Spinoza to the point of convincing me that Deleuze wrote about this to the point of Zizek feeling a way about what Deleuze wrote, and then arriving back to the beginning. There was even a few mentions of multiplicity. And perhaps where Zizek gets his “and so on and so on”.
Update: I picked it back up and finished it about a year later as I was bored out of my mind but basically, it went from the point where I left it, to dissing Kant, to referencing Fichte and Aristotle, to references to Leibniz and Spinoza to the point of convincing me that Deleuze wrote about this to the point of Zizek feeling a way about what Deleuze wrote, and then arriving back to the beginning. There was even a few mentions of multiplicity. And perhaps where Zizek gets his “and so on and so on”.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews