The Beginning of Hegel’s Logic — Wissen und Kritik
1. The Matter of Logic is not the Logic of Matters
The object of logic are the determinations of thinking separate from the respective content. Now, to avoid misunderstandings, this does not mean that the specific object of logic is completely devoid of content. Hegel also knew this, in contrast to the modern formal logicians.
“First of all, however, it is already clumsy to say that logic abstracts from all content, that it teaches only the rules of thinking without getting involved in what is thought and without being able to have regard for its constitution. For since thinking and the rules of thinking are to be its object, it has its peculiar content immediately from them.” (Science of Logic, Introduction)
In G.W.F. Hegel’s “Science of Logic”, however, one does not purely deal with the simple explanation of the activity of thought once taken for itself: for he concludes from the circumstance that man grasps the world thinkingly, i.e. in the use of logical categories, the identity of the actual objects with the abstract determinations of thinking:
“This metaphysics thus held that thinking and the determinations of thinking were not something foreign to objects, but rather their essence, or that things and the thinking of them coincide in and for themselves, that thinking in its immanent determinations and the veritable nature of things are one and the same content.” (Ibid.)
In this praise of the old metaphysics, which Hegel holds up against the results of Kantian philosophy, he says correct and incorrect things at the same time. It is correct that scientific thinking brings out the identity of the respective objects thought of, i.e. grasps the essence of the object. The respective content of thought is not something foreign to the object, but it is the object thought of, not a third thing that interposes itself between thinking and object. Or as Hegel says: that things and the thinking of them (!) coincide in and for themselves.
It is something else, however, to think about thinking itself: this effort then explicates the essential determinations of thinking; the understanding has itself as its object, it reflects on its principles in thinking. But these principles (general determinations) of thinking, which occur in every content thought of, in every thought about something — it may be right or wrong — are therefore precisely not the essence or the true nature of things. In other words, if I have explained what a quality, a judgement, a purpose and a conclusion are, then I still have a long way to go before I know what the state is, what school is all about and what wage labour is.
2. Actuality as the Expression of Logic or Logic as the Cause of the World
“Logic is thus to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth as it is without veil in and for itself. It can therefore be expressed that this content is the representation of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit.” (Science of Logic, Preface)
Hegel’s conception that, by explaining the general determinations of form of thinking, he had at the same time conceptualised the essential nature of some fragment in the world, has the fatal consequence that the world is now upside down, in that thinking is declared to be the basis of everything. How does Hegel, for whom philosophy was supposed to be science and who — correctly — determined science as the ascertainment of the necessities of the matter in question, come up with this false identification?
Hegel’s concern in the investigation of thinking was to prove that thinking works itself up to objectivity. His result was: thought is objective. And his erroneous conclusion: therefore the objective is thought, but in the form of objectivity.
“When one says that thought, as objective thought, is the inner of the world, it can seem as if thereby consciousness is to be ascribed to natural things. We feel a reluctance to conceive of the inner activity of things as thinking, since we say that man distinguishes himself from the natural through thinking. Accordingly, we would have to speak of nature as the system of unconscious thought, as an intelligence that, as Schelling says, is petrified.” (Encyclopedia §24 n, 1)
Hegel thus inverts the subject and predicate of his statement. A judgement about thinking thus becomes a judgement about the world. Just because it is correct that thinking grasps the identity of an object, the identity of the object is supposed to be thinking. The mistake is that Hegel declares a relation of the world to the subject — it is cognised, thought by him — to be the peculiarity of the world. Thinkability thus becomes its nature: the world is of logical nature. The continuation of this error consists in the equation of the sole manner in which the understanding can appropriate the world for itself, namely in the judging and concluding recapitulation of the determinations of a matter, with the thought of genesis of the matters themselves. The identity of concept and matter as one generated by spirit is taken so literally that the objectivity presupposed by thinking appears as the work of the idea, so that logic “governs” the world of appearances.
Thus everything is reversed: the fact that a matter has a logical determination, that, as in the conclusion, a connection between two states of affairs that is asserted to be necessary is expressed in logical categories, is twisted by Hegel to the effect that the matter in question is essentially characterised by this logical determination, i.e. it is not the necessarily connected content of the matter that is the topic, but the matter as an expression of precisely the logical categories.
“All things are a categorical judgement” (Ibid. §177) “Crime … is the infinite judgement” (Ibid. 6, 325)
And it is precisely in such judgements that the matter itself is not grasped, for it is obviously nonsensical that the most diverse things should have their identity in equal measure in being a conclusion, a judgement, an ought, etc., and thus not differ in what is essential. This gives science à la Hegel a new aim of cognition: it should no longer simply cognise the matter, but should rather always cognise itself in the matter.
For Hegel, science consists in the activity of finding out the identity of the objects studied, their concept. Scientific explanation offers an exposition of the necessary determinations of a matter and its necessary connection to other matters. Hegel’s speciality now consists in letting necessity, i.e. the ascertained concept of a matter, speak in favour of this matter. He considers the explanation of a matter by reason to be the same as the proof of the reasonableness of the matter, that it not only exists, but must exist. With the assertion, put into the world by Hegel, that when explaining a matter one would at the same time still have to prove its explicability, he is not uttering a logical determination about a matter, but his interested dissatisfaction with what an explanation (derivation) achieves. Hegel criticised the achievement of reasoning to determine the necessity of a matter relative to its cause and thus to declare the existence of this matter to be a relative necessity — with the elimination of the cause, the caused no longer exists either — because what mattered to him was a kind of insight into necessity that makes it clear to the understanding that what it explains must exist. The necessity of the existence of a matter, however, is not the result of explaining, explaining rather creates freedom in dealing with the explained matter, but is the methodical demand to derive the whole (!) world (!), in his words “to prove both the being and the determinations … of the objects.” (Ibid. § l)
3. The Beginning of Logic is not the Logic of the Beginning
When Hegel thus imputes to every scientific reasoning the defect that a reasoned is not complete because the cause of the cause is not stated — a defect that is not a defect of the reasoned at all, for either the reasoned is correct or it is not, nothing is added to it if it turns out that the cause that is found out has a cause itself — then he demands a system of thought that traces actuality back to ultimate causes that cannot be further circumvented by understanding and therefore cannot be relativised, a demand that necessarily poses the question of the “absolute beginning”, the “absolute cause” of everything.
For if science is derivation, then nothing derived, “mediated”, may claim validity without its derivation. Here a fanaticism of scientificity breaks its course, which only reaches its vanishing point in the purely methodical thought of complete unmediatedness and underivedness, in the empty thought of derivability, wherein derivation is contracted in its mere possibility. Hegel’s methodical need thus leads him to begin logic with the problem of the beginning itself, with the contradiction of a causeless that is at the same time supposed to be the cause of everything in nuce.
The generation of the first category occurs with Hegel in that he lays out that science of course has to begin with the beginning (!) by constructing the beginning of logic from the logic of the beginning. I.e. Hegel here only analyses what it means to “begin” and from these determinations of “beginning”, “to begin” — separate from any content that begins — he constructs the beginning categories of logic. So not to think about the beginning of logic, but to think of “beginning as such”, precisely this methodical nonsense generates, according to Hegel, the first objective categories of logic.
“Thus the beginning must be absolute or, what here has the equal meaning, abstract beginning; it must thus presuppose nothing, must be mediated by nothing, nor have a cause; … it is only to be seen what we have in this conception. It is still nothing, and it is to become something. The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; being is therefore also already contained in the beginning. So the beginning contains both being and nothing; is the unity of being and nothing — or is the non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.” (Science of Logic)
They look accordingly, these hypostasies of the meagre rot that one thinks when one thinks “beginning”: being, nothing, becoming.
“Pure being” is determined negatively through and through in accordance with the methodical need: it is the “un-”, “without”, “-less”, in fact nothing but the methodical instruction how it is to be thought, more precisely, all that is forbidden to think — and precisely all is forbidden to think, one should think, but think nothing — so that one does not miss it. The first category of the “Logic” is thus not a category, but a methodically generated universal: derivability to be thought without cause. Nothing is introduced as the determination of being, that is, as distinguished from it. According to matter, however, determination and determined are absolutely identical. But at the same time they ought to be distinguished. The methodical thinker cleans up the difficulty with an artifice: he employs the “something” — which is not the topic here at all, must not be the topic — in order to be able to show that his invented distinction of one and the same matter are two matters that are identical in their distinguishedness.
Both sides, however, being and nothing, are indeed the same; their distinction falls entirely within supposing. The attempt to hold them as independents shows that they have each “already transitioned” into the other. Taken for themselves, therefore, they are both without support, they do not endure. Hegel, of course, does not want this to be understood to mean that his “being” and his “nothing” are chimeras in equal measure, but is their objective determination. “They do not endure”, this statement about “being” and “nothing” is taken seriously as a determination and made into an objective category: becoming. This progression from something without determination can only be made methodically: just as the methodical need has created a first category for itself, from which it must continue — total derivation — so it generates in the unsupportability and non-independence of the first two categories the transition: becoming.
Against this, it must be held:
Being is nothing and does not become something either.
German: https://wissenundkritik.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Der-Anfang-von-Hegels-Logik.pdf
