Hegel, Logic and Speculation

Paolo Diego Bubbio, Alessandro De Cesaris, Maurizio Pagano, Hager Weslati

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350243705
• eBook ISBN: 9781350056374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Idealism in Philosophy

This book offers new critical perspectives on the relationship between the notions of speculation, logic and reality in Hegel's thought as basis for his philosophical account of nature, history, spirit and human experience. The systematic functions of logic and pure thought are explored in their concrete forms and processual progression from subjective spirit to philosophy of right, society, the notion of habit, the idea of work, art, religion and science. Engaging the relation between the Logic and its realisations, this book shows the internal tension that inhabits Hegel's philosophy at the intersection of logical (conceptual) speculation and concrete (interpretative) analysis. The investigation of this tension allows for a hermeneutical approach that demystifies the common view of Hegel's idealism as a form of abstract thought, while allowing for a new assessment of the importance of speculation for a concrete understanding of the world.

1

Empowering Forms: Hegel’s Conception of ‘Form’ and ‘Formal’

Elena Ficara

The meaning of ‘form’ and ‘formal’ is the subject matter of many debates in the history of logic and in contemporary philosophical logic.¹ Usually, Hegel’s view is not considered in these debates. In what follows, I present five theses about logical forms and formal logic stressed by Hegel in the Preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic and ask about their role within the history and philosophy of logic.

Many authors stress that Hegel’s attitude towards formal or common logic is irretrievably critical (Ritter et al. 1971ff., vol. 5: 358; Peckhaus 1997: 120). Others, such as Krohn (1972: 57), highlight that Hegel’s standpoint is ‘ambivalent’, since Hegel not only criticized formal (intellectual) logic but also considered it as a fundamental endeavour. By contrast, I highlight that the critical views that are usually traced back to Hegel are not Hegel’s own views, but rather common theses Hegel recalls in order to present the diffused scorn of logic typical of the philosophy of his times, a scorn that Hegel himself does not share at all. Hegel defines it ‘barbaric’ (TWA VI, 375).² Formal, intellectual logic is not per se despicable for Hegel.³ Its content are the forms of truth, forms that are at the very basis of our life, thought and action:

The several forms of syllogism constantly exert influence on our knowledge. If any one, when awaking on a winter morning, hears the creaking of the carriages on the street, and is thus led to conclude that it has frozen hard in the night, he has gone through a syllogistic operation – an operation which is every day repeated under the greatest variety of complications. (EI, §183, 166)

Hegel even recalls that being aware about the forms we always use is important, for many reasons, first of all for pedagogic reasons, for educating human beings to the evaluation of arguments and to critical thought. In the Subjective Logic, he writes:

But without going into this aspect of the matter which concerns the education […] and, strictly speaking, pedagogics, it must be admitted that the study of the modes and laws of reason must in its own self be of the greatest interest – of an interest at least not inferior to an acquaintance with the laws of nature. (SL, 605)

What Hegel sharply criticizes is, by contrast, the way in which the subject of formal logic (the syllogistic forms) is dealt with in the handbooks of his times:

The most merited and most important aspect of the disfavor into which syllogistic doctrine has fallen is that this doctrine is a concept-less occupation with a subject matter whose sole content is the concept itself. (SL, 607)

It is an arid, ‘concept-less’ treatment – the syllogistic forms are the conceptual realm and are presented without any trace of conceptual thought. For this reason, Hegel states that the forms are reduced to an ‘ossified material’, and logic is a ‘ruined building’. In what follows, I examine these Hegelian views in more detail.⁴

Five theses on logical forms

Logical forms are dynamic

In the Preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic, Hegel writes that the forms produced by Aristotelian and earlier logic ‘must be regarded as an extremely important source [of the Science of Logic], indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged’ (SL, 12). In this respect, the task of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik is what I call an operation of ‘empowering’ the forms traditionally studied by logic and metaphysics (the realm of thought, das Logische) ‘to exhibit the realm of thought philosophically, that is, in its own immanent activity or what is the same, in its necessary development’ (SL, 12). This is the idea of the dynamic nature of forms or, what amounts to the same, of the ‘dynamics’ introduced into the forms (fixed in Aristotle and in the handbooks of Hegel’s times) by philosophy, i.e. by a reflexive and critical consideration about them.

In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, when Hegel discusses Aristotle’s view about the syllogism, this idea about the necessity of introducing dynamicity into the forms is clarified. Here Hegel not only praises Aristotle but also emphasizes that the syllogistic forms in Aristotle are just enumerated and fixed without any reflection about their relations to each other and without any explanation of what they are and that to which they are to be referred. They have lost their use. Thus Hegel also writes:

The form of an inference, as also its content, may be absolutely correct, and yet the conclusion arrived at may have no truth, because this form as such has no truth of its own, but from this point of view these forms have never been considered. (LHP II, 222; TWA XIX, 240)⁵

So one could say that introducing a consideration about the question ‘Are the syllogistic forms true?’ within the Aristotelian logic of Hegel’s times is, for Hegel, a way of rendering forms dynamic, so as to make them apt to grasp truth. The second thesis is coherent to this insight.

Logical forms are expression of the essence of things

In the Introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel remarks that the forms of thought are the expression of the peculiar essence and substance of individual things. Logic assumes, rightly, that ‘the determinations contained in definitions […] are determinations of the object, constituting its innermost essence and its very own nature’ (SL, 30) and that

if from given determinations others are inferred, […] what is inferred is not something external and alien to the object, but rather that it belongs to the object itself, that to the thought there corresponds being. (SL, 30)

This idea is further articulated in the third thesis.

Logical forms have a predicative nature

In the Preface to the Science of Logic, second edition, Hegel writes:

If the nature, the peculiar essence, that which is genuinely permanent and substantial in the complexity and contingency of appearance and fleeting manifestation, is the concept of the thing, the immanent universal, and [if] each human individual though infinitely singular has the most fundamental of all his singularities in being a man, exactly like each individual animal has it in being an animal: if this is true, then it would be impossible to say what such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed, no matter how richly endowed the individual might be with other predicates, if, that is, this foundation can equally be called a predicate like the others. (SL, 16; my emphasis)

The passage addresses the view about the conceptual (predicative) nature of logical forms. Predicates stand for properties, such as ‘being a man’ or ‘being an animal’, the concept is the essential predicate and is for Hegel the very condition of expressing things and their singularity.⁶

Logical forms are forms of truth

Logical forms, insofar as they express both the essence of things and the concept that makes our knowledge of things possible, have an alethic, i.e. truth-implying, nature. That is, they are conditions of our grasping things and thinking truthfully. In the Preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic, Hegel points to the generalized ‘scorn’ of logic typical of his times. Everyday thought has

so much lost its respect for the school which claims possession of such laws of truth [the law of identity and the law of contradiction] that it ridicules it and its laws and regards anyone as insufferable who can utter truths in accordance to such laws: the plant is – a plant, science is – science. (SL, 18)

Hegel also recalls a further reason of complaint. The inference rules

quite as well serve impartially error and sophistry and […] however truth may be defined, they cannot serve higher, for example, religious truth […] they concern only correctness […] and not truth. (SL, 18)

Hegel’s famous distinction between Wahrheit (truth properly speaking, higher philosophical or religious truth) and Richtigkeit (correctness) (EI, §172) is here connected to the problem of logic. What is important to focus on now is that philosophical (and religious) truth goes beyond the idea of correctness established by Verstandeslogik, i.e. a logic that does not critically reflect upon its forms. Such truth has different conditions and requires different forms.

The common understanding of ‘formal’ in the expression ‘formal logic’ is inaccurate

The connection between forms and truth introduces a criticism of ‘formal logic’ as it is usually intended. In the Introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel criticizes the view of logic typical of his times. He writes:

When logic is taken as the science of thinking in general, it is understood that this thinking constitutes the mere form of a cognition, that logic abstracts from all content and that the so called second constituent of a cognition, namely its matter, must come from elsewhere; and that since this matter is absolutely independent of logic, this latter can provide only the formal conditions of true knowledge [original German wahrhafter Erkenntnis/original translation: genuine cognition] and cannot in its own self contain any real truth, nor even be the pathway to real truth because just that which is essential in truth, its content, lies outside logic. But […] it is quite inept to say that logic abstracts from all content, that it teaches only the rules of thinking without any reference to what is thought or without being able to consider its nature. For as thinking and the rules of thinking are supposed to be the subject matter of logic, these directly constitute its peculiar content; in them, logic has that second constituent, a matter, about the nature of which it is concerned. (SL, 24)

Hegel criticizes here the formalistic conception of logic.⁷ In particular, he discusses the inference from the claim that logic studies the most general forms of thought, obtained abstracting away from particular contents, to the theses that logic has no content and therefore ‘cannot contain truth’. Some authors interpret these and similar passages as statements against formal logic⁸ and infer from them that Hegel’s logic is not a formal logic.⁹ But this reading risks being misleading. What I suggest instead is that Hegel does not discuss the formal nature of logic, but rather the philosophy of logic in his times, i.e. the interpretation that postulates the ‘abstract’ (separate) nature of logical forms.¹⁰ In other words, the theses considered above, i.e. the dynamic, ontological, conceptual and truth-implying conception of forms, introduce the last aspect, the criticism of the inference from ‘logic is interested in the form of sentences and arguments’ to ‘forms have no content, and have nothing to do with truth, i.e. with the relation of thought to content’.

Logic, for Hegel, is formal in the sense of interested in the underlying structure of sentences and arguments, but this does not mean that logic does not have content (its content are the same forms) or that logic does not express real truth. Importantly, as soon as we admit that forms are logic’s subject matter, the questions must be asked: ‘Are these forms expression of reality? Are they true?’. If we question the validity of the forms in this way, we are fulfilling, for Hegel, two important desiderata: first, we are shaking (introducing dynamicity into) the logical building, and second, we are beginning to practise and conceive logic as the pathway to real truth. The ‘living’ nature of forms (of any kind of form) is the same skepsis we address to the forms and what makes the forms our guide to truth. Thus, what is wrong is not formal logic in itself, but rather the way in which philosophers may think about it: ‘If logic is supposed to lack content, then the fault does not lie with [logic’s] subject matter but solely with the way in which this subject matter is conceived’ (SL, 28; my emphasis).

One hypothesis

There are now non-classical conceptions of logic that are particularly close to the Hegelian view of forms and the formality of logic. Hegel’s critique of the incapability of traditional ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Speculation and Hermeneutics of Effectual Reality
• 1. Empowering Forms: Hegel’s Conception of ‘Form’ and ‘Formal’
• 2. Essence as Reflection
• 3. Effectual Contingency: The Ontological Problem of Modality in Hegel’s Science of Logic
• 4. Self-Consciousness and the Idea: From Logic to Subjective Spirit
• 5. The Concept of Habit and the Function of Immediacy
• 6. Singularity of the Concept – Singularity of the Will: The Logical Ground of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
• 7. Subverting Practical Philosophy
• 8. Work and Need, Particular and Universal
• 9. Hegel’s Conception of Personality and the Tension between Logic and Realphilosophy
• 10. Mind of God, Point of View of Man or Something Not Quite Either?
• 11. Logic and Theology in Hegel
• 12. The Concept of Religion and Its Hermeneutic Function
• 13. A Speculative Logic for Images in Hegel’s Philosophy
• 14. The Silence of Logik: Hegel after Kojève
• Index
• Imprint