Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic'

Hegel on Being

Stephen Houlgate

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350189409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Idealismus in der Philosophie

Hegel on Being provides an authoritative treatment of Hegel's entire logic of being. Stephen Houlgate presents the Science of Logic as an important and neglected text within Hegel's oeuvre that should hold a more significant place in the history of philosophy. In the Science of Logic, Hegel set forth a distinctive conception of the most fundamental forms of being through ideas on quality, quantity and measure. Exploring the full trajectory of Hegel's logic of being from quality to measure, this two-volume work by a preeminent Hegel scholar situates Hegel's text in relation to the work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Frege. Volume I: Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' covers all material on the purpose and method of Hegel's dialectical logic and charts the crucial transition from the concept of quality to that of quantity, as well as providing an original account of Hegel's critique of Kant's antinomies across two chapters.

PART ONE

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The Purpose and Method of Hegel’s Logic

CHAPTER ONE

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Categories, Language and Metaphysics

THE ROLE OF CATEGORIES

Hegel’s Science of Logic is a dense and difficult work, but its aim is easily stated: to “clarify” or “purify” (reinigen) the basic categories of thought (SL 17 / LS 17). It is tempting to think that simply opening our eyes confronts us with objects. In Hegel’s view, however, the matter is not that simple: opening our eyes merely lets in light and gives rise to visual sensations of colour. Strictly speaking, therefore, we do not actually see objects before us; all we see is a two-dimensional “plane” (Fläche) of colours.¹ So how do we come to experience objects? We do so, Hegel claims, by understanding what we see (and perceive through the other senses) in terms of general concepts or “categories” – a term he borrows from Aristotle and Kant (see LL 21, 34 / 25, 42). Such categories, for Hegel, include the thoughts of “something”, “quantity”, and “cause”. They make the experience of objects possible by enabling us to regard what we perceive as more than just an array of colours – as something, an object, that has a certain magnitude and exercises a causal influence on other things.²

In Hegel’s view, therefore, objects are not simply given to us by the senses. We experience objects because, by means of categories, we understand what we see and hear to be an object. Such categories, Hegel contends, are not themselves the result of sensation but have their source in thought (though, as we shall see, their ultimate ground is the rationality in being itself).³ Our experience of objects is thus the result of cooperation between sensation and thought. Hegel’s claim, however, is not that we first have sensations and then bring categories to bear on them; rather, we understand and “categorize” what we see and hear as we see and hear it.⁴ According to Hegel, therefore, we never have unconceptualized sensations (at least when we are no longer very young children): we never see colours without understanding them to belong to some object, or to be something in their own right. In this sense, whenever we open our eyes, we do, indeed, “see” objects. Yet such “seeing” is not mere visual sensation, but the “concrete habit which immediately unites in one simple act the many determinations of sensation, consciousness, intuition, understanding, etc.” (EPM 132 / 186 [§ 410 R]).⁵

For Hegel, thought and its categories inform all our sensing and perceiving (and, indeed, our imagining and desiring). This, he claims, is what distinguishes human beings from other animals.⁶ Non-human animals, we are told, remain immersed in unconceptualized sensations: they feel specific pleasures and pains and associate these with what they see, but they do not think of what they see as an object with qualities, magnitude, form and so on.⁷ In the human being, by contrast, what Hegel calls “the logical” (das Logische) – thought and its categories – “permeates all his natural behavior, his ways of sensing, intuiting, desiring, his needs and impulses; and it thereby makes them into something truly human” (SL 12 / LS 10). All human experience (beyond that of the very young) is thus mediated by categories.⁸

Hegel notes that the categories or “forms of thought [Denkformen] are first set out and stored in human language” (SL 12 / LS 9-10). They are given implicit or explicit expression in words; or, as Hegel puts it in his philosophy of spirit, “it is in names that we think” (EPM 199 / 278 [§ 462 R]). Categories thus inform and permeate our sensing and imagining insofar as language informs them. As Hegel writes,

In all that becomes something inward for the human being, or a representation as such, in whatever he makes his own, language has penetrated, and everything that he transforms into language and expresses in it contains a category [Kategorie], whether concealed, mixed, or well defined. So much is the logical natural to the human being, or rather it is his very nature itself.

—SL 12 / LS 10

Language, however, is something we have to learn. Before we learn it, when we are still very young, we are thus immersed, much like non-human animals, in sensations that are as yet unconceptualized. Instead of experiencing identifiable objects, therefore, “initially the child has only a sensation of light by which things are manifest to it” (EPM 56 / 80 [§ 396 A]). As we learn language, thought and its categories then gradually come to inform our whole consciousness; and, Hegel notes, explicit “instruction in grammar” also draws the attention of children to “distinctions of thought” (EL 59 / 85 [§ 24 A2]).⁹ In this way, although it is not initially true, it comes to be true of human beings that they never have unconceptualized sensations.¹⁰

Moreover, as our command of language improves, so the range of categories that permeate our consciousness increases. Individuals at different stages of linguistic development will thus understand the world in subtly different ways. Hegel also believes that whole languages can give expression to basic categories to different degrees and may not express certain categories at all (at least before certain points in their history), so different peoples and civilisations can understand the world in subtly different ways, too. “It is to the advantage of a language”, Hegel writes, “when it possesses a wealth of logical expressions, that is, specific and separate expressions for the thought determinations themselves”, and in certain languages “many of the prepositions and articles already pertain to relations based on thought”; “the Chinese language”, however, “has apparently not developed to this stage at all, or only to an inadequate extent” (SL 12 / LS 10). Whether this supposition about Chinese is correct, I cannot say; but Hegel’s remark confirms that, in his view, speakers of different languages can experience the world through different categories (or through the same categories conceived in different ways).¹¹

For Immanuel Kant, the twelve categories listed in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 2nd edn 1787) are the universal conditions of the objects of experience (though they must be “awakened into exercise” by experience itself) (see CPR B 1, 106, 195-7). For Hegel, by contrast, while the experience of objects necessarily presupposes categories, it does not presuppose that all people and peoples employ precisely the same ones or understand the ones they share in precisely the same way. Furthermore, Hegel thinks that in the course of history human beings can change the categories they employ. Indeed, he claims, “all revolutions, in the sciences no less than in world history, originate solely from the fact that spirit [ … ] has changed its categories, comprehending itself more truly, more deeply, more intimately, and more in unity with itself” (EN 11 / 20-1 [§ 246 A]). As an example of what he has in mind, Hegel maintains in the Logic that in early nineteenth-century physics, “where the predominant category previously was that of force, it is the category of polarity that now plays the most significant role” (SL 13 / LS 11).¹² In contrast to Kant, therefore, Hegel does not consider the categories of thought to be straightforwardly universal. He believes, rather, that “the advance of culture in general and of the sciences in particular [ … ] gradually fosters the rise of thought-relations [Denkverhältnisse] that are also more advanced, or it at least raises them to wider universality and consequently brings them to greater notice” (SL 13 / LS 11).¹³

Categories, such as “force” and “polarity”, are understood by Hegel to belong principally, though not exclusively, to natural science. Many others, however, find expression and employment primarily in everyday language. As noted above, for example, Hegel thinks that categories are expressed – at least implicitly – in certain languages by common “prepositions and articles”. (Later we will see the important role that the prepositions in (in or within), an (in or at) and für (for) play in Hegel’s own account of the categories of Insichsein (being-within-self), Ansichsein (being-in-itself) and Fürsichsein (being-for-self).)¹⁴ Hegel also points out that categories are expressed in many languages by everyday nouns and verbs. Indeed, he thinks that this is the more important way for categories to be expressed, for they are thereby made more explicit or “stamped into objec...