 
Hegel’s analysis of mind and world:
the Science of Logic
Hegel’s Phenomenology was completed, so Hegel liked to tell people, on the
night of the battle of Jena. However, by the time he published the first
volume of his Science of Logic in  – the later two volumes appeared
between  and  – he had lost his job as a professor, fathered an il-
legitimate son, run a newspaper, found a position teaching philosophy to
high-school students in Nuremberg, and gotten married to a womanfrom
the Nuremberg patriciate (and, by the time the Logic was finished, had fa-
thered a daughter who did not survive and two other sons who did). The
period between the Phenomenology and the Logic covered Napoleon’s tri-
umphant destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian army,
his disastrous invasion of Russia, his exile and comeback, the Congress
of Vienna, and the battle of Waterloo. Whereas the Phenomenology was
completed under the gaze of the Revolution triumphant, the Logic was
completed under the gaze of German monarchs seeking a restoration
of their powers and authority (but, in the case of the large kingdoms
created in Napoleonic Germany, these monarchs also refusing to cede
an inch of the land or property Napoleon had in effect given them).

While in Jena, Hegel had been working on his “system,” which was
to provide a unitary treatment of the philosophy of nature, the philoso-
phy of mind, ethics and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion,
along with a kind of “logic,” as he called it, that was intended to be the
overall structure for the whole enterprise.

In the post-Kantian context,
Hegel’s ambition for his “system” was clear: he was trying to rewrite the

Of course, it all depends on one’s notion of romance as to whether one judges the Logic to have

One of Hegel’s main points in reformulating the “Kantian paradox”
in this way was his conviction that the “spirit” of Kant’s philosophy not
only did not entail the dualismof concept and intuition that so many
post-Kantians had found so unsatisfactory, it was in fact opposed to it. For
Hegel, it was Kant himself who had shown that this dualism was unten-
able by virtue of having implicitly demonstrated in his “Transcendental
Deduction” that the normative authority of both concepts and intuitions
had to do with their place within the unity of inference (of reason) itself.
This was a point Hegel had made quite explicitly in an earlier 
essay, “Faith and Knowledge,” published in the journal he and Schelling
edited together.

Hegel was especially taken with Kant’s conception of a

Hegel, Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p. (“Dies ist nun selbst der vorhin
bezeichnete Standpunkt, nach welchemein allgemeines Erstes, an und f¨ur sich betrachtet, sich
als das Andere seiner selbst zeigt.” Italics added by me).

“How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? ...Reason alone is the possibility of this positing,
for Reason is nothing else but the identity of heterogeneous elements of this kind. One can glimpse
this Idea through the shallowness of the deduction of the categories. With respect to space and
time one can glimpse it too ...in the deduction of the categories, where the original synthetic
unity of apperception finally comes to the fore. Here, the original synthetic unity of apperception
is recognized also as the principle of the figurative synthesis, i.e., of the forms of intuition; space
and time are themselves conceived as synthetic unities, and spontaneity, the absolute synthetic
activity of the productive imagination, is conceived as the principle of the very sensibility which
was previously characterized only as receptivity,” “Glauben und Wissen,” Werke, ,pp.–;
Faith and Knowledge,pp.–.
 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel
“figurative synthesis,” which transforms what would otherwise be non-


Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: “But the figurative synthesis, if it be directed merely to the original
synthetic unity of apperception, that is, to the transcendental unity which is thought in the
categories, must, in order to be distinguished from the merely intellectual combination, be called
the transcendental synthesis of imagination. Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an
object that is not itself present ...But inasmuch as its synthesis is an expression of spontaneity,
which is determinative and not, like sense, determinable merely, and which is therefore able to
determine sense a priori in respect of its form in accordance with the unity of apperception,
imagination is to that extent a faculty which determines the sensibility a priori; and its synthesis
of intuitions, conforming as it does to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of
imagination. This synthesis is an action of the understanding on the sensibility; and is its first
application – and thereby the ground of all its other applications – to the objects of our possible
intuition. As figurative, it is distinguished fromthe intellectual synthesis, which is carried out by
the understanding alone, without the aid of the imagination,” –.
The Science of Logic 
sense of mind and world in ways that contradicted what they were trying
to achieve in holding those views.
To that end, Hegel broke up the Logic into three “books,” which them-
selves are divided into what Hegel calls “the objective logic” (comprised
of the first two “books”) and the “subjective logic.” In particular, the three
“books” of the Logic showed Hegel’s clearly post-Kantian take on philos-
ophy, and the Fichtean overtones to the division were clear: the first two
books laid out the internal logic within pre-Kantian metaphysics as the
attempt to make the distinction between agency and the natural world,
between subject and object, into an objective distinction. (As he put it,
the “objective logic, takes the place ...of the former metaphysics.”

)The
way in which the logic of pre-Kantian metaphysics pushes us ultimately
into a Kantian, and then post-Kantian (that is, Hegelian) position is

being and of the concept as concept – or, by employing the usual terms ...into objective and subjective
logic,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p.. (“Cycle” translates “Kreislauf ”.)
 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel
foreordained or already (somehow) existent all along, nonetheless had
a developmental logic internal to itself such that the development of
the pre-Kantian metaphysics of “substance” into the Kantian theory of
“subjectivity” was indeed the logical move to make, even if that move
was not necessitated by any law of history.

   :  ¨
The Logic began with echoes of H¨olderlin’s thoughts about “being” as
expressing our sense of a kind of “orientation” in the world that precedes
all our other orientations and thus as being more basic than any other
concept, including that of “judgment” (and thus beginning with a con-
ception of “truth” as an “immediate,” “primitive” concept). Hegel refers
to this as “being, pure being – without any further determination.”

That is,
the Logic is to begin with something that is prior to and more basic than
any kind of division into “subject” and “object,” and is then to show how
the tensions and contradictions that turn out to be at work in our holding
onto that “thought” of a pre-reflective orientation (which is not yet even
a judgment) show more explicitly what is really normatively in play.
The tension inherent in the conception of “pure, indeterminate
being” is that this “pure thought” has nothing within itself by which it
could be distinguished from“nothing,” and yet the sense of the thought is
just that being is different fromnothing. Thus, as soon as one tries to express
the so-called thought of “pure being,” to express the conception that the

guishing being fromnothing is not comparing two distinct “things” in terms
of their properties (as we might think we were doing in distinguishing,
say, maples from oaks, or turtles from rabbits); we are actually making a
move in the normative space of reasons, specifically, working out the kinds
of inferences that are permissible in terms of a conception of the world
as a process of coming-to-be and passing-away, in which we recognize
that what comes to be and what passes away is not nothing, after all, but
something; that this reliance on a conception of “becoming” in fact only
thereby makes explicit the necessity of recognizing that it is something,
some one determinate thing or another, that comes to be or passes away.

Or, to put it more in Hegel’s own preferred idiom, the basic distinction
between “what is” and “what is not” is itself an “abstraction,” a “mo-
ment” of a more comprehensive whole, namely, a world of determinate
things coming into being and passing away.
, ,  “”
On the one hand, the beginning of the Logic does not establish anything
particularly controversial: it shows that our judgments about “being” and
“nothing” require us to speak of something as coming-to-be or passing-
away, assertions which even Hegel himself admits are only “superficial.”

On the other hand, the beginning sections of the “Doctrine of Being”

“It is the form of the simple judgment,” Hegel noted, “when it is used to express speculative
results, which is very often responsible for the paradoxical and bizarre light in which much of
recent philosophy appears to those who are not familiar with speculative thought,” Science of
Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p.. (In saying that, unfortunately, Hegel laid
himself wide open for further misunderstanding by those who wished to see his philosophy in a
“paradoxical and bizarre light,” namely, that he was somehow endorsing the irrationalist view
that “speculative truths” could not be expressed in language at all, something that was exactly

that comes-to-be and passes-away (the details of which are not crucial
here). Hegel’s discussion, though, is intended to extend his logical point
to what is really at issue for him: in making even such “superficial”
judgments, we are moving in a kind of normative space in which much
more turns out to be normatively required of us than we would have
at first imagined when we started out with such very general and very
abstract conceptions of “something,” “qualitatively different items” and
the like. In particular, these are judgments about finite items, that is,
any two “things” that can only be characterized by their distinction
from something else that is external to them. Such judgments about the
“finite,” so it would seem, also commit us to judgments about the infinite,
since a judgment about some finite thing, a, commits us to a judgment
about another finite thing, b, which in turn commits us to another such
judgment about some c, and so on to infinity.

The language of undertaking and attributing commitments is best developed by Robert
Brandom, Making It Explicit, and in his “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism:
Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual
Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy, () (August ), –, and Tales of the Mighty Dead,
where the extension to Hegel’s conception of agency is explicitly made. I developed a similar
view of Hegel’s conception of agency as a position in social space in Hegel’s Phenomenology. See also
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, where he develops a conception of
Hegel’s view of agency that also draws on Sellarsian notions (which formthe core of Brandom’s
later account). A reading of Hegel in terms of contemporary philosophical concerns, particularly
those concerning the relation of inferentialist semantics to post-Kantian issues (and especially
those having to do with subjective and objective points of view), is masterfully done in Paul
Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ).
The Science of Logic 
The infinite, however, can never be conceived as a single itemitself. For
example, if we think of “the infinite” as the sum-total of all finite things, it

tative features of objects, with the intent being to show that such quan-
titative judgments are not comparisons of two things (say, an equation
and some Platonic entities called numbers), but different ways in which
we ascribe entitlement in, for example, mathematics (such as when one
has actually proved something, and so forth).
The guiding idea in the “Doctrine of Being” has to do with the
transformation of the “Kantian paradox” into a thesis about normative

In Hegel’s idiosyncratic way of putting it: “This sublation (Aufheben) is thus not the sublation of
the something,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..

Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,pp.–.

Hegel is clearly aiming at discrediting the idea of explaining the world by some supernatural
infinite – a conception of there being “two worlds, an infinite and a finite,” as he puts it, something
that he thinks clearly contains a “contradiction” once the logic of such a conception is put into
more “explicit form,” Science of Logic,p.; Wissenschaft der Logik, ,p.; HeW, ,p..