Mesocosm

One has to marvel at the breathtaking ambition and stupendous folly of the Science of Logic; that Hegel, armed only with his idiosyncratic method of immanent deduction and dialectic, would dare attempt to trace the logical structure of experience from its lowest foundations in empty, indeterminate abstraction all the way to its uttermost peak; through the vast manifolds of nature and objectivity and at last unto the Godhead itself, all in one great, self-consistent, and architectonically-complete demonstration. The Science of Logic is a Tower of Babel built by one man. 

The absurdity of the endeavor and the complete inadequacy of his intellectual toolkit makes itself felt on every page as his system struggles to hold itself together under its own enormous weight. It does so largely by relying on a core set of titanic, nebulous categories. In a single paragraph, I counted Hegel using the word Grund in at least four different ways (cause, reason, ground, and basis), as though the fact that one German word includes this diversity of meanings can do the work for us of binding together all of its manifold registers into a single concept. 

Here, I think Hegel fully earned Schopenhauer’s scorn, who remarked in his own infinitely clearer, infinitely more reasonable, infinitely less profound treatment of Grund that Hegel can’t even keep straight the difference between reason and cause. 

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Science of Logic is not a conventional work on the formal laws of deduction and so forth. Hegel refers to such thinking as “the object of universal aversion and disgust,” (682) and observes that the “laborious study of syllogistic formulae” is as necessary for rational thought as the study of physiology and anatomy are for walking and digesting. 

If the science of celestial bodies is to have the slightest value, it must concern itself not just with the laws and mechanics of heavenly motion; it must first ask whether or not the stars exist, and if so, what they are. Yet I was once told by a professor of formal logic that whether or not we can determine the truth value of propositions in principle is not of concern to logic. 

In this I fully agree with Hegel: a logic that ignores fundamental issues of existence and knowledge is necessarily deranged. 

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A central concern of Science of Logic is the analysis of composites, variously approached as the relationship between a thing and its parts, individuals or particulars versus universals, quantitative determinations of objects of the same type, and so forth. 

More than anything else, Hegel is interested in synthesis. Analytic cognition is easily understood; that things can be thought of in terms of their parts. It is more difficult to understand how it is that we cognize composites as unitary wholes–especially when there is a puzzling fluidity to how we effortlessly decompose and recompose parts and wholes, moving up and down an endless hierarchy of parts and their parts, with each object at every level appearing as a simple object in itself.

Hegel only notes this in passing, but I think it’s key to understanding his philosophy: the ultimate source of the dialectic lies in the a priori synthesis of the concept. With it, “Kant possessed a higher principle in which a duality in a unity could be cognized, a cognition, therefore, of what is required for truth” (SoL 594). By virtue of a priori synthesis, a concept subsumes its parts into a composite that is both the same and different as the sum of those parts.

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If we are to believe the published student notes, Hegel made the following comment on section 213 of his 1830 Encyclopedia: 

The purpose of philosophy has always been the intellectual ascertainment of the Ideal; and everything deserving the name of philosophy has constantly been based on the consciousness of an absolute unity where the understanding sees and accepts only separation. It is too late now to ask for proof that the Idea is the truth. The proof of that is contained in the whole deduction and development of thought up to this point.

Would that Hegel were so clear in his own writing. But if we take his student at their word, then the fundamental impulse motivating the Logic, which Hegel himself regarded as the self-movement of thought through the dialectic, is the impulse toward unity. And, if the idea means anything at all–and it’s not certain to me that it does–then it means unity. 

The synthesis is the essence of creation, consciousness, spirit, and life. “Something is alive only insofar as it contains contradictions within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradictions within it.” 

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Hegel’s theory of absolute idealism exhibits several core ambiguities that may be unresolvable. It is my view that he crafted his system precisely to preserve these ambiguities. 

How are we to take his account of concepts as truly-existing and constitutive, of ideas as the union of the subjective concept and objectivity? In what sense is Hegel’s system “idealist”? 

I will consider three possible interpretations. The first “deflationary” reading would argue that the intelligibility of phenomena is rooted in the fact that the dynamics of nature are in themselves rather cognition-like. This reading is the easiest fit with modern complexity theory and systems analysis. It would hold that the absolute idea refers to the sum total of self-organizing and emergent phenomena of nature, of which human consciousness constitutes a conspicuous example, and the epistemic terms Hegel used to describe it are essentially metaphors that were ready-to-hand. This account might draw support from Hegel’s analysis of life, or from his characterization of the germ of life, which can easily be read as a literal description of DNA. It could find support from his argument that natural drives result from the self-movement propelled by the contradictions inherent in the concept of the organism. 

The second “phenomenological” reading would emphasize Hegel’s insistence that reality as such is always already registered by consciousness. He amplifies Kant with his emphatic denial of the intelligibility of the Kantian thing-in-itself, and argues that conscious experience is not just the only actuality available to philosophical analysis, it is the only actuality whatsoever. Phenomena are ideal in the sense that reality always necessarily appears to consciousness. 

A third “theological” reading would hold that human consciousness as such in some deep sense does enjoy a privileged ontological status and constitutive role in the universe, not just phenomenologically, but cosmogonically. Such an interpretation may be favored by those who are inclined to interpret absolute spirit in theistic terms. In this reading, the entire Science of Logic could essentially be read as a commentary on the Gospel of John or as the last great medieval logical proof of God’s existence. 

I am not particularly comfortable with this reading, but it would be difficult to disprove. Consider, for example, Hegel’s repeated defense of the ontological proof of God’s existence, or passages like this: 

Accordingly, logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil, and in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature and a finite mind. (50)

And:

The concept is not merely soul, but free subjective concept that is for itself and therefore possesses personality–the practical, objective concept determined in and for itself which, as person, is impenetrable atomic subjectivity–but which, none the less, is not exclusive individuality, but explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other it has its own objectivity for its object. All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavour, caprice and transitoriness; the absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth. (824)

And:

Hence logic exhibits the self-movement of the absolute Idea only as the original word, which is an outwardizing or utterance [Äusserung]….(825) [compare to John 1:1]

And: 

The second negative, the negative of the negative, at which we have arrived … [is] the innermost, most objective moment of life and spirit, through which a subject, a person, a free being exists. (835-6)

Why does Hegel insist on characterizing the absolute in terms of personhood? This is, of course, the very heart of Christian dialectic. He does not mention trinitarian theology or Christology in Science of Logic, but it is obvious that his dialectical thinking was strongly influenced by them. One can trace the development of this influence in his early essay The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in its long discussions of the John gospel and the spiritual community unified in the holy spirit. (Has the relationship between the holy spirit (heilige Geist) in the New Testament and Hegel’s use of the term Geist ever been analyzed? There are obvious deep connections.)

All three possible interpretations find support in Science of Logic. To some degree, they may be three ways of saying the same thing. We can certainly ask: does the Logic reduce the belief in God to the absolute idea or does it elevate the absolute idea to the level of God? But on one level, this question is merely semantic, in the same sense that it ultimately doesn’t matter much whether one calls Spinoza a pantheist or an atheist; either substance is God or God is substance. 

“Philosophy has the same content and the same end as art and religion;” Hegel wrote, “but it is the highest mode of apprehending the absolute Idea, because its mode is the highest mode, the concept.” (824) That is to say, on one level, Science of Logic is an explication of what art and religion are ultimately getting at. 

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The problem of cognizing phenomena as unities is ultimately the basis for Hegel’s theory of dialectics, which I find the most important contribution of his wide-ranging philosophical labors by far. 

Dialectic was a kind of art of contradiction practiced in the ancient world. It was returned to philosophical prominence by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he analyzed four foundational philosophical problems by describing how they spawn what he called antimonies, or contradictory propositions that can both be proven to be true. For example, the age-old problem of free will versus determinism arises from the antimony that we can prove both that the everything that is must be the effect of a determinate cause, and that some actions are freely undertaken. 

Kant argued that the paradoxical quality of the antimonies stems from the mistaken attempt to determine objective truths about reality using pure reason, which reaches only to the boundaries of our experience. When we reason about space and time, we can only deliberate about our own experience, and in seeking to form conclusions about the world in itself, reason oversteps its authority and cannot resolve its own claims. 

Hegel praises Kant for returning the eye of philosophy to dialectic, but is critical of his use of it. In his reading, Kant purports to “solve” the contradictions generated from the antimonies by simply moving them from objective reality to subjective experience, as though contradictions in experience are more permissible than contradictions in objective reality. 

But the deeper mistake, in Hegel’s view, is that Kant, like most philosophers, fundamentally misunderstands the implications of dialectical reasoning in assuming that it demonstrates contradiction in order to refute; that is, that dialectics is a form of reductio ad absurdum. What dialectics in fact demonstrates is that any concept whatsoever necessarily includes contradictory determinations. Any object conceived in terms of unity or difference necessarily gives rise to contradiction, which is intrinsic to thought. 

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In Hegel’s view, the law of identity and the law of the excluded middle are not legitimate foundations for philosophical thought, they are merely postulates of an empty formalism that is incapable of true thinking. For example, he argues the law of identity stated as “A is A” already contains a contradiction, because the first A is a subject and the second A is a predicate. (Note: to object that A in itself is neither would be another form of asserting the thing-in-itself. That is, there is no inherently-existent A that is not mediated by such determinations.)

To my considerable surprise, Hegel offered a persuasive refutation of the law of the excluded middle, which states that all things are either A or not A. For any set of contradictory pairs–say, “hot and cold”–this law can be reframed as “All things are either positive or negative A.” Having put it in those terms, in each case A itself is necessarily both and neither A or not A. That is, Temperature is neither hot nor cold. 

This gives a clear view of the character of synthesis that arises from Hegel’s dialectical reasoning; analysis moves to a higher logical level and the contradictory terms are enfolded in a new, higher perspective that is both richer and more determinate than the preceding level. Confusion of terms on different logical levels generate hidden category errors, which Hegel believes are a hobgoblin of the history of philosophy and its many Gordian knots. 

In this system, all concepts necessarily subsume, or, to use his term, sublimate, the constituent terms on which they depend. Conceptual thought forms general categories that both include and annul their moments or parts, which are are preserved within the new concept, but only implicitly, just as hot and cold are implicit in the concept of temperature. And any concept whatsoever includes a synthesis of this kind; that is what concepts are. The concept of the wheel includes the concepts of tire and axel, but not explicitly. 

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The nature of dialectical thinking is misunderstood when we think its contradictions disprove. Zeno’s paradox of motion, for example, did not disprove motion. Rather, it forces the recognition that our concept of motion necessarily includes contradictory determinations. We must simultaneously affirm that a moving object traverses a continuous region of space as well as the fact that at any specific instant, we must be able to cognize a flying arrow as existing at a determinate place P and at time T. The continuous and the discrete conceptions of space contradict one another, but they are both essential moments of our concept of motion, and both are sublimated by it. Insoluble philosophical paradoxes often come from attempting to isolate and reify concepts that are dialectically entangled. 

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Much of what Hegel objects to in the Kantian determination of the thing-in-itself is the limit it places on knowledge of truth. He criticizes Kant at length in the Phenomenology for depriving us of the philosophical concept of truth that we should want, if such an objection can be called a “criticism.” When it comes to truth, what we should want has no bearing on the matter. 

And much of Hegel’s Logic is in fact an attempt to practice philosophy in the grand old way, to do metaphysics as it was done before Hume and Kant, in the manner of Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz, only now we are to call it transcendental logic or immanent deduction. It should therefore come as no surprise that Hegel’s system as a whole should strike us in certain key respects as monstrous and bizarre. Consider, after all, the metaphysics of Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz; only the most ardent believers in their own reasoning could confidently defend the eternal Idea, God as self-given substance, or the monad. And only Hegel could follow his own immanent deduction to his nebulous account of the Idea without the slightest reservation. 

At the pinnacle of Hegel’s system, we might feel a vertigo and a longing for the uncertainty built into the heart of Kant’s first Critique. It is there to serve, after all, as a corrective to our own lack of epistemological humility, and we might reflect that such limits are necessary for thought. 

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Where Hegel tends to treat the Kantian thing-in-itself as an indefensible foundation of experience, I tend to see it as a limiting concept. Obviously the “thing-in-itself” is not really a “thing,” but what else are we supposed to call it? 

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Many of the core ideas of systems theory and the science of self-organization are clearly anticipated by Science of Logic, sometimes in surprisingly-detailed and specific accounts. These include: 

Emergence: What systems theorists call emergence is a central focus of this work. In Hegelian terms, each object can be cognized as a whole which sublates its various moments; Hegel’s term, borrowed from Schiller, for parts that are both subsumed and annulled into larger, supraordinate objects which possess qualities and dynamics that are not entirely reducible to the sum of the parts. 

Complementarity: A core feature of general system theory is the view that descriptive models necessarily divide phenomena into the synchronic (atemporal) laws that govern their dynamics and the diachronic unfolding of the material objects of description in time according to those rules. Per systems theory, this distinction is made on the level of description and modeling, and the attempt to treat synchronic and diachronic elements of a system as though they are discrete in themselves leads to conceptual paradoxes and modeling errors. This understanding is entirely included in the Hegelian dialectic. 

“It from bit”: Hegelian idealism is ultimately an attempt to provide a philosophical model for what the physicist John Wheeler would later characterize as the information-theoretic origins of reality. In his understanding of the concept and the idea, the dynamics of nature are profoundly mind-like, such that they have an ideal character in themselves, and not merely insofar as they are objects of human awareness. 

It is not easy to account for this deep resemblance. Other than the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, I am not aware of any major systems theorist who has read Hegel, even among those who are more philosophically-inclined. Stuart Kauffman does not include a single reference to Hegel in At Home in the Universe, while J. Scott Kelso and David Engstrøm mischaracterize his philosophy in The Complementary Nature. It is possible that Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varlea were aware of Hegel, but he is not mentioned by the authors in Autopoiesis and Cognition, despite the fact that Hegel’s movement from life to cognition in the final section of Science of Logic resembles their core argument in key respects. 

To some degree, I think the similarity is attributable to the general structure of the dialectic, which has been independently discovered and characterized several times in the history of science and philosophy. To a certain extent, the dialectic characterizes a set of related concepts that imply one another, when considered deliberately and systematically. 

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Of all of Hegel’s bad tendencies–and he possessed a large number of them–his architectonic impulse is probably the worst, and the most destructive to his thought. 

First and foremost, we should doubt that our own understanding is adequate to the task of giving a systematic account of all that we know. This is the meaning of Nietzsche’s word: “The will to a system lacks integrity.” 

The bulk of what readers find incomprehensible in Hegel is his attempt to demonstrate the necessity and completeness of his system, and to move through dialectical maneuvers from being to becoming, from quality to quantity, and so on up the chain to the absolute idea. The prose in which he describes this logical maneuvering comprises a unique kind of jargon-saturated calculus that is replete with massive ambiguities, but which he presents as though it forms the very heart of his system’s scientific character. It looks like this: 

This yields the following more precise definition of the Idea. First, it is the simple truth, the identity of the concept and objectivity as a universal in which the opposition and substance of the particular is dissolved into its self-identical negativity and is equality with itself. Secondly, it is the relation of the explicitly subjectivity of the simple concept and its objectivity which is distinguished therefrom; the former is essentially the drive to sublate this separation, and the latter is the indifferent positedness, the subsistence that is in and for itself null. 

Discourse of this kind is not just “difficult,” it is not merely technical language of a kind that must be mastered in any high-level discussion, such as we might find in the work of Heidegger or Derrida, for Wittgenstein or Frege. Rather, it poses deep philosophical problems in itself in ways that should be evident to the critical reader of the Logic. One can follow along with many of these discussions, as far as it goes, but when Hegel writes in this manner for pages on end, as he frequently does, it becomes impossible to decode what the intended referents of his statements are, and the whole rational character of his argument breaks down. The proof of this is the well-established fact that no two expert interpreters of Hegel are likely to fully agree on the meaning of a single page of his works.

Hegel follows his abstractions into analyses of the abstractions themselves, spawning second- or even third-order discussions, and the result of all this is that it produces artifacts that have no meaningful conceptual referent in themselves, but are merely artifacts of his calculus. Especially in the second major division of the Logic, treating the Doctrine of Essence, many of his core concepts cannot be understood other than as essentially reified dynamics of elements of his system. They lack what we would call construct validity in the sciences, referring to no observable or describable phenomenon, and only understandable in their own terms. 

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The synthesis is creation, consciousness, and life. It is the mechanism of sublimation. The root of the dialectic is in the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, which, Hegel tells us, allows us to cognize contradictory terms in a single concept. 

“Something is alive only insofar as it contains contradictions within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradictions within it.” This is essentially what Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela describe as autopoiesis. Elements interact such that the sum total takes on its own autonomy, takes on qualities that are not reducible to the sum of the parts, which have become moments that are preserved within the new whole. 

Hegel describes  the transition from a mere assemblage of parts construed mechanistically to an actual individual with its own determination in the following terms: 

The empty manifoldness of the object is now gathered first into objective singularity, into the simple self-determining middle point. Secondly, in so far as the object retains as an immediate totality its indifference to determinateness, the latter too is present in it as unessential or as an outside-one-another of many objects. As against this immediate totality, the prior or the essential determinateness constitutes the real middle term between the many interacting objects; it unites them in and for themselves and is their objective universality. (from di Giovanni’s translation, 641)

For Hegel, concepts are an instance of what Carl Jung calls “uniting signs.” This is why numinous characteristics leak out of the unconscious in his discussion of concepts, as in his following characterization of universals: 

The universal is therefore free power; it is itself and grasps its other within its embrace, but without doing violence to it; on the contrary, the universal is, in its other, in peaceful communion with itself. It is called free power, but it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness [freie Liebe und schrankenlose Seligkeit], for it bears itself towards its other as towards its own self; in it, it has returned to itself. (603)

Also: 

Life, ego, spirit, absolute concept, are not merely universals in the sense of higher genera, but are concretes whose determinatenesses, too, are not species or lower genera, but genera which, in their reality, are absolutely self-contained and self-fulfilled. (605)

At the same time he stresses the creative power of the concept. Following Kant’s theory of the unity of the apperception, Hegel argues that the unity or totality imbued by the concept is itself the unity of the subject, which takes the form of each concept in the act of cognition. Each act of unification or sublation is therefore an act of self-unity. 

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Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka philosophy should be carefully considered as an attractive alternative to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Nagarjuna established the dialectic through providing a catalog of reasonings illustrating the contradictions that adhere to a variety of common categories, and his follower Chandrakirti abstracted from this collection to produce two general patterns of analysis capable of demonstrating dialectical contradictions in any given object. In the first analysis, Chadrakirti demonstrates that a thing cannot be viewed as either the same as or different from its parts; in the second, he demonstrates that a thing cannot be considered either the same as or different from its causes and conditions.  

Their approach bears close similarity to the skeptical and Eleatic analyses that Hegel admired, and there are probably historical connections at work here. Pyrrho, the founder of classical skeptical philosophy, was said to have been a great admirer of the yogic philosophers of India.

In comparison with Phenomenology of Spirit, this approach loses the deep historical consciousness that is so important to understanding the unfolding of spirit in time. But this loss of historical analysis is hardly felt in Science of Logic, which generally analyzes the logical structure of categories synchronically, and is not much concerned with philosophical tenets in history. 

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The critical reader may discern that despite its self-presentation, the Science of Logic does not persuasively establish a system. The content is far too heterogeneous in nature to be seriously viewed as a consistent set of deductions. This becomes increasingly clear in the later chapters, However the book may appear in the table of contents, the “philosophical encyclopedia” frame he would later use is more appropriate here, and the reader will create needless and substantial interpretive difficulties for themselves if they try to understand this work as some kind of unified whole or totalizing statement. 

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A note on A. V. Miller’s translation: 

Miller’s translation is very useful in parsing the often-difficult German syntax into something resembling readable English, but it has severe downsides. This edition lacks a glossary and includes very few parenthetical comments or footnotes to indicate German originals, which is a shame, because his translation equivalents are often misleading. His use of “Notion” for Begriff is well-known, but more disturbing is his inconsistent handling of technical terms. For the first half of the book he renders Dasein as “determinate being,” and then explicably shifts to using “existence” in the second half, no longer distinguishing it from Existenz, and without so much as a footnote. In Hegel’s final discussion of dialectic (832 ff.), Miller renders “Gegenstand” as “subject matter” instead of “object,” which is quite wrong in ways that have important philosophical ramifications. It is objects that are determined by concepts and which cannot exist without them, not merely the content of our discussion or analysis. 

Miller uses “superior” for höher when Hegel clearly meant “higher” in the sense of “more abstract.” His translation of Trieb as “urge” instead of “drive” is a bit odd, but not so odd as his rendering of erfüllt as “pregnant” instead of “fulfilled” or “completed”. Etymological relationships between technical terms (which abound in this book) frequently pass unnoted. 

For what it’s worth, my cursory review of the new Cambridge Di Giovanni translation suggests that it is not much better, though it does at least include more of the standard scholarly apparatus. This came as a surprise to me, as the Pinker translation of Phenomenology of Spirit in the same series marks a major improvement over Miller’s edition in accuracy and clarity. Whichever translation you use, if you understand even a little German, it is worth taking care and verifying important passages or terms. My copy is filled with crossed-out words and margin notes. 

In the quotations I provide in this review, I change all references to Begriffe to “concepts” and similarly make various corrections when they seem important.