Table Of Content

Studies in Continental Thought John SaJJis, EDITOR CONSULTING EDITORS Robert Bernasconi William L. McBride Rudolf Bernet J. N. Mohanty John D. Caputo Mary Rawlinson David Carr Tom Rockmore Edward S. Casey Calvin 0. Schrag Hubert L. Dreyfus tReiner Schurmann Don Ihde Charles E. Scott David Farrell Krell Thomas Sheehan Lenore Langsdorf Robert Sokolowski Alphonso Lingis Bruce W. Wilshire David Wood Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Lectures on Logic Berlin, 1831 Transcribed by Karl Hegel Translated by Clark Butler Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis Publication of this book is made possible in part with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research, education, and public programming in the humanities. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders bye-mail [email protected] Published in German as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Vorlesungen iiber die Logik (1831). Transcript by Karl Hegel. Edited by Udo Rameil with Hans-Christian Lucas. Q 2001 by Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg. English edition C 2008 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical. including photocopying and recording, or by any infor mation storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub lisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. [Vorlesungen iiber die Logik. English] Lectures on logic: Berlin, 1831 I Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; transcribed by Karl Hegel; translated by Clark Butler. p. cm. - (Studies in Continental thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35167-8 (cloth: alk. paper) !. Logic I. Butler, Clark, date 11. Title. B2944.V652E5 2008 160-dc22 2007048893 I 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08 Contents Translator's Introduction vii Introduction to the Lectures on Logic Preliminary General Concept of Our Subject Matter A. The First Position [of Thought] toward Objectivity 19 B. The Second Position of Thought toward Objectivity 26 B.l. Empiricism 26 B.Il. The Critical Philosophy 30 [B.II.]a. The theoretical faculty 32 [B.II.b.] Practical reason 53 [B.Il.c. The reflective power of judgment] 55 C. The Third Position [of Thought] toward Objectivity 59 [More Exact Concept and] Division of the [Science of] Logic 72 [I. Being] 75 Il. [Essence] 80 Ill. The Self-Concept 81 BEING I. Being 85 I.A. Quality 86 l.A.a. Being 86 l.A.b. Determinate Being [Dasein] 95 l.A.c. Being for Itself 114 l.B. Quantity 117 l.C. Measure 124 EssENCE II. Essence 129 II.A. Essence as the Ground of Existence 132 Il.A.a. The Show of the Essence of Being 132 II.A.a.a. Identity 132 II.A.a.f3. Difference 134 II.A.a.y. Ground 140 II.A.b. Existence 143 II.A.c. The Thing 143 Il.B. Appearance 147 [II.B.a.] The World of Appearance 148 [II.B.b. Form and Content] 148 [ll.B .c: Correlation] 149 [I.) The whole and its parts 149 [2. Force and its expression) 150 [3. The inner and the outer) 153 V Contents vi 1I.C. Actuality 155 [Moments of Actuality as an Efficacious Process: Contingency and Mere Possibility versus the Real Possibility, Pre-Conditions, and Necessity of a Matter at Hand] 157 [1I.C.a. The Matter at Hand] 159 [II.C.b. The Moments of Necessity] 161 [1.] Conditions 162 [2.] The matter at hand 162 3. The activity [of a matter at hand actualizing itself] 162 [II.C.c. The Forms of Necessity] 164 [I. The correlation of substantiality] 165 [2. The correlation of causality] 167 [3. The correlation of reciprocal interaction] 169 THE SELF-CONCEPT Ill. The Self-Concept 177 Subdivisions [of the Logic of the Self-Concept] 178 III.A. The Subjective Self-Concept 179 III.A.l. The Self-Concept as Such 179 III.A.2. Judgment 182 [III.A.2.a. Qualitative judgment] 186 III.A.2.f3. Reflective judgment 187 III.A.2.y. Necessary judgment 188 III.A.2.b. Conceptual judgment 190 III.A.3. The Syllogisms 191 III.A.3.a. The qualitative syllogism 193 III.A.3.f3. The reflective syllogism 198 III.A.3.y. The necessary syllogism 199 III.B. The Object 200 III.B.a. Mechanism 201 III.B.b. Chemism 205 III.B.c. Teleology 207 III.C. The Idea 212 III.C.a. Life 214 [III.C.a.l. The soul] 214 [III.C.a.2. The bodily organism] 215 [III.C.a.3. The species] 217 III.C.b. Recognizance [Erkennen] 218 III.C.b.l. Recognizance as such 220 [The analytical method] 220 [The synthetic method] 221 [Definition] 223 [Classification] 223 [Proof] 224 III.C.b.2. The will 225 III.C.c. The Absolute Idea 227 Translator's Introduction This introductory discussion concerns the context and state of the text along with a small number of general rules adopted in its translation. The first three sections, which address the text and its context in rela tion to Hegel's other works and to the history of philosophy, are in tended even for beginning students of the logic.1 The last three sec tions address more especially Hegel scholars, since they seek to justify my decisions regarding certain translation issues on which such schol ars have not always agreed. Throughout all six sections a recurrent theme will be the complex relationship between Hegel and his near contemporary Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819). 1. The Text This book has its source in lectures by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). His name appears as the author on the title page of the German edition. But, like many posthumous works, this is not a book expressly intended by the author. He delivered lectures, but did not in tend their publication as a book. But the lectures did constitute a poten tial book by Hegel, which his son Karl Hegel (1813-1901) penned as a manuscript, and which has become actual due to the German editors chiefly Udo Rameil, with the collaboration of Hans-Christian Lucas and the support of the Hegel Archiv in Germany. 2 The first thing beginning readers must keep in mind is that Hegel's works on the science of logic are not in any sense treatises on formal logic. This is true despite the fact that Hegel first turned to write his Sci ence ofL ogic3 after the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit, 4 upon re ceiving a request from the Royal Bavarian Ministry of Education to write a formal logic text for use in the kingdom's secondary schools.' To be sure, his science of logic treats the concepts of judgments, syllogisms, definition, and proof in its third and last part on the self-concept, but vii Lectures on Logic viii this does not make the Science or Lectures a logic textbook. The Lectures are far more a treatise in rational theology in which the author aban dons himself to the life and internal self-development of the divine logos at work since the true Parmenidean onset of the history of philosophy. 6 And this is so even though Hegel understood that the science of logic could be used non-theologically as a study of the universal and neces sary thought determinations or categories of thinking.7 At first glance the Lectures on Logic seem to be Hegel's commen tary on the first book of the third edition of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.8 They thus suggest self-interpretation, self-.expli cation, but this impression is not the whole truth. The Lectures should not be taken merely as a kind of commentary since they are a self contained exposition that can be understood even without reading the Encyclopaedia. Nonetheless, they contain periodic explicit refer ences to selected paragraphs of that work. Often the German manuscript of the Lectures begins a paragraph with a number in parentheses from the 1830 Encyclopaedia (e.g., §19), but many of the German paragraphs do not begin this way. If the Ger man edition of the lectures omits a paragraph number at the begin ning of a new paragraph, the present edition sometimes identifies a slightly later Encyclopaedia paragraph-in which Hegel typically intro duces a new technical term or transition-in brackets within the para graph of the lectures in which the term or transition is introduced, not at the start of the paragraph. 2. Interpolation in the Text A further general comment on the translation has to do with interpola tions in this text which was never intended for publication, and which indeed was first published only very recently. The editors of the first col lected works of Hegel did not draw on Karl Hegel's transcript of these lectures in constituting the published additions (Zusiitze) in the Encyclo paedia's logic.9 Thus not even brief excerpts of it appeared in print in the nineteenth century. The manuscript was in private hands until a few decades ago when its owners transferred it to the Hegel Archiv for ex pert review.10 The German editors took nearly two decades to decipher the script and edit the text, which was published late in 2001. The man uscript contained a fairly large number of brief omissions which could only be filled in by interpolation, though Udo Rameil notes that most of his interpolations were quite obvious and resolved no ambiguity controversially. The present translation contains interpolations beyond those in the Rameil edition. Rameil puts his interpolations in brackets, and they Translator's Introduction ix may be consulted in the German edition. Bracketed interpolations in this edition are my own. Interpolations in the text were needed to pro duce a text that could serve as more than Karl Hegel's personal manu script, and Rameil largely provided these basic interpolations. Further interpolations, which I have sought to provide, were needed to produce a readable text for those who are not Hegel scholars. I have sought to limit these interpolations to those that are necessitated by the text and needed for a smooth reading. I have sought to exclude from my interpo lations and footnotes any interpretive comment that would seek to re solve in a controversial manner any real ambiguity left in Karl Hegel's transcript. In producing a book such as this, editors and translators face a choice between letting the ambiguity and incompleteness of Karl's words stand, or filling in what is missing through their contextual awareness of the Hegelian opus as a whole. Hegel scholars typically prefer the first solution, which allows them to complete the text with their own con textual knowledge. But beginners who hope to use this volume as an initiation to Hegel's logic will tend to prefer the second solution. By bracketing interpolations beyond those of the German edition, this translation seeks to address both audiences. Hegel scholars remain free to judge these additions. However, in some cases I have added words without placing them in brackets as explicit interpolations. For instance, I have rendered the text gender-inclusive in this way. I have also done so when a few extra words help the reader keep in mind what Hegel has referred to and is still re ferring to in the text. Thus, when Hegel introduces "essence" in the logic of essence, he makes it clear that he means "the abstract inner essence of immediate being." Afterward, Karl Hegel's abbreviated transcript may simply mention "the essence," but I have sometimes reminded the reader of Hegel's meaning by making it repeatedly explicit that he is still talking about the abstract essence of being. Footnotes to this translation occasionally cite classical texts in the history of philosophy to which Hegel refers, or provide possible alter native wordings of the translation. Suggestions as to how to resolve possible basic philosophical ambiguities of the text in different ways as implied, for example, by the fact that some reputable Hegel scholars read the science of logic as theistic while others do not-may be re served for commentary elsewhere. One hope behind this translation has been that for some it may, for the first time, make the science of logic not only readable but teachable, whereas it has often proven inscrutable even to many professional phi losophers. Since the science of logic for Hegel is an ideal reconstruction of the real history of philosophy, its understandability for philosophers who are not specialized Hegel scholars will be assisted by recalling clas- Lectures on Logic X sical philosophers and their particular ways of identifying reality that come to be reconstructed on the level of pure thought in Hegel's logic: e.g., Parmenides, Heraclitus,11 Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Anselm, Des cartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Ja cobi. Some idea of these different historical philosophers, if held in mind, makes the development of pure imageless thought in the logic easier to follow. Students who have not yet studied the whole prior his tory of philosophy will need to form a general representation of each of these historical philosophical positions in order to enjoy a similarly fa cilitated comprehension of Hegel's science of logic. These lectures, with the help of rudimentary knowledge of key clas sical philosophers, are the most readable introduction Hegel himself provides to his logic. But they do not replace his Science of Logic, which has some sections (e.g., on reflection) that do not even appear in the Lectures. 12 The Encyclopaedia outline of the logic may be viewed as a guide to the subsequent lectures and, as we have noted, the lectures were keyed to that outline. The Karl Hegel transcript does not key them to the Science of Logic, and this translation does not attempt to do so either. The Encyclopaedia previews in outline the lectures, which then illuminate the Encyclopaedia. As often happens when a thinker is present with his listeners, Hegel expresses himself more clearly in his lectures than in either the Science of Logic or the Encyclopaedia. The Science of Logic was largely written at night during the first years of Hegel's marriage, as he was a gymnasium rector during the day, with a view to earning an eventual university professorship. The Hegelian authenticity of the lectures does not seem to have been disturbed by Karl Hegel's transmission. This is due to the intelli gence of the young man, and to his desire to assimilate his father's logic accurately. His transcript was surely not verbatim. Karl could only recreate what he had heard and taken down in notes according to the spirit, not always the exact letter. But of two known transcripts of the 1831 logic lectures, Karl's is recognized as far superior in qual ity.13 Still, it would be false to claim that his transcript records only Hegel's words or all his words. The claim that this is a new, previously unpublished book by Hegel is implied by the appearance of his name on the title page of the German edition-a convention we have main tained in the present edition. Yet ambiguity remains. Scholarly cor rectness obliged the German editors to add a disclaimer that quite technically the volume, as a reconstruction of the lectures after the fact, is "the product of another author, namely, the transcriber."14 Karl Hegel was not a tape recorder. The Science of Logic will always have greater authority. But these lectures may very likely be read as the best available preparation for and help in reading the larger Logic.