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Overview
Rosen’s overarching question is how, if at all, rationalism can overcome the split between monism and dualism. Monism—which claims a singular essence for all things—ultimately leads to nihilism, while dualism, which claims multiple, irreducible essences, leads to what Rosen calls “the endless chatter of the history of philosophy.” The Science of Logic, he argues, is the fundamental text to offer a new conception of rationalism that might overcome this philosophical split. Leading readers through Hegel’s book from beginning to end, Rosen’s argument culminates in a masterful chapter on the Idea in Hegel. By fully appreciating the Science of Logic and situating it properly within Hegel’s oeuvre, Rosen in turn provides new tools for wrangling with the conceptual puzzles that have brought so many other philosophers to disaster.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226065915 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 518 |
| File size: | 961 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Idea of Hegel's Science of Logic
By STANLEY ROSEN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06588-5
CHAPTER 1
The Historical Context
In this chapter, I shall be primarily concerned with the manner in which Hegel's understanding of the history of European philosophy contributes to the formation of his central problematic. My presentation of these problems is designed to cast light on Hegel's appropriation of the tradition and not to write a potted history of Western philosophy. Only those topics that are essential for an understanding of the SL will be included. I have postponed the consideration of excessively difficult material, such as Fichte's Doctrine of Science, for a more appropriate stage in our investigation. The interested reader will find additional historical material, in particular with respect to Plato and Aristotle, in my earlier book on Hegel. It should also be admitted at the outset that Hegel's treatment of the history of philosophy is sometimes excessively general and that he often overinterprets points of interest to his own agenda.
I have not hesitated to introduce my own interpretations of familiar doctrines or problems when this seemed the best way to bring the serious student into the heart of the matter. The main intention of these pages is to think about or with Hegel, unrestricted by his own terms. Still more precisely, it is to arrive at a plausible representation of the spirit or inner dynamic of the Hegelian solution to the problem of traditional rationalism. I would almost go so far as to suggest that Hegel is appropriated in these pages, not merely interpreted. We shall attempt to learn from Hegel without becoming his disciples. This places upon us the burden of deciding which parts of the SL require extensive expansion and which may safely be put to one side.
Before I turn to the main order of business, I want to mention that Hegel's interpretation of his philosophical predecessors, and the use he makes of some of their doctrines, is not separate from the main doctrine of the SL, in particular from the relation between temporality and eternity. To put this in an introductory formulation, human existence is for Hegel historical in the sense that it develops in a chronological order that somehow approximates to the dynamical development of the world at the dialectico-speculative level. In other words, the historical order in which the major stages of philosophy unfold toward its completion in Hegel's system is the same as the order of development in the logical derivation of the conceptual determinations of the idea of the whole. History mirrors logic. Or at least it mirrors a scientific presentation of logic.
This peculiar doctrine deserves a restatement. History, and in particular the history of philosophy, is the story of the process by which human beings discover more and more about the structure of intelligibility, until at last the stage is set for Hegel, who arrives at the critical moment at which the whole has in principle been revealed and awaits only Hegel's explanatory description of it. In other words, the truth about the whole exhibits progressively more complex stages of its development within the thought of the most perspicuous thinker of each epoch, culminating with Hegel. This is surely one of the most obscure facets of Hegel's teaching; it is connected to his appropriation of Christian eschatology, in which the pivotal moment is the entrance of Jesus Christ into human history, but with this radical difference. Christ's parousia, or the entrance of eternity into temporality, sets the stage for a series of events that culminate in the "second coming" in the persona of Hegel, whose teaching is thus judgment day for all preceding doctrines and the establishment of heaven upon earth. Strictly speaking, Hegel does not create a new doctrine but reports on the cumulative historical process by which the truth is realized. The chronological order of the history of philosophy thus mirrors, not just the human description of the revelation of truth, but the inner dynamic of that revelation itself.
It is not easy to explain the Hegelian doctrine of the coincidence of history and logic. Things become clearer when we recognize our own post-Hegelian age as the dissolution of the European Enlightenment, that is, the failure of Hegelianism. We can see Hegel as offering a choice between two versions of the future. The first version leads to scientific socialism and the second to Georg Lukács. But this by the way.
I note here only that this coincidence of history and logic is the foundation of Hegel's attempt to overcome modern nihilism. Another related question is what to make of expressions like the "life-pulse" of the concept or reiterated "spirit," human or absolute. Hegel applies the former to the dialectical process itself, and not just to the thinking of that process. "Spirit," on the other hand, does not refer to a psychological or self-conscious being, but, as Stephen Bungay puts it, "it is rather a concept in terms of which anthropological and psychological phenomena can be understood."
The "demystification" of Hegel's logic is sometimes convincing and sometimes not. One finds with some frequency in the secondary literature the view that Hegel accommodated his doctrines to Christianity in order to avoid trouble with religious and political authorities. One problem with this approach is that it attributes to Hegel a practice that he rejects. For whatever it is worth, Hegel denies in his lectures on the history of Greek philosophy that philosophers can conceal their ideas in their pockets. He does hold that philosophy in its own nature is esoteric, but by this he means that it is difficult, not that it can be concealed. The aforementioned difficulty does not arise explicitly in the SL; it belongs more properly to the PS as well as to the Encyclopedia and Hegel's various university lecture courses. Let us also remember that in the SL, the movement of thinking is a response to the movement or "life-pulse" of the determinations of thinking. If that were not so, dialectic would itself disappear, and (in the Kantian sense of these terms) reason would be reduced to understanding.
Plato and Aristotle
It is by now a platitude to all those trained in academic philosophy that the Socratic school, and in the first instance Plato, initiates the tradition of Western philosophy by a synthesis of the main teaching of Parmenides and Heraclitus. To the extent that this is true, we may regard that tradition as a debate between the partisans of the one and the many for dominance in the attempt to discover, and later to construct, a comprehensive understanding of the world. Hegel as it were resolves the debate by transforming it into his new version of dialectic. Simply stated, the palm is awarded neither to the one nor to the many, but to their agreement to disagree. This can be illustrated by the problem of "nothing" or what Parmenides apparently calls "the altogether not." He warns us never to think or mention it in any way but illustrates the inadequacy of this admonition by its very formulation. Historians normally follow the Eleatic Stranger, the hero of Plato's Sophist, from which we derive our knowledge of the Parmenidean admonition, in speaking of a "parricide" by Plato, the actual student of father Parmenides. By this is meant the ostensible fact that Plato rejects the admonition and proceeds to offer us an analysis of the meaning of negation. But there is no parricide here; instead, Plato begins the long tradition of rationalist adherence to Parmenides by avoiding the altogether not in favor of one form or another of a rule or concept for syntactic negation. It is as if Parmenides were to have said that "the altogether not" has no semantic weight whatsoever, thereby persuading his successors to provide it with a syntactic function.
In fact, there is no radical distinction between semantics and syntactics, since rules of syntax themselves have meanings or express concepts. Plato interprets "not" to mean "other" or, more abstractly, "otherness." To say that the cow is not brown is then in fact to mean that the cow has some other color than brown. I cannot go into the details of this patently unsatisfactory analysis. I will mention only the case of negative existentials, such as "Socrates does not exist," which certainly cannot mean that Socrates is actually some other person. It is not necessary to give the history of the doctrine of predication, first systematically developed by Aristotle, for our present extremely restricted purpose. Suffice it to say that in a negative statement, we deny that a certain property "belongs to" a certain substance. I put "belongs to" in quotation marks because it is an unanalyzed or primitive concept in modern set theory as well as in Aristotle's doctrine of predication. A negative statement is thus not at all an attempt to say something about a self-contradictory entity called "nothing" (self-contradictory because it is a referent of a statement that denies that it possesses a referent). Instead, it records the absence or privation of something in particular within something else in particular. Stated somewhat awkwardly, to refer to the absence of something is not to refer to absence. In deference to Parmenides, we refer to the concept of absence, which has particular but never universal application. Something in particular can be absent from some other particular, but it makes no sense to try to utter true statements about total absence, because that would require a listing of its properties, of which it has none.
On the other hand, we can and do talk about the concept of total absence. In making use of this concept, we do not define the (nonexistent) properties of a (nonexistent) entity called "nothing." Instead, we explain how to use the expression "total absence" or "nothing" in rational discourse. In my opinion, which I have expressed elsewhere at considerable length, this is not a satisfactory solution to the paradox of Parmenides. But our concern here is with Hegel, and he resolves the paradox by applying the previously mentioned principle that we cannot think of anything that is outside our thought. "Nothing" is for Hegel the most universal form of the concept of the absence of all categorial determinations. But these determinations are absent in the unity of thinking and being that is the inescapable horizon or theater within which we think of anything whatsoever. There is, so to speak, nothing outside this horizon, because the moment we posit that there is, we have in fact situated it within our thinking. This is the background to the otherwise unintelligible statement that being and nothing are the same.
Pure being cannot possess any determinations whatsoever, for then it would no longer be pure. That is, it would be some other category, such as becoming or existence. As nothing in particular, being just is, or is inseparable (but not, as we shall see later, indistinguishable) from nothing. Being and nothing are thus the first stage in the process by which we identify the universal horizon of the world or, more precisely, what Hegel calls "the whole." Hegel calls the universal horizon "the concept," which we can gloss as follows. Thinking begins with the mind's act of grasping within itself whatever it thinks about. "Grasp" is the literal sense of the German word for "concept": Begriff. It should already be obvious that Hegel is going to have to explain the relation between the world of existing things (what the Greeks called onta) and the process of thought. To anticipate, he will not say that the world of things is identical with the thought processes of each existing thinker, since this would amount to filling up our thought with existing stones, trees, and so on. But he will say that the laws of thought are the same as the laws of existing things. There is thus a structural, or (in the dialectical sense of the term) logical, connection between thinking in general and being in general.
Despite all signs to the contrary, Hegel is thus firmly within the rationalist tradition in obeying Parmenides's command not to think of or mention the altogether not. Hegel is entirely concerned with the category "nothing," which is itself a primitive structural component, along with being, of the concept, that is, of the universal horizon for thinking altogether. Hegel's understanding of the structure of negativity is, however, more complicated than the usual rationalist view. For the time being, let me say that what is normally called "logical negation" is in Hegel's terminology "determinate negation." That is, the positing of a particular as not some property p (i.e., the negation of p) highlights the particular as some other particular q. We can see here quite plainly the concept of what Plato called "otherness." For Platonists, each "other" is logically or ontologically distinct from all the rest, and this is also true at the logical or ontological level of the universal forms (Plato's "greatest genera") or categories that underlie all discourse. For Hegel, the determinate negation is the first step in a dialectical process through which the formal properties or categories implicit in anything whatsoever are gradually made explicit and shown to be interconnected. Stated as simply as possible, negation introduces a connection between two terms as well as a separation. To think p is also to think non-p.
The transformation of the altogether not into the concept of negation can be understood dialectically as the resolution of the debate between the one and the many in such a way as to give a proper role to each in the construction of intelligible discursive thinking. The many are in fact many ones or units, and this makes it possible for the many to retain their independent natures when they combine into identifiable unit-multiples (or units with inner articulation). For example, "red" and "ball" combine into "red ball," a unity that does not destroy its component units. Conversely, each one may combine or not combine with any of the others, which makes it possible for us to speak about any given unit in terms of its "properties" or the other units with which it combines (and similarly for those properties with which it does not combine). Thus the world is neither simply one nor simply many but a unification of the two that gives equal weight to each. The world is a unity of unit-multiples. Hegel calls this an identity of identity and nonidentity (or difference). I shall frequently refer to this expression as "the identity of identity and difference" in order to preserve its positive resonance. That is, the identity of the world (= the whole) is not in addition to, but is essentially defined by, the nonidentity or difference between one unit and another.
This apparently peculiar expression can also be understood as the dialectical version of Aristotle's use of qua or "with respect to." The various respects in which we can speak of something are its collective differences, and the substance or entity of which we are speaking in each case is the identity that stands under or unifies the differences without dissolving them. For example, the substantial unity "ball" unites without dissolving the units "red" and "round" to form the unit multiple "red round ball." To be anything at all is to be both identity and difference (a red ball rather than a blue one), and these jointly constitute the complete nature of the entity, which is brought out by referring to the identity of identity and nonidentity. It is not enough to say that the entity is both identity and difference, because these two expressions are opposites. They need to be reconciled or united at a higher level to which each contributes by the retention of its own nature. A word of warning: the one that unites with no other units, and thereby exhibits no differences at all, is nothing, or rather the sameness of being and nothing. Conversely, the many, in which each element is entirely detached from the others, is neither being nor nothing but the concept of quantity.
Earlier in the chapter I mentioned that Plato attempts to overcome the problem of the one and the many by a noetic alphabet of pure formal letters or elements, each of which is a determinate form as well as a unity. In his simile, we can distinguish, say, change from rest just as we distinguish the letter alpha from the letter beta. In both cases, the element or letter presents a unified form that is distinct from every other form. This unity remains undisturbed and indeed untouched in its identity by attempts to analyze it, all of which attempts are predicated upon its antecedent existence as just what it is. The complex structures of formal discourse are built up of atomic elements, just as words (or, as we can say, the names of concepts) are built up out of letters. We cannot give an analytical account of the formal element by reducing it to some simpler constituents; these elements are themselves the simplest constituents of the intelligible. So too the letters of the alphabet are simples with respect to the "spelling" or structure of the word. This thesis is obviously the ancestor of the early-twentieth-century doctrine of logical atomism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Idea of Hegel's Science of Logic by STANLEY ROSEN. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE / The Historical Context
TWO / The Prefaces
THREE / The Introduction
FOUR / The Beginning of Logical Science
FIVE / From Being to Existence
SIX / Transitional Remarks
SEVEN / Quantity
EIGHT / Quantitative Relation
NINE / Transition to Book Two
TEN / The Fichtean Background
ELEVEN / The Nature of Essence
TWELVE / Contradiction
THIRTEEN / Absolute Ground
FOURTEEN / Foundationalism and Antifoundationalism
FIFTEEN / Appearance
SIXTEEN / Actuality
SEVENTEEN / Introduction to Book Three
EIGHTEEN / Subjectivity
NINETEEN / Judgment
TWENTY / Objectivity
TWENTY-ONE / The Idea
Notes
Index