The first question that presents itself to us is, what type of book is it exactly that we are reading? After all, Hegel's Logic is neither a textbook of logic, nor metaphysics in the traditional sense.
It seems that we cannot answer this question satisfactorily merely from our preliminary readings of the text. Hegel himself tells us that "knowledge of [Logic] only emerge[s] as the final result and completion of it's whole treatment." (pp.23) We can merely recite a few preliminaries.
The subject matter is thinking. Or more specifically, we are told that we are to examine "conceptual thinking." From a survey of the table of contents we gather that what this means precisely will only be made fully clear to us in the third part, when we will be given the doctrine of the concept. So again, we are instructed to be patient - the full nature of the process itself can only be appreciated once we have already completed it.
The introduction first presents us with a picture of knowledge. In this picture, the truth is something outside thinking, an object for the consideration of a subject. The truth of thought consists in it's adhering to the nature of the object, but since thought is presupposed to be something entirely alien to it's object, it cannot actually represent the latter truly. What it produces in fact belongs solely to it's nature, and so the object remains as an unknowable thing-in-itself.
This picture should be familiar to us, it is the philosophy of Kant, the results of which were given to Hegel's generation to content with.
In contrast to this, we are told that traditional metaphysics had a higher point of view, inasmuch as it began from the standpoint of the unity of thinking and the thing to be thought.
But then onto the scene comes the Understanding.
Understanding it seems is a crucial dramatis personae in the dialectical drama. It abstracts, separates, and remains fixed in these separations. "The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed." (pp.10)
But as it determines, it finds that it's determinations come into contradiction with each other. At this point, the critical philosophy of Kant and his followers retreats. Reality cannot possibly contradict itself. So, goes the sad tale, they gave up in despair. Since our attempts to grasp the thing-in-itself are contradictory, they cannot possibly succeed. We must retreat from metaphysics.
But where Kant left off, our great dramatic hero - dialectical reason - begins.
Dialectical reason is negative, it recognises contradiction and negates it. It is the negation of the self-negation of the fixed determinations which arise in the course of the activity of thinking. As such a negation of the negation, it is at the same time positive. Unlike skepticism it does not retreat in despair, but moves ever onward in it's progress towards the absolute.
Absolute knowledge is the standpoint from which the opposition between consciousness and it's object is completely resolved. It is the standpoint reached by us in the course of Hegel's prior work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. At this point, however, it is not our part to discuss this work.
Kant's philosophy, it seems, was one of despair. It left us with an unbridgeable separation between subject and object, between consciousness and the thing-in-itself. And it left us with contradictions that, while banished from the realm of reality, were left for the subject.
Hegel's philosophy rises above the separations and contradictions, it begins from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, and proceeds through dialectical reason. Proceeds to what though? To truth. A truth which is "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit."
And here the modern mind is bound to despair. Hegel's philosophy stands revealed as theology. What then, is it's interest to us?
From the subjective side, the profound influence that Hegel had on the history of thought cannot but provoke us, if we wish to gain insight, to study his work.
But I think there is something deeper.
Hegel conceived his Logic as the science of thinking. But this thinking is not something static, it is a form of activity, it produces thoughts. This is why it is possible for the discipline of philosophy, for example, to have a history. Although it would appear at first sight that the history of philosophy contradicts it's concept, since it is concerned with truth, and truth is something which it seems should not have a history, but be valid in any time and place, it is actually entirely in it's nature that it should be so.
Onto the scene jumps Marx. 'Activity' is not just the production of ideas, he tells us, it encompasses a much greater variety of things. In the first place, of course, the production of material life, and also of human social relationships (since production is always social production). Only after humanity has secured for itself a basic level of development of it's productive forces can it afford for one part of it to concern itself solely with mental labour - the production of ideas, and in fact this production is always bound up with material production (vulgar economics is in many ways merely a compendium of the ideas produced by the capitalist in the normal progress of his life).
In fact production, human activity as such, is not something which occurs in the misty realms of the absolute idea. It is a process of metabolism, through which human beings regulate their relationship to nature. It always has a natural and material basis. This is the meaning of materialism.
It is not the materialism of Helvetius or Holbach, in which human beings appear as passively determined by their environment. It is a materialism which has taken on board the active side, which, as Marx notes in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, was developed by idealism, however abstractly.
The assurances of analytical philosophy, that Hegel's contradictions are meaningless, his system a form of mysticism, cannot reassure us communists, who have grasped the reality of separation and opposition as it exists in contemporary life. If Hegel's philosophy is mystical, it is only because we live in a world in which everything is mystified, where the relationships between human beings take on the prosaically real appearance of relationships between things.
In such a world, the separation of subject and object appears as the separation between human beings, whose life essence is their activity, and the means of realising their activity. The subjects have become objectified, and the objects personified. Human physical existence has become a commodity, and the objects which humanity uses to produce it's material life have become personified in the figure of the capitalist.
If Hegel tries to rise above this world of separation and contradiction through pure contemplation, we cannot bemoan him the effort. He saw the problem, however obscurely refracted through the lens of speculative philosophy. This is the basis on which we retain interest in Hegel today, and the basis on which we commit ourselves to a study of the great drama of dialectical reason.
We know the what, and for ourselves also the why. All that remains is the work itself. This Hegel tells us is divided into two essential parts, the 'objective' and the 'subjective' logic. The former is divided into the doctrines of being and essence, and corresponds to some extent to what was formerly understood as ontology. The latter is the doctrine of the concept. All of this, we are told, will only be fully understood at the end of the journey. Let us begin.
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