The Beginning and the Programme of Hegel’s Logic

Abstract

The aim of the article is to show that Hegel’s Science of Logic is a purely logical non-standard metaphysics, which even today belongs more to the future of philosophy than to its past. The essay has three parts. The first part explains the programme of the Logic, which is to design a strictly presuppositionless theory, and shows how such a theory must look in its first steps. This makes it possible to interpret and explain the text of Hegel’s first chapter (“Being”) and the transition to the second chapter (“Being-there”). It thus becomes clear why Hegel must understand the absolute or, as one could also say, logical space as a process whose logical evolution is to be exposed in the Logic. In the second part, negation is presented as the only basic logical operation in the Logic and then expounded in its self-application as circular (or non-well-founded) negation. The main differences between circular negation in the logic of being, the logic of essence and the logic of concepts are explained, and doubts are raised about Hegel’s optimism that logical evolution can come to a happy end.

The various stages of the evolution of logical space correspond to actual historical and possible future approaches to metaphysics, all of which mistake one such stage for the logical space as a whole, because they all fail to recognise the processual character of the logical. Thus Hegel’s Logic can be read not only as a theory of the evolution of logical space, but subsequently also as a systematic critical exposition of actual and possible standard forms of metaphysics. This is illustrated in the third part by three revealing examples: Spinoza’s monism of substance, Plato’s theory of transcendent Forms (ideai, eidē) and Aristotle's theory of immanent substantial forms (eidē).