The Divisions of Logic

§ 64-65

People say that logic has 2 main parts:

1. The theory of elements
   • Laws of Thought
   • Chapter 1: Concepts
   • Section 1: The Clearness of Concepts
   • etc
2. Methodology

These definitions and divisions, made without any deduction or justification, constitute the systematic framework and the entire connectedness of such sciences.

Such a logic regards it as its vocation to talk about the necessity of deducing concepts and truths from principles; but as regards what it calls method, the thought of a deduction of it simply does not occur to it. The procedure consists, perhaps, in grouping together what is similar and making what is simple precede what is complex, and other external considerations.

But as regards any inner, necessary connectedness, there is nothing more than the list of headings of the various parts and the transition is effected simply by saying Chapter II, or We come now to the judgments, and the like.

§ 66

The superscriptions and divisions, too, which appear in this system are not themselves intended to have any other significance than that of a list of contents.

Besides, the immanent coming-to-be of the distinctions and the necessity of their connection with each other must present themselves in the exposition of the subject matter itself for it falls within the spontaneous progressive determination of the Notion.®

§ 67

The genuine dialectical negative moment is what enables the Notion to advance.

Dialectic in this way is totally different from when it was considered as a separate part of Logic.

The Platonic dialectic in the Parmenides:

• aims only at abolishing and refuting assertions through themselves and
• nothingness as its result

Dialectic is commonly regarded as an external, negative activity which does not pertain to the subject matter itself.

It is based in mere conceit as a subjective itch for unsettling what is fixed.

§ 68

Kant rated dialectic higher. This is among his greatest merits.

He freed it from the seeming arbitrariness which it possesses from the standpoint of ordinary thought. He exhibited dialectic as a necessary function of reason.

Dialectic was held to be merely the art of practising deceptions and producing illusions. People assumed that it is only a spurious game.

Its power rested solely on concealment of the deceit. Its results are obtained only surreptitiously and are a subjective illusion.

Kant’s expositions in the antinomies of pure reason, when closely examined as they will be at length in the course of this work, do not deserve any great praise.

But the general idea on which he based his expositions and which he vindicated, is the objectivity of the illusion and the necessity of the contradiction which belongs to the nature of thought determinations.

These determinations are applied by reason to things in themselves. But their nature is precisely what they are in reason and with reference to what is intrinsic or in itself.

This result, grasped in its positive aspect, is the inner negativity of the determinations as their self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual life. ®

But if no advance is made beyond the abstract negative aspect of dialectic, then the result is only the familiar one that reason is incapable of knowing the infinite. This is a strange result because the infinite is the Reasonable. It follows that reason is incapable of knowing the Reasonable.

§ 69

This type of dialectic, which grasps opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, is the basis of speculative thought.

Speculative thinking must first practise abstract thinking. It must hold fast the Notions in their determinateness and learn to cognise by means of them.

An exposition of logic for speculative thinking would have to keep:

• to the division of the positive and negative
• to the definitions given for the particular Notions without touching on the dialectical aspect
  • This is for the more detailed contents.

The external structure of speculative thinking would resemble the usual presentation of speculation.

• But its content is different
  • This is because it can still work for abstract thinking, though not in speculative thinking

It would give to mind the picture of a methodically ordered whole, although the soul of the structure, the method (which dwells in the dialectical aspect) would not itself appear in it.

§ 70

Finally, with respect to education and the relation of the individual to logic, I would further remark that this science, like grammar, appears in two different aspects or values.

It is one thing for him who comes to it and the sciences generally for the first time, but it is another thing for him who comes back to it from these sciences.

He who begins the study of grammar finds in its forms and laws dry abstractions, arbitrary rules, in general an isolated collection of definitions and terms which exhibit only the value and significance of what is implied in their immediate meaning; there is nothing to be known in them other than themselves.

On the other hand, he who has mastered a language and at the same time has a comparative knowledge of other languages, he alone can make contact with the spirit and culture of a people through the grammar of its language; the same rules and forms now have a substantial, living value.

Similarly, he who approaches this science at first finds in logic an isolated system of abstractions which, confined within itself, does not embrace within its scope the other knowledges and sciences. ®

On the contrary, when contrasted with the wealth of the world as pictorially conceived, with the apparently real content of the other sciences, and compared with the promise of absolute science to unveil the essential being of this wealth, the inner nature of mind and the world, the truth, then this science in its abstract shape, in the colourless, cold simplicity of its pure determinations looks as if it could achieve anything sooner than the fulfilment of its promise and seems to confront that richness as an empty, insubstantial form.

The first acquaintance with logic confines its significance to itself alone; its content passes only for a detached occupation with the determinations of thought, alongside which other scientific activities possess on their own account a matter and content of their own, on which logic may perhaps have a formal influence, though an influence which comes only from itself and which if necessary can of course also be dispensed with so far as the scientific structure and its study are concerned.

The other sciences have on the whole discarded the correct method, that is, a sequence of definitions, axioms, theorems and their proofs, etc.; so-called natural logic now has its own validity in the sciences and manages to get along without any special knowledge of the nature of thought itself. But the matter and content of these sciences is held to be completely independent of logic and also has more appeal for sense, feeling, figurate conception, and practical interest of any kind.

§ 71

At first, logic must be learnt as something which one understands and sees into quite well but in which, at the beginning, one feels the lack of scope and depth and a wider significance.

It is only after profounder acquaintance with the other sciences that logic ceases to be for subjective spirit a merely abstract universal and reveals itself as the universal which embraces within itself the wealth of the particular — just as the same proverb, in the mouth of a youth who understands it quite well, does not possess the wide range of meaning which it has in the mind of a man with the experience of a lifetime behind him, for whom the meaning is expressed in all its power.

Thus, the value of logic is only apprehended when it is preceded by experience of the sciences. It then displays itself to mind as the universal truth, not as a particular knowledge alongside other matters and realities, but as the essential being of all these latter. ®

§ 72

The mind is not conscious of this power of logic at the beginning of its study. But it nonetheless receives within itself through such study the power which leads it into all truth.

The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities freed from all sensuous concreteness. The study of this science, to dwell and labour in this shadowy realm, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness.

In logic, consciousness is busy with something remote from sensuous intuitions and aims, from feelings, from the merely imagined world of figurate conception.

Considered from its negative aspect, this business consists in holding off the contingency of ordinary thinking and the arbitrary selection of particular grounds — or their opposites — as valid.

§ 73

But above all, thought acquires thereby self-reliance and independence. It becomes at home in abstractions and in progressing by means of Notions free from sensuous substrata, develops an unsuspected power of assimilating in rational form all the various knowledges and sciences in their complex variety, of grasping and retaining them in their essential character, stripping them of their external features and in this way extracting from them the logical element, or what is the same thing, filling the abstract basis of Logic acquired by study with the substantial content of absolute truth and giving it the value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but includes them all within its grasp and is their essence, the absolutely True.

General Division of Logic

§ 74

From what has been said about the Notion of this science and where its justification is to be found, it follows that

The general division of science can only be provisional until all of it is known.

§ 75

Still, the attempt can be made to promote an understanding beforehand of what is requisite for such a division, even though in doing so we must have recourse to an application of the method which will only be fully understood and justified within the science itself.

We must therefore point out at the start that we are presupposing that the division must be connected with the Notion, or rather must be implicit in the Notion itself. The Notion is not indeterminate but is in its own self determinate; the division, however, expresses this its determinateness as developed; it is the judgment of the Notion, not a judgment about some object or other picked up from outside, but the judging, that is, determining, of the Notion in its own self.

§ 76

The quality of being right-angled, acute-angled or equilateral, according to which triangles are classified, is not implicit in the determinateness of the triangle itself, that is, not in what is usually called the Notion of the triangle, just as little as there is implicit in what passes for the Notion of animal as such, or of the mammal, bird, etc. the determinations governing the classification into mammal, bird, etc., and the subdivision of these classes into other species. Such determinations are taken from elsewhere and are annexed to such so-called Notion from outside. In the philosophical treatment of classification or division, the Notion itself must show that it is itself the course of those determinations.

§ 77

But in the Introduction, the Notion of logic was itself stated to be the result of a preceding science, and so here, too, it is a presupposition. In accordance with that result logic was defined as the science of pure thought, the principle of which is pure knowing, the unity which is not abstract but a living, concrete unity in virtue of the fact that in it the opposition in consciousness between a self-determined entity, a subject, and a second such entity, an object, is known to be overcome; being is known to be the pure Notion in its own self, and the pure Notion to be the true being. These, then, are the two moments contained in logic. But now they are known to be inseparable, not as in consciousness where each also has a separate being of its own; it is solely because they are at the same time known as distinct (yet not with an independent being) that their unity is not abstract, dead and inert, but concrete.

§ 78

This unity also constitutes the logical principle as element, so that the development of the difference directly present in that principle proceeds only within this element. For since the division is, as we have said, the judgment of the Notion, the positing of the determination already immanent in it, and therefore of the difference, we must not understand this positing as a resolving of that concrete unity back into its determinations as if these had an independent self-subsistence, for this would be an empty return to the previous standpoint, to the opposition of consciousness. This however has vanished; the said unity remains the element, and the distinctions of the division and of the development no longer originate outside that element. Consequently the earlier determinations (those used on the pathway to truth) such as subjectivity and objectivity, or even thought and being, or Notion and reality, no matter from what standpoint they were determined, have lost their independent and purely affirmative character and are now in their truth, that is, in their unity, reduced to forms. In their difference, therefore, they themselves remain implicitly the whole Notion, and this, in the division, is posited only under its own specifications.

§ 79

Thus what is to be considered is the whole Notion, firstly as the Notion in the form of being, secondly, as the Notion; in the first case, the Notion is only in itself, the Notion of reality or being; in the second case, it is the Notion as such, the Notion existing for itself (as it is, to name concrete forms, in thinking man, and even in the sentient animal and in organic individuality generally, although, of course, in these it is not conscious, still less known; it is only in inorganic nature that it is in itself). Accordingly, logic should be divided primarily into the logic of the Notion as being and of the Notion as Notion — or, by employing the usual terms (although these as least definite are most ambiguous) into ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ logic.

§ 80

But in accordance with the fundamental element of the immanent unity of the Notion, and hence with the inseparability of its determinations, these latter, when distinguished from each other in the positing of the Notion in its difference, must at least also stand in relation to each other. There results a sphere of mediation, the Notion as a system of reflected determinations, that is, of being in process of transition into the being-within-self or inwardness of the Notion. In this way, the Notion is not yet posited as such for itself, but is still fettered by the externality of immediate being. This is the doctrine of essence which stands midway between the doctrine of being and that of the Notion. In the general division of logic in the present work it has been included in objective logic because although essence is already the inwardness of being, the character of subject is to be expressly reserved for the Notion.

§ 81

Recently Kant has opposed to what has usually been called logic another, namely, a transcendental logic. What has here been called objective logic would correspond in part to what with him is transcendental logic. He distinguishes it from what he calls general logic in this way, [a] that it treats of the notions which refer a priori to objects, and consequently does not abstract from the whole content of objective cognition, or, in other words, it contains the rules of the pure thinking of an object, and [b] at the same time it treats of the origin of our cognition so far as this cognition cannot be ascribed to the objects. It is to this second aspect that Kant’s philosophical interest is exclusively directed.

§ 82

His chief thought is to vindicate the categories for self-consciousness as the subjective ego. By virtue of this determination the point of view remains confined within consciousness and its opposition; and besides the empirical element of feeling and intuition it has something else left over which is not posited and determined by thinking self-consciousness, a thing-in-itself, something alien and external to thought — although it is easy to perceive that such an abstraction as the thing-in-itself is itself only a product of thought, and of merely abstractive thought at that. If other disciples of Kant have expressed themselves concerning the determining of the object by the ego in this way, that the objectifying of the ego is to be regarded as an original and necessary act of consciousness, so that in this original act there is not yet the idea of the ego itself — which would be a consciousness of that consciousness or even an objectifying of it — then this objectifying act, in its freedom from the opposition of consciousness, is nearer to what may be taken simply for thought as such. [2]

Footnote

1. I would mention that in this work I frequently refer to the Kantian philosophy (which to many may seem superfluous) because whatever may be said, both in this work and elsewhere, about the precise character of this philosophy and about particular parts of its exposition, it constitutes the base and the starting point of recent German philosophy and that its merit remains unaffected by whatever faults may be found in it. The reason too why reference must often be made to it in the objective logic is that it enters into detailed consideration of important, more specific aspects of logic, whereas later philosophical works have paid little attention to these and in some instances have only displayed a crude — not unavenged — contempt for them. The philosophising which is most widespread among us does not go beyond the Kantian results, that Reason cannot acquire knowledge of any true content or subject matter and in regard to absolute truth must be directed to faith. But what with Kant is a result, forms the immediate starting-point in this philosophising, so that the preceding exposition from which that result issued and which is a philosophical cognition, is cut away beforehand. The Kantian philosophy thus serves as a cushion for intellectual indolence which soothes itself with the conviction that everything is already proved and settled. Consequently for genuine knowledge, for a specific content of thought which is not to be found in such barren and arid complacency, one must turn to that preceding exposition.

2. If the expression ‘objectifying act of the ego’ suggests other products of spirit, e.g. fantasy, it is to be observed that we are speaking of a determining of an object in so far as the elements of its content do not belong to feeling and intuition. Such an object is a thought, and to determine it means partly, first to produce it, partly, in so far as it is something presupposed, to have further thoughts about it, to develop it further by thought.

§ 83

But this act should no longer be called consciousness; consciousness embraces within itself the opposition of the ego and its object which is not present in that original act. The name consciousness gives it a semblance of subjectivity even more than does the term thought, which here, however, is to be taken simply in the absolute sense as infinite thought untainted by the finitude of consciousness, in short, thought as such.

§ 84

Now because the interest of the Kantian philosophy was directed to the so-called transcendental aspect of the categories, the treatment of the categories themselves yielded a blank result; what they are in themselves without the abstract relation to the ego common to all, what is their specific nature relatively to each other and their relationship to each other, this has not been made an object of consideration.

Hence this philosophy has not contributed in the slightest to a knowledge of their nature; what alone is of interest in this connection occurs in the Critique of Ideas. But if philosophy was to make any real progress, it was necessary that the interest of thought should be drawn to a consideration of the formal side, to a consideration of the ego, of consciousness as such, i.e. of the abstract relation of a subjective knowing to an object, so that in this way the cognition of the infinite form, that is, of the Notion, would be introduced.

But in order that this cognition may be reached, that form has still to be relieved of the finite determinateness in which it is ego, or consciousness. The form, when thus thought out into its purity, will have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content, and that a necessarily explicated content in the form of a system of determinations of thought.

§ 85

The objective logic, then, takes the place rather of the former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construction of the world in terms of thoughts alone.

If we have regard to the final shape of this science, then it is first and immediately ontology whose place is taken by objective logic — that part of this metaphysics which was supposed to investigate the nature of ens in general; ens comprises both being and essence, a distinction for which the German language has fortunately preserved different terms.

But further, objective logic also comprises the rest of metaphysics in so far as this attempted to comprehend with the forms of pure thought particular substrata taken primarily from figurate conception, namely the soul, the world and God; and the determinations of thought constituted what was essential in the mode of consideration.

Logic, however, considers these forms free from those substrata, from the subjects of figurate conception; it considers them, their nature and worth, in their own proper character.

Former metaphysics omitted to do this and consequently incurred the just reproach of having employed these forms uncritically without a preliminary investigation as to whether and how they were capable of being determinations of the thing-in-itself, to use the Kantian expression — or rather of the Reasonable.

Objective logic is therefore the genuine critique of them — a critique which does not consider them as contrasted under the abstract forms of the a priori and the a posteriori, but considers the determinations themselves according to their specific content.

§ 86

The subjective logic is the logic of the Notion, of essence which has sublated its relation to being or its illusory being [Schein], and in its determination is no longer external but is subjective free, self-subsistent and self-determining, or rather it is the subject itself.

Since subjectivity brings with it the misconception of contingency and caprice and, in general, characteristics belonging to the form of consciousness, no particular importance is to be attached here to the distinction of subjective and objective; these determinations will be more precisely developed later on in the logic itself.

§ 87

Logic thus falls generally into objective and subjective logic, but more specifically into:

1. The logic of being
2. The logic of essence
3. The logic of the Notion