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. It progresses through Notions free from sensuous substrata. It develops an unsuspected power of:

• assimilating in rational form all the various knowledges and sciences in their complex variety
• grasping and retaining them in their essential character, stripping them of their external features.

In this way, it extracts 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.

It gives 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.