Preface to Edition 1

¹ In the last 25 years, philosophical thought in Germany has complete transformed. Spirit has reached a higher standpoint in its awareness of itself.

But it has had little influence on the structure of logic.

² Before this, the study of metaphysics had been totally extirpated from being a science.

This included:

• ontology
• rational psychology
• cosmology
• natural theology

Examples are inquiries into:

• the immateriality of the soul
• efficient and final causes

Even the former proofs of the existence of God are cited only for their historical interest or for uplifting the emotions.

There is no longer any interest in metaphysics.

It is remarkable that Germany has become indifferent to its:

• constitutional theory
• national sentiments
• ethical customs and virtues

But it is equally remarkable that it has lost its metaphysics, the spirit which contemplates its own pure essence.

³ Kantian philosophy led to the renunciation of speculative thought.

Its popular exoteric teaching is that the understanding should not go beyond experience, otherwise the cognitive faculty will merely generate fantasies.

This was supported by the cry of modern academics that:

• the current needs demanded attention to immediate requirements
• experience was the primary factor for knowledge
• skill in public and private life, practice and practical training were alone necessary
• theoretical insight might even be harmful.

Philosophy and ordinary common sense thus cooperated to bring about the downfall of metaphysics

A cultured nation without metaphysics is a strange spectacle like a temple richly ornamented but without a holy of holies.

Theology:

• was in former times was the guardian of the speculative mysteries and of metaphysics (although this was subordinate to it).
• had given up this science in exchange for:
  • feelings
  • popular matter-of-fact
  • historical erudition

In keeping with this change, the ascetics vanished.

This got rid of:

• the dark utterances of metaphysics
• the colourless communion of the spirit with itself

Outer existence was transformed into the bright world of flowers with no black flowers.

⁴ Logic did not fare quite so badly as metaphysics. ®.

Logic teaches us how to think.

But this notion has long since vanished.

Practicality triumphed over logic logic just as it triumphed over the sister science of metaphysics.

⁵ Nevertheless, logic was kept among the sciences as a subject of public instruction.

However, this is only the outer fate of logic.

In the course of being passed on, its contents have become ever more diluted and attenuated.

The old is making way for the new.

⁶ Even in the philosophical sphere, this ignoring of the general change is ending.

Even those who are opposed to the new ideas have been influenced by them.

⁷ On the other hand, the period of fermentation with which a new creative idea begins is past.

The challenge to elaborate and systematise the material now becomes all the more pressing.

⁸ The science of logic which constitutes metaphysics has still been much neglected.

Logic needs a completely fresh start.

Philosophy cannot borrow its method from a subordinate science like mathematics.

It can be only the nature of the content itself which spontaneously develops itself in a scientific method of knowing, since it is at the same time the reflection of the content itself which first posits and generates its determinate character. ®

⁹ The understanding determines, and holds the determinations fixed.

Reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing.

Reason is positive because it generates the universal and comprehends the particular therein.

The understanding is usually separate from reason.

Likewise, dialectical reason is usually distinct from positive reason.

But reason in its truth is spirit which is higher than either merely positive reason, or merely intuitive understanding.

It is the negative, that which constitutes the quality alike of dialectical reason and of understanding; it negates what is simple, thus positing the specific difference of the understanding; it equally resolves it and is thus dialectical.

But it does not stay in the nothing of this result but in the result is no less positive, and in this way it has restored what was at first simple, but as a universal which is within itself concrete; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal but in this determining, this positing of a difference, and the resolving of it, the particular has at the same time already determined itself.

This spiritual movement which, in its simple undifferentiatedness, gives itself its own determinateness and in its determinateness its equality with itself, which therefore is the immanent development of the Notion, this movement is the absolute method of knowing and at the same time is the immanent soul of the content itself.

I maintain that it is this self-construing method alone which enables philosophy to be an objective, demonstrated science.®

¹⁰ It is in this way that I have tried to expound consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as a concrete knowing, a knowing too, in which externality is involved; but the development of this object, ®like the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic.

Consciousness, as spirit in its manifestation which in its progress frees itself from its immediacy and external concretion, attains to the pure knowing which takes as its object those same pure essentialities as they are in and for themselves. They are pure thoughts, spirit thinking its own essential nature. Their self-movement is their spiritual life and is that through which philosophy constitutes itself and of which it is the exposition.

¹¹ In the foregoing there is indicated the relation of the science which I call the Phenomenology of Spirit, to logic.

As regards the external relation, it was intended that the first part of the System of Science which contains the Phenomenology should be followed by a second part containing logic and the two concrete [realen] sciences, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit, which would complete the System of Philosophy.

But the necessary expansion which logic itself has demanded has induced me to have this part published separately; it thus forms the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit in an expanded arrangement of the system.

It will later be followed by an exposition of the two concrete philosophical sciences mentioned. This first volume of the Logic contains as Book One the Doctrine of Being; Book Two, the Doctrine of Essence, which forms the second part of the first volume, is already in the press; the second volume will contain Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion.

Nuremberg, March 22, 1812.®