Preface to the Second Edition

¹² When I undertook this fresh elaboration of the Science of Logic of which this is the first volume, I was fully conscious — not only of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and of its exposition, but also of the imperfection of its treatment in the first edition; earnestly as I have tried after many years of further occupation with this science to remedy this imperfection, I feel I still have reason enough to claim the indulgence of the reader.

One title to such claim in the first instance may well be based on the fact that in the main there was available for the contents of the science only external material in the older metaphysics and logic. Though these two sciences have been universally and abundantly cultivated, the latter even up to our own day, the interest taken in the speculative side has been only slight; in fact, on the whole, the same material has been just repeated over and over again, sometimes being thinned out to the point of being trivial and superficial and sometimes more of the old ballast has been hauled out afresh and trailed along with logic. From such efforts, often purely mechanical, the philosophical import of the science could gain nothing.

¹³ To exhibit the realm of thought philosophically, that is, in its own immanent activity or what is the same, in its necessary development,® had therefore to be a fresh undertaking, one that had to be started right from the beginning; but this traditional material, the familiar forms of thought, must be regarded as an extremely important source, indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offers is only here and there a meagre shred or a disordered heap of dead bones ®.

¹⁴ The forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored as human language. Nowadays we cannot be too often reminded that it is thinking which distinguishes man from the beasts. Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated, and everything that he has transformed into language and expresses in it contains a category – concealed, mixed with other forms or clearly determined as such, so much is Logic his natural element, indeed his own peculiar nature.

If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes. It is an advantage when a language possesses an abundance of logical expressions, that is, specific and separate expressions for the thought determinations themselves; many prepositions and articles denote relationships based on thought; the Chinese language is supposed not to have developed to this stage or only to an inadequate extent.

These particles, however, play quite a subordinate part having only a slightly more independent form than the prefixes and suffixes, inflections and the like. It is much more important that in a language the categories should appear in the form of substantives and verbs and thus be stamped with the form of objectivity. In this respect German has many advantages over other modern languages; some of its words even possess the further peculiarity of having not only different but opposite meanings so that one cannot fail to recognise a speculative spirit of the language in them: it can delight a thinker to come across such words and to find the union of opposites naively shown in the dictionary as one word with opposite meanings, although this result of speculative thinking is nonsensical to the understanding.

Philosophy therefore stands in no need of a special terminology; true, some words have to be taken from foreign languages but these have already acquired through usage the right of citizenship in the philosophical realm – and an affected purism would be most inappropriate where it was the distinctive meaning which was of decisive importance.

The advance of culture generally, and of the sciences in particular, gradually brings into use higher relationships of thought, or at least raises them to greater universality and they have thus attracted increased attention. This applies even to the empirical and natural sciences which in general employ the commonest categories, for example, whole and parts, a thing and its properties, and the like.

¹⁵ In physics, for example, the category of force has become predominant.

But more recently the category of polarity has played the leading part.

It is a matter of infinite importance that in this way an advance has been made beyond the form of abstraction, of identity, by which a specific concept, as, for example, force, acquires an independent self-subsistence, and that prominence and currency have been given to the determinate form, the difference, which is at the same time an inseparable element in the identity.

Because of the fixed reality of natural objects the study of nature compels us to fix the categories which can no longer be ignored in her, although with complete inconsistency towards other categories which are also allowed to remain valid; and such study does not permit the further step of abstracting from the opposition and indulging in generalities as so easily happens in the intellectual sphere.

¹⁶ But while logical objects and their expressions may be thoroughly familiar to educated people it does not follow, as I have said elsewhere, that they are intelligently apprehended; and to have to occupy oneself with what is familiar can even arouse impatience — and what is more familiar than just those determinations of thought which we employ on every occasion, which pass our lips in every sentence we speak?

It is the purpose of this foreword to indicate the general features of the course followed by knowing in its advance beyond a mere acquaintance with its objects, of the relation of philosophical [wissenschaftlichen] thinking to this natural thinking. This much, together with what was contained in the earlier Introduction, will be sufficient to give a general idea of what is meant by logical cognition, the kind of preliminary general idea which is demanded in the case of any science prior to its exposition, that is, prior to the import of the science itself.

¹⁷ In the first place, we must regard it as an infinite step forward that the forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged in self-conscious intuition, figurate conception, and in our desiring and willing, or rather in ideational desiring and willing — and there is no human desiring or willing without ideation — and that these universalities have been brought into prominence for their own sake and made objects of contemplation as was done by Plato and after him especially by Aristotle; this constitutes the beginning of the intelligent apprehension of them.

‘It was only’, says Aristotle, ‘after almost everything necessary and everything requisite for human comfort and intercourse was available, that man began to concern himself with philosophical knowledge’ ‘In Egypt’, he had previously remarked, ’there was an early development of the mathematical sciences because there the priestly caste at an early stage were in a position to have leisure’.

¹⁸ As a matter of fact, the need to occupy oneself with pure thought presupposes that the human spirit must already have travelled a long road.

In the silent regions of thought which has come to itself and communes only with itself, the interests which move the lives of races and individuals are hushed.® it is, one may say, the need of the already satisfied need for the necessities to which it must have attained, the need of a condition free from needs, of abstraction from the material of intuition, imagination, and so on, of the concrete interests of desire, instinct, will, in which material the determinations of thought are veiled and hidden. In the silent regions of thought which has come to itself and communes only with itself, the interests which move the lives of races and individuals are hushed.

¹⁹ ‘In so many respects’, says Aristotle in the same context, ’the nature of man is in bondage; but this science, which is not studied for its utility, is the only absolutely free science and seems therefore to be a more than human possession.’

Philosophical thinking in general is still concerned with concrete objects — God, nature, spirit; but logic is concerned only and solely with these thoughts as thoughts, in their complete abstraction.

For this reason it is customary, to include logic in the curriculum of youth, for youth is not yet involved in the practical affairs of life, living at leisure so far as they are concerned; and it is only for its own subjective ends that it has to busy itself with acquiring the means to enable it to become actively engaged with the objects of those practical interests — and still theoretically even with these.

Contrary to Aristotle’s view, the science of logic is included in these means.

The study of logic is a preliminary labour to be carried out in school and it is not until later that the serious business of life and the pursuit of substantial ends begins.

²⁰ In life, the categories are used; from the honour of being contemplated for their own sakes they are degraded to the position where they serve in the creation and exchange of ideas involved in intellectual exercise on a living content.

First they serve as abbreviations through their universality (for what a host of particulars of outer existence and actions is embraced by a conception — battle, war, nation, ocean or animal, for example — and in the conception of God or of love there is epitomised in the simplicity of such ideating an infinite host of ideas, actions, states, etc.!).

Secondly, the categories serve for the more exact determination and discovery of objective relations; but in this process the import and purpose, the correctness and truth of the thought involved, are made to depend entirely on the subject matter itself and the thought determinations are not themselves credited with any active part in determining the content.

Such a use of categories, which above was called natural logic, is unconscious; and when in philosophical reflection the categories are assigned the role of serving as means, then thinking as such is treated as something subordinate to the other activities of mind. We do not indeed say of our feelings, impulses or interests that they serve us, rather do they count as independent forces and powers, so that to have this particular feeling, to desire this, is what we are.®

But probably we are more conscious of obeying our feelings, impulses, passions, interests, not to mention habits, than of having them in our possession, still less, in view of our intimate union with them, of their being at our disposal. Such determinations of feeling and mind soon show themselves as particular in contrast to the universality which we are conscious ourselves of being and in which we have our freedom; and we are disposed to regard ourselves as caught up in these particular states and dominated by them.

²¹ Consequently it is much more difficult to believe that the forms of thought which permeate all our ideas — whether these are purely theoretical or contain a matter belonging to feeling, impulse, will — are means for us, rather than that we serve them, that in fact they have us in their possession; what is there more in us as against them, how shall we, how shall I, set myself up as more universal than they, which are universal as such?

When we give ourselves up to a sensation, a purpose, an interest, and in it feel ourselves confined and unfree, the place into which we can withdraw ourselves back into freedom is this region of self-certainty, of pure abstraction, of thought.

Or again, to speak of things, we call the nature or the essence of things their notion, and this is only for thought; but still less shall we say of the notions of things that we dominate them, or that the determinations of thought of which they are the complex are at our service; on the contrary, it is our thinking that must accommodate itself to them and our caprice or freedom ought not to want to mould them to suit itself.

²² Since, therefore, subjective thought is our very own, innermost, act, and the objective notion of things constitutes their essential import, we cannot go outside this our act, we cannot stand above it, and just as little can we go beyond the nature of things. ®

We can however disregard the latter determination; in so far as it coincides with the first it would yield a relation of our thoughts to the object, but this would be a valueless result because it would imply that the thing, the object, would be set up as a criterion for our notions and yet for us the object can be nothing else but our notions of it.

The way in which the critical philosophy understands the relationship of these three terms is that we place our thoughts as a medium instead of connecting us with the objects rather cuts us off from them. But this view can be countered by the simple observation that these very things which are supposed to stand beyond us, and at the other extreme, beyond the thoughts referring to them, are themselves figments of subjective thought, and as wholly indeterminate they are only a single thought-thing — the so-called thing-in-itself of empty abstraction.®

²³ Still, sufficient has been said of the point of view which no longer takes the determinations of thought to be only an instrument and a means; more important is the further point connected with it, namely that it is usual to regard them as an external form.

The activity of thought which is at work in all our ideas, purposes, interests and actions is, as we have said, unconsciously busy (natural logic); what we consciously attend to is the contents, the objects of our ideas, that in which we are interested; on this basis, the determinations of thought have the significance of forms which are only attached to the content, but are not the content itself.

But if the truth of the matter is what we have already stated and also is generally admitted, namely that the nature, the peculiar essence, that which is genuinely permanent and substantial in the complexity and contingency of appearance and fleeting manifestation, is the notion of the thing, the immanent universal, and that each human being though infinitely unique is so primarily because he is a man, and each individual animal is such individual primarily because it is an animal: if this is true, then it would be impossible to say what such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed, no matter how richly endowed the individual might be with other predicates, if, that is, this foundation can equally be called a predicate like the others. The indispensable foundation, the notion, the universal which is the thought itself, in so far as one can make abstraction from the general idea expressed by the word ’thought’, cannot be regarded as only an indifferent form attached to a content. But these thoughts of everything natural and spiritual, even the substantial content ®, still contain a variety of determinatenesses and are still charged with the difference of a soul and a body, of the notion and a relative reality; the profounder basis is the soul itself, the pure Notion which is the very heart of things, their simple life-pulse, even of subjective thinking of them.

To focus attention on this logical nature which animates mind, moves and works in it, this is the task. The broad distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free act is that the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done; when the content of the interest in which one is absorbed is drawn out of its immediate unity with oneself and becomes an independent object of one’s thinking, then it is that spirit begins to be free, whereas when thinking is an instinctive activity, spirit is enmeshed in the bonds of its categories and is broken up into an infinitely varied material.

²⁴ Here and there in this mesh there are firm knots ® which give stability and direction to the life and consciousness of spirit; these knots or nodes owe their fixity and power to the simple fact that having been brought before consciousness, they are independent, self-existent Notions of its essential nature.

The most important point for the nature of spirit is not only the relation of what it is in itself to what it is actually, but the relation of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is; because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a fundamental determination of its actuality.

²⁵ As impulses, the categories are only instinctively active.

At first, they enter consciousness separately and so are variable and mutually confusing.

Consequently, they afford to mind only a fragmentary and uncertain actuality.

Logic should clarify these categories and raise mind to freedom and truth.

²⁶ The truth is the aim of logic.

The truth can be attained by:

• the general treatment of Notions
• the moments of the Notion (the determinations of thought)

These moments are forms which are distinct from the matter of thought and only attached to it.

These are mere forms which are distinct from the content.

These forms are finite.

This makes them incapable of holding the infinite truth.

Putting the infinite truth in the finite is to negate it. ®