Preface to the Second Edition Part 3

²⁷

Merely formal categories are bald.

This causes healthy common sense to:

• believe itself to be correct.
• contemptuously abandon acquaintanceship with the formal categories, leaving them to the school of logic and metaphysics.

• not appreciate the value even of a proper awareness of these fragments

This leads common sense into bondage to unclarified and therefore unfree thinking.

Identity is the simple basic determination or common form of the collection of such forms.

Logically, this creates:

• the law of identity, as A = A
• the principle of contradiction.

The science of logic claims to possess such laws of truth.

Healthy common sense has so much lost its respect for the science of logic.

The science of logic has also formed an equally just estimate of the significance of the formulas which constitute the rules of syllogising.

But in fact these formulas are a cardinal function of the understanding.

The science of logic knows that:

• the formulas also serve error and sophistry impartially.
• however truth is defined, logic cannot serve higher, religious truth.

Logic concerns only with the correctness of the knowledge of facts, not truth itself.

²⁸ This way of thinking leaves truth on one side.

This makes it inadequate. It can only be made good by including in our conception of thought:

• the external form and
• the content [of that form].

Content cannot be formless. It cannot be devoid of inner determination.

If it were, then it would be only vacuity, the abstraction of the thing-in-itself.

With this introduction of the content into the logical treatment, the subject matter is not things but their import, the Notion of them.

But there are many Notions, and many objects.

We have, however, already said how it is that

Thinking imposes restrictions on this multitude.

The Notion is simply a thought, a universal.

It is the immeasurable abbreviation of many things which are vaguely present to intuition and pictorial thought.*

A Notion is in its own self the Notion.

• This is only one and is the substantial foundation.

A Notion is determinate. It is this determinateness in it which appears as content.

But the determinateness of the Notion is a specific form of this substantial oneness.

It is a moment of the form as totality, of that same Notion which is the foundation of the specific Notions.*

This Notion is not sensuously intuited or represented.

• It is solely an object, a product and content of thinking.
• It is the absolute, self-subsistent object.
• It is the logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things.
• It is least of all the logos which should be left outside of the science of logic.

Therefore its inclusion or omission from the science of logic must not be simply a matter of choice.

Random Thoughts

We sometimes get discrete thoughts which are only external forms.

When we think of those thoughts, we see their finitude and their dependence on others – their truth is in their content.

Discrete thoughts run through our mind instinctively and unconsciously.

Consequently, the science of logic in dealing with our thoughts will reconstruct those thoughts which are isolated by reflection, into subjective forms external to the content.