Logic, Writing and History:

On Hegel’s Speculative Ontology of Being

Submitted to the
University of Amsterdam
in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the

Master’s Degree of Philosophy

by

Kristiaan Knoester
9838937
Supervisor: dr. D. Schulting

July, 2008

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 Contents

I. Introduction………………………………………………………………………...3

II. Prelude To A Beginning……………………………………………………………8

III. The Beginning of Philosophy……………………………………………………..13

IV. Thinking About Being and Becoming……………………………………………..17

V. Natural vs. Modern Consciousness: The Historicity of Thought…………………19

VI. Skepticism and Apperception……………………………………………………..32

VII. Writing and the Movement of Thought…………………………………………...39

VIII. Philosophy and the End of Reason………………………………………...……..43

IX. The Owl of Minerva: Conclusion…………………………..……………………..52

X. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………58

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 But a soul that never saw the truth cannot take a human shape, since a human being must
understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into
a reasoned unity. That process is the recollection of things our soul saw when it was traveling
with god, when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly
real instead. For just this reason it is fair that only a philosopher’s mind grows wings, since its
memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods
are divine. A man who uses reminders of these things correctly is always at the highest, most
perfect level of initiation, and he is only one who is perfect as perfect can be.
— Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, 249b4-d1.

Book One of Hegel’s Science of Logic begins with the title: “With What Must the Science
Begin?” The question is meant to address a difficulty he had noticed thinkers of his time1
were struggling with: the awareness that in speaking of thought, philosophy itself “must be
either mediated or immediate.”2

Although this is the contraction of a fundamental question with which ancient philosophy had
busied itself with – what is there? – by Hegel’s time, however, the history of philosophy had
accumulated enough self-awareness of itself as an intellectual tradition that its own cognitive
categories had themselves become objects of sustained critical speculation. The work of Kant
was groundbreaking in this regard, for it laid bare the limitations of metaphysical claims
concerning things that go beyond empirical experience. But it also invited further critical
analysis. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is – to a certain extent – a response to Kant’s
transcendentally idealist position and its reliance on pure intuition.3 More importantly,
though, was Hegel’s radicalization of the notion of synthetic a priori judgments – i.e.
ontologically and necessarily true judgments that do not rely on experience for their validity –
by going beyond a critique of pure reason and determining what pure reason actually is.4 His

1
The first edition was published in 1812
2
Hegel, Science of Logic (SL), trans. A.V. Miller: 67.
3
Not to be confused with mere opposition. Hegel is often explicit about Kant’s important contribution to philosophy, so his
criticisms should not be confused with outright rejection. In fact, discernible not only from some of his appreciative remarks
(e.g. preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit) is a commitment to continue developing what Kant had started, viz. the relation
of the noumenal realm to human knowledge (and reason). (See also Robert L. Zimmerman, The Kantianism of Hegel and
Nietzsche: Renovation in Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd. (2005): 64; and
Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness, New York: Cambridge University Press (1989):
176. On Kant’s reliance on “pure intuitions,” see Pippin, 1989: 8, 24-5; Pippin explains this as Kant’s attempt at resolving the
problem of synthetic a priori knowledge, “the question of how thought can successfully determine a priori what is other than
thought.” Kant’s solution, according to Pippin, is to likewise “claim that we can somehow represent a priori all possible
intuited objects, things other than or given to thought, in a preconceptual way; that there are pure intuitions.” Although Pippin
is not convinced by Kant’s approach to the problem of self-conscious experience, he nevertheless regards as insufficient
Hegel’s take on Kant’s understanding of the role of intuition, and of imagination as well, in the perception and representation
of objects in experience (Pippin, 1989: 24-5; see also Hegel on the “possibility of the understanding” in SL: 584.) More on
this below in section VI: “Skepticism and Apperception.”
4
Cf. Hegel, SL: 59-64,

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work as a whole therefore exhibits this move from transcendental philosophy to an immanent
philosophy that corrects Kant’s project by attempting to overcome the distinction between
phenomena and noumena, or, in other words, understanding and reason. Hegel’s objective
logic, which is meant to take the place of traditional metaphysics, accomplishes this
(according to Hegel) by tackling the ultimate presupposition of pure reason – pure being – and
showing how we determine this notion as both the beginning, and end, of thought itself. (SL:
70, 78)

In fact, Hegel’s Science of Logic is, for the most part, an attempt to explain knowing as a
movement of thought; in this sense, it begins with a simple and immediate determination –
pure being – and ends with the same insofar thought recognizes itself as nothing more but that
which mediates this self-determination. Hegel therefore claims that the Logic can demonstrate
how it is that this self-movement of thought – beginning with Understanding – can end up
contemplating and becoming the Absolute: the rational structure of everything that is. Though
this part of Hegel’s development can aptly be understood in relation to Kant’s work, I
nevertheless would like to explore what it is about his philosophy (viz. speculative logic) that
warrants his claim about the actualization of absolute wisdom and being.

I believe that a proper interpretation of Hegel’s thought requires a reconsideration of what

speculative philosophy precisely entails. To this end not only will we reflect upon the logic of
the dialectic in the context of post-Kantian idealism, but also reconsider our own prevalent
historical consciousness. From this perspective, Hegel stands at the threshold embracing the
transition from a theological ontology of time and space (viz. a Biblical perspective based on
the Fall of Man) to one that openly expounded a secularized view of temporality and human
progress, not to mention History. But I also believe that Hegel, conscious of this transition,
purposefully set himself the task of expounding, contra the religious and mystical
consciousness of his time, the speculative path of reason as something perennial – even
mystical5 – but not ineffable.

5
It is important not to underestimate nor over-emphasize Hegel’s references to so-called ‘mystical’ or esoteric traditions,
such as alchemy, hermetic theosophy, kabbalah, freemasonry or rosicrucianism, although elements of these traditions do
play, to differing degrees, an important role in the thought of Hegel (though this is not the place to discuss these issues in
detail; for a good introduction, despite the arguable conclusion, see G.A. Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). What I am positing, in this context, as Hegel’s perspective on ‘mysticism’ in
relation to speculative philosophy, is a ‘worldview’ that, in a way, reconciles the Judaeo-Christian conception of God as a
self-sufficient being, metaphysically distinct from the world, with the pantheist doctrine that sees everything as the
representation of God. In this sense, mysticism both affirms the transcendental status of God and His necessary relation to
His own creation, i.e. everything, but particularly man, which He requires for His own self-actualization (this is strongly
stated in Gnosticism, Christian kabbalah, and hermetic traditions). This divine process is therefore not accidental, but both

4
In fact, Hegel’s work, though abstract, is ferociously exoteric by virtue of its self-
consciousness, and the efforts it undergoes so as to not take any thought or presupposition for
granted. However, this philosophical commitment, which he identified as truly scientific, was
something that he recognized as actual to the historical epoch in which he lived. Hence his
belief that speculative philosophy not only manifests itself as the actualization of the ethical
state and freedom, but must also be able to prove the reason behind this actualization. As he
writes in the Philosophy of Right:

The ethical is a subjective disposition, but of that right which has being in itself. That this Idea is
the truth of the concept of freedom cannot be assumed or derived from feeling or from any other
source, but, in philosophy, can only be proved. […] Those who think they can dispense with
proofs and deductions in philosophy show that they are still far from forming the least idea of
what philosophy is; they may well speak on other matters, but those who wish to speak without
the concept have no right to participate in philosophical discourse. (PR: §141)

As we will see later, this proof is itself a part of the actualization of rational, speculative,
thought.

Before commencing this investigation let me state from the onset that I will be discussing the
Phenomenology of Spirit (PS), the Science of Logic (SL), and the Philosophy of Right (PR). In
doing so, I have simply assumed these as his fundamental texts, meaning that I find precisely
these three books to function as a unified conceptual whole in so far they reveal and develop
essential aspects crucial to his argument. Other works, like the various Lectures he gave and
which subsequently became bundled into books, though certainly important in themselves and

necessary and rational. And it is precisely in the systematization of what is rational about such a process, and inherent to
man, that Hegel distinguishes speculative philosophy. It does not take for granted what is ‘divine’ about truth, but situates
it squarely as the necessity of rational thought, not esoteric claims based on ‘divine’ experience. In this sense, what is
divine is speculative truth, which is both rational and necessary. However, this actualization of the role and essence of the
speculative path of reason is itself historically mediated, and in this sense dependant on the particular development of
‘mystical’ ideas as much as it was on the religious consciousness (which I discuss later). The following quote should put
in perspective both Hegel’s acknowledgment of the historical role of “mysticism” (which we should in turn interpret as
encompassing a broader group of ‘esoteric’ traditions) in relation to the history of philosophy (i.e. ideas), but should also
demonstrate that his ‘speculative’ agenda was much more radical, viz. scientific:
Speculative truth, it may also be noted, means very much the same as what, in special connection with religious
experience and doctrines, used to be called Mysticism. […] On which we first of all remark that there is mystery in the
mystical, only however for the understanding which is ruled by the principle of abstract identity; whereas the mystical
[as synonymous with the speculative], is the concrete unity of those propositions which understanding only accepts in
their separation and opposition. And if those who recognise Mysticism as the highest truth are content to leave it in its
original utter mystery, their conduct only proves that for them too, as well as for their antagonists, thinking means
abstract identification, and that in their opinion, therefore truth can only be won by renouncing thought, or as it is
frequently expressed, by leading the reason captive. [EL: §82]

5
in conjunction with the books mentioned, are not crucial to the development of specific
aspects of his philosophy. I even take the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences to be
more formalistic and dependent on the fundamental [philosophical] inquiries developed in
these books, though this is far from a unanimous point of view.

I will also begin with the Logic and conclude with the Philosophy of Right. I begin with the
Logic in order to introduce the problem of the philosophical beginning, which I take the
Phenomenology to represent but in a pre-logical form. I will conclude, though, with the
Philosophy of Right because I think that it is this work that completes the actualization of the
onto-logical presupposition of thought – Being – in the realm of subjectivity (and freedom),6
thereby uniting the free self-movement of Spirit in the Phenomenology with its self-
comprehension in the Logic. From a post-Kantian perspective,7 what is then missing in
Hegel’s idealism, prior to the Philosophy of Right, is an explanation of the development of
thought as the ascension of consciousness to the knowledge that “what is rational is actual;
and what is actual is rational.” This last is meant not only as part of the determination of
thought itself, but also as that which grounds the “innermost truth” of his speculative logic8
with the subjective experience of “reality.”9

6
SL: 571.
7
I.e., in the context by which we can understand the nature of thought; but more specifically, by investigating the notion of
being itself as an epistemic and ontological priority for subjective thought. (See Pippin, 1989: 19) We will later look in more
detail the role of Kantian ‘apperception’ in relation to the experience of self-consciousness, though what according to Pippin
is one of the most influential claims about the experience of this subjective state – that it “does not count as having an
experience of and so being aware of that state unless I apply a certain determinate concept…and judge that I am in such a
state, something I must do and be able to know that I am doing” – is particularly relevant to the topic at hand; my view of the
role of the Philosophy of Right, in this sense, represents my perspective on what resulted from this particular Kantian
influence. While Pippin considers it “so influential in Hegel particularly because it is the clear origin of an entire Hegelian
strategy in the PhG [PS], the distinction between what consciousness is ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’,” (ibid.,) I would posit that
the content of the PR also displays this influence; namely, it represents concrete notions that as thought manifest themselves
in the subjective, and thus limited, thinking of Hegel himself, and of which he is aware; but he can nonetheless treat the
matter (Sache) scientifically because the account of self-conscious subjectivity and the logical condition of knowledge have
already been sufficiently treated in the Phenomenology and the Logic (though the first part of the Logic was revised for the
second revised edition at a later date).
8
Cf., SL, 71: “It must be admitted that it is an important consideration—one which will be found in more detail in the logic
itself—that the advance is a retreat into the ground, to what is primary and true, on which depends and, in fact, from which
originates, that with which the beginning is made. Thus consciousness on its onward path from the immediacy with which it
began is led back to absolute knowledge as its innermost truth. This last, the ground, is then also that from which the first
proceeds, that which at first appeared as an immediacy.” Hegel’s comments concerning the “preliminary understanding of the
meaning of progress in logic” is also instructive, since it will help us understand other important Hegelian concepts such as
the ‘autonomy of consciousness,’ ‘freedom,’ and the ‘actualization of reason’: “Further, the progress from that which forms
the beginning is to be regarded as only a further determination of it …[t]hus the beginning of philosophy is the foundation
which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further
determinations.” And thus, Hegel explains later, “the ground, the reason, why the beginning is made with pure being in the
pure science [of logic] is directly given in the science itself….If it were not this pure indeterminateness, if it were
determinate, it would have been taken as something mediated, something already carried a stage further: what is determinate
implies an other to a first.” These passages are important for they point, as Pippin noticed (1989: 187), to a complicated
relation between Hegel’s logic and ontology. However, I will be dealing with this problem throughout the paper, though I
should clarify that my aim is to clarify the role and aim of the Philosophy of Right in terms of its relation to the determination
of thought (according to speculative logic) and thought’s autonomy (i.e. the ground). This, however, requires a better
understanding of the Notion [Begriff], which I explain below.

6
Hegel’s comments about the “actual development of the science” are particularly instructive:
“[W]e are not concerned in the science of logic with what is present only in principle or as
something inner, but rather with the determinate reality in thought of what is inner and with
the determinateness possessed by such an inner in this reality.” (SL: 77) So, although the
Science of Logic determines thought itself as immanent,10 I believe that Hegel is forced to
formalize the transition from what was determined as true and immanent to what appears to
thought “in reality” (as opposed to “determinate reality in thought”), which he accomplishes
in the Philosophy of Right. Hence, he writes, “if in the intuition or thought…there is implied
more than pure being…then this more must make its appearance in our knowing only as
something thought, not as something imagined or figuratively conceived…” (SL: 78) Though
this is meant to justify the immediacy of pure being as the proper ‘beginning of philosophy,’
it also leaves open the possibility of philosophy determining itself as ‘more’ than just simple
immediacy, but that from which the movement of thought began (and thus already complete
in the Logic). What is crucial, however, is that philosophy be able to prove its identity with
this ‘pure beginning,’ whether in the context of a perceived “progress in philosophy” (SL: 70)
or despite the forgetfulness of the subjective ego (SL: 76). It is this problematic that Hegel
recognized in his own time, the consciousness of which I believe he set out to ‘complete’, i.e.
determine as both rational and necessary in itself. In other words, this development is not only
logically presupposed in the Phenomenology and Logic, but, to a certain extent, determined as
actual in the Philosophy of Right.

We may follow the rationale underlying this line of thinking if we compare Hegel’s reference
to a ‘subjective ego’ that is “still entangled in the world of appearance” and thus not yet “the
pure knowing which has in truth overcome the opposition of consciousness” (SL: 77) with what
he says at the beginning to the Logic: “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 it here
can only be provisional, can be given, as it were, only in so far as the author is already
familiar with the science and consequently is historically in a position to state here in advance
the main distinctions which will emerge in the development of the Notion.” (SL: 59) I believe
that this ‘historical position’11 is determined as actual in the Philosophy of Right, which is

9
SL: 77-8.
10
See SL: 71
11
It is important to clarify that although the historical position is itself a presupposition that is brought up in the preface, it
will not play a role during the Logic. However, I believe that this is a result of his injunction to begin without

7
why it is able to determine scientifically the truth of its subject matter without first having to
demonstrate its “logical progression in each and every detail.” (PR: 10) In fact, insofar the
subject matter is taken as ‘concrete,’ it need not first clarify the ‘presuppositions’ of its
speculative method but may instead deal directly with the matter [Sache] itself (though, as
Hegel explains, “in science, the content is essentially inseparable from the form,” meaning
that the Philosophy of Right will reflect the ‘speculative truth’ of the Logic).

II

Prelude to a Beginning

The Phenomenology of Spirit sets up the problem that Hegel begins with in the Logic – the
beginning of philosophy, or the science of thought, itself. On one level, the Phenomenology
shows how consciousness can oppose that which appears in opposition to itself, and how this
can eventually result in the truth of pure thought and pure self-consciousness as moments in
the self-development of consciousness (SL: 49). Conversely, this truth pertains only to the
content of pure science – it remains a ‘presupposition’ as long as its beginning is considered
abstractly; i.e. as long as it is only measured in terms of its ‘simple immediacy’ (SL: 69). For
Hegel, then, the claim that the philosophical beginning is inherently ‘hypothetical’ or
‘problematical’ – although important – also reveals a misunderstanding of the “very nature of
a beginning.” (SL: 72)

Hegel can make this claim because he has already worked through the process of his logic.
His Science of Logic will be the litmus test of his initial claims; it will therefore demonstrate
that it is the immediacy of indeterminate Being that forms the beginning of his logic. His basic
argument is that the only viable, and scientific, criterion should be the radical skepticism12 of
his speculative logic, which is both self-reflexively critical of all prior assumptions and

presuppositions, and is likewise an attitude that – as a precondition to properly understanding his science of logic – was
already suggested in the Phenomenology, where Hegel speaks of a “pathway of doubt” or “way of despair” instigating what
he terms as ‘Understanding.’
12
Hegel distinguishes his “thoroughgoing scepticism” from the sort of scepticism that, despite all other doubts, nevertheless
begins its examination with the conviction that it is “prepared and equipped” to fulfil its task. Hegel offered a similar
prescription in the Phenomenology. There he wrote of a “pathway of doubt” whose only initial conviction is the “conscious
insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge.” Only this “way of despair” leads to “the resolve, in Science, not to give
oneself over to the thoughts of others, upon mere authority, but to examine everything for oneself and follow only one’s own
conviction, or better still, to produce everything oneself, and accept only one’s own deed as what is true.” (PS: 50) More on
this in part one, below.

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presupposed categories of thought and knowledge, while remaining rationally meticulous in
the scrutiny and investigation of both the objects of its study as well as its own methodology
as it arises in the process. Although Hegel argues for the simplicity of the insight concerning
the “nature of a beginning,” I will take Hegel’s comments to convey more ambivalence on the
matter than may at first seem the case.

The Science of Logic – made up of three volumes first published between 1812-16 (first
edition), while the second edition13 appeared in 1832 – falls between the Phenomenology
(1807) and the Philosophy of Right (1821).14 The structure that will determine this work, in
addition to its relation to the Phenomenology, is hinted from the start by the word ‘logic,’
which – apart from its modern use – also combines both the Greek and Christian conception
of Logos. Logos is notoriously difficult to explain; it has been used to refer to a wide array of
concepts that are not easily reconciled in any one of them. Even in Greek philosophy we are
confronted with changing meanings: from an absolute principle, common to all, underlying
the cosmic law of flux (Heraclitus), a rational principle governing both the cosmos and human
knowledge (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), to an animating power of the universe (Stoics).
Later, the Christian tradition translated it as the ‘Word’, which refers to the creative and
animating force of God, as expressed in the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the
Word [Logos], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God.” Hegel,
who was an avid student of ancient Greek thought, also spoke in this context of the Holy
Trinity15 as bringing into greater unity the triadic form of science, which had heretofore first
manifested itself in ancient Greece16 but would not achieve a deeper unity until Christianity
and its notion of the Holy Trinity. However, this ‘utterance’ of the Word, representing in

13
He was only able to revise the first volume, on Being, before his death in 1831.
14
The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – first published in 1816 and subsequently revised in 1827 and 1830 –
summarizes his entire philosophical system, functioning more as an introductory tool and an aid to his academic lectures. I
therefore consider the Phenomenology, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Right as the principal works that define the path and
the development of his thought.
15
Hegel, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, writes: “The act of manifestation is not a condition which may be or
may not be equally, so that thought may remain as thought when it is not manifested, but its manifestation is itself, its Being.
Numbers, as will be remarked in respect of the Pythagoreans, are unsuitable mediums for expressing thoughts; thus monas,
dnas, trias are, with Pythagoras, unity, difference, and unity of the unity and of the difference. The two first of the three are
certainly united by addition; this kind of union is, however, the worst form of unity. In Religion the three make their
appearance in a deeper sense as the Trinity, and in Philosophy as the Notion, but enumeration forms a bad method of
expression. It is noteworthy that in the observing consciousness of the Indians it struck them that what is true and in and for
itself contains three determinations, and the Notion of the Idea is perfected in three moments. This sublime consciousness of
the trinity, which we find again in Plato and others, then went astray in the region of thinking contemplation, and retains its
place only in Religion, and there but as a Beyond. Then the understanding penetrated through it, declaring it to be senseless;
and it was Kant who broke open the road once more to its comprehension.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy
(1805-6), trans. E.S. Haldane (1892-6), Hyper-text online at www.marxists.org ; last recovered: 13-07-2008.)
16
See Hegel’s discussion of the triad, tetrad, and tetraktys in the section “Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans” of the Lectures
on the History of Philosophy, online at www.marxists.org.

9
Christianity the divine relation between Father (God) and Son (Nature/Adam [humanity])
through the Holy Spirit, will similarly be shown to represent the manifestation of a similar
conceptualization – also spoken in terms of ‘Spirit’ but referring more to the ancient Greek
notion of Logos – that we will see both in the Phenomenology and the Logic.

To understand this relation some things need to be clarified. Hegel characterized each form,
or Idea, of this triad as moments within the “immanent circular movement” of “what is true
and actual”17 and which subsequently “proclaims the absolute Being as Spirit.” (PS: §771) But
Spirit must still become self-knowing Spirit (PS: §785); only in this ‘absolute knowing’ does it
realize its Notion “as remaining in its Notion in this realization” (PS: §798), and subsequently
(though this needs a detailed account) Absolute Knowing. He also characterizes this in terms
of a “shape of consciousness,” a “shape of Spirit,” and – when Truth identifies itself with the
content18 – the “shape of the Self.” (PS: §797-98) With regard to Spirit, Hegel states in the
lectures on the Philosophy of Nature of 1819-1830 that the triad is the “fundamental form of
necessity” in Spirit.19 This aspect of necessity – and its relation to the triadic form – will
prove to be important elements of the “Doctrine of Being” in the Logic.20 But there is also a
circularity and a “movement” of categories that Hegel sees represented by the Christian
conception of the Trinity, though he considered only become fully expressed (i.e. objective)
through speculative philosophy; viz. in the dialectic science of logic. Take for example this
statement from the Encyclopedia Logic of 1817:

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself.
In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or
medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its
special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a
circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is
constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the
organisation. (EL: § 15)

17
Hegel, PS: 465/§770.
18
On the other hand, Hegel also states that “Truth is the content, which in religion is still not identical with its certainty.”
(PS: §798)
19
PN: §248 (Quoted in G.A. Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, 2001: 101n.57)
20
See Magee, 2001: 100-1; Magee gives an interesting quote (from the Science of Logic, 1812) in relation to Kant’s
rediscovery of the ‘perennial’ triadic form, and the triad quality, quantity, measure (of the doctrine of Being): “Kant did not
apply the infinitely important form of triplicity—with him it manifested itself at first only as a formal spark of light—to the
genera of this categories (quantity, quality, etc.), but only to their species which, too, alone he called categories.
Consequently he was unable to hit on the third to quantity quality.” (SL: 327; Quoted in Magee, 2001: 100). The ‘third’ refers
to ‘Measure’; this passage comes from the beginning of the chapter on Measure.

10
Although comments that Hegel has made elsewhere sometimes give the impression that he
finds no value in the use of symbolic forms,21 I agree with Alexander Magee that Hegel is
only pointing to the fact that these symbols are limited in their ability to express philosophical
wisdom (compared to the conceptual language of speculative logic). However, though
Hegel’s symbolic forms do not “occur in the text,” they do “lie beneath the text, structuring
it.” (Magee: 103) My argument is therefore that just as mathematical-geometrical images like
the circle and the triad (and the square)22 structure the (meta-)logical process of thought by
facilitating the recollection of what is intrinsic to its own movement (the form of the
dialectic), this philosophical whole23 is likewise given shape, or determined, in philosophy by
the form of the Logic; while the logic is itself determined by the dialectic movement of the
negative. Hegel recognizes that the ground of thought relies on the possibility of
consciousness being led back “from the immediacy with which it began” and thus “to
absolute knowledge as its innermost truth.” (SL: 71) In fact,

This is true in still greater measure of absolute spirit which reveals itself as the concrete and final
supreme truth of all being, and which at the end of the development is known as freely
externalizing itself, abandoning itself to the shape of an immediate being—opening or unfolding
itself [sich entschliessend] into the creation of a world which contains all that fell into
development which preceded that result and which through this reversal of its position relatively
to its beginning is transformed into something dependent on the result as principle. The essential
requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but
rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and
the last is also the first. (SL: 71)

21
For example, in the Science of Logic Hegel writes: “To take numbers and geometrical figures (as the circle, triangle, etc.
have often been taken), simply as symbols (the circle, for example, as a symbol for eternity, the triangle, of the Trinity), is so
far harmless enough; but, on the other hand, it is foolish to fancy that in this way more is expressed than can be grasped and
expressed by thought. Whatever profound wisdom may be supposed to lie in such meagre symbols or in those richer products
of fantasy in the mythology of peoples and in poetry generally, it is properly for thought alone to make explicit for
consciousness the wisdom that lies only in them; and not in symbols, but in nature and mind. In symbols the truth is dimmed
and veiled by the sensuous element; only in the form of thought is it fully revealed to consciousness: the meaning is only the
thought itself.” (SL: 215) And in the 1805 Lectures on the History of Philosophy he has the following to say: “[T]here is
a...method of representing the universal content by means of numbers, lines and geometric figures. These are figurative, but
not concretely so, as in the case of myths. Thus it may be said that eternity is a circle, the snake that bites its own tail. This is
only an image, but Mind does not require such a symbol. There are people who value such methods of representation, but
these forms do not go far.” (LHP I:88; Werke 18:109-10) [Both quoted in Magee, 2001: 102-3]
22
Hegel wrote the following in his doctoral exam (Jena, 1801): “The square is the law of nature, the triangle of spirit.”
(G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets (1801) Preceded by the 12 Theses Defended on
August 27, 1801, trans. Pierre Adler, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal I (1987): 269-309; 276; Also Hegel, Sämtliche
Werke, vol. I, Erste Druckshriften (Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1928; Quoted in Magee, 2001: 101).
23
See also: Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in Outline, § 6. Cf. the Science of Logic: “By virtue of the nature of the
method just indicated, the science exhibits itself as a circle returning upon itself, the end being wound back into the
beginning, the simple ground, by the mediation; this circle is moreover a circle of circles, for each individual member as
ensouled by the method is reflected into itself, so that in returning into the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of an
new member. Links of this chain are the individual sciences [of logic, nature and spirit], each of which has an antecedent and
a successor—or, expressed more accurately, has only the antecedent and indicates its successor in its condition.” (SL: 842)

11
In other words, the dialectic movement of the Logic resembles the form of the eternal Logos;
in the Trinity this is the ‘utterance’ of the immanent essence of its Being (the ‘Father’ or ‘God
“in-Himself”), which is characterized above in terms of an “opening and unfolding.” Logos is
therefore the medium by which, in a manner of speaking, the ‘Godhead’24 becomes aware of
itself. Hegel writes: “In the Son, God is cognizant of Himself as God. He says to Himself: I
am God. The within-itself ceases to be negative.”25 The Science of Logic represents this
process. It is – as a written text – the ‘utterance’ of wisdom and its own recognition of itself.

Similarly, Nature in Hegel’s Logic embodies the abstract concept of the Trinitarian Son (itself
a personification of God); both (Logos, Logic) are understood in terms of the dialectic, or
negative movement of [speculative] thought, leading to the recognition of the ‘moment of
God,’ or Absolute Spirit. Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the “Spirit is this
power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the
negative is the magical power that converts it into being.” (PS: 32) This ‘tarrying with the
negative’ is the struggle that opens up the possibility of understanding the form and content
underlying Hegel’s work as a whole, which in this sense is an organic system of thought that
embodies the Urbilder of the triangle, circle, and square. But it is the recognition of the unity
of form and content underlying the Notion that these are meant to awaken, and this then is the
task of reason.26 “Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to
truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.” (PS §438) Thus
the dialectic movement of thought and the utterance of the Word represent similar
conceptions whose unity of form and content come together in the mediation of Logic/Logos.
This process culminates in the [Absolute] Spirit, which is the self-understanding of the Notion
of Logic/Logos.

24
This expression – meant to represent the Trinity – is also used by Rosenkranz in relating Hegel’s conceptualization of the
‘Triangle of Triangles.’ See: K. Rosenkranz, ‘Hegels ursprüngliches System 1798-1806’(Literarhistorisches Taschenbuch,
ed. R.E. Prutz, Vol. Ii. 1844) by Helmut Schneider, reprinted in Hegel-Studien, x. 1975, 133-5. Translation in: H.S. Harris,
Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983; 184-8.
25
Excerpt from Rosenkranz, ‘Hegels ursprüngliches System,’ (H.S. Harris, Night Thoughts: 186).
26
In the Encyclopedia Logic (EL: § 79-82) Hegel explains that understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft) are both
different aspects of the same movement of thought, mediated by dialectic. All three – understanding, dialectic (or negative
reason), and [positive] reason – constitute the ‘logical moments’ of thought. Specifically, “understanding sticks to the fixity
of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of
its own.” “The Speculative stage,” on the other hand, “or stage of Positive Reason, apprehends the unity of terms
(propositions) in their opposition - the affirmative, which is involved in their disintegration and in their transition.” Earlier
Hegel wrote, explaining the relation between the two: “The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which
the understanding has reduced everything.” (EL: § 32)

12
 This Logos is at the same time the teacher of wisdom for self-consciousness. For natural things
are upheld only in their laws; but self-conscious beings know also of these laws, and this is
wisdom. Thus the λογος is the high priest, who is the mediator between God and man, the Spirit
of the Godhead who teaches man — even the self-conscious return of God into Himself – into
that first unity of the primordial light. That is the pure intelligible world of truth itself, which is
nothing other than the Word of God. (LHP)

As we will see in the Phenomenology, the movement of thought results in the Notion
[Begriff], which is simply the recognition of consciousness of itself, in both form and content,
as this very movement of thought. In this manner, “the Notion, simply as thought, as a
universal, is the immeasurable abbreviation of the multitudes of particular things which are
vaguely present to intuition and pictorial thought.” (SL: 39) Insofar the Logos (i.e., the Word of
God and the science of logic) and the Notion are related to the Truth, we will have to pay
close attention to the [conception of] form that Hegel is invoking in both the Phenomenology
and the Logic; we will nevertheless address these issues more fully later on when we discuss,
among other things, the conception of the Notion [Begriff]. For the moment, we need only
keep in mind the following statement by Hegel in relation to what has already been discussed:

This Notion is not sensuously intuited or represented; it is solely an object, a product and content
of thinking, and is the absolute, self-subsistent object [Sache], 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 the
science of logic. (SL: 39)

Now that we have positioned the Logic in its proper context we can commence the real
business of understanding how it proceeds in its particular role as the Science of Spirit.

III

The Beginning of Philosophy

As previously mentioned, Hegel begins the Logic by addressing the need to justify a
beginning; a preoccupation he considered symptomatic of modern thought. In this context it is
also a response to critics, whom he takes to task for their lack of critical self-examination and
unwillingness to examine their own presuppositions. However, this evaluation also brings to

13
the fore a crucial aspect of his entire “system”: its confidence on the possibility of a
“presuppositionless” form of thinking, regardless of the historical circumstances of thought
(i.e., the presuppositions of its time). I agree wholeheartedly with Stephen Houlgate – from
whom I borrow the notion of “presuppositionless thinking” as an important Hegelian category
– that understanding this possibility is essential for a proper reading of Hegel’s Logic. But
Hegel himself is unequivocal: on the one hand, the beginning is logical insofar it is freely
determined by its own conditions, which is how ‘logic’ can exist as a pure science. While this
logical beginning is here presupposed, the proof will be borne by the Logic itself, i.e., by the
careful examination of the conditions and categories of thought as they make themselves
manifest to thought. (SL: 68-9) On the other hand, the beginning is also absolute, since it is the
necessary presupposition of science, “the ground of the entire science.” (SL: 70) It is upon this
premise of a pure and simple immediacy, “or rather merely immediacy itself,” (ibid.,) that
Hegel qualifies the presuppositionless beginning as the ground of science.

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure
immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is
also the last and the last is also the first. (SL: 71)

But this grounding unveils further assumptions and conditions that need to be considered. For
one, Hegel also specifies pure knowing – “the element of thought that is free and for itself”
(SL: 68) – as a factor qualifying the possibility of a logical beginning to philosophy;

accordingly, freedom is itself an element of thought, though this must be understood within
the science. On the other hand, the science, which will deal with the abstract form of pure
being by beginning with pure knowing, nevertheless “has for its presupposition the science of
manifested spirit, which contains and demonstrates the necessity, and so the truth, of the
standpoint occupied by pure knowing and of its mediation.” This ‘science of manifested
spirit’ is the Phenomenology of Spirit, which, like the Philosophy of Right,27 deals with a
concrete form of knowledge. But prior to being able to consider such concrete forms
scientifically, science must determine the nature of knowing from within the science itself,
which in the beginning requires “ridding oneself of all other reflections and opinions

27
See for example his comments in the preface to the PR about its relation to the Science of Logic: “Since I have fully
developed the nature of speculative knowledge in my Science of Logic, I have only occasionally added an explanatory
comment on procedure and method in the present outline. Given that the subject-matter is concrete and inherently of so
varied a nature, I have of course omitted to demonstrate and bring out the logical progression in each and every detail. …I
have presupposed a familiarity with scientific method; and…it will readily be noticed that the work as a whole, like the
construction [Ausbildung] of its parts, is based on the logical spirit. […] For what it deals with is science, and in science, the
content is essentially inseparable from the form.” (PR: 10)

14
whatever.” (SL: 69) It is in this way, by being able to consider simply “what is there before us,”
that Hegel considers the Logic to be pure science. But this also demonstrates Hegel’s view
regarding the particular functions of the ‘parts’ within his system, and their relation to what he
felt was the culmination of thought in his time – conscious knowledge of the unity of form
and content in rational thought – despite its problems with the philosophical beginning,
among other matters:

Inasmuch as this opposition [of immediacy and mediation], as related to thinking, to knowing, to
cognition, acquires the more concrete form of immediate or mediated knowledge, it is the nature
of cognition simply as such which is considered within the science of logic, while the more
concrete form of cognition falls to be considered in the philosophy of spirit and in the
phenomenology of spirit. But to want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science is to
demand that it be considered outside the science; outside the science this cannot be accomplished,
at least not in a scientific manner and such a manner is alone here in place. (SL: 68)

In addition to this, the beginning is mediated by pure knowing and its necessity, which
manifests itself through the science of consciousness (phenomenology), from which the Logic
determines its beginning. The Notion of science manifests itself as Logic through the simple
immediacy of pure knowing; which in its true expression is pure being, for just “as pure
knowing is to mean knowing as such, quite abstractly, so too pure being is to mean nothing
but being in general.” (SL: 69) Phenomenology is therefore the necessary step that leads
modern consciousness to this pure science as the “absolute truth of consciousness;” (SL: 68)
which in turn is the presupposition of logic. It is the immediacy of this very notion, which
appears before us as abstract being in the logic, that will be separated from other conceptual
presuppositions through the use of the dialectic (though reminiscent of the Platonic dialectic,
particularly the use of dairesis), though only to recollect the truth of what was apprehended
and understood as a unity, which then brings thought back to what it began with in the first
place: “Now starting from this determination of pure knowledge, all that is needed to ensure
that the beginning remains immanent in its scientific development is to consider, or rather,
ridding oneself of all other reflections and opinions whatever, simply to take up, what is there
before us.” (SL: 69)

I would, however, like to add two complications which I feel are understated: 1) the proper
manner of reading Hegel – in the context of modern hermeneutics – must itself be revised;
and 2) for this reason, we too, in reading Hegel, must begin by examining our own

15
preconceptions of Hegel, most of which is influenced by the more generalized presuppositions
of modern thought concerning the history of ideas, not to mention scientific theories meant to
explain the true nature of reality, human consciousness, or the absence of God. Put simply,
my argument places modern historical consciousness as a challenge obstructing the
possibility of presuppositionless thinking. Whereas Houlgate is correct in arguing – against
critics of the Logic – that to ask the question “what is ‘being’ according to Hegel?”
presupposes the determinacy of the very thing in question, the requirement that one approach
the “what” in question from a position of “indeterminate immediacy” (SL: 82/1; Houlgate: 40)
nevertheless remains problematic. And this is not lessened but compounded by what Houlgate
goes on to describe as Hegel’s “presuppositions of presuppositionless thinking.”28 Following
Houlgate’s account, I discern three inter-related categories: the hermeneutic, the historical,
and the linguistic presuppositions. The first is related to the willingness, and readiness, to
forget the learning and preconceptions that determine one’s presuppositions (Houlgate 2006: 60),
and to instead let go and allow oneself to be guided by the thought of pure being (instead of
trying to determine where thought should lead). In the second presupposition we find the
social preconditions of speculative philosophy, viz. an attachment and commitment to
freedom and critical self-reflexivity. Here we also find the important role that religion
(Houlgate doesn’t mention art) plays in the development of speculative philosophy. And in
the third, speculative philosophy must rely on words and the “concepts of reflection” that is
mediated by language if it is to determine any category of thought.

Now, with regard to all three presuppositions, Houlgate agrees that they do indeed describe
determinate conceptions that precede, but are consequently taken for granted by, speculative
philosophy. However, his argument is that these are not “founding presuppositions;” i.e. they
“do not predetermine the course or the outcome of speculative logic.” (Houlgate 2006: 71, 78)
Instead, it is by the process itself that we are able to determine the categories of thought from
the pure being of thought (indeterminate immediacy). Likewise, it is through this process that
the limitations of language and concepts are made apparent. The mediation of language, albeit
foundational for thinking and the communication of thought in general, is not necessarily
foundational for the determination of the category of pure thought, even if – as Houlgate
concedes – “pure thought develops autonomously in language and thanks to language.”

28
See Chapter Three, “The Presuppositions of Presuppositionless Thinking,” in particular the section on “The Historical
Conditions of Hegelian Logic,” in: Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, Indiana: Purdue University Press
(2006).

16
(Houlgate 2006: 79) For this reason, prior to engaging in speculative logic (and likewise the

reading of the Science of Logic), presuppositionless thinking itself also requires suspension of
all notions of abstract mediation, including language. This does not mean that we ignore these
abstractions, nor the conditions (natural, historical) that appear to precede thought (and which
are consequently taken for granted at the beginning), only that we “tarry with the negative” –
i.e. the dialectical process – in a focused yet self-reflexive manner. But what, exactly, does
thinking without presuppositions mean in practice?

IV

Thinking about Being and Becoming

The Science of Logic is divided in three main sections: the doctrine of Being, the doctrine of
Essence, and the doctrine of the Notion. As a whole, the Notion of logic is the Logic, and its
true character (“the absolutely True” [SL: 59]) will be to discipline consciousness into
apprehending the Notion as universal being. To do this, however, it needs to begin with being
itself, or more specifically, pure being.

I do not disagree with Houlgate that one of Hegel’s most radical yet innovative conceptual
advancements has been to think seriously and thoroughly the need to begin his science of
logic – a necessity for modern philosophy as a whole – with presuppositionless thought. I
likewise agree that there is a difference between the presuppositions that are taken for granted
by thought in its attempt to reach the ‘immediate indeterminacy’ of pure thought, and the
presuppositions that lead thought astray during the process of self-differentiation; e.g. pre-
conceived notions of being, temporality, or rationality, all of which remain abstract unless
developed and determined by Hegel’s speculative (but presuppositionless!) method.

However, I feel that Houlgate is too hasty in alleviating all the challenges brought to light by
the presuppositions, and therefore in the implicit assumption that Hegel was therefore not
concerned with these. To begin with, and as Houlgate also points out, despite Hegel’s
assurance that the requirement of understanding is a capacity shared by every rational

17
person,29 the whole process nevertheless does require great effort and self-discipline.30 I think
that we must keep in mind that Hegel’s philosophy is not what one may describe as
popularphilsophie, even if he claimed to be presenting a universal process as it had become
manifest in his time. On the other hand, I think that Houlgate is correct in pointing out that
Hegel’s logic is also “not some esoteric exercise in mystical thinking that can only by grasped
by specially gifted initiates.” (Houlgate 2005: 43) However, being explicit,31 even if true, does
not dispel the problem at hand. In this context it is still relevant to ask to what extent Hegel
sought to create an exoteric work free from the esoteric proclivities of other thinkers of his
time – Romantics, mystics, intuitionists and empiricists – claiming to be philosophers.

Though we should not take for granted the possibility that Hegel was describing a mode of
thought that may or may not reach its universal actualization at a later time,32 the problem of
interpretation proves to be a more serious challenge due to the unfamiliar form Hegel’s
philosophy exhibits to the contemporary point of view. Even if we accept that this dissonance
presides solely at the aesthetic level, and that rationally and logically speaking Hegelian
philosophy is truly accessible to all rational beings, including postmodernists, we must still
get over the extra layer of historicity separating Hegel’s “own time comprehended in
thoughts” (PR: 21) and our own. We are therefore forced to deal – prior to any reading of
Hegel – with historical consciousness as an intrinsic element of the modern perspective. So it
is not only a question of reading Hegel – taking seriously his arguments and honestly
following his line of reasoning – and determining whether or not his methodology is
internally consistent. We too – in light of the particularities of Hegel’s own historical context
– must ask ourselves if we are properly understanding what he is saying at all.

Secondly, I believe that Hegel was just as concerned about the process leading up to the
indeterminate immediacy of thought in the beginning – i.e. pure reflection (SL: 99) – as he was
about stipulating the movement and self-determination of thought thereafter. In fact, I believe
that not only was Hegel aware of this hermeneutic problem – which I’ve demonstrated with
the help of Houlgate and his analysis of Hegel’s presuppositions – and took it seriously, he

29
Cf. Houlgate’s comments on the esoteric/exoteric distinction, see: Houlgate 2006: 40, 66.
30
Houlgate warns that it is also uncertain how we are to understand the relation between speculative logic and
phenomenology, so as to avoid committing the error of “turning speculative logic into a phenomenological logic.” (Houlgate
2006: 273, ‘Why Being and Nothing Move?’)
31
Houlgate includes a quote from the Phenomenology that clearly states Hegel’s view of scientific understanding in exoteric
terms (PS 7-8/20; Houlgate 2006: 66).
32
Though this question is in itself irrelevant to the given argument, it will be important in relation to the Philosophy of Right
discussed later.

18
also (pace Houlgate) consciously struggled with the implications. The fact that he is
concerned with the scientific grounding of his philosophy should not only be seen as a simple
commitment to a method, no matter how constitutive and foundational to thought in general.
There is both a personal and political thrust animating his project. Obviously, such a
statement is itself a presupposition, and without a doubt unwarranted without making the case
according to what Hegel himself has written (or is known to have said). The question is, how
are we to commence this reading of Hegel while taking into consideration what I have just
written.

Natural vs. Modern Consciousness - The Historicity of Thought

Before beginning the task of reading Hegel we must therefore consider what a beginning
without presuppositions (for contemporary philosophy) entails. To be precise, we need to
recognize how in order to understand Hegel’s epistemology, we will have to take into
consideration Hegel’s historical self-awareness, and his own appreciation of the state of
thought of his time, from our point of view. To be fair, Houlgate does thoroughly discuss
elements of the hermeneutic problem, comparing the important criticisms leveled against
Hegel by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida – among others. But all
of these are nevertheless instantiations fully within the scope of Hegel’s immanent logic,33
regardless of their criticism against its possibility, or the challenges brought about in the use
of language. In other words, because of their focus upon the categories of ‘being’ – viz. the
preconditions of the thought of being (Houlgate: 109) – they all remain caught up on a supra-
historical level, and thus unable to reconcile the hermeneutic problem that the notion of
philosophy as one discipline among many in the history of ideas presents. This in turn begs
the question as to how we are to justify the need for philosophical logic while at the same
time distinguishing such an analysis from an investigation into the logic of history, including
philosophy. In fact, such a metaphilosophical perspective is to a large degree the result of the
modern temporalist framework which grew in the wake of Romanticism’s engagement with
Enlightenment philosophy and the rise of modern scientific relativism.

33
Hegel, SL: 582; Houlgate, 2006: 100.

19
In an article34 dealing with Romantic historiography in relation to the esoteric tradition,
Wouter J. Hanegraaff outlines some of the differing historical perspectives concerning the
nature of the Enlightenment and Romanticism that are germane to our discussion (keeping in
mind that he places these within a context that also takes esotericism into account). In
comparing the works of Arthur O. Lovejoy, René Wellek, Morse Peckham, M.H. Abrams,
and Ernest Lee Tuveson,35 Hanegraaff isolates three heuristic elements – organicism,
imagination, and temporalism – that their debate on the nature of Romanticism bring to the
fore. It is not necessary to describe the differences and distinctions that Hanegraaff presents us
with. Suffice it to say that what we see in Romanticism is what Lovejoy referred to as the
“temporalizing of the Chain of Being.” The Platonic Chain, simply put, is an organicist
hierarchy based on the Platonic Idea of Ideas (Idea of the Good) meant to represent the
necessary ascending gradations of perfection, culminating in the ens perfectissimum – the
uncreated end to which all creations are necessarily bound. In this sense the supreme Idea
serves as the ontological background of the forms found in existence, a ‘plenum formarum’
(‘plurality of forms’) that supplies in its infinite perfection the necessary limitations of all
forms of beings partaking of its content. The problem that this formulation had presented
thereafter, including those engaged in Enlightened discourses, was that such a strict system
left no space for free creativity. The Counter-Enlightenment reaction to this (affirmed by
Lovejoy, Peckham and Abrams) has been a shift in perspective in attempting to maintain the
possibility of an infinite kosmos as divine emanation (Chain of Being), while combining this
with the possibility of change in terms of a progressive temporal movement that itself, in its
intrinsic distinctiveness, is an expression of the unifying essence of Being and experience. In
other words, the Neo-Platonist concept of a ‘Chain of Being’ produced in this context a
panentheistic ‘diversitarian holism’ – i.e. Romantic organicism according to Lovejoy – that
coalesced with a newly emerging temporalist mindset. The latter Hanegraaff describes as
‘historicism’ in order to distinguish it from the more skeptical and relativist ‘historism’ found
in many Counter-Enlightenment proponents (in opposition to ‘dogmatic rationalism’), while
also conserving a belief in ‘universal laws’ (a distinctive feature upheld by many pro-

34
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Romanticism and the Esoteric Connection,” in: Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff
(eds.), Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998. See
also: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought’, E.J.
Brill, Leiden: 1996; p. 411-421, 462-470.
35
His selection of these authors is based on the similarity of their conclusions – regarding the ‘esoteric connection’ of
Romanticism – to that of other French and German studies, despite the limited familiarity of the latter on these authors, as
well as their limited influence on English research in general.

20
Enlightenment advocates), albeit for the sake of a realm only accessible to a supra-rational
faculty.36

Keeping this in mind, I nevertheless think that it is indeed possible to understand Hegel’s
conceptions and the historicity of his science, though to do so we should return to the
Phenomenology for a more careful look at both the science of the ‘experience of
consciousness’ and the beginning of the logic in relation to the ‘movement of thought.’
However, because it is precisely this perspective that we must then proceed to discard before
even beginning to follow Hegel and his development of the science of logic, we will in fact
have to consider this problem after having first come to terms with the problem of the logical
beginning. In other words, if we are to drop all assumptions of what it means to be logical,
scientific, rational, speculative, and historical, we will first have to consider the
presuppositions of thought by means of our modern historical consciousness.

The reason for this approach need not lie in current debates between historicists and
hermeneutic philosophers; Hegel’s remarks on the state of affairs of scientific thought – e.g.
in the Logic he writes that the “advance of culture generally, and of the sciences in particular,
gradually brings into use higher relationships of thought” (SL: 32) – before the formal
beginning of the Science of Logic itself precludes such an approach. Hegel here not only
introduces his own bearing on the matter – proposing a thorough analysis of the categories of
thought – but more importantly, he implicitly states how he has attempted to do this; these
comments are part of the second preface written (along with the added revisions to Book One:
The Doctrine of Being) in 1831, one year before his death (he died before revising the other
two books). On the one hand, these statements demonstrate a commitment to express the
thought of his time in the form in which it can best understand its own content; a unification
of thought he felt was the culmination of his time. Although “the loftier business of logic
therefore is to clarify these categories and in them to raise mind to freedom and truth,” (SL: 37)

36
Hanegraaff develops this distinction in the context of Isaiah Berlin’s dualistic framework of an Enlightenment/Counter-
Enlightenment based on the dichotomy of rationalism vs. irrationalism. This dichotomy, Hanegraaff points out, is ultimately
derived from another dichotomy: universalism vs. relativism/scepticism. This division is unwarranted, according to
Hanegraaff, because it does not take into account the esoteric mindset of some justifiably placed within the Counter-
Enlightenment camp who nonetheless advocated ‘reason’ from a non-relativist perspective. Hanegraaff concludes that the
rise of a ‘historical consciousness’ should be seen as developing from the relativist tendencies found in the Counter-
Enlightenment, more typical of Romanticism, while within this movement (Counter-Enlightenment) it was the esotericists
that sought to preserve universalism albeit in a ‘supra-rational’ template. As such, it is within the Counter-Enlightenment
itself that an absolute distinction should be made in terms of relativism (Romantic) and non-relativism (esoteric traditions).
While it is in (relativist) ‘historism’ that we see the clearest impetus towards the secularization of temporality which is a
distinctive trait of modern consciousness, ‘historicism’ nevertheless stands as the perspective that bring these two together.
See: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 411-415.

21
Hegel also warns that “the determinations of thought, primarily as forms which are distinct
from the matter of thought and only attached to it” reveal an attitude that is “intrinsically
inadequate for the attainment of truth.” (SL: 38) We should therefore – in beginning without
presuppositions – be particularly attentive of the distinct forms which govern our own
intuitions, so as to better discern the formal moments of thought being determined in the
science of logic. Critical thought should put aside the tendency to think: “what at first to
ordinary reflection is, as content, divorced from form, cannot in fact be formless, cannot be
devoid of inner determination.” (SL: 39) In so doing, thought is then better equipped to
understand that “content in its self possesses form,” and that it is actually “through form alone
that it has soul and meaning, and that it is form itself which is transformed only into the
semblance of a content, hence into the semblance of something external to this semblance.”
(SL: 39) Therefore, insofar “truth is the declared object and aim of logic,” (SL: 38) it is this that

Hegel believes to have revealed as “the moment of the form as totality,” a moment which
Hegel also refers to as the Notion.37 Apprehending the form of the Notion is therefore crucial
to understanding its truth.

Recall that Hegel speaks of a movement that is only recognized once it has been made
apparent, i.e. objective, which only comes to pass by the activity of the dialectic. Now, this is
only possible insofar the categories of thought, and thought (Logic) itself, carry within them
(i.e. immanently) the essence of their own being, which also explains the circularity of the
Logic. Earlier in the Phenomenology Hegel explained the dialectic movement (“labour of the
negative”) as “this reflection in otherness within itself” and “the process of its own becoming,
the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by
being worked out to its end, is it actual.” (PS: 10) Later, in the ‘Introduction,’ Hegel writes:
“Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which
consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is
precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung].” (PS: 55) In other words, reality [actuality],
for Hegel, is Spirit: “Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to
truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.” (PS §438) Spirit
should therefore be understood as the [dialectic] unity of consciousness [thought] and the
experience of consciousness [being] in rational self-consciousness [Reason]. This, explains

37
“This Notion is not sensuously intuited or represented; it is solely an object, a product and content of thinking, and is the
absolute, self-subsistent object [Sache], 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 the science of logic.” (SL: 39)

22
Hegel, is the “essence, or the object of consciousness,” (PS: 55) while the spiritual essence of
self-consciousness is the actualization of its awareness of itself. This is also Spirit, though in
this case it is the actuality of the “ethical substance,” i.e. the content of the true Spirit: the
ethical order of the “world as itself” (PS §444)38: “It is the self of actual consciousness to which
it stands opposed, or rather which it opposes to itself as an objective, actual world, but a world
which has completely lost the meaning for the self of something alien to it, just as the self has
completely lost the meaning of a being-for-self separated from the world, whether dependent
on it or not.” (PS §439) Of course, the goal of the Logic will be to re-establish this meaning,
though this does not mean the Phenomenology does not partake of this true Spirit. In fact,
because it is part of the “circle that presupposes its end as its goal,” it is also a “moment of the
True.” More important for our consideration, is that the Phenomenology, being the experience
of Spirit, is necessary insofar it represents the path39 of modern consciousness towards the
Logic and Philosophy of Right:

Spirit, being the substance and the universal, self-identical, and abiding essence, is the unmoved
solid ground and starting-point for the action of all, and it is their purpose and goal, the in-itself
of every self-consciousness expressed in thought. […] All previous shapes of consciousness
abstract forms of it. They result from Spirit analyzing itself, distinguishing its moments, and
dwelling for a while with each. This isolating of those moments presupposes Spirit itself and
subsists therein; in other words, the isolation exists only in Spirit which is a concrete existence.
(PS §439-40)

This also helps us understand the distinction between the Phenomenology and the Logic: the
former, being the “appearance of Spirit” (PS: 22), represents the “way to Science” (PS: 54), and
as such, is “the True in the form of the True,” (PS: 22) while the Logic is “the Science of the
True in its true shape” (ibid.,), i.e., as the movement of the whole. In other words, the Logic is
the movement of the moments of self-conscious experience as given shape in the
Phenomenology. It recollects actuality as it is by grasping [understanding] the necessity
underlying its movement (PS: 56), i.e. by understanding that “the way to Science is itself
already Science,” (ibid.,) and subsequently “organizing itself in this element [i.e. movement]

38
We should keep in mind that Hegel is speaking here of an ethical order in the context of the phenomenology of spirit, not
the philosophy of spirit (of which the Philosophy of Right is itself an element of). The ‘truth’ that he alludes to in these
passages are therefore still indeterminate, i.e. unscientific, for they are based on the very ‘presuppositions’ that his Science of
Logic will eventually have to clarify.
39
It is not, however, a requirement for the possibility of speculative logic. As Hegel explains: “To enter into philosophy,
therefore, calls for no other preparations, no further reflections or points of connection.” (SL: 72) The crucial element
underlying the relation between these works is not causal, but the mediation of thought coming to terms with logic and its
own historicity.

23
into a whole.” (PS: 22) So, although the Phenomenology seems only concerned with the
“appearance of Spirit,” it nevertheless deals with the object and essence of consciousness,40
which is why it is still nevertheless a Science; i.e., “the Science of the experience of
consciousness.” (PS: 56)

So what is the relation between the conception of Being – which in the Logic begins with
simple immediacy as the true expression of pure being (SL: 69) – and consciousness? Well, in
the previous chapter we saw that Hegel had stated that pure being – although not an
immediacy – is the essence of sense-certainty (ibid.,). Knowledge of pure being likewise needs
negation and mediation. But to understand how we can get from pure being to the truth of
being, we need to understand that our own understanding is being mediated by language,
which Hegel describes as “the more truthful” because “in it, we ourselves directly refute what
we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language
expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say or express in words,
a sensuous being that we mean.” (PS: 60) There is therefore a relation between language and
the learning from experience that Hegel is alluding to, and which makes possible the
transition from a “natural consciousness” – as exemplified by the ancients (PS: 19) – to the
self-consciousness of the True – i.e. truth of being – which we will see develop itself in
Hegel’s speculative logic. As Hegel writes in the preface of the Phenomenology: “The
Science of this pathway is the Science of the experience which consciousness goes
through…’’ (PS: 21)

A good example of this is a passage from the Phenomenology. I will quote it at length:

The fact that the object represented becomes the property of pure self-consciousness, its elevation
to universality in general, is only one aspect of formative education, not its fulfillment—The

40
See also Hegel’s comments in the preface to the Phenomenology: “Philosophy, on the other hand, has to do, not with
unessential determinations, but with a determination in so far as it is essential; its element and content are not the abstract or
nonfactual, but the actual, that which posits itself and is alive within itself—existence within its own Notion. It is the process
which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth. This
truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one
might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the
True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regarded as something on the other side,
positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is “in itself” [i.e.
subsists intrinsically], and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. The True is the Bacchanalian revel
in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much
transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than
determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moment, as they are negative and evanescent. In the
whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is
preserved as something that recollects itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is jus as
immediately existence.” (PS: 27-8.)

24
 manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the
proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test at every
point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything it came across, it made itself into a
universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds
the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving-
forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of
the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in
purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a
substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing
determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it
spiritual life. But it is far harder to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state than to do so with
sensuous existence. The reason for this was given above: fixed thoughts have the ‘I’, the power of
the negative, or pure actuality, for the substance and element of their existence, whereas sensuous
determinations have only powerless, abstract immediacy, or being as such. Thoughts become
fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment, or when the pure
certainty of self abstracts from itself—not by leaving itself out, or setting itself aside, but by
giving up the fixity of its self-positing, by giving up not only the fixity of the pure concrete, which
the ‘I’ itself is, in contrast with its differentiated moments which, posited in the element of pure
thinking, share the unconditioned nature of the ‘I’. Through this movement the pure thoughts
become Notions, and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements, circles, spiritual
essences, which is what their substance is. (PS: 20)

This quote is long, but worth treating in full. Not only does Hegel refer here to the Notion
[Begriff] as thought itself determined by movement, but more importantly he refers to a
recognition of ‘inner immediacy’ mediated by ‘differentiated moments.’ More specifically,
Hegel draws a distinction between modern and natural consciousness by localizing the latter
in terms of time and space, and the appearances (or phenomena) through which it recognizes
itself as immediate and sensuous experience – i.e. in abstract thought, not yet in the Notion. In
effect, Hegel then posits a distinctly historical consciousness as the form of modern
consciousness, further making the essence of this Notion the moment of self-consciousness
itself when it recognizes its identity with its own historical consciousness, and as such, Spirit,
or more explicitly, the truth underlying this historically mediated form of thought. For in this
context we should recall Hegel’s explanation of Spirit as one of the triads of the ‘Godhead,’
or, in other terms, the self-consciousness of God in Nature (Son) contemplating Himself. This
knowledge of Himself as the Absolute is, in History – i.e. the other side of Spirit’s Becoming

25
into Time – the representation of the truth of the Notion; it is an element of the existence of
the True, or ‘knowledge of the Absolute.’ (PS: §6) It is not the Notion of the True.

A capital misunderstanding which prevails on this point is that the natural principle or the
beginning which forms the starting point in the natural evolution or in the history of the
developing individual, is regarded as the truth, and the first in the Notion. Now in the order of
nature, intuition or being are undoubtedly first, or are the condition for the Notion, but they are
not on that account the absolutely unconditioned; on the contrary, their reality is sublated in the
Notion and with it, too, the illusory show they possessed of being the conditioning reality. When
it is a question, not of truth but merely of history, as in pictorial and phenomenal thinking, we
need not of course go beyond merely narrating that we start with feelings and intuitions and that
from the manifold of these the understanding extracts a universality or an abstraction and
naturally requires for this purpose the said substrate of feelings and intuitions which, in this
process of abstraction, remains for representation in the same complete reality with which it first
presented itself. But philosophy is not meant to be a narration of happenings but a cognition of
what is true in them, and further, on the basis of this cognition, to comprehend that which, in the
narrative, appears as a mere happening. (SL: 588)

But again, because the Truth, or Whole, is the “process of its own becoming, the circle that
presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked
out to its end, is it actual,” (PS: §18) the historical consciousness of modernity is the truth of
the Notion. In other words, modern consciousness, through speculative philosophy, is able to
determine the “rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole,” which is in fact the
very same movement underlying the Logic (i.e. thought) itself. Hegel describes this rhythm as
the Notion’s ‘logical necessity,’ (PS: §56) and equates it with speculative philosophy. As we
already know, what is ‘logical’ is related to the self-awareness of thought as the dialectical
movement of knowledge (Truth). ‘Necessity,’ however, somehow instigates this dialectical
movement, and as such is the other ‘moment’ of the Notion itself. To the natural
consciousness, this ‘moment’ is Existence itself, since it lacks ‘the ready-made abstract form’
by which it can distinguish sense-experience from a pure essence. In other words, it misses
the Notion of the Absolute as an abstract beginning. (SL: 70) Insofar the natural consciousness
of the ancients was able to determine “the actuality and the movement of the life of truth” (PS:
§47) beyond appearances (think of Plato’s myth of the cave), without an absolute ground (SL:

67) it would always fail to preserve the truth of this experience (see also §108). According to

Hegel, it is only the Absolute Notion that allows the ‘single shapes of Spirit’ or moments of

26
the Notion to persist, or be ‘recollected,’ for it is in the immanent movement of speculative
thinking that thought recognizes the ‘logical necessity’ of the dialectic motion of thought (i.e.
the Notion) itself, and thereby identifies with it. This unity of consciousness and Notion as the
Absolute, which the Phenomenology recollects, is then picked up and continued by the Logic:

The beginning is logical in that it is to be made in the element of thought that is free and for itself,
in pure knowing. It is mediated because pure knowing is the ultimate, absolute truth of
consciousness. In the Introduction it was remarked that the phenomenology of spirit is the science
of consciousness, the exposition of it, and that consciousness has for result the Notion of science,
i.e. pure knowing. Logic, then, has for its presupposition the science of manifested spirit, which
contains and demonstrates the necessity, and so the truth, of the standpoint occupied by pure
knowing and of its mediation. (SL: 68)

Hegel later draws a historical connection between this beginning of thought and the natural
consciousness:

The thinking or figurate conception which has before it only a specific, determinate being must be
referred back to the previously-mentioned beginning of the science made by Parmenides who
purified and elevated his own figurative conception, and so, too, that of posterity, to pure thought,
to being as such and thereby created the element of science. What is the first in the science had of
necessity to show itself historically as the first. And we must regard the Eleatic One or being as
the first step in the knowledge of thought… (SL: 88)

Parmenides’ beginning, however, is in itself not logical for it does not develop immanently
from consciousness recognizing its unity with “what is there before us,” (SL: 69) and
consequently being as a ‘simple immediacy,’ i.e. as ‘pure being.’ As such, the Eleatic
beginning is not absolute; it lacks a mediated ground from which the dialectic movement can
originate and return to. This is not the case for the ‘speculative nature of the philosophical
beginning.’ Here the investigation by ‘consciousness’ – i.e. the science of logic – into
absolute truth is in turn an investigation into “what is primary and true” for philosophy. It is
an acknowledgment of how the very treatment of ‘truth’ as a hypothetical problem in turn
reveals the ‘progressive’ nature of the philosophical quest. More importantly, though, is that it
makes philosophy a necessary component of the very inquiry that inspired it, which is why
Hegel argues that “it is equally necessary to consider as result that into which the movement
returns as into its ground.” (SL: 71)

27
What Hegel specifies as the “ground” is therefore the very same consciousness that mediates
its development: i.e. it is both the quest that defines it and the primary truth that inspires it:
“Thus consciousness on its onward path from the immediacy with which it began is led back
to absolute knowledge as its innermost truth. This last, the ground, is then also that from
which the first proceeds, that which at first appeared as an immediacy.” (ibid.) This conception
of ‘ground’ is important because, although Hegel plainly states that the investigation into the
philosophical beginning does not require any other ‘preparations’ or ‘reflections,’ he is very
clearly demonstrating how the historically self-conscious approach to philosophy not only
sustains the investigation into the ‘simple immediacy’ of pure being, but helps reveal an
intrinsic element to the investigation itself: that which grounds its quest for truth is also the
necessary component that determines it and the ‘primary truth’.41 In fact, it is the
indeterminateness that the concept of pure being presupposes that also mediates it; through it
thought assumes the form of a unity that in turn distinguishes itself from its content, which
appears as “something absolutely mediated,” in terms of a “pure immediacy.” Thought
therefore withdraws in order to continue this process of self-determination, itself the result of
a consciousness which has identified itself with this process itself (i.e. the “absolute ground”;
SL: 455).

Although the dialectic movement between form and content helps determine the essence of
philosophy, Hegel’s ‘grounding’ of the science of logic in terms of an inquiry into pure being
– which requires the positing of an abstract conception of pure immediacy as the starting point
of its investigations – also effectively reveals that this movement is itself a sublation of the
dialectic relation between philosophy as the science of logic and its historical consciousness.
However, such a view may be tempted to posit the pure beginning of science as an
indeterminate ‘nothing’ distinct from a determinate being opposed to being. Such a
characterization as the beginning of thought, Hegel argues, would be “wholly form without
any content.” It would express an “undifferentiated unity” that would merely formalize the
descriptions and definitions produced by such an analysis of the beginning. It would also end
up presupposing its subject-matter in the same manner as “other sciences,” thereby taking for
granted the concrete form of immediate or mediated knowledge that will determine the results

41
“But because it is the result which appears as the absolute ground, this progress in knowing is not something provisional,
or problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content. The said
beginning is neither an arbitrary and merely provisional assumption, nor is it something which appears to be arbitrarily and
tentatively presupposed, but which is subsequently shown to have been properly made the beginning…” (SL: 72)

28
of its analysis. The error lies precisely in confusing the relation with the concrete object –
which is presupposed as known – with immediacy, for it also encloses the process of
mediation in terms of this internal relation, thus subjecting its determinations to the effects of
contingency and arbitrariness (SL: 74). This also goes for “the beginning with the ego” that he
acknowledges had recently become popular, and, we must assume, would also hold in the
case of a ‘historical consciousness.’

However, this is only the case for the science of logic insofar it is concerned with what
constitutes its beginning, “the determinate reality in thought of what is inner and with the
determinateness possessed by such an inner in this reality.” (SL: 77) Anything “enunciated”
beyond the “actually present of intellectual intuition” is something concrete and “contains
within itself diverse determinations.” (ibid.) This is not the case for the science of logic
because it is a “true, intellectual intuition” that forcibly rejects mediation. This cannot be said,
however, of the Science of Logic, for as a written account of the science of logic, it is an
enunciation “above and beyond simple immediacy” that now partakes of the process of
mediation. This is crucial, for it means that if we are to succeed in setting aside as a concern
for the science of logic “what is present only in principle or as something inner, but rather
with the determinate reality in thought of what is inner and with the determinateness
possessed by such an inner in this reality,” then we must be willing to reject the Science of
Logic as itself the “starting-point” of a ‘science of logic’ since it is itself a concrete object that
is both “entangled in the world of appearance” and it “retains the perennial character” of
subjective ego, both of which inevitably determine the process of mediation ‘enunciated’ as
an immediate beginning, but which goes beyond. It is therefore more akin to the exposition of
a ‘concrete beginning’ precisely because it does not “enter into our knowing as thought” but
as a written account on thought. This is not to say that its content is not grounded by the true
essence of concrete knowledge; it only means that the unity of this content with the concrete
form of cognition will need to take this into account, particularly in the philosophy of spirit
and the phenomenology of spirit. (SL: 68)

Based upon these remarks, we can then interpret Hegel’s comments on natural and modern
consciousness as an attempt to demonstrate 1) that natural consciousness and modern
consciousness are moments in the same movement of thought and that, 2) the historical
consciousness of modern consciousness preserves and is the inner being of the experience of
which natural consciousness is also a moment of. Consequently, awareness of the Absolute

29
Notion in the Logic is, in the context of the Phenomenology, the recollection, or inwardizing,
of that which the “self-knowing Spirit” experiences as “a conscious, self-mediating process”:
History. (PS: §808) Considering that the ‘simple immediacy’ of what is present is the ground of
absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology,42 we should also be able to interpret historically
grounded modern consciousness along the same lines as a necessity of pure knowing.
However, it is not pure being – i.e. the immediate being of natural consciousness – that
modern consciousness must confront as “what is there before us,” but pure thought [knowing]
and the necessity of a historical consciousness that mediates it. It is in this manner that we, in
Hegelian terms, recognize the Notion as the Absolute itself; in this movement, or circle, it is
the ground of absolute knowledge, and as thought, the Absolute Truth. Absolute Spirit
therefore represents the genealogical development of ontology itself;43 but through the
mediation of the Notion, the unity of natural and modern consciousness is itself revealed as a
moment in the dialectic movement of thought which – by virtue of being free and necessary –
is also the absolute truth of the unity of consciousness and experience. “The Notion is the
principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised,”44 Hegel tells us in the
Encylopedia Logic, it is “the principle of all life.” (EL: §160) But in the Science of Logic, Hegel
adds that

Life, or organic nature, is the stage of nature at which the Notion emerges, but as blind, as
unaware of itself and unthinking; the Notion that is self-conscious and thinks pertains solely to
spirit. But the logical form of the Notion is independent of its non-spiritual, and also of its
spiritual, shapes. The necessary premonition on this point has already been given in the
Introduction. It is a point that must not wait to be established within logic itself but must be
cleared up before that science is begun. (SL: 586)

This ‘necessary premonition’ was, if we recall, being as the beginning of the science of logic.
But the pure determination of being, in marking the transition to the logic of essence, also
transforms the absolute as the ground of thought itself. Moreover, this thought is a moment in

42
“For the self-knowing Spirit, just because it grasps its Notion, is the immediate identity with itself which, in its difference,
is the certainty of immediacy, or sense-consciousness—the beginning from which we started. This release of itself from the
form of its Self is the supreme freedom and assurance of its self-knowledge” (PS: § 806)
43
Cf. “… in the science of the Notion its content and character can be guaranteed solely by the immanent deduction which
contains its genesis and which already lies behind us.” (SL: 582)
44
Hegel in the Science of Logic speaks of the immanent dialectic of the substance which leads to the Notion as “the sole and
genuine refutation of Spinozism.” The “genesis of the Notion” is therefore “the unveiling of the substance,” which in its unity
“is its relation of necessity.” But, continues Hegel, “this unity is only an inner necessity; in positing itself through the
moment of absolute negativity it becomes a manifested or posited identity, and thereby the freedom which is the identity of
the Notion.” (SL: 581)

30
its own determination as thought, that in so far it recognizes its essence in the dialectic of
abstract negativity as reason, also recollects that it is from the immanent movement of the
Notion that “being is posited as existence and the mediating agent of this being is posited as
the ground.” (SL: 99, 125) In fact, Hegel explains in the Logic that it is by the mediation of the
ground that essence is determined and given form as the movement of reflection, (SL: 444)
while later he writes that the ground contains the content of this mediation. (SL: 455) As such,
this “immediacy [essential negativity or pure form] that is mediated by ground and condition
and is self-identical through the sublating mediation, is Existence.” (SL: 478) This explains how
the “essential relation” of essence and Existence is the movement of thought positing and
identifying itself with the unity of whole and parts, or inner and outer, which is also the “truth
of Appearance.” If we consider his explanation about how the “essential relation, in this
identity of Appearance with the inner or with essence, has determined itself into actuality,”
(SL: 528) it would seem that both the immanent logic of science and the Science of Logic

require the external reflection of its formal moments – i.e. actuality, possibility and necessity
– only to return each “expression or utterance” into itself. This implies an ambiguous but
nevertheless dialectic relation between the Logic and both the Phenomenology and Philosophy
of Right (the latter being an element of the ‘philosophy of spirit’) which will depend largely
not only on the “concrete form of cognition” considered by the latter works, but also whatever
is enunciated as ‘actually present’ in actuality.

But like I said, Hegel is not positing an ‘empirical,’ or ‘historical,’ transition as the essential
moment(s) from which the logic developed. Instead, he is demonstrating that it is the Notion
itself that has been realizing itself throughout. This realization, then, is the necessity
underlying the transition from natural consciousness to a modern consciousness capable of
knowing its truth in this movement of thought. “Consciousness,” writes Hegel, “is explicitly
the Notion of itself.” This is the knowledge of the truth of experience that consciousness
recollects as a result of the abstract form of natural consciousness from which the Notion
turns itself against. Although Hegel characterizes the initial stage, necessary for this
realization of the Notion, as the “loss of itself” that sets it upon the “pathway of doubt, or
more precisely as the way of despair,” this path is also “the conscious insight into the untruth
of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the
unrealized Notion.” As a result, “the series of configurations which consciousness goes

31
through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness
itself to the standpoint of Science.”45

This ‘pathway of doubt’ that Hegel is referring to, however, should not be confused with the
simple ‘resolve’ not to adhere to established conventions but instead seek out ‘what is true’ by
oneself, nor with the one-sided skepticism that, like nihilism, gets lost in the experience of the
negation, such as the realist skeptics who nevertheless remain attached to the ‘facts’ of sense
experience. On the contrary, the skepticism that Hegel is referring to is “directed against the
whole range of phenomenal consciousness,” (PS: §78) including the aforementioned
skepticisms, which are part of the path by which it examines and determines what is true. “For
it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions,
regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the
consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and
hampered, so that it is, in fact, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake.” (PS: §78)
In other words, it is necessary for skepticism to be confronted with negation or internal
contradiction, for “it is only when it is taken as the result of that from which it emerges, that it
is, in fact, the true result; in that case it is itself a determinate nothingness, one which has a
content.” (PS: §79)

Before looking at this ‘determinate nothingness’ as the essence of the Notion, of knowledge
finding itself, or ‘consciousness’ proper, (PS: 51-52) and its relation to a “concrete existence
(Existenz) that is itself free,” (SL: 583) it may be of interest to consider some remarks by Robert
Pippin regarding Hegel’s scepticism.

VI

Skepticism and Apperception

Pippin in Hegel’s Idealism sees Hegel’s confrontation with scepticism – particularly the
transcendental scepticism of Kant and Fichte – at the heart of the Phenomenology. He
surmises from the adoption of a transcendental approach to the “pure conditions” of conscious

45
Cf. Pippin, 1989: 101.

32
experience by Hegel the influence of Kant’s own criticism of “dogmatic realism,” whose
scepticism of sense experience precludes the fact of “self-consciousness” as the original
condition of its possibility. Pippin notes that this approach obfuscates the distinction between
“the certainty of immediate experience and the dubitability of inferences about objects,”
thereby raising the “transcendental problem of the ‘conditions’ under which self-awareness
and a distinction between self- and other-awareness is possible.” (Pippin: 97) The problem,
stated differently, therefore begs the question as to why the realist should accept that the
possibility of knowledge is necessarily pre-conditioned. It is to this criticism, Pippin adds, that
Kant, according to Hegel, exposed himself to by isolating knowledge from the ‘thing-in-
itself.’ Hegel’s aim, however, was to overcome this criticism while keeping intact his claim
that we can “know ‘reality’ (Absolute Spirit) as it is in itself.” (Pippin: 99) His claim that
experience is always determined by the ‘developing Notion’ is, according to Pippin, meant to
address the realist sceptic’s objections by changing the ground upon which the problem of
objectivity was founded. These are, in effect, the presuppositions about ‘being’ that do not
take into account experience itself. Pippin, however, finds problematic Hegel’s interpretation
and determination of the self-determining Notion as both immanent and the identity of reality
in itself, detecting in it an “antirealist, idealist position, as if it could have no realist
competitor.” He also characterizes it as the result of an idealist theory that – because it “states
that reality is the developing Notion” – only allows access to the truth of reality via the “self-
determining” Notion. (Pippin: 99)

To understand Pippin’s position, which confronts Hegel’s solution of the problematic relation
between subjective consciousness and the conditions of experience (i.e. the conditions by
which reality is understood, or determined), we should keep in mind Kant’s theory of the
“transcendental unity of apperception.”46 This “fundamental [Kantian] principle,” which
justifies ‘synthetic a priori knowledge,’ establishes self-consciousness as a condition of
judging in experience, viz. as a necessary potentiality intrinsic to the reflexive experience of
perception.47

46
See Hegel, SL: 584; Pippin, 1989: 18, 20, 26.
47
Pippin refers to a “necessity of possibility,” or “logical condition,” approach (quoted from H. Allison) to Kant’s
apperception principle – regarding the experience and activity of self-consciousness – which is distinguishable from a
stronger “Cartesian” version. In the latter, “all consciousness, including what Kant is calling experience, is a species of self-
consciousness, representing objects is at the same time attending to the mind’s activities and objects.” Although he takes
Kant’s arguments to rely more on the “logical condition” approach, where the possibility of consciousness is “logically
presupposed as a condition of experience,” Pippin believes that the question is why this must be the case. This leads him to
consider what, according to Kant, is “implicitly” reflexive in experience; i.e., “potentially self-conscious.” (Pippin, 1989: 20-
1; 26-7.)

33
 That is, consciousness of objects is implicitly reflexive because, according to Kant, whenever I
am conscious of any object, I can also be said to “apperceive” implicitly my being thus conscious.
In any remembering, thinking or imagining, although the object of my intending is some state of
affairs or other, I am also potentially aware as I intend that what I am doing is an act of
remembering, thinking, or imagining. […] And no such complex judgment, Kant thinks he can
show, is possible unless there is one subject of experience continuing over time, potentially aware
of its continuity in any conscious act. (Pippin: 21)

Hegel, however, as Houlgate correctly points out,48 does not seek to ground the Notion in the
presuppositions of subjective understanding and reflexivity – i.e. in their operations – but
instead wants to account for the “ontological structures of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘concept’” which
ground speculative thought. (Houlgate: 139) He instead views Hegel’s categories of thought as
elements of an autonomous and self-determining ontology, not constitutive for the self-
understanding of consciousness (or, more specifically, the Notion of the Notion) in terms of a
transcendental logic of absolute reflexivity. This latter approach seems to risk emphasizing
the methodological aspects of Hegel’s logic at the expense of the logical aspects of thought
and being itself. As Houlgate explains, “Pippin misses the essential lesson of transcendental
logic as Hegel conceives it: namely, that being can no longer be distinguished at all from what
it is understood to be.” (Houlgate: 141)

In fact, I would argue that Pippin underplays the most important lesson with which Hegel
begins his introduction of the general notion of logic:

“Logic, on the contrary, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection and laws of thinking,
for these constitute part of its own content and have first to be established within the
science….[I]t is essentially within the science that the subject matter of logic, namely, thinking or
more specifically comprehensive thinking is considered; the Notion of logic has its genesis in the
course of the exposition and cannot therefore be premised.” (SL: 42)

The reason for this underestimation, to my mind, lies in Pippin’s reading of the “movement of
self-positing,” in the context of apperceptive judgment, from an overtly idealist (Kantian)
perspective. (Pippin: 104, 169) More specifically, he equates the conception of ‘reflexivity’

48
Houlgate, 2006: 139.

34
implicit in Kant’s ‘principle of a spontaneous apperception in all experience and action’
(Pippin: 169), which Hegel himself develops in order to resolve transcendental scepticism, with

Hegel’s description of the “reflection in otherness within itself.” (PS: 10; Pippin: 105) Tracing
Hegel’s claims of “reflection in itself,” or “self-moving self-sameness” (PS: 11) in the
Phenomenology (he recognizes that Hegel does not thoroughly discuss the Notion,
“conceptuality as such,” until the third book of the Logic; Pippin: 105-6) to the relation
between natural consciousness and conscious experience, Pippin seems to find in Hegel’s
instantiation of “internal negation” (Pippin: 124) the “first step on the ‘pathway of doubt’ that is
supposed to establish Absolute Knowledge and overcome scepticism.” (ibid.,) Having assumed
this perspective, Pippin wonders whether Hegel’s use of ‘reflective understanding’ and his
claims concerning the impossibility of indeterminate Being do not lead him – on the basis of
his [Hegel’s] “highly artificial and strained methodology of dialectical progression” – into the
same trap of ‘psychologism’ that Hegel had criticized Kant for falling into. Or, similarly,
whether the only thing that “we” can determine is that “we” cannot determine what there is,
“if what there is is indeterminate being as it is in itself.” (ibid.,) Either way, the ‘key issue’,
Pippin admits, revolves around Hegel’s “central term of art,” reflection, viz. how the return of
consciousness into itself accounts for the distinction between particularity and universality in
perception – i.e. by the mediation of understanding in experience – and, moreover, how this
“reflection out of the True and into itself,”(PS: 71) which “alters the truth” (PS: 72) (i.e., the
reflection itself) is meant to account for [the principle of] “change and alteration” (PS: 97) that
we nonetheless perceive, in sense-certainty, as the sensuous world. (Pippin: 130)

In fact, as Pippin points out, consciousness goes through an “idealized ‘education process’”
and, more importantly, becomes aware of its role in the process, thereby recognizing itself as
a perceived determinacy mediating between the perceived diversity of properties of the Thing
and its self-identity and truth as a unity, or One. (PS: 72) It is this self-conscious aspect of
reflection that becomes the “key issue” upon “which most of the rest of the PhG will turn”
(Pippin: 130), though not before introducing Understanding as the “nonsensible source” of

unconditioned absolute universality that itself mediates in experience the recognition of the
necessary dialectical movement (PS: 100). Pippin adds that it is in chapter three of the
Phenomenology that Hegel makes his “crucial transition … away from realism and toward a
‘historical’ idealism.” (Pippin: 131) All this is meant to confirm, as we have already seen,
Pippin’s reading of Hegel as a post-Kantian idealist (Pippin: 10, 262n.15) primarily concerned
with undermining sceptical doubts and epistemological realism (Pippin: 131) by grounding

35
human knowledge not in intuition but in the “organic self-grounded movement” of the shapes
of consciousness (i.e. specific Notions). (PS: 491; Pippin 171) Thus, Hegel’s formulations of the
truth of sense-certainty and later the untruth of perception – which guide understanding and
the reflection of consciousness – eventually give way to a historically idealist account of the
relation between the sensible world and the supersensible world that ultimately grounds
Hegel’s understanding and the “autonomous character of such self-determinations” (Pippin:
140) in terms of “moments of self-consciousness” (Pippin: 145). Pippin, however, finds this

“anthropological representation of an empirically and metaphysically ungrounded and self-

determining subjectivity” problematic because it “brings together so many historical and
conceptual assumptions that it is hard to see just where in the account Hegel is trying to
defend many of his claims, or even just what issues he takes to be at stake.” (Pippin: 163)
Hegel’s Master and Slave dialectic – the struggle for recognition between an independent and
contingent form of consciousness – for example, specifies that it is the “fear of death” that
constitutes the “beginning of wisdom,” and which subsequently gives shape to history. And
yet, Pippin notes, this ‘fear of death’ “is wholly undetermined by any specific telos or preset
value, some absolute of greater value than life.” (Pippin: 162) Again, it is Hegel’s idealism that
gives shape to this account. It is in these terms that Pippin understands Hegel’s explanation of
subjective experience as “actuality as it is in itself”; i.e. the recognition that it is the necessary
struggle for self-determination that enables the realization of self-consciousness, and
furthermore, that it is this “pure movement” of thought or, alternatively, “infinitude of
consciousness,” that is the basis of the ‘new shape’ of consciousness: “Reason.”

Pippin nevertheless recognizes in this transition to more speculative language – which is

concerned with, for example, “desire,” “life and death struggle,” “self-determination” and
“autonomy” (Pippin: 143-153) – a continuation of Hegel’s idealist view that there must be some
undetermined set of conceptual conditions prior to any empirical investigation that themselves
can only be “understood and legitimated … within the ‘movement of thought’ itself.” (Pippin:
170) However, the Phenomenology is unable to account for the self-determination of the

Notion, i.e. how the “forms of objectivity” mediate not only what is thinkable but also real,
despite Hegel’s own assertions in favour of such a resolution in Science.

As a result, that which is the very essence, viz. the Notion, has become the element of existence,
or has become the form of objectivity for consciousness. Spirit, manifesting or appearing in

36
 consciousness in this element, or what is the same thing, produced in it by consciousness, is
Science. (PS: 485-86)

Pippin therefore identifies that much of what Hegel is developing in the Phenomenology
ultimately presupposes what will be developed in the Logic, including “the ‘incompleteness of
the SL, and the fact that the ‘self-knowing Spirit’ knows ‘not only itself but also the negative
of itself, or its limit’ (PhG, 433; PS, 492).” The question for Pippin is whether Hegel succeeds in
his attempt to complete Kant. (Pippin: 170-71)

Regardless of the answer, it should be clear that Pippin has identified a very important, and
difficult, aspect underlying Hegel’s apparent transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic,
viz. the relation between (self-determining) thought and rationality and the need for a
“socially self-realizing subject” that is recognized by a “historical community” – a
community, that is, in which philosophy can become actualized. (Pippin: 170) In this sense,
both these works display their unity as moments of the Absolute Idea, or the pure Notion; the
Phenomenology embodies the transition from a consciousness of being (experience) as an
account of history of being experiencing itself, while this is then presupposed by the Notion
of science (Logic). (SL: 68) Pippin, at any rate, recognizes that this ‘truth of consciousness’
somehow mediates the beginning of the Logic, though not necessarily in a neo-Kantian way,

Although it would be fair to say that this emphasis on thought’s developing self-consciousness of
itself associates the Logic’s approach with the PhG. The difference between the works is not the
abandonment of reference to “Spirit’s experience of itself” but the nature of the “experience.” In
Hegel’s language, it is not the experience by “consciousness” of itself, skeptically posing its
experience against ‘reality,’ but “pure thought’s” experience of itself, without such skeptical
doubts. (Pippin: 186)

So, it may be possible to say, although the Logic eschews the need to determine the ‘empirical
transition’ (SL: 98) from indeterminate being to the self-determination of being as the ground
of Science and Existence, the problem of grounding empirical experience upon
nonempirically determined principles remains open (this is what Pippin refers to as the
‘“incompleteness” of the SL’)49. Pippin, therefore, has helped reveal the problem we have

49
He makes these remarks in reference to M. Theunissen, who makes a valid point about the logical need to draw a
distinction between subject and object in order to explain logical movement, though his proposed solution (an account of the

37
been tackling from the onset: the relation between the beginning of philosophy and the ground
of its epistemological and ontological status, or, in other words, the relation between
speculative science [practice] and the ground from which the Notion is ‘actualized’(SL: 175)
[theory].

All of this suggest that the resolution in question is an absolute comprehension of the nature of
the incompleteness of thought’s determination of itself, of the necessity for reflectively
determined Notions, and yet the instability and ultimate inadequacy of those Notions. … It would
mean…that a truly determinate reflection is not a resolution of the opposition between positing
and external reflection, but a continuation of such a constantly unstable reflective enterprise in a
suitably self-conscious (and so, in a speculative sense, satisfied) way. (Pippin: 257)

It is precisely the difficulty of determining “this self-determining element” 50 that I have been
attempting to integrate as a fundamental aspect of Hegel’s ‘project.’ To this end, we have
taken in consideration the “thought, or theory, of classic metaphysical realism (the doctrine of
‘Being’),” (Pippin: 185) and in doing so, looked at what it is about notions of ‘reality’ and
‘thought’ – and the self-realization of [these] concepts – that is somehow intertwined within
any (onto)logical or idealist determination of either concept. (Pippin: 185) What we now require
is the proper context in which to assess Hegel’s ontology with his epistemological claims.
This, I believe, has been facilitated by Pippin and his demonstration of the idealist
commitment that Hegel exhibits in both the Phenomenology and the Logic. But I have also
pointed to limitations in his argument, primarily in regard to his interpretation of Hegel’s
commitment to ‘speculative’ philosophy, which he sees too much from a Kantian perspective.

Before looking in more detail at this aspect, it is worth keeping in mind the following
important observation by Pippin: “…in a phrase that greatly confuses hard and fast
distinctions between the methodology of the PhG and the Logic, [Hegel says] that it is
“consciousness” that is “led back” to absolute knowledge as the “innermost truth” of its
supposed immediacy (WL, I, 35; SL, 71).” (Pippin: 186) In order to grasp this “innermost truth,”

problem of Schein) meant to explain the “problem of incompleteness or finitude in the Logic” is ultimately inadequate.
(Pippin: 297 n.23) More on the incompleteness of the Logic in Pippin: 237, 249, 253, 257.
50
Cf. Pippin’s earlier comments: “In sum, since Hegel has assumed that he has proved the centrality and priority of a kind of
self-determining self-consciousness in all experience he begins with the task of trying to isolate this self-determining
element, to specify ideally Spirit’s own self-transformations as it tries to determine itself in its relation to all possible objects.
It is not yet at all clear what this project involves, but Hegel does not seem hesitant about admitting that it already determines
the beginning of the Logic, “mediates” it, and about admitting that we are already invoking thought’s inherent self-reflection
in determining the possibility of such moments.” (Pippin: 186)

38
we need to confront the whole of Hegel’s project (Phenomenology, Logic, Philosophy of
Right) not only as an “agreement of a thought-content with itself,” (EL: 86; EnL: 41; quoted in
Pippin: 187) but we need also take into account that Hegel was himself very much aware that
the notions (e.g. “being” and “becoming”) from which he was developing his logic were
themselves historically determined.51 My argument has therefore been to bring to the fore the
historical aspect of our own reading of Hegel, so as to show how much of Hegel’s own
project itself depends on this historical self-consciousness.

VII

Writing and the Movement of Thought

But now I want to demonstrate how this historical self-consciousness can nevertheless help us
understand some of the more difficult aspects of Hegel’s own project, particularly what
Pippin finds so problematic (Pippin: 184, 187): the relation between the ‘self-determining
Notion’ and ‘actuality,’ which he looks at from an idealist perspective.52 To begin with, the
very finitude that Hegel describes as ‘moments’ in the ‘process of becoming’ (SL: 148) are
themselves historically determined notions of being, which, as he reminds us in both the
Encylopedia and the Logic, take us back to Parmenides53 and Heraclitus54 55. But this does not

51
Cf. Houlgate’s comments on historical “presuppositions of presuppositions” in 2001: 67.
52
And Houlgate ontologically; both, it could be said, share in the same moment of Hegelian thought, though pivoting around
the historically determined aspect of each, i.e. classical ontology and post-Kantian idealism.
53
“To the historian of philosophy it belongs to point out more precisely how far the gradual evolution of his theme coincides
with, or swerves from, the dialectical unfolding of the pure logical Idea. It is sufficient to mention here, that logic begins
where the proper history of philosophy begins. Philosophy began in the Eleatic school, especially with Parmenides.
Parmenides, who conceives the absolute as Being, says that ‘Being alone is and Nothing is not’. Such was the true starting
point of philosophy, which is always knowledge by thought: and here for the first time we find pure thought seized and made
an object to itself.” (EL §86)
54
“As the first concrete thought-form, Becoming is the first adequate vehicle of truth. In the history of philosophy, this stage
of the logical Idea finds its analogue in the system of Heraclitus.” (EL §88)
55
Cf. his comments on Becoming in relation to Heraclitus:
“We often hear it maintained that thought is opposed to being. Now, in the face of such a statement, our first
question ought to be, what is meant by being. If we understand being as it is defined by reflection, all that we can say
of it is what is wholly identical and affirmative. And if we then look at thought, it cannot escape us that thought also
is at least what is absolutely identical with itself. Both therefore, being as well as thought, have the same attribute.
This identity of being and thought is not however to be taken in a concrete sense, as if we could say that a stone, so
far as it has being, is the same as a thinking man. A concrete thing is always very different from the abstract category
as such. And in the case of being, we are speaking of nothing concrete: for being is the utterly abstract. So far then
the question regarding the being of God — a being which is in itself concrete above all measure — is of slight
importance.
As the first concrete thought-form, Becoming is the first adequate vehicle of truth. In the history of philosophy, this
stage of the logical Idea finds its analogue in the system of Heraclitus.
When Heraclitus says ‘All is flowing’, he enunciates Becoming as the fundamental feature of all existence, whereas
the Eleatics, as already remarked, saw only truth in Being, rigid processless Being. Glancing at the principle of the
Eleatics, Heraclitus then goes on to say: Being is no more than not-Being; a statement expressing the negativity of

39
invalidate neither the idealist nor the ontological aspect underlying the relation between being
and the Notion. So, while Pippin regards Hegel’s introduction of “classical problems in
ancient ontology,” and the “unusual description of their source” that Hegel gives them, as
insignificant claims (he say that they are “not doing very much at all” [189]), I would instead
posit that they are indeed quite relevant in the context of what Hegel takes to be the
‘autonomous’ aspect of the Notion, or, in other words, “the realm of subjectivity or of
freedom.” (SL 571)

On the one hand, Pippin may be correct in positing the “Kantian apperception theme” as
“what generates the extreme claims” of “thought’s autonomous development,” while “the
rejection of Kant’s reliance on intuition” is “what places so much weight on the claim that
thought can determine its own objective notions developmentally,” i.e., “that there is some
sort of progressive self-negation in this reconstruction of a subject’s Notional determination
of possible objects.” (Pippin: 233) On the other hand, Pippin does not follow through with what
he himself recognizes is a radical element of Hegel’s logical idealism: the identity of theory
and practice, or knowledge and experience, in the Notion. (SL: 824) Instead, Pippin sets aside
as “another book-length topic” the question regarding “how Hegel understands the speculative
sublation of the most important reflective opposition, freedom and necessity,” (Pippin: 254)
even though these are crucial in relation to what Hegel says about “actuality,” and by
extension, the rational necessity of thought as the absolute substance of both thought and
experience (Pippin: 180). The reason for this is nevertheless clear. He presupposes a distinction
between the “theoretical issue of idealism” (Pippin: 12) that is the main focus of his research,
from the “holism and the moral theory that depends on it,” (Pippin: 13) or equally, “[Hegel’s]
account of an ‘originary, universal, purposive subjectivity.’” (Pippin: 260) More importantly, he
wants to isolate a “logical framework” implicit in the Phenomenology and the Logic that
makes it possible to investigate how it is that self-consciousness and thought determine ethical
life without this automatically implying that the content of this ethical experience is itself
“determined by the requirements of the Logic.” (Pippin: 259) Apparently, Pippin finds in Hegel

abstract Being, and its identity with not-Being, as made explicit in Becoming; both abstractions being alike
untenable. This may be looked upon as the real refutation of one system by another. To refute a philosophy is to
exhibit the dialectical movement in its principle, and thus reduce it to a constituent member of a higher concrete form
of the Idea.”
Even Becoming however, taken at its best on its own ground, is an extremely poor term: it needs to grow in depth
and weight of meaning. Such deepened force we find e.g. in Life. Life is a Becoming but that is not enough to
exhaust the notion of life. A still higher form is found in Mind. Here too is Becoming, but richer and more intensive
than mere logical Becoming. The elements whose unity constitute mind are not the bare abstracts of Being and
Nought, but the system of the logical Idea and of Nature.” (EL §88)

40
the tendency towards a “theory of systematic necessity” (Pippin: 260) that he finds
philosophically indefensible, though this too is ultimately a matter that would require “yet
another book-length review” and so must remain for the moment as “another unsolved
problem.” I, on the other hand, don’t see how we can take Hegel’s claims about absolute
knowledge and the realization of a positive account of the ‘whole’ by isolating the logic and
its immanent character in idealist terms. As I’ve argued, such an approach disregards, and in
effect nullifies, what is in fact intrinsic to speculative logic (in agreement with Pippin), but
which likewise has become actualised, in Hegel’s writing, as a historical self-consciousness.

Because of this limited interpretation, Pippin frequently takes Hegel to task for attempting to
overcome the problem of reflective understanding, or apperceptive judgment, by shifting the
ground upon which subjective thinking – i.e. the conditions of the subjective categories of
thought – can differentiate itself. (Pippin: 139) This is evident towards the end, where he
characterizes as “metalogical” the “consummation” (Vollendung) of the Logic – i.e. the
dialectical progression of the Notion towards self-realization (see SL: 828; Pippin 249) –
which he subsequently identifies as the “telos” or ‘end’ (goal) underlying the self-negating
activity of speculative sublation (Pippin: 254). As a result, as far as giving a positive
assessment, Pippin does not go any further than contrasting Hegel to Kant: “The difference
between understanding such oppositions as an unresolvable antinomial problem and
understanding them as originating in ‘thought’s self-determining necessary transitions’ is the
difference between contradiction as a problem internal to reflection and as comprehended by
speculation.” (ibid.,)

Ultimately, argues Pippin, Hegel’s claims about completion and Absolute Truth are less about
resolving the opposition between positing and external reflection than about continuing the
“unstable reflective enterprise” as the best method for understanding the Notion’s
determination of objectivity, which is why Pippin can’t find anything meaningful to say about
Hegel’s description concerning the “circularity” of the system, and his insistence “that at the
‘end’ of the Logic we have indeed reached the ‘beginning.’” (Pippin: 256)

Again, Pippin is having a hard time digesting the ‘content’ of claims of an Absolute Idea, and
difficulty grasping the ‘autonomy’ of the Notion which somehow finds resolution, or
Vollendung, in its own incompleteness. (Pippin: 256-7) However, what Pippin describes as the
‘metalogical’ aspect of Hegel’s enterprise (Pippin: 257), and which he equates with his

41
‘speculative’ project, is in fact part of what Hegel himself understood as intrinsic to the
science of logic, but which cannot be completed immanently (“the Notion is itself raised into
the Notion”) until it is (self-) liberated “in the science of spirit.” (SL: 844) Houlgate in this
sense correctly points out that Pippin’s Hegel is a transcendental philosopher whose method
“starts with the bare thought of being and then regresses to ever more fundamental conditions
of the successful thought of determinate being.” (Houlgate: 436) On the other hand, I think that
Houlgate too underestimates the autonomy underlying the movement of the logic (see
Houlgate: 272-274), which is then reflected in the distinctive manner of the Philosophy of
Right.

Although it may be correct that the recollection of history, or the interpretation of language,
are in themselves not necessary for the validity of the science of logic, this does not exclude
the possibility that a speculative form of hermeneutics may actually be necessary before
commencing speculative logic. After all, if we take Hegel’s logic seriously, then we too must
begin with “the forcible rejection of mediation and the ratiocinative, external reflection,” (SL:
77) both of which are products of the modern problem of having to deal with philosophy in

terms of the indeterminacy of history itself. This, in turn, is similar to the account of the
problem of the philosophical beginning exemplified in the Logic in terms of the
indeterminacy of being.56 I am in any case interested whether there is an aspect of the “logical
framework” (Pippin: 259) – that Hegel admits is contained and mediated within itself in
“diverse determinations” (SL: 77) –57 that not only complicates the internal exposition58 of the
self-determination of thought, but whether this is also reflected in the Philosophy of Right.

56
This, according to Pippin, in turn typified the failure of Hegel’s system to resolve “the incompleteness of thought’s
determination of itself.” (Pippin: 257)
57
With regards to the Phenomenology – which, like the ‘philosophy of spirit’ deals with a “concrete form of cognition” (SL;
68) – we should see Hegel’s attempt to bring together the knowledge and experience of modern consciousness with the
knowledge and experience of the natural consciousness as the first stage of his attempt to “bring fixed thoughts into a fluid
state,”57 and thus as a prelude (not a logically necessary beginning or presupposition) to the Logic. Hegel’s work is therefore
best seen as both an attempt to adapt modern consciousness to the natural consciousness through its categories of thought –
and for which Hegel considered German a language ideally suited – and a propadeutic education of consciousness as an
“authentic Science of Spirit.” (PS: 57)
58
Reconsider what Hegel writes in his second preface to the Logic: “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.” (SL: 31-32) Of interest is Hegel’s statement in this passage, that
logic can be found in an “image or conception,” i.e. each can “contain a category,” insofar they can be “penetrated” by
language. (Cf. Magee, 2001: 103; See also Pippin on language, 1989: 119.) His reference to an “image or conception”
implies the phenomenological science of appearances and experience treated in the Phenomenology, though it also adds the
crucial element of language into the equation. And indeed, with regard to important “images” or “conceptions” that Hegel
evokes throughout, and the statement we regarded earlier in relation to natural and modern consciousness – that it is much
“harder to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state than to do so with sensuous existence” – it would appear that the language

42
 VIII

Philosophy and the End of Reason

Having established a tentative link between logic, ontology, and historical hermeneutics,59 I
will now focus my attention on the preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The reason for this
is straightforward: I believe that it is in this work that Hegel attempts the reconciliation
between his speculative system and its role as a historical product; itself a necessary
extension, I will argue, of the ontological premise of his speculative logic (and the claim that
it reconciles modern and natural consciousness).60

Here he writes that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.” Interpretations
to what he was actually trying to say have varied – the most critical accusing him of
sanctioning both good and evil by condoning a form of stagnant conservativism unwilling to
change things as they ought-to-be, i.e., in pursuit of the just social order. This view is given
credence by his statement that his work, to the extent that it deals with political science, “must
distance itself as far as possible from the obligation to construct a state as it ought to be.” He
explicitly establishes his principal aim to “comprehend and portray the state as an inherently
rational entity.”

The underlying intention, however, goes further. By identifying the state with reason, Hegel is
forcing the reader to reconsider basic assumptions of his relationship with a firmly established
social construction necessary for his well-being, if not his existence. The revelation of what is
inherently rational is meant to direct one to reflection of the whole61. This is not possible if we
remain on the realm of finitude. A purely empirical approach to what is given, to what
presents itself before us, signifies remaining at the level of the object while ignoring the
inescapable subjective element. The particularity of the given, e.g. an object or a state, is
historically constituted and therefore experienced as external. However, this notion of

and structure of the logic (triadic and circular) must themselves reflect the dialectic process inherent to speculative logic [i.e.
the Notion].
59
On Hegel’s “hermeneutic presupposition,” see Houlgate 2006: 60-1, 67, 69, 71, 78, 89, 98, 163. On the ‘historical
conditions’ [of the Logic] see Houlgate 2006: 67-9, 71, 78, 89, 163.
60
Cf., Houlgate: 144-45.
61
i.e., the totality of everything including its underlying principles, usually referring to the divine realm and God himself.

43
externality merely represents a limitation within the whole that manifests itself as such.
Considered in terms of the whole, particularity is universality in a condensed form, at least to
the extent that it fails to attain actuality. Actuality then, in this sense, is the unity of the
particular with universality. It is a dialectical synthesis that brings together knowledge and the
phenomena of knowledge by the mediation of consciousness that itself is expressed as a
differentiation within a unifying whole.

Therefore, when Hegel states that “in the states of classical antiquity, universality was indeed
already present, but particularity [Partikularität] had not yet been released and set at liberty
and brought back to universality, i.e. to the universal end of the whole,”62 he is stating that the
subjective freedom of the individual does not reach the state of actuality until reason, in the
conscious volition of the individual, becomes aware of its own being-for-self as inherently
rational. It is through the process of reflection that reason discovers its own end: absolute
freedom. History is therefore rational precisely because it makes intelligible the emanation of
freedom which in turn is the actualization of reason. This is why “the essence of the modern
state is that the universal should be linked with the complete freedom of particularity
[Besonderheit] and the well-being of individuals, and hence the interest of the family and of
civil society must become focused on the state.”63 It is the right of subjective freedom finding
satisfaction in the particularity of the subject that “is the pivotal and focal point in the
difference between antiquity and the modern age.”64

For Hegel, then, freedom is the essence of Spirit, which in turn represents the absolute, i.e.,
the unity of the whole, the universal principle. It is equal to the philosophical Idea that in
concrete terms – as opposed to the abstract – brings together through recognition form
(‘reason as conceptual cognition’) and content (‘reason as substantial essence of both ethical
and natural actuality’).

The point here is that reason attains actuality in the concept by opposing the ideal from the
real, i.e. by differentiating unity itself. This differentiation – form – remains incomplete if it
does not manifest its essence. This essence is the content that becomes immanent as the
expression of reason awakened from its natural, dormant, state (realm of pre-conscious

62
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. H.B. Nisbett, ed. A.W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005
[1991]; § 260.
63
Idem.,
64
Idem., § 124.

44
individuality) within an ethical order necessary to bring about to full cognition its end in
freedom. Hegel’s statement that “the state is the actuality of concrete freedom” is an attempt
to clarify the process of thought in the world. The state is therefore a necessary stage precisely
because it represents and embodies the ‘right of subjective freedom’ when rational and self-
conscious individuals, aware of this relation and their mutual constitution, act accordingly, i.e.
“to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial.”65

Hegel begins his preface to the Philosophy of Right by establishing the relation of the
Philosophy of Right with other important texts he has written, namely the Science of Logic
and the Encyclopedia. If anything, Hegel makes it seem as it is a mere elaboration of the
‘same basic concepts’ that are already contained in those works, albeit more systematically.
He actually calls it an “outline,” as opposed to a mere compendium. What distinguishes the
two is the speculative mode of cognition – i.e. the method – of the philosophical outline.
Whereas an ordinary (but genuine) compendium presents the established content of a science
in a conventional form, it is agreed that philosophy, because it deals with somewhat
ephemeral items, must necessarily do so by different means. Hegel here makes apparent his
ambivalence towards this sort of presupposition; he evidently does not think that what
distinguishes speculative science from other forms of cognition should be taken for granted.
In fact, philosophy must pursue the essence of this distinction, for it “is the only thing which
can save philosophy from the shameful decline into which it has fallen in our times.”66

The basis of my argument is that it is only in the Philosophy of Right that Hegel is able to
reconcile the notion of actuality as an actual moment of immanent thought. In other words, the
text itself, i.e. the writing, exemplifies the ‘experience’ of the Notion itself as free and self-
determining thought. This is the reason why Hegel criticizes esoteric and intuitionist
philosophies, which he feels are not scientific precisely because they are not actual or rational
in accordance with the Notion as developed in the Logic. Because of this, I think that the
Philosophy of Right should indeed be considered a key work; without the supposed synthesis
of thought and actuality, his so-called system remains an abstract theoretical presupposition
insofar it does not develop the philosophical text to its logical end: the return into its ground.
(SL: 71) This is also alluded to in the preface of the Phenomenology where, anticipating the rest

of his system, he writes that the “goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is,” and that

65
Idem., Preface, p. 22.
66
Hegel, Philosophy of Right: 10.

45
“Science on its part requires that self-consciousness should have raised itself into this Aether
in order to be able to live—and [actually] to live—with Science and in Science.” (PS: 14) But
here he immediately adds that “the individual has the right to demand that Science should at
least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within
himself.” As he goes on to explain, the individual remains an “unconditioned being” and
Science an “inverted posture” so long as self-consciousness remains “outside of Science.”

Science must therefore unite this element of self-certainty with itself, or rather show that and how
this element belongs to it. So long as Science lacks this actual dimension, it is only the content as
the in-itself, the purpose that is as yet still something inward, not yet Spirit, but only spiritual
Substance. This in-itself has to express itself outwardly and become for-itself, and this means
simply that it has to posit self-consciousness as one with itself. (PS: 15)

In the Logic, after having demonstrated the self-determination of the Notion and its
reconciliation as absolute knowledge (and being), Hegel describes the ascension of the Notion
“as the free Existence that has withdrawn into itself from externality, that completes its self-
liberation in the science of spirit, and that finds the supreme Notion of itself in the science of
logic as the self-comprehending pure Notion.” (SL: 844) This segment is crucial, for he clearly
states that it is in the “science of spirit,” not the “coming-to-be of Science as such” (i.e. the
Phenomenology; p. 15), that the Notion completes its self-liberation, which it then recollects
as the absolute Idea (or ‘pure Notion’) – i.e. the “identity of the theoretical and practical Idea”
(SL: 824) – of which the ‘science of logic’ is a reflection. In this sense, the Philosophy of Right

completes and fulfills what is implied in the third volume of his System of Philosophy, the
Philosophy of Spirit67 (in the second section, on Objective Spirit), which, as I’ve mentioned
before, is alluded to in the Logic where Hegel writes that just as the “nature of cognition
simply as such…is considered within the science of logic…the more concrete form of
cognition falls to be considered in the philosophy of spirit and in the phenomenology of
spirit.” (SL: 68) Consequently, he writes in the Phenomenology that “Reason is in history” (PS:
§449), while in the preface to the Philosophy of Right he famously stated that “what is rational

is actual; and what is actual is rational”; both these comments are not only meant to imply that
thought and reality appear as inextricably related to one another, but that the recognition of

67
Cf. Hegel’s statement that “the philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. One can in no way become ingenious
[geistreich], one cannot even argue about history ingeniously [geistreich] without aesthetic sense.” [Quoted in D.P. Verene,
Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University Press of New York Press
(1985): p. 46.] See also Merold Westphal, ‘Hegel’s Theory of the Concept,’ in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. W.E.
Steinkrauz and K.L. Schmitz (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980).

46
this truth as actualized in the state (which appears and is experienced as temporally situated
within a particular moment) as a “concrete form of cognition,” (SL: 68) and in this sense the
“image and actuality of reason” mediates the science of logic insofar “its truth is the authority
which is openly accepted and manifest to all; a concrete existence which appears for
immediate certainty in the form of [an] existence that has freely issued forth.” (PS: §448) It is to
an awareness of this ‘moment’ which Hegel’s system is meant to guide us, by freeing the
determinate thoughts (see quote PS: §18) that language has concealed and mixed with other
forms as something that has become inward for thought. Hegel begins with the moments of
consciousness in the Phenomenology, though in doing so we should be aware that this
guidance itself is in a sense a mere formality, since the recognition has already been
presupposed by Hegel himself; he is the one guiding us after all.

There is a hermeneutic aspect underlying this presupposition, though Hegel himself alludes to
it elsewhere (e.g. beginning and end of the preface to the Phenomenology); but he also took it
seriously enough so as to adapt his writing according to the necessity underlying the science
of logic in relation to the Notion: its self-determination in actuality. For example, in the
preface to the Phenomenology – i.e. before having walked the ‘pathway of doubt’ in the Logic
that leads us to Absolute Idea as the universal determination of the Notion – Hegel speaks of a
logical necessity residing in the Notion itself that “alone is the rational element and the
rhythm of the organic whole… in other words… speculative philosophy.” (PS: 34) This
necessity therefore impels the self-movement of the Notion, thereby raising “itself to logical
form” (PS: 34) and likewise the movement to logical existence. This, then, is the study of
Science and the labour of the Notion. “Only the Notion can produce the universality of
knowledge which is neither common vagueness nor the inadequacy of ordinary common
sense, but a fully developed, perfected cognition.” (PS: 43) However, Hegel also refers to “an
essential moment of the Notion”: “the effort to give up this freedom [from all content], and,
instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content, to sink this freedom in the
content, letting it move spontaneously of its own nature, by the self as its own self, and then to
contemplate this movement.” (PS: 35-6) It is to an awareness of this essential moment that the
Philosophy of Right returns us to. “The subject-matter of the philosophical science of right is
the Idea of right – the concept of right and its actualization,” writes Hegel at the beginning of
the Introduction, adding later that the “Idea of right is freedom, and in order to be truly
apprehended, it must be recognizable in its concept and in the concept’s existence [Dasein].”

47
With regard to this scientific method, Hegel therefore assumes that the reader will already be
acquainted with his Science of Logic – where he “fully developed the nature of speculative
knowledge” – though he also makes clear that this work too carries with it the “logical spirit,”
both as a whole as in its parts: “For what it deals with is science, and in science, the content is
essentially inseparable from the form.” In other words, the form of this particular work is
related to the form of the whole of Hegel’s system, insofar it deals with its content by means
of the same scientific method (logical spirit). Still, it may be important to recall what Hegel
writes at the end of the Logic: “Philosophy has the same content and the same end as art and
religion.”68 What distinguishes it as a higher mode of cognition (of the Absolute Idea) is the
Notion.

The role that the Philosophy of Right seems to play in relation to the Phenomenology and the
Logic can be discerned from the affirmation of the Idea as the “unity of existence [Dasein]
and the concept, of body and soul.” (PR: § 1) For whereas the Phenomenology presents the
experience of consciousness as the movement of the Notion whose “content, in accordance
with the freedom of its being, is the self-alienating Self, or the immediate unity of self-
knowledge,” (PS: § 805) in the Logic the Notion emerges from the Idea “as a free Existence that
has withdrawn into itself from externality, that completes its self-liberation in the science of
spirit, and that finds the supreme Notion of itself in the science of logic as the self-
comprehending pure Notion.” (SL: 843-44) This passage is similar to that found at the end of
the Phenomenology:

Science contains within itself this necessity of externalizing the form of the Notion, and it
contains the passage of the Notion into consciousness. For the self-knowing Spirit, just because it
grasps its Notion, is the immediate identity with itself which, in its difference, is the certainty of
immediacy, or sense-consciousness—the beginning from which we started. This release of itself
from the form of its Self is the supreme freedom and assurance of its self-knowledge. (PS: 806)

So what Hegel says at the end of the Logic regarding the completion of the Notion’s “self-
liberation in the science of spirit” must consequently follow from the “freedom of its being”
as from its immediate identity with the Spirit’s “supreme freedom and assurance of its self-
knowledge.” And yet, this science of spirit is not expressed in either the Phenomenology or
the Logic. In fact, it is in part three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – the

68
Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller: p. 824.

48
Philosophy of Spirit – that we find the closest instantiation of a ‘science of spirit.’ However,
this fits with the schema alluded to in the Phenomenology, for the Philosophy of Spirit
culminates in Philosophy, though without first being mediated by Objective Spirit, which
itself culminates in ‘Universal World History.’ Likewise, the externalization of self-knowing
Sprit, according to the Phenomenology, is not completed until it “displays the process of its
becoming Spirit” both “in the form of free contingent happening” – which produces Nature –
and as “a conscious, self-mediating process,” – i.e. History. In other words, the science of
right (Philosophy of Right), which depends on the concept of right “coming into being”
outside of its investigations, could not be possible had Hegel not first written both the
Phenomenology and the Science of Logic. And yet, the science of right is itself both the
“actualization of the universal spirit” and its self-liberation. It completes the recollection
[inwardizing] of Spirit in History and Nature through the preservation of Becoming in both
experience and philosophy. This is the recognition of the unity of concept and reason in
actuality, i.e. in the free and ethical state, that Hegel alludes to in his famous statement
(‘reason in actuality, actuality in reason’). “For since the rational, which is synonymous with
the Idea, becomes actual by entering into external existence [Existenz], it emerges in an
infinite wealth of forms, appearances, and shapes and surrounds its core with a brightly
coloured covering in which consciousness first resides, but which only the concept can
penetrate in order to find the inner pulse, and detect its continued beat even within the
external shapes.” (PR: 20-21; on Dasein see: 25)

In the introduction to the Logic, Hegel makes an observation also worth noting: the division
and method of the science of logic he is promoting is “provisional”: its determination will
only result from the development of the science itself, though this in turn depends on
particular unity of form and content that thought is able to accomplish its actual self-
determination. Although the Notion of this science is hereby also presupposed, the Notion
itself is “not indeterminate but is in its own self determinate.” Because what is being
presupposed is the connection of the Notion with the division of the science, this self-
determination is itself the development that is implicit as the essence of the Notion itself.
However, insofar as this is not developed and understood concretely, logic remains an abstract
universal for the subjective spirit (SL: 58); “Thus the value of logic is only appreciated when it
is preceded by experience of the sciences.” However, with regard to the “provisional”
presentation of the Notion, its’ historical determinateness has already been ‘recognized’ by
Hegel himself: “the author is already familiar with the science and consequently is historically

49
in a position to state here in advance the main distinctions which will emerge in the
development of the Notion.” (SL: 59). The important thing is to keep in mind that this does not
mean that the Notion has been developed; its provisional classification alludes to a moment of
“reflected determination” of the Notion (SL: 61), i.e. a “moment in the inwardness of the
Notion” (or “transition into being-within-self”). This movement, however, is essentially the
articulation of truth; for what results from recognizing the life inherent within its created
objects (forms of Substance, PS: § 748) and its community (universal self-consciousness, PS:
§ 781) eventually leads, according to the Phenomenology, to absolute wisdom, while in the
Philosophy of Right he describes the “element of the universal spirit’s existence [Dasein]” as
“pure and free thought in philosophy,” while “the movement of spirit within this element is
the demonstration of this fact.” (PR: § 341)

In other words, absolute wisdom is absolute freedom, and it is this unity in world history that
is being expressed by the unity of form and content within the Notion: the movement of the
Absolute from universal to particular and back again is the self-determination of the Spirit in
thought, “this knowing is the inbreathing of the Spirit, whereby Substance becomes Subject,
by which abstraction and lifelessness have died, and Substance therefore has become actual
and simple and universal Self-consciousness” (PS: § 785). In the Outline to the Philosophical
Sciences, he mentions two moments of the speculative method. The first represents the
beginning of the Notion as intuition and perception, and thus not yet logic. But because of the
second moment – “progressive motion” – the Notion becomes determined by the dialectical
movement itself towards “immanent reflection,” or what he also describes as the “judgment of
the idea.” (PS: § 186). Here too, Hegel describes how life is the manifestation of the unity of the
particular and universal in itself:

“The speculative idea, which is thus the idea for itself, is therefore infinite reality, and in this
absolute freedom does not merely pass over into life, or as finite cognition allow life to appear
in it. In its own absolute truth it resolves to let the moment of its particularity, or of the first
determination and otherness, the immediate idea as its reflected image, release itself as nature
freely out of itself.”

This is what Hegel accomplished in the Phenomenology and Logic. But because these
‘moments of thought’ themselves remained as externalized forms of the Notion – having not
yet externalized their own freedom as philosophy – it is the goal therefore of the Philosophy

50
of Right to accomplish this by developing the Idea of right (by recognizing freedom in its
concept and in the concept’s existence [Dasein]) that not only mediates concrete existence (PS
§440, 448), but is itself a concrete form of knowledge mediating the self-determination of

thought, and as such, the “actuality, possibility and necessity” of a science of logic. (SL: 529)
The Philosophy of Right in turn completes the self-liberation of the Notion by ‘making
conscious this work,’; i.e. recollecting for philosophy in actuality how it in itself (i.e. the
science of logic) mediates the immanent process of its own self-determination, which insofar
it exemplifies ‘reason in actuality,’ also typifies the “actuality, truth, and certainty” of
absolute Spirit.

This development of the Idea as the activity of its own rationality is something which thought,
since it is subjective, merely observes, without for its part adding anything extra to it. To consider
something rationally means not to work upon it, for the object is itself rational for itself; it is the
spirit in its freedom, the highest apex of self-conscious reason, which here gives itself actuality
and engenders itself as an existing world; and the sole business of science is to make conscious
this work which is accomplished by the reason of the thing [Sache] itself. (PR: § 31)

However, we must also therefore keep in mind the mediation of history in the movement of
thought in speculative philosophy; likewise the recognition of the formal moments (necessity,
possibility, actuality) which ground the unity of essence and Existence, though nevertheless
immanent to the science of logic, may no longer reflect the relation to itself in Hegel’s works
as it once did in the time of Hegel, though that is not to say that they do not retain the unity of
form and content that grounds speculative philosophy. This only means that we need to be
cautious of what concrete forms of cognition inform our own presuppositions in relation to
the content that they nonetheless mediate. “In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit
has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had
learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits.” (PS: § 808) If this is still possible
today, however, it is because

Philosophy awakes in the spirit of governments and nations the wisdom to discern what is
essentially and actually right and reasonable in the real world. It was well to call these products of
thought, and in a special sense Philosophy, the wisdom of the world; for thought makes the

51
 spirit's truth an actual present, leads it into the real world, and thus liberates it in its actuality and
in its own self.69

IX

The Owl of Minerva - Conclusion

Hegel brings up a very important matter in the preface to the Philosophy of Right70 that
undoubtedly cannot be separated from the manner in which he presents his text. Hegel refers
to the conventional opinion regarding the “task of the writer, especially the philosophical
writer” and how he is to discover, make statements upon, and disseminate “truths and correct
concepts.” Hegel therefore reflected upon this state of affairs, and the cacophony of truths
produced by over-zealous ‘disseminators of truths,’ many whom unjustly spoke on behalf of
philosophy. The scientific method, on the other hand, makes apparent the distinction between
truths and opinions by seeking to comprehend these truths in a rational form; it is not satisfied
by the possession of such knowledge, never mind making public statements as to their
custody. Philosophy must justify its claims.

In this sense, the circularity of Hegel’s speculative logic demonstrate two things: 1) it must
begin without any presuppositions about what mediates actuality (e.g. pure being and pure
thought), and 2) it must end by recognizing as necessary and rational the conditions with
which it began this movement of thought. Hegel’s speculative logic, in the Philosophy of
Right, in a way represents the Socratic return to the ‘market place,’ insofar it is in ethical life
where we find “what is universally acknowledged and valid.” Although he is by no means
suggesting that philosophy should be swayed by public opinion – he is equally critical of such
popularphilosophie, elsewhere accusing Fries of falling for such an ingenuous temptation, as
well as some post-Kantians71 – Hegel clearly wants to purge philosophy from sophistic
poseurs and their sycophants who think of philosophy as a game. It is this tendency for
restless reflection, and the conception of perplexing problems, that has given the impression
that philosophy goes about its business like Penelope, weaving a shroud in the clear light of

69
Hegel, Philosophy of Spirit: § 552.
70
Something similar is also mentioned at the end of the preface of the Phenomenology.
71
In the first preface to the Science of Logic, for example, Hegel blames “the exoteric teaching of Kantian philosophy” for
the movement away from speculative thought and into the immediacy of practical training and popular feeling. (SL: 26.)

52
day and undoing it during the night, only to make it seem as if it is continuously working to
the completion of the same. “No other art or science,” writes Hegel, “is treated with this
ultimate degree of contempt, namely the assumption that one can take possession of it
outright.” (PR: 15)

We should therefore reconsider what Hegel writes at the end of the Science of Logic, and how
the logical Idea, as pure thought, has the infinite form as its content, while the concept (i.e.
Notion) is the movement towards self-determination of this Idea “prior to its immediate
reflection [Scheinen] in a form-determinateness.” The point that Hegel is trying to make, is
that in trying to determine the content of the absolute Idea, the science of logic has
demonstrated – through its method – that the identity of the Idea comes to existence in the
unity of form and content. The “Idea is the absolutely universal Idea,” so what therefore
“remains to be considered here is not a content as such, but the universal aspect of its form—
that is, the method.” (SL: 825) I take the Philosophy of Right to represent the self-determination
of thought both in subjective terms – the autonomous self-knowing Notion exemplified in the
science of logic – and as the concrete (objective) universality of absolute truth which is
mediated in concrete existence (and cognition) by the Science of Logic (and by extension, the
whole system of logic). This movement in actuality is actuality insofar philosophy identifies
itself as both the process and mediation. Philosophy, as Hegel explains in the Phenomenology,
“is the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement
constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth.” (PS: § 47)

Likewise, the unity of theory and practice will produce its own disruption so long as it is
mediated by desire, which in turn will remain the case so long as there is a difference between
philosophy and non-philosophy. Although I do realize that Hegel did conceive of his system
as a circle of circles (SL: 842), and in that sense is ‘closed,’ we should keep in mind that
‘Encyclopedia’ means an encirclement of teaching, which in this context is the mediation of
thought in actuality by the science of logic. We should therefore heed the implication of the
circular notion of the method (SL: 842), and Hegel’s statement at the end of the Logic that
“what remains to be considered … is, the method.” (SL: 825). I think that the ‘method’ refers
to the possibility of thought’s self-determination in itself, a “modality of cognition” which,
although determined in the science of logic, need not be reflected as determined in the Science
of Logic as such. (SL: 826, 827) This possibility will be the outcome of reflective logic so long
as it keeps open the ground mediating the process of self-determination.

53
As a result, the “unity of form and content” that the Philosophy of Right represents is shown
to be essentially political (in the Socratic sense). Although Hegel writes that the Philosophy of
Right, “in so far it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to
comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity,” (PR: 21) this actuality is
indeed the very actuality experienced by consciousness in the Phenomenology as “movement
of the life of truth,” and which propels it to develop the “method of this movement, i.e. of
Science,” which itself “is the mode of cognition that remains external to its material.” (PS: 28)
So, when Hegel writes that philosophy is necessarily a speculative science, and as such, must
deal with its content as inseparable from its form (PS: 10), along with this comments about
philosophy coming too late to issue instructions about what ‘ought to be,’ we should see it as
Hegel’s own political contribution to the liberation of the ‘science of spirit’ (SL: 844).

Hegel originally wrote that “as the thought of the world, [philosophy] appears only at a time
when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state.” The
lesson, than, that history teaches us, is “that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that
the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its
substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm.” (PR: 21)

But, unlike today, the stability of states during Hegel’s time could not be taken for granted
and thus could only be justified to the extent that their raison d’etre were sanctioned by extra-
mundane principles difficult to refute (if not dangerous). Hegel himself had witnessed the
repercussions of the French Revolution and its aftermath, as well as the rise and fall of
Napoleon, and wrote self-consciously of their historical significance at a time when historical
consciousness itself was beginning to develop itself systematically and scientifically. He thus
became aware of the gap between the description of events and the events themselves; that
actuality always seems to give a free rein to itself in manners that could never be conclusively
foreseen or steered by purposeful (human) design. In that a historical consciousness was
necessary to reach this stage, the result is a modernity intrinsically mediated by itself through
modern tools made possible by its own development.72 But to view world history solely in
terms of an ‘abstract and irrational necessity of a blind fate’, i.e. the power of spirit, is one-

72
E.g. in our present context, liberal democracy, freedom (as civil right), and media technologies have helped disseminate
and perpetuate, at first, the notion that information is knowledge, and later, knowledge is power. These in turn have
influenced our cognitive organization in terms of a globalized and inter-connected world based on universal human rights and
infinite technological progress, at least given the right (natural) conditions, i.e. in the absence of scarcity.

54
sided, for this process is the result of the self-actualization of reason. This “return into itself
from its alienation, is the spirit at a stage higher than that at which it stood in its earlier [phase
of] comprehension.” The myth of Minerva depicted at the end of the preface of the
Philosophy of Right, in a way, represents this process.

Minerva is the Roman version of the goddess the Greeks knew as Athena. Greek mythology
portrays Athena as the goddess of wisdom, civilization, weaving and cunning. She is the
daughter of Metis, goddess of cunning, and Zeus, lord among gods. Her birth was initially
frustrated by the efforts of Zeus himself who feared a prophecy foretelling that the power of
Metis’s children would overshadow his own. He therefore tricked Metis into turning herelf
into a fly after laying with her and swallowed her, but it was too late; Metis was already
pregnant with Athena. Zeus then suffered unbearable headaches on account of Metis’s
hammering and weaving when crafting a helmet and robes for her daughter, ending only when
he was cleaved on the forehead with a double-headed Minoan axe (differing accounts present
either Prometheus, Hephaestus, Hermes or Palaemon doing the favour). Athena then springs
forth from his skull fully clothed and armed, and becomes his favourite daughter.

This portrayal of wisdom presenting itself before Zeus through a process of desire, deception
and pain is significant. Plato himself describes her as “the mind of God”, representing moral,
or divine, intelligence (Cratylus 407b). It should be apparent that Hegel’s mythical depiction is
meant to illustrate how it is that only when the philosophical knowledge of ‘states, nations
[Völker], and individuals’ have reached their zenith (self-conscious recognition in freedom as
the actualization of spirit/reason), and this culmination itself is recognized and comprehended
as yet a further “object of its own consciousness … [an] interpretation of itself to itself”, does
spirit recognize itself as deed; “for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself.”
This is why Hegel viewed his own time as just such a culmination. In becoming aware of
itself as historically mediated, the consciousness of his time was performing its actualization
by recognizing that its completion is only a moment in the movement of history, an “act of
comprehension, […] at the same time its alienation [Entäuβerung] and transition.” (PR: § 343)

So we should be willing to understand that determining the unity of form and content will
remain a challenge for thinking so long as it is willing to start anew, without the ‘weapons’
and ‘powers’ of Spirit (concrete objects of cognition) previously exemplified in actuality by
thought seeking its own realization and self-determination. This then signifies Hegel’s use of

55
Athena: she is the externalization (alienation) of ‘divine’ wisdom (unity of thought in form
and content), the product of struggle and sacrifice, only to come fully prepared for the
continuation of the process of self-determination. The myth itself represents the movement of
thought that in history has moved from the realm of externalized Gods – Zeus, Athena – to
that of mortal man mediated by History. Likewise we should keep in mind that in contrast to
Minerva’s liberation from Zeus, Minerva’s owl, albeit separate from the goddess of wisdom,
does not only fly away “with the onset of dusk,” but obviously returns with the onset of dawn.
The process is circular. After all, it is Athena that helps mortal Odysseus return to his home
after proving his own cunning talents.

Similarly, although the science of logic reached its completed state (onset of dusk) in Hegel’s
system, actuality itself has already sublated this movement of thought. In the Philosophy of
Right Hegel reveals the ideal world “in the shape of an intellectual world” simply because it is
this ‘appearance’ that “arose” as the “in-itself” of the Notion positing itself as actual in his
time. This method, although external to his system, nevertheless represents the “necessity of
the Notion” (PS: 29) whose movement allows the self-comprehension of the pure Notion in the
concrete universality of its form (i.e. universal spirit in absolute right, or the moment in
reason when spirit becomes self-conscious of itself as free and universal; see PR: § 341-42).
In the Logic he writes that “the method has emerged as the self-knowing Notion that has itself,
as the absolute, both subjective and objective, for its subject matter, consequently as the pure
correspondence of the Notion and its reality, as a concrete existence that is the Notion itself.”
(SL: 826) After all, the “history of spirit is its own deed; for spirit is only what it does, and its

deed is to make itself – in this case as spirit – the object of its own consciousness, and to
comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself.” (PR: § 343) And “as far as the
individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy,
too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts.” (PR: 21)

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“Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth: we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round
and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning, and just as far from that which we were seeking
at first.”
Socrates, in Plato’s Euthydemus.

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• —., “Romanticism and the Esoteric Connection,” in: Roelof van den Broek and
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• Harris, H.S. Hegel’s Development: Towards the Sunlight, 1770-1801. Oxford: Oxford
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• —., Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts, Jena 1801-1806. Oxford: Oxford

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• Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, From “Hegel’s

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H H

• —., Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Introduction. Tr. H.B. Nisbett. Cambridge:
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H H

• —., Phenomenology of Spirit. Tr. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press,
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• —., Philosophy of Right. Tr. H.B. Nisbett, ed. A.W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge
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• Zimmerman, Robert L. The Kantianism of Hegel and Nietzsche: Renovation in

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