Wow does the Science of Logic ever hit the ground running! Talk about leaving a reader revved up! Ha.
Here’s my notes on the second preface, following on from the notes on the first. The notes aren’t systematic, just typed out as I read. I forgot how hard this stuff is to read!
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Paragraph 13
“To exhibit the realm of thought philosophically, that is, in its own immanent activity or what is the same, in its necessary development”
I’m not sure of this. What does “it” refer to? Presumably “the realm of thought.” I don’t know how to read this other than as seeking some access to thought or mode of thought which in some way corresponds to some built-in qualities of thought. That’s not a charitable read for me - I’m not on board with that, because I’m not sure how one could tell the difference between thinking in tune with thought’s internal/essential properties and merely thinking one is doing so. And “necessary development”? Hmm. I’ll leave that for now.
I like this: “familiar forms of thought, must be regarded as an extremely important source, indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offers is only here and there a meagre shred or a disordered heap of dead bones” - it fits with the comment earlier about digestion and all that.
I’m quoting 14 in full:
“The forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored as human language. Nowadays we cannot be too often reminded that it is thinking which distinguishes man from the beasts. Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated, and everything that he has transformed into language and expresses in it contains a category-concealed, mixed with other forms or clearly determined as such, so much is Logic his natural element, indeed his own peculiar nature. If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes. It is an advantage when a language possesses an abundance of logical expressions, that is, specific and separate expressions for the thought determinations themselves; many prepositions and articles denote relationships based on thought; the Chinese language is supposed not to have developed to this stage or only to an inadequate extent.These particles, however, play quite a subordinate part having only a slightly more independent form than the prefixes and suffixes, inflections and the like. It is much more important that in a language the categories should appear in the form of substantives and verbs and thus be stamped with the form of objectivity. In this respect German has many advantages over other modern languages; some of its words even possess the further peculiarity of having not only different but opposite meanings so that one cannot fail to recognise a speculative spirit of the language in them: it can delight a thinker to come across such words and to find the union of opposites naively shown in the dictionary as one word with opposite meanings, although this result of speculative thinking is nonsensical to the understanding. Philosophy therefore stands in no need of a special terminology; true, some words have to be taken from foreign languages but these have already acquired through usage the right of citizenship in the philosophical realm-and an affected purism would be most inappropriate where it was the distinctive meaning which was of decisive importance. The advance of culture generally, and of the sciences in particular, gradually brings into use higher relationships of thought, or at least raises them to greater universality and they have thus attracted increased attention. This applies even to the empirical and natural sciences which in general employ the commonest categories, for example, whole and parts, a thing and its properties, and the like.”
There are a few elements I want to note here. First, the distinction and inter-relation between language and thought. Thought is not language. Rather, language displays and stores thought. This implies some mode or quality of thought which is not linguistic. That is, thought (here) is not reducible to language use. On the other hand, all interiority involves language. Question: are thought and interiority the same? If so, then there is not an alinguistic thought. (This seems wrong to me, in part because it renders language acquisition mysterious - it would either mean humans are always-already linguistc [such that “language acquisition” is a misnomer - that would mean that a language learner acquires _a_ language but already has _language_] or it would make language acquisition a sort of creation ex nihilo, a leap from nonlanguage [and thus nonthought] into language-and-thought.) Part of the stakes here I think has to do with categories: language use involves the use of categories. Therefore to the extent which thought is linguistic, thought is categorial. Not sure, though. I’m also not sure how to sort out Hegel’s categories of language vs languages - thought and language vs German and Chinese. Hegel’s racism and his German chauvinism strike me as illustrating what I said about re: paragraph 13 and thinking thought itself - what’s the position from (or criteria with) which to make the call about the superiority of this or that language for thought itself? Seems to me that any claim like Hegel’s is subject to a counter claim along the lines of “well, you think that about our language because you don’t speak it well enough; people who have mastered it are capable of the same feats of thought that you think can’t occur in this language - we can’t show you evidence, though, because you won’t understand those complex uses of the language.”
Second, time in this passage. Assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the terms are not an artifact of the translation into English, the passage uses temporal terms which imply something which happened, not something structural: “language has penetrated,” conceptions have been “transformed into language,” logic “transforms” things into full humanity. The terms suggest these things happen in time rather than being transhistorical aspects of humanity or thought. This also suggests to me that Hegel’s “human” is a normative category - more like “humane,” perhaps. Not a quality which all biological humans necessarily possess. I wonder - is human hear a quality which has gradations - more and less human? This is relates as well to the claim about human nature - logic as the “nature element” of the human.
Third, nature. Hegel contrasts nature as such from the spiritual sphere, identifying logic with the latter. And yet, logic is natural for the (properly?) human. Humanity, thus, has a sort of supernatural nature. A nature which is above itself? A nature which overcomes itself? (I’m reading what I know or think I know about Hegel back into this term, perhaps unjustifiably.)
Fourth, terminology. Philosophy requires no special terminology. Why not? And what does this mean? I think the point here is one about the relationship between philosophy and other speech and thought, but I’m not sure. The claim also seems odd, given that philosophy seems to involve a sort of terminological element much of the time.
Paragraphs 17 and 18 strike me as potentially self-serving. Philosophy appears in these paragraphs as the result of people being freed up from other activity - a freedom from necessity, perhaps - such that philosophy is the sign of an advance, of progress. That’s an awfully convenient thing for a philosopher to say. Of course, Hegel asserts that “interests (…) are hushed” in the type of thought he is after (is that as a thought to practice or a thought to study? thought as subject or object? anyway…), which presumably means he would reject my suspicions of interest on his part here (and in his remarks on the superiority of the German language). Again, awfully convenient - philosophy is a sign of an advanced, and is disinterested, so the claim that philosophy is advanced is just true, not an interested claim.
19: “logic is concerned only and solely with these thoughts as thoughts, in their complete abstraction,” just after Hegel quotes Aristotle that logic “is not studied for its utility,” a quote I wonder about - since Hegel doesn’t gloss the quote I assume he agrees with it. If logic is useless, then why study it? What’s the use? If none, then how is logic justified as a pursuit? (Are the justifications which don’t appeal to a sort of use or to something re-describable as use?)
In the next paragraph, 20, Hegel distinguishes contemplating logic - which honors logic/is honorable - from using logical categories - which degrades the categories/is a degraded relation to the categories. Sounds a bit ascetic to me. (The stuff on subject and object in this paragraph seems important to me, will have to come back to it, likewise with paragraph 22.) Also the contemplation bit… seems to imply that the categories are just there, found rather than made. Not sure, though, as in 23 he sounds different - though as active….
I like the stuff in 21 about abstraction as getting away from being submerged in (controlled by) perception etc. Abstraction as getting-free-from.
23 - recurrence of temporal terms. “To focus attention on this logical nature which animates mind, moves and works in it, this is the task. The broad distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free act is that the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done; when the content of the interest in which one is absorbed is drawn out of its immediate unity with oneself and becomes an independent object of one’s thinking, then it is that spirit begins to be free, whereas when thinking is an instinctive activity, spirit is enmeshed in the bonds of its categories and is broken up into an infinitely varied material.” Logical nature animates mind. Could mean that mind’s motive force is always derived from logic, yet there’s another version of logic here as something taught and acquired which means the mind pre-acquisition of logic must have some motive force already and means that the acquisition of logic (occurring in time) is an animation of the mind, a setting-into-motion. I like the stuff on freedom, names some of the stakes, though I’m not sure I understand or am compelled by the idea of freedom offered here.
I don’t know how to say this in a way that feels right, but I get the sense that Hegel has a sort of “become what you are” thing going on - the mind already acts logically, just not very well, so we become conscious of that acting in order to perfect. A sort of naturalist harmony with how things are - like becoming aware of how digestion works in order to eat and live in better harmony with the digestion process and thus to live better (more happily?) over all. (Is this what he means in 28 when he talks about the science of logic reconstructing thought determinations?)
Abstraction as getting-free is a utility; an implied disagreement with the Aristotle quote.
Para 26: “truth is the declared object of and aim of logic.” This is a move taken straight from Andrew Bowie, the guy who taught the Hegel class I had in 1999 (and which I remember being awesome and totally shaped my subsequent intellectual path) - if truth is the object and aim then Hegel must already have a notion of truth in mind. Logic doesn’t establish truth, it aims for it or acts in relation to it (logic takes truth as its object). One can only have an aim and object if one knows what that aim and object is. Otherwise how does one know when one has achieved the aim and object? (Reminds me of the Hunting of the Snark.) Doesn’t seem presuppositionless to me. I can’t really argue this, but I wonder then if Hegel is doing what he criticizes in 27, posing tautologies (truth is truth).
29: “I have been only too often and too vehemently attacked by opponents who were incapable of making the simple reflection that their opinions and objections contain categories which are presuppositions and which themselves need to be criticised first before they are employed. (…) Thoroughness seems to require that the beginning, as the foundation on which everything is built, should be examined before anything else, in fact that we should not go any further until it has been firmly established and if, on the other hand, it is not, that we should reject all that follows.” Again, time. A beginning is not a beginning until the moment after a beginning. It’s the end of this sentence that makes this a sentence. (Consider: “It’s end of this sent-”) Put simplistically and schematically, there are 3 or 4 moments here. Let’s say four. Time t1, t2, t3, t4. T1 is the beginning - some presupposed category. T2 is the formulation of some point (drawing on the presupposed category), which makes t1 a beginning. T3 is Hegel’s response, which says “no, let’s go back and analyze t1/the presupposition,” something Hegel probably only cares about because the formulation in t2 made the presupposition relevant. T4 is the instance when the consideration of t1 begins. So examining the beginning “before anything else” means “before any other next step from here.” (It seems to me. I may be wrong, though. Hegel may mean “consider the beginning before beginning.” That sounds silly to me, though, like trying to learn to swim before getting into the water.) Put differently, I think the abstraction procedure Hegel mentioned earlier - as a way of disentangling, of getting free - occurs at what I’ve here called t4, which is to say - one gets free/disentangles only a starting point - a beginning - which is not free/which is entangled.
Science of Logic Reading Group: Beginnings
Just another quick update on the Science of Logic reading group. The first in-person group meeting takes place in Melbourne on Thursday, discussing (or beginning to discuss) the Prefaces, Intro, and the section on “With What Must the Science Beg…
Trackback by Roughtheory.org — January 8, 2008 @ 1:50 am
hi nate.
just want to point something about about “chinese” and Hegel.
Hegel of course knew nothing about chinese language or culture or history. In this period, before the first british military aggression against china, the state of educated europeans’ knowledge of chinese language and intellectual product is basically total ignorance. however, chinese luxury goods were a hugely important feature defining civilisation and participation in it.
but china and chinese was a key trope of german intellectual product for over half a century by the time hegel writes. there are two important connotations.
one, a general cosmoenlightened yerupeen cultural product theme, but particular for germany, exemplified by say Herder and his characterisation of a certain attitude as “chinese judgements”. Chinese judgements for Herder are the prejudiced common sense of stolid provincial middle class Germans who read the Hamburg newspaper. No sense of history. No sense of context. The notion that values, esp. truth and beauty, are obvious, universal and transhistorical. “Chinese judgements” are the result of “pride and ignorance”.
the second important connotation of “china” and “chinese” is even more specifically related to german burgherism. In this period, Germany’s claim to belong to this thing hegel is elaborating on, enlightenment, modernity, west, etc, is by no means obvious. From the point of view of the producing centres of this culture, enlightenment, modernity, Germany was throughout the 18th century outside, savage, backward, might as well be Poland. the german language is barbaric, crude, unsuitable for poetry, science, diplomacy or amours. But in the 18th century, germany has one claim to belong to modernity and civilisation, and one only, and this is that after decades of efforts and expense its industrial sector (in Saxony) succeeded in replicating genuine bone china. So Germany’s yerupeenity and modernity rested on this one thing, the successful chinesification of its manufactures in the early 18th c. Except for that it might as well have been populated by wolves as far as Parisian salons were concerned.
this achievement is also not to the credit of military aristos or university professors, but the deed of the same middle class provincial commonsensical folk who are wont to make “chinese judgements”.
so the passing remark about chinese is not just a little accident due to ignorance and racism unrelated to the overall project here. Chineseness is basically an established metaphor for a “given” feature of provincial middle class Germanness, a trope for a certain kind of small town burgher common sense, narrowmindedness, mistaking particularism for universality, culture for nature, but possessing aspects practical for manufacturing.
Comment by chabert — January 8, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
Thanks Colonel, interesting stuff.
Comment by Nate — January 8, 2008 @ 2:29 pm
i know its evil to invoke the structurally absent third, but seems to me hegel is making small modifications to received ideas and when read in isolation, the text can look like there are just parts missing. but its mostly paraphrases of herder, replying to rousseau and voltaire etc etc. hegel had no need to rehash the basics for his readers, but one doesn’t necessarily grasp now from just reading this hegel all that was assumed, about that aristotle quote for example, or about Logic and “terminology” (the scholastic term for ontology) versus “healthy understanding” which is good for “the people” and esp “the german people”, or about natural morality versus self conscius ethical systems, childlike virtue and energy versus senile decadent abstract philosophising, or about european liberties versus oriental despotism (herder on this question (This Too Is A Philosophy of History…) is what the bit about digestion is quoting. Herder says did you ever teach a child to walk by explaining the most abstract theory of motion? and this is in the midst of a kind of apology for “oriental despotism” as the necessary childhood development of humanity). I think just in isolation this text seems to make a lot of assertions out of the blue, but that’s only because the arguments for these assertions were too well known by the readers to need recap for every one.
Comment by chabert — January 9, 2008 @ 12:25 pm
oh and you put me in mind, the deployment of the temporal metaphor you note there to revise (an) account(s) previously given using the metaphors of a map and/or architectural plan could be a good example of the liminal stage between what Lowe identified in History of Bourgeois Perception as the epistemic order of “the estate society” (enlightenment, early romanticism) - “representation in space” - and the epistemic order of “bourgeois society” (the 19th century to 1910) - “development in time”. the german provincial middle class’ “chinese judgements” are chinese because chinese maps show china absorbing the entire central rectangular map surface with the europeans relegated to representations by gargoyles on the margins and in the extreme corners.
Comment by chabert — January 9, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
Logic to look up where Hegel quotes jacobi:
Heh. Some things don’t change…
I’ve only read A. Bowie’s books on Schelling Schelling and Modern European Philosophy and (his translation of ) On the History of Modern Philosophy so I can’t say about his general Shelligianism regards to Hegel, but it is in my understanding by way of Bowie (and manfred frank and so on) that the move Schelling’s positive philosophy attempts to make against Hegel’s negative one, is a better defense of a “free action”.
A free action, in German Idealism through to Heidegger (Metaphysical Foundations of Logic), is “an action for its own sake” (fundamental to the problems of a priority of thought and language). The problem, then, of an “entangled beginning” is solved by the succession of potencies: “Only different moments of the same time can be considered successive” (Ages of the World).
Now what becomes radical or problematic with regards to logic and positive philospohy is the treatment of potencies–as the “repeatibility or infinite substutability of the
other”. That is, the problem of logic and substitution is an aesthetic problem, that appears to be what is troubling chabert here…
Comment by fanboi — January 10, 2008 @ 12:48 pm
when I read this yesterday, through Chabert’s comments, I got my Hegel’s Logic to look up where Hegel quotes jacobi:
Heh. Some things don’t change…
I’ve only read A. Bowie’s books on Schelling Schelling and Modern European Philosophy and (his translation of ) On the History of Modern Philosophy so I can’t say about his general Shelligianism regards to Hegel, but it is in my understanding by way of Bowie (and manfred frank and so on) that the move Schelling’s positive philosophy attempts to make against Hegel’s negative one, is a better defense of a “free action”.
A free action, in German Idealism through to Heidegger (Metaphysical Foundations of Logic), is “an action for its own sake” (fundamental to the problems of a priority of thought and language). The problem, then, of an “entangled beginning” is solved by the succession of potencies: “Only different moments of the same time can be considered successive” (Ages of the World).
Now what becomes radical or problematic with regards to logic and positive philospohy is the treatment of potencies as the “repeatibility or infinite substutability of the
other”. That is, the problem of logic and substitution is an aesthetic problem, that appears to be what is troubling chabert here…
(Sorry, something got cut off there…having a bit of trouble with the Captcha thing.
Comment by fanboi — January 10, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
I think, if I recall rightly, what is going on here in the Logic and the Natur Philosophy has to do with an assertion from aristotle and thomas about the “real being of creatures” and that it is not something that can be withdrawn–or that, that it is “on loan”. Read the other way, if what is neccessarily human is not biological, then “in so far as” a human can be more or less just or kind or good (Meister Eckhart ), is it possible–in time–to be more or less human? Or be progressively less human and more something else (while remaining the same, biologically)?
I think that in the Logic humaness (a free act) is not “a quality which has gradations” or at least as long as (but not in so far as)
(I like that quote since it seems to me it helps put the bildung and digestion metaphor into a better perspective.)
Comment by fanboi — January 10, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
hi FB,
Real quick as I’m in a rush - first, thanks, interesting stuff. I haven’t read any further in the book, need to get a paper copy as reading it online is harder. Second, just on this more or less human thing, I’m thinking of paragraph 14.
Hegel writes that logic transforms human “sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct (…) into something human, even though only formally human.” There are two gradations of human here - formally human vs some other sense of human, and the qualities transformed both before and after their transformation. Those qualities prior to their transformation into something human are still human qualities in some other sense of human - they are at a minimum biologically human or of biological humanity. It may be that the biologically human here is the human as of the beasts, rather than as distinct from them (I’m just thinking of that because Hegel makes the human/animal distinction in the start of this paragraph). One other thing on this, related to the logic/thought and language relationship - if logic makes human and this occurs in language then pre-linguistic humans are another implied category of the not-(yet?)fully-human here, or an example of the same category, a lower gradation of humanity.
Make sense?
Gotta run.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 10, 2008 @ 6:13 pm
Nate, I just visited today for the first time, since your analysis of the soft ware industry appeared over at Chabert’s. So pardon me for joining this thread so late.
I just wanted to a say a word about your notes on Paragraph 13 of the second preface. I think Hegel proposes two answers to the problem of thought enjoying scientific certainty in the knowledge of thought.
The first answer does not appear explicitly in the prefaces. ‘Thought’ means the historical process of philosophy. ‘Thought’ gaining knowledge of ‘thought’ does not mean introspection into cognition, it means the critical examination of the preceding body of philosophy. This examination runs less risk of confounding self-identity and reflexivity.
The second answer does appear in the prefaces, but the translation you linked obscures it. Almost everywhere where the translation says ‘philosophy’ Hegel wrote ‘science’ (Wissenschaft). And in the rest of the book, Hegel does devote considerable space to what would be today questions of natural science. In Paragraph 8, the translation says ‘the science of logic,’ but Hegel wrote ‘logical science.’ The two variants identify substantially different ends for Hegel’s discussion. He does not discuss logic for the sake of logic. He wants to establish a science of logic in order to regiment science, philosophy if you will, through logic. This foundational role of logic is what Hegel means by ‘metaphysics’ and ‘speculative.’ Carefully and thoroughly applied logic guarantee the scientific nature of all knowledge and most importantly of philosophical knowledge.
Of course the Science of Logic delivers some monumental demonstrations of the value of rigorously logical metaphysical speculation. My favorite is the passage that proves by logical inference from first principles that lightning can be caused by electrical charges in the air. Hegel seems to have been particularly proud of this proof and exults in his definitive deflation of crude empiricism. Although to do him justice, in the course of the book Hegel does dissect many instances of bogus ‘scientific’ thinking that you can find daily in the press, television, internet, and, need I say, refereed journals.
Comment by Chuckie K — January 15, 2008 @ 6:01 pm
Oh damn. Edited and still missed it. That is ‘lightning can NOT be caused by electical charges’.
Comment by Chuckie K — January 15, 2008 @ 6:03 pm
Hello all,
i really find it surprising as to why hegel has not glossed over the aristotelian quote on the vanity of logic. instances prove otherwise.
just a wonder, is it not possible to look at the transformation of the human qualities into human qualities with the aid of logic as a process of ‘becoming’. ‘becoming’ in the more deleuzean sense, that is.
himanshu
sorry for the infringement, but i found the discussion too stimulating.
Comment by himanshu damle — May 13, 2009 @ 4:49 am
the 19th paragraph does disclose hegel’s refusal to take the aristotelian quote seriously (i quote it in full):
‘In so many respects’, says Aristotle in the same context, ‘the nature of man is in bondage; but this science, which is not studied for its utility, is the only absolutely free science and seems therefore to be a more than human possession.’ Philosophical thinking in general is still concerned with concrete objects — God, nature, spirit; but logic is concerned only and solely with these thoughts as thoughts, in their complete abstraction. For this reason it is customary, to include logic in the curriculum of youth, for youth is not yet involved in the practical affairs of life, living at leisure so far as they are concerned; and it is only for its own subjective ends that it has to busy itself with acquiring the means to enable it to become actively engaged with the objects of those practical interests — and still theoretically even with these. Contrary to Aristotle’s view just mentioned, the science of logic is included in these means; the study of logic is a preliminary labour to be carried out in school and it is not until later that the serious business of life and the pursuit of substantial ends begins.
Comment by himanshu damle — May 13, 2009 @ 6:29 am
hi Himanshu,
No infringement, thanks for your comments! I had to leave off the Hegel reading because of too many other demands on my time. I hope to get back to it someday. Right now I’m too worn out to think clearly so I can’t reply to your interesting comments with any substance.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 13, 2009 @ 10:42 am