The Science of Logic by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (review)

Since 1969, English-speaking scholars of Hegel’s Science of Logic have been reliant on Arthur Miller’s commendable translation. That work is now almost certainly to be superseded by George di Giovanni’s new translation, which appears in the Cambridge Hegel Translations series, a highly anticipated project that promises to render Hegel afresh for the anglophone world.

The Science of Logic, often dubbed Hegel’s Greater Logic (as distinct from the so-called Lesser Logic of his tripartite Encyclopedia), is a two-volume work that was published in instalments from 1812 to 1816, when Hegel was teaching at a gymnasium in Nürnberg. As such, it appeared after the 1807 publication of his Phenomenology, though di Giovanni shows in his introduction that Hegel began composing the Logic piecemeal as early as 1801, during his Jena period when he worked in Schelling’s shadow as a Privatdozent. Hegel’s purpose in writing the Logic was to analyze the most basic and general categories of thought, moving from objective logic—which includes its own internal movement from “being” (simple immediacy and givenness) to “essence” (reflection on being)—to subjective logic, namely, the category of “concept” (thought reflecting consciously on itself). This overall movement from objective to subjective logic is Hegel’s attempt to advance a particular unity of ontology and metaphysics. What it means “to be” is thus bound up with what it means “to have being.” In other words, for Hegel, “being” is at once its own concept, namely, what he calls the Idea or the Absolute. But the Idea, according to Hegel, is also a determination; it is the “space of discovery” defined by the oscillation of “being” and “nothing” (xxxviii). One of the great contributions of the Logic, therefore, as di Giovanni points out, is the overarching claim that “becoming” constitutes “the first self-contained category, of which ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ are only abstractive moments” (xxxviii).

While Hegel’s entire oeuvre is notoriously dense and abstruse, The Science of Logic is especially onerous and stands apart as virtually impenetrable. On this score, di Giovanni’s introduction “cannot be a step-by-step guide for the neophyte” (xi); it presumes that the reader already has an acquaintance with Hegel on the basis of reliable introductory treatments, such as G.R.G. Mure’s Introduction to Hegel (Clarendon, 1940) and Stephen Houlgate’s more recent Opening of Hegel’s Logic (Purdue University Press, 2006). What di Giovanni’s introduction does accomplish is an assessment of the Logic’s own problematic nature. He understands the work “as still in line with Kant’s Transcendental Logic, though without being ‘transcendental’ in Kant’s sense” (xi). Metaphysics and ontology are, for Hegel, identical with logic. Di Giovanni readily concedes, however, that the Logic, as a historical document, is subject to variegated interpretations, and he thus attempts to trace some of the key fault lines of the interpretive debate. One such line demarcates a certain dogmatic stance, such as that taken by John McTaggart of the early twentieth century, who reads the Logic as a work of logic, as a philosophy of categories that is entirely the product of reason. Accordingly, for McTaggart, the Logic’s method is not internal to the Logic itself, such that it is the exclusive content of the Idea (as Hegel would assert); method is rather what has its own prior content, whose “application” has made possible the Logic in the first place. Another line of interpretation is what di Giovanni identifies with claims that truth is worked out in story-telling. But it must be remembered, as he rightly notes, that truth is much more for Hegel than the product of human narratival constructs; it is rather “nature” (mechanistic causation and repetition—what Hegel called “the Idea in the form of otherness”) attaining self-comprehension. Whether one follows McTaggart or the storytelling approach or some...