Why Study the Science of Logic?
Five reasons why Hegel's foundational text is still important for us today
Philosophy Portal’s next course focuses on the Science of Logic, and starts January 16th 2023, and in-between now and December 25th 2022, there is a Christmas Sale on all four tiers of the course.
Hegel’s Science of Logic is an incredibly dense work of conceptualisation. Why bother with it? Surely there are more modern and up-to-date texts, works by logicians which go beyond Hegel, no?
In my view, it is debatable whether there are works by post-Hegelian logicians which actually go beyond Hegel, but certainly, without a deep understanding of the foundations that Hegel lays bare for us in the Science of Logic, we will be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle that is the historicity of logic itself. In this post, I am going to present five reasons why I think Hegel’s Science of Logic still has a lot to offer us today.
MODERN SCIENCE
In contemporary science and spirituality, there are often debates on the relation (or lack there of) between reductionism and emergentism. The reductionist frame of mind attempts to study the mechanics or the parts of being. Particle physics is perhaps the ideal expression of reductionist science, but this ideal easily extends to many aspects of chemistry and biology, as well as certain dimensions of geology, psychology, and sociology. Perhaps one of the most famous or popular examples of reductionism can be found in the work of biologists like Richard Dawkins, who, in works like The Selfish Gene (1976), or The Blind Watchmaker (1986), describes biological processes from a gene-centric point of view, or a natural selectionist point of view.1
In contrast to reductionism, emergentism is a frame of mind that attempts to focus on the whole as opposed to the parts where we find a movement or a becoming that is often described as spiritual as opposed to mechanistic. The nature of a spiritual group, like a Christian, Islamic, or Buddhist society, is perhaps the ideal expression of an emergentist phenomena, where the individual parts of the society (the subjectification of Christians, Islamists or Buddhists) cannot explain the totality of the community or society which becomes structured by higher-order rituals and events. However, the same logic applies to approach explanations of many social phenomena, like capitalism or political movements. For both capitalism and large-scale political movements, there is a totalising force that can emerge from reductionist micro-interactions, and cannot be predicted or explained by those micro-transactions.
Hegel was aware of these paradoxes, or this dialectical oscillation between reductionist and emergentist approaches to knowledge. In the Science of Logic, he uses the mega-triad Being-Essence-Concept to describe the way in which, when we engage in reductionist activity (isolating parts of being to understand their mechanics, or to quantify their substance), we cannot forget that the very condition of possibility for this activity is opened by an emergentist spiritual community. In this way, it makes no sense to think of fundamental physics (Hegel will use examples of atoms and the void), abstracted away from the spiritual community which upholds the whole abstract endeavour.
However, the opposite is also true: if we think of spiritual communities as fundamental (Christian Islamic, Buddhist, Capitalist, Neoliberal), we cannot forget that all of these communities engage in dramatic abstract reductions of being to the symbols that constitute the totality or the whole of their group (i.e. Christians and Buddhists will use totally different symbols to describe the nature of the individual and the community, truth and fiction of reality, for example). In this way, reductions of being (different abstract ontologies), and emergence of essential concepts (like physics communities and Christians communities in-and-for-themselves), become mediated or reconciled with each other in a higher-order triad that structures the whole of the Science of Logic.
LIFE MOVEMENT
In our contemporary world, many may be highly educated in abstractions (e.g. engineering, computer science, business management, and so on), but very few of us are highly educated in life movement. Hegel’s logic can be essential to help us here, as its very foundational “atom/void” is “Being/Nothing.” When we think about the process of our life movement: Nothing comes up in Being, and Being comes up in Nothing. We are often very unreflective about this oscillation, which happens so quickly and often, that we can find ourselves in a radical disorientation vis-a-vis the most essential dimensions of our conceptual becoming.
Let’s get practical for a moment: if you think about the history of your love life, social relationships, desire for recognition, career ambitions, or basic somatic processes related to eating, sleeping or sexuality, it is impossible to become in these processes, without conceptually reconciling the way in which Nothing comes up in Being, and Being comes up in Nothing. Being and Nothing are a unity of the Becoming of these phenomena. One moment, you are reconciled with your love, the next moment, you experience the abyss of your love; one moment you are recognised by the other, the next moment, you are confronted by an abyssal recognition; one moment you are overwhelmed by sexual passion or hunger, the next moment, you are disgusted or even revolted by the very same sexual passion or hunger.
To think about your self as a process of conceptual becoming, one has to learn how to navigate the unity of Being and Nothing: How to hold? How to let go? If one holds too tightly to the general other (reifying Being), one will lose the other (Being); if one lets go of everything (reifying Nothing), one will never experience the closeness needed for maturation in relation to intensities of otherness. We must avoid the all-too-common temptations of reifying ultimate Beings and ultimate Nothings, if we are to really be in touch, in close contact, with conceptual Becoming. This is what we might call the logic required for the dialectics of life movement itself, which must contend with the absence of the One, the appearance of the Many; the absence of unity, the appearance of division; the absence of presence, the appearance of absence.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of this oscillation is expressed in the desire for Eternal Life (Being) and the Real of Absolute Death (Nothing). In this way, the true spiritual maturation that opens a Becoming is a conceptual determination that is capable of including within life’s desires Absolute Death (the way Nothing comes up in Being), and the Real of Death within the desire for Eternal Life (the way Being comes up in Nothing). Here we are the (very strange) entities/processes traversing the split of the One and the Many, the Unity and Division, and Presence and the Absence.
TWO IN ONE
Throughout history there has been a deep rift or split in the nature of consciousness as a life unfolding or development. This rift/split can be categorised between ordinary and mystical consciousness. Consider that many seekers of mystical knowledge withdraw from ordinary life and seek a space for inner contemplation, reflection and practice that separates them from the rest of the world, or the normative order. Or consider that many individuals comfortable within the confines of ordinary day-to-day existence never seek contact with, or end up experiencing, anything that may be categorised as divine or sacred. In many ways, ancient societies were fundamentally based on this rift, with one group (ordinary consciousness) maintaining the pragmatic appearances of reality, and the other group (mystical consciousness) maintaining the heart of the sacred reality.
For Hegel, ordinary and mystical consciousness must be conceptualised as a one split into two, and thus over-identification with one over the other is itself an illusion to be overcome as a process that contains both. In other words, if we can define mystical consciousness as desiring and demanding direct experience of the Absolute, and if we can define ordinary consciousness as that which operates within confines of day-to-day “common life” (kids, family, friends, work, practical affairs), what Hegel’s logic suggests is that the direct experience of the Absolute must be integrated or extended into the experience of a common social order. Here the split becomes only a split from the perspective of a logic that cannot unify Being-Nothing into a unity of Becoming.2
From a Hegelian frame, it is not enough to withdraw for a reclusive sanctuary away from the “real world” in order to develop contact with suprasensible altered states of consciousness, and it is also not enough to embody/inhabit the “real world” without cultivating some contact with the suprasensible.3 There is a higher relation where this "two" is in fact "one." This "one" is not a self-identical one of pure self-similarity of abstract identity, but rather a self-repelling one that is constantly maintaining a gap between identity and difference, or self-simiarlity and otherness. This gap is the "line" that needs to be "walked" (discursively) by an "ordinary mystic" that finds the "mystical in the ordinary."
Here we should state the “ordinary mystic” that finds the “mystical in the ordinary” is capable of both experimenting with the limit-edges of experience retroactively sense-making these limit-edges logically, and walking the social line of normative day-to-day life where common-sense rituals and practices maintain the real appearances of the world. In this sense the traditional split of the ancient world becomes unified in a way that opens us to a new form of Becoming.
SPIRITUAL DETERMINATION
When we think about standard education, what comprises this education includes the abstract content or representations of art, religion, and science (for example). This education is often implicitly framed within a deterministic understanding. Here we learn reifications about dimensions of X artistic movement or Y religious movement or Z scientific movement, as historical representations determined in the past. Perhaps good examples of such teachings in art would include a comprehensive understanding of the way in which ancient art transitioned to medieval art, or medieval art transitioned into renaissance art, or various modern movements related to Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and so forth. The same examples could be given for an overview of a religious or a scientific education.
However, what this style of deterministic education misses is the very way in which such phenomena come to be determined by spirit in history, namely that all of the various movements in art, religion and science were, in their respective moment, absolute determinations of and by spirit. Moreover, as contemporary spirit, as spirit in the immediacy of a process of mediation that we may refer to as spiritual development, you are capable of such absolute determinations, and that such absolute determinations could forever, retroactively, re-write the entire story of the human species. For example, in art, everything changed before and after a figure like Salvador Dali or Pablo Picasso spiritually determined a new course or direction of movement; in religion, everything changed before and after a figure like Jesus or Buddha spiritually determined a new course or direction of movement; in science, everything changed before and after a figure like Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin spiritually determined a new course or direction of movement.
Here we have to shift our attention from representationalism to motivationalism. Of course learning about the various historical shapes of consciousness is an important and necessary process to move through — and indeed, Hegel himself sets this as his task or motivation in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a (giant) preface to the Science of Logic — but we eventually need to shift our attention to how shapes or forms emerge or are created in the oscillation of Being-Nothing. This brings us to, not what has been determined by spirit, but how we become deterministic agents of art, religion and science, and how these determinations emerge from motivations and desires that, by definition, were at one moment of the dialectical process, Nothing, whereas at another moment of the dialectical process, Being.
Motivation and desire are the very source of knowledge itself, and too often, this fact is left out, abstracted away, from our educational systems (supposedly) responsible for cultivating knowledge. In this way we move away from identifications with abstract knowledge, and we move closer to identifications with the self-core (the self-repelling one) where the creative act must be perceived as central to any understanding of a proper education.
NEW OBJECTIVITY
Finally, when we think about science, we think about the dimension referred to as “objectivity.” Objectivity is here often understood as a correlate for what is assumed to be a natural existence outside of us (our subjectivity). The entire scientific method is set up to control for “subjective distortions,” to “dissipate” the chances that subjectivity (our desires and motivations) will interfere with our approach to a neutral objective understanding of the real world. Consider that much of scientific history has been involved in de-centering many of the beliefs and understandings that were underpinned by desires and motivations to be the center (of the universe, of life, of humanity, etc.).4
In the Science of Logic we are thinking in relation to objectivity, but it is an objectivity of the concept, or what Hegel will call the Absolute Idea. The Absolute Idea is not an externality independent of us, but rather an externality that emerges integral to our very process of coming-to-be what we are. The Absolute Idea “uses” historical subjectivity (only has existence in and through historical subjectivity) to come to know itself as the ultimate or the Absolute object. In this way, Hegel does not so much offer us an “objective worldview” (like Newtonian mechanics, or Darwinian evolution), but rather offers us the very process of subjective worlding where the subject comes to know itself as an object in the Absolute Idea.
In this process of subjective worlding, there is no escaping discursivity or language for a final perfect image. Indeed, one can think about the appearance of a final perfect image as a misrecognition of the Absolute Idea, and a childish idea to be with the Absolute Idea that has yet to be cultivated or matured. In other words, for Hegel, there is no “treat” at the end of the metaphorical tunnel of our spiritual labour where we will be free of and beyond language. Instead, what we achieve in our spiritual self-labour is a perspective shift on the very obstacle that thwarts our desires to be with the perfect image, and a raising of consciousness to the level of a new capacity to work with its own limits, paradoxes and contradictions of Being-Nothing.
One way to think about this is that classical scientific objectivity attempts to establish a unified object of Being independent of Nothing, but in its very historical process, in its own historical unfolding, it came to recognise that (a strange form of) Nothing is at the core of Being (e.g. quantum wavefunction, indeterministic oscillations, etc.). For Hegel, this forces us to consider that what we think of as a deterministic Being is really something that comes-to-be deterministic Being (intelligible) through our own historical subjective work. Thus, ultimately, we may be able to approximate a form of classical scientific objectivity when it comes to external Nature, but that when we include our historical subjective work into the picture, we have to more radically consider the relativity of the object (of desire) in question, and the (primordial) indeterminism of this object, which must be won through a commitment to truth as an unfolding (self) process. This means that, far form excluding desire and motivation for objectivity, we must work-through desire and motivation towards (a new form of) objectivity. We could call this new form of objectivity, the conceptual drive, or the drive of the concept.
WHY STUDY THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC?
This article set forth to demonstrate some of the crucial ways in which Hegel’s Science of Logic is “worth the effort” (the arduous struggle) to contemplate its object, that is the nature of logic as such, for the scientific universe. To recapitulate, these include:
MODERN SCIENCE: Reduction versus Emergentism
LIFE MOVEMENT: Unity of Being-Nothing
TWO IN ONE: Working Mystical-Ordinary Consciousness
SPIRITUAL DETERMINATION: Art, Science, Religion
NEW OBJECTIVITY: Subjective Worlding
Philosophy Portal aims to be a space where you can meditate on the most fundamental texts in philosophical history, and connect it to your personal life drive. The next course on the Science of Logic starts January 16th 2023, and if you act now, there is a Christmas sale until December 25th 2022.
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From an emergentist biological point of view, we would focus on the superorganism or the domain of Life itself (as opposed to genes), or we would focus on how natural selection must be complimented by processes like self-organisation. These points of view are very much alive in the works of biologists like E.O. Wilson and Stuart Kauffman.
The Being or the Nothing here is a parallax depending on what side of consciousness you are privileging: for the ordinary consciousness the suprasensible divine is a Nothing (i.e. there is no God/Absolute etc.); and for the mystical consciousness the world of ordinary consciousness is a Nothing (i.e. all objects of desire fail).
In Hegelese, when we speak of “suprasensible” we are thinking the logical or metaphysical realm in-itself as: “the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion.” In this sense, ordinary consciousness is fully identifies with sensuous concretion, and mystical consciousness is totally negating sensuous concretion, whereas Hegel’s logic points towards a negation of negation or an absolute affirmation of an ordinary consciousness that has traversed the fantasy (to use the Lacanian jargon) of sensuous concretion.
Sigmund Freud famously asserted that the history of science can be defined by three great de-centerings: Copernican astronomy vis-a-vis humanity at the center of the cosmos, Darwinian biology vis-a-vis humanity at the center of life, and Freudian psychoanalysis vis-a-vis the ego at the center of the mind. This process of de-centering throws us from a self-identical one into a multiplicity (of solar systems, life forms, psychic agents) which we can find extremely disorienting and destabilising. Here Hegel’s philosophy seeks to engage with the dialectic of the one and the many, via the self-repelling one, so that a childish desire (to be one), can become a mature desire (to unfold one-self as a process).