John Burbidge-King

In the conclusion to his long book on Hegel, Michael Inwood cites a passage describing the way Stephen Spender’s tutors approached the study of philosophy: “This might be described as the Obstacle Race way of teaching philosophy. The whole field of human thought is set out with logical obstacles and the students watch the philosophers race around it.” Inwood mentions it because “it represents … one of the ways in which we should not treat Hegel - disqualifying him from the race altogether on account of his obscurity or allowing a simplified parody of him to stumble at an early stage”.

When he died in 1831, Hegel had just completed a revision of the first Book of the Science of Logic, “The Doctrine of Being”. Since the revised edition has been consistently used in subsequent printing, the first edition disappeared from view, to surface again only in 1966 when Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht of Gottingen published a facsimile reprint. Along with the never-revised “Doctrine of Essence” of 1813, that original text of Book I has now received elegant treatment in volume 11 of the critical edition.

In the year 1841, the sixty-six year old philosopher, Schelling, was installed in the chair of philosophy at Berlin. Because he wanted someone with sufficient authority to combat the influence of Hegel, the new king of Prussia supported his appointment. As Crown Prince he had been concerned about the liberal and subversive elements in Hegel’s political philosophy. In power, he chose an associate of Hegel’s youth to lead the attack, a man who had disappeared from the intellectual scene just as Hegel’s star was beginning to rise. Although Schelling and Hegel were collaborators in the years that led up to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling had not been converted to dialectical philosophy. Indeed, in lectures on the history of philosophy given in Munich during the years after Hegel’s death, he challenged its rationality. The move from the logic of pure thought to a philosophy of nature was unjustified. For Schelling there could be no logical bridge between transcendental idealism and the theory which expressed the inherent structures of the natural order. They are two quite different disciplines, of quite a different order. When Hegel moved from one to the other, then, he was violating a fundamental logical principle, first enunciated by Aristotle. He was passing over into another genus—from thought to reality. The image that sprang to Schelling’s mind was one vividly expressed by Lessing for an analogous problem. Between the two—thought and reality—lay a “nasty broad ditch.”

To formulate a philosophy of time is not easy, even though it would seem to be the basic requirement for any philosophy which attempts to comprehend the world of nature or of history. The problem is briefly posed: Can the conceptual framework of philosophical thought do justice to the dynamic character of time?The purpose of this paper is not to provide a definitive answer to this question. Its aim is more limited. By discussing carefully the way in which Hegel's philosophy related conceptual thought to time, it hopes to provide new perspectives on this vexing philosophical problem.

Di Giovanni’s review of my On Hegel’s Logic in the September 1982 number of The Owl of Minerva fulfilled its own prediction. By responding to my thesis concerning the logic, he transformed my monologue into “an instructive debate on what the nature and value of the Hegelian Logic truly are.” After a thorough and carefully analysis of my “meta-logical” introduction and conclusion, he raises a central question concerning my interpretation of the logic: whether in fact I have fallen prey to psychologism. In accordance with the traditions of debating, his challenge deserves a considered rebuttal.

The Logic interpreted by Professor Harris is the Encyclopaedia Logic translated by Wallace. He goes through it chapter by chapter and provides explanations of the various concepts and transitions, using references to the larger Logic, illustrations from the philosophy of nature, and anticipations of subsequent sections. His interpretation is essentially Spinozistic: the ultimate point of reference is the whole. And the dialectical development is the result of thought’s comparing its immediate concepts with “the whole immanent in them, which figures in each as what it aspires, yet fails to be”.

By comparing the argument in the first edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic with that of the second we find that he not only introduces significant changes but indicates why he found the changes necessary. As over time he rethought his method in the course of his annual lectures he realised that pure thought should not anticipate results but follow from the inherent sense of each term. The details of his logical method suggest how the novelties that emerge in history can require the introduction of new modified categories.

By comparing the argument in the first edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic with that of the second we find that he not only introduces significant changes but indicates why he found the changes necessary. As over time he rethought his method in the course of his annual lectures he realised that pure thought should not anticipate results but follow from the inherent sense of each term. The details of his logical method suggest how the novelties that emerge in history can require the introduction of new modified categories.