Kommentar zur Naturphilosophie, Chapter 42
Neuser: The Other Logical Tradition
The second contribution is a classification that explains the dispute over Hegel’s method. Neuser distinguishes two basic currents of thought.
The Aristotelian current proceeds from the theory of abstraction: one omits the inessential determinations until only those describing the essence remain; the degree of abstraction decides which science one is practicing. From it, in late antiquity and scholasticism, a logic arose that depends on three conditions: linearity of argumentation, exclusion of circularity, transitive orderedness. These conditions ensure that thought remains traceable and unambiguous — at the price that the object is grasped only with respect to the determinations under consideration, not in its totality.[1]
The Platonic current, further developed in Neoplatonism, has no elaborated formal method of inference. It aims “always to think the whole of an object at once and to accept no reductive abstraction to individual determinatenesses of the object.” Its basic questions are correspondingly different: How does multiplicity generate itself out of unity? How are the elements related to one another and to the whole?
The three conditions do not hold there: the argumentation is not linear; it becomes circular as soon as determinations are related to their whole; and transitivity may be violated.
What this explains. Anyone who examines Hegel by the three conditions finds him illogical — and is not wrong in this, but is measuring him by the standard of the other tradition. Hegel’s procedure follows different rules, not no rules at all.
This justifies nothing. It only says what is at stake when Hegel’s method is disputed: not whether he draws correct inferences, but whether an argument may be circular when its object is a whole.
Neuser, Natur und Begriff, chap. VIII.4. ↩︎