Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 9
What Logic Means for Hegel
Hegel’s logic is not formal logic, which deals with rules of inference and forms of argument. Nor is it a science of correct thinking that provides rules for how a subject ought to conduct its thoughts. It is thinking’s thinking about itself: the systematic self-clarification of what happens in thought at all when it determines an object — whether that object is a thing, a property, a relation, a process, a person, or anything else.
The point is that thinking does not proceed arbitrarily in making such determinations, but follows certain structures that drive each other forward. Thinking first posits something as being (an is); then it turns out that this being is always already more than the immediate positing can say — it has an essence that shows itself in appearance, not behind it; Hegel says explicitly in the lecture course that essence is “not behind appearance,” it is “out”; and finally it turns out that being and essence are only moments of a movement that Hegel calls the concept: that which determines itself through its own differences and, in this self-determination, presents the truth of being and essence.
The Logic is therefore organized into three great stages: the doctrine of being, the doctrine of essence, and the doctrine of the concept. The three differ not only in their object but in the form of their movement: in being, one determination passes over into its other; in essence, two determinations shine into one another and constitute each other reciprocally; in the concept, a determination develops out of what was already implicit in it (Hegels Logik, 1–18). For the following account of the philosophy of right, the doctrine of the concept is above all relevant — and within it, three stations that are central to understanding human action.
The Doctrine of the Concept: Subjective Concept, Object, Idea
The doctrine of the concept is organized into three stages: it begins with the subjective concept (the concept of the concept), then turns to the object (the concept of what is not itself concept), and finally arrives at the idea (in which subjective concept and object are grasped as a unity).
The subjective concept is the concept insofar as it unfolds its determinations out of itself alone — universal, particular, individual; judgment and syllogism as the forms in which the determinations are linked to one another (Hegels Logik, 9–11). Here thought displays its own inner articulation without relating to anything external.
There is a reason why thought does not remain at the subjective concept, and this reason must be stated here because it underlies the entire analysis that follows. The disjunctive syllogism (“A is either B or C”) only works if one knows the particulars into which the universal is divided. But the concept of the concept says only how concepts are built, not which concepts there are — it is the universal, and it needs its own particularizations. In addition: thought is always also thought of something other than itself; without this difference it would remain in pure self-reference. Hegel himself puts it more concisely in the lecture course: if the moments of the concept are “each developed into totality,” then each has “independence” — and independent moments are no longer mere thought-determinations. “That is the true transition into the Object.”[1] Cf. Der subjektive Begriff. [KF]
The Object is thus the next stage. The common shorthand — the concept of what is not itself concept — captures only half the matter, since it suggests a conceptless outside. More precisely: objectivity is that in which the categorial forms show themselves and to which they belong. What is meant is the logical form of that — that is, the logical form of what we think as nature, as the objective, as the extra-conceptual. It is important to see here: the Object in the Logic is not itself nature, but the conceptual determination of what we think when we think nature. The Logic remains the self-clarification of thought; it does not itself become natural science.
For this volume the direction of the question changes. In the Logic the series is a sequence in which one wrong measure corrects the next; at the level of spirit the three forms stand simultaneously within one and the same institution. What is asked is therefore not at which stage an institution stands, but in which of its relations there is too much identity and in which too little — whether an administrative body proceeds mechanically where it should, and whether it does so also where it should not. That is a judgment about relations, not a classification of objects. [KF]
Within the Object, Hegel distinguishes three stages: mechanism, chemism, and teleology (Hegels Logik, 13–15). Hegel also gives examples of the three forms from the domain of spirit, thereby indicating that they are not confined to nature. The systematic elaboration of this thought — that mechanism, chemism, and teleology recur on three levels: in inanimate nature, in life, and in spirit — is an extension beyond Hegel’s text, proposed here and carried out in what follows. [KF] Hegel gives a criterion for the series that is easy to keep in mind: “In chemism and mechanism there is too much identity; in external purposiveness, too little; in the Idea, this is the unity.”[2] What is measured is the degree of identity between concept and object; the series is developed in Hegels Logik, 13–16.
Mechanism, Chemism, and Teleology on Three Levels
Mechanism, chemism, and teleology are thus not successive stages of a single linear development, but structural forms that occur simultaneously in every developed system — even if concretized differently on each level.
Mechanism is the simplest form: external connections between things that, by their own determination, are unconnected. What holds them together is not their inner essence but an external constellation. On the level of nature: the solar system as a gravitational system, the collision between two bodies. On the level of life: the mechanical aspects of the organism — bones as levers, blood vessels as tubes. On the level of spirit: bureaucratic structures in which files lie side by side; interchangeable positions in an administration; “human resources” treated like cogs. In all these cases the characteristic form is indifference — and it must be grasped precisely: not that the elements remain unaffected by one another (in a collision, both bodies change their momentum), but that the relation does not constitute their determinateness. The ball is not a ball by virtue of being struck.
Chemism goes a step further: here the connected things are not indifferent to one another but disposed toward one another. Their own determinations first become what they are through their relation to the other, and their combination brings forth something qualitatively new. On the level of nature: hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, which is neither the one nor the other; sodium and chlorine form table salt with entirely new properties — this is emergence in the strict sense. On the level of life: the affinity between enzyme and substrate; the relation of egg cell and sperm, which brings forth a new being; DNA, in which the complementary bases presuppose one another. On the level of spirit: the relation of question and answer, in which each first brings the other into its own; the relation of teacher and student, which transforms both; the genuine resonance between interlocutors, in which the encounter itself is more than the contributions each brought to it. What distinguishes chemism is affinity — the being-disposed-toward-one-another that establishes a constitutive relation. But in chemism it remains contingent whether the combination actually comes about: the substances must first meet, the conversation must first begin, the catalyst must first be present.
Teleology sublates this contingency: here mechanism and chemism are brought into an overall context determined by a purpose. The means are no longer brought together contingently but are coordinated toward a purpose. A clarification belongs here, so that two distinctions do not collapse into one another. The step that matters goes from external to internal purposiveness: in teleology, purpose and material stand apart; in life, purpose is immanent to the object. Whether consciousness is involved is not logically decisive — an organism need not know its purpose in order to be an internal purpose; the distinction is tested on the object itself in Hegels Naturphilosophie, 26–29. Only on the level of spirit does reflected purpose-setting come into play: the human being who sets purposes that he examines and changes. That is a third stage, not the definition of the first. Cf. Chemismus. Mechanical motion does not belong here: Hegel explicitly places weight, pressure, and impact within mechanism, not within teleology.
In spiritual matters teleology operates in three moments that are foundational for the philosophy of right. The subjective purpose: the idea not yet realized — “I want to build a house.” The means: the purpose becomes objective in the tool, the material, the procedures — bricks, tools, workers. The realized purpose: idea and actuality come together — the finished house. Hegel makes an important point about the means: “the plow is more honorable than are immediately the enjoyments it procures and which are its purposes” (TWA 6, 453). The means is more enduring than the individual realized purpose — the plowshare outlasts the harvests it produces; the tool preserves the human purpose beyond the individual act of use. But the means has its own resistance: the hammer has its weight, the wood its grain, the screw its standard thread. This is the point at which teleology can show its dialectical reverse side: what serves as means can turn against the purpose — a possibility that was developed in II.2 as a structure of inversion.
The teleology of the logic of the concept is the form of every intentional action in which a subject applies means to actuality with a purpose. But this purpose is here still an external purpose: it does not come from the material itself but is imposed on it by the subject. Only the Idea brings the internal purpose — the purpose that is not set upon the material from outside but comes from the material itself.
The Idea, finally, is the next stage, in which subjective concept and object are grasped as a unity. Here the purpose becomes internal: the Idea is not an external purpose imposed on an alien material, but a nexus in which the material pursues its own determination as its own purpose.
The Idea: Life, Cognition and Will, the Absolute Idea
The Idea itself also has three stages.
The first is life. A living organism is an internal purpose in the strict sense: its organs are self-explanatory; their function is not imposed from outside but is proper to the living thing itself. The lung exists in order to breathe air, the heart in order to pump blood, the stomach in order to digest food — and these purposes are not set by an external designer but by the life of the organism itself, which has its own reproduction as its purpose.
Hegel’s determination of life contains three structural moments that are foundational for our analysis. First, self-differentiation: the living thing articulates itself from within into distinct parts that relate to one another and together form an organism. Second, self-preservation in the engagement with its environment: the living thing takes in from its environment what it needs, excretes what it does not need, and asserts itself against threats — all without ceasing to be itself. Third, self-sublation — carried under the same word in Teleologie: the living thing reproduces itself beyond itself, in the next generation, and thereby crosses the boundary of the individual organism into the species. These three moments — self-differentiation, self-preservation, self-sublation — determine the structure of the living. They recur in the shapes of spirit insofar as these are forms of life, but they are not the basic model of the Idea as such, since the Idea also encompasses determinations that are not life-shaped. [KF]
The second stage is cognition and will — at first as logical determinations, not as a description of human consciousness. Only in the philosophy of spirit do these structures appear as human cognition and conscious willing; the examples illustrate the logical form, they do not define it. [KF] Here something is added to the structures of life that in mere life is only implicit: the conscious setting of purposes. The living thing has its purpose (to reproduce itself) within it without knowing it; cognition sees what corresponds to the concept and what does not, and will alters actuality accordingly. Cognition and will are thus the taking-up of the structures of life into a reflected form: self-differentiation becomes the conscious articulation of tasks and functions, self-preservation becomes the conscious engagement with environment and conditions, self-sublation becomes the conscious formation of the next generation and the conscious transformation of one’s own forms of life.
The third stage is the absolute Idea. It is not an additional sphere alongside life and cognition-will, but the self-cognition of the method: here thought becomes conscious of its own forms of movement, which were already at work in the preceding stages — self-relation, differentiation, sublation of one-sidedness, recognition of its own limits. The absolute Idea brings nothing substantially new in content; it is the reflection on the form in which content as such becomes disclosed at all.
Absolute here does not mean omnipotent or perfect, but ab-solutus — not bounded by another. This absoluteness is itself limited: it holds only within the sphere of pure logic. The absolute Idea completely cognizes what thinking is; but it does not yet cognize the other of thinking — nature, history, concrete experience. These must be examined in the philosophy of the real, whose first part is the philosophy of nature and whose second part is the philosophy of spirit (with subjective, objective, and absolute spirit).
The structure of the absolute Idea as method is circular, but not static: beginning (immediate unity — life), development through inner deficiencies (reflected division — cognition and will), result as enriched unity (comprehended method — absolute Idea). Each return to the beginning is enriched by the process it has traversed. This is what Hegel calls “true infinity” — the process that does not progress endlessly into ever-new content, but returns to itself by comprehending itself as process. (The counter-formula “good infinity,” widespread in the literature, is not Hegel’s own word; he consistently opposes true infinity to the spurious one.)
Logic, Nature, Spirit — An Important Clarification
A clarification is important here, one that avoids a common misunderstanding. The Object and the Idea in the Logic are not themselves nature and spirit. They are the conceptual form of how we think nature and spirit when we grasp them as Object or as Idea. The Logic remains the self-clarification of thought; it does not itself step outside itself.
The common formula that nature is “the other of the Logic” or “the other of the Idea” is therefore not quite precise. The Idea, as logical form, is already contained in nature — nature follows structures that we can reconstruct in thought, it has its own mechanisms and chemisms, and in living beings it unfolds a teleological structure that has the form of the Idea. But nature knows nothing of this. It is Idea, but it does not know itself as Idea. The stone falls without knowing that it falls; the animal reproduces itself without knowing that it reproduces itself.
Only in life does the Idea appear in a first form in which it is something more than mere logical structure — it is present as a self-preserving, self-transcending nexus that has its purpose within itself. But even here the living thing does not know its purpose; it merely enacts it. Only in human spirit, which has emerged from nature (more precisely: from life), does the Idea appear in its reflected form: as cognition, which grasps the structures, and as will, which reshapes them according to cognized purposes.
The human being is therefore determined in a twofold sense. On the one hand, he is part of nature — a living being with all the structures of life. On the other hand, his essence is logic itself: he thinks, and in his thinking he follows the structures that the Logic has uncovered. His cognition and his will are the human form of what the Logic distinguishes as the two moments of the Idea.
For our analysis of human action, social institutions, and political form, three categories of the Logic are therefore especially relevant: teleology (the form of intentional action as such), life (the structures in which social reproduction takes place), and cognition and will (the reflected form in which human beings consciously shape their forms of life). These three categories will accompany us throughout the philosophy of right.