The LogiCy as I have presented it in this chapter, is a presuppositionless science designed to meet the modern demand for free self-determination in the sphere of philosophical think
ing. As such it is to be understood as the product of a specific set of historical circum
stances and a specific form of historical consciousness. Yet, precisely because of its presuppositionless, self-determining character, it is to be understood as the science which determines the true, intrinsic determinations of thought. The claim of the Logic to truth is thus not undermined by its emergence from a specific historical situation, because the his
torical situation from which it arises is the one in which consciousness has at last become aware of what true freedom means. Hegel’s philosophy can therefore be said to offer us a developmental account of thought in two senses. As I have tried to show in this chapter, it shows how the categories of thought are generated logically from one another and, ulti
mately, from the very nature of thought itself. At the same time, as I tried to show in chapter 1, it understands its own definitive study of the logical self-determination of thought to be the product of definite historical circumstances.
The Hegel who emerges from the pages of this book is a profoundly historical philoso
pher, but he should not be mistaken for the ‘soft’, hermeneutic, pragmatic Hegel who some
times appears in modern commentaries.38 The Hegel I have presented in this chapter is a rigorous, precise and logical thinker who is concerned with truth and necessity, not just suggestive associations between concepts. Yet those familiar with the interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy offered by such commentators as Charles Taylor may still find my account of Hegel’s logic strangely one-sided.39 Yes, they will say, the Science of Logic sets out the necessary determinations of thought, but doesn’t it also present what Hegel calls various "definitions of the Absolute’?40 Is not Hegel’s logic a metaphysical or ontolo
gical logic which gives us an account of the essence of absolute spirit? Haven’t I deprived Hegel’s philosophy of its metaphysical heart and left merely a categorial skeleton of dialectical thought?
It is certainly true that Hegel conceives of his science of logic as a metaphysics and onto
logy, as well as a logic. In the preface to the first edition of the Science o f Logic, for example, he talks of "the logical science which constitutes metaphysics proper, or pure, speculative phi
losophy’; in the Encyclopaedia he claims that ‘logic coincides with metaphysicsy with the science of things grasped in thoughts’; and in the general introduction to the Science of Logic he maintains that the objective logic - which contains the logics of being and essence - "takes the place of the previous metaphysics which was a scientific edifice to be erected over the world by thought alone’. The metaphysical and ontological character of the Logic is also emphasized when Hegel asserts that the subject matter of his logic is the logos: "it is least of all the logos which should be left outside the science of logic, he says. Speculative logic, for Hegel, is therefore "objective thinking’," thought in so far as it is just as much the matter [Sache]
in itselfy or the matter in itself in so far as it is equally pure thought1 This metaphysical, onto
logical side to Hegel’s logic - the fact that it determines the structure of being, as well as the structure of thought - cannot, in my view, be denied and is, indeed, part of what makes Hegelian logic a logic of truth, not just validity.41
However, it is also clear that Hegel’s logic does not constitute a traditional metaphysics of the kind put forward by, say, Leibniz. Hegel is not providing an account of the world based on the "either/or’ logic of the understanding and, more significantly, he is not offer
ing us philosophical arguments and propositions about presupposed metaphysical entities.
He is not, therefore, presupposing that there is an Absolute and enquiring into what it is.
In this respect I agree with commentators such as David Kolb and Richard Winfield that Hegel’s logic is not a metaphysical account of "a wondrous new superentity, a cosmic self or a world soul or a supermind’, and indeed that the Logic does not present an account of any determinate, given reality at all.42
In what sense is Hegel’s logic metaphysical and ontological, therefore? The answer to this question can be found if we reflect once more on the fact that Hegel is seeking to provide a presuppositionless logic. Logic, for Hegel, seeks to understand the basic categories and rules of thought. In a presuppositionless logic such categories and rules cannot be taken for granted at the outset, but must be discovered by the science itself. Presuppositionless logic may begin, therefore, from nothing more determinate than the simple being of thought. That is to say, it must proceed from the thought of thought itself as sheer, inde
terminate being. It is from the sheer being of thought that the basic categories are then to be derived immanently.
Yet logic cannot just be an account of the nature of thought, but must also be an account of the nature of being as such - that which we otherwise call "existence’ or ‘actuality’. The reason why is straightforward: in a fully self-critical, presuppositionless logic we cannot start out from anything more than the indeterminate being of thought, yet neither can we presuppose at the outset that being as such (or ‘existence’) is anything beyond the being of which thought is minimally aware. If we are to set all our presuppositions - including those about being - to one side, we cannot simply suppose that being constitutes a world of objects that are external to thought or that it exceeds the reach of thought in some way.
Initially we may suppose nothing about being at all, except for the fact that it is minimally pure and simple being. This means, however, that we have no warrant to assume that being as such is anything other than or different from the indeterminate being of which thought is minimally aware. Conversely, we have no warrant to assume that the being of which thought is aware is anything less than being as such.
Hegel’s claim is not that being is a mere postulate of thought. On the contrary, he argues that, for the fully self-critical philosopher who suspends all his determinate preconceptions about thought and being, our thought of being cannot be anything less than the thought
of being itself. Thought cannot be assumed necessarily to fall short of what there is - to be confined, for example, to the realm of conceivable possibility - but must be understood to be the awareness and disclosure of being as such. This may seem to some to be presump
tuous. How can thought be certain that it is able to bridge the gap between itself and being and disclose the true nature of what there is? From the point of view of the self- critical philosopher, however, this question is illegitimate, for we are not entitled to pre
suppose that there is such a gap in the first place. The fully self-critical philosopher may not assume that being is anything beyond what thought itself is aware of. Consequently, he or she may not assume that thought is aware of anything less than being itself.
For Hegel, then, no fundamental distinction can be drawn in a genuinely presupposi
tionless logic between the determinations of thought and the determinations of being.
What we understand to be the determinations of things are always to be understood - after Kant - to be the determinations of our thinking; but conversely - and contrary to what Kant believed - what we know to be the true determinations of our thinking are always also to be understood to be the determinations of things themselves. The mode of con
sciousness which recognizes this is what Hegel calls ‘absolute knowing’ or philosophy.
Philosophy, as Hegel understands it at the start of the Logic, has given up the presup
position, which is never challenged by Kant, that the determinations of thought could be, or indeed are, utterly distinct from the determinations of things themselves. And to the extent that philosophy has freed itself from the fundamental ‘opposition of consciousness’43 and has realized that being cannot be thought to be utterly other than thought, philoso
phy must acknowledge its categories to be ontological. However, this does not allow us to say that Hegelian philosophy has returned to the traditional metaphysical conclusion that the categories of thought ‘correspond’ to the nature of a given reality. To say this would be to imply that one can distinguish dearly between our thought and reality and then recog
nize a correspondence between the two. But Hegel’s point is that, at the start of the Logic, thought is not entitled to make such a clear distinction. Presuppositionless philosophy begins with no systematic assumptions. That means that it cannot begin from the assump
tion that the determinations or categories of thought and reality are conceivably distinct from one another, or that they might conceivably ‘correspond’ to one another. It cannot begin with any definite conceivable distinction between thought and being at all.
Since we can presuppose no conceivable distinction between thought and being at the beginning of the Logic, the categories set out in the Logic must be ontological. At the same time they cannot provide a description of any Absolute, reality or being that is presup
posed as the distinct, given object of philosophical enquiry. The Logic thus does not seek to
‘m irror’ in pure thought a world that is assumed to stand over against us. To suppose that our categories ‘correspond’ or ‘apply* to a distinct reality that is given to us is to take for granted, in David Kolb’s words, ‘what it means to be’.44 It is to suppose from the start that reality or being is to be understood as some kind of object of enquiry which lies, as Hei
degger puts it, ‘present at hand’ waiting to be known by us. We similarly beg the question if we assume that being is not an ‘object’ but spirit, or if we assume that being might elude or exceed thinking altogether. Presuppositionless thinking, however, cannot assume what it means to be any more than it can assume what it means to think. Hegel’s logic may not presuppose from the outset that being is objective, substantial, absolute or in any way deter
minate, and then seek to provide a metaphysical account of such a determinate reality.
Rather, it must start with pure indeterminate being as such and determine from scratch precisely how such being is to be conceived by letting being determine itself immanently in thought. Hegel’s Logic does not, therefore, merely contain ideas and propositions about being. It presents in thought the self-determining and self-unfolding o f being itself. In this
way, it discovers what it means to be’ and what it is to be, without taking anything deter
minate for granted at all. It is in this sense that Hegel’s logic is ontological.
It should be clear from this why Hegel’s logic does not presuppose any specific corre
spondence between consciousness and nature. This is because speculative logic considers the general ontological question of what it means to be, and this question must be con
sidered before we can know what it means to be natural or to be conscious in particular.
Indeed, Hegel insists that we must derive our understanding of what it means to be natural or to be conscious from our logical study of what it means to be as such, if we are not to take the character of natural things and of human consciousness for granted.
The transition from the logic to the philosophy of nature and consciousness in Hegel’s system is thus not made by bringing in given material to which the categories of the logic are then "applied’ but is simply the result of further determining what it means and what it is to be. Hegel’s logic shows that to be means to be qualitatively and quantitatively deter
minate, to be substantial and to be rational or the "Idea’. The Idea itself then proves to be self-external or spatio-temporal It turns out, therefore, that being-as-Idea is in truth nature,.
The further determination of what it is and means to be nature then reveals that nature requires there to be physical, chemical and organic structures and leads, ultimately, to the emergence of consciousness. The final part of Hegel’s system shows that to be conscious is to be subjective, to be free, to be historical, to be aesthetic, religious and philosophical. The logic thus provides the categories and method by which the philosophy of reality proceeds, but these categories are not applied to a given reality; they are developed further to gener
ate new and more complex determinations of what it means to be; that is, to generate the concepts of nature and consciousness freely and without presuppositions. As David Kolb puts it, "what happens in the transition to concrete reality can only be a further thinking of the logical Idea in terms of itself’45