Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
asunder; there are a number of kinds of judgment and conclusion, each
of which is held to be independent, and is supposed to have absolute
truth as such. Thus they are simply content, for they then have an
indifferent, undistinguished existence, such as we see in the famous
laws of contradiction, conclusions, &c. In this isolation they have,
however, no truth; for their totality alone is the truth of thought,
because this totality is at once subjective and objective. Thus they
are only the material of truth, the formless content; their deficiency
is hence not that they are only forms but rather that form is lacking
to them, and that they are in too great a degree content. Thus as many
individual qualities of a thing are not anything, such as red, hard,
&c., if taken by themselves, but only in their unity constitute a real
thing, so it is with the unity of the forms of judgment and conclusion,
which individually have as little truth as such a quality, or as a
rhythm or melody. The form of a conclusion, as also its content, may
be quite correct, and yet the conclusion arrived at may be untrue,
because this form as such has no truth of its own; but from this
point of view these forms have never been considered, and the scorn
of logic rests simply on the false assumption that there is a lack of
content. Now this content is none other than the speculative Idea.
Conceptions of the understanding or of reason constitute the essence
of things, not certainly for that point of view, but in truth; and
thus also for Aristotle the conceptions of the understanding, namely
the categories, constitute the essential realities of Being. If they
are thus in and for themselves true, they themselves are their own,
and thus the highest content. But in ordinary logic this is not the
case, and even as these are represented in the Aristotelian works
they are only universal thought-determinations, between which the
abstract understanding makes distinctions. This, however, is not the
logic of speculative thought, _i.e._ of reason as distinguished from
understanding; for there the identity of the understanding which
allows nothing to contradict itself is fundamental. However little
this logic of the finite may be speculative in nature, yet we must
make ourselves acquainted with it, for it is everywhere discovered in
finite relationships. There are many sciences, subjects of knowledge,
&c., that know and apply no other forms of thought than these forms of
finite thought, which constitute in fact the general method of dealing
with the finite sciences. Mathematics, for instance, is a constant
series of syllogisms; jurisprudence is the bringing of the particular
under the general, the uniting together of both these sides. Within
these relationships of finite determinations the syllogism has now,
indeed, on account of its terms being three in number, been called the
totality of these determinations, and hence by Kant (Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, p.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account