Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
But Inductive Logic should have adopted a more thorough policy. There
can only be one Logic, which must be both inductive and deductive, but
exclusively, and in parts, neither. To achieve that task however Logic
must not turn its back indifferently on what it calls metaphysics, and
it must rise to a higher conception of the problems of what it calls
psychology.
In these circumstances the ordinary logic, in its fundamental terms,
is more on the level of popular thought, than in a strictly scientific
region, and does not attempt to unite the two regions, and examine the
fundamental basis of thought on which scientific methods rest. The case
of Concrete and Abstract will illustrate what has been said. To popular
thought the sense-world is concrete: the intellectual world abstract.
And so it is in the ordinary logic. To Hegel, on the contrary, the
intellectual interpretation of the world of reality and experience
is a truer and thus a more concrete description of it than that
contained in a series of sense-terms. Now the difference between the
two uses of the term is not a mere arbitrary change of names. When the
philosopher denies the concreteness of the sense-world, and declares
that it, as merely sensible, is only a mass of excluding elements, a
'manifold,' and in the second instance a series of abstractions, drawn
out of this _congeries_ by perception, the change of language marks
the total change of position between the philosophic and the popular
consciousness. Reality and concreteness as estimated by the one line of
thought are the very reverse of those of the other. A mere sense-world
to the philosopher is a world which wants unity, which is made up of
bits imperfectly adjusted to each other, and always leading us to look
for an explanation of them in sources outside them. The single things
we say we perceive,--the here and the now we perceive them in--are
found, upon reflection and analysis, to depend upon general laws, on
relations that go beyond the single,--on what is neither here nor
now, but everywhere and timeless. The reality of the thing is found
to imply a general system of relations which make it what it is.
Sense-perception in short is the beginning of knowledge: and it begins
by taking up its task piecemeal. It rests upon a felt totality: and to
raise this to an intelligible totality, it must at first only isolate
one attribute at a time.