under construction
Wissenschaft der Logik
on logic.
With Hegel you’re getting what seems to us today a curious package. The whole dynamic (or ‘dialectic’) of the unfolding of the Logik is prior to any actual thinking, realised in concrete humans. In fact, the world, and that part of it which is human thought, is the Idea (or Spirit) realising itself. I say ‘curious’, but in a way I’m hearing echoes of this in things Urs is suggesting, as though the universe worked itself out according to type theory. For Hegel one isn’t to be a Kantian, where what one theorises about the universe is just how the universe is taken up by the human understanding, with the further idea that this will be limited in certain ways, e.g., no access to the thing-in-itself. For Hegel, the human mind itself is part of the universe and as such part of the unfolding of the Idea/Spirit. It’s a dizzying picture which tends either to delight or revolt people. See at absolute idealism (Corfield)
from (EPSBOI):
Sec. 86 Pure being constitutes the beginning, because it is pure thought as well as the undetermined, simple immediate, and the first beginning cannot be anything mediated and further determined.
87 Now this pure being is a pure abstraction and thus the absolutely negative which, when likewise taken immediately, is nothing.
88 Conversely, nothing, as this immediate, self-same category, is likewise the same as being. The truth of being as well as of nothing is therefore the unity of both; this unity is becoming.
Remark: A proposal for a formalization of being and becoming is later given by Bill Lawvere in terms of the notion of cohesive topos, see at Some Thoughts on the Future of Category Theory.
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830) W. Bonsiepen und H.-C. Lucas (eds.) in Gesammelte Werke, Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and xx. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 = Bonsiepen/Lucas 1992.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Science of Logic