Introduction
The defence of the possibility of a priori knowledge of the world is crucial to an understanding of the core of the philosophical tradition we call German idealism, committed as it is to a critique of empiricism, understood as the claim that all knowledge must be based on sensory experience.
Kant is certainly the starting point for the distinct projects of systematic philosophy elaborated by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. All these thinkers welcome Kant's conception of a priori synthesis as a philosophical revolution which solves the problem of metaphysics (is metaphysics as a science possible?) and, simultaneously, lays the cornerstone of a science of freedom, grounded on ‘a free self-activity that produces forms-contents’ (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2015: 173).Footnote 1
The motivation of my essay is to bring to light the novelty of Hegel's understanding of the a priori. My approach differs from how the topic of the a priori in Hegel has generally been addressed across its history of interpretation, where we find two opposing approaches. On one hand, Hegel's critics accuse him of being the spokesman for an aprioristic philosophy, which blatantly mistakes the question of what is prior or most fundamental for the question of an absolute first cause of the actual world, by means of which the philosopher could deduce everything from the most universal features of reality to the existence of specific phenomena in the world. On the other hand, more sympathetic readers relate Hegel's a priori to Kant's understanding of a priori synthesis. They argue that Hegel's idealism is a speculative radicalization of the core of Kant's Transcendental Deduction (namely, the identity-in-difference of subjectivity and objectivity), although without the burden of his transcendental idealism, understood as a claim about the imposition of subjective categories onto an alien content provided by sensible intuitions.
In my view, Hegel's enemies’ approach calls for a thorough deconstruction of their unwarranted assumptions about what Hegel intended his own philosophy to be, while the approach of Hegel's friends must pass through the analysis of three interrelated issues: (i) the nature of Kant's idealism; (ii) the premises of Hegel's reading of Kant's transcendental idealism;Footnote 2 (iii) Hegel's translation of Kant's question about the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge into the question of an original unity of being and thinking.
These are complex issues, which attract an enormous amount of attention in the literature and require a detailed interpretation of Hegel's idea of logic (its main problem, its method, its transitions, its relation with the Phenomenology of Spirit) in order to evaluate whether Hegel rejects the foundational role of a transcendental subjectivity. The aim of what follows is not a new interpretation of Hegel's evaluation of Kant's Transcendental Deduction.Footnote 3 Instead, I will try to spell out more generally what it could possibly mean to say that Hegel's Science of Logic is a defence of the real possibility of an a priori knowledge of the actual world and, simultaneously, a self-knowledge of pure thinking.
My argument is divided into two parts. The first part locates the problem within the current debate. Given the prominent place of Kant in this debate, my claim is that Hegel's understanding of the a priori does not presuppose a sheer continuity with Kant's, but rather transforms the core of Kantian philosophy, namely, the productivity of the form or the spontaneity of thinking, into a kind of ‘Spinozism of freedom’ (Henrich Reference Henrich and Pacini2003: 91–95). As a result of Hegel's conception of reason, the demarcation between a posteriori and a priori turns out to be a much more fluid distinction in Hegel's idealism than it is in Kant's. The second part of the essay elaborates the problem in the form of a response to three different charges of apriorism against Hegel's Logic, and their analysis will form the bulk of the essay. The result will not be a conclusive understanding of Hegel's position on the distinction between a priori and a posteriori, but rather a critical result, in the sense that I hope to defuse what I take to be three misleading interpretations of Hegel's claim of the aprioricity of the Logic.Footnote 4
I. Is Hegel's Logic a work of a priori philosophy? Mapping the debate
Regardless of Hegel's sparse use of the ‘a priori/a posteriori’ dichotomy in his works, some scholars (Hösle Reference Hösle1987; Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 5) hold that Hegel's Logic is clearly a work of a priori philosophy, and argue that interpretive issues only begin when it comes to the question of how a priori knowledge of the ordinary spatio-temporal world is, at the same time, a self-knowledge of thought. In my view, the claim that the Logic is a work of a priori philosophy is not self-evident. This is not to say that the opposite claim (namely, the claim that the Logic is only an a posteriori reconstruction of the history of metaphysics) is obviously correct. Rather, the very opposition must be—and indeed has been—placed under scrutiny, in order to see which claim, if any, fits with Hegel's position. In what follows, I will formulate my position against the background of four possible standpoints drawn from the literature.
1. A priori, not a posteriori. Hegel's Logic is a priori because it carries forward Kant's project of a transcendental logic inquiring into the conditions of possible experience (Pippin Reference Pippin1989; Redding Reference Redding1996; Pippin Reference Pippin2019).Footnote 5 These conditions must not be understood too narrowly, as if the discussion of ‘experience’ concerned exclusively an epistemological problem (the relation of percept and concept in the Transcendental Analytic of Kant's first Critique). ‘Experience’ must be taken as having a very broad meaning: the unfolding of the subjective-objective constitution of reason or the development of Geist in all its possible fields of actualization, which extends well beyond sensory perception, and includes many higher forms of human reason (subjective spirit) and objective spirit (reason in history), as well as their self-comprehension in different media of expression (absolute spirit). The point is not the alleged replacement of metaphysics with epistemology as first philosophy—this prejudice suits neither Kant nor Hegel—but rather the claim that experience must be explained by a constitutive activity (the a priori) which cannot derive from experience itself, although it is by no means separate from experience.
2. A priori as a mark of an aprioristic philosophy. This standpoint gathers a number of interpretations that aim to discredit Hegel's philosophy as an aprioristic metaphysics devoted to proving the primacy of divine thought (in Hegel's own terms, the logical idea) as a first cause of the world. This kind of reading, inaugurated by Schelling and still dominant within the Marxist tradition until Bloch (Reference Bloch1951), made a huge contribution to turning Hegel into an easy target for Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology and hermeneutics.
3. A posteriori, not a priori. The third group takes Hegel's Logic as an a posteriori reconstruction of the categories that have already appeared on the experiential ground of the history of philosophy and the sciences (Pinkard Reference Pinkard1988; Jaeschke Reference Jaeschke2013). This reading also includes Brandom's expressivist account of Hegel's Logic, according to which empirical enquiry is the basic process of determining conceptual content, so that the logical concepts just make explicit the content of ‘the ground-level empirical and practical concepts’ (Brandom Reference Brandom2005: 156).
4. Neither a priori, nor a posteriori. The fourth group offers what may be called a neutralist view: Hegel's Logic is neither a priori nor a posteriori, because this distinction can only hold for transcendental philosophy, not for speculative philosophy (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2017; Rand Reference Rand2007: 385–86). Hegel himself seems to defend this view, when he writes that his Objective Logic is a critique that considers categories ‘not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in themselves according to their particular content’ (SL: 42/21.49).Footnote 6 This passage suggests that Hegel reads into Kant a subjective idealism that shares with empiricism the assumption that the form, as a priori as it may be, is an empty cabinet unless the content of sensory experience fills it from without, a posteriori. However, advances in the debate on the status of Kant's transcendental idealism (Allison Reference Allison1996) have convincingly shown that this conflation of transcendental idealism and subjective or psychological idealism is highly questionable.Footnote 7 Kant's a priori synthesis is not the external combination of an empty form and a raw material, but an active form-content,Footnote 8 and it is not a matter of psychology, but rather of logic. According to Ferrarin, once we acknowledge the distortions of Hegel's reading of Kant, there is no use in taking the notions of a priori and a posteriori as hermeneutical devices to understand something significant for Hegel's own project, because only a transcendental philosophy investigating the conditions of possibility of experience can take its cue from a preliminary division between a priori and empirical, whereas Hegel's philosophy is the permanent contestation of this division in any of its forms (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2017: 11–12).
5. The position I would like to defend is inclusivist: Hegel's Logic is both a priori and a posteriori, because it transforms this distinction into the differentiation of one idea into the complementary features of activity and passivity. This position can be related to positions 1 and 4 so as to encompass their aspects of truth. It is true that we must begin with the suspension of the transcendental a priori-a posteriori divide, but this suspension does not entail a claim about Hegel's dismissal of this conceptual pair. Rather, it opens the space for an appreciation of how in his own way Hegel understands, or better, ‘sublates’ (in the sense of aufheben), this distinction. My position is sympathetic to position 1, in so far as I recognize the aprioricity of Hegel's Logic and the tight connection between aprioricity and a logic of freedom. Nevertheless, I disagree with the first position in so far as I want to stress the discontinuity between Kant and Hegel, and I think that on this issue the fourth position has a point. Hegel's conception of reason as ‘a priori synthesis’ differs from Kant's to the extent that it incorporates and intertwines Aristotle's theory of nous (intellect) and Spinoza's substantiality as causa sui (interpreted as substance in the process of becoming subject) in a way that is neither Aristotelian nor Spinozan.
As autonomous as it may be, the causality of reason in Kant could never be identical with the self-positing or active self-manifestation of a passive substance (that is, the implicit intelligibility of nature and finite spirit). This major difference has two implications for the issue of the a priori. In the first place, Hegel does not conceive of a priori and a posteriori as two fixed poles, but rather as momentary terms of a movement that runs both from the a posteriori to the a priori (the way of discovery, the journey of consciousness towards science) and the other way around, from the a priori (the logical element) to the a posteriori (reality) in the mode of deduction or exposition (Peperzak Reference Peperzak2001: 85; Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2017: 12). In the second place, passivity is not just an external conditioning of reason, but rather the result of an activity that translates itself into externality and is not able to recognize that the given is its own product (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2016: 129). Passivity and activity are two sides of one reason (objective thinking) in the process of reconciling ‘the reason that exists’ (passive nous) and ‘the reason that is conscious of itself’ (active nous) (EL: 33/47 §6).Footnote 9
Position 2 is right to say that Hegel's Logic is a reconstruction of a certain history (mainly, the history of metaphysics) and so it presupposes a material ‘inherited from the philosophical tradition’ (Brandom Reference Brandom2005: 156), but it does not follow from this that reconstruction as such is a posteriori. The proof of the aprioricity of the reconstruction is not its starting point, but the manner and process of reconstruction itself, which must be free from presuppositions in order to be a ‘self-constructing path’, that is, an ‘objective, demonstrative science’ (SL: 10/21.8). So the best response to the claim of position 2 is to take up the challenge of the presuppositionlessness of Hegel's Logic, as I will try to do in the section II.ii.
The real stumbling block to the fifth position is the third, which is the charge of apriorism. For this reason, the focus of what follows is an attempt to reject this charge. Before entering into the discussion, a preliminary distinction between the notions of ‘a priori’ and ‘aprioristic’ is in order. In my view, the claim that Hegel's Logic is a priori must be understood as an attempt to provide a presuppositionless exposition (Darstellung) of pure thinking. On the contrary, ‘apriorism’ labels the projection onto Hegel's idealism of a distorted conception of the a priori, consequently it does not take into account Hegel's peculiar redefinition of the a priori/a posteriori distinction. The label of apriorism has a pejorative and polemical sense, because it usually serves as the basis for a sweeping criticism of Hegel's philosophy. Instead, ‘a priori’ is neutral, because it designates a task that the Logic must be able to accomplish if it purports to be a science of freedom. In the second part, I will consider in detail three versions of what I called an aprioristic reading of Hegel's Logic in order to spell out their shortcomings. The first and the third versions concern the relation of the Logic to reality in general, whereas the second is a charge against the allegedly immanent methodology of the Logic.
II. Three aprioristic readings of Hegel's Logic
II.i. First version of apriorism: Logic as the exposition of God before the creation of reality (theological reading)
The first version of apriorism concerns the relation between Logic and reality. It interprets Hegel's Logic as a theological form of idealism, according to which categories are universalia ante res (Bloch Reference Bloch1951: 138, 164, 183, 211) or ideas in the mind of God before the creation of nature and finite spirit. While this kind of Leibnizian vision maintains the transcendence of God as a first cause of the universe and relies on a realist reading of the categories—categories are ideal things or entities explaining other things in the real world—we may imagine another version of metaphysical idealism, viewed as ‘a doctrine that all that exists is in some sense mental’ (Pinkard Reference Pinkard1988: 14), or, as Redding puts it, the ‘view of the totality of things as a self-referential super-mind, whose thoughts need not, nor cannot, go beyond itself’ (Redding Reference Redding, Haaparanta and Koskinen2012: 162). In my view, both the mentalist and the realist reading of God (in Hegel's conceptual vocabulary, the idea) are wrong, and each for a different reason: the former for assuming from the outset that thinking is the property of some mind, the latter for taking literally a metaphor from the introduction to the Science of Logic: ‘this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit’ (SL: 29/21.34).
A theological readingFootnote 10 of the absolute idea has counterproductive consequences (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2016: 95–96). I will comment on four of them.
The first consequence is the (con)fusion of philosophy and dogmatic theology. If the Logic were a presentation of God's view of the universe, philosophy would not be different from the rational theology of the German scholastics, already criticized by Kant in the transcendental dialectic. Even worse, the Logic would be subordinated to religion, because it would take for granted the image of God as a creator.
The second consequence is a separation between the logical and the real. Talk of ‘an eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit’ (SL: 29/21.34) introduces surreptitiously a relation of ‘before’ and ‘after’ into the logical element and, in so doing, contradicts the eternal self-productivity of the idea, which is not submitted to an order of temporal succession.Footnote 11 By merging the notion of creation, which pertains to the domain of religious representations, with the concept of self-production,Footnote 12 which belongs to speculation, the priority of the Logic is misunderstood. Logos (das Logische) appears to be an autonomous realm of thoughts (or a Leibnizian realm of possible beings), closed in-itself and really separate from nature and spirit, while truth comes to be established once and for all as an independent essence, which at some point falls into existence. However, Hegel's Logic does not defend any real and temporal separation between essentialities (objective thoughts) and the world, between logic and reality. Rather, the point of Hegel's idealism is the logical homogeneity or structural identity between the objective order of things and the order of the subject's self-conscious thinking (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2016: 77; Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 94).
The third consequence is the neglect of Hegel's endorsement of Spinoza's notion of immanent causality, according to which the infinite substance is the power of internal configuration of the world (including both the ordo idearum and the ordo rerum). Any claim of a gap between the logical and the real or between an eternal essence and its temporal existence is incompatible with Hegel's Spinozism. To be sure, Hegel is not just a Spinozist, because he tries to save Aristotle's theory of formal and final causality within a theory of the concept that must result from the overcoming of the faults of Spinoza's principle of substantiality and of the category of efficient causality. But Hegel's ambition to sublate Spinozism still belongs in a philosophical theory of immanence. Therefore, it is not intended to restore some religious representation of God as a transcendent creator of the universe.
The fourth consequence is that the religious representation of an eternal essence preceding the act of creation blurs Hegel's developmental conception of truth in favour of a theological notion of truth as a transcendent structure that is always already there. On the contrary, Hegel admits no truth (and no God) apart from its becoming-true (Bewährung), which is the ‘eternal’ process through which the concept gives to itself its own actuality both in the natural and in the human world. Truth (in a speculative sense) is studied in the Logic in terms of its pure form, and ‘pureness’ refers to a standard of self-transparency that is constituted by three demands: self-development (the movement of the concept), self-actualization (the idea as the union of concept and reality), and self-knowing (the transition from the idea in-itself or implicitness to the idea in-and-for-itself or explicitness). For Hegel, truth acquires its meaning or actual value as spirit, and spirit is a process of self-knowledge. Truth cannot be accepted as a realm in-itself, because it must include the perspective of finite spirit (both subjective and objective). Although the truth is not exclusively the product of finite rational thinkers like us, finite spirit cannot be dismissed in the movement from the in-itself to the for-itself. In other words, truth is not an actual living truth unless it realizes itself through us and for us. The pureness of truth is not an attribute of ideas separate from the sensible, but the result of a purification, which involves the work done by individuals, the philosophizing subjects, in order to free themselves from the narrowness and sensible concreteness of their particularity.
Besides these arguments, the theological reading places on the notion of origin an explanatory weight far greater than Hegel's intentions. What is absolute in Hegel's system is not an origin or being-in-itself, but rather a process that attains its self-consummation only as a result, as the accomplishment (being-for-itself) of the goal of self-knowledge through different levels of spirit's relation to nature.
For these reasons, the theological reading of Hegel's metaphor misses the immanence of the absolute, which is incompatible with the application of any demiurgic model of external purposiveness.Footnote 13 If we conceive of self-knowledge as a self-consummating process of reality, then Hegel's philosophy turns out to provide a critique of apriorism understood as the idea that philosophical truth has to do with a realm of essences given in advance of some act of creation. The self-productivity of Hegel's idea is not the singular and arbitrary act of a third entity (beyond the ideal and the real world), but the all-encompassing process of self-determination of reality itself.
In the end, we may ask why Hegel used a metaphor that is exposed to so many distortions. On the one hand, the metaphor at issue may be seen as a strategy of communication (possibly also related to a precaution against the charge of atheism): Hegel's attempt to accommodate a then common understanding of God in a section of the Science of Logic was intended to attract the reader, without yet requiring the rigor of scientific deduction. In hindsight, we can say that this attempt failed or came with the price of unwanted misunderstandings. On the other hand, we may redeem the value of Hegel's style if we interpret the metaphor as an ingenious joke that pictures the limited or abstract character of the logical idea with respect to the totality of the real forms of the idea, which are exposed by the Realphilosophie.Footnote 14 This reading will be confirmed by my response to the third charge of apriorism (section II.iii).
II. ii. Second version as apriorism: the presupposition of the point of arrival (‘vicious circle’ reading)
The second objection of apriorism has an epistemic character in so far as it accuses the method of the Logic of tacitly presupposing its point of arrival from the outset. This charge implies that Hegel's talk of a strict derivation of categories is a sleight of hand, because the end is the hidden a priori of the beginning, from which the end should be proven, and this constitutes a vicious circle in the foundation of the Logic as a science.
In this regard, the critiques of Schelling and Feuerbach are exemplary. According to Feuerbach, the beginning with pure being is just an ‘ironical lack of knowledge’ (GW: 41), since
What Hegel premises as stages and constituent parts of mediation, he already thought are determined by the absolute idea. Hegel does not step outside the idea, nor does he forget it. Rather, he already thinks the opposite out of which the Idea should produce itself on the basis of its having been presupposed. (GW: 39)
The motor of logical advancement is the resolution of the contradiction between thinking and writing the absolute idea, in the sense that the order of writing exposes the absolute idea as the end of the Logic, but in the order of thought the idea cannot derive from pure being unless this abstract beginning is already thought as the opposite of the end.
A similar criticism can be found in Schelling's Munich Lectures on Hegel's philosophy. The method of Hegel's Logic is not driven by thinking's immanence in its own products; what really drives thinking is the wish of the thinker to arrive at its goal, which is the actual world, where science is ultimately supposed to arrive (SW: 132).
In my view, an adequate response to the objection of vicious circularity must address the question of how the Logic as a whole can be presuppositionless. This question is at the centre of an important debate among interpreters who are interested in showing how Hegel's Logic provides a critical response to any kind of foundationalism (both epistemological and ontological).Footnote 15
Although Pippin's approach is right in emphasizing that the dynamical structure of conceptuality is key to presuppositionlessness, his claim that ‘Hegel does not believe there is such a thing as absolute presuppositionlessness’ (2019: 184) is either inconsistent with Hegel's rigorous idea of Wissenschaft or unclear about the meaning of ‘absolute’.
For the purposes of my argument, the issue of presuppositionlessnessFootnote 16 is crucial for arguing two main points against the objection of vicious circularity between the beginning and the end of the Logic: (i) the notion of presupposition needs a qualification; (ii) the demonstrative force of the Logic does not rely upon a hypothetico-deductive model of knowledge, but rather on a model of circularity that is not committed to a petitio principii.
As far as the first point is concerned, the philosophy of science comes to help when it distinguishes between genetic and validating presuppositions. The former are presuppositions for the knowledge of truth on the part of a finite knowing subject, and they build the so-called context of discovery, whereas the latter are presuppositions for the truth or validity of a claim, and belong to the context of justification. This distinction was already present in Aristotle and Hegel, who distinguished between what is first in-itself from what is first in the Bildung of the individual (SL: 36/21.41). The fact that Hegel's Logic has genetic presuppositions of different sorts, as well as pragmatic (the ability to use a natural language) and semantic presuppositions (the use of words in judgments as minimal units of discursive knowledge), does not entail that these presuppositions constitute ipso facto validating presuppositions, because the latter are form-determinations of the concept, which must develop autonomously, not driven by some external purpose of communication or by the rules of some language.
However, the distinction between a genetic presupposition, as a precondition for doing philosophy, and a validating presupposition, as an objective reason for rendering something intelligible, is still a preliminary requirement for approaching the Logic. The full understanding of the Logic relies on a much more radical insight, which must be proven within the Logic itself: no presupposition at all (regardless of whether it is genetic or validating) has truth or can be rationally warranted in so far as it remains just a presupposition. The form of a presupposition as such is not adequate to its rational content. The reason why no validating presupposition (regardless of whether it occurs at the beginning or at the end of science) can persist in its state is the challenge of scepticism, especially in the form of Agrippa's Trilemma, according to which no proof can succeed, because it is confronted with the choice between an infinite regress, a vicious circle, and a dogmatic interruption of the proof-procedure through an allegedly self-evident fact. The discussion of how Hegel provides a way out of this trilemma takes me to the second point.
Generally speaking, what matters in Hegel's Logic is not starting from the right presupposition in order to advance to the right conclusions, but rather pure thinking determining itself wholly freely. Through the course of its self-determination, which generates several spheres (being, essence, concept) and distinct ways of determination (passing over into another, shining into another, developing itself in the other), thinking turns out to be ‘the concept’ or the form of conceptual thinking. The concept is self-explication in so far as it posits or reconstitutes from itself what it presupposed in the order of derivation, namely, being and essence. The concept sublates its own presuppositions, because the latter prove to be the moments through which the concept determined itself as self-determination. If we were to compare the Logic to a sequence of moves in a game, the sublation of presupposition would mean that the subsequent moves do not eliminate the previous ones, but rather include them as integral parts of a global plan that involves the subsequent ones and their direction towards an end. However, although we can say that Hegel's Logic shares some features with a game (both are free and end-directed activities), it is important to stress some differences: (i) the end of the Logic is not given in advance, as Feuerbach and Schelling have it, (ii) the rules of the Logic, if any are available, are not established from the outset by those who supposedly invent the game, (iii) the logical movement is neither a metaphor for the inferential structure of conceptuality (Pinkard Reference Pinkard1988: 12; Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 45, 253) nor is it exhausted by a merely linear sequence of moves (namely, discrete unities of sense-making).
Hegel's methodology is that pure thinking must be the deployment of itself, nothing over and above its own development. The derivation (the movement from the most abstract to the most concrete) ‘turns into a circle’ (SL: 49/21.58) because ‘the whole of a science is within itself a circulation [Kreislauf] in which the first becomes also the last, and the last also the first’ (SL: 49/21.57, translation modified). The circulation is the movement by which the first (the beginning) and the last (the end) come to coincide, in so far as the end is the total explication of the beginning. Circularity is decisive because it means that logic as a ‘science’ is necessarily a system of pure thought-determinations, and the system is not a derivation from some presupposition, but the holistic, dynamic self-production of truth. This process cannot be accomplished at some point or by some determinate move: because the truth of the system proves to be at work at any point, the circularity dissolves the illusion of a stopping point, of the claim that the logical system may just rest on some ultimate expression or move.
Hegel's talk of self-becoming is his way of avoiding both scepticism (the impossibility of knowing any absolute whatsoever) and the temptation of a negative theology, according to which the knowledge of the absolute can only consist in saying what it is not, keeping away the imperfections of the finite. Hegel's discourse on the absolute aims to be the discourse of the absolute, and the latter must have two complementary meanings: (i) the absolute is objective thinking (or the logos of what there is) as the infinite movement of its own articulation, (ii) the absolute is the subjectivity of objective thinking, or knowing (Wissen) in the form of science (Wissenschaft), which is the ‘thinking of thinking’ (EL: §19R) or ‘thinking thinking thinking itself as its object’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 258). This second meaning involves the deliberate exercise of rationality on the part of finite spirit, which must reconstruct the thought-determinations immanent in its theoretical and practical life in the form of a system.
Keeping in mind the dynamic of explication I have tried to sketch out, we can now understand the reason why the charge of vicious circularity is misleading. Vicious circularity is based itself on presuppositions which Hegel explicitly dissolves thanks to his dialectical conception of logic. We can identify at least three presuppositions and their limits. In the first place, vicious circularity relies on the grounding relation (ground-grounded), whereas the structure of conceptuality is not the same as a dual structure of foundation, which is analysed and dissolved in the logic of essence, long before the crucial transition into the logic of the concept. In the second place, vicious circularity assumes that the distance between the beginning and the end in the written exposition of the Logic implies a firm difference in their being. This assumption depends on the confusion between pictorial and conceptual thinking. In the third place, vicious circularity holds fast to the linearity of deduction, but ignores that the proper meaning of derivation is (or better, comes to be) circulation in the sense explained above: ‘the line of scientific forward movement […] turns into a circle’ (SL: 49/21.58).
To be sure, in the section ‘With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?’, Hegel writes that ‘progression [going forward] is a retreat [going backward] to the ground’ (SL: 49/21.57), and also the seemingly opposite claim: ‘the beginning of philosophy is the ever-present [gegenwärtig] and self-preserving foundation or basis [Grundlage] of all subsequent developments, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations’ (SL: 49/21.58). However, this statement does not mean that pure being is the ground of all beings, as Parmenides may have it. As I understand this passage, the word Grundlage anticipates what must be proven by the course of science, namely, the unity of the subject-matter or content of the Logic throughout all thought-determinations. In my view, it is important to notice that the Grundlage is not the same as the Grund (ground) of science. The basis per se does not yet give an account of how the unity of the Logic is possible (how it can be proven), and pure being as such does not ground the necessity of beginning philosophy with pure being. On this issue, the relevant passage is the one that qualifies circulation as the ‘completed cognition [vollendete … Erkenntnis] of it [the beginning], replete with content and finally truly grounded [wahrhaft begründet]’ (SL: 49/21.58). The true ‘grounding’ (Begründen) (SL: 48/21.57) of the Logic is not a stable piece of foundation, but the self-constructing path of science.Footnote 17 Pure being remains ‘immanent in its further determinations’ because pure thinking begins as pure being by abstracting from every determination, including from itself as the activity of abstracting and determining pure being as a beginning or as the opposite of determination. Then it dissolves the pureness (namely, the abstractness) of being and develops itself as becoming, which is the first ‘movement of being itself’ (SL: 56/21.66). In its turn, becoming is the logical genesis of ‘determinate being’ as such, which is the first cell of all the ‘further determinations’.
Eventually, pure being proves to be the so-called Grundlage of science by transforming itself into conceptuality (being that comprehends itself). On the one hand, the notion of Grundlage is meant to emphasize that the logical progression from pure being to being as idea (SL: 672/12.175) has no gap, because it occurs within the element of thinking's continuous self-determination. Here Grundlage goes hand in hand with Gründlichkeit as the spirit of rigorous foundation that is required from science (SL: 20–21/21.19). On the other hand, according to the way Hegel understands this requirement, the word Grundlage must be taken carefully, because it does not have a fixed meaning, but recurs with different meanings across the Logic, and the understanding of the modes of recursion is crucial for a non-foundationalist reading of its Gründlichkeit. If we leave aside the specific meaning of Grundlage as a certain comprehension of the reflexive determination of ground (Grund) in the third chapter of the ‘Doctrine of Essence’ (1813), and we focus on its methodological meaning, we notice that foundation moves from pure being to becoming (SL: 62/21.72), then from becoming to ‘determinateness’ as the ‘unity of non-being with being’ (SL: 85/21.98). When we take a bird's eye view of the macro-transitions of the Logic, the title of absolute Grundlage goes from the substance to the concept (SL: 508/12.11), and, finally, from the concept to the absolute idea (SL: 737/12.238). These shifts do not depend on a decision of the thinker, but are logically immanent, because they stem from within the breakdown of each momentary ‘foundation’ under examination.
As a result, the self-movement described by the Logic is the production of a system of interconnected concepts, whereby the first turns out to be last, and vice-versa. Hegel's ‘concept’ is a self-completing being-at-work (energeia) (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2016: 97–98), because the movement and its telos (end, goal) coincide. In the perspective of this telos, the beginning can be seen retrospectively as the result in potential, and the result proves to be the actualization of what was implicit (in-itself) in the beginning. The circularity of the absolute method is able to integrate the order of derivation and the order of development, because the circular movement is the actualization of two movements in one. The meaning of the simultaneity of progressive determination and regressive foundation of the thought-determinations is the overarching sense of thinking's subjectivity, understood logically (not psychologically) as self-development.
Summing up, my argument in response to the second charge of apriorism consists in dissolving the claim of a vicious circularity between the beginning and the end of the Logic by exposing the confusion between a dogmatic notion of ‘foundation’ and the critical notion of thinking's self-development. This response required a characterization of the method of logical science as wholly conceptual and internally purposive, so as to suspend the representation of a spatial or temporal distance between pure being and the absolute idea.
III. Third version of apriorism: the alleged self-sufficiency of pure thinking
According to the third charge of apriorism, Hegel's Logic first makes a complete abstraction from empirical reality, and then undertakes an a priori deduction of all the contents of experience.Footnote 18 The big issue here is the relation between logical conceptuality and reality, and the extent to which ‘existence’ is a logical problem. The indications coming from Hegel's texts may seem ambiguous. On the one hand, the first Preface to the Logic states that science is objective in so far as it is an immanent development of one logical element, which Hegel compares with a ‘self-constructing path’ (SL: 10/21.8), an ‘unstoppable and pure progression that admits of nothing extraneous’ (SL: 33/21.38). On the other hand, many categories of the Logic (in particular, those of ‘objectivity’ and ‘life’) seem to refer to what belongs to the extra-conceptual realm of nature, so that the empirical apparently slides into the logical discourse. Trendelenburg was the first to object that the so-called dialectical movement of thought would not be possible unless material reality were not already in movement, behind the back of the concept, so that Hegel's argument could advance only by force of an illegitimate introduction of empirical matter.
In my mind, this charge of apriorism is afflicted by three basic faults. In the first place, it neglects the way Hegel introduces the standpoint of the Logic via the phenomenological path (Phenomenology of Spirit), or through the gradual transformation of representations into concepts in the Introduction of the Encyclopaedia. Hegel's extended preoccupation with the problem of the introduction to speculative philosophy shows that experience is not the realm of chance, matter and givenness, but rather the process through which consciousness turns out to be the appearance of spirit, and produces by necessity the concept of science, which is the standpoint of Logic (SL: 28–29/21.32-33). In the second place, differently from Kant, Hegel does not conceive of abstraction in the Logic as one of the procedures for obtaining empirical concepts through the arbitrary selection of this or that mark, but as the comprehension of the most universal conditions of intelligibility of anything at all, or as ‘the sublation and reduction of that material as mere appearance to the essential, which is manifested only in the concept’ (SL: 519/12.21). In the third place, the task of the Logic is misunderstood as taking the place of empirical science or as a deduction of the existence of specific objects in the world. In this regard, Pippin has suggested we distinguish between questions of existence and questions of actuality (2019). The content of the Logic are questions of actuality, considered in terms of ‘categoriality’ or conceptuality (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 86–87), by which Pippin means the system of structures of explanation or account-giving of anything at all. By contrast, he considers questions of existence either as empirical questions or as traditional metaphysical questions (such as: does God exist? Why is there something rather than nothing?) that must be dissolved through the critique of their dogmatic presuppositions.
I admit that this distinction is useful for refuting the idea that the absoluteness of the Logic has something to do with the caricature of an omniscient cosmic spirit. However, we must remember that ‘existence’ does not have a merely factual or empirical signification in Hegel, because existence is itself a category, whose specificity must be investigated in the logic of essence. ‘Existence’ (Existenz) and ‘actuality’ (Wirklichkeit) are neither separate nor mutually exclusive, but stand in a relation of conceptual ascent, in virtue of which actuality sublates the duality between explanans (ground) and explanandum (essential being) that still affects the immediacy of existence.
In order to articulate the relation of the Logic to reality, what we need is not a blunt distinction between existence and actuality, but an articulation of four levels of intelligibility of existence.Footnote 19 The first level is the Logic in-itself (as a realm of pure forms), where experience enters into the scene only to illustrate the categories (so, for instance, the transformation of water into steam exemplifies the category of the nodal line of measure in the logic of being). Examples taken from the world of representations appear in the Logic, usually in the Remarks, with the aim of illustrating the universal forms, not in order to validate their logical content. The second level is the relation of the Logic to the Realphilosophie (the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit). Here I would like to endorse Houlgate's understanding of the method of the Philosophy of Nature as paradigmatic for the Realphilosophie: ‘the systematic structure of the Philosophy of Nature is generated not merely by the fusion of pure logic and natural contingency, but by the distinctive a priori logic that is immanent in nature itself’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2002: 109). Analogously, the same could be said for the philosophy of spirit, with the difference that the logic of spirit can be made explicit by spirit itself. Houlgate's argument for claiming a specific logic of nature that goes beyond pure logic is an interpretation of Hegel's account of the transition from logic to nature. This topic is quite controversial and the details of Houlgate's reconstruction do not concern this essay, except for two aspects: (i) the move from logic to nature is a logical or a priori move, because being as idea turns out logically to be nature; (ii) the move is dialectical, because the method must be able to demonstrate how the idea as such transforms itself immanently into its own externality (the idea as nature). If this transformation is thinking's self-determination as a ‘self-transcending accomplishment’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 91), and is dictated by the logic of the idea as a logic of freedom (freedom as a self-developing being-with-self-in-the-other), then we do not need to read the so-called transition to nature through a Christian theological lens as the ‘Absolute's self-consciousness’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 91) deciding to create nature.
The specific ways in which the logical categories develop in the domains of nature and spirit is not a matter of the Logic alone, but of its fulfilment or embodiment (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 29) in the specific disciplines of the Realphilosophie, which explore the specific logic of their specific embodied forms, nature and spirit. This specificity does not amount to some empirical description of what there is, but still belongs in a philosophical consideration of things. In my mind, Pippin is correct in emphasizing that the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit are ‘metaphysical projects’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 41), but precisely for this reason I do not see why he refuses to admit that these projects have a distinctive a priori logic that does not coincide with the pure logic. On the contrary, he argues that ‘the attempt to deduce a priori the “most universal aspects of reality”’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 41, n.4) is a paradigm of bad metaphysics. However, deduction (understood as the concept's self-explication) is precisely what Hegel does when he ‘demonstrates a priori that certain natural processes are made necessary by the distinctive logic of nature, but he also recognizes that there are contingencies in nature that only empirical science can discover’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2002: 107). What prevents Hegel from the caricature of a logical deduction of Krug's pen is the acknowledgment of the role of contingency. But this does not imply that everything in nature and spirit is contingent, as if the transition from the Logic to Realphilosophie were an irrational leap from the a priori to the a posteriori. As a system of philosophical sciences, Realphilosophie does not stay immediately in contact with empirical reality, but requires two further levels of mediation.
The third level is constituted by the transition from philosophical concepts to representations or abstract universals, which are the products of experimental science. Although ‘the origin and formation of the philosophy of nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics’ (EN: §246R), Hegel distinguishes between historical and logical genesis, between the order of historical inquiry and the order of systematic presentation of the determinations of nature (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2002: 117). At last, the fourth level is the level of perception or the empirical encounter with the contingent, sensible multiplicity. Still, this is not a ground-level of brute facts, as empiricism may have them, because even on the level of what Hegel calls Empeirie we have a distinction between form and matter, not a sheer aggregate of sense-impressions. The level of sensible experience shows the impotence of nature, namely, its inability to be explained by pure logic alone, but ‘reason holds sway in nature as much as contingency does’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2002: 114). The impotence of nature is counterbalanced by the capacity of spirit to ascend the different levels of intelligibility of nature, which are simultaneously the levels of spirit's relation to nature and of its own liberation from nature.
With the picture of these four levels in mind, we can finally dissolve the third objection of apriorism. The relation between pure logic and Realphilosophie shows that the autarchy of the Logic was not Hegel's own ambition, but an invention of its critics. It is easy to endorse this invention when we assume an aprioristic reading of the Logic, which introduces a contrived separation between the logical essentialities and the actual world. On the contrary, the absolute idea must prove to be actually ‘absolute’ through the Darstellung of its immanence in the three interconnected aspects of the system (logic, nature and spirit). Precisely because the absolute idea is concrete (konkret, from the Latin concrescere meaning ‘to grow together’), it proves to be the concrete subject of all knowing in so far as it knows itself as absolute spirit. The insight expressed by the three final syllogisms of the system in the Encyclopaedia (1817, 1830) is that Logic is not just the first science of the system, but also the last, in so far as the absolute spirit recognizes the logical element that pervades both nature and spirit. Logical forms can appear abstract or concrete according to how we (finite spirit) approach the value of thinking, as Hegel makes clear through the analogy of the logic with grammar (SL: 36/21.41). This is not to say that Logic may be considered from any arbitrary perspective or reduced to a ladder that can be thrown away after we have climbed up it. The Logic remains the science of pure thinking, and its determinate articulations establish its rational necessity. However, it makes a great difference if we consider the absolute idea as the supreme form of pure thinking or as the knowledge of spirit's freedom in the worlds of nature and culture.
Although it is undeniable that the Logic has for Hegel a certain Selbständigkeit, that is, a claim to complete self-justification, this claim is misconceived when we ignore the inner purposiveness of Hegel's Logic and submit the logic of the system to the dichotomies of analytic thinking.
IV. Conclusion
As a conclusion, I would like to fix the following results of my investigation.
1. The theological reading of the Logic is committed to apriorism in so far as it takes the logical truth as a realm of essences given in advance of some act of creation. I rejected this version of apriorism through a critical discussion of its main assumption, namely, the confusion of the Christian notion of creation with the self-productivity of the idea, which also provides the key to Hegel's speculative concept of God as reason immanent in the world.
2. The charge of vicious circularity is a methodological version of apriorism based on the application of a model of external teleology to the logical progression. Against this charge, I argued in favour of a virtuous circularity between the beginning and the end of the Logic. Virtuous circularity qualifies the method of the Logic in so far as it is a dynamic of self-development, whereby the end is the completed cognition of the beginning and the justification of its necessity.
3. The alleged self-sufficiency of the Logic is used to ground the charge of either deducing empirical reality out of a realm of shadows (apriorism as panlogism) or fixating a quasi-Fregean separation between the realm of thought and the actual world. I tried to show that these charges rely on the misunderstanding of the productivity of logical forms and on the confusion between four different levels of conceptual content: the purely logical content, the content of either the Philosophy of Nature or the Philosophy of Spirit, the content of empirical sciences, and the content of empirical judgments.
The logical element (das Logische), which is the ‘internal formative factor’ (innerer Bildner) (SL: 523/12.25) of any possible actuality, is the content of the Logic (die Logik), but also the principle of its concretization in the philosophy of reality, so it acquires a different meaning according to its systematic context of explanation. This entails that ‘however central the Logic is to everything else Hegel wants to say, it is still a restricted and limited picture of thought's self-determination’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 28). Therefore, the image of an autarchic logic that is totally independent from the human world (finite spirit) is a form of metaphysical apriorism that is just as far from Hegel as the opposite claim that thinking is merely a product of finite rational minds like ours (subjective idealism).
