Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: ‘If Hegel had written his entire Logic and said in the preface that it is merely a thought experiment, … he would be the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is comical’ (Reference Kierkegaard1996: 182). While I cannot second Kierkegaard’s statement, it hits on a very real problem that haunts scholarship of Hegel’s Science of Logic: it seems very hard to interpret the text as being about anything other than itself. If one takes Hegel’s own ambitious claims about his Logic seriously, that it represents a metaphysical system, a combination of epistemic method and ontological explanation of the nature of reality, as well as a cornerstone to the rest of of his philosophical system, then the sheer ambition of the work seems to put it outside of the domain of the modern worldview. Most efforts to interpret Hegel’s philosophy in line with some more recent school of thought stop short of endorsing Hegel’s mission statement for the Science of Logic. On the other hand, many of the finest commentaries on Hegel’s Logic get so caught in the incredible complexity of the details in the text that they struggle to remain relevant to broader philosophical debates.

Rocío Zambrana’s Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility represents a bold attempt to interpret Hegel’s Logic as being about more than itself. In her interpretation, the Logic represents a philosophical deduction of normative concepts that we use to make sense of reality. The main lesson of Hegel’s ‘theory of intelligibility’ is that our grasp of reality is mediated by concepts that are marked by ‘normative ambivalence and historical precarity’. The virtue of this reading is that it places Hegel’s Logic at the crossroads of two powerful interpretations of how Hegel’s philosophy could be relevant: Pippin’s understanding of Hegel’s theory of modernity as an intersubjective way of justifying ethical norms; and continental readings that focus on how Hegel undermines claims of absolute truth. Zambrana works to show that Hegel’s Logic allows us to make sense of how our normative concepts are shot through with ambivalence and precariousness.

However, there is a price to be paid for reading Hegel’s Science of Logic as a theory of intelligibility. The reading must disregard many of Hegel’s own claims about how he intended the Logic to be understood, and in the course of her argument, Zambrana often supports her thesis by imposing a frame on Hegel’s thought that does not seem justified by the text itself. Zambrana’s interpretation seems to sacrifice accuracy to Hegel’s intention for the sake of achieving a higher degree of philosophical relevance for the Logic. I would perhaps be able to follow the argument a bit better if it acknowledged its distance from the text, if it stated that it is not so much an interpretation as a creative reading that is inspired by some sections of the Logic.

The early chapters of the book argue that Hegel’s Science of Logic is not to be interpreted in an ontological sense. This argument rests primarily on a reading of the Doctrine of Being and the Doctrine of Essence as refutations of an onological perspective in metaphysics. Indeed, the author frequently offers commentary on passages and asserts: ‘This is not to be understood in an ontological manner’ (e.g., 60–63).Footnote ¹ Rather, she argues that the Logic really proceeds by laying out and thinking through historical norms that underlie our paradigms. As I understand it, Zambrana’s argument for reading the Logic in a non-ontological way rests primarily on a claim about the relations of priority between the Doctrine of Being, Doctrine of Essence and the Doctrine of the Concept. In Zambrana’s discussion, the Doctrine of the Concept gains much greater methodological weight than the prior two sections. ‘A Subjective Logic responds to the failures of an Objective Logic’ (87). The Doctrine of Being and Doctrine of Essence are to be understood primarily as refutations of an ontological metaphysics, while the Doctrine of the Concept teaches that metaphysics must proceed without making ontological claims. To the extent that Hegel seems to make claims about the nature of being, he is really making claims about how we should ‘think’ the nature of being. Rather than offering a post-Kantian metaphysics, in which being and concept are identical, Hegel is said to develop an account of categories of thinking, without claiming that such categories actually exist in the world or have any weight that transcends a particular historical epoch.

The crucial argument in favor of her non-ontological reading seems to come in the sixth chapter, where Zambrana discusses the dialectic of form and content. She argues that the Logic offers an exposition of absolute form, but that Hegel’s conception of form emerges from content. The ‘form’ of the Logic is negativity, but this negativity does not exist independently of that of which it is the negativity (125). Form needs content: they are dialectically related concepts. But in her account, the content that the absolute form requires is outside of the Logic: the Logic only makes sense as a way to interpret the historical norms of past and present social reality. In this sense, Zambrana’s Logic has to reach outside of itself to deal with ‘reality’ and has no ontological reality of its own.

Zambrana’s non-ontological reading of the Logic thus leads to a historicist reading. The work teaches us that our norms are shot through with ‘historical precariousness’ and ‘normative ambivalence’ (132). They are precarious because as we seek to develop our norms or apply them to reality, we notice contradictions. They are ambivalent because even when we apply a norm, we end up encountering both a positive and negative valence. Zambrana provides some interesting analyses of how specific dialectical arguments from the Science of Logic recur in texts such as the Phenomenology or Philosophy of Right which are about normativity. It is certainly a valid insight that Hegel regarded the Science of Logic as developing and justifying the forms of thought that he would apply in his normative philosophy. It is equally correct to demonstrate that Hegel’s normative philosophy consists largely in pointing to contradictions and negativity within both past and present norms. Yet when Zambrana tries to assert the historical finitude of the categories of human thought as a metaphysical absolute, as the only perspective from which metaphysics is possible, it seems that she opens the door to a kind of historical relativism that is at odds with Hegel’s method. Hegel understood history to be shaped by logic, rather than logic as shaped by history. He offered the metaphor that the Logic ‘depicts God, as he is in his eternal nature, before the creation of nature and of the finite human mind’ (WL: 44). This is a highly problematic metaphor, but seems to suggest that the Logic is not simply ‘in’ history, although it might offer a metaphysics that underlies historical becoming.

To put it in less metaphorical terms, Hegel did not believe that he was analysing a specific set of finite commitments that had to be negated through analysis, but rather the actual rules or structures on which human thought depends in order to achieve truth. He does not confine his analysis to categories of human understanding. What is more, I find that Zambrana’s absolutizing of historically finite subjectivity risks falling prey to the kind of contradiction that Hegel diagnosed in his conception of the ‘spurious infinite’. He asserts that true idealism would regard the finite as a non-real, non-absolute framework. To the extent that the finite exists, it is shot through with negativity. Historical becoming is not something that exists as an absolute horizon that shapes thinking, but as an ontological structure that depends on logic.

One of the challenges in interpreting Zambrana’s text is the kind of textual evidence that she uses to justify its innovative reading. Hegel is notorious for a difficult writing style that defines terms in a highly idiosyncratic way and makes use of long, involved developments to reach its conclusion. Yet he also wrote many passages that are quite clear in communicating certain methodological commitments. In the Logic, such passages are found mostly in the prefaces and introductions, as well as in the Encyclopedia texts, but also in polemical texts throughout the Logic that refer to other philosophies. Although these passages do not represent the true ‘labour of the concept’, they do provide the framework in which we can make sense of such labour. While Zambrana has many citations from the Logic, most of them refer to highly truncated thoughts that are deeply embedded within the argument. At one point, she argues for a need to disregard the prefaces and introductions as confusing the matter.Footnote ² This strategy leads to a high degree of interpretive freedom, but left me unpersuaded. That is, I found myself thinking of passages in which Hegel directly attributes ontological significance to the Logic, and I wished that Zambrana would confront these passages head on. At the same time, it left me with the sense that she resolves ambiguities in the text based more on her own choice than on methods that emerge out of the text.

I find that this interpretation would be more persuasive if it took account of several key ideas in Hegel that relate to its thesis. For one, I would appreciate an account of how this reading understands the difference between the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic. The former text seems much more aligned with the interpretive horizon in which Zambrana seeks to place the latter. That is, the Phenomenology works on the negativity inherent in the perspective of the experiencing subject; it works through a number of ‘shapes of spirit’ that more or less represent various historical forms of normativity. And yet Hegel seems to emphasize that the perspective of the Phenomenology has to be abandoned at the phase of absolute knowing, and that the Logic represents a starkly different method of knowing reality. Second, I find that the text could benefit from a deeper explanation of Hegel’s account of the Logic as ‘true metaphysics’. Hegel’s Logic begins with the assertion that thought is identical to being, that there is a form of thinking that is no longer bound by opposition to reality. What is more, he seems to assert that this mode of pure thinking has a determinative role in shaping other spheres of philosophy, such as nature, normative philosophy or philosophy of history.

While Zambrana does not deny the metaphysical import of the Logic, she offers a metaphysics that seems marked by the finitude of the subject, and the involvement of concepts in a historical context, rather than the identity of concept and being. Although her reading of the Logic might be more relevant to contemporary philosophy, it seems hard to make this reading fit with certain key passages in the Logic.