Stanley Rosen’s The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic is a follow up to his book on Hegel published almost four decades earlier, G. W. F. Hegel: The Science of Wisdom (Rosen Reference Rosen1974). Moreover, unless he has left something further that is unpublished, this will be his last word on Hegel as, sadly, Rosen died within six months of its publication. In the earlier book Rosen had described Hegel as ‘first and foremost a logician’ rather than ‘a philosopher of history, a political thinker, a theologian, or a Lebensphilosoph’ (1974: xiii). The new book might indeed be read as the eventual expansion of this original suggestion, although his assessment of the success of the project has changed: Rosen now seems more convinced of the success of Hegel’s science. As in the earlier work, Rosen presents Hegel in the context of a history of philosophy, book-ended by Parmenides and the problem of the one and the many and, at the other end, the state of contemporary philosophy diagnosed as essentially nihilistic. The theme of nihilism, with its origins deep in the Socratic-rationalist philosophical project, had been a recurring theme from the time of Rosen’s earliest work (Rosen Reference Rosen1969). Its presence here signals the importance attached to the figure of Hegel, for Hegel had insisted, and Rosen adds, ‘not entirely without reason’, that ‘if we repudiate his enterprise we are doomed to the nihilism of multiple and mutually partial views, perspectives, interpretations, or opinions about human life’ (72).

Rosen’s approach to Hegel had been influenced by a range of thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, and in this work he continues to defend Hegel against his ‘left Hegelian’ interpreters, whom he takes to reduce Hegel’s philosophy to ‘philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of history, including political and sociological theory’ (163). But Rosen’s interpretative positioning of Hegel never really gets expressed in a more than general way. Indeed, one gets from The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic no sense of what has transpired in the field of Hegel interpretation since the appearance of the original book. Apart from a handful of oblique references, there is essentially no attempt to engage with any recent secondary work on Hegel’s logic in any language. Rosen makes it clear that this is a consciously adopted strategy (4). Part of its justification is that an engagement with the secondary literature would make it a work only relevant for Hegel specialists, but I believe that Rosen overestimates the accessibility of the book in its present form. Nevertheless, Rosen’s somewhat lofty bypassing of the scholarly community allows him to maintain a continuous focus throughout this book, and it results in many insights, and some genuine gems.

Rosen has not set out to write a standard scholarly exposition: Hegel is to be ‘appropriated … not merely interpreted’ in an attempt ‘to learn from Hegel’ without becoming a disciple. The book is nothing less than an attempt to ‘think about or with Hegel unrestricted by his own terms’ (11)—it is a type of one-on-one dialogue with Hegel. Rosen’s willingness to correct Hegel is refreshing, and goes beyond the effort to free Hegel’s underlying points from the restrictions of his historical context, as he does, for example, in relation to Hegel’s writings on mathematics (160ff). Thus Rosen points out ‘mistakes’ (204) ‘confusions’ (91), ‘faulty expositions’ (121), and ‘tactical errors’ (293) in Hegel’s text. Such criticisms, however, are always internal to the project of attempting to strengthen Hegel’s alternative to what Rosen considers to be contemporary nihilism. Hegel is presented as unequalled in being able to think beyond any foundationalist alternative to nihilism. Nihilism cannot be warded off by finding some purported source of certainty; it can only be bypassed by acknowledging its necessity and using its own negativity against it.

It is a commonplace that Hegel’s logic is not to be taken as a formal logic of the sort now associated with the term ‘logic’, and Rosen is clear on what, from a Hegelian perspective, are the inadequacies of a mathematical rather than properly conceptual construal of logical relations. Rosen freely uses the term ‘analysis’ to describe the type of thought at work in Hegel’s Science of Logic, but what is at stake is not the familiar unpacking of thought into ultimately atomic parts.Footnote ¹ That is the type of analysis limited to the ‘external’ reflection which Hegel attributes to the understanding and which presupposes an ultimately ‘lifeless’ categorial structure. Hegel’s logic, which Rosen goes so far as to describe as having ‘no predecessors’ (38), acknowledges the ‘life-pulse’ of actual thought in a way that traditional logic or its current post-Fregean variant—‘functional logic’—cannot. The Science of Logic presents Hegel’s dialectical ‘logical construction of the world’ (156). Moreover, for Rosen, Hegel is ‘the only philosopher who offers an explanation to the central question of how we can know anything about the external world’ (226). These are, of course, enormous claims for which to make a case.

After the Introduction and a first chapter treating Hegel’s historical context, the subsequent twenty chapters of The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic follow the structure of Hegel’s massive Science of Logic. Chapters 2 to 4 treat Hegel’s general statements: his 1812 and 1831 Prefaces, his Introduction, and the methodological essay ‘With What Must the Science Begin?’. The remaining chapters are devoted to the Doctrine of Being, the Doctrine of Essence and the Doctrine of the Concept. As one might expect, Rosen uses Hegel’s prefaces, introduction and methodological essay to sketch his more general interpretation of the project, but considerable parts of the subsequent chapters ostensibly devoted to specific parts of the text return to these more general issues. Large sections of Chapters 8 and 10 in particular are given over to the scrutiny of Hegel’s relation to Fichte.

Rosen presents Hegel’s Doctrine of Being as a text concerned with ‘an analysis of Greek ontology prior to Plato’ that features Parmenides and Heraclitus as prototypes of antagonistic claims about the nature of what is. At the heart of this, and crucial for the development of Hegel’s logic, is the status of ‘nothing’, about which Parmenides had issued a warning: avoid all talk of ‘the altogether not’. According to Rosen, this warning initiated the rationalist tradition: whereas Plato reduced ontological talk about ‘the not’ to the rule of ‘syntactic negation’ (14), Aristotle equated it with the denial that a certain property belongs to a certain substance. Thus, the philosophical tradition begins by understanding negativity as something that belongs to thought, not being, thus locking itself into the treatment of a thing’s essence as the sum of its essential properties. Given that the identification of the relevant properties must presuppose a grasp of the ‘essence’ to which they apply, however, this solution was problematic from the very start. By the end of Book 2, Hegel has shown how all attempts to define ‘essence’ have collapsed.

Issues of negation and negativity are central to Rosen’s reading of Hegel. Parmenides had wanted to isolate being from nothing, but in the early chapters of the Science of Logic Hegel demonstrates that the raw immediacy of ‘being’ leaves it bereft of features needed to distinguish it from ‘nothing’. Rosen follows Hegel’s analyses of the series of attempts to capture the ultimate nature of the world through Book 1 to the Pythagorean claim that all is number, represented by the positing of the category of quantity. After the transition to Book 2, a similar dialectic is traced through the new opposing pair of ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ which leads eventually to the category of ‘actuality’. The dynamics and transitions in each case represent ever more complex versions of those seen originally in Hegel’s treatment of being and becoming. By the time that the category of ‘actuality’ has been reached, the complete categorial unpacking of the original Greek notion of ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ has been achieved, but what the progression has demonstrated is the ultimate groundlessness of this notion.

There is much to be learnt from Rosen about the nature of Hegel’s dialectic as it operates through the more ontology-focused contents of Books 1 and 2. He carefully discusses passages first in Hegel’s terms and then his own. Throughout, the exposition is punctuated by helpful summaries and Rosen recurrently reminds us of the most general features of the larger project. In the Doctrine of Essence the discussion of Hegel’s treatment of the laws of identity and difference and contradiction are particularly illuminating. Defending Hegel against Russell’s charge that Hegel simply confused the ‘is of identity’ with the ‘is of predication’, Rosen points out the subtlety of Hegel’s actual treatment of this relationship. As I understand him, Rosen claims that in the law ‘A=A’, the relation involved is that of identity, but that the very act of stating the law renders it as a predication. That is, the ‘=A’ of ‘A=A’ understood as a judgment is now taken as a predicate naming that property uniquely satisfied by A, as, for example, the way the property of being-identical-with-Socrates is understood as instantiated by Socrates alone. Rational thought’s commitment to this law of identity comes at a cost. Treating anything as self-identical must involve positing an internal ‘difference’, because a concrete thing simply cannot be identified with an abstract property. This is the situation at the heart of Hegel’s notion of contradiction: everything is contradictory, in this sense. Although Rosen doesn’t put it in these terms, this view seems to be in the vicinity of Russell’s paradox, since in thinking about Socrates one simply cannot avoid equating Socrates with the property of being identical to Socrates. We are committed to this ‘contradiction’ but not in the sense of infringing the law of contradiction. Rather, as Rosen has it, one can describe this constitutive contradiction as something like a transcendental condition of the law, as long as ‘transcendental condition’ is read not in a Kantian way, but as applying equally to thought and that which thought is ultimately about—‘actuality’.

Unfortunately, Rosen does not really carry over the consequences of this insight into his treatment of Hegel’s more general approach to predication in the Doctrine of the Concept, or at least does not do so clearly. He does go further than many commentators in attempting to say what Hegel is up to in this book, which is more explicitly focused on ‘logic’ rather than ‘ontology’. At one point he repeats the often-heard claim that Hegel had ‘no interest in the formalization of syllogistic’ (408), but this would seem to be an odd attitude for a thinker who took the early modern collapse of the traditional syllogistic to be of such consequence. Moreover, I suggest, Rosen’s claim leads him to overlook those parts of Hegel’s account, such as his treatment of ‘the mathematical syllogism’ of Leibniz and Ploucquet, which criticize traditional syllogistic in a way quite close to that of modern ‘functional logic’. As I see it, Rosen mistakenly criticizes Hegel for following Kant in treating existence as the satisfaction of a predicate in the manner of ‘functional logic’ (425), missing Hegel’s canny analysis of the destructive effects on classical predication introduced by Leibniz’s new analysis.

In short, Rosen appears so intent on reinstating Hegel’s science of logic against what he considers to be the implicitly nihilistic functional logic of analytic philosophy that he seems to neglect his own insight: Hegel’s approach had been to embrace the nihilism of the present and think it through in its own terms, letting the contradictions generated by the understanding take it apart. In one of the few references to recent work on Hegel’s logic, Rosen dismisses John Burbidge’s approach to Hegel’s subjective logic (Burbidge Reference Burbidge1982), failing, I think, to grasp how Burbidge engages with just these sorts of issues.

This conceptual terrain, which is immensely tricky, has generated much debate over the last few decades. As is standardly pointed out, while Hegel’s ‘logic’, or at least his ‘objective logic’, is basically a category theory, he was critical of Kant’s construal of the categories as subjective structures. One alternative has been to think of the categories more after the fashion of Aristotle, that is, as categories of ‘being’, and so, primarily, as ‘ontological’. Rosen often sounds as if he agrees, for example, in his criticism of Burbidge (438), and by claiming that ‘for Hegel, logic is ontological’ (3). But on the whole, Rosen seems closer to a Kantian reading. ‘Hegel’ he says, ‘repudiates both the conformity of the intellect to the independent object and the constitution of the object by forms that are intrinsic to the cognitive process. Nevertheless’, he adds, ‘he is much closer to the latter than to the former’ (61). This suggests a side to Rosen’s reading that separates him not only from the Aristotelian reading but also from, say, Stephen Houlgate who, in his work on the early parts of Hegel’s Objective Logic (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006), treats the categories as equally ontological and logical. Rosen elsewhere claims that all of the determinations of Hegel’s logic ‘are “logical predicates” in [Kant’s] sense’ and not ‘real’ predicates (102), as well as that Hegel accepts ‘the Kantian version of the modern Cartesian enterprise to replace “being” or “substance” or “essence” with a world that is entirely the product of human thinking’ (164). I suspect that for an interpreter like Houlgate, such passages would put Rosen’s construal of the categories towards the Kantian end of the scale, a portion typically occupied recently by ‘post-Kantians’ such as Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.

It would be very helpful to be able to encounter Rosen’s voice as one of those within this debate, with him answering questions and criticisms posed by others and posing questions of them in return. As Rosen reminds us, we can only understand something in its relationships to what it is not. Unfortunately, the time in which such questions might be posed and answered directly is now past.