Three Paragraph Summary of Hegel's Logic

Version I (Kant)

The logic of being consists of what Kant called the ‘mathematical’ categories (quality, quantity). These are the forms that content is in as content, minimally formalized content. These are the instrument of empirical science, the forms that the data of the empirical world are in as data. The standpoint of consciousness which corresponds to these forms is dogmatism: it takes the truth to be just what it experiences in the world outside it. Here, thinking is passively receptive with respect to the object. The object is disorganized on this account, lacking inner unity, and thus appears in forms which are only externally combined, and not inwardly united.

The logic of essence consists of what Kant called the ‘dynamical’ categories (relation, modality). The first section of essence, ‘essence as reflection within’, is the pure form of thinking, the propositional form in abstraction, A = A. The rest of the logic of essence consists in the contentization or materialization of the pure form, i.e. minimally reified form. This is the logic of natural science by which it organizes the data of experience into a systematic whole. The standpoint of consciousness which corresponds to essence as the formal side of logic, is skepticism: it doesn’t take the world (being) as immediately revealing its true nature, but reflects on it, discovers its inner systematic unity (its essence). Here thinking is active with respect to the object, actively constituting the object. The categories here are doubled, mirroring each other, mutually interpenetrating each other and reciprocally potentiating each other. One side is taken as form, the other side as content; one side as cause, the other as effect, and so on.

The logic of concept is the unity of essence and being, form and content, thinking and what is thought about. This is in a sense God, the Absolute, but it is the self-reverting being, self-thinking being. This is logic as such, pure self-thinking thought. Not formal thought, but thought which has the same structure as its content, which produces its content out of itself. If being is called mathematical, and essence is called dynamical, then the categories here may be called teleological, because they are the form which brings itself into being, the effect which is its own cause, and so on. These categories correspond to the teleology described in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. This is the thinking which overcomes and sublates the standpoint of dogmatism (being) and skepticism (essence). This is the standpoint of philosophical science.

Version II (Plato)

The logic of being corresponds to the whole first half of the divided line in Plato’s Republic: the sensible world. This is the world in its immediacy. The categories that obtain here are those features of grammar that describe things insofar as they are simply there to be beheld and observed in their presence, without regard to mediate factors such as their origin or context or purpose. Being is a world of immediately existing entities whose origin and destiny are of no significance. These entities differ from each other not essentially, but only by qualities and quantities and the combination of them. In the grammar, the logic of being is effective when the copula is used to express a quality of a substantive: the rose is red. There is no question as to whether the rose will continue to be red, whether it is essentially red, whether it ought to be red, etc., since those would be departures from immediacy.

The logic of essence corresponds to the third segment of Plato’s divided line, i.e. the first half of the second half. This is the logic of dianoia, which can be translated as intellect (or into German: Verstand, understanding). Here, the sensible world is taken as a hypothetical starting point for the generation of essential insights. The world of manifold entities is led back to an origin and destiny which causes and grounds the existence of the entities. For example, every swan I have seen is white, therefore I induce that all swans are white, i.e. that swans are essentially white. This activity, which is reflection, corresponds in English grammar to the auxiliary verb ‘do’. Being is to ‘is’ as essence is to ‘does’. E.g., I am writing vs. I do write. The latter statement means it is essential, even if not immediately the case. In essence, the immediate fact is subordinated to general principle. Essence is the inner world, the intrinsic world, and existence is the outer world, the extrinsic world. Dianoia is the kind of thinking that divides the world this way: dianoia connects hypotheses to principles. It stars from a hypothesis and deduces a principle, or starts from a principle and posits an instance. But this does not go in a circule: the principle is not self-establishing, but only other-establishing, only the basis for secondary facts.

The logic of concept corresponds to the final and highest segment of Plato’s divided line, i.e. the second half of the second half. This is the logic of noesis, which can be translated as reason (Vernunft). Here, the manifest world is only a middle, a detour, within a circular process of truth which begins from principles and ends with principles. Principles, i.e. essences, are now self-relating. The essence that begins and ends with itself is called the concept. Concepts are the true beings: thinking is what is truly being. The knowledge of the world, the process of the concept thinking itself, the idea that knows itself, is what is truly real and actual. The world of transient phenomena is only the means (yet a necessary means) by which the concept realizes itself and establishes its circular return on itself.