Soul, World, God: Hegel’s Vorbegriff to the ‘Science of Logic’ in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Abstract

This text is an exegetical commentary on the Vorbegriff to the 1830 edition of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The Vorbegriff is a frequently overlooked text and is often mistaken for an introduction, but it has a significant role to play in undergirding and justifying the remainder of the Encyclopedia-system. The text of the Vorbegriff breaks down into five core sections, some of which then further subdivide. The text opens (§§19-25) with a purely abstract and nonhistorical account of the narrative which will underpin the remainder of the text. This opening section is followed by ‘Metaphysics’ (§§26-36), in which Hegel identifies and critiques those conceptions of philosophy which assume that through thinking the true nature of objects is brought before consciousness. ‘Metaphysics’ begins without a clear historical referent but finds itself coalescing around the dogmatic metaphysicians of the post-Reformation German universities. Hegel then moves on to a discussion of the innovations produced by Humean Empiricism (§§37-39) and especially on the new conception of freedom that Empiricism brings to philosophy. Hegel aims to argue that it was not a historical accident that Humean Empiricism had such a disproportionate influence on Kant; rather, there is something implicit in the logical structure of Empiricism which demands to be rendered explicit within the Kantian critical philosophy. Hegel’s analysis of Kant (§§40-60) is split between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment and focuses on the way in which Kant wrestles with the relationship between thought and being. Hegel does not so much argue against Kant as observe that the Kantian system cannot help but formulate the demand for a system which would make it possible to conceive of the concretely existent idea. The final section of the text (§§61-78) concerns itself with Jacobi and with the philosophy of immediate knowing. Hegel is keen to emphasise that Jacobi is right in demanding the unmediated and direct relationship between the individual and the absolute, but just as much criticises Jacobi for failing to recognise that when there is no mediation there is likewise no content. On Hegel’s account, what Jacobi arrives at is a true and important apprehension of the pure being with which logic begins. Where Jacobi falls short is in failing to move onwards from that starting point, leaving the philosophy of immediate knowing as the antechamber to Hegel’s own Logic. Although the central aim of this piece of work is to provide a commentary to the text that could then be of use to scholars and reading groups, questions arise over the course of the text which demand to be answered. I devote particular attention to the question of why Hegel chooses to defend the idea of presuppositionlessness in such a historically conditioned fashion and argue that in addition to justifying his approach to logic, Hegel also wishes to explain the development of new and distinct forms of freedom without which his own approach to philosophy would be impossible.