Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Contents

1. 1817 Preface to the First Edition 6 min 6

   Hegel presents the first edition as a guide for his Heidelberg lectures: an outline that cannot give full proofs but follows a new method, one “identical with the content”, unlike the external order of the sciences or the arbitrary schemas of fashionable philosophy. He diagnoses two tendencies of the time, a giddy speculative enthusiasm that plays with baroque analogies and a sceptical “modesty” that denies reason can know the truth, and forgives the first more readily than the second. Against both he sets the persisting love of rational knowledge, even where it takes the form of feeling, and dedicates the book to it.

2. 1827 Preface to the Second Edition 33 min 9

   The second preface explains the revisions, then turns to Hegel’s critics. An eighteenth-century harmony of philosophy, religion and state has broken down; those who conclude that finite categories cannot reach truth retreat into feeling and assurance, while still using those categories uncritically. Hegel rebuts the charge that speculative philosophy is a “system of identity” in which good and evil coincide, defending even Spinoza against the pietist Tholuck. Religion and philosophy share one content in two languages, representation and notion; contentless piety betrays both. He praises Baader’s revival of Böhme while insisting that the Idea must take the form of the notion.

3. 1830 Preface to the Third Edition 15 min 8

   Hegel dismisses recent attacks on his philosophy as conceit and ignorance, then turns to a church quarrel of 1830 in which pietists judged other people’s Christianity. Citing the Gospels, he argues that their certainty about “the Lord” stops at faith’s beginning, while the Spirit, which leads into truth, comes later as developed doctrine and cognition. Rationalist theology, with its formal appeals to freedom, is equally empty of content. Philosophy is left as a free, inner need of the individual, pursued for its own sake, and the quick sale of the second edition shows that a quieter readership exists.

4. §§ 1–18 Introduction 54 min 14

   Hegel defines philosophy as the thinking study of things, which turns feelings and images into thoughts and notions. Its content is actuality, so it must agree with experience; hence the much-attacked thesis that the rational is actual and the actual rational. The empirical sciences supply laws but leave their starting points and connections contingent; philosophy supplies necessity. Kant’s demand to test knowledge before knowing is dismissed as learning to swim on dry land. The history of philosophy is one developing system, and philosophy must be a system, a “circle of circles”, divided into Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind.

5. §§ 19–25 Logic: Preliminary Notion 1 h 13 min 8

   Logic is the science of the pure Idea, the “thinking of thinking”. Hegel distinguishes sense, conception and thought: sense gives isolated particulars, conception loose universals, thought the universal that is the essence of things. Because the categories are objective, logic coincides with metaphysics; truth is the agreement of a thing with its notion, not mere correctness. The Additions, drawn from lectures, illustrate with the child learning grammar, the laws of planetary motion, thought’s power to topple constitutions, and a long reading of the Fall: knowledge divides humanity from nature, and only knowledge and labour heal the division. The section then announces the three attitudes of thought to objectivity.

6. §§ 26–36 First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity 39 min 6

   The first attitude of thought to objectivity is naive confidence that thinking grasps things as they are, exemplified by pre-Kantian metaphysics. Hegel praises its belief that thought reveals essence but faults its method: it attached isolated, finite predicates to ready-made subjects taken from popular conception (God, the soul, the world) and became dogmatic, insisting that one of two opposites must be true. He reviews its four branches, ontology, rational psychology, cosmology and natural theology, showing how freedom and necessity, good and evil, and God as the “most real being” are distorted when held apart, and how proofs of God should be reconceived.

7. §§ 37–60 Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity: Empiricism and the Critical Philosophy 1 h 42 min 16

   Hegel’s second attitude of thought to objectivity covers empiricism and Kant’s Critical philosophy (§§ 37–60). Empiricism rightly demands that truth be actual, but uncritically uses metaphysical categories; Hume shows that experience gives no universality or necessity. Kant locates these in the categories of the understanding, grounded in the unity of self-consciousness, but makes them merely subjective, leaving an unknowable thing-in-itself. Hegel then reviews Kant’s critique of rational psychology, the antinomies, the proofs of God, the practical reason’s formalism and the Critique of Judgment, whose intuitive understanding comes nearest to the Idea.

8. §§ 61–78 Third Attitude of Thought to Objectivity: Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge 42 min 8

   The third attitude is Jacobi’s doctrine of immediate knowledge, or faith (§§ 61–78). Holding that thought can grasp only the finite and conditioned, it claims that God and truth are known directly. Hegel answers that immediate knowledge is a fact only by being mediated, through education, habit and the elevation of mind above the finite, and that its criterion licenses any belief, superstition included. He shows it to repeat Descartes, and closes by rejecting all presuppositions, including a sceptical introduction, at the entrance to philosophy.

9. §§ 79–83 Logic Further Defined and Divided 33 min 5

   Hegel defines logic’s three moments (§§ 79–83): understanding, which fixes distinct determinations; dialectic, in which they pass into their opposites; and speculative or positive reason, which grasps their unity. The Additions defend the understanding’s necessity in theory, conduct, the state and art, trace dialectic from Socrates and Plato to Kant’s antinomies and into nature and ethics, and distinguish it from sophistry and scepticism. Logic is then divided into the doctrines of Being, Essence and Notion.

10. §§ 84–111 The Doctrine of Being 2 h 5 min 14

    The Doctrine of Being (§§ 84–111) begins with pure being, which proves identical with nothing; their truth is becoming. Becoming settles into determinate being: quality, something and other, limit, alteration, and the bad infinity of endless progression, overcome in being-for-self, the One and the Many. Repulsion and attraction lead to quantity: continuous and discrete magnitude, number, extensive and intensive degree, ratio. Quantity returns to quality in measure, where quantitative change past a limit alters quality, and measure’s self-relation leads to essence.

11. §§ 112–130 The Doctrine of Essence: Essence as Ground of Existence 1 h 19 min 14

    Hegel opens the Doctrine of Essence (§§ 112–130). Essence is being “reflected” into itself, so that every term now exists only in relation to its partner. He works through the categories of reflection: identity, difference and diversity, and opposition of positive and negative. Along the way he criticises the school-logic “laws of thought” and declares contradiction “the very moving principle of the world”. Identity and difference unite in the ground, whose explanations stay formal; the Sophists show how grounds can be found for anything. Ground passes into existence and the thing with its properties. The thing breaks down into matters and form, and its contradiction turns it into appearance.

12. §§ 131–141 The Doctrine of Essence: Appearance 46 min 10

    The second division of Essence (§§ 131–141) argues that essence is not hidden behind appearance but shows itself in it. Hegel credits Kant with distinguishing appearance from ordinary immediacy, but faults him and Fichte for making appearance merely subjective. The world of appearances develops through content and form, illustrated by works of art. It then passes through three relations: whole and parts, force and its expression, and inward and outward. Their identity yields the thesis that “a man is what he does”, turned against excuses of good intentions and against “pragmatic” historians who debunk great men. The identity of inner and outer is actuality.

13. §§ 142–159 The Doctrine of Essence: Actuality 1 h 11 min 13

    The final division of Essence (§§ 142–159) defines actuality as the unity of essence and existence. Hegel defends his claim that the actual is rational and reads Aristotle's energeia as its ancestor. He analyses possibility, contingency and condition, mocks empty talk of what is “possible”, and distinguishes free choice from real freedom. Real possibility and its conditions make up necessity, which develops through substance (with a long assessment of Spinoza), causality and reciprocity. Understood necessity becomes freedom, and the truth of substance is the Notion. The Addition explains why the Logic could not have begun with it.

14. §§ 160–193 The Doctrine of the Notion: The Subjective Notion 1 h 52 min 14

    Hegel opens the Doctrine of the Notion (§§ 160–193), the third part of the Logic. The notion is freedom: a universal that particularises itself and returns to itself as an individual. Universal, particular and individual are its moments, and the concrete universal is set against the merely common feature. The judgment is the notion’s “original division”, and its kinds (qualitative, reflective, of necessity, of the notion) form a graded series. The syllogism unites notion and judgment; its qualitative, reflective and necessary forms lead to the claim that everything rational is a syllogism. Completed mediation yields the Object, with a discussion of Anselm’s ontological proof.

15. §§ 194–212 The Doctrine of the Notion: The Object 45 min 10

    Objectivity (§§ 194–212) is the notion realised as an immediate, self-contained world, which Hegel treats in three forms. Mechanism relates objects only externally, by pressure and impact, but develops into centrality and a “triad of syllogisms”, illustrated by the solar system and the state. Chemism joins objects by affinity into a neutral product. Teleology frees the notion as an end that uses objects as its means; here Hegel names the “cunning of reason”, later quoted by Marx. External design stays finite, since every achieved end becomes a means again. Seeing through this finitude yields the unity of subjective and objective, the Idea.

16. §§ 213–244 The Doctrine of the Notion: The Idea 1 h 5 min 10

    The Logic ends with the Idea (§§ 213–244), the unity of notion and objectivity and Hegel’s definition of truth. The idea is a process with three forms. Life is the idea in immediate form: an organism that maintains itself, assimilates inorganic nature and reproduces its kind, while its individuals die. Cognition divides into theoretical knowing, with its analytic and synthetic methods (definition, division, theorem), and the practical willing of the good, whose endless “ought” Hegel criticises in Kant and Fichte. Their unity is the absolute idea, whose content is the whole Logic and whose form is the dialectical method. The idea finally releases itself as Nature.

17. §§ 377–386 Philosophy of Mind: Introduction 15 min 7

    The Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (§§ 377–386) says what spirit is and how its study is divided. Hegel rejects both the old rational psychology and empirical faculty psychology, praising Aristotle’s De Anima instead. Mind is the truth of nature, which it presupposes. Its essence is freedom, at first the bare power of self-withdrawal, and its mode of being is self-manifestation. “The Absolute is Mind” is the system’s supreme definition. Mind develops in three stages: subjective, objective and absolute. Treating the finite as fixed is “the worst of virtues”.

18. §§ 387–412 Mind Subjective: Anthropology. The Soul 1 h 19 min 19

    Anthropology (§§ 387–412) treats the soul, mind still sunk in nature. The natural soul shares planetary life, climate, racial and national character and individual temperament. It passes through the ages of life, the sexual relation, and sleep and waking. The feeling soul is examined through the mother–child bond, animal magnetism and insanity, which Hegel treats as a contradiction within surviving reason, praising Pinel. Habit, a “second nature”, frees the soul from its feelings. The actual soul makes the body its sign, and with that consciousness awakes.

19. §§ 413–439 Mind Subjective: Phenomenology of Mind. Consciousness 26 min 13

    This short Phenomenology (§§ 413–439) condenses the first half of the 1807 book into a section of subjective mind. Consciousness passes from sense-certainty through perception to the understanding’s realm of laws. Hegel charges Kant, Reinhold and Fichte with stopping at this standpoint. Self-consciousness begins as consuming desire and moves to the struggle for recognition, which ends in master and slave. Through fear and service the slave reaches universal self-consciousness: mutual recognition among free selves. Reason, the certainty that thought’s forms are those of things, passes into mind.

20. §§ 440–482 Mind Subjective: Psychology. Mind 1 h 36 min 25

    Psychology (§§ 440–482) studies mind as theoretical and practical. Theoretical mind rises from feeling and attention through intuition, recollection, imagination and the sign to memory, and so to thought. Along the way Hegel criticises Condillac, the association of ideas, mnemonics and hieroglyphic writing, praising the alphabet and the arbitrary sign. Practical mind passes from practical feeling through impulses, passion, choice and happiness to the free will. A remark on liberty, which Hegel says came into the world through Christianity, leads to Objective Mind.

21. §§ 483–552 Mind Objective 2 h 17 min 47

    Objective mind (§§ 483–552): freedom given outward existence in a world of institutions, in outline the Philosophy of Right. Abstract right covers property as the embodiment of the person’s will, contract, and wrong (civil dispute, fraud, crime) answered by punishment. Morality covers purpose, intention, welfare and the good, ending in the unstable identity of conscience and evil. Ethical life comprises the family; civil society, with its system of wants, division of labour, estates, courts, police and corporations; and the state, with constitution, monarchy, estates, budget, war, international law and world history. A long closing remark argues that a free state needs a Protestant religion, against Plato.

22. §§ 553–577 Absolute Mind 1 h 1 min 11

    Absolute mind (§§ 553–577): spirit knowing itself in art, revealed religion and philosophy. Art presents the absolute as beauty in sensuous shape, in symbolic, classical and romantic forms, and belongs to a stage that religion outgrows. Revealed religion presents the same content as a story in pictorial form: Trinity, creation and fall, incarnation, death and reconciliation in the community. Philosophy grasps that content in the concept. A long remark rebuts the charge of pantheism with readings from the Bhagavad Gita and Rumi. The system closes with three syllogisms linking Logic, Nature and Mind, and with Aristotle on self-thinking thought.