Introduction

This chapter deals with Hegel's account of “determinate being” (Dasein), the “ought,” and “infinity,” in the “Quality” section of the first part – the Doctrine of Being – of his Science of Logic. This is the beginning of Hegel's extensive analysis of reality, freedom, subjectivity, and God, in the Logic. Hegel doesn't often use the word “God” in the Logic; he says more about “freedom” and the “subject” in the final part of the Logic (the Doctrine of the Concept) than in the earlier parts; and his account of all of these topics develops additional dimensions in the Philosophy of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. But I will show that his accounts in the Doctrine of Being of what he calls “negativity” and “true infinity” address fundamental issues about reality, freedom, subjectivity, and God in a way that establishes a pattern that the rest of his philosophical system doesn't depart from, but only elaborates. In particular, the articulation of “negativity” in “true infinity” shows: (1) how we can preserve what is true in Kant's respect for nature and in his conception of freedom without becoming entangled in the problems of the two “worlds” or two “standpoints” that Kant believed this combination required; (2) how thought is more fundamental than being, or (as Hegel puts it) how “substance” becomes “subject”; and (3) what is true, and not a mere “projection” of features of humanity, in traditional theism.