This chapter argues that Hegel’s aim in his philosophy of nature is not to compete with natural science but to show that there is reason in nature – reason that science cannot see but that works through the causal processes discovered by science. It considers first the transition from Hegel’s logic to his philosophy of nature and argues that the latter continues the project of the former, starting with reason, or the “absolute idea”, as nature, as sheer externality. It then argues that Hegel derives nature’s categories logically – a priori – from the idea-as-externality, and subsequently matches them with empirical phenomena (rather than constructing categories to fit the latter). It provides an abridged account of Hegel’s physics in order to show how the categories of physical (as opposed to mechanical or organic) nature are derived from one another and how they are embodied in physical phenomena, such as sound, heat, and magnetism. It then concludes by arguing that, contrary to appearances, Hegel’s conception of light complements, and is not simply at odds with, that presented by quantum physics.

This chapter examines the principal differences between the Encylcopaedia Logic (EL) and the larger Science of Logic (SL). It will focus especially on the section on “essence” in which the categories are ordered in a somewhat different way from the way they are ordered in the SL. The chapter will consider whether these differences are just due to the different aims of the EL and SL, or whether Hegel develops an altogether new conception of essence in the EL.

Hegel’s philosophy of “subjective spirit” in his Encyclopaedia (1830) shows that the human spirit, when fully developed, takes the form of “free will, which is for itself as free will” (Enc. 3I §481). In his account of “objective spirit” Hegel then shows that the free will – insofar as it is rational, rather than merely arbitrary – conceives of freedom as something both individual and universal. Freedom, for Hegel, belongs to the self-conscious individual; yet at the same time, as the object of a rational will, “freedom and its content … are the universal in itself” (Enc. 3I §485). This means not only that freedom belongs in principle to all self-conscious individuals, but also that it has a rational character of its own that individuals must recognize if they are to be truly free.

Hegel is aware that it is only in the modern world, with the emergence of civil society, that ‘the freedom of property has been recognized here and there as a principle’ (PR § 62R). Nonetheless, he contends, property is made necessary by the very idea of freedom itself. The purpose of this essay is to explain why this is the case by tracing the logic that leads in Hegel's Philosophy of Right from freedom, through right, to property and its use. I conclude by briefly comparing Hegel and Marx on the topic of ‘value’.

Free Will and Right

The first task is to explain why freedom, or the free will, must give itself the form of right (Recht). What Hegel calls ‘intelligence’ is the knowing of what is (PM § 465). Will, in contrast, seeks to realize, and realizes, its subjective aims in the external world. It is, therefore, the activity of giving objective ‘existence’ (Existenz) to the content of its aims (PR § 8; PM § 469). Insofar as will actively objectifies itself in this way, it is ‘self-determining’ and free. Initially, however, its aims are determined by nature, rather than by itself: they are its immediately given needs, drives and inclinations. Accordingly, Hegel maintains, will is at first not fully free, but free only implicitly or ‘in itself’ (an sich) (PR §§ 10–11; PM §§ 471–475).

Will is, however, explicitly free, or free ‘for itself’, insofar as it distinguishes itself in thought from its given drives and inclinations and understands itself to be the power to choose which aims it will realize: the power of Willkür or ‘arbitrariness’ (PR §§ 12–15; PM §§ 476–478). Yet, as such, will is still only implicitly free, since the aims among which it can choose remain determined by nature. Arbitrariness is thus contradictory, even though it is what most people take true freedom to be: for, although it is the explicit and unfettered freedom to choose, it can choose only what is given to it and so is completely dependent on the latter (PR § 15A; VRP 3: 134).

Hegel's idea of the ‘end of art’ has been a topic of ongoing discussion in the philosophy of art since his death in 1831. Two of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers, Heidegger and Adorno, both developed interpretations of art that engage directly with this idea. The person who appears to embrace the idea most enthusiastically, however, is Arthur Danto, who has even described himself as a ‘born-again Hegelian’. Yet how much impact has Hegel had on Danto's philosophy of art and of the history of art?

Hegel and the ‘end of art’

Hegel identifies three ways in which art may be said to come to an ‘end’. First, he maintains ‘art has its end in the comic’, especially the comedy of Aristophanes. Art gives expression to the truth through particular, finite shapes, images or sounds. The comic character, however, shows his freedom ‘from the content and forms of finitude’ by laughing at his own foibles and at the frustration of his particular aims. In so doing, he manifests a profound sense of inner reconciliation and satisfaction: ‘the absolute freedom of the heart’. Such freedom is human and worldly; yet it points forward to religion because it is an inner freedom attained by letting go of what is finite. Comedy brings art to a logical – though not historical – end, therefore, by pointing beyond art to religion in Hegel's philosophical system.

Kant is sometimes thought to be a thoroughly ahistorical philosopher. Allen Wood points out, however, that those who think of Kant in this way “have a profoundly false image of the critical philosophy” (Wood 1999: 208). Although Kant considers reason to be a faculty with unchanging principles, he holds that our awareness of the rational principles of right and morality is historically conditioned and also that “our use of reason develops through history” (ibid.: 230, 248).

The key text for understanding Kant's philosophy of history is his essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784). In that essay Kant claims that history proceeds “in accordance with a determinate plan of nature” (UH 109). This claim itself presupposes that there is “purposiveness” [Zweckmäßigkeit] in the arrangement of nature as a whole (UH 115 [8:25]). Kant's philosophy of history thus forms part of his “teleological doctrine of nature” (UH 109).

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Kant maintains that the concept of “the purposiveness of nature … has its origin strictly in the reflecting power of judgment” (CJ 68). In particular, such judgement presupposes that nature's universal empirical laws are purposefully suited to our understanding of them (CJ 72). Kant also claims, however, that the concept of an objective purposiveness of nature – the idea that nature does not just accommodate our aim of understanding it but has purposes or “ends” of its own – is “a critical principle of reason [Vernunft] for the reflecting power of judgment”, rather than a principle of reflecting judgement itself (CJ 268 [5:397]; see also CJ 274).

Hegel's Science of Logic does not enjoy the best of reputations. It is invariably criticized for being obscure and impenetrable, or it is simply ignored altogether, as if it had never been written in the first place. Allen Wood speaks for many who have read some of Hegel's dense and difficult text when he maintains that the philosophical paradoxes explored in it are frequently based on “shallow sophistries” and that the resolution to such paradoxes supplied by Hegel's system is often “artificial and unilluminating”. With even friends of Hegel, such as Wood, dismissing the Logic in this way, it is hardly surprising that (as Wood notes) “Hegel's system of dialectical logic has never won acceptance outside an isolated and dwindling tradition of incorrigible enthusiasts”.

In the eyes of such enthusiasts, however - who include, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dieter Henrich, Jean Hyppolite, and John Burbidge - Hegel's Logic is by no means shallow or sophistical, but is one of the most subtle and profound works of philosophy ever produced. My aim in this chapter is to shed light on the distinctive purpose and method of Hegelian logic in the hope of enabling many more readers than hitherto to discover that subtlety and profundity for themselves.

In the eyes of many, Hegel's Science of Logic appears to be a monstrous anachronism – a work, written thirty years after Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, that revives precisely the kind of naive metaphysics Kant had shown to be illegitimate. For Hegel, by contrast, the Logic represents the culmination of a philosophical development that Kant himself set in motion. Kant's great achievement, in Hegel's view, was to place at the center of philosophical attention the categories through which philosophers had traditionally understood the world. Philosophers from Aristotle to Spinoza and Leibniz employed various categories, such as “substance” and “causality,” to understand what there is, but, according to Hegel, they never examined with sufficient rigor whether it is actually legitimate to employ them in the way they did. Kant's merit is to have focused specifically on those categories themselves and to have undertaken an extensive and thorough enquiry into their source and range of validity.

In the course of his enquiry, Kant recognized that the source of the categories was not empirical experience or divine revelation but the spontaneity of thought itself and that the true character of the categories could thus be discovered by examining the distinctive activity of thought. This Kantian insight above all others is the one that Hegel embraces most keenly in his Logic. From Hegel's perspective, however, Kant's own attempt to discover the categories in the Metaphysical Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason falls short of what a truly critical philosophy should deliver: Kant simply took it for granted that the basic activity of thought is that of using concepts in judgments and read off the categories from what he saw as the primary logical functions of judgment

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought – at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we ‘abandon … the notion of “essence” altogether’, along with ‘the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences’.

It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers – thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or ‘absolute’.