7

The Relation of Logic to Ontology

in Hegel
Paul Redding

Even among those philosophers who hold particular aspects of Hegels philosophy in
high regard, there have been few since the nineteenth century who have found Hegels
metaphysics plausible, and just as few who are not skeptical about the coherency of the
logical project on which it is meant to be based. Indeed, against the type of work characteristic of the late nineteenth-century logical revolution that issued in modern analytic philosophy, it is often difficult to see exactly how Hegels logical writings can be
read as a contribution to logic at all. Furthermore, any tendency toward skepticism
here can only have been reinforced by the well-known views of Bertrand Russell about
the logical inadequacy of the Hegelian approach of his predecessors.
Russell had regarded his own embrace of the emerging modern logic around the turn
of the twentieth century as part of a reversal of his own youthful Hegelian views, and in
various places he provided synoptic accounts of how he had come to see that Hegelian
metaphysics was irretrievably damaged by its naive logical assumptions.1 As he tells it, it
was his work on Leibniz that had led him to the topic of relations, and there he had
discovered a thesisthe axiom of internal relationsat the heart not only of Leibnizs
metaphysics but also of the systems of Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley. This thesis held that
every relation is grounded in the natures of the related terms,2 and it was an ontological
thesis that was ultimately based in Leibnizs assumption that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject and (what seemed to him almost the same thing) that every
fact consists of a substance having a property.3 Elsewhere he expanded:
Now the traditional logic holds that every proposition ascribes a predicate to a subject, and from this it easily follows that there can be only one subject, the Absolute,

1
2
3

See, for example, Russell 1959a, 42.

Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 48.

145

146 Categories of Being

for if there were two, the proposition that there were two would not ascribe a predicate to either. Thus Hegels doctrine, that philosophical propositions must be of the
form, the Absolute is such-and-such, depends upon the traditional belief in the
universality of the subject-predicate form. This belief, being traditional, scarcely
self-conscious, and not supposed to be important, operates underground, and is
assumed in arguments which, like the refutation of relations, appear at first such as
to establish its truth. This is the most important respect in which Hegel uncritically
assumes the traditional logic.4
On this reading, Hegels philosophical system was just a late remnant of premodern
thought, the elimination of which had been under way in the sciences since the sixteenth century.
Not all logically astute readers have been so dismissive. Graham Priest, for example, sees Hegel as an innovatory dialethic logician, who, above all philosophers,
understood the dialethic limits of thought,5 while Robert Brandom claims Hegel as
the initiator of his own inferentialist approach to semantics based on analytic
thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, who helped free modern philosophy from the myth of the given.6 And while, among logicians, Priest and Brandom are unusual in this regard, their unconventional assessments of Hegel find
lateral support from a number of more general recent reassessments of the idealist
traditionreassessments that suggest that it is perhaps time to reexamine the issue
of Hegels logic. Among analytic philosophers Kant has always been held in higher
regard than Hegel, and among the stream of positive readings of Kants work, a
number of studies have stressed Kants positive relevance for the development of
modern logic.7 Meanwhile, innovative recent interpretations of Hegel have stressed
the continuity of his thought with just those aspects of Kants taken as responsible
for its generally modern character.8
In the claim that Hegels metaphysical inadequacies are consequent upon problems
in the logic from which he starts, Russells view at least concurs on one issue with
Hegels sympathetic post-Kantian interpreters: it acknowledges the degree to which
Hegels metaphysics is meant to be somehow grounded in logic, and as such suggests a
distinctly Kantian dimension to Hegels approach. Kant, it might be said, had effectively

Russell 1914, 48.

Priest 2001, 7. A dialethic logician works with a paraconsistent logical system in which certain
contradictory statements of the form p and ~p can be true.
6
Brandom 1994, 92.
7
See, for example, Tiles 2004, Longuenesse 1999, Hanna 2001, and a seminal early paper by
Thompson (197273).
8
In particular, in the work of Robert B. Pippin (1989, 1997) and Terry Pinkard (1994, 2002).
5

147 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

reversed the relation of logic to ontology found in Aristotles account of the categories.
While Aristotle attempts to explain the categories used in talking and thinking about
the world in terms of the basic structures of being, Kants Copernican strategy gives
explanatory priority to the structures of our judgments about the world, and then
derives the corresponding categorical structures from the way we talk and think
about it.9 But Kants reversal was carried out on the assumption that what was explained
in terms of the judgment-derived categories was a subject-relative appearance, behind
which stood the unknowable thing-in-itself.10 However, is not the idea of a conceivable
world-in-itself just as problematic from the Kantian orientation as the conception of it
as knowable? Such a combination seems to take away our capacity for an aperspectival
Gods-eye view with one hand only to give it back with the other. Much of Hegels work
can be read as an attempt to show how while we are each fundamentally limited and
conditioned in our cognitive capacities, we are nevertheless capable of somehow going
beyond those limits in virtue of a socially based capacity for conceptual reason, an idea
he thought was expressed in theological imagistic form in the Christian myth of an
incarnated God, who after his death continued to live in the spirit of a certain kind of
human community.
In the spirit of the post-Kantian interpretation, one can see Hegel as having
attempted to extend the scope of Kants reversal of explanatory direction to the metaphysical assumption that limited Kants own attempt to go beyond Aristotles category
theory. This gives to Hegels approach the seemingly paradoxical result that features
of Aristotles logic and ontology are reintroduced, it being a characteristic of Hegels
approach to negation (Aufhebung) that what is so negated is in some way retained
within the superseding account. For Hegel, then, the categories do not simply reveal
the form of thought that is able to be conceived apart from and opposed to the world;
they reveal the structure of the world itself, and so in this way the extension of Kants
critical approach is meant to restore substantive content to philosophy by undermining the residual dogmatically metaphysical assumptions responsible for Kants denial
of it. But of course the type of ontology restored could not be that original type susceptible to Kants critiqueit must be a new, post-critical form.
Such a post-Kantian reading at least has the advantage of fitting with Hegels claim
that logic is the basis of philosophy and the starting point of his system, but what of
Russells diagnosis of the fundamental inadequacy of Hegels logical starting point?

In this reversal of the direction of explanation, Kants position might be likened to that
expressed in Wittgensteins claim that grammar tells us what kind of an object anything is (1953,
373).
10
Or at least that was how Kant was understood by Hegel, as he has been by many others. Such
a two-worlds interpretation of Kant is, however, now commonly disputed. See, for example,
Allison 2004.

148 Categories of Being

In the following section I sketch some of the progressive features of Kants approach
to logic against which any assessment of Hegels logical thought needs to be situated. While Hegels criticisms of Kant have often been taken as symptomatic of a
slide back into the type of pre-scientific and dogmatic metaphysics that Kant
attempted to overturn, I will suggest a different reading in which Hegel attempts to
make explicit Kants seemingly ambiguous attitude to the way thought achieves a
representational content.

KANTIAN PROGRESSION AND HEGELIAN REGRESSION

IN LOGIC?
Kant is usually compared unfavorably to Leibniz, who is commonly regarded as having
anticipated the development of symbolic logic in the nineteenth century.11 Recently,
however, this view has started to change. The emerging revisionist view stresses the
continuity between Kant and Frege and is summed up in Mary Tiless description of
Kant as the architect who provides conceptual design sketches for the new edifice that
was to be built on the site once occupied by Aristotelian, syllogistic logic, but which in
the eighteenth century was covered by rubble left by Ramist and Cartesian demolition
gangs.12 According to Tiles, Kant had laid the groundwork for three important structural features of modern logic: the distinction between concept and object, the primacy of the proposition (or sentence) as the unity of logical analysis, and the conception
of logic as investigating the structure of logical systems, and not merely the validity of
individual inferences.13 With the first two of these structural features of modern
logic Tiles is clearly alluding to features or consequences of Freges so-called context
principle, expressed in claims such as that the meaning of a word must be asked for in
the context of a proposition, not in isolation.14
With the context principle, Frege had reversed the conception of predication as
found in Aristotelian and scholastic term logic. For Aristotle, a judgment was formed
by the copulation of independent subject and predicate terms, but the context principle denied that such terms could be understood as independently meaningful.
Rather, they must be understood in terms of their contribution to the proposition,
which was now regarded as the basic meaningful unit, the traditional analysis of predication now being replaced by one based on the mathematical distinction between

11

In particular, the algebraic logic developed by Boole.

Tiles 2004, 85.
13
Ibid.
14
This is the second of three fundamental principles that Frege lays down in The Foundations of
Arithmetic (1997, 90; see also p. 108). Wittgenstein (1922, 3.3) was to effectively repeat this claim:
Only the proposition has sense; only in the nexus of a proposition has a name meaning.
12

149 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

function and argument.15 On the standard interpretation, this logical distinction is

now seen as correlated with a metaphysical one between objects and the concepts
applied to them.16
The case for Kants progressivism is bound up with the distinction that he himself
regarded as his seminal discovery, that between intuitions and concepts understood
as different species of representation (Vorstellung). While concepts are general and
mediated, intuitions, he claimed, are singular and immediate. To be meaningful,
judgments require the contribution of both, as is summed up in his well-known dictum
that without intuitions thoughts are empty, but without concepts, intuitions are
blind.17 This interdependence of intuitions and concepts in turn looks like Freges context principle, since, as Kant puts it, the understanding can make no other use of ...
concepts than that of judging by means of them.18 Furthermore, the distinction between
concept and intuition was itself bound up with Kants novel concern over the semantics
of our representational capacities, as expressed in the oft-quoted letter to his student
Herz. The key to the whole secret of metaphysics, he wrote, is to be found in the
answer to the question concerning the ground of the relation of that in us which we call
representation to the object.19
One can appreciate the forward-looking nature of Kants distinction between concepts and intuitions by contrasting him to Leibniz. Despite the modern look of Leibnizs attempts at formalization, the logic he favored was the term-logical system of
syllogisms.20 Most important, in contrast to Kants proto-Fregean grasp of the primacy
of the proposition, Leibniz firmly held to an interpretation of the subject-predicate
structure of the sentence in terms of the idea of conceptual inclusion, asserting that in
all true affirmative propositions, necessary or contingent, universal or singular, the
notion of the predicate is always in some way included in that of the subjectthe predicate is present in the subjector I do not know what truth is.21 This conception of
conceptual relations in terms of the spatial metaphor of containment was just the conception that was responsible for what Russell was later to identify as the axiom of

15
Arguments are singular terms regarded as standing for individual objects within some domain,
and functions are incomplete expressions that take arguments and assign values as outputs for
those arguments. For example, in the case of arithmetic, the relation ... + ... will be considered
as a function that yields numerical outputs for numerical arguments: the output 7 for the arguments 5 and 2, for instance.
16
Furthermore, in association with modern set theory, this seemed to square logic with a modern
natural-scientific conception of the world.
17
Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75.
18
Ibid., A68/B93.
19
Kant 1999.
20
Lenzen 1990.
21
Leibniz 1998b.

150 Categories of Being

internal relations. Aristotles syllogistic structures appear to be based upon Platos

method of collection and division, the series of major, middle, and minor terms of a
syllogism representing a series of universals from the most general to the most specific,
related intensionally because generated from successive divisions by the application of
specifying features, commencing with the major term. In this sense, they map relations
between intensional contents of concepts, with the more general contained in the
more specific. But from this perspective, how could logical structure be thought of as
bearing on our investigations of the empirical world?
Leibniz had believed that if the definition (effectively Platos division by specific differences) of a universal term were to be taken far enough, one would arrive at a complete individual concept, theoretically capable of determining an individual substance
(monad).22 Against this, Kant insisted that conceptual specification alone could never
be sufficient to render a thought capable of referring to an individual thing. By itself,
conceptual specification could not achieve adequate representation of the sort of existing single spatiotemporal unity that could be presented immediately as this thing presented here and now in perception.23 Hence the distinction between concepts and
intuitions, and the linked distinction between a general (formal) logic, which abstracts
concepts from their application to any objects at all, and treats them in terms of their
intensional interrelations alone, and transcendental logic, which considers concepts in
relation to possible objects of experience for finite rational subjects. Hence, while in
some way regarded as based upon formal logic, Kants transcendental logic was one
that, in contrast to formal logic, already had contenttranscendental content.
With this focus on the semantic relevance of Kants concept-intuition distinction, the
lines for his logical rehabilitation seem reasonably clear.24 However, it is just this focus
that seems to strengthen the case against Hegel, since the concept-intuition distinction
was a doctrine of which he, along with other post-Kantian idealists, was most critical.
Indeed, Hegel typically opposes the whole way of framing the type of semantic question that Kant poses in his letter to Herz, and characteristically rejects the idea that we
can independently consider something mindly, some representation, and something
worldly, an object, and then ask after the nature of the relation of the former to the
latter. How then could Hegel deny the concept-intuition distinction and yet not regress
back into the framework from which Kant was breaking free?

22

Discourse on Metaphysics, section 8.

Any further division of concepts will always yield more specific but still general and further
specifiable concepts. In Kants equivalent of the Tree of Porphyry there is no lowest level, no
species infima (Critique of Pure Reason, A658/B686; cf. A33132/B38889).
24
Even Russell, for example, had seen his own early account of the distinction between those sensedata known by acquaintance and the conceptually articulated knowledge by description as lining
up with Kants own distinction between empirical intuitions and concepts (Russell 1959b, 85).
23

151 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

In fact, the relations between Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel here are more
complex than the story suggests when told in this way. Furthermore, the resources of
Aristotelian term logic, on which Hegel (and Kant) drew, cannot be simply equated
with the predicate-in-subject principle (the logical doctrine expressed in the metaphysically holist doctrine of internal relations), nor can Hegels rejection of the intuition-concept distinction, despite his idealism, be simply equated with a blanket
rejection of the idea that determinate thought involves a relation of concepts to something non-conceptual or worldly. As in other contexts, on issues of logic Hegel seems
to have had an acute, albeit general, idea of what distinguished modern reflective
thought from ancient thought, and he was far from being some simple nostalgic critic
of all things modern. What he was typically critical of was what he perceived as a
one-sided affirmation of modern as against ancient thought, and he sought to effect
some type of mediation between them.

KANT, HEGEL, AND THE DETERMINATION OF

THOUGHT CONTENT BY NEGATION
Kant, as we have noted, had linked his discovery of intuition as a separate, non-conceptual
species of representation to the semantic need to establish a relation of thought to the
world. Hegel rejected the idea of such a starting point, but he too was concerned with the
general issue of the conditions under which thought can gain determinate content. But
here it must be remembered that Kants transcendental logic was itself a logic with contenttranscendental content. Such would be Hegels starting point, and the task of getting
an ontology out of logic would proceed by a process of making such initially indeterminate
content determinate. The means of this determinationdetermination by negationis
usually associated with the figure of Spinoza. However, it is also found in Kant himself and
is derived from features of Aristotles term logic.
The procedure of determination by negation is effectively found in Kants approach
to the way in which spatial and temporal representations (which for him are forms of
non-empirical or pure intuition) can be determinate. Thus, in the Transcendental
Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that a determinate region of space,
for example, must be conceived as generated by a type of division within an encompassing larger (and, if the procedure is reiterated, ultimately single) space. Such a
global representation of space itself is thus presupposed by any capacity to regard finite
spaces as determinate, and so cannot be achieved by any type of compounding of representations of smaller, finite regions.25 But in a number of essays in his late pre-critical

25
This is one of the basic considerations behind his idea that space and time must be considered
transcendentally ideal, and hence his conception of his own position as transcendental idealism.

152 Categories of Being

period, and hence prior to his making of the concept-intuition distinction, Kant
employed conceptual oppositions to make similar points concerning the determination of spatial representations. Specifically, in an essay from 1763, Attempt to Introduce
the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,26 he employs a distinction between
what he calls real and logical negation to describe the structure of spatial relations
that he later deals with in terms of the idea of pure intuition.27
Logical negation, he says, is just that which holds between contradictory statements,
the simultaneous affirmation and denial of some property of a thing: one statement
thus affirms that A is F and the other says that it is not the case that A is F, or to put it
otherwise, it predicates of A the contradictory predicate not F. In contrast, real negation occurs where two predicates of a thing are opposed to each other [entgegengesetzt], but not through the law of contradiction.28 Such oppositions hold between
opposed and reciprocally cancelling determinations, Kants favored example being that
between mechanically opposed forces. As with this example, a number of others given
also involve opposed spatial directions,29 but Kant also identifies as real oppositions
those holding between credits and debits of money, and between amounts of pleasure
and displeasure, good and evil, love and hate, and desire and aversion.
In fact, Kants distinction between real and logical negations repeats a distinction
within Aristotles term logic. Unlike modern propositional logics, in which negation is
an operation applying externally to a proposition (p) to give its contradictory (~p),
traditional term logics have two forms of negation: one can negate either of the two
terms (subject or predicate terms) making up the sentence, or one can deny rather
than affirm the predicate of the subject of the sentence.30 Term negation produces the
contrary of the term negatedfor example, negating the predicate term beautiful
would produce a term having the meaning non-beautiful, effectively the term ugly.

26

Translated in Kant 1992.

Michael Wolff is one of the few interpreters of Hegel to point to the importance of Kants early
essay. The introduction of the concept of real negation in this essay, he points out, was of great
(though little understood) significance for Kants later philosophy, and also for post-Kantian,
Hegelian, and materialist dialectic (Wolff 1999). While Wolff illuminatingly brings out the
mathematical and mechanical dimensions of Kants account of real negation, he fails to do justice
to its Aristotelian logical dimensions.
28
Kant 1992, 211.
29
For example, a ship sails from Portugal to Brazil, and the miles traveled under conditions of an
east wind can be designated by +, while those traversed when the ship is blown back by a west
wind can be designated by . The miles traversed westward by the ship are themselves just as real
as those traversed eastward, but one might count them as negative in opposition to the positive eastward miles in the context of the ships journey.
30
For a helpful discussion of Aristotles two negations, see Horn 1989, ch. 1.1; for an extended
treatment of a contemporary form of logic using term negation, see Sommers 1982 and Sommers
and Englebretsen 2000.
27

153 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

In contrast, denying rather than affirming a predicate of a subject produces a sentence

that is contradictory to the affirmation. Thus, affirming a contrary predicate of a subject (affirming that Socrates is ugly rather than beautiful, for example) is different from
denying the original predicate (asserting that Socrates is not beautiful). Kants idea of
bipolar real negation would in fact continue to play an important if somewhat ignored
role within the transcendental logic of the Critique of Pure Reason itself, being
expressed, for example, by the third of the three categories of quality (limitation) as
well as of relation (community).
Thus it would seem there are two dimensions of the determination of concepts in
Kants transcendental logicone that is dependent on some non-conceptual empirical
content being given via the singular representations of intuition, and another in which
determination is dependent on contrastive relations between contents that are already
conceived as conceptual in some way.31 This contrast, I suggest, is crucial to Hegels
way of generating an ontology (a content) from the structures of logic itself. A key to
understanding this is found in his distinction between the categories of singularity
and particularity, a distinction based in Aristotelian logic but largely invisible from the
perspective of modern reflective (propositional) logics.

SINGULAR, PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL

Hegel seems to be at his most reactionary when he appeals to the dialectical logic of reason
to grasp such things as religious truths that escape the logic of the modern scientific point
of view, the logic of what he calls the understanding. One such example is his linking of
his three basic logical categories, universality, particularity, and singularity, after the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.32 Hegels notorious use of this triadic structure has a more
genuinely logical provenance, however, and can be seen as a consequence of his attempts
to integrate ancient term logic and modern proposition-based logic, as suggested above.

31
See, for example, Kants distinction (in the discussion of the transcendental ideal) between the
merely logical principle of determinability and what he calls the principle of thoroughgoing determination [Grundsatze der durchgngigen Bestimmung], according to which, among all possible
predicates of things [Dinge], insofar as they are compared with their opposites [Gegenteilen], one
must apply to it (Critique of Pure Reason, A57172/B599600). See also the discussion of this in
Tiles 2004, 11114.
32
The concept as such Hegel describes in the Encyclopaedia Logic (161) as containing the moments of universality, particularity, and singularity, which in the Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion (362) are identified with the kingdoms of the Father, Son, and Spirit, respectively. Even
in discussing these conceptual determinations logically, Hegels vocabulary is redolent with theological terminology. See, for example, his description of the universal as free power which
takes its other within its embrace, but without doing violence to it or as free love, and boundless
blessedness, for it bears itself towards its other as towards its own self (Science of Logic, 603).

154 Categories of Being

For Aristotle, the singular and particular judgment forms are importantly different.
Thus, in his threefold distinction of judgment forms in chapter 7 of De Interpretatione, the first group is described as containing judgments about individuals (singular judgments) while the second and third groups contain judgments about
universals.33 Judgments of the second group, he says, are about universalssay, about
the species man, rather than about individual men such as Socratesand they
express truths about those universals by being made universally about its members.
In contrast, those of the third group, while also judgments about universals, are made
non-universallyas in man (as such) is mortal. While Aristotle does not explicitly
refer to particular judgments here, it has been convincingly shown that they, along
with judgments about universals made universally, properly belong to the second
group.34 Particular judgments, it would seem, rather than being judgment about individuals per se, are judgments about universals, but made in a non-universal way.
Particular judgments are made partially about a universal or species, by way of reference to some rather than all of its members (literally, individuals are referred to as
part of the universal).35
Strictly speaking, there is no role in syllogisms for the singular judgments of group
one: the syllogism provides no way of reasoning about individuals as such. Rather,
syllogistic reasoning maps relations among universals. The particular judgment
form can appear in syllogisms precisely because it is a form of judgment about universals. Traditional logicians had, of course, been aware of the problem posed by
singular judgments for syllogisms, and the standard solution had been to treat singular terms as universals on the grounds of certain common logical properties
shared between their respective (universal and singular) judgment forms.36 In recent
times, this move has effectively been revived by Quine.37 Leibniz too had followed
this practice, but he had also used the Aristotelian particular judgment form as way
of referring to individuals alongside the standard scholastic treatment of singular

33

Aristotle, On Interpretation.
Whitaker 1996, 8489.
35
Judgments partially made is Whitakers apt term (1996, 86). Preserving the etymological link
between particular and part, for Aristotle a particular affirmative judgment affirms the predicate of part only of that totality of members of the universal for which the predicate is affirmed
when it is affirmed universally, and so, like the concept part, it depends for its sense on the idea
of the judgments being made universally.
36
For example, both universally affirmative judgments and affirmative singular judgments can be
considered alike inasmuch as they are both exceptionless. Kant alludes to this treatment of singular judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason, A71/B96.
37
Quine (1960, 181) links his construing names as general terms with the attitude of logicians in
past centuries who commonly treated a name such as Socrates rather on a par logically with
mortal and man, and as differing from these latter just in being true of fewer objects, viz. one.
34

155 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

terms simply as universals. Moreover, he regarded singular and particular judgment

forms as equivalent.38
Leibnizs practice thus draws attention to an alternative way of securing an empirical
referent for the subject term besides the use of a proper name, since a particular judgment
form will be able to be used to pick out an individual as an instance of (or part of) a species,
as when the individual Socrates is picked out by a noun phrase such as this man or a
certain man. In contrast to Leibniz, however, Kant insisted on preserving the distinction
between strict singular reference through intuitions and the type of reference that is mediated conceptuallythat is, he distinguished between the referents being picked out qua
singular and qua particular. While a concept is necessarily part of the judgments subject
term at the surface level, the judgment can be understood as having an underlying logical
structure such that reference is secured through intuitions, the only properly singular form
or representation.39 But if the alternative idea of securing reference to individual objects
through the particular judgment form was open to Kant, why, we might ask, did he then
insist on the further separation of concepts and intuitions? Could not a referent picked
out by a demonstrative phrase establish the necessary relation of judgment to the world
without any further appeal to intuitions as radically non-conceptual representations?
The clue here has to do with Kants claim about the systematic nature of all knowledge
the idea that all true judgments must be conceivable as logically united within a transcendental unity of apperception in virtue of which they are judgments about the one
world.40 Were some ineliminable judgments to gain their reference to the world via a
demonstrative concept term, a this such, the necessary indexicality of such judgments would then seem to compromise the very unity of the world as presented in the

38
This is remarked upon by Sommers (1982, 15): Leibniz has an interesting variant of the traditional doctrine that singular terms are syntactically general. According to Leibniz, Socrates is
mortal is a particular proposition whose proper form is Some Socrates is mortal. But Some
Socrates is mortal entails Every Socrates is mortal so we are free to choose either way of representing the sentence. Leibniz thus views the singular proposition as equivalent to the particular
proposition that entails a universal one.
39
For Kant the subject term of a properly cognitive judgment contains a (necessarily general)
concept. (The only properly singular judgment in Kant is an aesthetic judgment, which is not
genuinely cognitive.) When one takes into account the role of intuitions, this gives to the judgment a different underlying logical structure. See the perspicuous discussion of this in Longuenesse 1999, 90, 90 n. 20.
40
Thus Kant describes a concept as resting on a function, by which is understood the unity of
the action of ordering different representations under a common one and as hence grounded
on the spontaneity of thinking (Critique of Pure Reason, A68/B93). Judgments are described as
functions of unity among our representations, since instead of an immediate representation a
higher one, which comprehends this and other representations under itself, is used for the cognition of the object, and many possible cognitions are thereby drawn together into one (ibid.,
A69/B94).

156 Categories of Being

totality of true judgments about it. The transcendental unity of apperception is by

necessity universal, and hence cannot be identified with a particular point of view
within the world that it is concerned with making known. But while these two
approaches to the determination of judgments are present in Kant, the relation between
them is very obscure. Hegels more explicit use of the idea of singularity, particularity,
and universality as the three moments of the concept is meant, I suggest, as a way of
making these relations explicit.
Hegels thought here is complex and far from lucid, but it is nevertheless suggestive.
On one hand, he wants to give a place within thought to a form of judgment that has
this Aristotelian particular judgment structure, that is, the structure of an egocentric
or perspectival judgment predicating one from among a group of contrary properties
of an object qua instance of some species. The object of predication so conceived is
essentially the structure of what Hegel describes in the Phenomenology of Spirit as the
object of Perception. Such immediate judgments about such objects do not have a
straightforwardly propositional content but are articulated by the features of term
logic. On the other hand, he wants to keep a place for judgment forms more like those
Kant needs to conceive of how judgments can be integrated within a coherent transcendental unity of apperception. This will be the structure of those reflective judgments belonging more to what he calls Understanding: here the content of such a
judgment form is more propositional than objectual, and such judgments will be correlated more with abstracts feature of the worldfacts or state of affairsrather than
any individual object in the everyday sense of the word.

A LOGIC FOR OBJECTS, A LOGIC FOR FACTS, AND

LOGICAL LIFE
In the first three chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel charts the progress of
a conscious subject though a series of what we might think of as separate epistemicontological attitudes that he labels Sense-certainty (die sinnliche Gewissheit), Perception (die Wahrnehmung), and Understanding (der Verstand).41 Each of these
41
Consciousness had started out taking the immediate qualitatively determined this of Sensecertainty as the truth of its object and had come to learn that such immediately perceivable
quality is just an aspect of the more complex object of Perception. In contrast to the simplicity of
the this of Sense-certainty, the perceived object has an internal structure such that an underlying substance has changeable phenomenal properties. But in turn Perception learns that that its
object is in truth more complicated again, the distinction between it and Understanding roughly
enacting the distinction between the everyday commonsensical and scientific or nomological
views of the world. While from the point of view of Perception we might think of the world as
simply an assemblage of propertied objects, from the point of view of Understanding, such
objects will be integrated as interacting components of a single, unified, law-governed world.

157 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

attitudes is a version of a generally realistic orientation within which that which is

known within experience is taken to be an independent in-itself (das Ansich). That
is, the attitude of consciousness is to take things as experienced as being just as they
would be anyway, were they not being experienced.42 Each shape, therefore, represents an attitude that is properly ontological or metaphysical.
The attitude of Sense-certainty takes as true a type of singular content purportedly
given immediately in experience and hence presented as a pure This.43 But Hegel
attempts to show the incoherence of the idea of anything being so given and yet determinate or cognitively relevant. To be determinate, one needs contrast or negation, and
this content is meant to be grasped independently of such relations. It is the very
immediacy of these supposed phenomenal contents that precludes any relations of
identity or difference from being established among them, but without any specifiable
grounds of relations of identity or difference they cannot be distinguished, and hence
they pass over into each other. Effectively, this constitutes Hegels anticipation of more
recent critiques of the Myth of the Given.
The collapse of Sense-certainty as a cognitive attitude will result in its being replaced
by a new shape of consciousness, Perception. What Sense-certainty had taken as a
singular, simple this has now become a property inhering in an abstract universal
medium or substrate. The perceptual object is an instance of a kinda this such
and so instantiates particularity. In the first instance, says Hegel, the properties will be
taken as simply inhering in the medium in a way that makes them indifferent to each
other, but if all such properties were in fact indifferent to each other in this way, they
could not be determinate, for they are only determinate in so far as they differentiate
themselves from one another, and relate themselves to others as opposed [als entgegengesetzte].44 This is where the principle of term negation manifests itself: in Hegels
example, white is white only in opposition to [in Entgegensetzung gegen] black, and so
on.45 The very existence of things determinately colored F must then presuppose the
existence of things determinately colored non-F: the point of singularity [Einzelheit]
in the medium of subsistence therefore must radiat[e] forth into plurality.46 But the
object so conceived in turn shows itself to be incoherent and (like Aristotles own
thoughts about primary substances) develops into more complex conceptions of the

42

These various shapes of consciousness had been differentiated by their respective assumptions
regarding the fundamental characteristics of that independent in-itself.
43
Phenomenology of Spirit, 91.
44
Ibid., 114.
45
Ibid., 120.
46
Ibid., 115. The idea is that if, say, the world were monochromatically colored red, then from the
point of view of perception, it could not even be thought to be red. Being (determinately) red
requires the existence of other, non-red things.

158 Categories of Being

structure of such perceivable objects, and is ultimately, with the transition to the
Understanding, replaced by something like nomologically interacting forcesthe distinction between Perception and the Understanding roughly enacting the distinction
between the everyday commonsensical and modern scientific views of the world.47
The logic of the purely conceptual relations existing among these thought determinations, but now abstracted from the concrete form in which they are presented to a
consciousness in the Phenomenology and thus free of any empirical determination, is
charted in Hegels Science of Logic. Of course, the lack of empirical determination does
not exclude such logic from having a content, and the apparent ontology in which the
Science of Logic appears to terminate in Book 3 represents Hegels equivalent to the
transcendental content of Kants logic. The first two books of this work can be considered as Hegels category theory, which, like Kants, is meant to be objective in the sense
that its thought determinations are considered to be equally determinations constituting the transcendental structure of the things that thought is about, but unlike
Kants in that no longer are they to be considered the mere appearances behind which
unknowable things-in-themselves stand.48 Moreover, while Kants synthesis of ancient
and modern positions in logic might be described as in some sense ad hoc and unconscious, Hegels is clearly very conscious. Here as elsewhere, Hegels position was that of
the self-conscious mediation of what he understood as the immediate characteristics
of ancient thought (in this case, the mediation of the term logic reflected in the opposed
categories of Book 1, the logic of being) with the mediation characteristic of modern
thought (here the modern propositionally based approaches to logic reflected in the
structures of Book 2, the logic of essence).
It must be remembered that Hegel refuses the modern reflective starting point in
which all things mindly (concepts, knowledge, etc.) and all things worldly (objects, facts,
etc.) are conceived as radically separate and yet determinate, and their relations then
inquired into. Nevertheless, the content generated from logic itself will need to be such
that we can understand how the world can be known, conceived, reflected upon, and so
forth from somewhere within it. It is not surprising, then, that Hegels logical categories
will fit a more or less organic worldview within which we might think of mind as somehow immanent. More particularly, however, Hegels way forward here will be essentially
to ground cognitive processes in something like the pragmatics of socially based and
rule-governed language games that is central to his notion of objective spirit.49 In this

47

Or alternatively, the understanding could be thought of as parallel to the specifically scientific

type of knowing that Aristotle refers to as episteme.
48
Again, Hegels is unlike Kants given Hegels own understanding of Kant. On the more Fregean
reading of Kant, it is misleading to regard Kant in this way.
49
This aspect of Hegels position is brought out strongly in Terry Pinkards (1994) thesis of the
sociality of reason.

159 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

regard, the role of what Hegel describes as the recognition holding between finite
embodied and socially located subjects is crucial for understanding his approach to the
human capacity for reflection and thought. There will thus be a sense in which a life of
the mind is immanent within or emergent from his somewhat organic conception of the
world. This has led some interpreters to think of Hegels starting point as a type of metaphysical philosophy of nature, and to consider his approach to thought itself, and hence
to logic, as somehow derived from this organic metaphysics.50 On the opposed postKantian approach, however, this is to reverse the relation between Hegels logic and his
metaphysics. Hegels task is to, in some sense, derive what is taken to be his organic
metaphysics from the immanent development of a content for logic. While it is clear that
the feature central to this logical derivation, Hegels notorious use of contradiction, is
clearly thought of as a type of organic feature of thought, for the post-Kantian reading
this must not rely on any independently conceived organicist metaphysics, but rather
must have a properly logical origin. Again, it would seem, his attempt to combine determinations of term and proposition logics and their differing accounts of negation is
crucial here.

THE ROLE OF CONTRADICTION IN HEGELS LOGIC

One of Hegels constant complaints about the type of cognition characteristic of the
Understanding is its static, mechanical, and lifeless nature, which he contrasts to a
much more organic and animated dialectical form of thinking.51 Notoriously, he here
appeals to contradiction to capture the vitality of thought.52 In the history of logic, what
is appropriately called the law of non-contradiction is commonly called the law of
contradiction, but when Hegel appeals to his law of contradiction, the title is appropriate. The law that Hegel calls the law of contradiction states that everything is contradictory. It is a law, Hegel says, that expresses the truth and essential nature of things.53

50
Something like this position is represented in current debates by Frederick Beiser. See, for example, Beiser 2005.
51
For example, Hegel accounts for the lifeless, dull, and spiritless content of the modern
reflective version of logic, in that its determinations are accepted in their unmoved fixity and
are brought only into an external relation with each other. In judgments and syllogisms the
operations are in the main reduced to and founded on the quantitative aspect of the determinations; consequently everything rests on an external difference, on mere comparison and
becomes a completely analytical procedure and mechanical [begriffloses] calculation (Science of
Logic, 52).
52
Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality it is only in so far as something has a
contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity (ibid., 439).
53
Ibid.

160 Categories of Being

While most defenders of Hegel claim that he does not deny the law of noncontradiction,54 for Priest it is his dialethist denial of this law that marks the advanced
nature of his logical thought.55 However, it is far from clear that Hegel means by contradiction what modern logicians typically mean (the conjunction of contradictory
propositions), as Hegel does not assume propositional logic as fundamental. Rather, he
attempts to integrate structures of term and propositional logics, each with their differing senses of negation.
Aristotle sometimes seems to invoke the modern idea of contradiction, but this is
misleading, as he did not have the modern notion of negation as an external operation
applied to a propositional content and so could not consider sentences of the type p
and ~p. Where he apparently refers to a contradictory pair of propositions,56 he typically means statements that result from simultaneously affirming a predicate of a subject and denying that predicate of that subject.57 As Laurence Horn points out, We
should be aware that any translation of the term logic operation of predicate denial
into the one-place truth-functional connective of propositional (or sentence) negation
cannot faithfully render Aristotles vision.58 Since, as I have argued, Hegels fundamental logical idea, the idea of determinate negation, is derived from Aristotles alternative
to modern propositional negation, it would seem unlikely that Hegel too could mean
by contradiction exactly what modern logicians typically mean by the term. But what
then does he mean by it?
Hegel expresses the law of contradiction in terms that seem primarily ontological
rather than logical, concerning as it does the contradictoriness of all things rather than of
judgments or propositions. However, as has been stressed, here we can read Hegels
ontology as expressing his logic: the things that are contradictory are things as articulated
within the evolving set of thought determinations traced throughout the Science of
Logic. We might understand this by considering the fate of an object that is first grasped
as a perceptual object and then thought and reasoned about. If what we have seen of the
term-logical determinations of perceptual objects and the more propositional determinations of objects reasoned about is correct, then there is a very real sense in which such
objects must change despite being the samemust be, in Hegels sense, contradictory.

54

According to Brandom, for example, rather than deny the law of not-contradiction, Hegel
places it at the very center of his thought (Brandom 2002, 179).
55
Of course paraconsistent logics do not accept p and ~p for all sentences p. Specifically, paraconsistent logics are posited as ways of dealing with such logical paradoxes of the form This
sentence is false (a version of the liar paradox).
56
As, for example, in Aristotle, On Interpretation, 17a30.
57
We mean by affirmation a statement affirming one thing of another; we mean by negation a
statement denying one thing of another (ibid., 17a27).
58
Horn 1989, 21. It is commonly argued that the Stoics invented propositional logic.

161 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

Hegel clearly conceives of dialectical interactions between normative claims to the

truth of beliefs or the rightness of actions as central to his pragmatics of language use.
Consider, then, a situation in which a particular immediate claim on the part of one
subject, such as This A is F, is met with opposition from the point of view of another
perspectivally located subject for whom this A is experienced as having some other
contrary quality and for whom it is thus some non-F.59 (For example, my immediate
perceptual response is to describe this tie as blue, while yours is to describe it as green.)
But when the opposing opinion is expressed in relation to the first claim, this counterclaim typically will be put as a denial: This A is not F. (This is blue will now be met
with This is not blue.) But this in turn must affect the interpretation of the original
claim, as while it was initially immediate, it too is now a mediated claim. It is now
maintained in the face of its denial (Its not the case that this is not blue).
The original judgment, which was understood as being some immediate reflection or
representation within thought of the nature of its object such that its subject-predicate
structure corresponded to the substance-attribute structure of the perceptual object,
must now be reconceived as being contrastively determined by its contradictory within
the logical space of reasons. Effectively this new conception of the content of the judgment is conceived by Hegel in essentially propositional terms such that negation is
regarded as an external operation. We can appreciate the reasons for this by looking to
Frege, who claimed that we must consider negation to be an operation that applies to
complete propositions if we are to understand propositions in non-assertive contexts
such as interrogatives and hypotheticals. That is, in reflecting on a claim, we must
understand its content independently of the question of its actual truth or falsity.60 If
we think of the proposition p as the content of a question p? whose possible answers
are p and ~p, then the proposition p, without the sign of assertion or negation, must
be taken to be the understandable sense of the question.
It is significant that in his comments on the law of the excluded middle, which in
Aristotle is expressed as of one thing we must either assert or deny one thing,61 Hegel
argues for the existence of a third that is indifferent to the opposition he describes as
A and not-A. This third is A itself without the + or that marks the affirmation or
denial of A.62 When Hegel describes it as the unity of reflection into which the opposition withdraws as into ground, this suggests something like the unity Frege gives to
a propositional content that must be able to be understood in abstraction from its

59

This is brought out most clearly in Hegels discussion of the evaluative judgment of the concept in Science of Logic. See note 64 below.
60
See, for example, Freges discussion of the question Is the Sun bigger than the Moon? in his
classic paper Negation (1997, 34748).
61
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011b2425.
62
This A is neither +A nor A, and is equally well +A as A (Science of Logic, 43839).

162 Categories of Being

being judged true or false. It is this conception of the content of a judgment that is
the heir to Kants contextualization of judgments within the transcendental unity of
apperception.
Such a signless content of a belief fits with the content in relation to which the
rational asserter must come to stand under conditions of dialectical contestation.
Faced with a counterasserted denial, the asserter is thereby confronted with the
two opposed beliefs that stand as contradictories, p and ~p, and must deal with the
dilemma that both cannot be believed at the same time. The subject is forced into
reflection to judge which of the two propositions, p or ~p, is correct, and this
change of stance requires a complete modification of its conception of the nature of
that original object of knowledge. Originally it had been conceived as unproblematic and as immediately available to the subject: one simply had to observe how the
thing was in order to know its properties. It was simply F and not non-F. Now,
however, the object is grasped as that which is possibly F or possibly not F. If it is F,
it will have to be understood as that which was responsible for its appearing to the
other to be not F; if it is not F, it must be understood as that which was responsible
for its originally appearing to be F.63 The known object will develop through many
further categorial transformations beyond these, but at least this transition allows
us to understand the contradictory nature of such objects for Hegel. From the
modern model-theoretic perspective, for example, thinking of the object first in
terms of its particularity and then in terms of its singularity will appear to conflate
a class that has a single member with that member.

CONCEPT AND OBJECT, MIND AND WORLD

Regardless of Hegels attempts to specify how thought will gain a determinate content
by being self-determining under dialectical conditions in which individual claims are
developed in the face of counterclaims, is it not still the case that in his refusal of the
concept-intuition distinction Hegel shows his commitment to an implausible metaphysical view of the totality of things as a self-referential super-mind whose thoughts
need not and cannot go beyond itself? This was just the distinction that Kant had
attempted in order to connect concepts to a world beyond them, and without it Hegel
can seem to lose just the distinction that Frege insisted upon between objects themselves and the concepts we have about them.

63

Clearly, the object is now being treated as the subject of a reflective judgment whose inner nonapparent properties are manifested in terms of the effects the thing has on other things, namely,
human perceivers.

163 The Relation of Logic to Ontology in Hegel

That this criticism rests on a mistake, however, can be appreciated by again invoking
the singular-particular distinction. If we pose this question from the reflective point of
view that we moderns seem to adopt instinctively, then Hegel is surely in agreement
with the idea that in judgments, concepts are ultimately applied to something external
to thought, for here concept and thought are meant in the subjective sense. The
concepts applied to objects or the thoughts entertained about them are the concepts
and thoughts of particular, finite subjects, and the correctability of these testifies to the
independence of that which they are about.
In his account of the forms of judgment in Book III of The Science of Logic, the final,
most developed form of judgment is the explicitly evaluative judgment in which predicates such as good, bad, true, beautiful, correct, and so on are applied to objects.64
What distinguishes this form of judgment from the immediately preceding judgment is
the moment of singularity in the subject term. The preceding judgment form, the disjunctive judgment, specifies the array of mutually limiting particulars into which a kind
or species is differentiated: colour is either violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange or
red.65 Such a necessary judgment is neither empirical nor analytic, but rather something like a Kantian synthetic a priori judgment.66 Hegel says of this judgment form that
its moments do not confront one another in determinate self-subsistence and that
although objective universality has completed itself in its particularization, the unity of
the judgment has not yet determined itself to the third moment, that of singularity
[Einzelheit].67 In contrast, in the assertoric judgment form, which is the immediate
form of the judgment of the concept, the content is posited as a determinate relation
between the moments of a subject as an immediate singularity [ein unmittelbar
Einzelnes] and a predicate.68
Hegel portrays the initial manifestations of these judgments of the concept as
subjective and problematic because each will be based only on some bare assurance
(Versicherung) that is able to be confronted with equal right by its opposite [die
entgegengesetzte]. When one is assured that this action is good, then the opposite
assurance, this action is bad, has equal justification [hat ... gleiche Berechtigung].69
Such judgments will be initially based on some contestable, immediately felt assurance

64

Science of Logic, 65758. Such judgments express that the thing is measured against its universal concept ... and is or is not, in agreement with it. Ibid.
65
Ibid., 656.
66
The disjunctive judgment is a subtype of the judgment of necessity, of which the initial, more
analytic form is the categorical judgment (The rose is a plant).
67
Science of Logic, 658.
68
Ibid., 659.
69
Ibid., 660. Miller has here contradictory for entgegengesetzte despite the fact that good [gut]
and bad [schlect] are a typical pair of polar contraries, not contradictories.

164 Categories of Being

as to their rightness, and as such, they can be met by their contraries offered in
judgments by others who can have opposed assurances that they feel to be equally
justified. Here it is the singularity of the object judged in its abstraction from any
concept that is associated with the merely subjective element in the assertion,
some external third factor that makes the connection between the object and the
universal applied to it externally posited.70
The clear suggestion here is that the concrete thing in its singular determination has
an effect on the judgment, but it is not efficacious in the sense of playing the role of an
intuitive given that secures a truth about the object that is known with certainty. It
produces certainty merely in the sense of a subjective assurance that will bring the
judge into conflict with other similarly assured judges with different certainties. But
this is just the dialectical situation that, as we have seen, forces reflection and the search
for justifications that can initiate self-correction. Hence it is essential that a concept
applied by any particular finite judge is brought into contact with the world considered
as external to his or her concept. But in another sense, of course, the singular object
judged and the world to which it belongs are not beyond the sphere of conceptuality,
precisely because in predicating the concept of the concrete thing in its singularity, the
judge becomes aware of (posits) that thing in the determination of singularity, and
therefore as external. As Hegel puts it in the discussion of Sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit: An actual Sense-certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but
an instance (or example [Beispiel]) of it.71 Anything present to us as bare this is nevertheless present as an instance of the determination of singularity, an exemplification
of thisness in general. But is there any reason to demand some further, stronger sense
of the externality of the world? A Hegelian answer here would be that anything stronger indicates the metaphysically skeptical picture of an unbridgeable gap between concept and a world-in-itself. But if we have formed the concept of a gap here, then it is
clearly not unbridgeable.

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