Hegel's Logic of Freedom

Mind is active and conducts itself in its activity in a determinate manner; but this activity has no other ground than its freedom.1 Reason is Thought conditioning itself with perfect freedom.2

What is the Science of Logic about? One account Hegel gives of it would not sound strange to today's logicians: it is about the "forms of thought" and the "laws of thinking."3 But in at least two decisive respects, Hegel's conception of a formal logic is different from contemporary versions. He insists that even as pure abstractions, logical forms are not divorced from content.4 He holds further that logic does not merelyprovide rules for arriving at truth when some given, external content is added;5 rather, it affords truth itself-not just any old truth, but infinite absolute truth.6 "[T]he logical is the absolute form of the truth, and, even more than that, the pure truth itself . . . . "7 Further distancing himself from contemporary views, he notes that this truth is not a matter of the "correctness of the knowledge of facts, [for that is] not truth itself"8 Still other comments Hegel makes about logic may also seem sufficiently out of temper with our time to relegate the Science of Logic to the junk heap of error, where it has so long dwelled in desuetude.

Logic, he tells us, is "the colourless communion of the spirit with itsel9 .... the spirit which contemplates its own pure essence . . . . "10 But even as communing with itself, logic has special powers, for it "must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human .... "11 This must be the case since "the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic."12 "Thus logic coincides with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts that used to be taken to express the essentialities of the things"13 Explaining why truth is not the correctness of facts, he observes that, "[w]ith this introduction of the content into the logical treatment, the subject matter is not things [Dinge] but their import [Sache], the Notion of them."14 As such logic presents that which is "solely an object, a product and content of think-ing, and is the absolute self-subsistent object [die and und fur sich seiende Sache], the logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things . . . ."15 Perhaps most notoriously he tells us:

This objective thinking then, is the content of pure science...

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