Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) is one of the great figures of German Idealism along with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854). Hegel's most famous publication is undoubtedly the Phenomenology of Spirit, which appeared in 1807 just after he had left his teaching position at the University of Jena. In 1800 his friend Schelling, with whom he had been a student at Tübingen, had invited Hegel to join him in Jena, where they taught side by side until 1803, when Schelling left for southern Germany. When French troops under Napoleon entered Jena in October 1806, Hegel's situation became too precarious for him to stay. The university was closed, Hegel's position there was relatively insecure, and his salary (which Goethe had been able to procure for him) was too small to make ends meet. As much as Hegel desired to continue in an academic setting, he was forced to spend the next decade of his life outside the university, first in a temporary job as editor of the Bamberger Zeitung, a newspaper that appeared in Bamberg, Bavaria, and then as professor and headmaster of the Gymnasium in Nuremberg, Bavaria.

The Nuremberg years (1808–16) are the gestation period of Hegel's mature philosophy.¹ During this time, he wrote and published the Science of Logic (appearing in two volumes comprising three books, in 1812–13 and 1816) and began to work out the contours of his comprehensive philosophical system. Like his contemporaries, Hegel was convinced that any philosophy had to take the form of a system, i.e. it had to be a comprehensive, complete body of knowledge organized around a central principle, such that all propositions were rigorously derived in a progressive line of argument and all parts methodically connected to each other. In 1807 he intended the Phenomenology of Spirit to be 'the first part of the system',² to be followed by a second part comprising a logic (i.e. a general ontology) and a philosophy of nature and of spirit. While this second part of the system was never published in its originally intended form, the first volume of the Science of Logic came out as the first instalment of the system's second part, but because it had grown to such dimensions Hegel decided to publish it separately, without the philosophies of nature and of spirit.

Apparently, Hegel then changed his mind and abandoned the idea of working out the remaining parts of the system as initially planned.³ Instead, he decided to develop an abbreviated version of the entire system under the title of an encyclopedia. This encyclopedic version was to reflect the basic structure of the system itself, but it was meant to provide only the key concepts and major parts in outline without going into too much detail. So what Hegel had in mind was a compendium of the fully worked-out system itself: a summa philosophiae, so to speak. While the key concepts and parts of the system would be contained in it, the text would represent a slimmed-down version, organized in successively numbered sections. In the Nuremberg text, Hegel defines its purpose as follows: A 'philosophical encyclopedia is the science of the necessary connection, as determined by the concept, and of the philosophical genesis of the fundamental concepts and principles of the sciences'.⁴

It seems that Hegel's decision to compose an outline of his system was primarily motivated by his obligations as principal of the Nuremberg Gymnasium: his responsibilities included teaching philosophy in lower, middle, and upper level courses. The guidelines he received from the Bavarian ministry of education for the upper-level course prescribed that he teach 'the topics of speculative thought' that had been taught separately at the lower and middle level, and that he do so in the comprehensive form of 'a philosophical encyclopedia'.⁵ Thanks to manuscripts discovered in 1975, scholars have been able to determine that Hegel taught the entire Encyclopedia (consisting of a logic, a philosophy of nature, and a philosophy of spirit) for the first time in the school years 1811–12 and 1812–13.⁶

In August 1816 Hegel accepted the offer of an appointment as professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, where he stayed for four semesters before accepting an even more prestigious position at the University of Berlin in 1818. Already during his first semester at Heidelberg he lectured on the Encyclopedia and repeated this course twice during the Heidelberg years (typically, Hegel would hold his lecture courses six hours per week, Monday to Saturday). Based on the drafts written in Nuremberg, Hegel prepared a book manuscript entitled Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline for publication. The book was supposed to serve as a compendium for his lectures, i.e. a resource for his students and a basic text to be expanded on during the oral presentation. This so-called Heidelberg Encyclopedia was printed and available to the public in the summer of 1817.

Practically from the start, Hegel began to emend and elaborate on the printed text in handwritten notes. To this end, he ordered a specially made personal copy of the Encyclopedia with blank pages inserted between the printed ones.⁷ The second edition of the Encyclopedia, which appeared in 1827, grew out of these revisions. As early as 1822, Hegel had expressed the need for a second edition, and in 1825 the first edition had in fact gone out of print. The second edition of the Encyclopedia contains significant revisions and adds a hundred sections to the 477 of the Heidelberg version. The revisions chiefly concern the Introduction to the work, the Preliminary Conception of the Logic, the arrangement of the categories at the beginning of the Doctrine of Essence, and various elaborations in the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. By comparison, the third edition of the Encyclopedia, which followed in 1830 and on which our translation of the Logic is based, contains few further revisions.⁸ In particular, beginning with the second edition Hegel now prefaced the main body of the text with a new explanation of the method, purpose and the overall structure of philosophy (the 'Introduction' comprising §§ 1–18 in this translation of the 1830 Encyclopedia), a new introduction to the Logic (the 'Preliminary Conception' comprising §§ 19–78), and an explanation of the dialectic with an overview of the structure of the Logic (the 'More Precise Conception and Division of the Logic' comprising §§ 79–83).⁹

Since the 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia incorporates Hegel's own successive revisions, it is natural for students and scholars of Hegel's philosophy to rely on this edition today. However, today's editions of the 1830 Encyclopedia are in one respect significantly different from the one published by Hegel, for they usually contain additional material deriving not only from Hegel himself but also from notes taken by his students during his lectures. This material was added to the first posthumous edition of Hegel's collected works published by Hegel's students in 1832 and the following years. The editors used material from notes taken during different lecture cycles, unified it in language and style, and added it to the relevant sections of the Encyclopedia. For the most part, this material, flagged as 'Zusatz' (Addition) to the section and printed in smaller type than the original Hegelian text (which contains the main body of the section and very often an indented Remark), expands on the point made in the main section by elaborating on the argument and offering illustrations or examples. It adds flesh to the bare bones of the original text, as it were, and thus reflects Hegel's oral presentation of the printed material in the classroom. While the text of these Additions cannot be said to be a verbatim reproduction of Hegel's lectures, it certainly constitutes a faithful and reliable echo of them. In their mostly non-technical language, the Additions are also immensely helpful in elucidating the main text.

The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline is the only form in which Hegel ever published his entire mature philosophical system. It is therefore an indispensable text for those who want to study Hegel's conception of philosophy as a whole. Whereas some parts of it, such as the Encyclopedia Logic (also called the Lesser Logic) and the Philosophy of Objective Spirit, also exist in expanded published versions, namely, the Science of Logic and the 1821 Philosophy of Right, or in the form of lecture cycles, other parts, like the Philosophy of Nature, have up till now never been accessible in any other form than the Encyclopedia version.¹⁰

Hegel organizes the material of the philosophical sciences into three large blocks, each with a tripartite subdivision: Logic (subdivided into Being, Essence, and Concept), Nature (subdivided into Mechanics, Physics, and Organics), and Spirit (subdivided into Subjective, Objective, and Absolute Spirit), each of the subdivisions being further divided in tripartite fashion. He thereby means to capture all fundamental aspects of reality and to indicate the basic concepts and principles of each. Thus, for instance, Mechanics discusses space, time, matter, motion, gravity; Organics treats of geology and meteorology, inorganic and organic nature (plant and animal life); Subjective Spirit deals with the nature and functions of the human soul and its relation to the body (under the title of Anthropology), consciousness as it relates to and begins to categorize and discern regularities in the world of objects, self-consciousness in its relationship to other self-consciousnesses, and the inner workings of the mind such as memory, imagination, the formation of language, and volition (under the title Psychology); Objective Spirit represents an outline of Hegel's philosophy of right and his moral and political philosophy, while the Philosophy of Absolute Spirit contains Hegel's philosophy of the arts, religion, and philosophy itself (with an account of the syllogistic structure of the entire tripartite system).¹¹

The important consideration for Hegel, however, is the unity of the system as a whole and its logically rigorous internal structure. Each concept or category of reality (also called 'thought-determination' by Hegel) must be methodically derived from its predecessor and together they must form a single, comprehensive, closed system such that his philosophy can claim to be an exhaustive account of the ideal structures underlying all reality. The fact that the account is exhaustive, that the grounding structures of reality are conceptual, and that the system is closed makes Hegel's philosophy a statement of absolute idealism. It is in part the ambitiousness of this programme and the fact that Hegel did in fact execute it (in the form of the Encyclopedia and in his lectures) that has earned him his reputation as one of the greatest philosophical minds ever (the other part being the unique style of his philosophizing and the stupendous insights growing out of it).

How, then, does Hegel ensure the inner cohesion of the system? First, he determines the core or ground of reality to be in fact thinking or reason¹² (or, in its most highly developed form, spirit), so that reality can be said to be organized in terms of intelligible structures that are conceptual or conceptualizable. The problem that the world in its material reality is not itself thought is solved by referring to anything that is not thought or reason as otherness. However, what is other than thought is conceptualizable, since this otherness can be determined by thinking. Whatever is an object of thought (and in this sense opposed to, excluded from, or a negation of thought) is other than thought, but its otherness has a name and a conceptual content that can be specified. This, however, is only the first step. Merely to generate concepts or thought-determinations for what is other than thought would not allow thought to claim that it is itself the real ground of this otherness. In fact, in our ordinary understanding this is precisely how we look at the world – as describable and intelligible, even conceptualizable and predictable (for instance, through the laws of physics), but as something other than thought, not as the otherness of thought itself. Hegel's perhaps most notorious move here is to integrate this otherness (i.e. anything that is an object of thought) into thought itself by negating its otherness. Since the otherness was already determined as something negative, its second negation now amounts to a negation of the negation, i.e. an affirmation in the sense of integration into thought. This is Hegel's famous negation of negation, the most important aspect of his dialectic.¹³ What happens is that the conceptualized otherness is made part of a system of thought-determinations¹⁴ and is then shown to be only a partial determination of the system as a whole. Thus, new aspects of otherness need to be identified that have not yet been integrated into the complete conceptual account, until all otherness is exhausted. It is important to keep in mind, however, that conceptualized and integrated otherness is a determination of reality itself; hence Hegel is able to say that the concepts or categories represent 'objective thoughts' (Encyclopedia § 24), or that they contain 'the object in its own self'.¹⁵ The concept of the object is equivalent to the object itself to the extent that the object is intelligible, conceptualizable, or 'rational'. In this sense, thought thinks itself in thinking about the thought-determinations of the real. Philosophy is the knowledge that the world of nature and spirit is structured in accordance with reason, and its highest aim is the recognition of this accord (see Encyclopedia § 6). In this recognition philosophy fulfils its highest aspiration according to Hegel, namely the reconciliation of reason with the reality we live in (ibid.). Philosophical thought is self-recognition in the other, hence, Hegel's designation of philosophy as speculative thought (see Encyclopedia § 82).¹⁶

Hegel ensures the overall unity of the system by presenting its three parts as three forms of a single reality called 'the idea' (see Encyclopedia § 18). The idea is the ensemble of all the ideal structures that constitute reality. At the same time, it is the thinking that contemplates this ensemble and recognizes itself in it. The idea is reality as subjectivity, i.e. as a self-referential, self-organizing, self-determining system that is capable of self-reflection to the extent that it is thought or reason. The Logic is the idea 'in the abstract element of thinking' (Encyclopedia § 19), while Nature is the idea in its self-externality and Spirit the idea as it realizes itself in the human spirit, its institutions and its achievements (e.g., political community, in the arts, religion, and philosophical thought). In truth, therefore, we do not have three parts of the system but instead three aspects of one and the same totality.

However, the Logic is not only the logical core of the idea; it also occupies a special place within the system in that it serves as the structural foundation of its other parts. At its core is the concept (see Encyclopedia §§ 163–5),¹⁷ a complex ideal structure that is the blueprint, so to speak, for all self-referential, self-organizing and self-determining forms of reality. In traditional terms, its basic form is that of a definition by genus and specific difference (see Encyclopedia § 164 Remark). The thought behind this is that concrete reality always has the form of a particularized universality instantiated in individuals.

But why does Hegel give the name of 'logic' to the first part of the system? Here it should be pointed out that Hegel's idea of logic does not derive from the modern concept of formal logic but from the ancient Greek word for reason, word or language, logos. The logos means the ideal structure that makes sensible reality intelligible, just as the meaning of a word makes the mere sound of a word intelligible. More precisely, logos stands for the conceptual structure that captures the essentialities of things (see Encyclopedia § 24). Hegel's logic should therefore be understood as a theory of the fundamental concepts of reality – concepts that in the philosophical tradition since Aristotle are referred to as 'categories'. Consequently, Hegel either identifies his logic with traditional metaphysics (ibid.), or he says that his Logic replaces the metaphysics of the past (see Science of Logic 63). His Logic can therefore also be called an ontology.¹⁸ The categorial structures developed in the Logic, and in particular those of the Doctrine of the Concept, form the conceptual basis for the Philosophies of Nature and of Spirit.

The objectives Hegel tried to achieve with his philosophy and with the Logic in particular are too complex to summarize in the space of a short introduction. Two goals may be identified here, however. First, as the opening sections of the Encyclopedia Logic explain, Hegel believes that the primary business of philosophy is the translation of representations (Vorstellungen) into thoughts (see Encyclopedia § 3 Remark, § 5), or the reflection on the deeper meaning of our experience by means of thinking things over (see Encyclopedia § 6, § 3 Remark). What in ordinary experience and in the empirical sciences is understood in more or less depth and detail and often in isolation must be contemplated in its true meaning and in its inner coherence so as to understand its place within the whole of human knowledge. Philosophy is the attempt to comprehend things holistically, i.e. in their interconnectedness and their relative contribution to the self-organizing whole. But philosophy is not only the attempt to comprehend the fundamental nature of the object-world. The translation of the contents of our experience must ultimately lead to a contemplation of the underlying principle of experience, namely to a contemplation of thinking itself,¹⁹ spirit's 'loftiest inwardness' and 'unalloyed selfhood' (see Encyclopedia § 11), so that it may know itself, achieve complete self-transparency, and thus fulfil what Aristotle called the desire to understand that is characteristic of the human spirit. Philosophy is actual knowledge of the truth, not merely love of wisdom (see Encyclopedia § 25).

But second, thinking is unable to recognize its own unalloyed self entirely in the object-world. The tradition of metaphysics had been to understand reality in terms of an objectivity existing over against the thinking subject. In other words, traditional metaphysics was an ontology focused on substances as with Aristotle and Descartes, or on the one substance as the sum total of reality that is both God and nature, as with Spinoza. Although substance could be endowed with thought or reason like Aristotle's nous or Spinoza's God, the thinking that contemplated this substance contemplated an object: something other than itself that is not a self for itself and therefore still separated from the contemplating subject. It was only with Kant's Copernican turn that philosophical thought came to understand that subjectivity itself is at the basis of the object-world as well. Hence, Hegel believed that, by drawing out the consequences of the Kantian revolution (as he understood it) he was also bringing to completion the quest that had motivated philosophy throughout its history, namely, achieving full understanding of the world by achieving full understanding of thinking itself – since the world is, at its core, subjectivity itself. For this reason, substance had to be shown to be subject, too, and substance ontology had to be seen ultimately to be subject ontology.²⁰ For Hegel, this insight revealed the very meaning of the history of philosophy.

Bibliographical references

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1817) Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Herausgegeben von W. Bonsiepen und K. Grotsch. In: Gesammelte Werke. Herausgegeben von der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band XII. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000 [= Bonsiepen/Grotsch 2000].

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (1827) Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Herausgegeben von W. Bonsiepen und H.-C. Lucas. In: Gesammelte Werke. Herausgegeben von der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band XIX. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1989 [= Bonsiepen/Lucas 1989].

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (1830) Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Herausgegeben von W. Bonsiepen und H.-C. Lucas. In: Gesammelte Werke. Herausgegeben von der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band XX. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 [= Bonsiepen/Lucas 1992].

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (1961) Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe in 20 Bänden. Herausgegeben von Wilhelm Glockner. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog [= WW (Glockner)].

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (1969) Hegel's Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller, Foreword by J. N. Findlay. London/New York: George Allen and Unwin/Humanities Press (based on second, revised edition 1831) [= SL].