Grammatical Introduction to Hegel

I thought I would endeavor to say succinctly what Hegel’s philosophy is, and the reason for the high status afforded to logic therein.

The natural world confronting scientific consciousness evidences what is called the hierarchy or ‘great chain’ of being. Human beings are more complex or ‘higher’ than animals, animals higher than plants, and so on down to inanimate things, rocks and the like. It may be noted that this is the philosophical origin and ground of the theory of evolution, which contributes only the thought of historical development, and thus introduces considerations which are secondary to the pure science of the chain in and of itself or in its concept.

It was Aristotle who first put forth the definition of man as zōon logon echon, the animal that has the logos, the word or reason. Reason, the power of thinking and speaking, is laid down as the essence of man. Now if it is further granted that in the great chain of being man is at the top, and that the top is the end and purpose of the whole, then it follows straightaway from what has been said that reason, thinking, is the essence of the world, of natural and human history, and the essence of being in general.

At this point I will venture to say what this reason, this logos is more precisely, and especially more concretely than is usually done, that is in the fullness and wealth of its inner content. Our most proximate acquaintance with reason in its general externality is the experience of human language and communication, of which this letter is a convenient example. The science of language, conceived as the externalization of thinking, is grammar. And grammar is to language as logic is to pure thought. Inasmuch as language is the expression of thinking, then grammar is the expression of the science of logic, or grammar is logic as seen through a glass darkly.

The content of grammar is roughly as follows: parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on), sentence structure (subject and predicate), adjective order (opinion, size, age, etc.), modal verbs (does, can do, must do), articles and determiners (a, an, the), word order (subject, verb, object), object direction (direct and indirect objects), voice (passive and active), conditionals (if, then, when). It can be seen that this content corresponds roughly to the content of logic, and as we will see later, classical metaphysics too. Each word corresponds to a concept; a sentence is a combination of words that expresses a judgment. A judgment is a connection of two concepts through the copula (the ‘is’ or being). Speaking is the stringing together of sentences, as reasoning is the stringing together of judgments.

It has just been said that grammar is the expression of logic, and that if an essential structure can be discerned in grammar in general, then a corresponding structure must be discovered as part of the content of the science of logic. I will now show that this necessitates an expanded conception of logic from how it is traditionally conceived. Every language, even those without a definite class of adjectives, has a way of performing the basic function of the adjective, which is to exhibit the quality or attribute of a noun. And it can be seen that despite great variability, there is a more or less consistent ordering of adjectives across languages, Eastern and Western.

Take for example the sentence, “that is one beautiful big red Canadian racing bicycle.” The ordering of adjectives is roughly: quantity (one), quality or opinion (beautiful), size (big), age (new), color (red), origin (Canadian), purpose (racing), substantive (bicycle). In some languages the adjectives come after the substantive, often in an order which is a reverse of the English ordering. In some languages, some of the adjectives appear before the substantive, and some after. A wide variety of exceptions can be discerned. But an exception does not destroy the rule, as is sometimes thought. The general pattern is this: the adjectives which occur closer to the substantive are more essential to it, i.e. more concerning its inward and necessary nature, whereas the adjectives which occur further away from the substantive in the sentence are more superficial, more external and thus more accidental.

The foregoing may be regarded as evidence that the science of logic must contain within it also a science of essence, that is, a science of the classes of qualities which have more or less extrinsic and intrinsic existence relative to the substance. Nouns, the substantive part of speech, correspond to what in metaphysics are called substances or essences (ousíai in Greek), which were traditionally defined as what is not said of (predicated of) anything else. These are more definitely individuals, for example this pencil here on my desk or Alexander the Great. Moreover, adjectives correspond to what in classical metaphysics were called qualities, which are primarily predicated of another and thus have only derivative being. The general conclusion to be gleaned from this is that the basic structures of the grammar, the relations of subject and predicate, indeed correspond to the distinction between substance and accident, essential and inessential qualities, in metaphysics, and subject and object in logic.

The content of logic and metaphysics also includes a theory of modality. The three forms of modality are generally, actual or assertoric (he does it), possible or problematic (he might do it, could do it), and necessary or apodictic (he must, has to do it). This theory, which is both logical and metaphysical, corresponds to modal verbs in the grammar. The subject matter in grammar of voice (the dog chased the ball vs. the ball was chased by the dog) also reflects the theory of passivity and activity in metaphysics. This also corresponds to the reversal of ordering of subject and object in the sentence. The related topic of indirect and direct objects in the grammar reflects the difference between judgments and syllogisms, or two- and three-term judgments (he gave a gift vs. he gave his sister a gift), and to the mediation of substances generally, one substance to another via a third. This is explicit in the syllogism of traditional logic (Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal). Lastly, conditional statements in the grammar correspond to hypothetical judgments in pure logic (if the grass is wet, then it has rained), and relations of cause and effect in metaphysics.

Now before we proceed it may be worthwhile to remove some confusions which commonly arise regarding the status of logic (all of the foregoing) with respect to the world. It is sometimes thought that logic is only an abstraction from all worldly reality, by which is meant that it only comes to the world after the fact, as something tacked on as it were to reality, rather than being the world’s eternal and inward essence. But the common view is not how things stand in fact. Because what is unchanging and necessary cannot be extracted from the contingent and temporal, just as ends cannot be extracted from mere means, unless the former were present in them implicitly all along. This is known in Aristotle’s philosophy as the priority in substance of actuality over potency. No proposition could be more important for science. To give an example from experience: everyone knows that the seed emerges in the fruit at the end of the cycle of reproduction of a tree. And it also occurs to everyone that this seed is not a spontaneous emergence from nowhere, but rather definitely a re-emergence of the one present from the beginning as the tree’s first cause. The logos (the whole content of logic and metaphysics just exhibited) is to be taken in the same way, as at first pre-existing before time, then as submerged in the externality of nature (analogous to the branches and leaves), and thirdly as re-emerging in the product, the fruit, which is likewise the human being, the rational animal. And this re-emergence is the chain of being that was referred to at the beginning of this essay.

We have illustrated the relation of the content of classical metaphysics—the ground structures of reality—to the sciences of thinking and language, logic and grammar, and to the world in general and man’s position in it, to anthropology. This is the whole circle of science. The appearance of the logos in man is to be taken as the re-emergence in time of logic out of its submergence (its implicitude) in nature, in unthinking organisms. The great chain of being, manifest in the history of the natural and human worlds, is on the one hand an interiorizing development, in which the inner logos is recollected out of the externality of space and time; and on other hand as an externalization of the same logical concept in the activity and work of the human being. The merely external—the soulless and irrational—has proceeded from its essence, from logic, and in the human being has returned back to that essence, back to the logos or God, just as adjectives proceed from and return to, in the judgment, the nouns from which they derive their being, a relationship of dependence which is made explicit in the elements of grammar. And the seed in the plant may be called its concept, and the leaves that it puts forth (posits) are likewise its predicates, its attributes. This movement corresponds to what in the Thomistic philosophy was called the exitus et reditus, the exit from and return to God.

With one final comment I will bring to conclusion this brief overview of the circle of treasures that constitutes the science of philosophy. The average, ordinary definition of God (which even atheists will readily assent to) contains implicitly all the foregoing categories of logic and metaphysics, rolled up in it as it were. God is generally defined as the infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, divine legislator, supremely beautiful, and the truth itself. It can be seen that this definition contains all the content of the science of logic in one. God’s infinity and oneness are his basic quality and quantity. His external quality is his supreme beauty. His origin is his own self: that he is the causa sui. This is likewise his omnipotence, his infinite causal power. His status as legislator is his modality: he is infinitely necessary being, necessitation itself. His omnipresence is his infinite activity, by which he continues himself into his creation. His perfection is his ideality: that he knows himself to be the absolute purpose, the end in itself. And this is likewise his omniscience, that he is the infinite self-comprehending being, the concept. He is thus the subject of the world and of history; the plurality of beings encountered in finite reality, in this world, are his predicates. The most essential of these predicates is the individual human being, who is just as equally the essence of being in and of itself, the power of thinking and speaking: reason, God or logos. Thus the whole of science is a circle in which the logos puts forth its inner content in the natural world, in space and time, and then recollects itself back into itself, thus re-emerging from submergence in nature as the human being, the animal with reason.