Three Paragraph Summary of Hegel's Logic

Version I

Being is the sensible, empirical side of reality. It consists of quality and quantity (Aristotle’s ‘poion’ and ’poson’ respectively). Qualia (e.g. shiny, red, apple) constitute the content of sensible reality, but in a form which is generally recalcitrant and unreceptive to combination (shiny cannot be added to heavy). Quanta (e.g. 5, 9, etc.) constitute the combinability of sensible reality, but a formal combinability abstracted from all content (e.g. addition, subtraction, ratio, etc.). Measure is the combination of quality and quantity (e.g. 100 books in a library, 2 atoms of hydrogen), and it constitutes the field of sensation and experience. But this field is still the external combination of qualia and quanta. Their inward union is substance, essence.

Essence is the invisible, formal side of reality. This form is identity-in-difference. First, essence is formal thinking, the empty formal identity of itself with itself. These are the laws of thought (e.g. A = A). Second, essence is the difference between itself and its manifestation. This is the difference between the formal laws of nature (e.g. F = ma) and their manifestation in sensible being (e.g. the movement of planets around the sun). Third, essence is the identity-in-difference of the form, the law, and its manifestation, its being. This is actuality, the infinite rejoining of essence with itself in its existence (e.g. the seed manifests on the tree in the fruit; seed = tree = fruit). This triune circle, this infinite self-rejoining movement, is the concept.

Concept is essence fully entered into being and thus become present to itself. It is thinking, but no longer as merely formal thinking, but a thinking which has all reality in it as its own self-production. This is the ‘I’ of self-consciousness, but a divine ‘I’. In itself this is the content of traditional logic (Aristotle’s Prior Analytics). As externally projected, the concept is an objective end apart from itself to which it relates (Aristotle’s ‘telos’). When this end is brought back into the concept, then we have the end in itself, the idea. The idea is the philosophical method, self-knowing truth, and imperishable life. It is the creator of nature, the unity of truth and goodness, and the purpose of being. This is the Absolute Idea or Word of God.

Version II

In the sphere of being, everything is what it is immediately. What-ness (essence, determination) is dissolved in that-ness (being, immediacy). On account of this immediacy, something cannot alter without becoming something else entirely. Determination, what-ness, is here quality. When what-ness is distinguished from that-ness, and this distinction is itself taken as immediate, mechanical, then we have quantity, being which is indifferent to what-ness (qualitative determination). Quantity is extension and quality is what-ness. The emergence of quality in quantity (e.g. the paradox of the heap) is thus the transition from being into the essence of being. In general, being is the sphere of unmovedness.

In the sphere of essence, what-ness and that-ness are at once distinguished and connected. Essence is thus being in and for itself. In itself because distinct from mere being, and for itself because connected to it. The connection here is however dyadic, essence appears in another. The course of essence is that it fully enters into being so that the difference is sublated. In the sphere of being, being (that-ness) went out in extension and withdrew into what-ness. This retraction of being into itself is reflection. Reflection is first pure mediation (A = A). Reflected out of itself it is existence. The uniting of essence and existence is actuality. This uniting is itself a reflection, in which essence is bent through a series of increasing manifestations in existence: whole and part, inner and outer, substance and accident, cause and effect, power and act, which culminates in the reciprocity (chemistry) of passive and active substances. In general, essence is the sphere of movement, but moving another.

The concept emerges at the point where essence and existence coincide as a result of the reflection. So that what is reflected in the reflecting is the reflection itself. Self-reflection. That is, the movement of reflection bends the essence back into being, so that reality becomes the effectivity of reflection (thought), and thought is revealed to be the one substantive being. This self-thinking being is the universal concept, which is the ‘I’ of self-consciousness, but a divine ‘I’. Freely exercising its power to disseminate and recuperate its moments, the concept becomes the object, the end. When the end is bent back into the concept, this is internal telos: the idea, the end-in-itself. This is first life, and then knowledge, but a finite knowledge in which the true and the good are distinct. The unity of truth and goodness is the method, the truth, and eternal life. This is the unmoved mover, the Absolute Idea or Word of God.

Version III

First of all, reality is 1. being. Being is basically static reality without intrinsic operation. It is real, but not operatively real, and so subject to passing away. Change in being is the destruction of being. Being is presence, but transitory presence. Secondly, 2. transient being is taken back into the enduring essence. Essence endures change, because its nature is to be intrinsically operative and moving. But it is not real. Essence is only virtual being, being in the form of non-being. It reveals itself, makes itself present, by actualizing itself in being. So we have transient static reality on the one hand, and enduring virtual motion on the other. The virtual operation reveals itself in its transient beings, which are constantly passing away. Then thirdly, 3. we have the essence which is actual as essence. It is real, actual, like being. And it is enduring and operative like essence. But it doesn’t reveal itself by positing itself in transient being. Rather, it is its own positing. It is self-positing being, being which actualizes itself into itself. It is immanently active and actual. And infinitely so, since this is the definition of God. This is the concept. The concept is actual as essential. It is the actual virtuality. The the virtuality which is real as virtual. It is the human ego, the ‘I’ of self-consciousness, which is fully actual as the presence of virtuality in existence. This is in its fullest expression the God-man, Jesus Christ. Being is reality, but powerless to maintain itself. Essence is virtuality, power, but realizes itself by falling into transient being. Concept is virtuality which is real as virtual; the virtual, the power, which has made itself power, whose actualization is its virtualization. Or being is reality, which is basically inoperative, so its change is its passing away. Essence is operation, which consequently endures change (because it is change), but which is not real, whose reality is only through transient things. Concept is the operation which real as operational, real as virtual, whose reality is its activity, and whose operation is its existence. This is God.

Version IV

Being is that-ness, the matter of fact that something is. And essence is what-ness in general, the form of what something is. But in the science of logic we are concerned, not with the being of this or that thing, and not with a certain kind of form or other, but rather with being as such, pure that-ness, and form as such, pure what-ness.

Now that-ness and what-ness are related as matter and form, and likewise as potency and activity. Matter is the possibility for being something. And form is the actuality of it, which includes the operation of it. For example, a hand detached from a body is not an actual hand, because it doesn’t work (energeia). The pure essence is in fact pure operation, to be what it is means to be operational. And pure being is just pure potency, the possibility for being operative through and by essence/form. And the essence/form does the determining: form is formation. So being and essence are related as fact and act: that-it-is and (actively-being-)what-it-is.

Being is the matter of thought, pure content. And essence is the form of thought, pure operation. But this form is the propositional form, the formula for which is A = A. This is this. Or, commonly: that is a dog, that is a table, etc. On the left we have the indeterminate that-being (being), and on the right is form/identity of that thing (essence). But both are the same thing, just one side is in the form of being, and the other is in the form of essence.

This is how things stand in the theory of essence. There’s a determinable something on one side (which is the being) and then there’s a reaction against it, which asserts the form (the iterable, repeatable essence) on the other side. And this determination is a reaction against the tranquility of just being. The potency for determination (what is this thing?) is disrupted by this negative determining of the form which irrupts within the unformed being. It is actually being’s own self-movement which causes this irruption, which makes it (the “that”) negate itself into some determinate identity (the “what”). This is the process by which being all of its own transforms itself into thinking, which is the unity of what-ness and that-ness, essence and being. Thinking is rather the essence, the operation, which is intrinsically real, and whose determination is not a reaction or irruption from within mere being, but rather is one with its being and establishes itself as the foundation of reality, a status which it gives to itself by its own operation. Concept is the foundation which makes itself the foundation, the actuality which actualizes into itself.

Version V

The logic of being consists of what Kant called the ‘mathematical’ categories (quality, quantity). These are the forms that content is in as content, minimally formalized content. These are the instrument of empirical science, the forms that the data of the empirical world are in as data. The standpoint of consciousness which corresponds to these forms is dogmatism: it takes the truth to be just what it experiences in the world outside it. Here, thinking is passively receptive with respect to the object. The object is disorganized on this account, lacking inner unity, and thus appears in forms which are only externally combined, and not inwardly united.

The logic of essence consists of what Kant called the ‘dynamical’ categories (relation, modality). The first section of essence, ‘essence as reflection within’, is the pure form of thinking, the propositional form in abstraction, A = A. The rest of the logic of essence consists in the contentization or materialization of the pure form, i.e. minimally reified form. This is the logic of natural science by which it organizes the data of experience into a systematic whole. The standpoint of consciousness which corresponds to essence as the formal side of logic, is skepticism: it doesn’t take the world (being) as immediately revealing its true nature, but reflects on it, discovers its inner systematic unity (its essence). Here thinking is active with respect to the object, actively constituting the object. The categories here are doubled, mirroring each other, mutually interpenetrating each other and reciprocally potentiating each other. One side is taken as form, the other side as content; one side as cause, the other as effect, and so on.

The logic of concept is the unity of essence and being, form and content, thinking and what is thought about. This is in a sense God, the Absolute, but it is the self-reverting being, self-thinking being. This is logic as such, pure self-thinking thought. Not formal thought, but thought which has the same structure as its content, which produces its content out of itself. If being is called mathematical, and essence is called dynamical, then the categories here may be called teleological, because they are the form which brings itself into being, the effect which is its own cause, and so on. These categories correspond to the teleology described in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. This is the thinking which overcomes and sublates the standpoint of dogmatism (being) and skepticism (essence). This is the standpoint of philosophical science.