Georgi Boychev's Reviews > Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures

The treatment of Hegel in the nearly two centuries after his death has been baffling. While there were some dedicated acolytes such as the British Idealists in the 19th century, the majority of this particular thinker's reception has been to not read his texts in their entirety (or at all) and then to pronounce judgment on his philosophy. Schelling in his lectures on modern philosophy cemented in the minds of generations of philosophers the idea of Hegel's system as this totalizing monstrosity that refuses to engage with existence as such instead swallowing everything in its conceptual machinery and regurgitating it as dialectical obscurity. Engels, and then following Engels - Lenin, and then following Lenin - the Soviet orthodoxy promoted a caricature of Hegel as this idiot who, in thinking he was talking to God himself, accidentally discovered the three-step dialectical shuffle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that all reality follows, and was then too stupid to even realize what he had stumbled upon, though thankfully Marx and Engels read him and took the rational kernel from his philosophy, the rest of which philosophy could now be safely discarded as the reactionary, petty-bourgeois, mystifying nonsense that it was. Anglo-American analytic philosophy went even further and just pretended that philosophy skipped some 70-80 years after Kant, though cursory mentions of Hegel and the other German Idealists would be made here and there just as a warning that this is the kind of stupidity that instantly disqualifies you from being taken seriously. Even worse have been more favourable responses to Hegel which have been to appropriate bits and pieces of his philosophy here and there - such as the Master-Slave dialectic - and then pretend the rest of Hegel's philosophy does not exist, or - even worse, I would argue - to read Hegel as engaging in something not too dissimilar from Kant's transcendental idealism. Why this hostility to just reading the damn texts? Hegel is no more obscure than Kant once you get past the superficial characteristics of his style of expression. As metaphysics, his Logic is no more difficult than Aristotle's Metaphysics or Spinoza's Ethics, even if it is much longer as a text. A much more difficult and confusing philosopher like Heidegger has received much more attention from both continentals and analytics alike. A moch more incoherent, temperamental, and pretentious philosopher like Nietzsche has been so much more widely read. Why?

I write all this because Richard Dien Winfield along with someone like Stephen Houlgate are contemporary Anglo-American philosophers who strive to really take all of Hegel's writings by the letter. Thus, in Winfield's "Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures" you will not find much in the way of "critical rethinking" at all. Instead, the book is a concise running through the argument of the work from start to finish without any deviations or any real attempts at critique. Furthermore, Winfield, like Houlgate, takes absolutely seriously and uncritically the idea that Hegel is perpetuating a philosophy free of any foundations and presuppositions. I cannot help but be sympathetic at the very least to Winfield's commitment to sticking to what Hegel actually said and for that reason and given the horrid tendency of Hegel commentators to not read, misread, misrepresent, or misappropriate Hegel's actual texts, Winfield is to be commended for his work.

What this book represents then is a great scholastic tool that summarizes the often very long-winded categorial analyses in the Science of Logic, which is great because for all its exhaustiveness, the Science of Logic really suffers from how difficult it is to follow the main argument. In the original text Hegel diverts a lot, enters into extended commentaries of other thinkers, and most confusingly - often tends to comment on earlier sections of the work from the standpoint of later sections, which has provided a major instrument in the hands of those who like Schelling have insisted that the Logic is completely arbitrary and following a predefined course from the beginning. In reading Winfield you will get the main arguments distilled into their key points and then hammered into your head until you get them. Each lecture being some 12-13 pages at that!

Also of note is that the focus here is on the Logic of Being and the Logic of the Concept (being parts I and III of the Science of Logic, respectively), while the Logic of Essence is somewhat breezed through in a few lectures. Again, I think this is to counter those readings of Hegel who see the Logic of Essence as not just the centerpiece of the Logic, but of the entire Hegelian philosophy.

What this leaves you with is the burden of actually making up your mind about the text for yourself. Thus, there is real danger in just taking Winfield's uncritical retelling of the text as all there is to the Logic and leaving it at that: Hegel was right, he completed a presuppositionless logico-metaphysical system, truth and beauty and goodness can finally be rescued from the hands of those nasty analytics and those devious postmoderns, we can all sleep soundly now. I think Winfield's own intentions are noble though and even if he provides no good commentary and critique here, he does great justice to this great and so often bastardized and so uncritically dismissed philosopher, and for that reason this text deserves your attention.