Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

The Idea of Hegel's Science of Logic

STANLEY ROSEN
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014; 509 pp.; $55.00 (cloth)
doi:10.1017/S0012217314000584

In the past decades, philosophical interest in Hegel has seen a resurgence in both
continental and analytic circles. What has marked this veritable renaissance, however,
has been a noteworthy neglect of Hegel's second major work, The Science of Logic.
In one respect, this is surprisingthe Logic is the self-professed centrepiece of Hegel's
system; no comprehension of his thinking can thus occur in its absence. In another, it is
very understandable: if the Logic deals, as Hegel himself says, with the concept of God
before creation, it would seem prima facie difcult if not impossible to make such a
project palatable to current mainstream philosophical commitments.
Rosen's book is not only an admirable achievement insofar as it presents us with
a complete commentary on Hegel's often ignored groundwork, which counts amongst
the hardest texts in the history of philosophy. That there are only a handful of other
books in English that cover its entire trajectory alone makes it an important contribu-
tion. Furthermore, it is laudable because it elevates the Logic to its rightful place with
great audacity, arguing it is those very features that have made so many shy away from
it that prove its value. For Rosen, it is the heart of the system due to its concern with
logos, that is, the underlying structure that renders the world intelligible not merely for
us, but more primordially in itself (49). Its task is to show how being is intrinsically
open to thinking because both are a part of a single formation process, which Hegel
names God (87-88), thus guaranteeing science.
What makes Hegel's Logic so distinctive is its methodology. It justies its worldview
through a presentation of the incoherent conceptual structure of classical and modern
(i.e., pre-Hegelian) ontology (213). While Parmenides fails to elucidate what being
is because, when taken so globally, being is indistinguishable from nothing, Heraclitus
makes an advance by stating that the multiplicity of becoming is the metaphysical
beginning of order. However, this creates the dilemma of how sporadic multiples can
give rise to stable unity. Plato's attempt to hypostatize the unity-multiple relation in
Ideas merely poses the problem as the solution; moreover, divorced from ontology,
thinking amounts to a lifeless activity disconnected from the content of thought

Dialogue (2014), Page 1 of 3.

Canadian Philosophical Association /Association canadienne de philosophie 2014
2 Dialogue
and thereby cannot resolve these aporias (208). For a Hegelian history of philosophy, on
Rosen's reading, the crucial turning point is Aristotle, whose claim that the human
passive intellect can see the self-actualization of essences effected by the divine active
intellect allows being and thinking to be unied.
Yet, taken as something intuited through cognitive perception, Aristotle's theory of
essences proves to be at once static and circular: we must already know an essence
to identify it (220). But this entails we cannot rationally discern intelligible structure,
reducing experience to an illusion (Schein), a mere appearing without any recognizable
ground of unity. All we have is what Nietzsche will call chaoshence, we are on the
brink of the nihilism of becoming (274). Hegel's great accomplishment is to demon-
strate how this standpoint, too, is internally inconsistent. For chaos to be even thinkable
as radical becoming, this becoming must minimally structure itself. Both classical
metaphysics (foundationalism) and postmodern metaphysics (anti-foundationalism)
are therefore wrong (325): because essence proves to be nothing but the appearance
of appearances insofar as these display an inner rule that is at once immanent in and
transcendent to them (358), unsupported appearances are all we need for truth (365).
Yet, if the nature of essence is to appear, there is no ultimate gap between being
and thinking. Kantian subjectivism has also therefore been defeated: noumena and
phenomena are intertwined. Philosophy nally shows itself to be scientic knowledge
and, in that sense, wisdom (79). We can now declare substance is subject, which, for
Rosen, simply means substance possesses no secrets from the logician who thinks it
(392). More importantly, this signies that the categories of ultimate reality are nothing
without the particular forms in which they manifest themselves. Qua inseparable,
the absolute must thus be both subjective and objective and yet neither (392)it is the
formation process of a totality that brings them together because both obey the same
laws of self-unfolding negativity. Stated differently, God is unthinkable without His
creation such that our task now morphs into seeing how these categories become actual
in nature and humanity: It now remains for us who are at one with God to create the
world (486).
There are, however, two issues with Rosen's book that deserve to be highlighted.
The rst is conceptual. The Logic's most challenging thesis is indubitably that the struc-
ture of being and thinking is the same. Is this a metaphysical or transcendental thesis?
Rosen argues for the former, advocating that, since being and thinking are part of the
negativity of a metaphysical totality, it is the very work of negativity that lets them be
identied (for a summary, see 224ff.). But rather than explaining in detail how this
epistemologically works, the claim is merely repeated in different modes of expression
that explain how being metaphysically comes to be one with thinking in the formation
process (cf. 18, 74-75, 298-299, 394-395, etc.), leaving one wondering how Rosen's
Hegel is capable of developing a truly post-Kantian metaphysics. Some of these
descriptions seem more Schellingian than Hegelian (see above paragraph).
The second concerns the book's presentation. One wonders why Rosen desires so
strongly to offer a strict, almost line-by-line, commentary. Perhaps a stand-alone inter-
pretation would have been more streamlined. In many ways, this is de facto what Rosen
does. He takes the liberty of bringing in many extra-textual references to past and con-
temporary debates ranging from Plato's Parmenides and Heidegger's ontology to brief
interludes on logical atomism and his own work on nihilism to make Hegel more rele-
vant. In-between, however, there are purely exegetical analyses. Yet, because Rosen
also follows the step-by-step progression of the Logic, the reader often loses track of
 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 3
both Rosen's and Hegel's argument as they constantly oscillate between different regis-
ters kept rmly apart. More problematically, since Rosen wants to supply sufcient
hermeneutical background and cover every logical category, these analyses are often
too terse to be informative. For instance, his account of the determinations of reection
spans less than three full pages (272-274), while his reading of the conclusion of the
Doctrine of Essence is a mere four full pages (385-389). These are amongst the most
demanding and signicant transitions in the Logic.
Despite these drawbacks, Rosen's book deserves to be taken seriously. Being one
of the few complete readings of Hegel's masterpiece in English, it is recommended
for those already interested in German Idealism and especially Hegel. For those already
convinced by deationary readings, they will nd little here to persuade them to switch
sides, but will denitely see areas where fault lines of interpretation become visible.
Why, for example, does Rosen use so much space talking about human experience in a
book that is about the intelligibility of the world out there? As for individuals who
already advocate a metaphysical Hegel, although many well-known classical Hegelian
tropes abound in Rosen's reading, there are many captivating insights and suggestions.

JOSEPH CAREW McGill University