Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik - metaphysische Letzbegrundung oder Theorie logischer Formen?

Simpson, Peter

Schick, Friedrike. Freiburg/Munchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 1994. 336 pp. DM 94,00--Friedrike Schick's Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik-metaphysische Letztbegrundung oder Theorie logischer Formen? raises the question of the sense in which logic can perform the metaphysical work Hegel insists it can. It is Hegel's goal, according to Schick, to overcome the difference between logic, as the science of the forms of thought, and metaphysics, as the science of the forms of things themselves, by means of this transition, and it is Schick's goal in her work to evaluate Hegel's success.

The first section of Schick's book examines Hegel's own description of his logical work as it occurs in the various prefatory and introductory sections to both the Encyclopedia logic and the Science of Logic. Schick's task is to show how Hegel wants to be both Kantian, in his critical approach to the categories of traditional metaphysics and the role of pre-predicative assumptions, and "more-than-Kantian," in his claim to have resolved the issue of conceptual determination in a manner that allows us to answer the questions metaphysics wants to ask and to speak of things as they really are.

Hegel's striking response to the legacy of dualism is the focus of Schick's second section, as she moves to examine the claim that only when substance has become subject can the tension between logic and metaphysics be overcome. Schick rightly sees Hegel's argument to rest on the need to understand the real to be self-determining in its conceptual determinacy, and in this, the longest section in the book, she holds Hegel's claim up against a series of counter-positions, among them the conceptual metaphysics of Locke, Kant, Cassirer, and Russell. The remaining parts of the section include an assessment of what Schick suggests is the question-begging lying behind the selection of the category of Being as the moment of inception in the logical works, and an analysis of the section, at the close of the second book of the Science of Logic, on the absolute relation and causality.

Sections three and four, which develop the somewhat skeptical conclusion of the second section, trace the problem of universality in thought. In the third section, Schick argues that Hegel's treatment of the relation between universality and singularity, like his account of the transition from the subjective determination of the idea to its objective realization, depends ultimately on an abstractly or immediately determined notion of the unity of difference. In the last section, Schick examines a number of ways in which the Hegelian claim to have unified thought and being is challenged, concluding, in a rather striking passage, with a very sympathetic reading of Carnap's critique of the senselessness of metaphysical discourse.

Like many of Hegel's lesser critics, Schick's project is defined by a commitment to the very dualism Hegel argues is self-defeating. This turns up in a number of ways: in her repeated attempts to construe metaphysical arguments as first and foremost epistemic in nature; in her explicit isolation of those passages in which Hegel seems to be positing the unity of thought and being, and in the corresponding exclusion of any careful analysis of the passages, like the dialectic of reflection, in which the very foundations of dualism are shaken. Schick, however, is not a lesser critic; her argument raises some very serious challenges for anyone who would take Hegel at his word in the logical works. It is all too easy to forget just what Hegel takes on in his logic, both historically and thematically, and Schick's patient and pointed analysis of what seems to her his failure to deliver should come as a sharp reminder of just what it takes to make sense of Hegel's logic.