The Logic of Hegel

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

168.] The judgment is an expression of finitude. Things from its point of view are said to be finite, because they are a judgment, because their definite being and their universal nature, (their body and their soul,) though united indeed (otherwise the things would be nothing), are still elements in the constitution which are already different and also in any case separable.

169.] The abstract terms of the judgment, 'The individual is the universal,' present the subject (as negatively self-relating) as what is immediately concrete, while the predicate is what is abstract, indeterminate, in short, the universal. But the two elements are connected together by an 'is': and thus the predicate (in its universality) must also contain the speciality of the subject, must, in short, have particularity: and so is realised the identity between subject and predicate; which, being thus unaffected by this difference in form, is the content.

It is the predicate which first gives the subject, which till then was on its own account a bare mental representation or an empty name, its specific character and content. In judgments like 'God is the most real of all things,' or 'The Absolute is the self-identical,' God and the Absolute are mere names; what they are we only learn in the predicate. What the subject may be in other respects, as a concrete thing, is no concern of this judgment. (Cp. § 31.)

To define the subject as that of which something is said, and the predicate as what is said about it, is mere trifling. It gives no information about the distinction between the two. In point of thought, the subject is primarily the individual, and the predicate the universal. As the judgment receives further development, the subject ceases to be merely the immediate individual, and the predicate merely the abstract universal: the former acquires the additional significations of particular and universal,—the latter the additional significations of particular and individual. Thus while the same names are given to the two terms of the judgment, their meaning passes through a series of changes.

170.] We now go closer into the speciality of subject and predicate. The subject as negative self-relation (§§ 163, 166) is the stable substratum in which the predicate has its subsistence and where it is ideally present. The predicate, as the phrase is, inheres in the subject. Further, as the subject is in general and immediately concrete, the specific connotation of the predicate is only one of the numerous characters of the subject. Thus the subject is ampler and wider than the predicate.

Conversely, the predicate as universal is self-subsistent, and indifferent whether this subject is or not. The predicate outflanks the subject, subsuming it under itself: and hence on its side is wider than the subject. The specific content of the predicate (§ 169) alone constitutes the identity of the two.

171.] At first, subject, predicate, and the specific content or the identity are, even in their relation, still put in the judgment as different and divergent. By implication, however, that is, in their notion, they are identical. For the subject is a concrete totality,—which means not any indefinite multiplicity, but individuality alone, the particular and the universal in an identity: and the predicate too is the very same unity (§ 170).—The copula again, even while stating the identity of subject and predicate, does so at first only by an abstract 'is.' Conformably to such an identity the subject has to be put also in the characteristic of the predicate. By this means the latter also receives the characteristic of the former: so that the copula receives its full complement and full force. Such is the continuous specification by which the judgment, through a copula charged with content, comes to be a syllogism. As it is primarily exhibited in the judgment, this gradual specification consists in giving to an originally abstract, sensuous universality the specific character of allness, of species, of genus, and finally of the developed universality of the notion.

After we are made aware of this continuous specification of the judgment, we can see a meaning and an interconnexion in what are usually stated as the kinds of judgment. Not only does the ordinary enumeration seem purely casual, but it is also superficial, and even bewildering in its statement of their distinctions. The distinction between positive, categorical and assertory judgments, is either a pure invention of fancy, or is left undetermined. On the right theory, the different judgments follow necessarily from one another, and present the continuous specification of the notion; for the judgment itself is nothing but the notion specified.

When we look at the two preceding spheres of Being and Essence, we see that the specified notions as judgments are reproductions of these spheres, but put in the simplicity of relation peculiar to the notion.