The Logic of Hegel

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

179.] On the part of its at first un-mediated subject, the Assertory judgment does not contain the relation of particular with universal which is expressed in the predicate. This judgment is consequently a mere subjective particularity, and is confronted by a contrary assertion with equal right, or rather want of right. It is therefore at once turned into (2) a Problematical judgment. But when we explicitly attach the objective particularity to the subject and make its speciality the constitutive feature of its existence, the subject (3) then expresses the connexion of that objective particularity with its constitution, i.e. with its genus; and thus expresses what forms the content of the predicate (see § 178). [This (the immediate individuality) house (the genus,) being so and so constituted (particularity,) is good or bad.] This is the Apodictic judgment. All things are a genus (i.e. have a meaning and purpose) in an individual actuality of a particular constitution. And they are finite, because the particular in them may and also may not conform to the universal.

180.] In this manner subject and predicate are each the whole judgment. The immediate constitution of the subject is at first exhibited as the intermediating ground, where the individuality of the actual thing meets with its universality, and in this way as the ground of the judgment. What has been really made explicit is the oneness of subject and predicate, as the notion itself, filling up the empty 'is' of the copula. While its constituent elements are at the same time distinguished as subject and predicate, the notion is put as their unity, as the connexion which serves to intermediate them: in short, as the Syllogism.

(c) The Syllogism.

181.] The Syllogism brings the notion and the judgment into one. It is notion,—being the simple identity into which the distinctions of form in the judgment have retired. It is judgment,—because it is at the same time set in reality, that is, put in the distinction of its terms. The Syllogism is the reasonable, and everything reasonable.

Even the ordinary theories represent the Syllogism to be the form of reasonableness, but only a subjective form; and no inter-connexion whatever is shown to exist between it and any other reasonable content, such as a reasonable principle, a reasonable action, idea, &c. The name of reason is much and often heard, and appealed to: but no one thinks of explaining its specific character, or saying what it is,—least of all that it has any connexion with Syllogism. But formal Syllogism really presents what is reasonable in such a reasonless way that it has nothing to do with any reasonable matter. But as the matter in question can only be rational in virtue of the same quality by which thought is reason, it can be made so by the form only: and that form is Syllogism. And what is a Syllogism but an explicit putting, i.e. realising of the notion, at first in form only, as stated above? Accordingly the Syllogism is the essential ground of whatever is true: and at the present stage the definition of the Absolute is that it is the Syllogism, or stating the principle in a proposition: Everything is a Syllogism. Everything is a notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion gives itself external reality by means of particularity, and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes itself an individual. Or, conversely: the actual thing is an individual, which by means of particularity rises to universality and makes itself identical with itself.—The actual is one: but it is also the divergence from each other of the constituent elements of the notion; and the Syllogism represents the orbit of intermediation of its elements, by which it realises its unity.

The Syllogism, like the notion and the judgment, is usually described as a form merely of our subjective thinking. The Syllogism, it is said, is the process of proving the judgment. And certainly the judgment does in every case refer us to the Syllogism. The step from the one to the other however is not brought about by our subjective action, but by the judgment itself which puts itself as Syllogism, and in the conclusion returns to the unity of the notion. The precise point by which we pass to the Syllogism is found in the Apodictic judgment. In it we have an individual which by means of its qualities connects itself with its universal or notion. Here we see the particular becoming the mediating mean between the individual and the universal. This gives the fundamental form of the Syllogism, the gradual specification of which, formally considered, consists in the fact that universal and individual also occupy this place of mean. This again paves the way for the passage from subjectivity to objectivity.

182.] In the 'immediate' Syllogism the several aspects of the notion confront one another abstractly, and stand in an external relation only. We have first the two extremes, which are Individuality and Universality; and then the notion, as the mean for locking the two together, is in like manner only abstract Particularity. In this way the extremes are put as independent and without affinity either towards one another or towards their mean. Such a Syllogism contains reason, but in utter notionlessness,—the formal Syllogism of Understanding. In it the subject is coupled with an other character; or the universal by this mediation subsumes a subject external to it. In the rational Syllogism, on the contrary, the subject is by means of the mediation coupled with itself. In this manner it first comes to be a subject: or, in the subject we have the first germ of the rational Syllogism.

In the following examination, the Syllogism of Understanding, according to the interpretation usually put upon it, is expressed in its subjective shape; the shape which it has when we are said to make such Syllogisms. And it really is only a subjective syllogising. Such Syllogism however has also an objective meaning; it expresses only the finitude of things, but does so in the specific mode which the form has here reached. In the case of finite things their subjectivity, being only thinghood, is separable from their properties or their particularity, but also separable from their universality: not only when the universality is the bare quality of the thing and its external inter-connexion with other things, but also when it is its genus and notion.

On the above-mentioned theory of syllogism, as the rational form par excellence, reason has been defined as the faculty of syllogising, whilst understanding is defined as the faculty of forming notions. We might object to the conception on which this depends, and according to which the mind is merely a sum of forces or faculties existing side by side. But apart from that objection, we may observe in regard to the parallelism of understanding with the notion, as well as of reason with syllogism, that the notion is as little a mere category of the understanding as the syllogism is without qualification definable as rational. For, in the first place, what the Formal Logic usually examines in its theory of syllogism, is really nothing but the mere syllogism of understanding, which has no claim to the honour of being made a form of rationality, still less to be held as the embodiment of all reason. The notion, in the second place, so far from being a form of understanding, owes its degradation to such a place entirely to the influence of that abstract mode of thought. And it is not unusual to draw such a distinction between a notion of understanding and a notion of reason. The distinction however does not mean that notions are of two kinds. It means that our own action often stops short at the mere negative and abstract form of the notion, when we might also have proceeded to apprehend the notion in its true nature, as at once positive and concrete. It is e.g. the mere understanding, which thinks liberty to be the abstract contrary of necessity, whereas the adequate rational notion of liberty requires the element of necessity to be merged in it. Similarly the definition of God, given by what is called Deism, is merely the mode in which the understanding thinks God: whereas Christianity, to which He is known as the Trinity, contains the rational notion of God.