The ‘Reality’ of Contradiction

‘Logic’, Hegel writes, ‘is the all-animating spirit of all sciences, the determinations of thought as found in logic are the pure spirits’ (En.L, §24, add. 2). The theological scenario sketched out above provides the context for what I have called the ‘banalization’ which Hegel’s doctrine of contradiction undergoes in the course of the development of his system. Hegel leaves no doubt that it is precisely in logic, in the study of pure thought, that we achieve the rational cognition of God. But since God as ‘essence’ is ‘the infinite goodness that lets its own show freely issue into immediacy and grants it the joy of xistence’ (En.L, §131, add.), it is necessary to know God as well in the concrete forms of manifestation or Erscheinungsformen of this essence: to discover’His’ truth in the untruth of everything which is not ‘Him’.Thus, just as God who is infinite ‘spirit’ animates the entire universeof merely finite modes of existence, so too logic as the science of infinite form is the ‘spirit’ which ‘animates’ all merely finite sciences. Whatever determinations are to be found in logic, or in thought which is as yet without content, must then be rediscovered - as I said above, somehow and in some (namely, finite) form - in the investigation of the concrete contents which thought ‘gives itself in reality. Such determinations must be shown themselves to have reality.