Necessity and freedom in the Science of Logic

Abstract

This article attempts to reconstruct some of the elements from the passage on the Logic of Essence in the Logic of the Concept Hegel develops in the Science of Logic. Exactly two hundred years after the publication of the Logic of Essence, this paper will suggest that this passage is vital for understanding not only the Science of Logic but the entirety of Hegelian thought. In particular it will argue that the binomial necessity/contingency, one of the categorical pairs of the Logic of Essence, does not adequately capture Hegelian philosophy. As Hegel says on repeated occasions, we must overcome the hard notion of necessity if we are to give way for the logic of freedom. To explore the problem of freedom this paper will focus on the confrontation between the categories of essence, such as substantiality, necessity, contingency and causation and the categories of the concept, such as universality, particularity and singularity. From this discussion we will find Hegel’s notion of freedom and its relation to the system he develops in Science of Logic.