The status of Hegel's Science of Logic is one of the most controversial topics that have characterized the so-called ‘Hegel Renaissance’ over the past four decades. The stakes are high because treating Hegel's Logic involves taking a stand on a number of issues that concern Hegel's philosophy as a whole. It often requires addressing (at least) three matters: (i) the connection of this part of the system with the Realphilosophie (i.e., Hegel's philosophy of nature and spirit); (ii) the allegedly ontological character of the Science of Logic; and (iii) Hegel's complex and complicated relationship with Kant's transcendental project. Elisa Magrì's book serves as a further step along this much-trodden interpretative path. She tackles these three themes by allowing them to converge on a key concept: the notion of self-reference. Questions such as ‘How does self-reference work?’ and ‘What is its function in the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit?’ are principally guiding her project here, which comprises a comprehensive introduction, five chapters and a brief conclusion.
Before focusing on each chapter, I would like to reconstruct Magrì's main arguments. The first topic she explores is the connection between the genesis of the Concept and the process of self-reference. This link allows her to address two issues simultaneously, namely Hegel's criticism of Kant, and the ontological character of the Objective Logic. According to Magrì, the Objective Logic exhibits the genetic aspect of the Concept's deduction: It exposes the process through which the Concept becomes and actualises itself (31–32) in a way that allows the logical content to emerge through a dialectical movement of ‘negative determination’ (32). Here, Magrì is generally referring to a movement in which the active self-development of the Concept is not explicit yet. It will become explicit in the Doctrine of the Concept.
According to Magrì, the exposition of the Concept's genesis through the Doctrines of Being and Essence makes up Hegel's response to traditional ontology on the one hand, and to Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories on the other. Hegel's ontological (Objective) Logic has a more extended meaning than the traditional ‘science of being’ (98). Here, pure thought (i.e., thought whose internal movement excludes subjective interference) is both the subject and the object of the logical development. This means that pure thought is self-determining and self-referential: ‘it speaks of itself, not of the world, but to the extent that it expresses itself in pure concepts, it exhibits the forms through which to scientifically conceive the forms of nature and spirit’ (99).
For Magrì, the fulfilment of the Concept's genetic process generates the passage from the Objective to the Subjective Logic, namely from the genesis to the active self-development (Entwicklung) of the Concept. This threshold coincides with the explicit establishment of the logical form of thought's self-reference (75): here the Concept retrospectively reveals itself as the organizing principle of its own genetic course and achieves a stable self-relation, on the basis of which it can actively articulate its determinate contents.
Magrì suggests making sense of the Concept's self-reference as a substitute for Kant's synthetic unity of pure apperception. The transcendental identity of the self as a unitary and stable basis to which to refer the manifold of representations is replaced with the self-reference dynamics of the Concept that, while positing (and thus differentiating) itself in its determinations, maintains itself in them.
The deduction of the logical form of self-reference is also central—Magrì argues—because it coincides with the exposition of the principle of subjectivity, i.e., thought's ‘capacity to be principle and form of its other’ (32). Such principle is an expression of both negative and positive freedom: respectively, the independence from external conditioning and the possibility to realize itself in the other of itself.
The book also claims that the Logic plays a crucial mediating role in the system, as it provides the ‘pure deduction’ (37) of the logical form of self-reference, which makes (subjective) Spirit's life and freedom intelligible in a scientific sense. Magrì contends that habit, labour and memory—which Hegel discusses respectively in the Anthropology, Phenomenology and Psychology sections of the 1830 Encyclopaedia—are embodiments of the Concept's self-reference. They identify pre-reflective (i.e., not necessarily conscious) processes that lead to the acquisition of capacities and behaviours, thus producing a stable basis for the development of Spirit's spontaneity. Such processes warrant Spirit's independence from external bounds and are conditions for the subject's free thinking and practical agency.
Having reconstructed Magrì's main arguments, I now wish to turn to each chapter of her book. The introduction is devoted to discussing today's main interpretations of the Logic: Magrì principally scrutinizes scholars’ proposals that pertain to three different perspectives, namely: the ‘anti-realist’ or ‘ontological’ view (Hartmann; Henrich; Fulda; Jaeschke; Pinkard; Pippin; De Boer; Brinkmann; cf. 17–24); the ‘realist’ or ‘logical realism’ view (Falk; Koch; Gabriel; cf. 24–26); and the ‘metaphysical’ view (Düsing; Horstmann; Rosen; Ferrarin; Bowman; cf. 26–30).
One major problem here is the status of the logical determinations and their connection with real entities belonging to the dimensions of nature and spirit. Magrì examines a general trend to separate pure logical thought and subjective thought, preventing the investigation of their reciprocal mediation. In this respect, the very notion of self-reference allows the tracking of a common logical structure that explains both the functioning of the Concept in the Science of Logic and subjectivity's self-determination in the dimension of Spirit.
The first two chapters delineate the preliminary steps that pave the way for Hegel's elaboration of the notion of self-reference and its relevance for the systematic meaning of the Logic. The driving forces of this elaboration are Hegel's critical confrontation with Kantian apperception, and the reflections developed in the Jena writings and in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit about self-consciousness, labour and the role of the Logic.
In the first chapter, ‘Self-Affection and Causality’, Magrì analyses Hegel's criticism of two aspects of Kant's transcendental project: the transcendental deduction of the categories, and the theory of schematism elaborated in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's transcendental schematism would present the relation between understanding and sensibility, mediated by the work of imagination, in causal terms: A priori concepts are extrinsically applied to the manifold of intuition, determining the rules to which phenomena must conform. Magrì maintains that in the Jena writings, Hegel offers a non-causal model (shaped by expanding on the issues of memory and labour) to reframe the relationship between thinking and its other (i.e., between understanding and sensibility), thus setting the premises for a pure logic, in which thought is both form and content of itself.
Chapter two, ‘Memory, Labour and Self-Reference’, examines the influence of the Phenomenology of Spirit on Hegel's conception of the role of logic and of the philosophical system. A decisive element towards the development of the principle of self-reference is Hegel's treatment of labour within the context of the relationship between lord and bondsman. Here, we start to appreciate self-reference as the actualization of a natural potentiality, which attests thought's capacity to exert a causal, though not mechanical, action on itself. In this respect, Magrì establishes a substantive connection among labour, habit and memory, by recognizing them as processes that make thought's self-reference intelligible at the level of Subjective Spirit. The link between Logic and Spirit is also a major topic in the 1808–9 Encyclopaedia, in which we find significant changes regarding the systematic conception and the articulation of the notion of Spirit. All these elements converge into the project of a pure logic.
With the third chapter, ‘The Architectonic of Pure Logic’, Magrì enters the core of her interpretative proposal. She explores how the genesis of the Concept becomes a key element in rearticulating the structure of the Science of Logic. This genetic process culminates with the emergence of the logical form of thought's self-reference, which marks the transition from the Objective to the Subjective Logic and allows us to recognize their different roles. Here, the author provides a more extensive discussion of the ontological meaning of the Objective Logic, and the presentation of the Subjective Logic as the dimension in which the Concept actively develops itself.
Chapter four, ‘The Logical Genesis of Self-Reference’, expands upon the genesis of the Concept by focusing on the Doctrine of Essence. Magrì carefully reconstructs what she considers to be the most relevant ‘logical nodes’ (147) that mediate the advance towards the explicit emergence of the logical form of the Concept's self-reference. Magrì's thesis here is that the genetic movement of the Concept coincides with the constitution of a ‘logical memory’ (176) internal to the Science of Logic: This process stabilises the relationship of thought to itself, thus guaranteeing a ‘genetic continuity’ within the Logic and assuring stability in the development of logical thought.
Chapter five is dedicated to assessing the relevance of the Science of Logic for the dimension of Spirit. This operation is aimed at explaining logical thought and subjective thought as belonging to the same unique movement, which finds different actualizations within the system. Therefore, this part represents the author's answer to positions that tend to either psychologize the Science of Logic or isolate it from the Realphilosophie (as logical realists would do). To sustain her thesis, Magrì carefully analyses why and how habit, labour and memory, as they are expressed in the 1830 Encyclopaedia, individuate different forms of embodiment (Verleiblichung) of the Concept's self-reference, and conditions for the Spirit's free thinking and agency. Magrì's concluding claim is that the pervasiveness of the self-reference's form within the subjective sphere elucidates and justifies the unity of theory and praxis at the level of Spirit.
Finally, the merit of Magrì's interpretation is to offer the Concept's self-reference as a unitary process able to illuminate impacting questions of Hegel's philosophy: the notions of freedom and subjectivity, the relationship between pure and subjective thought, the continuity between the Logic and the Realphilosophie, and the internal coherence of the speculative system. Magrì's proposal is all the more interesting because it implies a crosscutting potential: Her explanation of habit, labour and memory is relevant to debates that seek to evaluate Hegel's position towards naturalistic perspectives––especially by examining the relation between first and second nature––and to discussions about Hegel's account of normativity that concentrate on the human subject's transition from natural to social, self-conscious life.
The challenge we could pose to Magrì's interpretative attempt would be to extend her account to the sphere of nature, exploring whether and how the process of self-reference, as a key to grasping freedom and self-determination, can be traced in nature. The lack of this further analysis, nevertheless, does not diminish the value of Magrì's contribution to the field of Hegel studies. The originality of her interpretation, together with the accuracy in anchoring her claims to Hegel's texts, make her attempt meaningful from both a historical and a systematic perspective.
