Outlines of Hegel’s Logic, translated by Harris
Harris believed that The Science of
Logic was the study of though, or the thinking activity. Being is when the will
unified with the intellect come to consciousness. Being is self-activity for
Harris. We all, humans, animals, plants, rocks, follow the Natural Logic, or
natural laws. Logic has for its content the determinations peculiar to the
thinking activity itself, which have no other ground, than the Thinking. Ideas,
representations, are the content of though. The thinking activity consists in
bringing the Manifold into unity. When the mind thinks upon things, it brings
them into simple forms, which are its pure determinations (Hegel 1957).
The Manifold is, at first, a seizing of the, Immediate,
manifold in the form of the feeling and the sensuous, this is not thinking,
because the relating of the same is thinking. The immediate seizing of the
Manifold we call feeling or sensation. Feeling becomes “intuition” when it is
determined in space and time. A trained intuition is conscious will and
intellect. Conscious will and intellect are the thinking activity,
self-activity, or being (Hegel 1957).
The thinking activity is Abstraction. If I neglect all
the determinations of an object, nothing remains, but empty self-activity. If I
neglect one and select another, then the latter is then abstract. The Ego, for
example, is an abstract determination. I know of the Ego only in so far as I
exclude all determinations from myself (Hegel 1957). This is a negative means.
I negate the determinations of myself, and leave myself as such, alone by
myself. The act of abstraction is the negative side of the thinking activity.
The content of representations are notions or concepts taken from experience,
but the form of unity itself, and its further determinations, have not their
source in the Immediate as such, but in the thinking activity (Hegel 1957).
The
Ego is a thinking activity, and it is that always. Because we are all Egos, we
always think. Ego is always the identity with itself and this is Thinking. As
Ego, we are the ground of all our determinations. In so far as the object is
thought it receives the form of thinking and becomes a thought-object. It is
made identical to the Ego, it is thought[1] (Hegel 1957).
In The Speculative, Harris describes what he means by the
speculative, of the final high-grained stage point of the self activity. In the
sixth book of Plato's Republic two grades of sensuous knowing and the grade of
the understanding, which must set out from hypotheses, because they do not deal
with principles but only with results, are described. One is the speculative
grade of knowing “in which the soul, setting out from an hypothesis, proceeds
to an unhypothetical principle, and makes its way without the aid of [sensuous]
images, but solely through ideas themselves."
Plato gives two examples of the method of the
Understanding. While he makes the speculative reason that which “posits
hypotheses by the Dialectic, not as fixed principles, but only as starting
points, so that by removing them, it may arrive at the unhypothetical--the
principle of the universe." Aristotle, in the Metaphysics describes the
first principle of the speculative “ontologically, starting with motion as an
hypothesis, that the self-moved.” In the De Anima Aristotle “distinguishes
psychologically the 'active intellect' as the highest form of knowing.” The
active intellect is “that which is its own object, (subject and object,) and
hence as containing its own end and aim in itself, its aim is being infinite.
Harris calls this “the Speculative result, which he found ontologically as the
Absolute.” Spinoza describes this in his Ethics “as the thinking of things
under the form of eternity (Harris 1867).” This is the foundation of the Logic,
the self-mover, self-activity, and thought activity is being. And this self
activity can be seen in Harris’s Psychologic System.
[1] Thoughts are of three kinds: (1) The Categories;
(2) Determination of Reflections; (3) Comprehension. The science of the first
two constitutes the objective logic in metaphysics; the science of
Comprehensions (concepts or notions) constitutes the proper or subjective logic
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