Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Excerpts from Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817)

page 5 of 19    print version    return to list

previous document      next document

Here the general and the particular must be distinguished according to their own determinations. Formal logic places the general next to the particular, but in itself it becomes another particular. Concerning the objects of everyday life such an arrangement would strike one as inadequate and awkward, as if for example someone who has asked for fruit would refuse cherries, pears, or grapes, and so on, because they are cherries, pears, and grapes, but not fruit.—

Concerning philosophy, however, one allows this procedure, partly to justify contempt for philosophy with the argument that there are so many different philosophies, and each one is only a philosophy but not the philosophy. The procedure is also allowed in order to place a philosophy whose principle is general next to one whose principle is particular, even to place one of these next to doctrines that insist there is no philosophy. These names are also used for a movement of thought that presupposes that truth is given and immediate, and on this basis constructs its further reflections.

#9.
As an encyclopedia, however, science is not to be presented in the specific development of its particularity, but is to be limited to the beginnings and basic concepts of the particular sciences.

How many of its particular components are needed to constitute a particular science is to a certain extent entirely indeterminate, since, in order to be true, the component must be not only an isolated moment but also a totality. In truth, therefore, the whole of philosophy constitutes one science; but it may also be viewed as a whole composed of several particular sciences.

#10.
What is true in any one science is so through and by virtue of philosophy, whose encyclopedia thus comprises all true sciences.

The philosophical encyclopedia can be distinguished from other, ordinary encyclopedias by the fact that the ordinary one is an assemblage of sciences, taken up in a contingent and empirical manner, and it sometimes includes topics that merely bear the names of sciences but are otherwise only collections of bits of information. The unity that brings the sciences together in such an assemblage is, because they are gathered extrinsically, at the same time only external, an ordering. For the same reason this arrangement must, especially since the materials are also of a contingent nature, remain an experiment, and will always exhibit incongruent aspects.