Hegel on Logic as metaphysics

Over the past 30 years the question of Hegel’s vision of metaphysics has become widely debated. Especially important is the issue: what does Hegel mean when he says, not that metaphysics requires an unusual, speculative logic for its exposition, but “coincides with logic.” The aim of this chapter is to offer an interpretation of this claim, with special attention to Hegel’s understanding of Kant’s transcendental logic, which Hegel both highly praises and sharply criticizes, and to his equally important attention to Aristotle, the originator of the view that logic itself has metaphysical implications. Hegel is a post-Kantian philosopher and he should not be considered as a fallback into the old metaphysics, which understood thoughts as essentialities of things (as in Scholastic philosophy or early modern rationalism). Hegel’s project in the Logic is the completion of the enterprise initiated by the founding assumption of Ancient metaphysics: that to be is to be intelligible. Accordingly the task of metaphysics is not to say of things what they are, but to say of anything at all what it must be, such that the question “what is it” can be raised.