Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of philosophy’s giants, and his influence on the science of logic and self-consciousness can’t be ignored. Philosopher Karen Ng puts Hegel’s thought and arguments into words in Hegel’s Concept of Life. Reason comes from life in itself, Ng explains.
Following and responding to Immanuel Kant’s writing, Hegel describes a type of internal purposiveness around which self-consciousness, freedom, and logic develop. Hegel derives a purposiveness from Kant’s third Critique of Judgment. Nature itself has a purposiveness, and, from this, judgement attains its power.
For a thing generated either by art, or by nature, …Art is the principle in a thing other than that which is generated, nature is a principle in the thing itself.Aristotle, Metaphysics
Hegel cites Kant’s use of Aristotle’s understanding of nature in distinguishing between external and internal purposiveness. While the external purposiveness uses artifact creation and instrumental action, the internal type uses organic production and life the same way Aristotle differentiated between art and nature. This is pertinent for understanding Hegel’s philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). In those texts, Hegel cites Fichte and Schelling in arguing against Kant that internal purposiveness is part of the activity of cognition. Ng offers her own interpretation, too. Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s idealism as “subjective” rests on Fichte’s inability to conceive of nature as internally purposive and living. From there, the cognition relates to the self and the world.
Ng interprets Hegel’s Science of Logic in a nuanced fashion that Hegel’s Subjective Logic are part of Hegel’s version of a critique of judgement. One can understand life as making intelligibility possible. Hegel’s theory of judgement is made up of reflective and teleological judgements such that a species or kind creates the objective context for predication. “Objective universality” is the context needed for predication, particularly the normative predicates ascription to the subject. Life is, then, something original of judgement, and presupposes the actualization of self-conscious cognition.