Abstract

I wrote earlier on the difference between the Pippinian and Houlgatian interpretations of Hegel’s Logic. In the current piece, I want to elaborate a bit more on Stephen Houlgate’s take on what he calls ‘sheer being’. It will still be extremely exploratory, without delving into the detail of Hegel’s own text, let alone into the secondary literature on the beginning of the Logic (apart from Houlgate, important work in this area is offered by Robert Pippin, Dieter Henrich, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and more recently Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer in his massive 3-volume commentary on the Logic). The piece is chiefly critical of a particular, sophisticated and influential reading of the Logic, and doesn’t make propositions on how a positive reading of the Logic might look like. These are just some more critical reflections on what I take to be an ultimately unsuccessful way of approaching Hegel’s Logic, one though that seems very influential and intuitively plausible. I am increasingly suspicious of their attempts to defend ontological readings of Hegel’s Being Logic, such as we can find in the work of Houlgate (but also many others). Below I shall comment in turn on various passages I quote from a recent essay by Houlgate (Houlgate 2018) and elaborate on some of the central arguments.