Science of Logic

So we can, you know, maybe briefly, uh, you know, answer or, you know, uh, I can shelf it for another day.

But, like, how close actually is their, uh, dialectical logic to what Hegel did in The Science of Logic? Like, uh, this, this question is more about Hegel actually than Adorno and Horkheimer, I guess.

Uh, so we don't have to talk about it today.

But I wanted to, like, ask, uh, because, uh...

This is-- It's very strange that Horkheimer's earliest plans, to address the second one briefly first, then go back to your first question, and then go to JE, and then I have something to say for your second question.

But at least, anyway, it's just like, to your second question, there's a first sort of-- Joking aside, it's that it's very confusing when Horkheimer keeps describing the dialectical project in, like, the earliest mentions in, like, 1934 in letters.

From then on, uh, until they start writing it, basically, he's like, "Yeah, what if the, The Science of Logic was, like, cool and materialist and not whack and ideal?" And it's like, that does not help whatsoever.

You know, like, and he keeps re-describing it in those terms, and it doesn't help.

They would have two sons who lived to grow up.

And in the midst of all this schoolmastering and marrying and fathering, in hours stolen from sleep, he wrote the most forbidding book of his whole career, The Science of Logic, a work that set out, with no exaggeration, to think the bare bones of reality itself.

Only then, in his late forties, did the academic world give him what it had withheld so long.

In eighteen hundred and sixteen, he became at last a full professor at Heidelberg, where he published a compact map of his entire system in a single volume.

It carried the ordinary mind up to the high standpoint of pure thinking, the place where the split between the knower and the known has finally closed.

But a ladder is a way in, not a home, and once he had reached the top, Hegel still had to build the thing the ladder led to, the system itself.

Its foundation, the hardest book he ever wrote, and by common agreement, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, is The Science of Logic, worked out in stolen hours during his years as a schoolmaster.

And to open it at all, you must first set aside what the word logic normally means.