This book defends a new interpretation of Hegel’s idealism as oriented by a philosophical and logical concept of life, focusing on Hegel’s Science of Logic. Beginning with the influence of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Karen Ng argues that Hegel’s key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which Hegel views as “Kant’s great service to philosophy.” Ng charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant and argues that its key innovation is the claim that the purposiveness of nature enables the operation of the power of judgment. Situating Hegel among contemporaries such as Fichte and Schelling, she further argues that this innovation is key for understanding Hegel’s philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in which the theory of self-consciousness plays a central role. In her new interpretation of Hegel’s Logic, Ng argues that the Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel’s critique of judgment, where he defends the view that life opens up the possibility of intelligibility as such. She argues that Hegel’s theory of judgment is modeled on reflective, teleological judgments, in which something’s species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Ng demonstrates that absolute method is best interpreted as the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing a new way for understanding Hegel’s philosophical system.
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