Hegel's Revisions of the Logic of Being

This essay aims to demonstrate a clear and significant difference, not merely expository revisions or additions, in the logical progression of Being between Hegel's two main versions of the Doctrine of Being (1812-1817 and 1827-1830, 1832). This controversial issue is analyzed by retracing and examining changes that international scholarship still widely neglects. Focusing on Hegel's introduction of the doubled transition of Quality and Quantity in the genesis of Measure, the essay argues that the main point of the revisions is that Hegel views the whole determinateness of Being as self-sublating its own externality, because in one determination of Being passing into another one, the first does not vanish; instead, both remain within their relational unity. Hegel's new version of the genesis of Measure indicates an essentially qualitative appreciation of the quantitative methods of the empirical sciences. This accords with Hegel's growing acknowledgment in Berlin of the independent cognitive status of the natural sciences in regard to philosophy, and with his reassessment of the relation between intuition, representation and conceptual cognition of the objects of consciousness, to do justice to their real differences and their being for themselves within their own existence.