Abstract

The present book was inspired by Hermann Schweppenhäuser, one of the last direct pupils of T. W. Adorno and the coeditor of the critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s works. Its goal is to show that the critique of metaphysics and its restitution are tied up in a “logical unity,” which Hegel’s Science of Logic has taken to its most extreme consequences. Coming from one scholar that places herself in the lager of Frankfurter critical theory, this statement may surprise. It is nonetheless consequential to a trend that Jürgen Habermas has made out since 1985 in the form of answers to questions such as how to compensate for the loss of sense in modernity or how to provide for the need of an interpretation of the self and of the world in the context of a cultural process of the development of science in which individuals are enabled to rely on situational truth and therefore have stopped looking for a permanent foundation. Obviously, the metaphysical content of the Science of Logic transpires from the systematicity of Hegel’s determinations of thought. Not only do the latter fulfill the metaphysical claim that truth is immanent, they also represent, in the view of Harnischmacher, the “increasing socialization of cognition”, which they actually push forward, insofar as they mediate subjective and objective moments of thought by exhibiting the totality of the modes of their relations. To give an idea of the structure of the book, be it indicated that chapter 1 deals with the systematicity of the subject and the subjective structure of Hegel’s system, chapter 2 with the integration of thought to a system, that is, with the idea of a self-generating system, and chapter 3 with the coming together of freedom and necessity.