Introduction

This great work, known as the 'Greater Logic', was written while Hegel was headmaster in Nuremberg, and he regarded it as the core of his system. The content of logic, he said, is 'the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit'. More detailed and rigorous than the Lesser Logic, it shows how the concept, starting from the poorest 'pure being', moves and enriches itself through its own negation and contradiction until it reaches the absolute Idea. It has three great parts: the doctrine of being, the doctrine of essence and the doctrine of the concept. Here contradiction is not an error to be avoided but 'the root of all movement and vitality'. Marx and Lenin both studied it closely, and Lenin filled notebooks with excerpts and comments. It is one of the most difficult and most influential works of Western philosophy. The work is translated in several volumes.