In the Introduction to his 1817 Encyclopedia, Hegel tells us that philosophy as a whole can be understood as “the science of freedom” (¶ 5).  In this paper, I consider what Hegel could mean in describing one branch of his system, the logic, as the science of freedom.  It is not obvious what this purely theoretical science has to do with freedom, at least if we associate freedom with human action.  I argue that, in common with the other two branches of his encyclopedic system, Hegel’s Logic can be characterized as “the science of freedom” because it shares features he associates with the nature of free subjectivity.  In particular, I focus on his account of how thought develops and is capable of generating its own form.

In his Science of Logic, Hegel treats life as a pure concept. This means that we know what it is to be a living being, and so how to distinguish living from non-living beings, non-empirically. We know it as an implication of the “science of pure thinking” that the Logic develops. The Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopedia also treats living beings as categorically distinct, and the treatment is also not an empirical one. But it is not derived from the science of pure thinking as such. This suggests that the latter treatment is not absolutely a priori but, as is sometimes said of other aspects of Hegel’s work, “relatively a priori.” (Stated another way, The Philosophy of Nature is philosophy, not natural science.) What “relatively a priori” might mean is the topic here, and the aim is to show by such an analysis the general form of the relation between the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. The main point of comparison and contrast will be Kant’s understanding of the relation between “Transcendental Logic,” The Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science and The Metaphysics of Morals, a similar, albeit quite differently conceived, tri-partite structure to Hegel’s system.