come The Science of Logic. (A new edition of the Jena Logic, edited by Lasson, has been published in the Philosophische Bibliothek series in 1923. The earlier edition was textually inadequate.)40 This Jena fragment contains not only a logic but also a general ontology and parts of the philosophy of nature, but it does not have the philosophy of spirit. What I am telling you about the history of the concept of time has quite a long past as regards its formulation, so I’ll have to be brief and restrained in explaining the concept of time that slipped me earlier. But even a quick run-through shows it to be richly informative in many ways.
Allow me to mention something that may not interest you much but that is important to me insofar as it completely substantiates the interpretation I have been presenting. In these fragments Hegel gives an extended explanation of the phenomenon of time (“extended” in the sense that he describes the dialectical steps thoroughly, since he is not yet caught within the real straightjacket of his system, or does not give to the presentation the compressed form it has in the Encyclopaedia). Right from the start let us note the context within which Hegel explains time: it is in the philosophy of nature, the first part of which is titled, “The Solar System.” In connection with his clarification of the phenomenon of ether [264] (today we would say “matter” in the broadest sense), Hegel first explains the concept of movement, and here the trajectory of his investigation goes from time to space—the reverse of the Encyclopaedia, even though the content is the same in both.
The explanation of time is dialectically more concrete. The dialectic is complete and thorough: there is more here than in The Science of Logic. On the other hand, Hegel’s explanation does not yet possess the elaborate structure of his own dialectic itself; that is, he still lacks the proper theoretical concepts of dialectical synthesis: being, nothing, and becoming. He simply works—quite securely, to be sure—within this dialectic. “Therefore in fact there is neither present nor future but only this relation of each to the other” (p. 203). Later on he will call this relation of each to the other “becoming,” which is to say that becoming is precisely a relation. I emphasize that he still lacks those distinctive dialectical concepts, and I must say: this lack works to the advantage of his explanation.
A brief delineation of the content may suffice. On the page just cited, Hegel says: The now (which, I repeat, is the proper phenomenon
40. [G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Leipzig: Meiner, 1923); this work was also published as vols. 3–4 of Hegel’s Sämtliche Werke, and vols. 56–57 of the series, Der philosophische Bibliothek. See also The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics, ed. and trans. John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986).]