Abstract
In this paper I investigate and try to get a sound understanding of essential aspects of Hegel's logic. I begin with a treatment of Hegel's relation to Fichte and Schelling; in particular the relationship between intellectual intuition and speculation. I argue that Hegel's Phenomenologie des Geistes (PhG) is related to Hegel's logic in a way in which the former is a self-sublating presupposition of the latter, in accordance with William Makers view, and claim that the transition between the chapters on consciousness and self-consciousness in PhG can be understood to be contingent without being fatal to the task PhG has; actually its contingence has a positive significance. Further I investigate Hegel's claim that WdL is a immanently and necessarily self-developing whole. I claim that central to understand Hegel's claims regarding the necessity of WdL must be seen in light of how the Aufhebung is both necessary and contingent; it is necessary in the sense of being a necessary condition for there to be an experience in thought of the abstractions of the Verstand and movements of dialectics; that this condition is reached is on the other hand contingent, and necessarily so, if the Logic is to be a self-developing whole. This further means that a question that asks for the ultimate truth and justification of the conclusion of an external material treated with the method given in the Logic will be answered in the Logic itself and involve and evolve around such things as dialectics and speculation. As an answer to the question of the openness or closure of the system or WdL, it is answered that the system is closed, but a kind of closure that entails openness in that it is a self-developed whole that includes and depends on negativity and otherness