In brief: Because the empiricist demand – begin with experience – is not disputed by Hegel but taken over. And because the „proof“ he offers is of another kind than an experiment: it consists in the necessity of the transition from one concept to the next, and one tests it by following it through.
An empiricist is already philosophising – only unnoticed
Whoever collects „facts“ or „data“ uses determinations in doing so that are not themselves data. The sentence „This stone is hard and fell to the ground because gravity acts as its cause“ contains four of them. Cause, force, thing, property can be neither seen nor measured; they are thought, so that the sense data can be ordered at all.
The Logic is the science of precisely these determinations – the operating system running in the background while the data are processed. To occupy oneself with it means to make it conscious and to test it for consistency instead of applying it blindly.
Why Hegel of all people, then?
Because consistent empiricism leads the empiricist into scepticism. Hume has to concede that in his sense data he finds neither a cause nor a law nor an I, but only a succession of impressions – and that it cannot be proved that the sun will rise tomorrow. Experience dissolves in his hands.
Hegel, by contrast, does not deny that experience stands at the beginning. He says so expressly:
The emergence of philosophy out of the need mentioned has experience, the immediate and reasoning consciousness, for its starting point.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 12
And for the philosophy of nature it is put more sharply still: „the emergence and formation of philosophical science has empirical physics for its presupposition and condition“ (§ 246 note). What Hegel denies is not experience but the claim that it already supplies cognition: the stimulus comes from the empirical sciences, but thinking has the task of raising their content „to necessity“. Not a flight from the world, then, but the most comprehensive attempt to comprehend the whole of experience – from gravitation to the French Revolution – as a connected process.
And why the philosophy of right?
Because among Hegel’s books it is the most empirical: the philosophy of everyday social experience. What property is one experiences with every purchase; what a contract is, with every signature; what wrong and punishment are, in every news broadcast; the tension between conscience and law everyone knows; and the difference between family and market – civil society – is a daily experience.
The empiricist observes all this as separate facts. The Groundlines claim that these facts are connected and can be developed out of one another. Whether that is so can be tested on the text – and that is exactly what the proof consists in.
What „proof“ means here
An empiricist looks for a proof as an experiment or a single datum: „Show me a fact that proves ethical life.“ That is a category mistake – a conceptual necessity cannot be established by a single fact, any more than a mathematical theorem by measuring.
The proof of philosophy lies in immanent coherence and in the necessity of the development. Concretely, in the Groundlines:
- That there is property is not proved – that is experience (§ 41 ff.).
- What is proved is that the concept of property, thought consistently through, necessarily contains the possibility of wrong (§ 82 ff.).
- And that wrong brings forth the concept of punishment as the restoration of right (§ 97–§ 101).
- And that the sphere of merely external right is inadequate and passes over into an inner one – morality (§ 104 f.).
The proof is therefore the process of reading itself. Whoever goes through the Groundlines from § 1 to § 360 and has to concede at each point that the next stage solves a problem of the preceding one and that the sequence holds has carried out the proof. Whoever says at some point „here it does not follow“ has an objection – and the only kind that counts. Both are results; neither can be had before reading.
What is demanded in this Hegel himself calls the „exertion of the concept“:
What therefore matters in the study of science is to take upon oneself the exertion of the concept.
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Sources. Encyclopaedia (1830) § 12 (experience as starting point), §§ 37–39 (critique of empiricism), § 246 note. – Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface. – Groundlines § 2 (legal science as a part), § 41 ff., § 82 ff., § 97–§ 104. – See also How does Hegel stand to empirical inquiry? and Why does Hegel document nothing and give so few examples?