Hegel's Phenomenology was completed, so Hegel liked to tell people, on the night of the battle of Jena. However, by the time he published the first volume of his Science of Logic in 1812 – the later two volumes appeared between 1813 and 1816 – he had lost his job as a professor, fathered an illegitimate son, run a newspaper, found a position teaching philosophy to high-school students in Nuremberg, and gotten married to a woman from the Nuremberg patriciate (and, by the time the Logic was finished, had fathered a daughter who did not survive and two other sons who did). The period between the Phenomenology and the Logic covered Napoleon's triumphant destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian army, his disastrous invasion of Russia, his exile and comeback, the Congress of Vienna, and the battle of Waterloo. Whereas the Phenomenology was completed under the gaze of the Revolution triumphant, the Logic was completed under the gaze of German monarchs seeking a restoration of their powers and authority (but, in the case of the large kingdoms created in Napoleonic Germany, these monarchs also refusing to cede an inch of the land or property Napoleon had in effect given them).

While in Jena, Hegel had been working on his “system,” which was to provide a unitary treatment of the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of mind, ethics and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion, along with a kind of “logic,” as he called it, that was intended to be the overall structure for the whole enterprise.