Phenomenology of Spirit

In the summer of 1806, as Napoleon Bonaparte was crushing the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, nearby at the University of Jena, Georg Hegel was finishing one of the greatest philosophical meditations in the Western canon, his Phenomenology of Spirit (Geistes)(1807). In the grand tradition of Augustine, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, Hegel sought to ground all knowledge in the certainty of careful introspection into the contents of consciousness and the Absolute Spirit that he discovered as a result. For some 50 years, his Phenomenology and later works dominated Western philosophical thought. Then Darwin published his Origin of Species, and for a half century Hegel’s dominance vanished. If there are no hard borders to the various species, then there are no essences attached to them. If species evolve through the crucible of natural selection, then humans have evolved, and human minds have evolved also. So human concepts about our world don’t reflect timeless, immutable essences. And phenomenological analysis of our consciousness of these concepts and mental contents can’t reveal the timeless essence of human consciousness.However, as the 1800’s came to a close, Darwinian science had yet to be matched with Mendelian genetics and eventually with Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA, so until then there was a sense among many philosophers that the Darwinian experiment had reached a blind alley in terms of providing an empirical basis for explaining the human mind, and thus that the Hegelian-based introspective methods of investigating the mind should be adopted again. Accordingly, interest in Hegel’s work was revived through the influence of the Englishman Francis Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 1893) and the Germans Edmund Husserl (Ideas, 1913) and Martin Heidegger (Being and Time, 1927), among others. Such contemporary Anglo-American philosophers as John Searle, Wilfrid Sellars, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and many others roughly follow this theme of using introspection to analyze human thinking and consciousness. It is illuminating to go back to the source of this traditional analysis – Hegel’s Phenomenology – to uncover the philosophical basis for this certainty among many that only the ‘first-person point of view’ is valid as an analysis of mind.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is beautifully written, as are all really great philosophical works; however, the elegance of Hegel’s language and the confident tone of his argumentation belie the difficulty of penetrating his work. A.V. Miller’s translation, on its own merits, is very readable, and J. N. Findlay’s Foreword is indeed helpful, but close reading of Hegel requires use of ‘companion’ works to assist the non-specialist reader.In the late 1940’s, as Francis Crick was beginning to perform his X-ray experiments to determine the crystalline structure of DNA, and as Alan Turing was formulating his thought experiment for determining whether a computing machine could exhibit intelligence, Martin Heidegger gave a series of lectures to his students on Hegel’s Phenomenology, published in 1950 in German and in 1970 in English under the title “Hegel’s Concept of Experience.” It’s an English translation of Hegel’s Introduction (by K. R. Dove) with line-by-line commentary by Heidegger on each short section of the Introduction, and it shows Heidegger’s scrupulous adherence to Hegel’s philosophical analysis of mind. Be forewarned: Heidegger can be as obtuse as Hegel in his ‘hermeneutical’ commentary on Hegel’s Introduction (e.g., “Unconditional self-awareness, being the subjectiveness of the subject, is the absoluteness of the Absolute.” Heidegger, pg. 34).Heidegger says at the start of his explication of Hegel’s Introduction, “’Experience’ states what ‘Phenomenology’ is.” Hegel begins his Introduction with the pronouncement that “one must first come to an understanding concerning the nature of knowledge before taking up the real subject matter, namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is.” He shortly thereafter follows with, “Natural consciousness will show itself to be merely the Concept of knowledge, or unreal knowledge. . . this road is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. . .” The first step of this process is to take “the abstract determinations of knowledge and truth [as they] are called to mind as they exist in consciousness.” This process is a “dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises on itself—on its knowledge as well as its subject—[and] is, in so far as the new, true object emerges to consciousness as the result of it, precisely that which is called experience.” Heidegger comments, “Philosophy now is unconditional knowledge within the knowledge of self-certainty.”Another useful guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is Gadamer’s Hegel’s Dialectic (1976), which is an English translation by Christopher Smith of five essays penned by Gadamer in the 1960’s and published in the original German in 1971. Gadamer holds that Hegel’s deep theme in the Phenomenology is to treat self-consciousness, “not as something previously given, but as something to be specifically demonstrated as the truth in all consciousness.” Gadamer claims that, to accomplish this task, Hegel ‘demonstrates’ the conversion of consciousness into consciousness-of-itself. Gadamer shows that Hegel’s demonstration of the ‘doubling back’ of self-consciousness into itself is “not self-consciousness as an individual point,” but rather a ‘spirit-world.’Hegel first shows the initial state of this universal spirt-world is that of ‘Perception,’ i.e., the ‘immediate dependency’ of consciousness on sense data (the “sense certainty” that a thing has qualities such as whiteness, hardness). Hegel then shows that this universal spirit-world transitions to the higher state of consciousness of ‘Understanding,’ i.e., to knowledge of a universe of objects standing in ‘force relationships’ to each other. “What exists are forces and their interplay.” This supersensible residual world is the ‘inverted world’ that is hidden behind the world of appearances. It is what remains after the world of constant changes disappears from consciousness. Hegel says, “The supersensible world is thus a tranquil realm of laws” – beyond the perceived world, but present in it as “its immediate, still image.” This universal spirit-world is the product of Hegel’s ‘dialectic of self-consciousness.’ It is the still image of constant change. This true spirit-world is not in opposition to the world of appearance. The true, supersensible world contains both aspects, it maintains itself in infinite change, it is continually differentiating itself from itself. It is consciousness of itself as infinite differentiation.

Will Phenomenology and Logic ever agree?Hegel has many a story to tell in this most amazing book. The most important, at least for our era, is the story of a final and complete reconciliation between all members of the human family. How could that, given the almost countless differences between myriad human groups, ever be achieved? Hegel achieves it by arguing (and dialectically showing) that everything partial, ambiguous and irrational in history is burned away in the process of that history until ...what? Until all that remains is all that could possibly (Hegel means theoretically and practically, logically and existentially) remain. There are, as you might guess, several non-trivial difficulties with a position as profound as this.To begin, until the promised 'utopian' end-state finally and completely arrives different people interpret this end state differently. This is why Hegel reminds us that philosophy can only equal Science (of Wisdom) at the end of this phenomenal and historical process. Until then, and this is important, each and every understanding of Hegel necessarily remains mired in partiality, ambiguity and irrationality. (- This is also true, I would argue, of the ones that base themselves on (Hegel's) Logic.) But this, the ambiguity of speculative or dialectical Logic & Phenomenology, leads to other difficulties. For instance, this end state has been taken by `Hegelians' in either a religious or atheistic manner. But until world history catches up to the `necessities' of the Logic, whatever they may be, even something as fundamental as this necessarily remains ambiguous. Another problem, is Hegel himself at the end of this process (at least as far as Logic/System are concerned) or is he the beginning of the end of this process?In fact, one can say, with perhaps only a little exaggeration, that the Logic itself waits, or seems to wait, on human history to turn the final page. But that is the problem with this `biography of Spirit' - does the hand that turns the page also write `new' pages? Is the Logic (and System, the full account of reality) changed too by the (seemingly endless) `phenomenological' ruses of human history? For if the `new' occurs in this sense (Logically) then there is no System at all. If you object that the Logic (or the Hegelian System) forbids the new (at least in Logic & System) then you will find yourself in the uncomfortable position of explaining how Hegel himself could introduce a new operator (the speculative or, if you prefer, the dialectic) into Logic.For, while the `new' in history can be explained (or so Hegelians maintain) by the Logic, by the self-contained Circularity of the System, all this collapses, or so one suspects, if the new can also happen in the Logic. ...How does (or could) one explain, from within the System, the irruption of the new within the Logic? One cannot. This is why Kojeve (correctly and, from his point of view, necessarily) reminded us, in his great commentary on the Phenomenology, that Hegel "definitely reconciles himself with all that is and has been, by declaring that there will never more be anything new on earth." It is this `declaration' by Hegel that is the great stumbling block of the System. Did the new come to an end in Jena almost 200 years ago? Is the Logic the only thing that no longer develops in the Hegelian System? We all need to read the Phenomenology and the Logic together, each in the light of the other, again.To reiterate all this in a different manner; for Hegel, one can indeed say that the System never encounters anything new. There is indeed only this great circularity of the Concept. But this is only correct from the standpoint of the Logic. From the standpoint of the Phenomenology (and History) the new does indeed emerge out of the ruins of the old. The `new' can perhaps be best understood as what's left after as much of the superfluous (the partial and ambiguous) and the unreasonable are subtracted (or burned away in the Golgotha of Spirit, the hell of history) as possible. It is only at the end of this process, the beginning of that end is the publication of the Phenomenology, that Logic and Being are precisely the same. Or, to put it yet another way, the only thing that doesn't change in Hegel is the System. Everything else, possibly even the Logic understood as the schematics of Spirit, moves. For Kojeve (and possibly Hegel) when movement finally stops (the End of History) one has the System entire. ...This is perhaps why Merleau-Ponty, in the Adventures of the Dialectic, calls this position of Kojeve an `idealization of death.'As an aside I want to point out that the earlier mention of Kojeve should remind us of his great sparring partner, Leo Strauss, the great explicator of the esoteric. The political esoteric he writes about (and demonstrates in his commentaries on Plato, Al-Farabi, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Nietzsche) is the only real methodological rival of Dialectics, at least for political philosophy. By way of comparison I will briefly say that Esotericism excludes nothing; everything comes back. There is no progress or change, not even through some exclusion of the negated. There is, of course, the hidden - but the hidden always returns, as the greatest modern esotericism, the one we find in Nietzsche, affirms. In esotericism the 'negated' (or hidden) remains, indeed, if it didn't remain esotericism would have no reason for continuing in its esoteric manner. This esoteric says there never was anything fundamentally new while the Hegelian Dialectic teaches that the new emerges until, and only until, Logic and Phenomenology are exactly the same. All that the esoteric requires is (exoteric) myth; all that the dialectical requires is Science. Each particular myth dies, but the necessity of myth is unending; while Science (in the Hegelian sense) seemingly can never reach birth. ...This is the impasse that the great methodological war of our time has brought us to: undying myths vs. unreachable Science.There is so much more to say about this book and the vistas it has opened to philosophy. I will say only this, the Phenomenology is easily one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy; read it at your peril.

Is this book easy to read? Absolutely not. But is it worth purchasing and coming back to? Yes. Very much so. It’s a struggle until it there are moments when it comes together, and then one loses it again. There is no shame in using secondary literature as a clarifier. But one must struggle, reflect, and keep coming back.