Abstract
As we saw earlier, to overcome the opposition of consciousness and to establish complete immanence of consciousness means to transcend the limitations of finite consciousness as a principle of a priori determination of objectivity and to transform the finite unity of intuition and concept into the infinite “form” of the Concept. This means that the Phenomenology must begin with a finite consciousness, and then show why and how this finite principle develops into the radical immanence of the Concept or of Absolute Knowing. Hegel’s candidate for the initial form in which finite consciousness comes on the scene is sense-certainty. But the conditions under which the Phenomenology unfolds its argument are complex. To understand this complexity, I will first look at the larger picture, i.e. the location of the Phenomenology within Hegel’s system.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel uses “pure I”, “pure self-consciousness”, “pure thought”, “pure Concept”, “pure spirituality” more or less synonymously.
- 2.
The soul assimilates the otherness of nature by making the body a sign and tool of the soul: see Dodd, 1995.
- 3.
For a more detailed analysis of the soul’s relation to nature see Brinkmann, 1998.
- 4.
Cf. the slightly ironic description of the usual understanding of the relationship between judgment and object (here called “the subject”): “When considering the judgment, one usually thinks first of the independence of the extremes (the subject and the predicate): that the first is a thing or determination [that stands] on its own, and that the predicate likewise is a universal determination outside that subject (for instance, in my head), which is then brought together with the subject by me, and is thus ‘judged’ ” (E § 166R).
- 5.
At E § 3 Hegel puts the matter in this way: “In any one of these forms [sc. of being conscious of an object] …, the content is the object of our consciousness. But in this objectivity the determinacies of these forms supervene on the content; with the result that each of these forms [sc. of cognition] seems to give rise to a particular object [e.g. an object of perception, memory, desire, definition etc.], and that what is in-itself the same can look like a different content” (GHS modified). In other words, the forms of cognition are forms of objectification. Klaus Hartmann has pointed out the affinity between Hegel and Husserl in this respect (cf. Hartmann, 1999, p. 15).
- 6.
“Consciousness … appears variously determined in accordance with the variety of the given object, and its further development appears as an alteration in the determinacy of its object. … [T]he logical determination of the object is what is identical in the subject and in the object, it is their absolute connectedness” (E § 415, my translation). See also E § 3.
- 7.
According to Anaxagoras, appearances (ta phainomena) are the sight or look (opsis) of the unseen or the concealed (ton adelon): DK 59B 21a.
- 8.
What we have retraced here so far relying on the text of the Encylopedia is the basic structure of the argument of the Phenomenology of Spirit in its transition from consciousness to self-consciousness to reason, an argument that we will examine in greater detail in the subsequent sections.
- 9.
Cf. SL 46/WdL I 27; see also E § 60 R.
- 10.
Cf. E § 420 R.
- 11.
One that is not based on empirical psychology as in Hume’s case, it might be added.
- 12.
Cf. FK 69–70/GuW 326–327. Hegel continues to refer to reason as a principle of unity in the Encyclopedia, except that there he distinguishes between a “pure” reason, which is equivalent to the logical Idea, and embodied reason or reason in actuality: see, e.g., E § 6. Their consummate union would be absolute spirit.
- 13.
I cannot enter into an examination of these issues here, nor are they crucial for our current concerns. For an excellent discussion of the complexity of the problem and the scholarly debate around it see Aschenberg, 1976. For a more recent review of the issue, see Harris, 1997, I pp. 193–195. Harris’s division of the Phenomenology into two halves (I 195) makes sense. Nonetheless, based on the systematic issue involved (viz. the overcoming of the opposition of consciousness) I will be suggesting a slightly different organization of the argument.
- 14.
Husserl called it the Generalthesis: see Husserl, Ideen I, § 30.
- 15.
It should be mentioned, however, that Hegel did not view Descartes’ contribution exclusively as one initiating the reflective turn. Rather, he believes that Descartes relapsed into the opposition of consciousness only after having successfully overcome it with the cogito, understood by Hegel as the speculative unity of thinking and being: see Brinkmann, 1996.
- 16.
For the claim that the argument of the Phenomenology has transcendental significance see Charles Taylor 1972. Recently, Terry Pinkard has criticized, rightly, it seems to me, the particular form Taylor’s argument takes: see Pinkard, 1996, pp. 350–351. In my view, Hegel’s procedure is perhaps best described as a critique of the idea of putatively incorrigible a priori frameworks of cognition. The opening argument in Sense-Certainty makes yet an additional point, however, as we shall see in the next section.
- 17.
- 18.
Cf. PS § 85/3, 78: “… consciousness thus finds that its knowledge does not correspond to its object ….”
- 19.
Husserl, Ideas I § 95.
- 20.
The opposition of consciousness is ostensibly overcome in the transition from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness. However, the opposition is thereby only internalized. It persists up until the transition from Religion to Absolute Knowing.
- 21.
Reinhold Aschenberg has pointed out that the apparent paradox is in fact three-fold (the so-called Münchhausen-Trilemma): cf. Aschenberg, 1976.
- 22.
See Section 4.1 below.
- 23.
For this reason I will be able to include only a limited number of secondary references into the discussion. For a detailed commentary on the Phenomenology the reader should consult the standard works such as Hyppolite, 1974, Heinrichs, 1974, Taylor, 1975, Lauer, 1976, revised 1993, Flay, 1984, Pinkard, 1996, Siep, 2000, Vieweg/Welsch, 2008, and Harris’s invaluable two volume study of 1997 titled Hegel’s Ladder.
- 24.
If there is any non-subjective, natural given at all, it would have to be sought at the pre-representational level which Hegel discusses under the title of the “natural” and the “feeling” soul (cf. E §§ 391–410).
- 25.
- 26.
See E § 418R: “The spatial and temporal singleness, Here and Now, as which I determined the object of sensory consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit … properly belongs only to intuition.” See also E § 449A, where Hegel suggests that the mere sensory awareness of objects in sense-certainty might already be called intuition, but it would be more like a “mindless intuiting” (geistloses Anschauen) than intuiting proper.
- 27.
Intuition proper, Hegel argues, grasps the external object in its totality, as a wealth of determinations held together by a concept rather than treating it, as sensory consciousness does, as a singular particular that immediately falls apart into many different aspects (cf. E § 449A). Intuition is also the gift of the poet who is able to give exemplary expression to a strong emotional experience and thus to objectify and “domesticate” it, so to speak: see Hegel’s reference to Goethe’s Werther at E § 448A.
- 28.
Cf. Aristotle, An post. II 19, 100a 12–13.
- 29.
Cf. PS § 109/3, 90: “It is therefore astonishing when … it is asserted as universal experience and put forward, too, as a philosophical proposition, even as the outcome of [sc. an attempt to defeat] Scepticism, that the reality or being of external things taken as Thises or sense-objects has absolute truth for consciousness.” For the influence of ancient skepticism on Hegel’s argument here see Düsing, 1973.
- 30.
Here Hegel’s comment at E § 419A is helpful: “The content of sensuous consciousness is in itself dialectical. It is supposed to be the single, isolated individual; but it is just this that makes it not a single individual but all individuals … ”
- 31.
See E § 418: “That rich contents is constituted by the determinations of feeling; they are the matter of consciousness (§ 414), the substantial and qualitative in which the soul consists… and which it finds in itself. ” And: “The specific contents of the sensible, such as smell, taste, color, etc., belongs to feeling (Empfindung), as we saw in § 401.”
- 32.
Note again that the content of the experience belongs to feeling, not to consciousness per se. The object of sensuous consciousness possesses as yet no other thought-determination than that of existing and of being some singular external thing which is other than consciousness (E § 418A). This sounds very much like bumping into some unidentified object in the dark.
- 33.
For the likelihood that Jacobi is the target see footnote 3 above. That Hegel’s account here is puzzling, perhaps even problematic, has not escaped the attention of scholars: see Stederoth, 2001, pp. 283–285 and Westphal, 1973, p. 89. Westphal has suggested, quite persuasively in view of E § 418 it seems to me, that Hegel’s sense-certainty very much looks like an artificial abstraction, not a genuine form of cognition.
- 34.
It should be noted right away that Hegel uses these indexicals not just as deictic expressions, but also as predicates, i.e. concepts (see below).
- 35.
This is apparently the reason why Terry Pinkard expresses misgivings about Charles Taylor’s treatment of the deictic expressions as indexicals: see Pinkard, 1996, pp. 350–351, footnote 11.
- 36.
I am therefore skeptical of Harris’s insistence that Sense-Certainty is about a common sense position and that those who argue that the position is at least somewhat artificial must be mistaken: see Harris, 1997, I 230–231, footnote 12. In everyday life we are not denied the association between the perceived This and its name. Hence Harris’s reference (I 211) to G.E. Moore’s “This is a hand” obscures the strategy and aim of Hegel’s argument.
- 37.
Incidentally, a point that I have not seen articulated all that well in the literature.
- 38.
One may be reminded here of the deictic expressions in so-called protocol sentences. But again, the idea is not to pick out some spatio-temporal object by “this” for the purpose of further description, but to ask what conceptual information the expression “this” conveys about the object thus picked out.
- 39.
See again the reference to M. Westphal in footnote 11 above.
- 40.
“Auch die Tiere … bleiben nicht vor den sinnlichen Dingen als an sich seienden stehen … ”
- 41.
Again, the point is not that we can distinguish two Thises by pointing. The point is that both are conceptually speaking a This, hence indistinguishable with respect to their conceptual determination. – It is tempting to suspect that in using day and night as examples Hegel may have a reference to Heraclitus in mind (see fr. 67). A reference to Pyrrhonian skepticism has also been suggested (which by no means excludes a further “background” reference to Heraclitus): see Köhler/Pöggeler, 1998, p. 9. Hegel’s point in any case is the same as Heraclitus’, viz. that the logos is that which unifies things by affirming and negating their difference at the same time.
- 42.
In this particular usage, meinen is difficult to capture in translation. It can be used in German the same way it is used in English, for instance when we ask “What do you mean?” – Was meinst Du? Meinen may also mean “to believe” or “to think” as in “If I am not mistaken, I believe (meine or, alternatively, glaube) that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.” But Hegel’s use of Meinen here is special. It is closer to having something in mind, but not being able to articulate exactly what that is. The phrase “If you see what I mean” perhaps uses “mean” in a way closest to Hegel’s here. For often we fail to see what somebody means when they are struggling to put it into words. In those cases we may divine or speculate what the other person means, but sometimes we simply remain clueless – and so may the speaker himself. He purports to communicate something but does not arrive at expressing it. This is the situation Hegel envisions in Sense-Certainty. Hegel elsewhere (E § 20R) draws on the etymological connection between meinen in the sense of “believe” and the possessive pronoun mein (“my”). What I mean is strictly what I mean, what belongs to me as my opinion or putative knowledge and what may therefore also be subjective to the point of being incommunicable. The connection with a Wittgensteinian argument against the possibility of a private language suggests itself. Hegel would agree that language is not such that it could express something supposedly exclusively mine. The reader should be cautioned against drawing parallels too quickly between Hegel’s point and Wittgenstein’s private language argument. The question of what affinity exists here, if any, should be examined in the light of Hintikka and Hintikka, 1986, pp. 241–271. As far as Hegel is concerned, language subverts the attempt to establish any kind of “private” meaning, i.e. a meaning that could not possibly be shared with others but that I could nonetheless “share” with myself. Hegel’s way of putting this is that “What I only mean is mine; it belongs to me as this particular individual. But if language expresses only what is universal, then I cannot say what I only mean” (E § 20R). However, neither Hegel nor, following Hintikka & Hintikka, Wittgenstein deny that there exist private experiences that can be meaningfully talked about in the context of a publicly available language-game. In a sense, the issue in both Hegel and Wittgenstein comes down to exposing a simple fallacy, viz. the idea of a language of the ineffable.
- 43.
Cf. Hegel’s similar comments on the supposedly inexpressible meaning of thoughts at E § 462A.
- 44.
Aristotle’s actual phrase is “… for though one perceives the particular, perception is of the universal – e.g. of man but not of Callias the man” (An. post. II 19, 100a 17- b 2). The wistfulness lies in the fact that the Greek uses the same word for “perceiving” and “perception” (αίσθησις), so that the sentence “means” to express the difference between sensing the particular and recognizing the universal in it, but does not actually express it, except through the morphological variation of verb as opposed to noun. And for good reason, since in the act of perception the two are immediately one. This means that while the proper name “Callias” is not a universal it could not be understood if it were not taken to name a particular that falls under a universal. Without the implicit relation to a universal such as “man” or some other kind of thing, “Callias” would be a word without meaning.
- 45.
This point was made in a different way brilliantly by Strawson in Individuals. The argument is that deictic expressions would be unable to fulfill their referential function without relying on a spatio-temporal framework that constitutes their a priori semantic condition (cf. Strawson, 1990, p. 31 ff.).
- 46.
This is what Hegel has in mind when, in the Science of Logic he approvingly refers to Kant’s complementarity thesis by saying that “it is an essential proposition of the Kantian transcendental philosophy that without intuitions concepts are empty and are valid solely as relations of the manifold given by intuition” (SL 585).
- 47.
There are of course many ways to illustrate weak ineffability. Imagine yourself at a dinner table with guests while you are trying to communicate to your husband some embarrassing little fact that you could not possibly convey openly under the circumstances etc. Here, ineffability is simply a consequence of a restriction on your means of expression required by etiquette, i.e., it is weak, not strong ineffability.
- 48.
Thus I cannot quite agree with Matthias Kettner that the argument in Sense-Certainty is primarily a critique of ontological atomism which in my view is the target rather of the third cycle of Perception: see Kettner 1990, 9. The reader may want to turn to Kettner for an excellent discussion not only of Sense-Certainty, but also of all the relevant literature on this chapter since Feuerbach and Purpus up to and including W. Becker, K. Düsing, J. Simon, E. Tugendhat, M. Westphal as well as analytic approaches from Frege, Quine and Searle to Putnam.
- 49.
Hegel details these developments at the beginning of Absolute Knowing, PS §§ 788–799/3, 575–583.
- 50.
For a persuasive (although in my view not entirely successful) argument in defense of Kantian dualism see Guyer, 2000, pp. 37–56.
- 51.
I argued earlier that the most serious difficulty for the empirical manifold, i.e. the matter of cognition (“the raw material offered by sensibility,” as Kant called it at A 1), is probably to be either determinate or indeterminate. To recapitulate briefly, if the manifold is pure, it is indeterminate and hence cannot generate determinacy. Since the categories do not themselves contain determinate content, determinacy of the structures of objectivity remains unaccounted for. If the manifold is empirical, i.e. determinate, it cannot account for determinacy either, because an empirical manifold must already be the product of some synthesis. We cannot, therefore, avoid the conclusion that the manifold is always already determinate. If so, the task becomes one of reconstruction of determinacy, not the construction and then superimposition of determinacy where allegedly there was none in the first place.
- 52.
In one of the analyses of the Theaetetus the sensible thing is indeed resolved into its sensory data which are then unified by the soul (see Theaet. 184D). There is an interesting parallel here between the Theaetetus and the Phenomenology’s Perception in that the soul as unifier is introduced after the sensible object has for all intents and purposes been “dissolved” in a Heraclitean flux (cf. Theaet. 182C – 183C), just as at the end of the first cycle of the experience in Perception consciousness learns that “the truth of perception is its dissolution” (PS § 118/3, 98), i.e. the dissolution of the realist conception of the object.
- 53.
For a possible Kantian background to the second cycle in Perception see Hyppolite, 1974, p. 113.
- 54.
Hegel summarizes the first cycle of the experience of perceptual consciousness in PS § 117/3, 97–98.
- 55.
The second cycle of the experience of perceptual consciousness is detailed at PS §§ 119–121/3, 99–101.
- 56.
Interestingly, Hegel locates the emergence of the Principle of Non-Contradiction at this juncture in the construction of thinghood. The PNC lets us avoid having to say that something is simultaneously F,G, and H “all over” by offering the escape hatch of the “insofar” (cf. PS § 121/3, 100–101). Insofar as x is F it is not G etc., notwithstanding the fact that in the thing all these properties interpenetrate – the grain of salt is not white on one side and tart or soluble on the other or now one thing and then the other, rather in perception it is all these things at once and everywhere.
- 57.
We are all familiar with this way of looking at things as collections of matters. When we pick up a box of margarine in the supermarket, for instance, the nutrition information tells us that we hold in our hands a composite of various “matters” combining x percent of fat, y percent of cholesterol, z percent of carbohydrates etc. From the chemist’s point of view, our piece of margarine is just that.
- 58.
Cf. Pinkard, 1996, p. 32. Pinkard does not explicitly suggest any particular metaphysical position that might be associated with this cycle of consciousness’ experience.
- 59.
It is probably not a coincidence that this terminology is reminiscent of Aristotle’s similar expressions kath’ hauto and kat’ allou. For Aristotle’s atomic essentialism cf. Metaph. VII 13, 1038b 9–11: “… primary substance is that kind of substance which is peculiar to an individual, which does not belong to anything else.”
- 60.
In an Aristotelian context the unessential aspect of the thing is similar to both the accidental properties (symbebekota) and the matter which, according to Aristotelian doctrine, is not part of the essence of something (cf. Metaph. VII 10, 1035a 26–32).
- 61.
See SL 118/WdL I 105 (something is “das Andere seiner selbst,” “the other in its own self”).
- 62.
See WW 19, 328–331.
- 63.
The categories of the understanding have, after all, objective reality, whereas the ideas of reason are merely regulative. Cf. Hegel’s comment in Differenzschrift (IV 6) that Kant’s theory of the understanding in the Transcendental Deduction had been held over the baptismal by reason (and thus was graced with a genuinely speculative spirit), but that afterwards – i.e. in the Dialectic of the Critique – reason was treated as if it was even more obtuse than the understanding.
- 64.
See E § 115 and SL 411–4116/WdL II 26–32.
- 65.
For the detailed analysis of being-in-itself and being-for-another see SL 122–129/WdL I 110–116.
- 66.
Hegel confirms this at PS § 163/3, 133: “Infinity … has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before ….”
- 67.
Hence Hegel comments that the object of the understanding “which is now the true object of consciousness is still just an object for it” (PS § 132/3, 107–108), that the object has “become Notion in principle; but consciousness is not yet for-itself the Notion” (ibid.), or that consciousness “converts” its insight “into an objective inner [i.e. an inner being of the object], and distinguishes this reflection of Things from its own reflection into itself. … This inner is, therefore, for consciousness an extreme over against it …” (PS § 143/3, 116).
- 68.
Cf. SL 137/WdL I 126: “The infinite is the negation of negation, affirmation, being which has restored itself out of limitedness.”
- 69.
In fact, as we saw above in Section 3.1 consciousness was never merely consciousness.
- 70.
Hegel explicitly confirms this. The concept of reason appears first, if only in an “imperfect” form, at PS § 144/3, 117 during the introduction of the so-called supersensible world. In Self-Consciousness, the mutual relation of one self-consciousness to another marks the presence of spirit, if only at first the “Notion”, not yet the actuality, of spirit (cf. PS § 177/3, 144–145).
- 71.
Cf. Leibniz, Discourse of Metaphysics §§ 6, 7.
- 72.
In force, Hegel says, “the absolute antithesis [of being-for-self and being-for-another, of independent and dependent being, ground and grounded] is posited as self-identical essence” (PS § 134/3, 108).
- 73.
As a result of the development in Perception, “the unity of ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-another’ is posited” (PS § 134/3, 108).
- 74.
The substance-accident relationship, it might be argued, was taken up in Perception under the title of the Thing and its many properties. In the Jena Logic Hegel says of force: „Über den soeben erläuterten Kausalzusammenhang erhebt sich der Begriff der Kraft; die Kraft vereinigt in sich die beiden wesentlichen Seiten des Verhältnisses, die Identität und das Getrenntsein“ (JL 50). The basic argument in the Jena Logic is also the same as that in the Phenomenology, viz. that the distinction between cause and effect or between two mutually reacting substances is only a formal one since the content is the same on both sides. See, for instance, JL 43: “Man sieht, daß die Kraft eigentlich das ganze Kausalitätsverhältnis in sich ausdrückt oder die Ursache, wie sie mit der Wirkung eins und in Wahrheit wirkliche Substanz, aber auch das Kausalitätsverhältnis aufgehoben ist” (my emphasis). Hegel even argues that the identity of cause and effect (which he continues to defend in SL and E) is the real reason why Hume was justified to deny any necessity to the cause-effect relationship – not, as Hume thought, because it could not be observed, but because the two relata are separable only in appearance (cf. JL 48). – For the question to what extent the Jena Logic serves as the foil for the argument of the entire Phenomenology see J. Heinrichs’ still indispensable study Die Logik der, Phänomenologie des Geistes’ (Heinrichs, 1974).
- 75.
The Miller translation interprets the text by adding “reciprocal” and “mutually” (end of PS § 138 and beginning of § 139/3, 113), expressions that have no direct counterpart in Hegel’s text.
- 76.
In order to avoid a misunderstanding we should keep at bay the Humean analysis of two events following one another. To make sense of what Hegel means here we should be thinking of one event only, where the event is itself the manifestation of force. The billiard ball rolling is already an “expression” of force, quite independently of its impinging on another ball. The conventional cause-effect sequence is discussed in what immediately follows under the title of a duplication of forces.
- 77.
Cf. also E §§ 153–154.
- 78.
Frank-Peter Hansen expresses this very well: „Der Begriff der Sache ist der Begriff der Sache“ – the concept of the matter is the concept of the matter: see Hansen, 1994, p. 53.
- 79.
He also formulates the critique that later reappears in the Introduction to the Science of Logic, viz. that if the supersensible realm is posited as necessary and affirmed to be unknowable nonetheless, we are left with the world of appearances as our object of knowledge, a world which, however, as something explicitly made dependent on the supersensible world is simultaneously known not to contain the truth. In other words, we then “perceive something as true which we know is not true” (PS § 146/3, 118). At SL 46/WdL I 27 Hegel calls this view “absurd” [ungereimt]. That the concept of the thing-in-itself is essentially a logical construct and a contradiction, viz. a ground whose grounding function is both affirmed and denied (and thus becomes a dysfunctional concept), is also Hegel’s view in the Logic (see, e.g., SL 489–490/WdL II 111–112; E § 124).
- 80.
It should be noted, however, that while Hegel’s tautology objection may be correct, the point is not the formula alone but its quantifiability that allows the scientist to derive non-tautological measurements and predictions.
- 81.
It was reported not too long ago that scientists have apparently managed artificially to isolate one magnetic pole. I am not competent to judge whether this invalidates the traditional belief in the inseparability of the polar opposites or whether the isolated pole can still be called a magnetic pole.
- 82.
The penetration of difference into the inner being of things occurs indirectly at first with the tautological process of explanation discussed earlier in the text, in which a difference between theory and reality is stated which “is not [yet] a difference belonging to the thing itself” (PS § 154/3, 125). Indirectly, because the self-differentiation is supposed to happen only “theoretically”, i.e. in the understanding, and does not yet affect things themselves (cf. PS § 155/3, 126). I take the discussion of explanation at PS § 155 to contain an implicit reference to Kant’s analysis of the Paralogisms and the Antinomies which so to speak explains away any possible contradiction so that from the point of view of the understanding everything is in good logical order in the noumenal realm.
- 83.
See also Falke, 1996, pp. 125–130.
- 84.
If correct this interpretation strongly suggests that a possible proto-version of the Phenomenology would not have ended with Force and Understanding but with the Reason chapter at the earliest.
- 85.
- 86.
Cf. PS § 160/3, 131: “… the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched the other [sc. supersensible] world and has it within it ….” Hegel rejects the view that the opposition between the first supersensible world and the inverted world is only external as if the first supersensible world were now a world of appearance and the inverted world contained the true “in-itself” of the first supersensible world: “Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the first [sc. supersensible world] in the sense that it has the latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an inverted actual world: that the one is appearance, but the other the in-itself …” (PS § 159/3, 129). If this were the case, duality and contradiction would not yet have entered into the supersensible world. We would just have produced an inverted version of the sensible world, i.e. a caricature (see below).
- 87.
As an interpretive addendum Miller’s translation puts “viz. in the earth” in the bracketed space above. This may be misleading since the reference is not to the sensible but the first supersensible world.
- 88.
The play by Ludwig Tieck entitled Die verkehrte Welt (i.e., “The Inverted World”) published in 1800, which is often cited as the model for Hegel’s discussion, obviously represents an inversion of the sensible world, not of the supersensible world, and is thus merely yet another version of the caricature of Hegel’s inverted supersensible world (the play begins with a “symphony”, the prologue is spoken by the Epilogue, the actors want to be spectators, the spectators want to rewrite the play etc. etc.). The correct interpretation and resolution of the conflict within the supersensible world is laid out at PS §§ 160–2/3, 130–133. PS § 162/3, 132–133 also contains a reference to Schelling’s principle of indifference and rejects it, not because it represents a caricature à la Tieck, but because it offers a mistaken solution to the conflict within the inverted supersensible world (see below).
- 89.
Cf. PR § 97: “The violation of the right qua right that has occurred exists, to be sure, positively, as an external fact which, however, is null and void in itself.”
- 90.
Miller translates “law completes itself into an immanent necessity” (PS § 161).
- 91.
Or if it does it would be revenge, not punishment. Revenge is the futile attempt to undo a crime. See Hegel’s discussion of revenge and punishment at PR §§ 97–103. Hegel had worked out his understanding of the self-subversive nature of the crime already during his time as headmaster in Nürnberg: see Nürnberger Schriften, WW 4 §§ 19–21.
- 92.
See E § 500: In the criminal deed “the agent … sets up a law – a law, however, which is nominal and recognized by him only – a universal which holds good for him, and under which he has at the same time subsumed itself by his action.” Allen Speight’s “corrigibilist” interpretation of agency in Hegel as developed in Speight 2001 nicely captures this phenomenon of an inverted inversion: the pretence to legitimacy of the criminal deed is subverted through “correctional” action, while the deed itself cannot be physically undone. Its inner meaning changes while its outer existence remains a fact.
- 93.
Evil, this suggest, is not contingent or accidental for Hegel, it is essential. It is the eternally negated but necessary and essential opposite of the good and the right.
- 94.
Cf. PR § 97A: “The criminal act is not a first, something positive, to which the punishment is joined as a negation; rather, it is something negative, such that the punishment is only the negation of a negation.”
- 95.
Also note that in Hegel’s architectonic of the philosophy of nature mechanics and physics, including the laws of motion and chemistry are followed by organics and the philosophy of the life sciences.
- 96.
Cf. Spinoza, Ethics II P 7.
- 97.
Cf. Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801) §§ 1, 9, 21, 22 (SW I 4, 114–129).
- 98.
“Urgegensatz” (SW I 3, 250); also „ursprünligcher Gegensatz“ (SW I 3, 251 footnote).
- 99.
Cf. SW I 3, 250: “But what, then, caused that primordial opposition to emerge from the universal identity of nature?” Hegel’s formulation at PS § 162/3, 132 directly echoes Schelling’s: “ ‘How, from this pure essence, how does difference or otherness issue forth from it?’ ” Through his use of quotation marks Hegel makes it clear that he literally mimics Schelling – only to dismiss the question as unnecessary “fretting” over a pseudo-problem.
- 100.
Cf. ibid.
- 101.
Cf. SW I 3, 251: “Both coexist necessarily; what is homogenous repels itself from itself only to the extent that the heterogeneous attracts itself, and the heterogeneous attracts itself only to the extent that the homogenous repels itself from itself.”
- 102.
See CPR B 422, footnote 3.
- 103.
- 104.
SW I 4, 114 (§ 1): “I call reason the absolute reason, or reason insofar as it is conceived of as the complete indifference of the subjective and the objective.”
- 105.
Hegel had also criticized this “Verstandes-Identität” as tautological and as a “one-sided abstract unity” in the 1801 Differenzschrift, although there his criticism had ostensibly been directed against Fichte only: cf. GW 4, 23–25.
- 106.
Hegel’s formulation suggests a Fichtean act of self-intuition: “Das Schauen des Inneren in das Innere [ist] vorhanden” (ibid.).
- 107.
For the thesis that all consciousness is representational, i.e. that there is no non-representational mental content and that consciousness’ relationship to the object is always subjectively mediated, see Hofmann, 2002.
- 108.
A hilarious example of such an inverted world (and perhaps a better one than the play by Tieck mentioned earlier) is Molière’s Amphytrion, a fireworks of paradoxical inversions of identity especially in the character of Sosias. Marivaux is also particularly good at this. Generally speaking, the era of the French enlightenment is full of plays of mistaken and inverted identities, often coupled with change of gender. Other examples of such duplications and inversions of reality such as Mozart’s Così fan tutte could easily be added to the list.
- 109.
At E § 79 Hegel refers to three aspects or moments of logical thought, viz. the abstractly rational or the aspect of the understanding, the dialectical or “negatively rational” and the “positively rational” which is also the speculative moment of thought.
- 110.
I am largely in agreement with Pippin’s construal of the dialectic in Pippin 1996 and his attempt to show that Hegel does not violate PNC (249–250). For other explanations of why Hegel employs but does not violate PNC see Hartmann 1973 and Wandschneider 1995. Hartmann’s explanation of the second negation as a limitative opposition has been neglected and should be rediscovered and discussed. I also find Robert Hanna’s interpretation of the dialectic very helpful and persuasive: see Hanna 1996.
- 111.
To this extent the argument in the inverted world episode is indeed a reductio, as Joseph C. Flay had argued, but it is only one part of the argument, one of the two red herrings that should not be pursued, the other being Schelling’s principle of indifference: see Flay 1970. To that extent, Siep’s comment on Flay in Siep 2000, 95, footnote 16, would need to be amended.
- 112.
Thematically, force is obviously one of the crucial concepts in modern metaphysics since Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. This metaphysics is a metaphysics of the understanding according to Hegel, and hence the chapter on Force and Understanding is also meant to analyze the significance of this category for the history of thought’s self-reflection.
- 113.
Hegel’s reference to Heraclitus here is only to be expected (cf. E § 88A). It was Heraclitus who for the first time dared to face the contradiction that contraries could be essential components of the identity of something and to declare this to be the universal truth.
- 114.
For this reason, I treat Becoming as a second stage in the dialectic, not as a regular synthesis of Being and Nothing despite some of Hegel’s own comments to the contrary.
- 115.
See SL 143–152/WdL I 132–142 and E § 95, including the Remark. The other important locus for studying Aufhebung in Hegel is the dialectic of something and an other (SL 117–129/WdL I 104–116).
- 116.
This is suggested by the language at SL 151–152/WdL I 141–142 where Hegel seems to treat the two moments as equipollent. We will see presently that this impression is corrected by passages such as the one in the Remark to E § 95.
- 117.
The structure of the totality is to be both limited and all-inclusive. It is the logical structure of Parmenides’ One as well (cf. KRS 252–253).
- 118.
§ 166/3, 137–138 in fact takes up the very same wording that Hegel had already used in § 84/3, 76–77.
- 119.
Cf. PS § 166/3, 137: “In this [relation of self to object] there is indeed an otherness; that is to say, consciousness makes a distinction, but one which at the same time is for consciousness not a distinction.”
- 120.
“Opposed to an other, the ‘I’ is its own self, and at the same time it overarches this other which, for the ‘I’, is equally only the ‘I’ itself,” Hegel adds and thus anticipates the formulation he will use later at the very beginning of the Encyclopedia Phenomenology (cf. E § 413).
- 121.
Hence Hegel’s appeal to religion as a representative of another truth beyond the domain of the “verifiable” (cf., e.g., SL 587–588/WdL II 225–226, SL 50/WdL I 31, E §§ 1, 12R, to mention just a few passages). SL 587–588/WdL II 225–226 in particular contrasts the reality and truth of the “fleeting and superficial phenomena of the world of sensuous particulars” with the truth represented by religion.
- 122.
See, for instance, his comment at E § 6 that agreement with experience is a criterion of philosophical truth: Philosophy’s “accord with actuality and experience is necessary. Indeed, this accord can be viewed as an outward touchstone, at least, for the truth of a philosophy ….”
- 123.
Indeed, the self-relatedness of the self must as yet emerge from the immersion of the self in its object – this being the reason why Hegel prefaces the famous confrontation of two self-consciousnesses in the struggle for recognition with the dialectical unfolding of the idea of life (the latter is best read in connection with Hegel’s analysis of the concept of organic life in the Organics chapter of the Philosophy of Nature).
- 124.
Cf. PS § 172/3, 143: In “the movement of Life itself” the “simple genus does not exist for itself qua this simple determination,” i.e. qua unity reflected into itself. Instead, “Life consists rather in being the self-developing whole which dissolves its development [i.e. the creation of individual members] and in this movement simply preserves itself” (PS § 171/3, 142).
- 125.
In Hegel’s words: “… only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it” (PS § 177/3, 144–145).
- 126.
The Encyclopedia version of the Phenomenology makes this connection more explicitly than does the Phenomenology: “Universal self-consciousness is the affirmative awareness of oneself in another self; each self as a free individuality has his own absolute independence, yet in virtue of the negation of its immediacy or desire it does not distinguish itself from the other. Each is thus universal self-consciousness and objective; each has genuine universality in the shape of reciprocity, so far as each knows itself to be acknowledged by the free other and is aware of this insofar as it acknowledges the other and knows it to be free. This universal re-appearance of self-consciousness … is the form in which the substance of all genuine spirituality becomes conscious of itself, i.e. the spirituality that is manifest in the family, the fatherland, the state as well as in all the virtues, in love, friendship, courage, honor, and glory” (E § 436, after Miller, with modifications; see also the Addition).
- 127.
- 128.
Note that in the Encyclopedia Hegel views the life-and-death struggle and the subsequent master-slave relationship as marking the transition from a Rousseauean state of nature into a semi-civil state: “… the fight for recognition pushed to the extreme here indicated can only occur in the natural state, where men exist only as single, separate individuals; but it is absent in civil society and the State because here the recognition for which the combatants fought already exists. For although the state may originate in violence, it does not rest on it” (E § 432A). And: “As regards the historical side of this [master-slave] relationship, it can be remarked that ancient peoples, the Greeks and Romans, had not yet risen to the Notion of absolute freedom, since they did not know that man as such, man as this universal ‘I’, as rational self-consciousness, is entitled to freedom. On the contrary, with them … freedom still had the character of a natural state” (E § 433A).
- 129.
PS § 191/3, 152: “The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal.”
- 130.
Cf. PS § 197/3, 155: “For the independent self-consciousness it is only the pure abstraction of the ‘I’ that is its essential nature, and, when it does develop its own differences, this differentiation does not become a nature that is objective and intrinsic to it. Thus this self-consciousness does not become an ‘I’ that … in this absolute differentiation remains identical with itself.”
- 131.
- 132.
Cf. E §§ 436–439.
- 133.
Cf. E §§ 464–468.
- 134.
It should be noted, however, that in their traditional meaning per se and kath’ hauto do not include the “inner difference”. They are supposed to be tautologically identical to themselves and hence suffer the fate of the atomic essences, as we saw in the chapter on Perception.
- 135.
Cf. E § 24A2: “Usually we call truth the agreement of an object with our representation of it. Thus we have an object as a presupposition, and our representation is supposed to conform to it. – In the philosophical sense, by contrast, truth means in general the agreement of a content with itself, to put it abstractly. Consequently, this is a meaning of truth entirely different from the one just mentioned. Incidentally, the deeper (i.e. philosophical) meaning of truth can already be found to some extent in the ordinary use of language. Thus, for instance, we speak of a true friend and mean by that someone whose way of acting conforms to the concept of friendship. Similarly, we speak of a true work of art. Untrue then means as much as bad, something in itself inadequate.”
- 136.
This seems to ignore that thought, reason, and spirit for Hegel also exist in nature as such, e.g. in the mechanics of the solar system, the chemistry of inorganic and organic compounds, the metabolism of the bioshpere, and the animal organism. These latter are, however, essentially the substrates of the living Idea rather than independent realities.
- 137.
The Phenomenology can therefore also be read as an account of the structures that are necessary for the comprehensive embodiment of spirit: see the illuminating study by John Russon, 1997.
- 138.
Miller also uses “to conceive figuratively” here (cf. PS § 197, p. 120).
- 139.
“These [sc. representationalist or referentialist] views on the relation of subject and object to each other express the determinations which constitute the nature of our ordinary, phenomenal consciousness; … as they bar the entrance to philosophy, [they] must be discarded at its portals” (SL 45/WdL I 25).
- 140.
Cf. Epictetus, Encheiridion I 1.
- 141.
See Kant, CJ V 209–211. A judgment of taste, says Kant, is “merely contemplative” and “indifferent” towards the existence or non-existence of the object.
- 142.
See Audi, 1995, s.v. skepticism.
- 143.
For a brief account of the three moments of the Notion or Concept see E § 163 (in the Geraets-Suchting-Harris translation singularity is used instead of individuality). The permutations of the three-fold syllogistic structure are illustrated in a helpful way at E § 198 with reference to the state.
- 144.
For other implicit references to Schleiermacher etc. see Falke 1996, 177–184.
- 145.
PS § 209/3, 165: “The Unchangeable that enters into consciousness is through this very fact at the same time affected by individuality ….” Moses’ meeting with God on Mount Sinai might be an appropriate allusion.
- 146.
Hegel speaks of an “immediately present One,” a One that has being (seiendes Eins, PS § 212/3, 167; modified).
- 147.
We may again be reminded of the logical configuration underlying the inverted world here.
- 148.
Hence the debates during the formative stages of Christian theology about the trinity and the true nature of Christ, in particular whether Christ was supposed to be essentially God himself (homoousios, same essence) or of the same nature as God but with a separate identity (homoiousios) or merely a human symbol of God (homoios, like or similar). Similarly, it needed to be determined whether the real person Jesus was entirely divine in nature (monophysitism) or of a dual essence (dyophysitism).
- 149.
PS § 212/3, 167: “By the nature of this immediately present unit, through the actual existence in which it has clothed itself, it necessarily follows that in the world of time it has vanished, and that in space it had a remote existence and remains utterly remote.”
- 150.
Kierkegaard may have found the paradox of faith analyzed here (and even more clearly at PS § 217/3, 168–170), but remained notoriously unhappy with Hegel’s solution (for Kierkegaard’s analysis see his Philosophical Fragments).
- 151.
Roughly, the answer to this question will be along the following lines: 1) “Consciousness” through “Spirit”: The immediate experience of consciousness of its gradual unification with spirit; 2) “Religion’: The concomitant reflective appropriation of this experience in the medium of representation; 3) “Absolute Knowing’: The resulting realization in thought of the identity of the immediate experience and its representational appropriation in religion. The result of the Phenomenology’s argument will thus be that the unification of consciousness’ finitude with spirit’s universality and infinity is first lived, then represented, and finally comprehended by thought.
- 152.
I am paraphrasing the last lines of the Second Article of the Creed in Luther’s Small Catechism.
- 153.
Cf. PS §§ 229–30/3, 175–177.
- 154.
I take it that Hegel attributes this stage of the unification of the transcendent and the finite to the Lutheran Reformation. If so, the birth of the scientific spirit of modernity is thus closely connected in Hegel’s mind with the this-wordly orientation of Luther’s spiritual revolution. Through faith, reason has been re-embodied in the world.
- 155.
See sections B and C, PS §§ 347 ff./3, 263 ff. and §§ 394 ff./3, 292 ff., respectively.
- 156.
“Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality; thus does idealism express its Notion” (PS § 233/3, 179).
- 157.
See also SL 755/WdL II 407–408.
- 158.
Teleological ground is Hegel’s translation of causa finalis: “ … by sufficient ground, Leibniz understood one that was also sufficient for this unity [of an existent being] and which therefore comprehended not merely [mechanical] causes, but final causes. … teleological ground is a property of the Notion and of mediation by the Notion, which is reason” (SL 446–447/WdL II 66). Hegel uses this expression to indicate the fact that what emerges at the end as the result of the dialectical process of derivation constitutes in truth the basis from which the derivation proceeds and to which it returns. Consequently, the progressive disclosure of new categories is in actuality the systematic reconstruction of their original unity.
- 159.
See the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (cf. PS §§ 582 ff./3, 431 ff., in particular §§ 587–92/3, 434–438).
- 160.
Descartes’ self-contained universe of moving bodies, Spinoza’s singular substance, and Leibniz’ attempt to show the compatibility of mechanistic and teleological causality in one systematically unified universe of monads may serve as examples.
- 161.
Cf. Leibniz, Monadology § 87.
- 162.
See LHP XX 122–156. See also Brinkmann, 1997.
- 163.
Referring to the interpretation of the cogito at Principles I 19, Hegel argues that “Descartes explains at once and explicitly that by “thinking” he understands consciousness in general and as such,” i.e. not just as this particular, individual consciousness (E § 76).
- 164.
Descartes famously claims that although he cannot comprehend the divine substance, he can still understand it and thus have a clear and distinct idea of it (cf. Meditations, Meditation Three, CSM II 32/AT VII 46 and footnote 1).
- 165.
“It is only the one-sided, spurious idealism that lets this unity again come on the scene as consciousness, on one side, confronted by an in-itself, on the other” (PS § 235/3, 181). E § 41, which we discussed in the previous chapter, echoes this earlier criticism. The Phenomenology likewise refers to Kant when it criticizes “empty idealism” for being in the same situation as (Humean) skepticism: It “fails equally … to bring together its contradictory thoughts of pure consciousness being all reality, while the extraneous impulse or sensations and ideas are equally [sc. deemed to be] reality. Instead of bringing them together, it shifts from one to the other, and is caught up in the spurious, i.e. the sensuous, infinite” (PS § 238/3, 184).
- 166.
Or again as the “pure category” (PS § 236/3, 183). The expression “the unity of apperception” does in fact occur at PS § 238/3, 184.
- 167.
Cf. De an. III 8, 432a 2 (nous eidos eidōn).
- 168.
For the definition of universal self-consciousness see E § 436.
- 169.
That the Reason chapter in the Phenomenology is an early version of what Hegel later in the Encyclopedia system calls “subjective spirit” is born out by sections such as §§ 344/3, 260–261, 356/3, 267–268, 357/3, 268–269. At § 356/3, 267 Hegel refers to spirit (which seems to be anticipated a bit too early at § 350/3, 264–265 under the title of substance) as being so far only an “inner abstraction,” i.e. the projection of subjective reason of what an objectively rational community of agents would be like.
- 170.
“Common cause” is the translation I suggest for Hegel’s “die Sache selbst.” In German, there are standard expressions such as “es geht mir/uns um die Sache selbst” (I am/we are concerned with the matter itself, i.e. not with some peripheral side-issue” or “nur die Sache selbst im Auge haben” (to focus exclusively on the matter at hand, and not, for instance, on some personal interest that may be involved as well).
- 171.
The reason is that the common cause is merely abstractly defined, “an abstract, universal reality lacking filling and content” (PS § 397/3, 294). The “deception” Hegel invokes at PS § 418/3, 309–310 has less to do with ill-intentioned individuals who play intrigues against each other for petty personal reasons. Deception is, rather, systemic at this level of individuated reason, because the universal can become actual only through being particularized and by benefiting the individual agents. Their disagreement about the good is inevitable.
- 172.
Hence the anticipation of the ethical world of spirit already at PS § 350/3, 264–265 (see footnote 169 above).
- 173.
I.e., the critique of Kant’s so-called formalism. It should be noted that Kant’s moral philosophy proper is critically targeted only much later in the Phenomenology, viz. in sub-sections “a. The moral view of the world” and “b. Dissemblance or duplicity.” The sub-section on reason as testing laws deals with the principle of universalizability as a criterion of the good generally. The chief example for Hegel’s critique is taken from a debate about distributive justice in the case of private property.
- 174.
See Groundwork, AA IV 405.
- 175.
Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel confirms this point by saying of the (Kantian) moral spirit that “it is immediate, like the ethical consciousness [sc. of the Ancients, or like Antigone’s] which knows its duty and does it …; but it is not character, as that ethical consciousness is …” (PS § 597/3, 442).
- 176.
Otherwise, it would be near impossible to explain why Hegel believes that changing one’s mind about whether to return or keep a deposit is not inconsistent with Kant’s moral theory but merely an “alteration of the point of view” that by itself is “not contradiction” (PS § 437/3, 322). Note that Hegel’s critique here is directed primarily at the Groundwork, not the later position in the Second Critique, the Metaphysics of Morals and the Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. For a recent succinct presentation of the fundamental ideas and principles of Kant’s practical philosophy, including his Anthropology and philosophy of history as well as the moral philosophy see Wood 2000. With this comprehensive approach, Wood sees a much better chance for Kant to escape the formalism critique.
- 177.
See again PS § 197/3, 156 and the contrast between thinking and representational thinking or “picture-thought” and our discussion above p. 163ff.
- 178.
Hence the interpretation of reality in terms of a teleological system in Observing Reason and of self-consciousness as an end in itself in the third subsection of Reason (cf. PS §§ 254 ff./3, 196 ff. and § 394/3, 292 f., § 401/3, 239 f.), respectively.
- 179.
Consequently, seeing in Hegel’s ethical life an institutional framework for a pluralistic normative discourse as does Pippin (in Pippin, 2000) while tempting is nonetheless problematic.
- 180.
One can and even should be critical of the lack of pluralism in Hegel’s ethical substance. In a sense, Hegel’s analysis of the self-destruction of the ethical world of the Ancients centers around such lack of pluralism. Still, Hegel continues to favor a monolithic and thus potentially fundamentalist or “ideological” interpretation of the unity of the modern state even later. The challenge posed by making Hegel’s political philosophy contemporary, so to speak, is obviously to try to combine his institutionally based organic model of political unity with the demands of a pluralistic society. It is a political community beyond (abstract) morality on the one hand and “Sittlichkeit” on the other.
- 181.
Note that in the Encyclopedia Hegel indicated that the “appearance of the underlying essence,” i.e. of the ethical substance, “may also be severed from that essence, and be maintained apart in worthless honor, idle fame etc.” (E § 436). It is this severance that is characteristic of Reason in the Phenomenology.
- 182.
For an interpretation of Hegel’s “developmental approach” that allows the individual agent a substantive, not only an accidental, role in the realization of freedom see again Pippin, 2000.
- 183.
This point is important for Hegel’s provocative thesis that from time to time the state needs to rally its citizens around itself through war since otherwise the natural fragmentation of society that encourages acquisition of private property and pursuit of personal well-being will erode the cohesion of the political community.
- 184.
“The ethical consciousness, because it is decisively for one of the two powers, is essentially character” (PS § 466/3, 343).
- 185.
According to Hegel, the characters of ancient Greek tragedy possess that ethical disposition that was absent in the sphere of Reason. The individual self-consciousness, “qua ethical consciousness, … is the simple, pure direction of activity towards the essentiality of ethical life, i.e. duty. In it there is no caprice and equally no struggle, no indecision, since the making and testing of law has been given up; on the contrary, the essence of ethical life is for this consciousness immediate, unwavering, without contradiction” (PS § 465/3, 342).
- 186.
Note that the concept of the highest good represents the consummation of the unification of the sensible with the noumenal in the idea of a happiness commensurate with moral worthiness.
- 187.
Kant admits that something honest may be achieved, and yet, strangely, what is honest is not good enough to be of moral worth (cf. Groundwork IV 397). I believe that Hegel’s critique of Kant’s conception of morality is largely valid, but this is not the place to defend it against its many critics. It all depends ultimately, however, on how stringent we want to make the requirements for moral goodness. If developing a good will means to acquire a holy will – as I think it does for Kant -, then there will be no moral acts done by humans. If moral goodness means something like Aristotelian practical wisdom combined with temperance, then our chances of achieving moral goodness at least occasionally will be much better.
- 188.
Cf. PS § 620/3, 456: “The postulate of the harmony of morality and reality [to be realized in the highest good] … is expressed … in the form: “Because moral action is the absolute purpose, the absolute purpose is, that there should be no such thing as moral action.’ ”
- 189.
“That consciousness is not in earnest about the perfection of morality is indicated by the fact that consciousness itself shifts it away into infinity, i.e. asserts that the perfection is never perfected” (PS § 622/3, 458).
- 190.
Incidentally, this sound much like the characterization of the relationship between individual and universal in the chapter on Reason. The difference, however, consists in the fact that the content of the individual’s ethical beliefs is now the ethical substance, not abstractly rational ad hoc principles. Also note the direct identification of Spirit with individual consciousness.
- 191.
On the role of conscience in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right see Brinkmann, 2003b, pp. 250–258.
- 192.
Cf. MM VI 401.
- 193.
Hegel does indeed develop a scenario in which the conscientious decisions of everyone would be accepted without question by everybody else and then shows that such a community of “moral geniuses” would soon degenerate into a state of total hypocrisy (cf. PS §§ 648–658/3, 477–484).
- 194.
For a reconstruction of the argument see Brinkmann, 2003b.
- 195.
Hegel’s “beautiful soul”. For the literary background to the chapter on Forgiveness see Speight, 2001, pp. 94–121.
- 196.
The reconciliation of the two selves consists and exists for Hegel essentially in an act of speech. It is through language in the sense of parole that forgiveness manifests itself and gains actuality (cf. PS § 667/3, 491). Hegel could make a good case for claiming to have been the first speech act theorist. Language in the sense of parole is “the existence of Spirit” or the existence of “self-consciousness for others, self-consciousness which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is universal” (PS § 652/3, 478–479).
- 197.
Note that at PS § 671/3, 493 the two consciousnesses are referred to as “these two self-certain Spirits” and “these Notions.”
- 198.
This formulation anticipates structurally the one in E § 6 according to which “it is the supreme and ultimate purpose of science to bring about the reconciliation of the reason that is conscious of itself with the reason that is, or actuality, through the cognition of this accord.” The fulfillment of this purpose is the goal of the Encyclopedia system as a whole. Consequently, Absolute Knowing, which achieves the same goal, is the foundation of the system (and of the idea of spirit), not just the foundation of the Logic.
- 199.
Miller’s translation uses “picture-thinking” for Vorstellen. As we explained earlier, what Hegel means by Vorstellen as a technical term is the common philosophical conception of a referentiality of thought where thinking is supposed to relate to a mind-independent reality which is typically assumed to be represented by some mental content or other, be it a Cartesian or Lockean “idea”, a Kantian Vorstellung or some representational mental content as in contemporary philosophy of mind. The important point is that “representational thinking” for Hegel captures the idea of a relationship between some mental content on one hand and a reality or object “out there” on the other.
- 200.
See, for instance, PS § 130/3, 105: “The sophistry of perception seeks to save these [conflicting] moments [of a being-for-self which is also not a being-for-self] from their contradiction, and it seeks to lay hold on the truth, by distinguishing between the aspects, by sticking to the “Also” and the “in so far”, and finally, by distinguishing the “unessential” aspect from an “essence” which is opposed to it. But these expedients, instead of warding off deception … prove themselves on the contrary to be quite empty ….”
- 201.
For instance, the Logic is organized in such a way that the Logic of Being is supposed represent the Notion in-itself, the Logic of Essence the Notion for-itself, and the Logic of the Notion the Notion in and for itself (cf. E § 83). But each lower triad down to the elementary dialectical triad of, say, in-itself, being-for-another, and their unity called determination in the triad titled “Something and an Other” (cf. SL 117–20/WdL I 104–107) exhibits the same structure.
- 202.
To reconstruct an exact parallel between the sequence within these two moments of spirit might nonetheless be difficult, a difficulty due in part, I assume, to the initial “work in progress” character of the Phenomenology.
- 203.
For a different explanation of this reversal of the order of precedence see J. Heinrichs’ succinct analysis of the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology in Heinrichs 1974, 473–476. Heinrichs does not seem to capture the significance of the next step in the argument, however, which we will discuss presently when he calls it a “repeated interpretation” and a “recapitulation” of the reconciliation through the act of forgiveness in PS §§ 795–6/3, 579–582. This does not detract, however, from Heinrichs’ superior analysis of the Phenomenology as a whole as well as its concluding chapter.
- 204.
A good way to illustrate what Hegel means by the representational aspect of religion is to recall that Christian faith, for instance, is inherently eschatological. That is to say, the faithful knows that he or she has eternally been redeemed, that his or her sins have eternally been forgiven, and that they can be eternally assured of God’s benevolence, and yet he or she believes that the real redemption is still outstanding, that it has still to happen, that there will be a Second Coming of Christ and a Judgment Day at the end of time. In other words, an element of the opposition of consciousness, of an outstanding, but expected fulfillment that would be the real event, is still present. For Hegel, such representational thinking is a sign that what has actually occurred has not yet been fully comprehended.
- 205.
Hegel develops this interpretation at PS §§ 795–796/3, 579/82.
- 206.
Angelica Nuzzo has pointed out that absolute knowing is a cognitive structure and that the absoluteness here at play is epistemological, not metaphysical. Absolute knowing is knowledge as the “absolute modality of philosophical knowledge”: see Nuzzo, 2003, p. 286, p. 277.
- 207.
This explains why Hegel understands the Cartesian thinking self that identifies with itself in an act of reflection essentially as a precursor of the standpoint of absolute knowing. The same holds mutatis mutandis for Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and Fichte’s absolute I. The self-referentiality of the Notion may also be discovered in Aristotle’s noesis noeseos, albeit with the qualification that despite its self-referentiality Aristotle’s Prime Mover is substance, not subject.
- 208.
As Hegel comments elsewhere (E § 377), this is an expansion of the philosophical maxim gnothi seauton – Know thyself! – of the Ancients, enriched by the idea that such knowledge can be obtained only by appropriating what appears to be the externality of consciousness, i.e. the mind-independent world.
- 209.
Cf. E § 213R, § 213A; E 24A2. Again, it is important to emphasize that the object correspond to its concept – not just to my representation or idea of it.
- 210.
Hegel’s dialectic will account for this difference by subjecting each synthesis to a completeness test with a view to its intrinsic determinacy (see Section 4.5 below).
- 211.
Cf. Aristotle, Phys. II 2: “For a man owes his birth to another man and to the sun” – and not as Plato perhaps suggests in the Republic’s Sun simile, to the sun alone.
- 212.
As Hegel also does: see PS § 801/3, 584.
- 213.
We will take up this issue again in our concluding reflections in the next chapter. Hegel will thus come even closer to the changeless Parmenidean One.
- 214.
It should be noted that what is being annulled here is not finite temporality itself, but only the fact that it is constitutive of the evolution of the concept of spirit. For a discussion of these final reflections on time and the Notion and a reference to the celebrated interpretations it has received from Kojève and Heidegger and in recent scholarship, see Baptist, 1998.
- 215.
Hegel hints at this new self-externalization towards the end of the Phenomenology in somewhat enigmatic terms and even indicates the tripartite structure of the system: “The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the externalization in which Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening, intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being in Space. This latter becoming of Spirit, Nature, is its living immediate Becoming; Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal externalization of its continuing existence and the movement which reinstates the Subject ” (PS § 807/3, 590, modified after Miller). Note the phrase “eternal externalization.” It seems to point in the direction of the later conception of the relationship of temporality and the Notion.
- 216.
Again, the reader will recall that the Phenomenology itself already started “this side” of the opposition of consciousness, just not for consciousness, only “for us”.
- 217.
Cf. E §§ 85, 112 R, 213 R.
- 218.
In his indispensable study of 1974 J. Heinrichs had attempted to unearth the logical skeleton of the Phenomenology in the light of the Jena System. It is questionable, however, whether Hegel thought that even the fundamental logical determinations of the later Science of Logic were in some sense already prefigured in the Phenomenology. That a number of basic categories are at play in the 1807 work is, however, beyond question. The issue is whether anything like the structural organization of the later Logic can be detected in the Phenomenology. I may be allowed to set this question aside here.
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Brinkmann, K. (2011). The Argument of the Phenomenology . In: Idealism Without Limits. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3622-3_3
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