Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Introductory Remarks:  The Spirit of the Times

G.W.F. Hegel's most important work is Phenomenology of Spirit [Phänomenologie des Geistes], published in 1807.  The current title only became the definitive title after it was used in posthumous editions of Hegel’s works, starting in 1832.  Hegel’s actual title was System of Science:  Part One, the Phenomenology of Sprit.  Geist (“spirit” or “mind”) is the central concept of the book; in fact, the whole work may be conceived as an attempt to scientifically ascertain the nature of Geist.  In his justifiably famous Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel wrote “the way to Science is itself already Science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness” (Preface, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford U. Press, 1977, p. 56). 

Although Hegel’s writing style can be ponderous and theoretically knotted, nonetheless — among philosophers — Hegel’s Phenomenology is widely recognized to be one of those rare, watershed moments in the history of philosophy.  Readers new to Hegel should realize that the Phenomenology was written when Hegel was only thirty-six years old.  More significantly, Hegel struggled to complete the book hastily and under pressure, as Napoleon’s army swept across Europe.  In October 1806, just a few days before his publisher’s deadline — and on the day before the Battle of Jena — Hegel watched as Napoleon himself rode through the city:

I saw the Emperor — this world-soul — riding out of the city on reconnaissance.  It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it […] this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire. (from Hegel’s letter to Niethammer, 13 Oct. 1806)

For Hegel, Napoleon signified the birth of a new world.  Scholars have compared the philosophical significance of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy to the French Revolution.  If we take this comparison seriously, then — in its significance for the history of philosophy — Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit might be compared to Napoleon’s audacious consolidation and dissemination of the democratic ideals of the French Revolution.  Along these lines, Hegel argues that Absolute Spirit (absoluter Geist) is disclosed in and through the development of human freedom in world history. 

Overview:  the Nature of Geist

As Hegel wrote in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right, a philosophy is a product of its time, and it is in and through philosophy that an age becomes accessible to reason.  If the philosopher attempts to transcend his/her time, this effort leads only to the vague and ambiguous, “soft element” of imagination and ungrounded opinion. 

For Hegel, the essence of Spirit/Mind is freedom.  All thought is purposive — or goal-oriented — and the purpose of Geist is to actualize its essential freedom.  But there is opposition or alienation between Spirit’s (free) essence and Spirit’s (unfree) existence in the world.  The development of the Phenomenology — as well as the development of world history (according to Hegel) — revolves around the effort to overcome this alienation between the essence of Geist and its existence.  Hegel’s Phenomenology involves a philosophy of redemption: rational beings transfigure their existence and actualize their freedom through retrospective self-knowledge.  Or, to give this a further push in the direction of Christian theology, self-alienated subjective spirit overcomes its alienation by dying to itself and being reborn. 

Moreover, freedom can only be actualized — that is, achieved and understood — in a dialectical way.  The process of freedom’s development thus comes into view in and through the relations between the individual life (subjective spirit) and the social order (Sittlichkeit, interpersonal ethical life).  Absolute Spirit realizes itself only in and through the evolution of both subjective spirit and interpersonal ethical life.  That is, the totality actualizes its potential and realizes its truth in the process of its own self-development.  In brief, the whole encounters itself in the form of an object, and comes to know itself in the process of knowing this object:

The notion of Geist [...] is the lineal descendant of the Kantian Transcendental Unity of Self-consciousness and of the Absolute Ego of Fichte and Schelling.  It also claims a collateral source in the Aristotelian nous  which, in knowing the form of an object, thereby knows itself, and which, in its highest phases, may be described as a pure thinking upon thinking.   J.N. Findlay, Foreword, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971) pp. viif.

In sum, the self-becoming of the whole is achieved insofar as it retroactively re-determines its own content, and this content is nature, which is the presupposition of human consciousness.  The totality returns to itself from the otherness of nature in and through human subjectivity, insofar as the Absolute is both Substance and Subject.  Beginning with Geist at the level of sense perception, Hegel traces the development of Spirit through the encounter with paradox, the conflict between the individual and society, and all of the typical confusions, subversions, doubts and reconciliations that are inherent to the development of intellect.  All of this indicates how Hegel’s Phenomenology is not only a science of consciousness, but also a theory of reality, a theory of knowledge, and a philosophy of history. 

Geist as Dialectical Development

Again, this development of Absolute Spirit as self-thinking thought is not above or beyond the cosmos in some ideal realm: the Absolute does not have a separate existence, in a “transcendental” realm of pure Spirit.  Instead of this, the absolute is nothing but the essence actualizing itself through the very process of its own development:

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, I have exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing.  “The path of this movement goes through every form of the relation of consciousness to the object and has the Notion [Begriff] of science for its result." (G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction, Science of Logic Amherst, NY:  Humanities Books, 1969, p. 48)

The development of Absolute Spirit has three aspects or phases: 

1. As self-relation:  Spirit has within it the ideal totality; this is Subjective Spirit in its self-contained freedom. 

2. As reality:  this is Objective Spirit, which is Spirit realized in the form of the cosmic object or universe.  In the cosmos, freedom appears in the mode of necessity. 

3. As a union or dialectical synthesis of subject and object. This is Absolute Spirit (cf. Phenomenology, §385). 

The Absolute Spirit is both Substance and Subject, and its nature cannot be defined abstractly, that is, apart from finite — and contingent — things and relations:

While Hegel undoubtedly thought that the sequence of thought-phases described in the Phenomenology — phases experienced by humanity in the past and recapitulated by Hegel in his own thought-adventures up to and including his own advance to the position of Science in about 1805 — was a necessary sequence, still he did not think it the only possible necessary sequence or pathway to Science, and certainly not the pathway to Science that would be taken by men in the future, or that might have been taken in other cultural and historical settings.  For Hegel makes plain [...] that he does not confuse the necessary with the unique, that he does not identify a necessary sequence of phases with the only possible sequence that can be taken. (J.N. Findlay, Foreword, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. vf.)

The truth disclosed by Hegel’s science of interpersonal Spirit is a union (or identity) of the individual and the specific with the universal.  But in this regard, it is crucial to realize that, for Hegel, union or identity is always identity-in-difference.  This inherent negativity is, for Hegel, the spirit of all natural and intellectual life.  All identity is thus inherently “contradictory”, insofar as inner negativity or inconsistency is the source of all dialectical development.  Because both thoughts and things have internal contradiction, what anything “is” inherently involves what it is not:

Dialectic is, in fact, a richer and more supple form of thought-advance than mathematical inference [...]; dialectic always makes higher-order comments upon its various thought-positions, stating relations that carry us far beyond their obvious content.  What is obvious, for example, in Being is not its identity with Nothing, and what is obvious in Sense-certainty is not its total lack of determinateness.  (J.N. Findlay, Foreword, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. vf.)

A philosophical idea, for example, does not stand alone; rather, an idea is meaningful only in the full context of its historical development: apart from this context, the idea cannot be evaluated or understood.  In an isomorphic way, an individual human life cannot be understood apart from its evolutionary and environmental aspects, as well as the political, economic, and social conditions of its existence.  In sum, both knowing and being are dialectical.  To relate this Hegelian insight to contemporary continental philosophy and psychoanalysis (both of which have been strongly influenced by Hegel), the subject of the enunciated must be distinguished from the subject of the enunciation, even though each of these can only be analyzed in relation to the other. 

Ontology involves metaphysical inquiry into the nature of being and nonbeing, becoming and changing phenomenal appearances.  The Platonic ideas — as forms of being — opened up both phenomena and empirical generalizations for speculative, dialectical reason.  With reference to Plato’s famous “Divided Line” (Plato’s Republic, 509d-513e), Hegel argues that reason — in opposition to the understanding — develops the dialectic of notions or concepts (Begriffe), and articulates the contradictory movement of notions into each other, into that which they are not.  Along these same lines, the Hegelian notion is always already an ontological concept.  This explains why Hegel insists that phenomena must be brought to their notion, otherwise the phenomena remain begrifflos, "without notion".  In other words, apart from the notion, the ontological status of phenomena remains unclarified.  This indicates how the Hegelian universal differs from an empiricist generalization.  The Hegelian notion (Begriff) is not derived from common features of real, empirical individuals.  As opposed to this, for Hegel the universal implies a totality of negative relations of difference, in the form of a whole which realizes itself in and through the empirical. 

The nature of Geist is to be this totalizing movement that presupposes its purpose as its end.  In other words, Subjective Spirit makes itself what it becomes: a subject is that which freely chooses — in a retroactive, revisionary way — what it always already was to be.  At any point in this process of dialectical development, unrealized potential from the past may be re-discovered and actualized. 

Hegel argues that not only Spirit, but existence too, is this totalizing, redemptive movement.  The structure of the totality is such that the whole is in each part.  Each part of reality, and each term in the system of thought, implicates all others.  And insofar as the definition — and existence — of any unity is constituted only through relations of difference with all others, any one may be viewed from the perspective of the other.  And when considered apart from the totality of its dialectical relations of difference, any one aspect or term is void of significance and cannot exist. 

A careful reading of Hegel thus makes it clear that in Hegelian triadic “synthesis” opposites are not homogenously blended in a way that effaces their difference.  On the contrary, insofar as the universal inherently involves negativity, it is clear that for Hegel “synthesis” involves the positing of difference as such.  To put this in contemporary philosophical terms, synthesis is inherently disjunctive.  And, as already indicated, this Hegelian conception of universality as negative runs counter to empiricist accounts of knowing and existence.  In order to understand the Hegelian notion or concept (Begriff), the most difficult thing for those of us trained in the Anglo-American approach to philosophy is to first forget about empirical generalizations or the nominalist use of the term.  For Hegel, the philosophical notion is universal; it is not merely an empirical generalization. 

As Hegel himself remarks, the word is the murder of the thing, in that the very symbolic representation of a thing mortifies it.  Moreover, the universal cannot be understood to be merely the neutral “container” of its species.  The notion is not strictly distinguished from objects, since the notion is constitutive of objects.  The distinction between an object and a concept (which represents, qualifies, or signifies that object) can neither be rigorously maintained nor entirely dispensed with; the distinction between a concept and an object is itself a conceptual distinction.  Moreover, the notion is not defined in isolation, but only through relations of difference with others, and also in relation to phenomenal objects.  Hegel discusses both the historically contingent as well as the universal notions (Begriffe).  The universal notions that are disclosed in empirical developments are ultimately shown to be aspects of a network that has the character of an organic unity. 

From the standpoint of the understanding (Verstand), general representations are merely determinations made by the understanding, which must be conceived separately and which have no existence, since only individuals exist.  The illusion of the understanding is its presumption that all categories of reason are nothing more than a self-enclosed frame of conceptual representations, and that to make them truly “alive”, you have to add something.  This defect in the understanding is overcome by reason (Vernunft).  In opposition to the understanding, reason discloses concepts as truly universal, that is, as defined only in relation to one another — in a negative way — in and through a totality of differential relations.  Reason discloses conceptualization itself as a constituent of phenomenal objects.  Conceptualizing in this sense is something concrete, not abstract.  The Hegelian notion or concept (Begriff) is thought itself, in its totality of differential relations.  In this sense — and contra Aristotle — the inherent negativity of the notion is the only “prime mover” of dialectical development. 

What does this mean? There is a structural tension between the universal and the particular, such that each particular one is a perspective on the whole.  Any one (when it is considered entirely according to itself) is an empty void (cf. Plato’s Parmenides).  What any particular is — its very existence — is thus determined in an oppositional way, through relations of difference with all others.  Since each particular is atypical, none of the particular “instantiations” of the universal notion ever fully actualizes the meaning of the universal.  In such ways, Hegel takes into account the moment of sheer contingency in nature, history, and thought.  Because of this contingency (cf. the Aristotelian dunamis, or “potentiality”), no universal can completely and consistently “totalize” its particulars.  Along these lines, Hegelian concrete universality does not reduce the universal to the particular.  On the contrary — as several recent commentaries on Hegel have shown — concrete universality refers us to the excessive moment of inconsistency/negativity at the heart of the universal.  There is a moment of antagonism or internal inconsistency at the heart of any unity.  Again, the one as such is internally inconsistent, and this inherent negativity is the primum movens of dialectical development:

In order, then, that in this complete void, which is even called the holy of holies, there may yet be something, we must fill it up with reveries, appearances, produced by consciousness itself. (Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 88f.)

In Hegelian dialectics — as in Plato’s Parmenides — the space of the (inconsistent) totality is the space between the abstract whole and the particular details that elude its grasp. 

To summarize, sensuous perception is particular knowledge, while the introduction of external determinations is understanding (Verstand).  Universal knowledge, however, is reason (Vernunft).  The true is concrete, and philosophy has its being in that universality which encloses the particular within it, i.e. in the universality of the notion (Begriff).  The fully concrete universality is the Idea (die Idee), defined in a negative way in and through the totality of differential relations.  Hegel’s Phenomenology traces the development of intellect from the abstract universality of the understanding (Verstand), to the notion, which includes reason (Vernunft) as an aspect of the universal.  The content of reason is developed toward the full, concrete universality of the Idea, through which the notion is seen to be a moment of the absolute Geist.  This absolute Spirit is then shown to a self-developing, self-relating totality of differential relations. 

Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. […]   But essence that is in and for itself, and which at the same time actual as consciousness and aware of itself, this is Spirit. (Phenomenology of Spirit § 438, p. 263)

Conclusion:  Reason in History

Hegel coined the term Zeitgeist, “the spirit of the times”, and our postmodern Zeitgeist involves cynicism regarding progress.  We are relativists who believe that everything about thinking is historically contingent, in other words, accidental and relative to its time.  But Hegel recognized that relativism too is historically contingent: it is a phase through which thinking passes now and again.  Plato, Kant, and (in his own way) Hegel, were all struggling against the relativism that was fashionable in their times.  Hegel describes how ideals function in human activity.  Ideals are cultural phenomena that develop historically; philosophers build theories, testing and refuting ideals in the dialectical struggle to attain the truth.  A moral principle, for example, has its significance and its application in relation to other principles: considered entirely according to itself, apart from its context, it would be empty.  As a guide for decision and action, a rule becomes determinate insofar as it is embedded in a particular situation and defined in relation to other rule.  Moreover, the nexus of rules itself implies “meta-rules” which indicate how and when to apply a rule. 

This indicates how Hegel’s antidote to relativism is itself thoroughly historical. 

There is a kind of universality that is negative; the universal is not an ideal in the sense of some “positive” content that is always implicit to any system of thought.  On the contrary: the universal is a kind of opposition or antagonism around which ever-changing, thoroughly contingent, historical constellations of thought circle and revolve.  Hegelian dialectics should thus be conceived as a process without a Cartesian “thinking substance”, insofar as the dialectic always revolves around a negative differential:

if Hegel’s system is rightly described as one of absolute idealism or spiritualism, it is also rightly described as one of dialectical materialism: it is in fact the true dialectical materialism of which the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels may be said to be an incompetent, amateur travesty. (J.N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1970, p. 132).

Again, Hegel associates this internal contradiction or “abstract negativity” with freedom, and asserts it to be the only first mover of the dialectical development of thought and existence.  The reconciliation of the universal and the individual is not in some “higher” synthesis that mediates the thesis and the antithesis.  Instead, dialectical analysis reveals that what the universal and the individual share is the very split or ontological difference that runs through both of them. 

According to the hackneyed interpretation of Hegelian dialectics that still predominates in some circles, Hegel presumed to overcome all differences in a system of complete rational synthesis, or “Absolute Knowledge”.  There is, in Hegel, a tension between rationalism as opposed to conflict and contradiction.  But the crucial point is that Hegel locates this very tension within reason itself.  So when reason struggles to overcome contradiction and antagonism, it is fighting against itself, against a deep and ineradicable split that is inherent to rationality.  There is a moment of unreason that is constitutive of reason, and this is why when reason fights its “opposite” it is struggling against itself.  Reason for Hegel essentially involves the excess of madness (cf. the famous “night of the world” passage from the Jenaer Realphilosophie manuscripts). 

In Hegel’s time, Kant had already demonstrated that being is not a predicate; that is, that existence cannot be reduced to the conceptual properties of entities.  Kant recognized the futility of any attempt to completely define what it is that any concept signifies.  Kant bequeathed to his German Idealist followers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) a notion of subjectivity as a dialectical split or emptiness.  But whereas Kant’s approach to freedom implied that subjectivity involves immediate access to subjectivity as thing-in-itself, Hegel’s approach to subjectivity never implies this movement from the phenomenal to the noumenal.  Instead, Hegelian dialectic grapples with the problem of how — within being — phenomena, or appearances, ever arise as such.  Kant emphasizes the ontological difference between phenomena (things for us) and noumena (things in themselves). Hegel, however, explicitly denies the existence of noumena, and re-introduces the difference throughout both phenomenal existence and even thought itself.  If we only have access to appearances, how could the term “appearance” as such have meaning, since there is nothing that is not an appearance?  This is Hegel’s problematic, and he highlights the moment of fundamental negativity that prevents any fully-realized dialectical synthesis.  

But although Hegel explicitly denies that there is any noumenal reality outside of or behind phenomenal appearances, this in no way implies that the concept/notion “contains” all reality inside itself.  Instead of reducing all of existence to thought (or all of thought to existence), Hegel metastasizes the very difference between thought and existence throughout both of them.  The Hegelian “negation of the negation” thus does not involve any return to positive identity.  Sublation (Aufhebung) — as the negation of negation — results in an affirmation that is different from the affirmation that was originally negated. 

The Hegelian dialectical process never culminates in any full synthesis that encompasses and neutralizes all difference.  Instead, Hegel makes thematic a fundamental negativity that prevents any complete dialectical synthesis by showing that any unification or synthesis is disrupted from within by an inconsistency/differential that proves to be essential to the very concept in question.  Subject and object are inherently mediated, so that any “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always already reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself.  Hegelian dialectics does not attempt to resolve all antagonism and efface all difference.  On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that dialectic is the very shifting movement between opposed perspectives.  The famous (or infamous) Hegelian Absolute Knowledge thus involves the insight that that there is no neutral “perspective of all perspectives” outside of or beyond the subject’s position of enunciation.  

In sum, the self-becoming of the whole is achieved insofar as subjective Spirit retroactively re-creates — in relation to evolving social orders — its own potentiality.  In his emphasis on the abstract negativity of freedom, as well as the retroactive moment inherent to dialectical development, Hegel effectively reinvents the Aristotelian progress from potentiality to actuality.  As several recent treatments of Hegelian dialectic have shown, Hegel reintroduces the openness or potentiality of the present into the already-completed actuality of the past.  Negativity is not reduced to a passing moment in the self-mediating process of dialectical synthesis.  Hegel’s Phenomenology preserves the difference, and posits the difference as such, and this negativity attests to the freedom of the subject.  In such ways, philosophical truth arises as a dialectically-articulated scientific system.  Philosophical dialectic exposes the inherent, structural moment of negativity that drives sensuous knowledge towards science.  Philosophy embodies this constitutive negativity insofar as freedom drives the dialectical process of development.