Phenomenology of Spirit

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

The Phenomenology is quite possibly the best work of philosophy ever put to paper. It’s also the bane of many a philosophy grad due to its complexity. Hegel is difficult, sure, but I can’t imagine reading anything other than Miller’s translation aside from the original German. Findley’s notes at the end are fantastic for reading comprehension (but do yourself a favor and don’t treat them as a crux, this is a text to be savored and thoroughly worked through on its own terms). Kant’s first critique and the Phenomenology are the gateway to understanding modern thought. In the Anglo-American world, Kant has clearly been more influential, and Hegel has always been considered “the continental”, solely for Germans and the French. Readers and students who deny themselves this, though, are doing themselves a disservice and missing out on half of our rich philosophical tradition. Regardless of what you hear, work through the preface, On Scientific Cognition, first. He overviews his whole system with the qualification that the true is both substance, the objective, stuff, a bone, and subject, the subjective, the self. Absolute idealism means just this: we do not interact with things, objects, but our ideas of those objects. When I take something as my object, I’m taking my understanding of it, my ideas, a photocopy made of pure thought. That is, I AM MY IDEAS and I exist insofar as I partake in acts of mind. I aim at the object, a glass of water, to quench thirst, but what I find, through Aufhebung (sublation) is my own metaphysical lack, that I exist insofar as I require water. I have thus changed, my understanding of the object qua object has changed, and my understanding of myself qua subject has changed. I AM NOW A DIFFERENT SUBJECT BECAUSE MY OBJECT HAS SHIFTED. I desire to know more about myself, but I see how my nature is to always direct my focus outside of myself for self-completion. This is the dialectic, going outside, coming back, learning, going out again. It’s process, not a “thing”, a ready-to-hand instruction. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing is actually Fichte, a predecessor of Hegel’s, and while he refers to it several times, Hegel would warn against trying to collapse his work (or any body of philosophical knowledge) into a particular, fixed, determination. The dialectic is everything. Also, all the conspiracy theory stuff is insane antisemitic propaganda. Hegel’s a philosopher’s philosopher, not a boogeyman for people whose worldview is motivated by a deep terror of anything that doesn’t look and behave exactly like them.

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

Good

精神現象学の邦訳を、より理解するために英訳版を二冊参考にしています。ひとつはＪ・Ｂ・Baillieです。バイリーの訳はどちらかというと現代英語的な感じで、これはこれで文意がとりやすいので悪くはないと思いますが、原書に忠実という点になると、やや古典的な英文ながらこのMillerの本を推薦したいと思います。ドイツ語版で勉強するのがベストでしょうが、邦訳と対称しながら読むときにその正確さを実感します。パラグラフごとに番号がつけてあり、さらに巻末にはAnalysis(分析）として、訳者による要約的なコメントがパラグラフごとに付けられているという点でも充実していると思います。

Are you sick of the feeling that you're beginning to grasp the nature of reality? If your answer is "yes," then this book is for you! Have you found yourself thinking: "the world makes sense, I totally get it now." Well, my dear sweet summer child, you get nothing. Yes, nothing. My man Hegel here is going to shatter all the things you hold as true and good into tiny little shards of your broken dreams. "What's this master-slave dialectic? I've read so much about?" you ask. Again, I don't mean to shatter your already delicate disposition, but the 'master-slave dialectic' is your life--in case I'm not being clear, you're the slave, Donny Lord-Emperor Cheeto is one of the lords. Remember Marx? Yeah, Marx was Hegel's boy. Freud? Yeah, that's Hegel too. <Insert a Literary Theorist or Philosopher's Name Here> is drawing his/her/xer/they inspiration directly from the work of Hegel. "Wow, that's incredible," you say. "I'm going to read this book right now!" So... here's the problem. Hegel is freaking hard, like FREAKING hard. I'd start with Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel." And, before you ask, yes, there is a book about learning how to read Hegel. Many smart people have spent their whole lives trying to dig meaning from Hegel's prosaic prose, most of them fail. Best of luck my young padawan, you're going to need it. May the fourth be with you.

Llegó rápido y en excelentes condiciones, recomendadisimo!

Front cover curls up, and has a thin plastic glossy coat that is coming off. DO NOT BUY THIS!!!