To Read Hegel vol. 1

To Read Hegel

Part 1

Robbert A. Veen @ 2009 All rights reserved

The Structure of Hegel's Philosophy and the Idea of the Phenomenology of Spirit

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Robbert Veen

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Foreword Let me start by saying what you will not find in this volume. I will not provide you with any references to Hegel's biography, historical circumstances or dealings with other philosophers. Not only because this has been done before - Pinkard's excellent work on Hegel treats the philosophy as well as the man as did Rosencrantz before him in his volumes on Hegel and the State - but because Hegel himself warns us in the opening paragraph of the Preface to the Phenomenology, that all of this is superfluous in understanding the nature of the concept.

In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries.

In this series under the title "To Read Hegel" I will do exactly that: read Hegel and show you what I found. This first volume of the series is devoted to the Phenomenology, especially its position within Hegel's philosophy as a whole, and I will try to give you an understanding of its method. In a summary of the Phenomenology I will try to outline the whole of the work, providing a road map for what lies ahead. Much of this work was already available on the internet, with the exception of the final essay on Substance and Subject that was especially written for this volume. - R.A. Veen, the Netherlands

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1. Why Do We Still Need to Read Hegel?

Summary Hegel can be read in order to improve one's skills at interpreting difficult philosophical texts, to improve one's own understanding of the world and to appreciate much of modern philosophy that is in dialog with him. To understand Hegel one needs a "voice" that can provide the necessary context for deciphering Hegel's sometimes obscure ways of thinking.

A personal response You can make a delicate and complex argument why it is necessary to understand Hegel's philosophy. You can write about the importance of his logic, his dialectics, to the understanding of human communication and social institutions. You can show elaborately how Hegel was the first to understand the nature of modern society, and construct a critical position on current issues from his philosophy of right. And even though we have found Hegel to be incorrect in many of his positions on the natural sciences and history - he found no room e.g. Žfor the concept of biological evolution1 - the way he constructed a philosophy of nature and the history of the Spirit is still exemplary in many ways.

Even if you cannot accept Hegel's approach and findings, it's still a good 1

Apparently however he did understand the necessary "reflective" character of chemical processes long before these were discovered to be essential for the understanding of biology, in what we now know as the capacity of DNA molecules to replicate themselves.

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thing to know about him anyway, because so many contemporary philosophers have taken his insights as a starting point. Slavoj ŽiŞek is certainly the best known of them in the present - he compared his relationship to Hegel, with that of Martin Luther to St. Paul - but you could also mention Jacques Derrida, Vittorio HÜssle and many others.

The complexity of Hegel is fascinating What makes Hegel so fascinating? I am not ashamed to say that I became obsessed with Hegel because it takes so much time and effort to understand him. It would seem that the complexity of his work and sometimes even the obscurity can be fascinating on a personal level, but that in itself is not very inviting. To me personally however it was and still is quite true. The art of interpreting a philosophical text reaches its highest level in the case of Hegel's writings.

All of the labor that you need to put in to understanding Hegel has however also a solid revenue. Understanding Hegel is always accompanied by an improved understanding of the world, our culture and ourselves. One might disagree with him in every respect, but you get the feeling that nothing is overlooked. It's dazzling. Everything is there. There is hardly any original thought that we have, that Hegel did not anticipate, formulate and showed to be inadequate. Some people, especially in the Dutch tradition of neo-Hegelianism, didn't even try to be original. Philosophy to them meant rewriting and editing Hegel, applying the system to new problems. "Understanding Hegel means understanding that he cannot be 8

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surpassed," said German philosopher Richard Kroner in the 1920s. That goes even beyond the famous dictum that the entire history of philosophy consists of nothing but footnotes to Plato.

It doesn't mean that Hegel is the only philosopher one should read. I have read Plato, Aristotle, Thomas and Kant extensively, and I try to keep up with contemporary philosophy as well. I always had a special interest in the Jewish philosophy of Martin Buber, Immanuel Lévinas and Emil Fackenheim. I like reading Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, Agamben and Žižek. And lately I had a renewed interest in English philosophy: Locke, Hume but also Rawls and others. I am indebted to all of them. But none of them have pages that are so delightfully complex, so cramped with obscure brilliance as Hegel's.

Understanding the world better All of these arguments however remain rather superficial. If philosophy is about understanding the world, then the only good reason for reading Hegel must be that he makes us understand the world better than anybody else. Ultimately there is no fun in interpreting texts just for the heck of it.

Now does he do that? I think there are at least three basic principles in Hegel's philosophy that we need in our contemporary efforts.

First of all, though mostly misunderstood, we need to understand Hegel's thesis about the identity of the concept and its reality. It is badly misunderstood if we just take that as a statement of principle by itself.

That is, if we mean by that, that the subjective idea that we have is iden9

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tical to the material reality out there. Hegel never said that. Understanding what he did say turns out to be a very prosperous enterprise.

Let me try briefly to sketch it out to give you a preliminary idea. At least you can say that our modes of thinking and the reality that we live in are not fully divergent. Our way of thinking and knowing is part of the world we know. You can approach that from many perspectives: as a specimen of nature we find within ourselves a growing understanding of the world, that is in some way a product of the world itself. Nature comes to self understanding within us. Hegel himself stressed the idea that the Absolute is Spirit, and that this Absolute Spirit is involved in a process in which it realizes itself both in nature and in the historical cultures of humanity.

(Here Hegel might have been tempted to understand "nature" in its own specific historicity, as natural selection and biological evolution, but unfortunately for him as well as for us, Darwin came too late.) But there are many other ways to approach this.

Second, and to me quite important, is Hegel's analysis of European culture, society, religion, and history. All of these have "objective" characteristics, and yet they are derived from and dependent on human thought.

At least here it is safe to say that thought and reality are in identity.

That is not without consequences! Especially because the concept in Hegel is not just a justification of things as they are. The concept for instance of property is not simply an expression of the status quo, but it is also a basis for critique. Critique of the way we think, act and live within our contemporary social institutions. Critique of current ideologies (in10

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cluding the so-called neo-liberalism that Fukuyama ascribed to Hegel), critique of the illusions of our modern political culture. This critical aspect of Hegel social philosophy and ethics is not immediately apparent, but it is required by the very nature of Begriff, the concept. And by the way, this explains why Hegel could say that whenever the concept differed from reality, it was too bad for reality. That was not an expression of subjective idealism, but a strong affirmation of the normative value inherent in the pure concept.

My third point is the most personal. Of course philosophy is and should be a science. As such its aims and contents go beyond the purely personal. Nevertheless philosophy remains a search for wisdom, and it attracts many people beyond the pale of academic pursuits precisely because it expresses the universal human quest for truth, goodness and beauty. Of course Hegel warns against any philosophy that tries to be reassuring or comforting or entertaining. Not because those aims are unworthy, but because comfort can only be found in the truth, and truth can only be found in the hard labor of the concept. I found that understanding Hegel also meant understanding my own life. Of course not in its psychological and social particulars, but in its universality as a social being, as a product of European culture, as a spiritual being.

That is why, ultimately, Hegel is worth the effort. And there is a simple dialectical argument to prove that, even if you're not convinced by my three previous arguments. They say that Hegel is the most important philosopher that ever lived. He is certainly the most difficult to refute. So 11

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there you have it: precisely by arguing with and against Hegel, you can develop your own position to its highest possible level. Hegel is the best sparring partner you can imagine. He is the most critical interrogator you can ever hope to find. If you really understand why you need to differ from Hegel, chances are that you have stumbled upon a meaningful truth for the present.

How to study Hegel?

How best to study Hegel? Just reading him would be a nice start. But that is an awesome task. The 500 odd pages of the Phenomenology alone, with its often obscure style and condensed - and sometimes mystifying references to contemporary history, might turn you away from Hegel for good. Nevertheless, with some stamina it can be done, say, in a year.

You could rewrite paragraphs in your own style, you could try to write down the flow of his arguments, you could make small lists of the various meanings of Hegel's terminology, you could read series of introductions to the Phenomenology. Your notebooks would soon be filled with a lot of question marks.

I remember sitting down with a friend when I just started reading philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. We tried to read the preface to the Phenomenology together. We couldn't understand what Hegel meant after the fifth or sixth paragraph of that preface. So we skipped that part, and tried the introduction. We couldn't understand the first paragraph.

Then we decided to go straight for the first chapter on consciousness.

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And then of course we found that we couldn't agree with anything Hegel said. It did not fit in with what we thought we had learned from Kant, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, who were popular at the time in Amsterdam.

But at least we thought that now we had some understanding of what he was trying to say. But the chapter was so complex that we wanted to drop it too and then we looked at the table of contents to find something a little easier to read. We discovered that Hegel had written a chapter on phrenology. We began to laugh at the silliness of this 19th century philosopher who believed in the science of measuring skulls to reach a psychological understanding of human nature. Needless to say that after just three sessions we decided to skip Hegel.

Fortunately we had a wonderful teacher in our second year whose classes were compulsory who showed us where we went wrong. When he explained the preface and introduction and the section on consciousness, it was as if Hegel himself was among us. Hegel needed a voice! To this day I have found no better way to understand Hegel than by becoming "initiated" by someone who went before us, but it also holds for Plato, Aristotle, Thomas or Kant for that matter. Classical texts of such complexity require the knowledge of a body of literature, a context in which you can understand what is going on. Hegel needs a personal guide. I had the good fortune to be taught Hegel by two of the cleverest minds I've ever encountered: professor of Modern Philosophy Jan Hollak and KeesJan Brons.

I will end this chapter on a personal and contingent note. I have been 13

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teaching classes on Hegel on the internet since may 2009. The experience described above is what prompted me to do so. For me it is a privilege to teach (or rather read together with others) Hegel in this manner. WiZiQ, Sclipo, Edufire and other educational facilities on the Web gave me the opportunity to reach out to people in the world that already have gained some access to Hegel, but now search for a living dialogue to advance our understanding. In teaching Hegel and sharing ideas with such a diverse and select company, everything becomes new again.

The World Wide Web may be one of the objective realizations of what Hegel called the world spirit. 19th century thought and 21st-century technology come together. We live in a fascinating age. Now it is up to us to really understand it.

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2. And Now to Move On A Recent Perspective in Understanding Hegel Summary The structure of Hegel's philosophy as a whole cannot simply be described from Hegel's own statements. Hegel was still wrestling with the general outline of his work when he died. In Hollak's thesis of 1962 the matter - though dealt with by others before him like Richard Kroner, Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Busse - the issue was resolved. Hegel's System as a whole consists of three parts: Phenomenology, Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of History.

In the current stage of reflection on the meaning of Hegel's philosophy, it is no longer necessary to focus on the understanding of the process and method of speculative dialectics as such. In the work of Kroner, Lasson and Hyppolite and many others we can safely say that the general laws of Hegel's dialectics and system are fairly well known.

The next stage of reflection was opened up by Nicolai Hartmann's question in 1935, concerning the inner structure of the whole of Hegel's systematic works. Hartmann contended that although each of the various disciplines of philosophy was clearly understood by Hegel himself - their methods and objects being sharply defined and distinguished from each other - the whole system of Hegel's thought was still "in-it-self" and not "for-it-self". From the external shape of Hegel's dialectics, we needed to turn to the inner dialectics at work between the various "sciences" that make up Hegel's philosophy as a whole.

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This inner dialectic structure of Hegel's philosophy became the theme of the 1962 thesis of a Dutch (then) assistant professor of philosophy called Jan Hollak (1915-2003), who taught History of Modern Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In his thesis entitled The Structure of Hegel's Philosophy (De Structuur van Hegels Wijsbegeerte) Hollak for the first time went beyond what he called the one-sided responses to Hegel's philosophy, present in the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Marx. They approached Hegel's system not from within, but from without by assessing it with an external yardstick - a procedure that according to Hegel was the handiwork of finite reason. Even though Hegel's system was admired greatly in the 1960s - especially his Phenomenology was present in most philosophical debates in Europe from 1920 up to the 1970s - without an adequate understanding of the structure of Hegel's dialectics, it would be impossible to make any significant connection between Hegel's thought and the problems of our contemporary philosophical reality.

What came out of the Hegel-renaissance in France and Germany were for the most part straightforward denials of single propositions that were represented as Hegel's views on particular issues, without examining structure and method of the system they were derived from. The stifling result was that Hegel became a philosophical milestone of the past. But that of course made Hegel at the same time irrelevant and contradicted one of his major theses, that in contemporary philosophy as well as in the history of philosophy we do not deal with the past as such, but with the 16

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present.

We cannot say that his thesis effectively changed the paradigm of contemporary understanding of Hegel. The work done by Hollak on Hegel remained mostly unknown even in the Netherlands, where only a handful of his students examined and applied his findings. One-sided responses to Hegel remained with us, from the interpretation of dialectics by neoMarxist humanism in the 50s, through attempts to reinterpret Hegel's dialectics as a theory of intersubjectivity and communication under the influence of Habermas (Theunissen and others), to Slavoj Žižek's reinterpretation of Hegel with a theory of concrete subjectivity as found in Lacan. In between there were many attempts to use Hegel in contemporary reflection: either dealing with the actuality of Hegel's philosophy of nature (Vitorio Hössle) or to turn Hegel into the institutionalized foe: the need for a straw man produced the well-known image of Hegel as the champion of abstract identity and systematic totalitarianism. 2 Is it possible now to enter a third stage? Or rather, do we see the dawn of a new stage in the interpretation of Hegel? In this stage we would no longer look for a critical response to Hegel from a fixed standpoint or principle, nor would we need again to deal with questions concerning the

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Derrida or Lévinas can be mentioned here. But note that it is not so much in these responses as such that Hegel has been misunderstood, but by the attempt to deliver a reconstruction of Hegel that grounded the response. Arguing against a possibility of thought that derived from Hegel is not the same as arguing against Hegel.

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inner dialectic structure of Hegel's work. It would require us to accept at least these two principles as adequately established foundations for any reflection on Hegel: 1. The whole of Hegel's philosophy consists of the dialectic unity of three basic shapes of the idea. The first of them, and not to be considered just the extrinsic introduction to the system, would be the Phenomenology of Spirit that deals with the appearing concept, the experience of the Spirit coming to itself, arriving at an understanding of it self. Secondly, the Encyclopedia contains the pure logic as it realizes itself in nature and spirit, and finally, the synthesis of these both, we have the philosophy of history in which logic and consciousness come together as the understanding of the history of the world.

2. Hegel's philosophy, though a closed system like any other consistent effort at understanding the world, is in principle not only open to the appearance off a new stage in the history or humanity, about as such its announcement. Precisely the finality with which Hegel managed to philosophically understand the history and principle of the GermanicChristian world (i.e. Europe), announces a new principle without either prophesying it nor demanding it to be realized in practice (as in Marxism), signifies the emergence of a new era. To us, for whom this era has already appeared in political history, art, science and technology, the understanding of this new principle allows for something other than ab18

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andoning Hegel as being outdated.

In this series I will try to present Hegel's Phenomenology from this perspective. Diverging from Hollak, I will try to raise also some objections to Hegel's position. But to contradict Hegel is no mean task. Most of what is said against Hegel is simply irrelevant and doesn't get to the issue.

A true contradiction to Hegel is a dialectic achievement of the first order.

But to phrase the matter in distinction to Kroner: to understand Hegel is to (truly) contradict him.

That qualifies my position as standing within the large realm of socalled left-Hegelianism. I'm not an orthodox neo-Hegelian, certainly not in the honorable tradition of Dutch Hegelianism that merely tried to paraphrase the Master. In many respects I side with Theodor Adorno and Slavoj ŽiŞek who emphasized the concreteness of Hegel's critical and negative dialectics. Ultimately I will have to make clear what my position is regarding Hegel as a whole. But is it really relevant? Maybe it is important first and foremost to try and understand Hegel. And to that end I have to make clear how important Hollak's thesis is for this endeavor.

How then must the structure of Hegel's philosophy be understood and why does it matter?

How not to construct Hegel's System The usual structure of Hegel's philosophy as taught in Universities all over the world, is based on a (flawed) reading of the last paragraph of the Encyclopedia. There we find the three logical syllogisms of philosophy.

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Robbert Veen (Par. 575) The systematic treatment of the nature of the concept ultimately develops into the idea of philosophical sciences and thereby affirms the beginning: the circle is complete. This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking idea, truth aware of itself or logic with the significance that it is generality preserved in concrete content. In this way science returns to its beginning, with logic as the result. The presupposition of its concept, or the immediacy of its beginning and the aspect of its appearance at that moment, are suspended.

Now, does this paragraph deal with the separate Phenomenology? Is it about the specific concept of philosophy in the Encyclopedia? Or is it about philosophy in a general sense? What Hegel seems to be referring to is the circular movement of the encyclopedic system as a whole. The "self-thinking idea" is both the start of science and the end result of science. The concept is the beginning of a syllogism - as is obvious from the basic structure of the System - but also its mean and its result, its other extreme. The three possible movements within the System show that and these are expressed as syllogisms. Each of them expresses the whole with a different emphasis.

These are then the three logical syllogisms of the System (Encyclopedia), and they express philosophy as (1) subjective knowledge, (2) objectivity, and their synthesis as (3) complete self-knowledge (=philosophy).

Most often however the second syllogism is interpreted as the Phenomenology of Spirit, the first is correctly identified with the Encyclopedia as a whole, and the third is thought to be the summary of a philosophy of Absolute Spirit that Hegel never wrote.

Let's take a look at each in turn.

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Robbert Veen ยง 575 This initial appearance is formed by the syllogism, which has logic basically as its starting point, with nature for the middle term and is linked ultimately to spirit. Logic becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit. Nature, which stands between the spirit and its essence, divides itself though not to the extremes of finite abstraction. For the syllogism is in the idea and nature is essentially determined as a transition point and negative moment. But the mediation of the concept has the external form of transition, and science takes the form of being.

So in essence we have here the whole of the movement of the Encyclopedia, starting from the Logic, going through the philosophy of nature and ending with the concept of absolute Spirit as it is being expressed in the concept of philosophy as the self-understanding of the Absolute Spirit. ยง 576 In the second syllogism this appearance is suspended, for the spirit is the mediating factor. This is a syllogism which is already the standpoint of the spirit itself, presupposes nature and joins it with logic. It is the syllogism of reflection on the idea; science appears as subjective cognition.

So now we start with nature (the Spirit presupposes nature), go through Spirit and then end with the Logic. This is the same as the Systenm or Encyclopedia, only now the syllogistic structure of the whole is different: Spirit is the intermediate, and logic the conclusion.

And finally: ยง 577 These appearances are suspended in the idea of philosophy, which has self-knowing reason, the absolutely general (the logic), for its middle term a middle which divides itself into spirit and nature, with the former as its presupposition (spirit), and the latter as its general extreme (nature). Thus immediate nature is only a posited entity, as spirit is in itself not a presupposition, but rather totality returning into itself. In this way the middle term, the self-knowing concept, has as its reality primarily conceptual moments and exists in its determinacy as general knowledge, persisting immediately by itself.

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So in this case we start with the Spirit, go through the logic of the (selfknowing) concept which is now the middle term and end with nature.

The System is not the Whole The system of Hegel's philosophy as a whole cannot be identified however with the “system” that is expressed in and as the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Hegel's entire philosophy should be seen as the dialectic unity of three major disciplines: 

the separate Phenomenology of Spirit,

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the System of Philosophy or Encyclopedia,

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the Philosophy of History

All three of these disciplines have the notion of the Idea in common. But in each the Idea is treated differently, in such a way that these three again form a single syllogism: 1. In the Phenomenology the idea moves from its immediate shape as substance (immediacy for and of consciousness) to self-reflecting subjectivity and produces the notion of pure science. (The self-thinking idea.)

2. In the System the idea is expressed as science, as systematic knowledge, i.e. as the pure concept, moving from the subjectivity of the

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concept in logic, through the externalized objectivity of the concept in nature to the complete and absolute self-expression of the Absolute Spirit as (the concept of) Philosophy.

3. In the Philosophy of History however, the Idea is understood as absolute Spirit and shown to be actively realizing itself within and as the history of humanity and the world, in the course of which it also develops its self-understanding as philosophy.

Starting from the appearance of the Spirit as consciousness (Phenomenology of Spirit) we move through the middle term of philosophy as conceptual science (Encyclopedia; the "System") to its other extreme: the absolute Spirit realizing itself as coming to its self-understanding through its own real history (Philosophy of History and the History of Philosophy).

Only in that perspective the whole of reality is expressed without leaving out any essential perspective. That is why Hegels philosophy as a whole should be seen as an attempt to understand the Idea as History (self-realizing Spirit).

That is also why the separate Phenomenology of Spirit is so different from the section on the Phenomenology of Spirit within the Encyclopedia.

In the separate Phenomenology the totality of all reality is consciousness, and the independent shapes of the idea are present as constantly changing objects. In these different objects we find a reflection of a pre23

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supposed subjectivity. In a continuous process of the self-correction of consciousness, the dialectic identity of the consciousness and its object appears.

The systematic Phenomenology on the other hand merely discusses the logical categories of the Phenomenology. That is why it only deals with three separate categories: consciousness as such, self-consciousness and reason.

The separate Phenomenology then continues beyond reason with a more "substantial" notion of reason, i.e. immediate Spirit. Only by remembering the shape of consciousness as it existed in Greek civilization - but still only by remembering it as it is present in contemporary culture i.e. as part of contemporary Bildung, as cultural awareness or education - it begins to understand that consciousness is not a property of an individual, but basically a collective awareness mediated within an historical Society.

In the following chapters Roman culture, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are used to provide the historical paradigms in which the structures of consciousness can be expressed. Even though these historical stages are also to be understood as stages in which this type of consciousness is produced, they are not dealt with as such.

That is left to the Philosophy of History.

It stands to reason that in the so-called syllogisms of the System, at the end of the Encyclopedia, only the concept of philosophy as such is dealt with. Philosophy is the method of understanding that sat the beginning of the Logic in a way is presupposed and has to move on toward understand24

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ing itself as such - which is identical to the construction of the whole of philosophy. At least in the sense that the Encyclopedia of philosophical sciences presents the main concepts of philosophy in their immanent order and intrinsic relationships.

One cannot however identify the separate Phenomenology with any one of these. The meaning of the syllogisms is to show, how the System of Speculative philosophy must be Encyclopedic: one can start from the logic going through nature and ending up with Spirit. One can also start with the external concept, nature, then develop a philosophy of Spirit and finally end with the concepts of the subjective science of logic. And equally we can start with the pure concept of the Spirit, then develop the formal concepts of the logic and then finally reach nature as the external realization of those concepts.

The system of Hegel's philosophy however is not complete if we just consider the Phenomenology that produces the notion of consciousness as science, nor if we just take the system of philosophy, i.e. the Encyclopedia, into account which ends with the notion of pure philosophy as such.

In both cases the concept of the absolute Spirit is part of the analysis yet as such it is not developed.

In the separate Phenomenology e.g. a whole chapter is devoted to the demonstration of how all the previous modes of consciousness, i.e. consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and Spirit, should be understood through the medium of the absolute, in this case the absolute as it is in and for consciousness, as religion. Likewise in the System, the notion of 25

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the absolute Spirit is present when Hegel discusses objective spirit in its highest shape, i.e. the State and the political history of states. Remembered history as education and the political history of the objective Spirit however do not exhaust the infinity of absolute Spirit.

Only in the Philosophy of History does Hegel deal with the absolute Spirit (the Eternal Spirit developing itself through time to its present and opening up a future) realizing itself as world history. Only in world history we have the reality of the Spirit in its totality, both subjectively and objectively - including the perspective that was worked out separately as the philosophy of (the history of) religion.

The system of Philosophy as a whole is therefore for Hegel a triad of three different disciplines: 

The Idea in its appearance as consciousness: Phenomenology

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The Idea in its pure conceptual form as philosophy: Encyclopedia (or “System” of Philosophical Sciences.)



The Idea in its historical realization: the philosophy of History.

In these three books, the basic topic is the idea in its development, and all three of them develop the whole of philosophy in a specific aspect.

"History" is present in each of them.

1. The separate Phenomenology of Spirit deals with the history of con-

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sciousness, but gives a linear development. What the Spirit experienced in separate stages is now remembered as succeeding momentswithin one movement of thought.

2. The Encyclopaedia treats history as a logical concept of the interaction between states (within the transition of objective to absolute Spirit).

The basic viewpoint of the System is static: the concepts are set in their order and remain for-themselves. (The separate Science of Logic shows that there is an inner dialectic to it that can be expressed as such. A separate philosophy of nature or a philosophy of Spirit never reached maturity.)

3. And finally the Philosophy of History deals with the spirit as the whole of the developing reality of humanity and the world, i.e. with history as a whole and as such.

The other works can then be understood from this basic concept as separate or minor philosophical disciplines, focused on a single element of the system as a whole. * The Science of Logic. The first section of the Encyclopedia gets a separate treatment in the Science of Logic. Now the dialectical deduction is presented that was not worked out in the Encyclopedia. * The Philosophy of the Fine Arts deals with the notion and reality of Fine Art in various ways. Its starting point and premise is not the notion of Art as it is present in the Encyclopedia! The status of this work is not 27

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completely clear. * The Philosophy of Right develops the idea of “Objective Spirit” already scrutinized in the third section of the Encyclopedia. History is present as the relationship between States and the World-Judgment. * The Philosophy of Religion does the same with the second stage of Absolute Spirit, Religion, which is mentioned both in the Phenomenology (as the antithesis to Consciousness – Spirit) and in the Encyclopedia. History is present in the sense that there is an order in which various shapes of religion ultimately come to full expression in the revealed Religion of Christianity. * The History of Philosophy deals with the historical process, part of world history, in which the self-understanding of the Absolute Spirit realizes itself. In a way it is the "subjective" mode of the Philosophy of History.

I think this overall picture of Hegel’s whole philosophical enterprise is crucial in understanding its elements.

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3. The status of the Phenomenology As I have stated elsewhere, the Phenomenology analyzes the "experience" of the Spirit in its appearance to itself, as it develops into self understanding and approaches this experience as a dialectic movement of consciousness. That already implies that the Phenomenology is not just an introduction to the System as J. Hyppolite and R. Kroner thought it was.

The primary object of the Phenomenology is the immediate knowledge of the Spirit. The Spirit in its appearance for short. The greek word phainomenon means "appearance" so that explains the title: Phenomenology, science of the appearance. But you might wonder if it doesn't also mean: the appearance of science. The -logy part of course refer to "logos" in Greek meaning "science of." We have therefore a science of the appearance, and the appearance of science. So what do we have? The Phenomenology is the science of the appearance of (or becoming of) science to itself.

To know always means to know at the same time the act of knowing itself. There can be no unconscious knowing - a dim awareness of a presence maybe, but no unconscious knowledge. All knowledge must express itself as "I know this or that and I know that I know this." You cannot say: "I know this table is white, but I don't know that I know it." That presupposition is distantly related to one of Descartes' great discoveries: 29

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percipere est se percipere. In a free translation: knowledge always implies knowledge of the knower. In other words: all knowledge is reflective. Ultimately it is Plato that in his Theaetetus developed this idea for the first time.

But what does it mean to say that science appears to itself? It appears to itself in the sense that every instance of knowing that we have implies some awareness of what knowledge should be. We are not just aware of our act of knowledge, but we are also aware of the requirements of knowledge when we claim something to be true. So when we talk about science we are talking about a method in which our knowledge is justified with reference to its origin and the process in which we reached it. If it were not so, we would not in our everyday lives know what it means to be in error and correct mistakes or understand that we sometimes do not know. Scientific knowledge is knowledge of things in which explicitly we know about our act of knowing it. We have an explicit method by which to arrive at the truth, an explicit criterion of truth with which to measure the truth of statements and principles. The 'self-awareness' of knowledge is the basis for its claim to truth.

In the Phenomenology this "science" appears as "consciousness". We must make an important distinction right at the outset. We are not talking about the "mind" here as some "thing" that is conscious of something. It's not about "a" conscious individual or one of its mental faculties. Consciousness is to Hegel a complete idea of knowledge, a structured subjectobject relationship expressed in words and offered as a truthful under30

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standing of our knowledge and the world.

This inclusion of the 'world', of an ontological dimension, is important as well. Hegel understood the Phenomenology to be the explanation of a reality. It is confusing to speak about these modes of consciousness as "epistemologies" unless one understands that Hegel focused on the ontological implications of such epistemologies at the same time. Consciousness in the Phenomenology stands for the totality of the reality of Spirit, that appears in separate, seemingly independent modes of consciousness.

Because it is consciousness that functions in the Phenomenology as the primary mode of knowledge, - and not the concept and not the historical reality as such - each of its forms always appears with an emphasis on the (ever-changing) object. Every form of consciousness, every specific claim of a subject-object relationship, posits its truth as residing in its object. It has a concept of its object and of itself as correlated to that. It appears as the expression of the totality of the subject as well as its object. Its claim is a claim about the totality of the knower and the known.

Every consciousness says: this is what knowledge in general really is, because this is what the knowing subject essentially is (e.g. immediate sensuous awareness) and that is what the known object essentially is (e.g. the immediate given here-and-now).

The method of testing consciousness I have said that every one of these modes of consciousness appear to say it all. They seem to be independent and exclude one another. Precisely 31

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this independence however of every specific consciousness, i.e. of every claim of a particular consciousness to express the totality of knowledge, is being tested at every stage. Not by any presupposed and external standard or criterion, because that would mean we already have jumped to a conclusion about what knowledge really is, before we examine the various claims to knowledge, but by its own claimed standard. The examination of modes of consciousness resembles an interrogation in a philosophical dialogue: Someone claims "X" as a standard and when asked it offers proof by demonstrating it in a form of knowledge, "Y". If I can show that consciousness actually does "Z" and not "Y" then it follows that the claim "X" is in error. Sensuous certainty e.g. claims "immediate knowledge" and shows that with the aid of its understanding of the object: "it is essentially always here and now." If I can show that its actual object is something that is mediated by a subjective activity, in this case the actual pointing to an object in the here and now, "Z", then this claim of immediacy is shown to be in error. Its claimed object is not understood properly. Then I move on to the next consciousness, that solves the former problem by claiming a new standard "X2" that consists of "X" and the result of the objection, "Z" and offers proof in the form of "Y2". And then I can show that it actually does something else "Z2" and so on.

The resemblance to Plato's dialogues where Socrates moves the discussion forward by asking questions, is not accidental. The Socratic dialectics is also a real (or idealized) conversation and of course that is highly formalized in the Phenomenology. But Hegel would agree with Plato on 32

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the intersubjective nature of all thought, even when it is not executed in the form of a real dialogue. There are no isolated thinkers.

Maybe for Plato the real (Socratic) dialogue is essential to method even though metaphysical insight is not construed as dialogical, because it is the lonely insight of the philosopher who has gone beyond the confines of the Cave. If anywhere, dialogue is to be found superficially in the rhetoric of the Sophists who explain the shadow images to a literally captive audience. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the changes in consciousness come from the contradictions in the concept of the object itself, not from any dialogue of truth as such. That is, the real dialogue is the development over time of a self-consciousness that includes others in itself and is truly universal. The participants in such a dialogue would be the historical agents through which the Spirit speaks to itself.

The various shapes of consciousness are but moments of the selfconscious Spirit, and in that sense they are not independent historical periods or complete philosophical systems but they belong to the whole as abstract elements. As part of the whole they are the logical conditions or determinations of philosophy as a science, or of the self-understanding of the Spirit in the present. But that is not how they appear.

That appearance or "substance" as Hegel calls their being in itself to consciousness needs to be examined to arrive at the essence - that Hegel calls "subjectivity", what they "really" are for itself. In every stage it is shown in the analysis that consciousness has a claimed objectivity and a real objectivity. Most of the time you can easily see that the claimed ob33

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ject presupposes something else that is not yet part of the definition of the object. When confronted with that fact, consciousness expands its definition of the object and creates thereby a new subject-object relationship.

Every new structure that consciousness accomplishes by means of the new definition of its object, is again taken as something independent, as an expression of the totality of knowledge instead of an appearing "moment" of the Spirit as absolute knowledge. Of course, in the form of a claim it always does express that totality. But it does not do so adequately. There is a nice Latin phrase for that: totum, sed non totaliter: the totality, but not totally. That means something like: the whole, but not in its fullness.

The limits of the object of any consciousness are correlated with the limits of that consciousness itself. Any concept of objectivity implies a corresponding concept of the knowing subject. In itself, every conceived form of objectivity is a reference to the real world in its totality. In Sense Certainty e.g., the concept of being that is used to express the immediacy of the object in the here and now, on its own does refer to this totality.

The example of 'being' We can show that easily by examining the concept from a logical point of view. It is the least you can say about the world as a whole, but you can say it truthfully: everything that is, is. There is nothing beyond or outside being. (But the dialectical counter argument will be: there is indeed nothing, i.e. the act of negativity, the power of abstraction that produces this 34

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concept, beyond being.)

As a category 'being' seems at first to be merely positive. It includes everything. It also excludes any limitation or difference, and in that sense it already expresses the identity of subject and object. But this positive universal is not a given but a result. It includes everything by excluding nothing. This exclusion is in contradiction to its claimed absolute positive nature. Exclusion is a logical activity that is not properly expressed in the concept of being itself, that simply says what is, is. Being means the positive universal, but we can only mean that, by doing something that is not included in the category. Being turns out to be based on a negation (the exclusion of limitations) that is itself negated (because we state it as a pure positive). The claim of immediacy is in contradiction with the mediation of thought required here by this double negation. The negation of the negativity of the exclusion turns out to be the condition of the positive nature of the concept of being. There is no such thing as an absolute immediate category, because we need mediation to get there in the first place.

Even if we accept its pure positive nature, the category is also deficient in another, more "metaphysical" sense. We could run into this counter argument: "being" does say "everything" so every determination is a determination of being. All other categories could be said to express modes of being. So why do we need to move beyond it? The answer lies in the pure content of the category that is unable to express what it means.

Being says it all but it does so in a limited or merely abstract fashion. It 35

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says everything, but does not express everything in its fullness: totum, sed non totaliter. It leaves out the negative nature of thought which is a condition of its being thought. Which is shown with regard to being in Hegel's Logic by the fact it has to exclude "nothing" to be thought and that exclusion is not expressed in the meaning of "being" which is pure immediacy and positivity.

This notion of expressivity is vital. A notion that refers to the totality is just a 'name'. What we need is a category that expresses that totality in its inner development, including all its previous stages. In such a category the totality would become explicit.

This does not mean that the notion of being is completely set aside.

There cannot be any concept without having this character of immediacy and universality and this claim to express a positive totality. Every concept presupposes and includes "being" as an element of its own determinacy. We can even say in general that every claimed concept of objectivity, including "being" and "thing" and "force" or whichever concept we are looking at in the Phenomenology, has some truth to it - that truth will be analyzed as such in the Logic that follows the Phenomenology. Not because it really expresses that totality, but because it refers to the totality that it (a) belongs to as one of its determinations and (b) from which it derives its own limited meaning.

The development of consciousness is reflected in the development of the concept of an object, i.e. in the changing claims to truth. In the end consciousness reaches the identity of self-consciousness and its object, what 36

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Hegel called absolute knowledge. The Phenomenology is at the same time a description of that development, and in that sense an historical description, and an analysis of consciousness, and in that sense a systematic or philosophical exposition.

The division between subject matter and form, or between subject and object has been sublated here. That is why we are not dealing with a science or philosophy of conscious experience that would deal with the empirical contents of consciousness. That is the difference between Hegel's Phenomenology and the transcendental Phenomenology of Husserl.

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4. The Movement of Consciousness A. Consciousness In the first movement of the Phenomenology, called Consciousness, the opposition between the abstract singular consciousness of the abstract singular object is overcome. By changing its object from the immediate given, moving through the object as "thing" to the concept of the world of laws, consciousness indirectly develops itself: it changes from immediate certainty, goes through perception to reflective reasoning. Every time the object changes, consciousness changes its own relationship to its object, and thereby changes itself to become a new form of knowledge.

When consciousness realizes that its object is not a singular object, but a universal, it sees its own nature reflected in its object. What it does finally as consciousness, is to differentiate the universal of the objective world, (the physical reality of force), and the universal as the awareness of universal laws. Consciousness comes to realize that it only has a world that it can understand, precisely by this activity of making a difference between reality and subjectivity and relating them to each other. To understand the world scientifically must mean to discover the universal within appearing reality on the one hand, and to apply the universal to given appearances on the other hand, or rather to do both at the same time.

So the relationship between the subject and the object has now become a 39

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correlation, subject and object determining each other and this correlation is the truth of consciousness. But that correlation that is now the truth of consciousness, is as such merely subjective. Or to put it differently: the real or effective object now turns out be the subject itself. Understanding the world implies a subject understanding its ways of thinking and its experiences or more to the point itself as a (physical) world, though this is a position that will only be fully understood within the realm of Existing Spirit.

B. Self-consciousness In the final movement of consciousness as Explaining Reason a new mode of being of the spirit appears: self-consciousness.

Although self-consciousness understands that it is the truth, it appears at the start simply as Sensuous Desire. As Sensuous Desire the object of consciousness is no longer a separate and independent world, but rather something that is relative to its own desiring. Consciousness is aware of its own lack in its object, and thereby it is aware of itself. By consuming and using the object, it gives itself actively an immediate self-certainty. It experiences itself in the process of negating the object. (In the sensuous certainty it experiences the object passively by negating itself as subject, so here we have reached the opposite.)

However, precisely because it consumes its object when it satisfies its desires, it renews itself also. No fulfillment of a desire is final. This bad infinite movement is interrupted when it experiences that the external 40

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object can be life and consciousness that appears as a self-consciousness in itself. Now it sees itself fully reflected in its object as such, this "other" subject, which however also means that it is alienated from itself. It is no longer independent. When it desires this other object that is in reality itself a subject, self-consciousness experiences that it also has become the object for another subject. Consciousness now experiences itself as the object for another consciousness and the immediate social relationship is reached.

The alienation that occurs here is crucial: by understanding someone else to be another subject, I see myself reflected. That reinforces my understanding of my own subjectivity. But the fact that this other subject is also Sensuous Desire like myself implies that I am at the same time something that is desired. That is the opposite of being a subject and makes me understand that I am also an object to this other selfconsciousness. This duality is therefore at the same time recognition and alienation (opposition).

Self-consciousness now has two shapes that appear to one another, and what has been a single self-consciousness is now a double subject. (Not "two" subjects as such, but a single self-consciousness doubled in itself.

Remember we are talking structures, not individuals.) One and the same true self-consciousness appears to itself as a relationship between two appearing self-consciousnesses.

At first it understands this movement metaphorically as the struggle for recognition that is a struggle to the death. That movement is only halted 41

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in the relationship between Lord and Slave, ultimately however the two movements of Lord and Slave are separate shapes of one selfconsciousness, they are in truth the one movement in which selfconsciousness recognizes itself in its own otherness.

And not in someone who is an other. The metaphor of the struggle to the death is precisely that, a metaphor. Sometimes it is claimed that Hegel refers here to some primordial stage in human history in which people did struggle like this, or it is read as an explanation of the origins of slavery.

We find that e.g. in the lectures on the Phenomenology by Kojève. But the passage is not meant to express any kind of real historical event. The closest example of this way of thinking is Locke's abstract thought experiment when he talks about humans having to defend themselves against all others in a war of survival. That wasn't meant historically either. It was a reconstruction of what is fundamental to human behavior in a process of imaginative abstraction. And that is the case with Hegel's text too.

Within this new single consciousness that has overcome the duality of Lord and Slave, the contradiction of the two movements continues.

In Stoicism and Skepticism and finally within Unhappy Consciousness there is an inner opposition at work between the changeable singular consciousness and the unchangeable universal consciousness, that is now projected outward as the True Essence.

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C. Free Concrete Reason This secondary opposition must be overcome to reach the truth of selfconsciousness which is the certainty that it itself is the whole of reality.

That is the stage of Reason.

As reason, self-consciousness is the singular subject that now has reached the concrete universal, it is like the "I" in Fichte's Doctrine of Science or the Synthetic Unity of Apperception in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Concrete universal self-consciousness in its immediate form is Reason.

It is however at this stage only opinion and awareness. So the movement of consciousness and self-consciousness is now repeated. Reason as consciousness is present in Observing Reason. Reason tries to describe nature as its universal object. But it does so self critically. Sensuous certainty, observation (perception) and reflective reasoning are now the topics of inquiry.

Observing reason assumes that it is only interested in objects of perception, but actually it searches for the universal, essential, within the facts of organic and inorganic nature in order to find itself. Its experience is however, that the concrete universal subject cannot be simply found in nature. Nature has exceptions and defies our categories and though in biology observing reason can understand itself as being the rational faculty of an organic being called human, it does not succeed in understanding its own objectivity like that. It tries to do so by explaining itself through a theory of logical and psychological laws. But because the description 43

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always remains external, the inner meaning of these laws remains problematic. Such descriptions of subjectivity do not explain the process of observation and reasoning itself.

In a second stage reason understands itself as active, corresponding to the previous moment in self-consciousness as desire. As realizing itself it is reasonable self-consciousness that tries to be the whole of reality by its own action.

Reason then finally comes to the understanding that it is the certainty of being all reality, though the carrier of that certainty still remains the abstract individual. Universal is not yet understood as conscious of itself.

Only the collective culture of a people can be said to express the selfconsciousness of the Universal.

Reason in its highest shape is individuality that is in itself and for itself real. It understands itself to be a real, it realizes itself, and understands itself in both these shapes. But precisely because it remains Individuality, it is still merely a consciousness of the concrete universal. Only as Spirit can it now in truth be seen as the identity of consciousness and its substance or object. It is therefore necessary to transcend even the perspective of reason.

D. (BB, VI) Spirit The ethical community of a people is the adequate shape of consciousness for the concrete universal, because it is in itself a universal mode of consciousness. In other words, if we understand the totality of being as a 44

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spiritual entity that is itself and for itself - e.g. if we state that the universal Spirit is the Spirit of a culture or people, we still posit something that is substance, not yet consciousness of itself. Hegel defines what Spirit actually is by positing that the Spirit actually comes to self understanding and self-consciousness within a community of people: the essence that is in itself and for itself is real as a consciousness and has consciousness of itself (though at first only in the form of representations) and that is called the Spirit. (p. 314 Hofmeister edition.)

The truth of the dialectic self movement of the spirit as consciousness is reached in this chapter on the existing spirit, but still only in the form of the in itself. (By the way, it is not right to talk about objective spirit here.) this is a concrete and universal form of consciousness that has its full reality in the life of a people. Within that concrete universal life also the truth of individual consciousness is discovered, implying that now for the first time we find the notion of a history of consciousness that is at the same time the history that is remembered as such, because it is now a history of the consciousness of a people. A movement through stages as for instance in the organic development, is not yet history. In other words, only if we reach a dialectic relationship between the incarnate truth of the universal spirit in a people in opposition to the position of an individual, do we have something that can be seen as immediate history. History after all presupposes the facts that are told and interpreted within the consciousness of people by an individual that reflects on them and passes judgment. Without this difference between events as they unfold in the 45

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perspective of an observer or participant that consciously aspires to achieve something, there is no such thing as history.

Though in this existing spirit we again have the basic shape of consciousness yet the world and its history are seen as the immediate objects of understanding. At the same time there is more than we had before, where individual reason remained secluded in its abstract individual energy. Now consciousness is aware of itself as the world and understands the world as itself. Although the Spirit is treated in a later stage of the development of the Phenomenology, going beyond the abstract individuality and equally abstract universal that we had before, we have now reached the real ground and substance of the previous stages.

We can now say that consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are the abstractions of the truth of the Spirit as incarnate in the culture of a people.

E. Religion At the end of the chapter on Reason we still have a difference between individual concrete reason, and the universal substance. Then in the chapter on the Spirit, Reason discovers that her own truth lies in the universal consciousness of the ethical world. The Spirit therefore, as the concrete existing spirit of a people, is still only the truth in itself. The shape of consciousness in which the Spirit now comes to self understanding or self-consciousness is Religion. The spirit that knows itself finds its 46

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adequate form of self-consciousness in religion, because there we have the universal subject and the concrete universal substance united.

In Religion the absolute becomes conscious of itself in all its previous manifestations. 

It was already present in the chapter on finite reason and under-

standing. Unhappy consciousness aspired toward the absolute but did not recognize it as itself. 

Reason overlooked the Absolute because it found itself only in

what was immediately before itself. 

In the ethical order the Absolute was an impersonal Fate in which

no one could recognize himself. 

The religion of the Enlightenment had only an empty absolute,

which stressed the interest it had in the present. 

Finally, the religious aspect of morality and conscience led to the

acceptance of the inner universal self, but now all differentiation and all actuality existed merely outside of itself.

In all of these religious moments, the Spirit was just a part of a finite object. Now in Religion Spirit sees itself objectively as the Universal Spirit that is expressed in an objective natural shape, that is transparent to its own essence. The immediate nature of religion however, implies only a partial connection to the universal substance, or in other words religion in part remains positivist. It does not understand the worldly expression of its essence to be spirit itself. That means that all the previous shapes of

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consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit must be realized in succession, even though as such Religion contains all of them in unity.

The religious spirit is at first self-conscious in an immediate manner.

The movements of its concrete shapes is driven by the attempt to unify itself with its content. That movement again is a movement from certainty to truth. Ultimately that truth is attained in the self-consciousness of religion.

Natural religion is the way in which absolute Spirit appears to itself in the manner of sense certainty, perception and understanding. Hegel refers to be Persian religion of light and darkness, as the first of these. Perception is present in the Indian religions where the absolute appears in a variety of independent vegetable and animal forms. As understanding the Spirit appears in the Egyptian religion, that ultimately expresses an inner duality in the Sphinx which is part animal and part human and as a whole divine.

In Egyptian religion the role of the artisan is crucial, but not for itself yet. When Religion reaches the level of self-consciousness, it becomes the Religion of Art in which the artisan is the essential self-consciousness at work. As a product of free spirit, Art is the immediate form in which a society that is simply built on customs and traditions, that has a culture that is treated as nature, is broken up. Ultimately the artist wants to express himself. The external work of art is basically a form without color that is how it is remembered because its color was lost! - in which the individual expresses his own content.

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The Religion of Art then goes through the separate stages of the abstract work of art, the living work of art, and the spiritual work of art. Ultimately self-consciousness is reached in a shape that corresponds to the end of the chapter on Individual Reason. The truth of Comedy is the self awareness of the individual in his own accidental individuality. The religious sense of that is the self knowledge of the absolute within it. The absolute is subjectivity as the identity of the individual to himself within the world of passions and the accidental.

In Comedy the individual consciousness now appears to be the basis of the absolute essence, judging and mocking it. Instead of the individual being the manifestation of the absolute, we now have the reversal of that.

In that sense we find ourselves now in the opposite corner of unhappy consciousness. When we analyze the structure of Comedy, we can see however that it contains not one but two shapes of self-consciousness.

On the one hand we have self-consciousness judging the absolute, on the other hand we have the absolute still being defined as a selfconsciousness itself, albeit in a negative form when seen from the first.

We have therefore two equal sides of self-consciousness operating in both Unhappy Consciousness and Comic Consciousness.

That is why as the basis of Revealed Religion we must picture a dual movement. On the one hand we have a substance going out of itself and becoming self-consciousness, on the other hand we have a selfconsciousness going out of itself and producing the Absolute Spirit. Revealed Religion contains the self-consciousness of God within human 49

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self-consciousness. It combines therefore both perspectives. As the Father we have the essence or being in itself of absolute self-consciousness.

At the same time it is being for itself for that essence. That is the moment of the Son. And finally we have the being for itself which knows itself in the other, the Holy Spirit. Ultimately this Spirit, is most essentially itself in the religious community or Congregation where the unity of the absolute self-consciousness and the individual self-consciousness of Christ is transformed into a collective self, a universal self-consciousness of the Universal Spirit.

Only as a community can we say that the self-

consciousness of the absolute is realized in its other. And only as a community can we say that we actually know this absolute as selfconsciousness.

In religion therefore, even though it can never fully identify itself with the object of its consciousness, and has to use narrative and images of that unity or use projections of that unity for the indefinite future, the social shape of knowledge that is the absolute condition of science is finally reached. In that sense one can say that the scientific community is of necessity a religious community.

F. Absolute Knowledge In Religion there still is a distinction between the objective form of narrative and image, and the contents of absolute self-consciousness. Again Absolute Knowing must transcend this distinction and become aware of itself in all forms it has successively gone through. Only if the content of 50

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religion is understood as the action of the self, only if religion is seen as expressing a stage of its own interior development, can conceptual knowledge transcend it.

Systematic science can only appear when self-consciousness has any conceptual understanding of itself and is able to see all objectivity as something conceptual. Only then we have the necessary unity of subject and object within the concept that is essential to both. Therefore substance, what seems to be solidly out there in itself, must be transformed into the conceptual and in that sense become subjective. The Encyclopedia or System will achieve that conceptual understanding.

Ultimately, systematic science cannot remaining simply conceptual, because it needs to understand the externalization of the Spirit in nature and political society as well as in human history. Its ultimate goal is the understanding of Spirit developing itself through a long procession of historical cultures and individuals, producing its self-understanding as philosophy.

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5. Why Substance Has to Become Subject toward a negative dialectics

Summary. Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is determined as “substance needs to be expressed also as subject.” In the Preface, par. 17 and 18, this is explained as both an epistemological and an ontological principle. Substance means the immediacy of the object and of consciousness, but it also means the “living substance”, i.e. reality as absolute. But what if the Subject that is the Truth and goal of Substance is not understood as divine and infinite? What if this Divine Subject is a way of expressing the excess in human subjectivity? Substance that should also be expressed as subject then comes to mean these three things:1.Being is only present within human discourse about being. 2. Being speaks about itself in the human discourse about being. 3. Being is continuously falsified by a subjectivity that is finite and false or rather mad, i.e. posits itself in an exclusive particularity. Without the onto-theological presumption of Hegel’s system – the idea that religion teaches us that the absolute is divine to which Hegel remained fettered – we can discover the full critical and “negative” potential of Hegel’s dialectics again.

According to the preface of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit the True should not only be conceived and expressed as Substance but equally as Subject. Now what does that mean?

If we start from the position of Immanuel Kant we can ultimately find three distinct meanings of this thesis.

To summarize the philosophy of Kant we can say: there is no reality without activity by the human subject. To which Hegel would reply: quite true, but the human subject is not a neutral and universal agency, what Kant called transcendental self-consciousness, that constitutes reality

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directly. According to Hegel, human subjectivity is in itself finite and imbalanced, limited and confused. (Verstand) Precisely for that reason the human subject tends to see reality as something that is completely external to him, a position that is still relevant to Kant in as far as he posits at least the notion of absolute (and distinct, external) reality as the Thing in Itself. In other words, human subjectivity is divided in itself between a consciousness that is prone to accept whatever it is immediately given as positive reality and a transcendental reflective subjectivity, that understands the world as being constituted by itself. Nevertheless, despite the insight that reality is constituted by the subject, we somehow need the concept of the thing in itself to prevent us from thinking that human cognition is productive. (This duality of consciousness is basically what Hegel's chapter on Lordship and Bondage is all about. ) The first meaning of the thesis is therefore epistemological: what consciousness accepts as reality as such (substance in the metaphysical sense) is actually merely formal, i. e. it is the fact of the object being given to consciousness, in particular the immediacy of what is present to consciousness. (Because consciousness knows its object to be other than itself, the difference between objective reality and consciousness becomes an obsession!) This epistemological reading of the thesis repeats the main Kantian thesis but also prepares for its destruction. If the presupposition of the duality of object and subject can itself become questionable, at least in so far as we begin to doubt the deduction of a metaphysical prop-

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osition from a phenomenological observation, we can move to another level of questions.

What if there is no such duality? What if this duality is merely an appearance? What if the presupposition of this duality is not vital to maintaining the meaningfulness of human cognition? And beyond that, what if the duality between the thing in itself and the reality as constituted by the subject is in itself a part of reality? That would lead to an ontological transformation of the thesis. Substance as such must be expressed as Subject because it truly is subjectivity in itself, and subjectivity is truly Substance. But that would somehow combine Kantian subjectivity with Spinoza's substance and would draw on insights derived from the Christian tradition. If we take a look at the preface we can see how Hegel moves forward from the first to the second meaning of his theses.

In paragraph 17 he says: In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only at Substance, but equally as Subject. At the same time, it is to be observed that substantiality embraces the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge itself, as well as that which is being or immediacy for knowledge.

In these sentences Substance is reduced to something formal, both the object for consciousness, and the consciousness for which it is the object, are now called substantial. There is no substance, i. e. no immediate object for consciousness, without the activity of consciousness, i.e. what in its repressed or abstract form is the immediacy of consciousness. Both being and consciousness of being in their separateness as well as in their

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unification are immediate, i. e. positive, expressed without the conditions of their possibility.

In paragraph 18 Hegel goes beyond this epistemological and Kantian interpretation to give an ontological twist to his thesis. Now both the immediate separateness and unity of being and consciousness is inscribed into the fabric of reality itself. Hegel writes: Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself.

What Hegel here calls the living Substance is reality, absolute being. It is this substance that posits its self in language, as concept, as subject. In human language being speaks about itself. It is actual in so far as it reaches truth because without it is simply not there, and it is true because what is expressed is indeed actual. But it speaks in such a way that the appearance is created that it is just man speaking about being. This appearance however is part of the reality, it is an element of the way that being speaks about itself. The alienation of being in its other, that creates this appearance, is vital to its own dynamics. That is why Hegel could say that we should express the true not only as substance but equally as subject.

That does not constitute a complete denial of the possibility to express the true as substance. Moreover, the phenomenology of Spirit is actual evidence that humanity has to speak about the world in various ways of immediacy. Immediacy is not something that can be discarded or surpassed.

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Or in other words, philosophy can never divest itself from all traces of human subjectivity nor should it try to do so.

How can there be a third meaning to this thesis? Such a third meaning would have to be about the nature of subjectivity. Let's summarize what we have so far. We have the Kantian thesis that being is only meaningful because the human subject speaks of being. There is no reality without the activity of the subject. We then have the Hegelian turn, that points to the duality contained in the Kantian thesis of being on the one hand and consciousness on the other, ultimately maintained by the empty gesture of the thing in itself. Now the duality is inscribed into reality itself. Substance truly is expressing itself as subject. The absolute substance is divine subjectivity. But what does that say about the human subject?

To Hegel this second meaning of the sentence was the ultimate thesis that opened up the possibility of his philosophy. I would suggest that just as in Kantianism an empty gesture (the notion of the thing in itself) protected the system from falling into an one-sided subjectivism, the empty gesture of the divine absolute prevents Hegelianism from doing the same.

Let's consider this argument. What can prevent us from repeating the question as to the ground in reality of the thesis? The ontological interpretation of the thesis merely posits that human subjectivity is the way in which substance, i.e. absolute reality, comes to self understanding. It promises that the system as a whole provides for the evidence. It guarantees that human subjectivity is constitutive of reality without becoming subjectivist, because that subjectivity is itself constituted by the absolute.

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But this is merely a contention, even after the systematic Darstellung has run its course. The notion that human subjectivity is ultimately constituted by the absolute itself, is itself a subjective idea. It remains in essence analogous to the Cartesian argument, that a finite human being is unable to conceive of an absolute being – because the finite cannot be the cause of the infinite - and that thereby the objective reality of such a being is guaranteed by the presence of such a concept itself. Hegel himself pointed to the fact that this could be construed as an illusion precisely because the idea of absoluteness here was abstract, i.e. reached by simple negation. The weakness of the theological presumption must therefore necessarily bring us back to the first meaning of the thesis.

Hegel can only prevent this subjectivist outcome by arguing that the absolute substance that constitutes us and reality is in itself subjective, i.e.

Spirit and that human subjectivity is the fragmented way in which it appears to itself. The revolutionary thesis of Christianity, that God has become human, is thereby exploited to the full. In the way his entire system becomes analogous to the ontological argument for the existence of God as was presented by Anselm. The totality of reality that surpasses human subjectivity, is not dependent upon human cognition to be there.

The incarnation is a representation of that fact. Human subjectivity is the embodiment of the divine. The common origin of substance and subjectivity in the divine substance that is in itself subjectivity guarantees the possibility of speculative philosophy itself. By identifying reality with the divine substance, Hegel can evade Kantian skepticism.

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What however if the thesis in both its meanings does not refer to a process that has an ending, but to a continuous movement? Substance, i.e. immediate reality, is continuously being sublated by a new shape of subjectivity that tries to posit itself in its exclusive particularity and thereby falsifies both its object and itself. But this exclusive particularity is precisely its untruth. Every mode of consciousness and every human act of cognition is therefore both true and false at the same time. And the same goes for the presumed object of human consciousness. By inscribing human subjectivity into reality, reality as such becomes untrue. The impossibility of cognition is no longer a failure of human subjectivity nor a weakness of reality, but precisely a precondition of knowledge. We know because we don't know. Without the guarantee of divine subjectivity, Hegel system boils down to the most damning critique of all pretended knowledge. The negative force of Hegel’s system needs only be turned against its theological presuppositions, to become this fully negative dialectic.

You might say that we try to move away from both the Platonic and the Aristotelian presuppositions of Hegelian philosophy. A daring but nevertheless intriguing prospect! The Aristotelian connection between scientific knowledge and the divine absolute is intrinsic to his definition of the objects of metaphysics. Being as being defines the perspective of the gods that philosophy can achieve. Plato before that defined the idea or concept as the inner essence of reality, by which the latter is measured.

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cy and origin as well as a precondition of mathematical and philosophical insight. Hegel's dialectical philosophy reaches its apex where it criticizes the ontological and epistemological roots of Western philosophy, and in that sense moved beyond its Greek roots. Hegel's critique of essentialism in the second part of the science of logic deconstructs both the Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. The analysis of the Greek city state as immediate Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit, shows it to be selfcontradictory. Of course Hegel never renounced on the importance of Greek philosophy as a constituent part of its methods and tradition and neither do we. But it is important to stress the radical renewal of philosophy that came to light within German idealism instead of allowing the gravity of history to confuse the revolution of Hegel's project with its failed execution.

Can we then produce an Hegelianism that moves beyond Aristotle? It would require us to reinterpret the notion of divine substance as a social construct, that derives its reality from social and political mechanisms. In his Philosophy of History Hegel comes very close to expressing the view that the notion of God is expressive of the self understanding of a people or a community. In his early work he considered Christianity to be a religion of the people, in which statehood, i.e. the legitimacy of power, and social morality were firmly rooted. In Hegel's philosophy religion was the representational form of the collective awareness of historical truth in a particular people. Nowhere do we find any “realistic� affirmation of a transcendent divine being.

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And why not also epistemologically? If we accept the Hegelian thesis, that being is only expressed through its other or rather its becoming its other, we are one step away from accepting that otherness or difference is crucial to being as being. We can say that being can only be expressed as its other, i.e. the concept, without at the same time arguing that it magically returns to its own identity in the concept. The relationship between being and its concepts must be maintained as dialectical itself, which signifies that at the same time the concept or human cognition remains other, i.e. the alienated or negated form of being. The discarding of the moment of otherness as if it were a ladder that we can dispose of when reaching a higher level, relegates negativity to the status of a provisionary instrument. What if this negativity truly is the essence?

The idea that substance has to become subject, would ultimately mean that the human endeavor to understand the world is a continuous transition between substance and subject. A movement that can never come to rest, and is therefore marked by an unsurpassable historicity. Substance inevitably has to become subject, not just because then alone it realizes its truth, but also the opposite. Only the negativity of the subject produces the untruth of substance. And of course the opposite of both would be that subjectivity that realizes itself as social substance can never be fully true either.

Huizen, the Netherlands, May - July 2009

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Contents Foreword ..................................................................................... 5 1. Why Do We Still Need to Read Hegel? ................................... 7 A personal response .................................................................. 7 The complexity of Hegel is fascinating ...................................... 8 Understanding the world better .................................................. 9 How to study Hegel? ............................................................... 12 2. And Now to Move On............................................................ 15 How not to construct Hegel's System ....................................... 19 The System is not the Whole ................................................... 22 3. The status of the Phenomenology ......................................... 29 The method of testing consciousness ....................................... 31 The example of 'being' ............................................................ 34 4. The Movement of Consciousness .......................................... 39 A. Consciousness .................................................................... 39 B. Self-consciousness .............................................................. 40 C. Free Concrete Reason ......................................................... 43 D. (BB, VI) Spirit.................................................................... 44 E. Religion .............................................................................. 46 F. Absolute Knowledge ........................................................... 50 5. Why Substance Has to Become Subject ............................... 52

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Still to come: Prefacing a Philosophy - To Read Hegel - part 2 Analysis of the Preface of the Phenomenology.

About the author: Robbert Adrian Veen was born in Amsterdam in 1956. After his studies in philosophy, theology and Semitic Languages he became a minister for the liberal Mennonite Church in the Netherlands. After teaching philosophy for many years as a fellow of the Dutch Philosophical Society, he received his doctorate in the Humanities in 2001 on a dissertation called: The Law of Christ, Christian ethics from a Mennonite perspective. In that same year he was appointed assistant professor in Christian dogmatics and ethics at the Free University of Amsterdam, a position from which he resigned because of internal conflicts in august 2008. Since then he has worked as a freelance author and teacher of philosophy and theology, for Philosophy.org and the Olterterper Kring in Friesland, and recently also on the internet (www.WiZiQ.com).

Besides his studies in Hegel and Barth he is also working on his third novel, the first to be published in English.

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