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Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit

I spent many years of my academic life diligently working my way through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I did so because I recognized its influence on later philosophers (its anti-foundationalism, the master-slave dialectic and the development of recognition). But I struggled with the impenetrability of the prose and often found myself reading whole pages without understanding a word. I read a page again, then get a glimmer, then read it again and the glimmer would become an insight.

It was hard work: the intellectual equivalent of hard labour.I poured over every secondary text---though not Heidegger's--- and came out favouring an historicist reading (the sociality of historical reason), not a Platonic one. I hung onto that insight like a dog on a bone.

The Phenomenology of Spirit was not a text that you could teach in a gum tree university that was undergoing big changes (downsizing of the humanities) from the effects of neo-liberal mode of governance. Hegel presupposed a great familiarity with other philosophical views, the difficulties they faced, and the major responses to these within the philosophical tradition. Few students had that kind of knowledge--it took a decade to acquire a rough grasp, and it was very unlikely that an Australian university would give you that education. You had to go to the US to gain such an education.

So I taught a portion of this extremely difficult and obscure text. I kept on reading and re-reading Hegel (Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of Nature, the Logic, Lectures of History of Philosophy etc) because of his central importance to modern philosophy. I bloody well lived Hegel for a decade without ever feeling that I got him nailed.

A passage from the difficult Preface, which is the preface to the Phenomenology and to Hegel's larger system mappedout in the Encyclopedia:

"...this gradual development of knowing, that is set forth here in the Phenomenology of Mind. Knowing, as it is found at the start, mind in its immediate and primitive stage, is without the essential nature of mind, is sense-consciousness. To reach the stage of genuine knowledge, or produce the element where science is found---the pure conception of science itself---a long and laborious journey must be undertaken ... The task of conducting the individual mind from its unscientific standpoint to that of science had to be taken in its general sense; we had to contemplate the formative development (Bildung) of the universal [or general] individual, of self-conscious spirit. As to the relation between these two [the particular and general individual], every moment, as it gains concrete form and its own proper shape and appearance, finds a place in the life of the universal individual. The particular individual is incomplete mind, a concrete shape in whose existence, taken as a whole, one determinate characteristic predominates, while the others are found only in blurred outline."

Thus we have the formative development (Bildung) of historical reason. Of course, this development of the coming-to-be of knowledge, is driven by contradictions. You can see where Marx got a lot of his ideas about how capitalism works.

The Phenomenology is generally seen as the preface to Hegel's larger system with the last chapter of the Phenomenology providing a relation or bridge . . . to the beginning of the Logic. The Phenomenology can be seen as a stand alone text that makes the case for the need of a new way of knowing--the historicity and dialectical development of reason; a new way of knowing that stands in oppostion to the mathematical way of knowing favoured by Descartes, modern physics and now neo-classical economics.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 27, 2005 11:57 PM | TrackBack