Findlay John Niemeyer - Hegels Phenomenology of spirit

[1] Page references to Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit given within parentheses in the Foreword are to the German edition edited by J. Hoffmeister (F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1952). The paragraph numbers are those used in A. V. Millers translation published in this volume.

[2] Hoffmeister refers to Enc. 267 where Hegel discusses the laws of gravitation in this sense.

[3] So-called Brownianism: John Brown, Elementa medicinae, 1780.

[4] An allusion to Fichtes Sun-clear Report to the Public about the True Essence of the Newest Philosophy (1801).

[5] i.e. the strenuous effort required to think in terms of the Notion.

[6] This was what the English Enlightment called enthusiasm, but the word has no religious overtones now.

[7] An allusion perhaps to the Stations of the Cross.

[8] The German for to perceive is wahrnehmen which means literally to take truly.

[9] A term coined by a chemist, Winterl, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These synsomatics are combinations formed directly without any intermediary which would produce and itself undergo change; they are still, in consequence, not strictly chemical processes.

[10] ber Physiognomik, 2nd edn., Gttingen, 1778, p. 35.

[11] The sense seems to require a no here.

[12] This refers to the claims put forward by Lavater, whose work was entitled Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe, Leipzig, 17758 (Baillies note).

[13] Timaeus, 71, 72.

[14] Einheit des Seins und des Seinen.

[15] Cf. Philosophy of Nature, p, 404 (Millers translation): In many animals the organs of excretion and the genitals, the highest and lowest parts in the animal organization, are intimately connected: just as speech and kissing, on the one hand, and eating, drinking and spitting, on the other, are all done with the mouth.

[16] Faust, Part I (adapted).

[17] Sophocles, Antigone, 11, 456-7.

[18] Cf. Antigone, 1. 910.

[19] Antigone, 1. 926.

[20] Diderot, Nephew of Rameau.

[21] Diderot, Nephew of Rameau.

[22] ibid.

[23] Diderots Nephew of Rameau.

[24] The subject of a prize essay proposed by Frederick the Great in 1778.

[25] Cf Lectures on Philosophy of World History (H. B. Nisbets transl. p. 87).

[26] Sophocles, Antigone.

[27] Socrates.

[28] Oedipus.

[29] Orestes.

[30] The Delphic Oracle.

[31] The witches in Macbeth.

[32] Macbeth.

[33] Hamlet.

[34] Phenomenology.

[35] Adaptation of Schillers Die Freundschaft, ad fin.

HEGEL'S

PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT

PHENOMENOLOGY
OF SPIRIT

BY

G. W. F. HEGEL

Translated by A. V. Miller
with Analysis of the Text
and Foreword by
J. N. Findlay, F.B.A., F.A.A.A.S.

J. N. FINDLAY

The Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is a work seen by Hegel as a necessary forepiece to his philosophical system (as later set forth in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline of 1817, 1827, and 1830), but it is meant to be a forepiece that can be dropped and discarded once the student, through deep immersion in its contents, has advanced through confusions and misunderstanding to the properly philosophical point of view. Its task is to run through, in a scientifically purged order, the stages in the minds necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy, showing thereby that this position is the only one that the mind can take, when it comes to the end of the intellectual and spiritual adventures described in the book. But this sort of history, he tells us in Encyclopaedia 25, necessarily had to drag in, more or less out of place and inadequately characterized, much that would afterwards be adequately set forth in the system, and it also had to bring in many motivating connections of which the adventuring mind was unaware, which explained why it passed from one phase of experience or action to another, and yet could not be set forth in the full manner which alone would render them intelligible.

Hegel also, in preparing for republication of the work before his death in 1831, wrote a note which throws great light on his ultimate conception of it. It was, he writes, a peculiar earlier work (eigentmliche frhere Arbeit) which ought not to be revised, since it related to the time at which it was written, a time at which an abstract Absolute dominated philosophy. (See the final paragraph of the first section of Hoffmeisters Appendix Zur Feststellung des Textes in the 1952 edition.) This note indicates that, while Hegel undoubtedly thought that the sequence of thought-phases described in the Phenomenologyphases experienced by humanity in the past and recapitulated by Hegel in his own thought-adventures up to and including his own advance to the position of Science in about 1805was a necessary sequence, he still did not think it the only possible necessary sequence or pathway to Science, and certainly not the pathway to Science that would be taken by men in the future, or that might have been taken in other cultural and historical settings. For Hegel makes plain by his practice, as well as in some of his utterances, that he does not confuse the necessary with the unique, that he does not identify a necessary sequence of phases with the only possible sequence that can be taken. Hegel was obviously familiar with the branching variety of alternative proofs, all involving strictly necessary steps, that are possible in mathematics, and it is plain that he did not think that a similar branching of proofs was impossible in his dialectical reasoning. Dialectic is, in fact, a richer and more supple form of thought-advance than mathematical inference, for while the latter proceeds on lines of strict identity, educing only what is explicit or almost explicit in some thought-positions content, dialectic always makes higher-order comments upon its various thought-positions, stating relations that carry us far beyond their obvious content. What is obvious, for example, in Being is not its identity with Nothing, and what is obvious in Sense-certainty is not its total lack of determinateness. If mathematical identities can thus follow different routes to the same or to different goals, dialectical commentaries can even more obviously do the same, and Hegel in his varying treatment of the same material in the two Logics and in the Phenomenology shows plain recognition of this fact. A necessary connection, whether mathematical or dialectical, is not psychologically compulsive: it represents a track that the mind may or may not take, or that it may or may not prefer to other tracks, on its journey to a given conclusion. There is no reason then to think that Hegel thought that the path traced in the Phenomenology, though consisting throughout of necessary steps, was the only path that the conscious spirit could have taken in rising from sensuous immediacy to absolute knowledge. It was the path that had been taken by the World Spirit in past history, and that had been rehearsed in the consciousness of Hegel, in whom the notion of Science first became actual. But this involved no pronouncement as to what pathway to Science would be taken by men in the future, nor as to what pathway would have been taken in other thinkable world-situations. For Hegel admits an element of the sheerly contingent, and therefore also of the sheerly possible, in nature and history.

The sequence of phases to be studied in the