For a work usually taken as Hegel’s first public expression of his break with Schelling, the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit is rather coy about the extent of Hegel’s innovation. Observing that prefaces usually justify their projects by contrasting them with the limitations of previous systems, Hegel warns against placing too much value on such programmatic statements. It is far too easy to create ‘the impression of hard work and serious commitment’ to philosophy simply by specifying how one’s own aims diverge from those of previous philosophers (H 9: 10, §3). This risks not only passing off formulaic drivel as original philosophical work, but also (and more importantly) conceiving ‘the diversity of philosophical systems not as the progressive development of truth, but … as mere contradiction’ (H 9: 10, §2). Seeking to comprehend a book merely by focusing on its differences from previous works is like trying to comprehend nature by focusing on its ephemeral transitions. A blossom can indeed be seen as the refutation of its bud and the fruit as the truth of the bud, ‘but at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but each is as necessary as another, and precisely this necessity constitutes the necessity of the whole’ (H 9: 10, §2). Hegel’s name for the ability to comprehend the mutual necessity and indifference of these moments is reason, and thus the imperative to grasp a text not simply from it difference from other texts, but within its organic unity with them is an imperative of reason itself.
And yet despite this risk of covering over his debt to previous philosophical works, Hegel does deign to specify the Phenomenology’s difference from these works. After reviewing his argument from Faith and Knowledge that knowledge cannot begin with the immediacy of faith, but rather faith must be found through the mediation of knowledge (H 9: 12, §7)—and thus implicitly contrasting his aims with those of Jacobi, Herder, and Fichte—Hegel turns to Schelling’s Identity Philosophy. Whether out of fear that his denunciations of merely external judgments of the relations between philosophical systems would go unheeded and Schelling’s positive contributions ignored or out of commitment to laying out his position without getting bogged down in historical antecedents, he does not mention Schelling’s name, but he targets so many of the central methodological assumptions of the Identity Philosophy that the specifics of Schelling’s systems could not have been far from his mind. Upon sending Schelling a copy of the book in May, 1807, Hegel clarified that his attacks applied not to Schelling’s philosophy as a whole, but to ‘the shallowness that makes so much mischief with your forms in particular and degrades your science into a bare formalism’ (Briefe 1: 162), but he remained silent on whether he thought Schelling himself ever lapsed into such shallowness. According to Rosenkranz’s reports of the Jena lectures on the philosophy of spirit, Hegel had earlier been more explicit in excluding Schelling from this formalism, stating ‘I know well enough that Schelling’s Ideas must be very clearly distinguished from the use that his school makes of them, and I honor Schelling’s genuine service to philosophy just as much as I despise this formalism’ (Harris and Knox 1979: 259).1 On the other hand, Hegel does say in his 1807 ‘Guidelines for the Journal of German Literature’ that Schelling had fallen into formalism for a time and was only now finding his way out of it.2 In any event, Schelling was not satisfied that his own work was excluded from this judgment (Briefe 1: 194), and Hegel never responded.3
Certainly these paragraphs should not be taken as a judgment on Schelling’s philosophy as a whole, since it was the System of Transcendental Idealism’s synthetic method that served as a model for what Hegel means by ‘real incorporation of difference,’4 but whether he acknowledged this fact or not, his criticisms in these paragraphs do in fact apply to the works of Identity Philosophy discussed in the previous chapter and in some cases even evoke Schelling’s very language.5 Given the intense interest with which Hegel treats the details of Schelling’s system in Chapter 5, he could not be condemning Schelling’s philosophy in its entirety by calling it ‘the shapeless repetition of one and the same [pattern], only externally applied to diverse materials, thereby obtaining a boring semblance of diversity’ (H 9: 16-17, §15), but his grounds for criticism were real and unavoidable.6 As Hegel conceives it in the Phenomenology, reason does not follow the path of self-division Schelling describes in the Identity Philosophy, but is instead much closer to the incorporative urge found in the Nature and Transcendental Philosophies. Suspicious that the parallel structure of each of the absolute’s potencies reflects at least a ‘monochromatic formalism’ and perhaps even an arbitrary imposition of predetermined categories, Hegel insists that reason’s development be guided by the particular structures of the objects it encounters (H 9: 17, §15). For otherwise reason is worse than mere reflection that takes its categories as absolute; it is a tyrannical stamping out of all difference. When philosophy refuses to see anything other than the unfolding of the absolute, it yields ‘the dissolution of everything distinct and determinate, or rather the self-justifying hurling of it into the abyss of vacuity without any further development’ (H 9: 17, §16). The diversity of nature’s forms cannot simply be deduced from the concept of an absolute. If absolute knowing is to have any content it must arise out of a self-reflection that knows its knowledge is anything but immediate.
Thus when Hegel famously criticizes proponents of grounding philosophy in the A = A as hoping ‘to pit this single insight [Wissen], that in the absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment, to palm off its absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black’ (H 9: 17, §16), there can be no doubt that he is at odds with Schelling.7 Whereas in the Phenomenology of Spirit absolute knowing is reached only at the end of a series of negations, after spirit has expanded itself to the point where it can realize that it has always been identical with all being, Schelling would maintain for the rest of his career that any knowing must begin with knowledge of (double genitive) the absolute. In the SPG, for instance, Schelling argues that the absolute knowing of the Identity Philosophy must be pure affirmation, not negation, for to speak of the absolute as a product of negations introduces differentiation into the undifferentiated (S 6: 163-4). Yet Hegel counters that so long as it does not allow for the incorporation of negations into the absolute, the System of Identity is nothing but warmed-over Spinozism. No matter how intricately such a system can mirror nature, so long as it involves merely the affirmation of a principle (and not its negation or inhibition), it is nothing but a boring semblance of diversity. To properly specify what it means for systematic philosophy as a whole to incorporate real negation would require a careful review of the entire Phenomenology, but in the next chapter I will at least work through what it means for reason to incorporate real negation. But this impossibility of summarizing reason’s task in advance is precisely Hegel’s point: if dialectic is to involve true incorporation of difference, then it must allow itself to be surprised by each new sort of difference that comes along.
Since this surprise is part of the unfolding of rational subjectivity, it could be said to belong to God as well, and thus Hegel is willing to grant that ‘the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as love playing itself, but,’ he warns, ‘this idea sinks to [mere] edification and even insipidity if it lacks the seriousness, the pain, the, patience, and the labor of the negative’ (H 9: 18, §19).8 Indeed, for Hegel it was Schelling’s playful spirit that separated him from his contemporaries and made him paradigmatic for Hegel’s understanding of reason’s activity.9 As we will see in the next chapter, the opposition of play and labor is central to Hegel’s discussion of Schelling’s Nature Philosophy, but his point here is the more general claim that the pure, joyful affirmation of the Identity Philosophy only achieves its playful height to the extent that it also presents reason at work.10 In order to come to know itself, reason needs the childish confidence that it can try on multiple forms for itself without losing its self-identity, but it also needs the commitment to work through each of these forms instead of abandoning them at the first sign of trouble.
Since as bare affirmation reason is nothing but divine love playing with itself, Hegel now argues it needs to tap into its negative, reflective side in order to know anything concrete. As such, both the Differenzschrift and the System of Transcendental Idealism overstate their cases in their efforts to show the emptiness of reflection without the intellectual intuition of the absolute, ‘for it is a misapprehension [Verkennen] of reason when reflection is excluded from the true and is not grasped as a positive moment of truth’ (H 9: 19-20, §21). While Hegel still conceives the speculative as essential to reason’s vitality, he no longer opposes it to reason, since reflection’s ability to alienate itself from the world, to carve it up into same and other, is also an ineliminable moment in absolute knowing.
Along with this recovery of reflection comes a renewed appreciation of the importance of the understanding. Because spirit’s progress depends on its ability to analyze its flaws, the understanding, as the faculty of breaking down ideas into their simple moments, proves to be indispensable. Amazingly, Hegel goes so far as to assert, ‘The activity of fissure [Scheidens] is the force and labor [Kraft und Arbeit] of the understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest, or rather the absolute power [Macht]’ (H 9: 27, §32). As we have already seen Schelling argue (and as Hegel himself will argue in the Phenomenology’s dialectic of ‘Force and the Understanding’), the concept of an absolute force is incoherent, since any force, no matter how powerful, only exists in relation to other forces. And since Macht is not a technical term for Hegel, an absolute power would seem to run into the same problem. Thus I take Hegel to mean not that there is anything absolute about the understanding as such, but that in the modern world the understanding has vanquished all other cognitive foes and become sovereign. First, to the extent that we take reason merely to be a conservative force willing its own perpetuation along the lines of an Aristotelian entelecheia, it must ultimately succumb to a power that can raise one concept above all others. Whereas there is nothing astonishing about an activity that follows a set pattern and reinforces itself (as, for instance the institution of slavery might), the fact that spirit can break away from such a circle attests to ‘the tremendous [ungeheure] power of the negative (H 9: 27, §32). Death, the ultimate possibility of spirit’s nonactuality, threatens reason’s synthetic impulse to the core, and thus so long as reason quails at the pure destructive force of the understanding, it can only put off its own annihilation.11 Only an effete aesthetic sensibility shrinks from the force of the negative;12 a reason that is just as much subject as it is substance learns to confront the divisive force of the understanding in all its tremulousness.
Of course, none of these programmatic statements about its necessity and danger tell us anything about what the power of the negative actually is—for that we need the concrete work of phenomenology. But even at this abstract level, there is a potential problem with linking the subjectivity of reason too closely with the negativity of the understanding. If reason is a continual overcoming of difference, then it seems its ultimate satisfaction must be permanently deferred in the same way that Fichte’s I is forever longing to unite itself with the not-I. As we will see in next chapter, Hegel’s more complex account of reason does not fall into the Fichtean trap of seeing nature as simply the creation of the understanding, but to the extent that it defines itself by its own act of negating otherness, it must, like the continuously destructive Chronos,13 continually consume the fruits of its labors. Hegel is careful to note (in one of the few exceptions to his rule against proper names) that Aristotle already showed that purposiveness need not be temporal, that there is a kind of rest in coming to know oneself, and thus that spirit’s activity does not have to continue infinitely until it exhausts itself (H 9: 20, §22), but reason’s path of coming to know itself through self-alienation is forever trapped in the restlessness of the negative.14 While reason’s willingness to redefine itself continually helps redeem it from the messianic tyranny of the understanding, the very flexibility that gives it so much vitality still urges it to turn its critical eye on itself and thus to posit conceptions of its own movement that it inevitably outgrows. One of the Phenomenology’s major tasks, therefore, is overcoming what Schelling referred to in the SPG as the ‘vain instinct of selfhood, which converts everything into its product’ (S 6: 187). In arguing that Fichte’s idealism needed to be supplemented with a Nature Philosophy, Schelling had already seized upon the incompleteness of any philosophical system based upon subjective striving. And since the Phenomenology builds such striving into its very conception of reason, Hegel ultimately must show that reason itself needs to be suspended. This, as we will soon see, depends on overcoming a self-devouring conception of time and learning to see absolute knowing as indifferent to reason’s striving for unity with its objects.
Yet to appreciate Hegel’s claims about reason in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, we need to recall that suspension involves not only putting out of action, but also preservation and elevation. While Hegel does conclude that reason’s effort to bundle its world into a necessary whole can never be complete in itself, he continues to insist on its utter necessity for coming to terms with the disparate forces and unresolved problems of the modern world. Thus the tasks of absolute knowing seem to be at cross purposes. On the one hand, it must not only reflect upon what spirit knows, but recollect how it has come to know it. In a retuning of the System of Transcendental Idealism, reason for Hegel comes to know itself most fully by acknowledging the contingent circumstances that forced it to gain a more adequate self-conception. But on the other hand, absolute knowing comes to realize that this reflection is itself necessarily incomplete and thus must learn to suspend it. To grasp how both of these tasks come together in ‘Absolute Knowing,’ we need to see, contrary to those who claim that nothing new occurs in the chapter,15 that there are actually three new steps in the dialectic, which for the sake of clarity I will label the phenomenological, the scientific, and the externalized shapes of absolute knowing.
The first of these steps is a recollection of how spirit has come to think of itself as absolute. It is phenomenological in the sense that it takes an experience of consciousness as its object, and it is absolute because its object is the experience of the unity of all prior moments of spirit. After reviewing the limitations of religion as picture-thinking (H 9: 422, §788), Hegel devotes the bulk of the chapter to retracing the path of spirit through its shapes in the Phenomenology and the corresponding developments in medieval and modern philosophy (H 9: 422-32, §§789-804).16 As we reflect (for by this point Hegel’s protagonist has caught up to our own position as phenomenological observers) on how spirit has shucked off its prior limited conceptions of itself, we begin to see that spirit’s final few steps toward absolute knowing involve the suspension of an infinite striving to be something beyond oneself.17 By forgiving itself for all its moral transgressions and recognizing that as a temporally finite being it could never treat all other self-conscious beings with the respect they deserve, spirit has learned that its absoluteness does not depend on its infinite striving, for as spirit it is already absolute (H 9: 362, §671). In the dialectic of religion, spirit has learned to suspend its striving for an adequate representation of the absolute. By locating the absolute in an object, an artwork, a body, or a text, spirit assumes that there is a gap between itself and the absolute—a gap that it suspends in the transition to absolute knowing. More generally, spirit learns that so long as it is grasped in a finite representation, the divine is self-suspending. What is more, the divine (in opposition to the absolute) even expresses the meaning of self-suspension: ‘The negative of the object, or its self-suspension, has a positive meaning for self-consciousness [insofar as] self-consciousness knows the nothingness of the object’ (H 9: 422, §788). By presenting the absoluteness of spirit externally, the image of the divine shows self-consciousness both its truth and its freedom to suspend its own access to this truth. Religion is the highest moment of spirit precisely because it can be repudiated in its very affirmation of spirit. Thus when spirit takes itself to be divine it finally grasps that it gives itself its meaning by trying on and shucking off various forms of consciousness. These are not expressions of spirit’s instinctive drive for freedom; they are its very life.
But since these various moments initially appear as a multiplicity, reason’s instinct is to bring them together through a process of recollection (Erinnerung), which Hegel sometimes spells Er-Innerung to emphasize that this process is an internalization of the unity of spirit’s path.18 In the Preface Hegel writes that recollection can only occur once spirit has labored through its moments so thoroughly that phenomenological reflection can convert what is ‘recollected-in-itself’ (i.e., passed through as a moment of spirit) to ‘being-for-self’ (i.e., collected into a rational whole) (H 9: 25-6, §29). Once spirit has overcome the contradictions of existence, it still must bring each of its moments into conscious experience, for otherwise they would remain just as external to spirit as religion’s representations of divinity. In this first stage of absolute knowing, spirit takes this very act of gathering these moments together as providing its unity (H 9: 427, §797).
Thus in the phenomenological stage of absolute knowing, it is time that gives the moments of spirit their unity, for they only stand alongside one another as moments to the extent that there is an underlying substance to their movement. When each stage is seen as a moment of the whole, there are two possible ways of conceiving their copresence. From the standpoint of what Hegel calls the ‘concept’ (Begriff), the speculative impulse that drives the movement of spirit through its various forms, ‘the moments appear earlier than the completed [erfüllte] whole whose becoming is the movement of these moments’ (H 9: 429, §801). That is, so long as we look at the moments of spirit from the standpoint of their fulfillment, we see them as incomplete and disparate moments that have yet to be reconciled. ‘In consciousness, on the other hand, the whole, though uncomprehended [unbegriffne], is prior to the moments’ (H 9: 429, §801). When the reconciliation of spirit’s moments is seen not in terms of the speculative urge for completion, but from the finitude of consciousness, the infinite whole must be taken (as in Schelling’s Identity Philosophy) as prior to the finite moments. But this, too, assumes a directed temporality, for
time is the concept itself that is there [da ist] and presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just so long as it has not grasped [erfaβt], that is, has not annulled [tilgt] time. It is the outer, intuited pure self which is not grasped [erfaβte] by the self, the merely intuited concept; when the latter grasps itself, it suspends [hebt … auf] its time-form, comprehends [begreift] this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending [begriffnes und begriffendes] intuiting. (H 9: 429, §801)
As soon as spirit grasps time, it recognizes it as not belonging to the moments of spirit themselves, but as an external schema, and thus to suspend this externality, absolute knowing must annul time itself. So long as time still governs experience, either by submitting consciousness to the demand for completion or by positing it as always already submerged in the absolute, spirit is divided against itself and unable to intuit itself fully. ‘Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of spirit that is not yet complete within itself’ (H 9: 429, §801); with its suspension spirit nullifies both the Fichtean striving that submits consciousness to its own perfection and the nihilistic urge to dissolve all finite determination in the infinity of time.
At this point absolute knowing enters its second stage, in which the various moments of spirit are judged from a standpoint that ignores their succession and sees them purely in their relationship to the concept. Whereas the movement of phenomenology depends on an opposition of consciousness, which fixates on external objects, and self-consciousness, which desires to be free of any external relation, science (Wissenschaft) grasps that knowledge is not a struggle between subject and object, but the necessary unfolding of being.19 Having absolved itself of a destiny outside itself, spirit can now be certain that it is nothing but ‘this movement of the self which empties itself of itself [sich entäuβert] and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it suspends this difference between objectivity and content’ (H 9: 431, §804). Spirit, that is, suspends not only its difference from itself, but also the very possibility of any self-division. But the necessity of expressing this freedom of determination is still left over as a stubborn remainder (H 9: 431-2, §805). Since spirit needs some means by which to know itself, it is dependent upon a phenomenology, a presentation of how it appears to itself. The suspension of this need moves it beyond phenomenology into the pure thought of science:
Whereas in the phenomenology of spirit each moment is the difference of knowledge and truth, and is the movement in which that difference is suspended, science on the other hand does not contain this difference and is its suspension; on the contrary, since the moment has the form of the concept, it unifies the objective form of truth and the knowing self in an immediate unity. (H 9: 432, §805)20
As the suspension of the distinction between the form of truth and the knowing self, science has for its object pure concepts absolved of all subjectivity. By learning the limitations of every form of cognition that presumes the truth to exist in some relation to the subject, spirit has finally arrived at the point where it can simply let the pure laws of logic be. Observing that Hegel did perhaps as much as any philosopher before or since to explore the wealth of libidinal, historical, psychological, and linguistic conditions that inform and prejudice human thought, various commentators have concluded that Hegel could not possibly have endorsed such a pure, nonsubjective form of thinking.21 But I cannot see any other interpretation for the Phenomenology’s descriptions of the elimination of the difference between truth and knower, consciousness and self-consciousness and in the Science of Logic’s discussions of pure thought thinking itself than the positing of just such a form of thought. A particularly evocative passage in the Science of Logic reads as follows:
Logic is pure science, pure knowing in its range and development. Pure knowing is certainty that has become truth, or the certainty that is no longer opposed to an object, but has brought it inside itself, knows it as itself—and, on the other hand, has given up the knowledge of itself as one opposed to the object and is only its annihilation. It has externalized itself and is a unity with its externalization.’ (H 11: 33)
Science has divested itself of its subjectivity not because it simply ignores its various prejudices and the conditions of its knowledge, but because it is ‘at one with its self-alienation.’ That is, no matter how spirit may be affected by its presence at a particular time, in a particular culture, with a particular human body, it still can divest itself of this subjectivity and see that thought follows its own laws independently of any particular shape of consciousness.
Still, this is only part of the story. Hegel states rather abruptly that ‘Science contains within itself the necessity of externalizing the form of the concept, and it contains the passage of the concept into consciousness’ (H 9: 432, §806). That is, there is something in science that exceeds the concept and must be released back into experience. Unlike the later Schelling, however, Hegel insists that this is not a limitation of knowledge: ‘Just as the existing spirit is not richer than science, so too it is not poorer either in content’ (H 9: 432, §805). Because the move to science entails fully conceptualizing the goals and limitations of each moment of spirit, it is not as if there were an excess of qualitative experience over conceptuality that science fails to grasp. Rather, ‘this release of itself from the form of its self is the highest freedom and assurance of its knowledge of itself’ (H 9: 432, §806). Consciousness’s release from science is not its freedom from self-knowledge, but rather its freedom of self-knowledge. By recognizing its limitations and allowing itself to grow in response to them, consciousness is able to develop freely in a way that perfectly corresponds to the concept of its fully realized self.
‘Yet,’ Hegel intones, ‘this externalization is still incomplete; it expresses the connection of its self-certainty with the object which, just because it is thus connected, has not yet won its complete freedom. The self-knowing spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know22 to sacrifice oneself [sich aufzuopfern]’ (H 9: 433, §807). A free spirit does not see itself as simply developing in accord with the concept, for this would amount to submitting the freedom of reason to the tyranny of the understanding. While freedom consists in part in knowing the necessity of one’s development, pretending to know this necessity in advance is the highest form of tyranny. The final shape of absolute knowing is thus acknowledging the limits of self-knowledge, of grasping which realms of life do not develop in accord with the concept. By disrupting the identity of spirit and the concept, this severing allows spirit to know its limits, its incompleteness, without resubmitting this incompleteness to the concept. Such knowledge is a forgiveness and suspension of the Fichtean I’s perpetual striving to reconcile itself with its world. It is the ultimate sacrifice in that it offers up not only everything by which the self could identify and fix itself, but the very possibility of spirit’s indefinite integrity. For spirit to know its inevitable distance from the concept is for it to know that no concept is absolute, for it to take care not to take itself too seriously.
Thus when Hegel says that the externalization of the concept in becoming-conscious is incomplete, he means that spirit must offer up a space that develops independently of the concept. ‘This sacrifice,’ he writes, ‘is the externalization in which spirit presents the process of its becoming spirit in the form of free contingent happening, intuiting its pure self as time outside of it, and equally its being as space’ (H 9: 433, §807). In order to conceive of limits that do not oppose spirit to anything external, absolute knowing comes to see space and time not as fixed prespiritual structures delimiting spirit from the external world, but as expressions of the limits the concept gives itself. The Encyclopedia’s account of space and time can serve as a useful guide here, though since it appears in the Naturphilosophie, its moments cannot be mapped exactly onto the moments of phenomenology.23 There Hegel defines space as the most primitive stage of nature, ‘the abstract universality of nature’s self-externality, self-externality’s mediationless indifference. It is a wholly ideal side-by-sideness because it is self-externality; and it is absolutely continuous, because this externality is still quite abstract, and contains no specific difference within itself’ (H 20: 245, §254). Time, in contrast, is ‘perpetual self-suspension’ (§257 Zusatz). Whereas in space points exist indifferently alongside one another, in time each moment succeeds and annihilates another. In the Philosophy of Nature this means that time has a determinacy that space lacks and thus is its suspension. But in absolute knowing the concept releases into both space and time, thus supplementing the predominantly temporal way in which philosophy recollects its development and science conceives its necessity with a spatial form of thinking that can appreciate the mutual externality of spirit’s moments.
Prior to absolute knowing, time is spirit’s need to become its other24 and thus is something merely external and privative: ‘It is the outer, intuited pure self which is not grasped by the self, the merely intuited concept’ (H 9: 429, §801). Since in absolute knowing spirit no longer needs to become its other, the form of time’s externality is no longer a burden, but is a bridge to the pure externality of space. The fissure in spirit’s temporality, the fact that in separating itself from its self it places itself outside of or indifferent to the necessity of time, is a becoming-spatial, a presentation of its being as space rather than time. Thus spirit takes even its becoming, its temporal transition into itself, as something spatial, both in the realm of nature and in that of spirit. In nature, ‘the externalization of spirit,’ spirit sees a distance both between itself and its absolute origins (i.e., the inevitable failure of a Schellingian Identity Philosophy) and between its externalization and the concept (i.e., the inevitable failure of a Fichtean teleology of nature). Presenting an equally unbridgeable gulf, ‘the other side of [spirit’s] becoming, history, is a conscious, self-mediating process—spirit emptied out into time; but this externalization is just the same an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself’ (H 9: 433, §808). Regardless of the fact that history constitutes time, that it is nothing but ‘spirit emptied out into time,’ it still must be presented in spatial, not temporal terms to preserve the discontinuities and incompleteness that give it life and disrupt its wholeness: ‘This becoming presents a slow-moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of spirit, moves thus slowly just because the self has to penetrate and digest the entire wealth of its substance’ (H 9: 433, §808). And this is equally true of the various moments of the Phenomenology. Appreciating them in full entails recognizing that they cannot be reduced to a mere sequence of stages leading to the concept, that their position in the dialectic does not tell us everything we need to know about them. It forces us to recognize, in short, that none of them can be conceived in their wholeness. And yet, through the effort to recollect these moments, spirit reconstructs ‘the concept’s time’ and brings itself ever closer to a community founded upon absolute knowing, a community that would know both its own inner constitution and the need to suspend its drive for complete knowledge of itself (H 9: 433, §808).
With this respatialized release, spirit is finally ready to comprehend what it means for reason to be suspended. If we follow his language carefully, Hegel gives perhaps his best account of this suspension in the Preface:
Philosophy … is the process that produces and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes the positive and its truth. This truth thus equally includes the negative, which would be called the false if it could be viewed as something from which one could abstract. The vanishing must rather itself be viewed as essential, not determined as something fixed, cut off from the true, left lying who knows where outside it, just as the truth is not to be seen as the dead positive resting on the other side. Appearance is the arising and passing away that itself does not arise and pass away, but is in itself and constitutes the actuality and movement of the life of truth. The true is thus the Bacchanalian frenzy [Taumel] in which no member is not drunk, and because everyone who drops out just as immediately collapses [auflöst], it is likewise the transparent and simple repose. In the court of that movement, the single shapes of spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are just as much positive, necessary moments as they are negative and vanishing. In the whole of the movement, grasped as repose, what distinguishes itself and gives itself particular existence [Dasein] is something that recollects [erinnert] itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence. (H 9: 34-5, §47)
Here Hegel presents the necessary coexistence of phenomenology and science in philosophy. The vanishing, temporal structure of experience must be preserved even after its individual moments collapse because this movement itself does not pass away, but is the ‘in itself,’ the very life of truth. But to take the frenetic movement of spirit as itself what is most real is equally a distortion, because it ignores that there is a kind of transparency, a kind of repose that settles out of this movement. A party is meaningful not simply because of its constant, self-forgetting movement, but also because it can be experienced and conceived as a party. While such reflection ought not to take place to the exclusion of the actual revelry, it raises the party from something merely present to something actual. But then again, if this standpoint of repose reflects on the whole of the movement, it finds that in its effort to internalize the revelry there is an immediacy to its existence that exceeds its recollection. In releasing itself from the striving to incorporate externality, spirit learns not only to appreciate the actuality of the revelry’s vanishing moments, nor even simply to grasp the very necessity of their vanishing, but also to let them be as vanishing. Their drunkenness, their inability to cognize themselves fully, is only a limitation from the perspective of the concept. In the all-forgiving generosity of absolute knowing, it is also the life of the party.