As vivid as Hegel’s description of the Bacchanalian frenzy of spirit is, it still presents the movement of reason under only the lowest of resolutions. Under magnification this movement shows itself to be richer, more playful, and far more perverse. For despite its length and obscurity—and thus its relative neglect at the hands of commentators1—the chapter on ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’ is as alive as any in the Phenomenology. Because it presents sprit’s self-conscious effort to define itself in relation to the world, it is, along with the death of God and absolute knowing, one of the most self-reflective of spirit’s moments. While this means that it is the section of the Phenomenology most likely to parody the ‘personal philosophy’ your neighbor on a transcontinental flight offers to share with you upon discovering what you study, it also means that it outlines the motivations of such single-minded strivers as Kepler and Margaret Sanger whom we cannot help but admire for their eccentric passion. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the chapter to an abstract Bildungsroman. Over the course of the chapter we learn that the impulse to find unity in the history of one’s failures, successes, and development is merely one of many ways that reason seeks to flee the facticity of human life. Nor is it quite right to conclude that life itself is the unchanging substance that proves indifferent to all of reason’s endeavors. While it shares with natural desire the inclination to incorporate difference into itself and the ability to experience this difference as indigestion or even poison,2 reason also proves able to suspend this acquisitiveness and simply let its object be. Nor, finally, is the dialectic of reason simply an overcoming of the rational urge to incorporate difference into an identity. It is an exploration of how different self-forgetting obsession, practical failure, and ethical perversion are as forms of difference.3
Shortly into the chapter, Hegel announces, ‘Now that self-consciousness is reason, its hitherto negative relation to otherness turns round into a positive relation’ (H 9: 132, §232) and thus lays out both reason’s task and the dialectical inertia impeding its fulfillment. Unlike in the Identity Philosophy, reason is not the prereflective identity of spirit with its other, nor is it the unity of the concept that has brought all otherness into itself. Rather, it is a relation to its other, and at that a positive one, one that starts out with the simple certainty that it is somehow the same as its other and must learn how to affirm the other as other, to know the truth of its relation to the other. But in contrast to an absolute knowing that has released its self-conception from time, reason still sees itself as a ‘now.’ ‘Now that self-consciousness is reason,’ now that it is no longer merely self-consciousness sunk in a negative relation to the other and has shifted to a mode of being that aims to find itself in the world, it views its previous moments (to the extent that it remembers them at all) as superseded, as things of the past.
Thus the dialectic of reason presents the adolescence of the Aufhebung itself.4 Not yet able to suspend flawed moments without losing them, it is forced to come to terms not only with its other, but with its own negativity and nonabsoluteness. Lacking both religious consciousness’s sense for the necessity of reconciliation and the spatiality to achieve this reconciliation, it struggles through a dialectic of alterity and transcendence. But to say that reason is a mere moment in absolute knowing’s gallery of shapes is not to place it as one part or aspect of knowing alongside, for example, the understanding and religion’s ‘representational thinking.’ In his critique of faculty psychology Hegel mocks the crude epistemology that can only identify a ‘collection’ of faculties ‘as if in a sack’ (H 9: 169, §303). Nor is it right to assume, as the Differenzschrift and System of Transcendental Idealism do, that reason incorporates ‘lower’ forms of thinking (like the understanding and imagination) into itself through a dialectical move to unity, for in its observation of self-consciousness reason learns that any such integration must be left unfinished. The sense in which reason stands alongside other moments in the Phenomenology of Spirit can only be appreciated through the dialectic of reason’s encounter with its other, in which reason learns that its unity with the world is always characterized by a self-absorbed perversity (Verkehrtheit).
But this is also not to say that reason comes to know itself through an organic-teleological process or that reason’s self-knowledge unfolds in a lawlike fashion. Klaus Düsing is right that Hegel takes reason to be something adaptive and animate as against those like Schiller, Hamann, and Herder who saw it as abstract and lifeless (Düsing 1998: 144), but we need to be careful not to infer that reason is therefore something living and organic. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, life is not simply a metaphor for Hegel and Schelling, but a condition for the possibility of meaning (and hence for metaphor), one which (like all of knowledge’s conditions of possibility) must be suspended for knowledge to be absolute. On its way to absolute knowing reason must ultimately suspend itself as organic, and also as ideal, human, and active.
Thus it is fitting that the transition to the Phenomenology’s chapter on reason, like the final move to absolute knowing, is also occasioned by a sacrifice. To unburden itself of an infinite striving to unite itself with the infinite, the finite self-consciousness of ‘The Unhappy Consciousness’ posits another self-conscious mediator who can bridge this infinite gulf. Having handed over responsibility for this infinite striving, the unhappy consciousness ‘frees itself from action and enjoyment so far as they are its own’ (H 9: 130, §228). Yet this ascetic self-consciousness finds that even after placing its decisions and possessions in the hands of another, even with ‘the certainty of having truly divested itself of its “I,” and of having turned its immediate self-consciousness into a thing,’ it has not dissolved itself in the absolute (H 9: 130, §229). For in sacrificing its self-determination, its possessions, and even its claim to know the reasons for its sacrifices, the unhappy consciousness nevertheless maintains a sense that it does all of this on behalf of the absolute, that its actions do not in fact amount to nothing, but are the activity of something greater than individual self-consciousness. Moreover, in allowing its desires and actions to be governed by another particular self-consciousness, it learns that not all determination is heteronymous and that a particular self-consciousness can itself be absolute. By giving up its duty of infinite striving, self-consciousness affirms itself as having value in itself.
The self-affirmation of this sacrifice carries directly over into reason, which Hegel initially defines as self-consciousness’s certainty of its identity with the absolute, or in his logical jargon, the ‘category’ or ‘unity of self-consciousness and being’ (H 9: 134, §235). No longer struggling with the absolute other for dominance or subjugating itself to it, reason is ‘at peace’ with the world and takes up the position of idealism,5 which holds ‘that everything actual is none other than itself’ (H 9: 132, §232). At first, however, such dogmatic idealism is entirely empty, for its self-knowledge consists merely in the assertion that anything outside of its cognition is ‘non-being.’ It must learn that its true content consists not in its being reality, but ‘through becoming this reality, or rather demonstrating itself to be such’ (H 9: 133, §233). If reason affirms its identity merely through assertion, by saying, for example, ‘I am I, my object and my essence is I,’ then it assumes a self-consciousness opposed to itself who can understand its assertion (H 9: 134: §234). This I is therefore absolute only insofar as it withdraws from other beings, and thus it only achieves its truth with reflection. Whereas in the Difference essay Hegel had at times used the term ‘reflection’ as a synonym of ratiocination, denoting reason that has been reduced to a mere instrument, here Hegel means it in a sense much closer to how he defines it in the greater Logic, as a movement of thought in which the object opposed to this movement is posited as mere seeming (Schein) (H 11: 249). Reflection is a mode of reason stripped of its historicity, which seeks to ground itself in a turn into itself instead of understanding its place in history. Yet unlike idealism, reflection is not a theoretical paradigm or attempt at a system that can fail to live up to its promises. It is, like reason, a moment in the unfolding of consciousness.
The first way that reason attempts to give its self-certainty content is to take the objects of experience as the whole of reality. This reason is conscious of itself as an empiricism, which asserts itself abstractly to be all reality, but flounders when it attempts to specify how it is one with its experiences. Without mentioning Berkeley by name, Hegel ridicules ‘the empty idealism that grasps reason only as it first comes on the scene [wie sie sich zunächst ist] and fancies that by pointing out this pure “mine” of consciousness in all being, and by declaring all things to be sensations or representations, it has demonstrated this “mine” of consciousness to be complete reality’ (H 9: 136, §238). Such simplistic idealism is the positive counterpart to the skepticism Hegel had explored earlier. Instead of defining itself solely through its negations of the infinite differences it encounters, it sees itself as the affirmation of these manifold differences. But without a way to think the difference of these differences, it is just as vulnerable to self-doubt as skepticism. Until it can find a way to see itself simultaneously as unity of apperception and as a thing (Ding),6 it remains mired in contradiction (H 9: 136, §238). Far from resting content with its own identity with reality, this initial abstract reason ‘remains a restless searching and in its very searching declares that the satisfaction of finding is a sheer impossibility’ (H 9: 137, §239). To overcome this despair, reason will be forced to suspend its artificial conceptions of self-knowledge and recognize its presence in the very bones that confine it.
This coming-to-know-itself, however, is not simply a blind groping or struggle against every object that confronts reason. As a slave, self-consciousness learned that it could find itself in work, in shaping its external environment (H 9: 119, §196). Through experimentation, reason now shapes its environment in an ideal way, hypothesizing laws and testing them actively (H 9: 137, §240). Its relation to nature, which it playfully posits as its ‘other,’ is one of ‘general interest’ (H 9: 137, §240). The world is interesting in that it surprises and attracts reason, but not in a way that genuinely challenges it. Though this empiricist, observing reason professes that it wants to learn not about itself, but about the essence of things, it can do so only because it does not realize that its conception of things puts itself in doubt. Its interest in things is merely an evasion of its own emptiness, for ‘even when reason digs into the very entrails of things and opens every vein in them so that it may gush forth to meet itself, it does not attain this joy; it must have completed itself inwardly before it can experience its consummation [Vollendung]’ (H 9: 138, §241). A course of action more in accord with its self-concept would be first to find itself in its own interiority and only then to seek out expressions of reason outside. But rather than developing a (Schellingian) account of self and nature from out of the very concept of reason as identity with all reality, reason in this early stage of Hegel’s narrative loses itself in the contingency of natural things. Whereas both Schelling’s synthetic method and his axiomatic Identity Philosophy limit themselves to reason’s inner necessity, the Phenomenology describes what happens when reason encounters its own contingency. In learning that what it supposes to be things are nothing but concepts, reason demonstrates its own limitations and thingly quality (H 9: 139, §242). The ultimate lesson of observing reason is thus that reason can comprehend its necessity only through an encounter with this contingency.
Before turning its gaze on itself, reason first posits nature as its object. Initially nature is taken as something devoid of conceptual determination, indifferently flitting upon sense organs and coyly fleeing reason’s grasp. But since it has already learned in the dialectic of consciousness that a pure particular is unintelligible, reason searches for a universal in its sense impressions. In so doing, it abandons the universal ‘mineness’ of the objects of consciousness and seeks to conform to the universals present in nature (H 9: 139, §245). But in reason’s consequent activity of describing and ordering nature in terms of universals, each object loses its interest for reason as soon as it has been labeled, forcing reason to seek out ever new objects or plunging it into endless redescriptions and retaxonomizations. As these taxonomies become more and more intricate, they lose their sense of a natural order and lead reason to suspect that nature’s universals are nothing more than a doubling of its own activity (H 9: 140, §246). To be certain that it is giving a true account of empirical reality and not just an arbitrary expression of itself, reason must be sure that the differences it describes are present in nature. It accordingly seeks out those ways in which natural beings actively distinguish themselves from one another, the claws and teeth of animals or the sexual differentiation of plants, for instance. In so doing, reason retraces what is decisive for its own constitution.7 In animals’ struggle for dominance, reason recalls the struggles of self-consciousness, just as it recalls in the lives of plants the even more basic self-division that constitutes desire. By seeking out the elements of its constitution in external nature, reason begins a process of remembering (erinnern) itself that will only be complete in absolute knowing.
Rather than unnerved, reason is reassured by the fact that these self-differentiations are sometimes fantastically unexpected, for this shows that empirical knowledge is something more than reason’s own internal development (H 9: 142, §249). But insofar as this self-seeking ‘instinct’ leads reason to focus on primitive features of its own self-consciousness, it disregards everything below the most basic, botanical form of self-consciousness. Its empiricist convictions, however, do not allow it to ignore that organisms rely on and are structured through processes that have nothing to do with their self-differentiation. The chemical basis of organisms initially ‘confuses cognition’ in the same way that physical nature taken merely as a thing does (H 9: 141, §246). Because these chemical processes do not show the self-organization of plant and animal life, reason again has to ask whether any structure it observes belongs to nature itself or whether it is imposing its form on its other. While reason finds the origins of its constitution in organic life, it is forced to admit that nature is fundamentally indifferent to self-consciousness, and the similarities that reason finds are mere traces of itself.
In the vertigo of this pervasive contingency, reason clings to the fixity of natural laws. Hegel is doubtlessly thinking of Hume when he notes that the mere analogy of empirical instances does not yield certainty of a law (H 9: 143, §250). While the assertion that a dropped stone will fall does not require the observer to drop every stone, reason initially does not understand the basis for such necessity. It cannot be the mere similarity of stones, for we can observe many objects in nature that initially seem analogous but reveal themselves to behave differently. Prefiguring the work of Carl Hempel,8 Hegel notes that ‘the instinct of reason does in fact take such laws for truth’ (H 9: 143, §250). That is, though reason does not claim certainty for any particular law, it is provisionally willing to defend theories that experimentation has successfully verified. The observation of nature thus cannot be a mere matter of making inferences, but entails an active participation in nature. Such activity cannot be reduced to mere falsification of theories, as even withholding judgment regarding unfalsified theories assumes a certainty of reason’s place as an observer.
As this process of testing laws grows more developed, the object begins to disappear under the theoretical gaze.9 At the beginning of the experimental process, ‘the law presents itself in an impure form, enveloped in a single, sensuous form of being, and the concept constituting its nature is immersed in empirical material’ (H 9: 143, §251). As this law is tested under various conditions, however, the conceptual structure of these conditions becomes more important to the observation than the material itself. Hegel gives the examples of resin-electricity and glass-electricity, which successive experimentation shows not to be confined to these particular materials. To unite the conditions under which the two forms of electricity appear in various materials, observation describes them as negative and positive electricity. And since electricity can behave similarly to magnetism under certain conditions, observation posits electromagnetism, a phenomenon further removed from resin and glass. The end of this increasing mediation of the experience of nature, which can be seen all the more starkly in twentieth-century quantum physics,10 is to eliminate the sensuous side of the law and replace it with pure law, an expression entirely created by reason and hence entirely transparent and accessible to it. Reason, that is, aims to find itself by creating a second nature purified of the otherness of sensuous nature.
While in light of twentieth-century science the most obvious candidate for a pure law is the elusive ‘theory of everything,’ which would unite the purely formal aspects of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, Hegel also considers the possibility that an organism might be seen as a pure law. If a pure law is one that, while present in sensuous nature, is not constrained by it, this should make any being that organizes matter to its purposes a candidate. But reason soon realizes that organic nature does not live up to the criteria for a pure law, for organisms never develop solely in accord with a law, but are conditioned both by each other and by the inorganic world. These conditions, however, cannot themselves be united under a single law, for there is no necessity or predictability in the relations of organisms’ structures (or in Hegel’s language, their concepts) to their environments. While animals that live in the air tend to be bird-shaped and ones that live in the sea fish-shaped, there is no universal law here, nor is there a set of identifiable conditions that could determine how an environment shapes an organism (H 9: 145-6, §255). Clearly, recent evolutionary biology and ecology have done a far better job of theorizing the relations between organisms and their environments than Hegel thought possible. But most of these discoveries depend on treating organisms not as pure laws, but as carriers of genetic information—that is, as theoretical objects whose matter is to be replaced by conceptual determinations of their conditions. The activity of these sciences is thus more of a creation of a second nature than an observation of organic life qua organic. Though this reduction of the organism represents a tremendous step forward with respect to observing reason’s goal of uniting all phenomena under a pure law, it is a step back with respect to the theoretical cognition of self-consciousness.
If the organism cannot be understood as a pure law, reason next considers it as a teleological being. If every organism can be influenced from without, and if these influences cannot be brought under a general law of the organic, then perhaps the general law of the organic rests not in their environments, but in their teleological activity. The principle of organic life thus is primarily self-preservation and only secondarily adaptation. But since reason has not yet learned how to make self-consciousness an object of observation, it cannot yet conceive how an end is to be united with an observed being. It still conceives of end and existence independently and thus fails to see the necessity of their connection—why, for instance, it is any more essential to the being of a cork tree to grow, photosynthesize, and reproduce than it is for it to be carved up to stop wine bottles.11 Reason fails to realize that the structure of organic teleology is identical with that of self-consciousness: ‘Just as the instinct of the animal seeks and consumes food, but thereby brings forth nothing other than itself, so too the instinct of reason in its searching finds only reason itself’ (H 9: 147, §258). Until reason becomes conscious of this constitutive drive, it can only conceive of an end as an external thing. Thus it takes the organism’s end as something merely external and the organism itself as nothing but the singularity lying between the positing of the end and its fulfillment. Since the organism has no other determination, not even a determinate means by which to reach its goal of survival, it is ‘not even a machine, for this has a purpose, and its activity therefore a specific content’ (H 9: 148, §260). So conceived, the activity of the organism would be pure immediacy, pure singularity, with nothing binding it to its own need for survival.
In order to draw such a connection, reason posits a more complicated form of teleological organic activity. Organisms do not simply aim at their own survival, but are composed of the drives of sensibility, irritability, and reproduction.12 Recall that this is precisely the development that Schelling traces in the Erster Entwurf from the pure activity of the organism to activity inhibited by the three basic organic drives. But whereas Schelling framed this development as the inhibition of reason as it is expressed in nature, Hegel describes it as a wrinkle in reason’s cognition of nature. Yet even still, Hegel recognizes that these are not merely cognitive forms that reason imposes on nature (as are the laws its experiments are designed to test), but foreshadowings of the structure of reason itself:
Now, as regards these moments themselves, they are directly derived from the concept of ‘end-in-itself,’ of a being whose end is its own self. For sensibility expresses in general the simple concept of organic reflection-into-self, or the universal fluidity of this concept. Irritability, though, expresses organic elasticity, the capacity of the organism to react at the same time that it is reflected into itself, the actualization which is opposed to the initial resting being-within-self, an actualization in which that abstract being-for-self is a being-for-another. Reproduction, however, is the action of this whole organism reflected into itself, its activity as in itself an end, or as genus, in which the individual repels itself from itself, and in the procreative act reproduces either its organic members or the whole individual. (H 9: 150, §266)
In these basic organic drives, reason finds not only its reflection, but its constitution. Like reason, every animal13 can only relate to others on the condition of a self-restoring inner life (sensibility). Yet this activity is not simply self-serving, but can fulfill a function in its environment (irritability) and even produce a reflection of its inner activity in the external world (reproduction). Without such externalization the organism would remain incomplete, striving against the external world for nothing in particular.
Unlike reductionistic accounts that attempt to explain physiology in terms of the rigid laws of biochemistry, this doctrine recognizes a freedom of interrelation among the organic drives. Since the interplay of these various instantiations of the formative drive determines the relationship of the organism to its environment, the organism does not relate to its environment with any lawful necessity, but is variably active and receptive according to its inner drives. Yet, as Hegel observes, the interplay of these inner drives can be described by only the most trivial of laws. While we can rightly say that an organism’s receptivity is inversely proportional to its irritability, this is no more informative than saying that the size of a hole is inversely proportional to the amount of material filling it (H 9: 152-3, §271). Because the conditions of these drives cannot be investigated without losing sight of the free activity that makes them drives, they cannot be formalized and remain expressions of organic activity. Instead, they represent ‘the freedom of nature released [entbundne] from the control of the concept, … irrationally playing up and down on the scale of contingent magnitude between the moments of the concept, rather than exhibiting these moments themselves’ (H 9: 154, §275).14 While this playful, even musical, approach to nature foreshadows the concept’s release into nature at the very end of the Phenomenology (H 9: 433, §808), its expression in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie lacks the rigor necessary to fulfill reason’s task of explicating the concept.
To overcome this formal poverty, reason learns to suspend its drive to produce and test laws. In organic beings, the distinction between concept and existence (upon which law-testing is predicated) drops out, for ‘what is essential in organic being, since it is in itself the universal, rather consists in general in its moments being equally universal in actual existence, i.e. in their being pervasive processes but not in giving an image of the universal in an isolated thing’ (H 9: 154, §277). Once reason no longer sees the individual (organism) as reflecting an abstract universal object of observation, but as putting into action its own universal, the need to isolate aspects of the universal in the individual is suspended, and law-testing becomes only one of several means of observing nature.
Although reason is now convinced of the need to suspend its law-making activity, it is not yet ready to suspend observation entirely. Thus it is left with the problem of how to observe these organic drives which have just been posited as universal. Any hypothesized connection between the drives and anatomical systems (such as linking sensibility with the nervous system, irritability with the musculature, and reproduction with the entrails) is soon found to be superficial, as registering environmental changes or externalizing oneself can manifest itself in a variety of different physiological ways and there are entire anatomical systems that have no obvious relation to the three drives (H 9: 155, §276). Drawing connections between these inner drives and their outer manifestation is thus mere play (Spiel), which fails to satisfy reason’s serious need to find itself in the empirical world. While it strongly hints at connections between the structures of organisms and the structure of reason, such a development of reason along the lines of Schelling’s Nature Philosophy remains limited: ‘here observation cannot do more than to make clever remarks, indicate interesting connections, and assume a friendly approach to the concept’ (H 9: 166, §297).15 To the extent that reason takes observation to consist of anything more than such a ‘friendly approach,’ it implicitly assumes, as the first sentence of Schelling’s First Projection puts it, that ‘to philosophize about nature means as much as to create it’ (S 3: 67).16 In its playful exploration of the resonances between reason and nature, this approach fails to see the difference between creating a second nature and observing the one given to reason. Because the analogy between organic drives and rational self-consciousness is nothing real, reason comes to know itself in nature through a kind of shadow play, superimposing its own form on the organism and learning the difference between this form and underlying nature.
But such a playfulness toward individual organisms is only possible because reason takes the whole of nature as itself a teleological organism which is, at its highest level, indifferent to the individual organism. All play requires that something be taken seriously,17 and reason is only willing to toy with the relation between organic drives and their particular expressions in nature because it presumes that these drives reflect the activity of nature as a whole. Once reason posits an end for the whole of nature, it implicitly acknowledges that ‘it is a matter of indifference to this stream of life what kind of mills it drives’ (H 9: 159, §285). Because the organism is neither itself universal nor an image of the universal, reason can cultivate a ‘friendly approach’ to it without sacrificing its instinctual need to find all reality in its object (H 9: 166, §297). Though such ‘childlike friendliness is childish if it wants to be, or is supposed to be, valid in and for itself,’ insofar as this need for validity is itself a form of childishness, a relation of mutual play can prove beneficial (H 9: 166, §297). In seeing the individual organism as to some degree indifferent to its environment and nature’s organic drives as indifferent to the individual organism, reason accordingly finds a model for both its freedom to suspend its dependence on others and the contingency of its own individuality. In the play-space of its observation of organic nature, spirit gets its first indication that the seriousness of its labor must be suspended for it to come to terms with nature’s indifference toward it.
But reason cannot be satisfied with mere play, as it still conceives itself as working toward self-fulfillment. Given that observation cannot find any specific correlates to the drives it posits, it ‘follows that in existence in its structured shape, observation can become reason only as life in general, which, however, in its differentiating process does not actually possess any rational ordering and arrangement of parts’ (H 9: 165, §295). Reason either identifies observable natural sequences in which it fails to find itself, or it finds itself in a rational nature whose sequence is entirely opaque to it. Thus ‘organic nature has no history; it falls from its universal, from life, directly into the singleness of existence … because the whole is not present in it, and is not present in it because here it is not qua whole for itself’ (H 9: 165-6, §295). The Schellingian project of tracing the unfolding of reason in nature cannot be taken entirely seriously because nature retreats from every effort of reason to find itself in it. In contrast to reason’s instinctive efforts to remember its own history (i.e., its own constitution as temporally conceived), nature is a realm of constant forgetting. Rather than pulling itself into unity with a guiding concept, (organic) nature allows its essence as life to dissolve in its pure activity. If reason posits a world-soul in which all of life’s potencies develop according to the concept, nature’s strangeness prevents it from specifying anything more about this world-soul than its universality (H 9: 166, §297). Thus reason will never find knowledge of its unity with the world in anything like a Gaia hypothesis. This is not because human beings are essentially strangers on Earth or have evolved any independence from it, but rather because a wandering body populated with platypuses, dozens of species of parrots, galvanism, tsunamis, and dark energy does not present itself to reason as a unity in anything more than number. While careful study, adventurous play, and longing attentiveness can remind reason of this foreignness and thus spur it on to grasp itself as spirit, to conclude that spirit is either at home or a refugee in nature is to fall into nostalgic anthropomorphism.18
Because reason cannot find a fully rational order in nature, it falls back on finding one in its own constitution. Whereas in inorganic nature reason found an external manifestation of itself, but not one that reflected the interiority of things, in organic nature it found beings whose inner nature accorded with the structure of self-consciousness, but in a way that could not be observed; only in observing self-consciousness itself does reason observe a being that is rational both for itself and for reason (H 9: 167, §298). Reason first attempts to observe self-consciousness through discovering the laws of thought, and as in its observation of nature, it begins with a purely abstract conception of its field: in this case the logical rules that govern all movements of thought. In order to capture what is universal in thought, reason seeks universally valid inferences, logical forms that exist in pure repose, indifferent to any thinker or thought. Whereas reason recognizes itself as (re-)constructing the laws of nature, it sees logical laws as merely given, as found (H 9: 167, §300). But as decontextualized found objects, these laws are contents looking for form more than forms without content. Since reason does not investigate the place of these logical forms within thinking, they show only the pure thatness of thought without identifying its formal role in human life. When reason searches for regularities in the formal laws of thought, it must settle instead for mere formal parallels between judgments that explain nothing about the inferences that self-consciousness actually makes.
To bridge the disconnect between these pure forms of thought and their role in human life, reason turns next to psychology in an effort to understand human action in general. The central problem of psychology, Hegel claims, is to show how a self-conscious being who is influenced by his environment nevertheless acts spontaneously to satisfy his desires (H 9: 169, §302). Ideally psychology would be able to explain both how individuals shape themselves in response to their environments and how they shape their environments in response to their desires, but when it actually investigates these desires, it finds a tangled mess of ‘faculties, inclinations, and passions,’ which cannot be generalized into a general theory of desire and receptivity without sacrificing the restless movement of actual human mental life (H 9: 169, §303). This is all the more frustrating because reason instinctively holds self-consciousness to be a unity, an intuition which all the observations of psychology seem to mock. If reason tries to fix upon some of these movements, it finds a study ‘much less interesting even than enumerating the types of insects, mosses, etc.’ because these at least are not assumed to have the unity of self-consciousness (H 9: 169, §304). In contrast, studying self-consciousness by taxonomizing psychological phenomena strips it of its intelligence, the only thing distinguishing it from mosses and insects. Thus even if psychology could find a universal law of psychology linking the desires of self-consciousness with the circumstances in which it finds itself and the actions it takes, it still could not account for the fact that the individual determines what will have an influence on him and what kind of influence this will be (H 9: 170, §306). Since individuals can always choose whether to allow an influence (Einfluβ) to flow in (einflieβen) upon their motivations for acting, the laws of psychology are never universal or necessary. Recalling his criticisms of idealistic Nature Philosophy, Hegel mocks those who imagine the individual as a reflection of his world: if the individual could be understood solely from a knowledge of the circumstances in which he finds himself, then
[w]e should have a double gallery of pictures, one of which would be the reflection of the other: the one, the gallery of external circumstances marked by complete determination and circumscription, the other, the same gallery translated into the form in which those circumstances are present in the conscious being [Wesen]: the former the spherical surface, the latter the center which represents [vorstellt] that surface within it. (H 9: 170, §306)
Such an image of simple reflection or translation shows reason at its laziest. To posit self-consciousness as a mirror of nature and nature as a mirror of self-consciousness is to recognize the necessary presence of reason in its environment while refusing to come to terms with this implicit unity. Reason cannot be satisfied with such a mere setting-beside-one-another without sacrificing its need for a true unity with its object.
Once observing reason learns the futility of treating individuals as reflections of something general—be it subhuman faculties or inclinations or superhuman environmental conditions—it comes to focus on the individual herself as the proper object of observation. But still it must discover how the individual’s interiority is to be observed, or how to link observable objects with the essence of the individual. The most obvious way to know the individual, Hegel notes, is through his actions or speech: for in each of these we find his internal being expressed externally (H 9: 173, §312). But it is precisely in these two most transparent means of knowing a person that the distinction between the internal and the external breaks down: ‘Speech and work are outer expressions in which the individual no longer keeps and possesses himself within himself, but lets the inner get completely outside of him, leaving it to the mercy of something other than himself’ (H 9: 173, §312). Since speech and action can be interpreted in infinitely many ways, even individuals who try to express themselves honestly can fail to do so. What makes actions and speech expressions of an individual thus dissolves as soon as it is externalized; there is a space between the individual and his expression. But at the same time, the externalized speech or action is too close to the individual’s interiority because there is no distinction between the individual and this expression. When observing reason takes an individual’s speech or work seriously, it cannot discern how these expressions are related to the individual other than by positing a simple identity of the two.
Given this inability to find verifiable laws through direct observation of speech and action, reason realizes that an adequate understanding of self-consciousness requires a recognition of its opacity and thus turns to the pseudosciences19 of physiognomy and phrenology, each of which assumes that self-consciousness is not immediately knowable, but only accessible by the mediation of laws. But unlike physiology and psychology, these new sciences recognize that self-consciousness cannot be understood simply by identifying correlations between external conditions and behavior, but must recognize that self-consciousness is something for itself, something that reflects upon itself. In observing the living human body (Leib), reason is observing the individual simultaneously as he is affected by his environment and as he spontaneously asserts himself, for ‘the body is the unity of the unformed and the formed being [des ungebildeten und gebildeten Seins] and is the individual’s actuality permeated by his being-for-self’ (H 9: 172, §311). As the section’s title indicates, the task of physiognomy and phrenology is the ‘observation of the relation of self-consciousness to its immediate actuality’ (emphasis added); reason here aims to discover how an individual’s being-for-self can be the same as his observable body.
Physiognomy, the search for correlations between body shape and disposition, assumes a ‘necessary antithesis of an inner and an outer’ by studying what the features of an externally observable body can tell us about the inner life of an individual (H 9: 174: §314). But if physiognomy is really to tell us anything about this inner life, it cannot merely relate body shape to behavior, since reason has already seen that an individual’s action is not an adequate expression of his inner life. Nor can it say anything definitive about the intentions behind actions, since these intentions are much more flexible than body-type (or genes for personality traits, for that matter). In order to avoid the deception possible in all action, physiognomy focuses on ‘a presumed [gemeintes] inner. It is not the murderer, the thief, who is to be recognized, but the capacity to be one’ (H 9: 177, §320). Thus physiognomy can do nothing more than make general statements about individuals’ ‘tendencies’ to externalize themselves in certain ways without actually grasping their being-for-self. For physiognomy, the body can only be an expression of interiority, whose ‘individuality permeates its shape, moves and speaks in it; but this existence in its entirety equally turns into a being that is indifferent to the will [Willen] and the deed [Handlung]’ (H 9: 176, §318). That is, by treating an individual’s being-for-self solely as a set of dispositions, physiognomy fails to live up to its goal of observing self-consciousness as a whole. Like psychology it also treats the interiority of self-consciousness as an external object, and the formal only difference between the two sciences is that one observes a rigid body while the other observes changing stimuli.
Although physiognomy seeks to show how a self-consciousness’s interiority is inscribed on its body, it fails to show this interiority as it simultaneously reflects on itself in its expression. Phrenology seeks to overcome this deficit by identifying laws relating the body not simply to disposition, but to thought. Reason thus posits a causal relation between thought and the body, which implies that spiritual activity is itself corporeal (H 9: 180, §325). In contrast to other physiological systems that serve as mere mediators between self-consciousness and the external world, the ‘brain and spinal cord may be considered as the immediate presence [Gegenwart] of self-consciousness, a presence which remains within itself, is not objective and also does not go beyond itself’ (H 9: 180-1, §327). In the skull reason finds the lifeless counterpart to the living brain, a corporeal, relatively unchanging entity that is neither an organ of thought’s externalization (like the hand) nor a reflection of thought (like involuntary facial expressions), but is a mere thing that nevertheless (if we accept phrenology’s dubious methodological assumption) makes self-consciousness’s reflection on itself observable. Here questions of whether the brain affects the shape of the skull or vice-versa and of how these organic processes work are beside the point. For the point of phrenology is not to reduce spiritual activity to physical processes, but to observe the spiritual and the physical in their identity. Thus while there is great reason to prefer magnetic resonance imaging (or other brain-imaging technologies that might come along) over phrenology from the perspective of observing nature, there is no reason to prefer either one as an observation of self-consciousness. In all cases their greatest failing (their inability to explicate precisely how this observable thing is the same as an individual spirit) is also their greatest insight. In phrenology, the skull is not to be taken as a reflection of self-consciousness, but as self-consciousness itself. Whereas ‘look and gesture, tone of voice, even a pillar or post erected on a desert island, directly proclaim that they mean something else than what they simply are at first sight,’ the skull is not a sign for anything, but a simple being that is identical with self-consciousness (H 9: 184, §333).
Since a set of eight bones is even less adequate to the panoply of human action than facial features, the ‘instinct of self-conscious reason’ is liable to grow distracted20 by the many flaws in its methodological presuppositions and miss the fact that its very project is a dubious goal (H 9: 188, §340). Phrenology’s more significant failing lies in that ‘The being of spirit cannot in any case be taken as something simply fixed and immovable. Man is free’ (H 9: 187, §337). To draw connections between a solid thing and infinitely flexible spirit, phrenology invents an infinite series of exceptions and qualifications to its rules (‘a bump on this particular crest only indicates a murderer in certain cases,’ etc.), desperately trying to keep up with spirit’s freedom. But while reason has already learned to distrust such transparent attempts to avoid criticism, there is something like an insight in phrenology’s imaginative attempts to explain away any data that might contradict its assumptions. The possibility of an endless multiplication of parasitic discourses on the necessary conditions for phrenology to provide verifiable insights ought to clue reason in to the fact that it has not really been speaking about nature at all. It is rather reason’s own activity that here constitutes its object; the conceptual work to evade the difference between the thingliness of things and the spirituality of spirit is all this difference consists in. But as soon as reason realizes how idealized its object is, it sees that it can find itself not merely in organisms, but in any thing whatsoever. Hegel is insistent that reason does not replace its initial idealism with materialism; spirit cannot be held in the hands or crushed like bone. But it is nevertheless a thing, in the same sense that the idealism from which observing reason set out assumed it could not be: spirit is in part something living and striving, but is also the suspension of this life, which comes to know its own finitude in the very impliancy and brute facticity of a set of bones (H 9: 190, §343). The lesson here is precisely not, as some have claimed, that to the extent that it is cognizable nature is ‘essentially discourse.’21 Phrenology reveals not through its discursive power, but through its very absurdity, that nature’s inanimate intrusiveness confronts reason not as a surd, but as a release from its discursive efforts.
This release from an utterly absurd discourse, which Hegel calls observing reason’s final, ‘worst’ stage, allows reason to reflect and turn back on its compulsion to find itself by talking about itself (H 9: 189, §340). Now nearly every stage of the Phenomenology has been called its central turning point by one commentator or another, be it the master-slave dialectic for Kojève, life and desire for Marcuse, the unhappy consciousness for Hyppolite, the inverted world for Gadamer, the suspension of representational thinking for Deleuze, the transition to ethical substance for Taylor,22 or any of the multitude of other interpretations that apply lessons from one stage of the book to its movement as a whole. Judged in the gallery of absolute knowing, all of these interpretations have their truth, as each must be preserved in its ultimate indifference to particular interpretations of the shapes of spirit. And we also should not infer too much from the fact that this is the only moment in the book where Hegel claims that spirit ‘must abandon itself and turn back on itself’ (H 9: 188, §340), as this is also one of the most poorly written sections of the book, given its awkward overextension of Lichtenberg’s ‘box on the ear’ comment (H 9: 188, §339) and its sudden excursion on the suffering of the Jewish people (H 9: 188-9, §340).
Even still, we should take the centrality of this moment seriously, since it is the only point in the book before absolute knowing where spirit stops to reflect on its previous development. Here this reflection takes the form of a remembering-internalizing (Erinnerung) that is soon forgotten, as reason does not yet conceive its past moments as indifferent with respect to time, but instead attempts to view them as part of a necessary sequence. Now realizing that it itself constructs its objects, reason recalls the sequence of inferences that led it from the simple thing to the organism and then to self-consciousness, knowing that it constructed each as a model of itself (H 9: 189, §341). Seeing each of these steps as a failed version of the unity of free subject and lifeless substance that it now knows itself to be, reason posits itself as ‘the transition [Übergang] of immediacy into mediation, or negativity’ (H 9: 191, §344). Much as in the System of Transcendental Idealism, reason here defines itself as a self-producing being that pulls itself into existence through the negation of incomplete determinations of itself. In Hegel’s quasi-Kantian terms, reason takes itself as the single, overarching category, ‘the infinite judgment that the self is a thing, a judgement that suspends [aufhebt] itself’ (H 9: 191, §344). Upon its first remembrance, reason takes itself to consist of nothing but the collection of determinations that it applies to itself and the power to suspend these determinations.
But if reason takes itself merely as the power of negating inadequate determinations, then it fails to appreciate the necessity of affirming what is true in these determinations, of suspending rather than negating them. Reason has not yet moved from the temporal self-conception that sees these determinations as surpassed moments to the spatial one that holds them together and offers up its own absoluteness to the possibility of free movement between the determinations. Still bound by its need for the world to recognize it, it becomes frustrated with the unresponsiveness of the thing. Though with its newfound insight into the truth of its relationship to the natural world ‘it knows that it is in itself recognized by the thingly object’ (H 9: 193, §347), reason needs more concrete proof that the world is not just at its disposal (as it is in the slave’s work), but recognizes and responds to its desires and plans. Hegel is careful to note that at this stage reason still sees itself as an individual, a uniquely modern moment of spirit lacking the inner feel of being at home in a community that Hegel takes to have structured Greek ethical life. Ultimately, Hegel will attempt to show that modern individualism must return to its Greek roots if it is ever to overcome the fragmentariness of its existence, but at this stage in its development, reason is still repulsed by what it sees as the Greeks’ sacrifice of their individuality to an arbitrary external order and so ‘must withdraw from this happy state, for … ethical life exists merely as something given’ (H 9: 195-6, §354). Unable to find recognition in what is merely given to it, reason refuses this gift of happy existence and sets out on its own to find a happiness it has earned.
Since the simplest way to achieve happiness is go out and take it in its immediacy, in the first stage of its search for individual self-actualization reason sees the world as beholden to its desires; ‘The shadows of science, laws and principles, which alone stand between self-consciousness and its own reality, vanish like a lifeless mist which cannot compare with the certainty of its own reality. It takes hold of life as a ripe fruit is plucked’ (H 9: 199, §361). Rather than consumed (as in the dialectic of life and desire), the world exists to be enjoyed. Because reason no longer conceives anything outside of itself as genuinely other, it does not desire its destruction as such, but the cancellation of the formal difference between the objective world and desiring self-consciousness (H 9: 199, §362). In achieving its pleasure, reason knows that its aim is not the object with which it occupies itself, but simply itself, and thus its enjoyment does not disappear in its attainment of the object, but is sustainable indefinitely.
Soon, however, reason takes this imperative as a responsibility rather than a source of self-fulfillment and comes to see not just the world, but itself as beholden to its drive for pleasure. So long as the object has no content other than its role in self-consciousness’s enjoyment, its enjoyment takes on a kind of necessity, ‘for necessity [Notwendigkeit], fate [Schicksal], and the like is just that about which we cannot say what it does, what its specific laws and positive content are, … whose work is merely the nothingness [Nichts] of individuality’ (H 9: 200, §363). When enjoyment is the one’s sole aim, it becomes a unitary, totalitarian principle and leaves the individual wholly without content. Since this necessity is independent of the specific desires of the self-consciousness, it does not actualize anything about the self, but is mere abandonment to an external principle.
In a typical dialectical reversal, reason’s subsequent move is to bring the necessity into consciousness, to make the individual’s convictions primary. In positing the ‘law of the heart’ as necessary, reason sets up an opposition between the peaceful resoluteness of the individual and the depravity and misery of a world that fails to live up to these convictions (H 9: 202, §369). There is thus a clash of necessities, one individual and authentic and the other alien and oppressive. The individual seeks to stamp out this external necessity, and ‘is thus no longer the levity of the previous form [i.e., that of ‘Pleasure and Necessity’] that only wants individual pleasure, but the earnestness of a high purpose which seeks its pleasure in the presentation [Darstellung] of the excellence of its own essence, and in producing the welfare of humankind’ (H 9: 202-3, §370). But as soon as the individual attempts to carry out this law, it ceases to be a law of the heart and becomes instead a law of external circumstances. The pleasure of presenting one’s individual essence dissolves when it is introduced into a community that does not recognize it. Because reason has drawn such a stark distinction between the individual’s pure heart and the corrupt world, it cannot see worldly involvement as anything but a corruption of the individual’s law.
Moreover, the individual soon encounters other individuals, each with her own law of the heart, and becomes especially flummoxed upon realizing that some even support what it had previously taken to be a dead, merely external order of things. Without a way to mediate these different laws of the heart or even the certainty that the law of the heart ought to prevail over the prevailing social order, the individual self-consciousness is forced either to fight to have its own law recognized (thus reverting to the fight to the death leading to the master-slave dichotomy) or to turn this conflict in on itself. In the absence of a stable sense for its own unity with the universal, madness (Wahnsinn) remains reason’s essential possibility (H 9: 20, §376). As Schelling’s Freedom essay will later develop at length, when reason becomes unable to separate the inner from the outer, the self-willing good from the evil that precedes and resists all unification, it is thrown into a self-lacerating despair that inverts the entire structure of reason: ‘The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore turns into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion [Verkehrtheit] which is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else’ (H 9: 206, §377). The word Hegel uses for perversion here is the same one he uses to describe the ‘inverted [verkehrte] world’ at the end of Force and the Understanding, and as before it represents a perversion of previous innocence and self-certainty. Whereas in the earlier movement spirit learned that its drive to reduce all phenomena to forces hides the dark, esoteric self-reflection inherent in all knowledge,23 here it learns that its idealism (in both the ontological and political senses) hides a violence that reason can suspend but never cancel. Reason’s grounding urge of separation, its need to be a self-certain individual with the power of the negative at its disposal, can never be fully reconciled with its guiding urge for identity, for a unity of the individual and its other, and thus the ‘insane self-conceit’ that demands a cancellation of this nonidentity represents an inevitable perversion in the life and career of reason.
Reason’s immediate response to this sudden welling-up of perversion is to fight it bitterly. ‘Virtue’ takes the stand that even though the world is dominated by selfish interests and a general disregard for the good of the whole, the individual can still step out of this evil and establish a private realm of virtue. Virtue thus actualizes itself through its rejection of the ‘way of the world’ (Weltlauf), the depravity of an external order that perverts the harmony that ought to exist between the individual and his community. Unlike the activist beholden to the law of the heart, virtue does not reject external structures outright, but believes that both the individual and his environment should conform to a higher law (H 9: 208, §381). The virtuous self-consciousness is thus one who works to stamp out the perverseness of individuality both in itself and in its world. Hegel again calls this moment a sacrifice (Aufopfrung), but unlike the sacrifice into absolute knowing, this one is to something determinate, a law. Virtue strives to eliminate everything merely individual through the development of supraindividual ‘gifts, capacities, and powers [Gaben, Fähigkeiten, Kräfte]’ but is forced to recognize that vice, its contrary, can also make use of such powers (H 9: 210, §385). Indeed, the development of these powers and consequent effacement of individuality is secondary to what virtue is really trying to accomplish. In its fight with vice over the way of the world, virtue fails to recognize that its certainty of victory is based not on the strength of its own powers, but on an implicit faith that good will triumph over evil (H 9: 210, §386).
Virtue fails to recognize that the individualistic ‘way of the world’ also has a claim to universality. For even when individuals strive solely for what they value, be it immediate enjoyment or enactment of their convictions, an invisible hand often guides these individual transactions such that individual pursuit of self-interest is ultimately also in the best interests of the community in general (H 9: 208-9, §382). Like the virtuous individual, the self-interested individual also participates indirectly in self-overcoming because her every action within the community is simultaneously a repudiation of the perverse hatred of the community that isolates her as an individual. Indeed, this laissez faire approach to the way of the world better accomplishes what virtue sets out to achieve, for virtue consists in the self-effacement of the very agent who is to carry out the universal good (H 9: 209-10, §384). Thus whereas the way of the world gains at least some content from the desires of individuals, virtue is a pure abstraction that only gets its meaning through its opposition to the way of the world. If virtue is to mean anything at all, it must be predicable of individuals.
With this realization, the opposition between virtue and the way of the world vanishes. Virtue realizes that it can be nothing but the action of individuals for partially self-interested goals, and the way of the world realizes that no action can be purely self-interested, for every action is already implicitly universal. Through what Hegel will later call the ‘cunning [List] of reason’ (H 20: 213, §209), individual actions realize broader goals and take a stand on the being of things as a whole, no matter how egocentric they appear. Reason’s next task is thus to realize that its individual actions are themselves immediately universal. Just as self-consciousness learned to embrace the perversity of the understanding’s esotericism, reason now learns to embrace the perversity of ‘the individuality that is real in and for itself.’ Certain that its every action is simultaneously individual and universal, reason now reaches perhaps the most perverse of all its shapes, Kant’s categorical consciousness or practical reason in general. Here reason assumes that so long as the law of the heart is in accord with itself, it could not possibly be perverse. Hegel agrees that this proposition is tautologous, but denies that the hypothetical could possibly be fulfilled. Yes, a reason completely in accord with itself would be neither mad nor perverse, but (as the following dialectic shows) there is no such thing. Because eccentricity belongs to its very project of proving that it shares its particularity with the world at large, reason itself is off-center, mad, perverse.
Frustrated with the heteronomy of hedonism and the compromises demanded by virtue, reason decides to bracket everything contingent about its world and rest content in itself as ‘Individuality that takes itself to be real in and for itself.’ In language strikingly predictive of Schelling’s Freedom essay, Hegel describes this shape of spirit as ‘the movement of a circle which moves freely within itself in a void, which, unimpeded, now expands, now contracts, and is perfectly content to play in and with its own self’ (H 9: 215, §396). Recall that in the Preface to the Phenomenology Hegel had criticized Schelling’s notion of divinity as ‘love playing with itself’ (H 9: 18, §19), an empty and juvenile relation that retreats from the other. The central problem with this philosophical standpoint, he has argued, is that it lacks the suffering and labor of the negative. Likewise, the self-certain individual who has stepped back from the abyss of madness must also be reminded of her suffering if she is to grow up and work for her individuality. Pure action ‘alters nothing and opposes nothing’ (H 9: 216, §396), but as such, it externalizes nothing of the individual. If action is to be adequate to the individual, it will have to have content, will have to involve work, through which the individual can raise herself out of animal existence.
Having overcome virtue’s distrust of ‘the way of the world’ and learned to value action simply as action, reason initially judges anything done by a self-conscious being to be a worthy action, just as we take any chemical compound incorporated into an animal to be organic (H 9: 216, §398). But such incorporation of action into consciousness is no different from the desirous incorporation of food into the organism; that is, it is pure negativity, pure destruction of what is other. In assuming that only its actions matter, the individual covers over any significance the world might have, and ‘the being-in-itself of the reality opposed to consciousness is reduced to a mere empty show’ (H 9: 217, §401). Since individuality makes itself at home in the world not by annihilating the other but by expressing itself, ‘an individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action’ (H 9: 218, §401).
If action [Tun] is to give the individual any content, it will have to relate her work [Werk] to a larger community, through which she can raise herself out of a self-seeking animal existence. Here we see one of the reasons Hegel cryptically refers to this stage as ‘the spiritual animal kingdom.’ By doing so, he points not only to its loneliness and viciousness, but also to the naive playfulness with which it approaches its product. Just as observing reason could only approach animals either reductively (as driven by biochemical processes explainable by mechanistic laws) or unseriously (as dubious analogues of self-consciousness), this stage of reason fails to take itself or others sufficiently seriously for its actions to have any lasting meaning. Others may very well engage in projects of their own, but since reason cannot observe the act of production itself, the transition from the interiority of individuality to the exteriority of expression, it has no recourse but to deny the authenticity of others’ works. But if the individual’s own works are to be true expressions of her individuality, they must present something unique about her in contrast to her community. Unless there is a real difference between the community and the individuality she wishes to externalize, she will merely be playing with herself.
Thus we see the second reason Hegel calls this first stage of self-certain individuality the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’: as if gazing upon a nature filled with creatures of varying attributes and aptitudes, individuality begins by considering the diversity of spiritual gifts as mere givens (H 9: 218, §401). As with physical characteristics in the animal kingdom, courage, intelligence, and all other spiritual attributes that determine how an individual acts in the world are not distributed evenly. The sociality of this realm consists in a fight for survival in which the origins of individual roles are not questioned.24 But if action is to be more than animal desire, more than spiritual consumption and metabolism, it must involve the development and refinement of these spiritual gifts. While reason takes every action as a true expression of individuality and thus cannot yet make judgments as to whether an action is worthy or unworthy, good or bad, it can identify individuals as having greater or lesser capacities for action, and hence greater or lesser natures (H 9: 219, §402).
Already with this valuation reason realizes that action by itself is an empty expression of an individual’s being-for-self and thus that what ought to be valued in action is not its pure happening, but the work it accomplishes. This, however, returns us to one of the problems of the law of the heart: if the truth of action lies in work, then it lies in an external realm in which its meaning can be co-opted by other individuals. So long as individuals define and actualize themselves through their work, the works of others have no value in themselves, but are merely there to be reworked; ‘Thus the work is, in general, something perishable, which is obliterated by the counter-play [Widerspiel] of other forces and interests and really exhibits the reality of the individuality as vanishing rather than as achieved’ (H 9: 221, §405). So long as work is taken to define the individual—in other words, so long as it is taken too seriously—it is nothing but a form of play, pretending to grasp hold of and shape the individual only to let her slip away. On the other hand, this play itself should not be taken too seriously, as even the very ephemerality of work is ephemeral. Work’s vanishing ‘is bound up with the work and vanishes with it; the negative itself perishes along with the positive’ (H 9: 222, §408). The play that is entered into when work takes itself too seriously is not a suspension of work, but merely its dissolution. It is, in other words, a spiritual dead-end and not a formative stage leading it to a more sustainable relation to work.
Reason steps out of this play when it learns to place some value on the work over against itself. The perishable work is significant not because it reflects the inner being of the individual, but because its very being is the being of the individual. Reason, having already learned that it is identical to a dead thing (Ding) such as the skull now learns that it is also identical with a product of spirit’s work, ‘the thing [Sache] itself’ (H 9: 223, §409). Work taken as the thing itself endures despite the contingencies of individual actions and intentions. In positing the work as the thing itself, reason acknowledges that even though works are achieved in contingent circumstances for contingent motives, they nevertheless deserve respect simply because they are products of self-consciousness (H 9: 223, §409). By presuming that her actions, simply by being actions, serve a universal good, the individual steps out of play and knows herself through serving a purpose. With this confidence in her self-identity, the individual can now surrender (aufgeben) the various moments of action (interest, means, and end) without giving up the determinacy of her activity (H 9: 224, §411). In the thing itself the active individual can be confident that her actions will not dissolve into nothingness. Even when others rework her product according to their own designs, the individual knows that they can never annihilate the fact that it is her expression on which they are working (H 9: 224, §413).
Such unconditional self-acceptance can quickly expand to other areas that to us seem only peripherally related to the individual’s activity. An individual caught up in the thing itself will assume every happenstance to be her own doing and take pride in even minor contributions to historical events (H 9: 225, §413). If, for example, the Napoleonic wars are being waged in a neighboring state, she might take credit for a loyalist victory given her expressed support for the loyalists at a dinner party the previous evening. When the individual tries to present her accomplishments to others, this vanity can turn into deception. The individual will refuse to admit that she is far more concerned with her own involvement in an event than in its success, spawning a community of self-centered deceivers. The unity of willing and achievement that the individual posits with the thing itself is merely thought. For anyone other than the individual doing the willing, it is no achievement at all (H 9: 225, §414). Thus the self-congratulation of the acting individual has its counterpart in the annoyance and disdain of others. So long as the individual values action merely as an expression of her freedom, she will fail to deserve the recognition she demands. And more generally, without a rich conception of what it means for a group of individuals to work together or share a thing itself, reason will remain unable to recognize individual actions without coming into conflict over their ownership (H 9: 226, §417).
When this conflict is not resolved, what was once the play of an individual becomes the play of a community. Though members agree that action is ‘what really matters’ and praise each other for their individual contributions to the universal, for them this praise is itself what really matters, and thus they value their own acts of praise more than the actions they are praising.25 They deceive not only each other in claiming to value the universal good, but themselves in pretending that through enacting their individual natures they can be universal (H 9: 228, §419). Indeed, the very supposition that individuals have natures which they simply enact is a form of play, for insofar as the individual’s action is determined by an independently existing nature, it fails to express anything about her. Thus whereas in the observation of nature reason plays at finding itself in nature, in the spiritual animal kingdom it plays at finding nature in itself.
To determine who is deserving of recognition and who is not, reason posits a distinction between morally good and morally bad actions. At first, it sees this distinction as something obvious to every individual. There simply are fundamental guidelines for acting that everyone can agree on (H 9: 229, §422). Hegel’s name for the ability to recognize immediately what is right and good, ‘sound reason’ (die gesunde Vernunft), recalls the ‘sound human understanding’ from the Differenzschrift, which also denoted a facile immediacy of thought whose soundness or health prevented it from recognizing its own perversion. But as Hegel’s title for this section already indicates, this form of reason is not immediately aware of what makes an action good or bad, but is instead a law giver (die gesetzgebende Vernunft). The laws that initially appear self-evident show themselves to be conditional and ambiguous. To leave no doubt that his target is Kantian morality, Hegel first considers the maxim, ‘Everyone ought to speak the truth.’ This law first assumes that the individual involved knows the truth, for no one could condemn someone for not knowing everything or failing to disclose what was beyond his knowledge (H 9: 229-30, §424). Sound reason will reply that this is not a limitation of the law at all, for everyone will understand these qualifications as part of the law, but this reply itself shows the difficulty of conforming to the law, for even in saying, ‘Everyone ought to speak the truth,’ sound reason means something other than it says (H 9: 230, §424). What sound reason initially thought was a universally known and immediately intelligible law turns out to depend on all sorts of contingent knowledge and circumstances in guiding actions.
When sound reason tries to fall back on the still more general rule, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ it runs into similar problems. Since unintelligent love is often worse than no love at all, even this purest expression of the individual’s responsibility of universalizing himself fails the test of meaning what it says. Given the relative powerlessness of the individual compared to the state and ‘way of the world,’ ‘[t]he only significance left for beneficence, which is a sentiment [Empfindung], is that of an individual action to help in a case of need, which is as contingent as it is transitory’ (H 9: 231, §425). Such a mere sentiment is no externalization of the individual at all, but the individual’s wasting away inside himself. Thus there is inevitably a fissure between the individual and his work, and he cannot count on self-certain laws to ensure his work reflects the goodness he intends it to express. For ‘chance determines not only the occasion of the action, but also whether it is a “work” [Werk], whether it is not immediately dissolved and even perverted into something bad [in Übel verkehrt]’ (H 9: 231, §425). The possibility of perversion is thus more essential to reason than its expression in language or actualization in work. While reason can postpone work in enjoying itself or replace it entirely with self-congratulating sponsorship of a cause, it never escapes the nonidentity of the individual and the universal.
As a final test of its own perversion, reason scales down its ambition from self-actualization in correspondence with immediately known laws to the mere testing of laws. Reason recognizes that it cannot be the giver of laws, but is not yet willing to accept them as a gift. Rather, reason sees itself along the lines of Kant’s categorical imperative as testing (prüfen) laws of action to determine whether they reflect the identity of individual and universal. This testing reveals that any attempt to determine this identity solely through formal calculations is bound to fail. When, for example, reason asks whether private property is justified, it finds nothing in the concept of property that might determine whether it ought or ought not be protected (H 9: 233, §430). Neither the protection of property nor its nonprotection is formally contradictory in the sense that a square triangle is, but both inevitably run into actual contradictions in their implementation. If everyone is permitted to use whatever objects he pleases, then conflicts emerge over scarce resources, but if on the other hand some are closed off from these scarce resources, a contradiction arises between the individual’s supposed universality and equality with others and his factual exclusive access to these resources (H 9: 233-4, §431). In the absence of a larger theoretical framework grown out of a community’s ethical substance, the individual can rely only on his own caprice in determining purportedly universal laws.
In moving from giving laws to testing them, reason has replaced the ‘tyrannical insolence [Frevel] that makes caprice [Willkür] into a law and ethical behavior into obedience to such caprice’ with ‘the insolence of a knowledge that argues itself into a freedom from absolute laws, treating them as alien caprice’ (H 9: 235, §434). In both cases reason attempts to mask its perversity and incompleteness with a self-assuring exercise of its autonomy. But because it presupposes that action unifies the individual with the world, it fails to see the irreducible incompleteness of this unity. Thus the lesson of reason is that it must be willing to suspend its activity and need for unity, for they themselves only magnify its perversity: ‘Spiritual being [Wesen] is actual substance through these modes [viz., reason as law-giving and law-testing] being valid, not in isolation, but only as suspended [aufgehobene]’ (H 9: 235, §435). Reason makes its transition into spirit upon becoming self-conscious of its need to suspend itself. By offering up (aufopfern) its ability to know itself through temporal action, reason admits that the only adequate response to the perversion of its individuality is to suspend its effort to unify its individual and universal sides.26 Its final movement is accordingly a moment of forgetting, in which it suspends its effort to know itself temporally by reenacting the historical moments that constitute it. Yet in letting go of this narrative of self-unification, it finds itself marooned in a world that is not its own. Because from the start it assumed its identity with all reality, reason has failed to appreciate the distance between the various moments of spirit.