On the varied role and position of the “Phenomenology of Spirit” within Hegel’s metaphysics
The work that we call, in short, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807 under the full title: System of Science. Part One. The Phenomenology of Spirit. The proper body of the work begins with a deliberation that in its next publication in the complete edition of his works1 comprised nearly thirteen pages and carried the explicit title “Introduction” (WW II, 59–72 [§§73–89]).2 With certain reservations we may call this deliberation “Introduction” even though this title is missing from the first edition. Already in the first edition the “Introduction” is preceded by an extensive “Preface” (WW II, 3–58 [§§1–72]) that in this edition comprises forty-one pages. In some copies of the first edition,3 a title page for the entire work can be found after the preface and before the “Introduction,” bearing the heading “Science of the Experience of Consciousness.” During the printing Hegel replaced this title with the following one: Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the complete edition of his works, which was commenced and attended to by Hegel’s students immediately after Hegel’s death, this work appeared in 1832 under the title Phenomenology of Spirit. (Hegel himself had already used this title in the introduction to the Logic 1812 p.X. [28])4 The determinate and determining article “the” is omitted. Shortly before his death Hegel had begun to revise this work; so it may be assumed that this change of the title and also the insertion of the heading “Introduction” stem from Hegel himself.
The title was changed for a weighty reason. The Phenomenology of Spirit had to forfeit its “role” as “Part One” of the system because the System itself had in the meantime changed in Hegel’s thinking. According to the advertisement that was written by Hegel himself and that appeared in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on October 28th, 1807, a second part was planned for the System of Science, whose first part was the Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit: “A second volume will contain the system of logic as speculative philosophy, and the remaining two parts of philosophy, the sciences of nature and of spirit.”5
Indeed five years later the announced “speculative” logic began to appear under the title Science of Logic. This title correlates to the title of “Part One” of the System of Science from 1807: Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Yet, in 1812 the Science of Logic no longer appeared under the overarching title System of Science. Nor is the Science of Logic edited according to Hegel’s own advertisement from 1807 as the “second volume” or the “second part” of the system. In the years 1812 and 1813 the first volume of the Logic appeared in two books that contain the “Objective Logic”; in 1816 the second volume appeared, which concludes the work with the “Subjective Logic” or the “Doctrine of the Concept.” The “Sciences of Nature and Spirit,” which had also been announced in Hegel’s own advertisement from 1807 for the second part of the “system,” did not appear at all. We know indeed that during his teaching activity in Jena (1801–1806) Hegel repeatedly and extensively lectured on the philosophy of nature and of spirit.6 Pieces from these lectures went into the Phenomenology of Spirit, albeit in a modified form. Thus the publication of the “Sciences of Nature and Spirit” was not omitted because Hegel had not worked on these areas but for another essential reason.
During the time between 1807 and 1812, the System whose first part consists of the Phenomenology of Spirit must have changed. We call the system that was determined by the Phenomenology of Spirit by the short name “Phenomenology-system.” One year after the completion of the Logic, which appeared between 1812 and 1816 without any explicit assignment into a system as its own part of the system, in 1817 Hegel published a work titled Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Science in Outline, for Use in His Lectures.7
Hegel began his teaching in Heidelberg in the winter semester of 1816–17 with a lecture on the Encyclopaedia. The almost simultaneous publication of the Encyclopaedia had its “most immediate occasion” in the “need to supply my listeners with a compendium.”8 But the inner reason of the publication is the change of the system into the shape that Hegel considered to be the definitive one and that he retained as such. He therefore says in the preface to the Encyclopaedia: “In an ‘outline,’ where the content is one that is already presupposed and familiar and that is to be presented with deliberate concision, what comes into consideration is that the order and arrangement of the topics be externally suitable. Since the present exposition is not like that but sets out a new treatment of philosophy according to a method that, I hope, will eventually be recognized as the only veritable one, the one that is identical with the content, I could have considered it more beneficial for the public—if my circumstances had permitted this—to let this treatment be preceded by a more extensive work on the other parts of philosophy, like the one I have presented to the audience about the first part of the whole, the logic.”9
Certain decisive things become clear from these remarks:
1. The Encyclopaedia is at bottom not a textbook but rather the shape of the new and definitive system. We call it in short “Encyclopaedia-system.”
2. This system now no longer takes the Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit as its first part but instead the Logic.
3. In the preface to the Encyclopaedia Hegel explicitly refers to the Science of Logic that he had completed in the preceding year and that thereby receives an outwardly ambiguous position. At first it still seemed to be the second part of the Phenomenology-system, but when it appeared it is in fact already the first and fundamental part of a new system, the Encyclopaedia-system.
4. In the preface to the Encyclopaedia Hegel no longer mentions the Phenomenology of Spirit because it was not only no longer the first part of the system; it was no longer a main part of the system at all.
The fact that the “Phenomenology-system” had already been given up by the time the Logic was published in 1812—five years after the Phenomenology—can be presumed from the fact that the complete title System of Science and its designation as “Part Two” are missing. We can gather from the Philosophical Propaedeutic, edited by Karl Rosenkranz in 1840 in Volume XVIII of the Complete Works,10 that the Encyclopaedia-system was already established between 1808 and 1811. Moreover, the arrangement of the teaching material of the Philosophical Propaedeutic, which Hegel presented as a teacher at the Nuremberg Gymnasium, reveals very clearly the primacy of the Encyclopaedia-system:
First seminar. For the Lower Grade: doctrine of right, deontology, theory of religion.
Second seminar. For the Middle Grade: phenomenology of spirit and logic.
Third seminar. For the Higher Grade: doctrine of the concept and philosophical encyclopaedia.11
Here the proper completion of the logic appears as the beginning and foundation of the Encyclopaedia-system. Yet, in this system the phenomenology of spirit is not erased. It is incorporated into the Encyclopaedia-system in a modified function. This system has three parts:
A. The science of logic.
B. The philosophy of nature.
C. The philosophy of spirit.
The third part is again subdivided into three parts:
Part 1: Subjective spirit.
Part 2: Objective spirit.
Part 3: Absolute spirit.
Part one of the third main part of the system, the philosophy of the subjective spirit, is in turn arranged into three sections:
A. Soul.
B. Consciousness.
C. Spirit.12
In the introductory paragraph 307 of part one of the third main part of the system it says: “subjective spirit {is}
(a) immediate spirit, natural spirit,—the object of what is usually called anthropology, or the soul;
(b) spirit as the identical reflection into itself and into another, relation or particularization—consciousness, the object of the phenomenology of spirit;
(c) spirit that is for itself, or spirit as subject;—the object of what is ordinarily called psychology.—Consciousness awakens in the soul; consciousness posits itself as reason; and subjective reason frees itself into objectivity through its activity.”13 This threefold distinction of the subjective spirit can historically be explained by means of the distinction of anima, animus sive mens, and ratio.[8]
The Phenomenology of Spirit has now become the middle portion of part one of the third main part of the system. Instead of supporting and determining the systematics of the system as the first part, as it had formerly done, the Phenomenology now disappears into a corner of the systematics of the definitive system. In terms of its doctrinal content the Phenomenology of Spirit has remained the same, yet in the new system it has a very different and a very restricted systematic function.
Hegel further expanded the content of the Encyclopaedia-system in the following years. Compared to the first shape of 1817, the so-called Heidelberg Encyclopedia, the second edition of 1827 is considerably more extensive; the third one of 1830 has been expanded even further. In the second edition Hegel included the address he delivered to his audience on the occasion of the commencement of his professorship in Berlin on October 22, 1818. The concluding sentence of this address characterizes the general orientation of the Encyclopaedia-system and thus of Hegel’s metaphysics in general: “The essence of the universe that is at first concealed and closed contains no power that could withstand the courage of cognition; it must open up before it and lay its riches and its depth before its eyes and offer them for its enjoyment.”14
The construction of the Encyclopaedia-system shows a decisive realignment with the basic structure of earlier metaphysics. The primacy of the Science of Logic corresponds to the metaphysica generalis. The philosophy of absolute spirit corresponds to the conclusion of the metaphysica specialis (metaphysics proper in the Kantian sense), i.e., of the theologia rationalis. The philosophy of nature corresponds to the cosmologia rationalis and the philosophy of subjective and objective spirit corresponds to the psychologia rationalis. Hegel indeed adheres to this inherited basic structure already in the Phenomenology-system, but he does so only in the second part of the system.
However, these remarks characterize the transformation from the Phenomenology-system to the Encyclopaedia-system only externally. The question of the inner necessity of this transition and of its metaphysical significance, the question of the concealed equal status and of how the two systems belong together within Hegel’s metaphysics, the questions of the essence and of the unfolding of the system character that is the distinguishing mark of modern metaphysics as such: all these questions require a mindfulness that lies outside the horizon of “historiological” Hegel scholarship. The elucidation of the Phenomenology of Spirit that is attempted here wants to prefigure the sphere of such mindful meditations and thereby aims to suggest that this metaphysics concerns us now and in the future with the same immediacy as the oldest saying of Western thinking.
When at the end of the address mentioned above Hegel says that the “universe,” which for him is the same as the absolute, has in itself no power of resistance to assert its concealed essence against the disclosing courage of metaphysical cognition, the question arises as to why the absolute lacks this power of resistance. The answer is: Because the absolute is, in accordance with its essential character, unable to resist this disclosure, but, on the contrary, it wants to reveal itself. This will to show itself is its essence. Appearance is the essential will of spirit. It is with an eye toward this essential will of the absolute that Hegel’s statement is made. This essential determination of the absolute is, therefore, the presupposition of the Encyclopaedia-system. But what about the presupposition itself? Can the system lay claim to being the absolute system if it rests on a presupposition that it does not ground itself, namely in an absolute sense? Hegel indeed carried out the grounding of this essence of the absolute and managed to carry it out in the Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit. If the absolute wills to reveal itself because it is the will to manifestation, then self-revelation, i.e., appearance, must belong to the essence of the absolute. Essence and appearance are identical here. The absolute is spirit. Spirit is the knowing that knows itself as the essential ground of all beings and that wills itself in this knowledge. Spirit is absolute knowledge. Since appearance belongs to its essence, absolute knowledge has to present itself as appearing knowledge. This is the only way in which absolute knowledge itself [von sich aus] grants the courage of human cognition the possibility to be open for this cognition and to be with what is cognized in this cognition in the first place. Conversely, insofar as human cognition knows the absolute, it must above all bring the self-presentation of appearing knowledge to realization. If this realization of the self-presentation of the appearing absolute is to be suitable for the absolute, then it can itself only be absolute. Science, in turn, must bring this absolute self-presentation to its absolute realization. If the Phenomenology of Spirit is this realization, then the work that bears this title has dared to undertake a metaphysical task that never before needed to be assigned and that afterward could never be assigned again. This “work” is, therefore, a unique and in a special sense distinguished moment in the history of metaphysics. By “work” we do not mean the intellectual achievement of the human being Hegel, but “work” as the happening of a history in and for the sake of which a unique constancy and determination (the insistence of Da-sein) is demanded from all human accomplishments.
Hegel knew in his own way of the uniqueness of the task of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and he made no mistake about its essential difficulty. Otherwise he would not have provided this work with a special “Introduction” and have this “Introduction” preceded by a “Preface” for which there are no comparable precedents in the history of Western thinking.
If they have a function at all, “prefaces” and “introductions” are meant to lead into the work and to provide “outsiders” with a bridge to the entrance into the work. In the “introductions” to works of the sciences this task can be performed without difficulty because everyday representation and scientific thinking remain directed straight-forwardly toward beings. An “introduction” to philosophical thinking is impossible; for there exists no steady and deliberate gliding-over from everyday thinking into thoughtful thinking, because the latter deals with being and because being can never and nowhere be encountered among beings as a being. The only thing that exists here is the leap and the leap into it. An “introduction” can only serve as a preparation for the leap, i.e., to bring the rift between the comportment toward beings and the thinking of being that we need to leap over into the field of vision, and to not make the approach to the leap too short. (Why is this possible? The pre-philosophical understanding of being.) But every introduction “into” “philosophy” still has to come to an understanding with those who do not stand in it and has to get involved with their horizon of understanding. In doing this, the “introduction” acts always and necessarily against its own intention.
Nevertheless it does not have to be in vain—as a preparation for the leap into the thinking that thinks the being of beings. However, in Hegel’s metaphysics—and in the metaphysics of German Idealism in general—we not only have to think being but it is necessary to think beings in their being as the absolute absolutely, in an absolute manner. This requires a leap that, in turn, must still leap over itself: the absolute leap into the absolute. The presentation of the Phenomenology of Spirit dares to accomplish this leap.
From these remarks it becomes clear that our attempt to elucidate what the Phenomenology of Spirit is remains in all respects thought-provoking. How are we to proceed if on top of this we presuppose neither the knowledge of the work itself nor that of the “Preface” and of the “Introduction”? We use the help that Hegel himself provided in the form of the “Introduction” to his work. By doing this, we must, however, take these few pages in advance as that which they must eventually be recognized and understood to be. For they are the explanation of the title that stands before the entire work and that is: Science of the Experience and Consciousness. Now, it was precisely this title that Hegel dropped during the printing. It remained only on a few copies of the first edition (1807). Hegel replaced the crossed-out title with the ultimate version: Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the edition of the Phenomenology that is part of the collected works (1832), which is the one that is most commonly used, the crossed-out title is missing, so that the “Introduction” which refers to it is left without any explicit mention of the respect in which it speaks. Moreover, in comparison to the massive “Preface” the “Introduction” appears to be of minor importance, so that at most one occasionally takes this or that passage from it as a “quotation”—and they are always the same uncomprehended passages. The “Introduction” lays out why the Science of the Experience of Consciousness is necessary and what it is from the ground of its necessity. If we juxtapose the second title—Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit—we notice immediately, albeit at first only formally, the following: The “phenomenology of spirit” is “the experience of consciousness.” To elucidate the Phenomenology of Spirit thus means: to explain on the basis of the “Introduction” what Hegel thinks in the domain of absolute metaphysics and “speculation” when he speaks of “experience”; it means to expound how that which is called “the experience of consciousness” is to be understood; it means to expound in what sense the Science of the Experience of Consciousness has to be thought (cf. below p.78ff.). In order to gain clarity on this, we must first elucidate what the term “consciousness” means in modern metaphysics.
“Consciousness” is the not entirely obvious name for conscientia, i.e., for that knowledge which also knows all modes of comportment of man, insofar as these refer to the mens, the “spirit.” “Spirit” expresses itself, i.e., itself as a self, by saying “I.” Insofar as consciousness, as the co-knowing of the known and of its knowing, “is” the relation to the self, it is self-consciousness. The essence of consciousness is self-consciousness; every cogito is an ego cogito me cogitare. The videre and ambulare is also a cogitare provided that they are truthful, that is provided that they are certain, in the manner of the cogitatum in the cogito me videre, cogito me ambulare. Descartes, therefore, says in §9 of the first part of Principia philosophiae 1646: Cogitationis nomine, intelligo illa omnia, quae/nobis consciis/in nobis fiunt, quatenus eorum in nobis conscientia est.15 “By the term ‘thought’ (‘consciousness’), I understand everything we know along ourselves, everything that occurs in us insofar as there exists an accompanying-knowing of all this in us.”[9]
Consciousness is not merely perceptio, a grasping placing-before [Vorstellen], but apperceptio, a placing-toward-ourselves that grasps us also. But according to its essence, the self that is thus represented alongside does not move into consciousness after the fact and in addition to that which consciousness is also conscious of, while consciousness otherwise remains immediately directed toward the things. Self-consciousness is not a consciousness that has been enriched in its content with the representation of the self; rather, the consciousness of things is essentially and properly self-consciousness, albeit one that most of the time does not represent the self distinctly [eigens] and thus in a sense forgets about it. The self in self-consciousness is both one side of the relation of consciousness to the object-of-consciousness and at the same time, and that means properly, the entire relation itself. This relation contains the basic constitution of consciousness. Hegel calls it “reflection,” though he does not take this term psychologically as a comportment but rather ontologically as the structural relation of the essential bending and of the shining back of every object-of-consciousness as such, and thus of consciousness, into the self. Hegel understands “reflection” not as a turning back of the gaze but as the bending back of the shining and the appearance, i.e., of light itself. (“Reflection” is taken in a metaphysical ontological sense, not a subjective-psychological sense; cf. already Kant in the “Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection”). (The essential unity of “reflection” and negativity; consciousness is spirit as the identical reflection into itself and into another.)
Since consciousness is essentially self-consciousness and must be comprehended from the self, yet the self steps out of itself toward the object and shows itself and appears during this process, consciousness as self-consciousness is the appearing knowledge. Consciousness is essentially the element and the ether of the appearance of knowledge, which itself is only as self-knowledge, i.e., as mens sive animus, i.e., as spirit.
That the human being is a self and is able to say “I” and knows of itself and has “self-consciousness” has always been known by Western thinking. Heraclitus says (Fragment 101): ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν.16 “I have—pursuing my self—listened into it.” But these “conversations” of the soul “with itself”of the Greeks and in Christianity, the “soliloquies” of Augustine as well, are fundamentally different from the “consciousness” that as self-consciousness, i.e., as self-certainty, constitutes the essence of the modern concept of truth, and that means of objectness and actuality. Hegel says in his lecture on the history of modern philosophy, after discussing Francis Bacon and Jakob Böhme: “Only now do we in fact arrive at the philosophy of the modern world, and we begin it with Descartes. With him we properly enter into an autonomous philosophy that knows that it is the autonomous product of reason and that self-consciousness is an essential moment of truth. Here, we can say, we are at home; and like the mariner after a long voyage on the stormy sea, we can cry ‘Land, ho!’ Descartes is one of those people who started everything over again; and with him the formation, the thinking of the modern age begins.”17 “In this new period, the principle is thinking, the thinking that proceeds from itself.”18
In our language we can also say: being an object of consciousness is now the essence of the being of all beings. All being is objectness of “consciousness.” Modern metaphysics is what it is in the element of consciousness. If for a brief moment Hegel titled this work in which modern metaphysics consummates itself Science of the Experience of Consciousness, then we must not let the brightness of this moment pass by but must attempt to use this brightness to illuminate the work. We must especially not evade this necessity, because even though the title disappears again, there is talk of “experience” everywhere in the course of the work in its decisive passages. So we ask: What does “experience” mean in the domain of absolute metaphysics and its unconditional speculation? What does “experience of consciousness” mean?
On the present occasion, the elucidation of the title Science of the Experience of Consciousness on the basis of the introduction cannot be carried out by means of a formal, continuous interpretation of the text of the introduction as it should really be done. An overview, and that means an insight into the structure of the “Introduction,” must provisionally suffice. The “Introduction” consists of sixteen paragraphs (1–16) which we will organize into five parts (I–V). At this time we will elucidate only the first four parts (1–15).
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. 19 vols. (Berlin 1832–45 and 1887).
2. Ibid., vol. II, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Schulze (Berlin, 1832, second edition 1845).
3. G. W. F. Hegel, System der Wissenschaft: Erster Theil, diePhänomenologie des Geistes, (Bamberg and Würzburg: Joseph Anton Goebhardt, 1807).
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 2 volumes (Nürnberg: Johann Leonhard Schrag, 1812–13 and 1816).
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Leipzig: Meiner, 1937). “Editor’s Introduction,” xxxviii.
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie (Natur- und Geistesphilosophie). II. Die Vorlesungen 1805–1806, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Leipzig: Meiner, 1931).
[English: Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–06) with Commentary, trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1983).
The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. John W. Burbridge and George di Giovanni (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986).]
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Zum Gebrauch seiner Vorlesungen (Heidelberg: August Oßwald, 1817).
8. Cf. ibid., beginning of the preface (to the first edition). WW VI, ed. Leopold v. Henning (Berlin, 1840), iii. [English: The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 1; translation modified.]
9. Ibid. Preface. WW VI, ivf. [English: The Encyclopaedia Logic, 1; translation modified.]
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. Vol. XVIII, Philosophische Propädeutik, ed. Karl Rosenkranz (Berlin, 1840). [English: The Philosophical Propaedeutic, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).]
11. WW XXVIII, 1, 77, 121. [English: The Philosophical Propaedeutic, 1, 55, 105.]
12. WW VI, table of contents, xi–xvi. [English: The Encyclopaedia Logic, “Contents,” 4–7.]
13. Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften [1840], 209. [English: Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §387; translation modified.]
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Zum Gebrauch seiner Vorlesungen, second edition (Heidelberg: August Oßwald, 1827).—The inaugural address mentioned here has been included in vol. XIII of the complete edition of Hegel’s works published by the association of friends. Cf. ibid., vol. XIII, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. I, ed. Karl Ludwig Michelet (Berlin, 1833), 6. [English: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 185; translation modified.]
15. Descartes, Principia philosophiae. §9. Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris, 1897–1910). Vol. VIII, 1, p.7. [English: Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1983), 5. “By the word ‘thought,’ I understand all those things that occur in us while we are conscious, insofar as the consciousness of them is in us.”]
16. Hermann Diehls, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Greek and German, fifth edition by Walther Kranz (Berlin, 1934). Volume I, 173. [English: Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 61. “I investigated myself (or: I made enquiry of myself).”]
17. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. WW XV, ed. Karl Ludwig Michelet (Berlin, 1836), 328. [English: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simpson (London: Kegan Paul, 1892–1896), 3:217.]
18. Ibid. [Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:217.]