Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is about the “coming to be of knowledge.” Understanding the title of his book goes some way to help us understand what this complicated book is about. Phenomenology is the science of experience and so the phenomenology of spirit is the experience or journey that our consciousness makes, where consciousness “comprehends within itself the various SHAPES OF SPIRIT as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge, that is, absolute spirit,” according to the ad that Hegel wrote to advertise this book. [p. 468] These shapes or stations are broadly five stages that we make, starting with consciousness, then self-consciousness, reason, spirit and finally absolute spirit. How this journey proceeds from an earlier stage to a later one is when an earlier stage finds in itself contradictions or oppositions which resolves, leading to a more advanced stage, which in turn runs into contradictions which then resolves, leading to a new stage and so on.
The term for this process is the dialectical movement. The term aufhebung is the German word Hegel uses for the dialectical movement and in English, the word is sublation. This word aufhebung or sublation has three senses, which is 1) to negate or cancel, which is the opposition or contradiction that each stage of spirit encounters, 2) to preserve, where some aspects of the earlier stages are preserved in later stages, and 3) to raise up, where a new stage is reached as a progress from the previous ones. [translator’s note] This journey of spirit deals also with multiple levels of our humanity, where the dialectical process happens in human beings as individuals but also as a collective, where community or society goes through this dialectical process to become a world spirit.
He begins by examining the state of the philosophical understanding of human consciousness at his time, responding to his predecessors, in particular Immanuel Kant, keeping in mind that the Phenomenology was published in 1807 while Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781. As an aside, one reason to study the history of philosophy or history of ideas is that thinkers tend to be responding to those before them and their contemporaries. They may have something to add to extend or clarify what earlier thinkers have put forward or they may have something new or maybe even opposing what has been previously theorised. Given that there is an entire history of ideas prior to the current thinker, the way academia, specifically academic philosophy, has progressed is to first understand their subject matter by learning what previous thinkers had thought, and then extending or contradicting their ideas. Often, this leads to a refinement and addition to previous systems of thought and sometimes, it can lead to a completely new system which completely contradicts previous systems, for e.g. idealism vs materialism, or Newtonian physics vs Einstein’s physics of relativity. Sometimes, it can go in directions that aren’t quite extensions or oppositions but new approaches. Nonetheless, even entirely new approaches still owe something to previous approaches, it is not something entirely novel sitting in a knowledge vacuum but is still in a way reacting to what has come before.
I think Hegel’s philosophy falls into the last category, where he brings this new idea that our development of knowledge is a work-in-progress, where previous stages, its history, has lead us to where we are now. As we consider existing ideas and theories, we recognise difficulties they face [which negates them] and then come up with new ideas to overcome these difficulties while preserving some aspects of the existing ideas, in that way creating a new idea, that is different from the existing ones, that is an advance from the existing ones but yet retains some aspects of the existing ones. The new approach Hegel brings is that the development of knowledge and of our consciousness is not static but a movement, a historical dialectical movement, and is a progress.
Introduction
The introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the clearest and easiest chapter in the book, where he lays out why he wrote the book and gives an overview of his dialectical method which then is used throughout the book as consciousness proceeds through the various stages to reach absolute spirit. Even the preface, which Hegel wrote after the text was completed, can make for difficult reading and the story he is telling in the actual chapters themselves can be hard to follow. Perhaps one way of looking at it is that he is telling a story, of the journey of human consciousness. While he makes it seem that the way this journey unfolds is necessary, it can be difficult to follow his logic and the cast of characters that appear in the form of concepts he introduces as his story unfolds. But if you take it that he is telling a story, then just like the way a fictional story introduces new characters which change the trajectory of the story, the same is happening for consciousness. So I think an approach, at least the approach I adopted in my first reading of this 500 page book is to just accept that he is telling a story and not try to understand exactly what is happening and why it is happening, since often, things are happening in the experience of consciousness and spirit but it is not clear to me why that is the case other than he is telling a story.
Back to the introduction to the Phenomenology. Hegel begins by referring to the Kantian notion that we cannot know reality itself. He summarises Kant’s argument from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the opening paragraph before explaining why he is mistaken in the next paragraph. I will be analysing and interpreting the text paragraph by paragraph, so you can refer easily between the actual text and my explanation of it. However, I will not read out the paragraph numbers just for the sake of flow. I am using the 2018 edition of Terry Pinkard’s translation published by Cambridge University Press. Please note that what I am presenting is simply my own interpretation of the text. How I have explained it is how I am making sense of the text to myself. It is of course linked to the text itself, but is not an authoritative interpretation but simply my trying to get to grips with what is going on and what I think he means. Without further ado, let’s look at the opening paragraph.
73. Hegel summarises Kant’s theory on phenomena and reality or noumena. If one aim of philosophy or of knowledge is to get at the truth or reality, then we need to understand the instrument which we use to get at the truth. This instrument is our faculty of cognition. We need to understand how it works, which part of the faculty is used since there may be different types of cognitions and in that way know its “nature and limits” so that we don’t go wrong.
While not explicitly naming Kant, he refers to how some thinkers might say that it is not possible to know the thing-in-itself or reality at all since our cognition mediates how we cognise the thing-in-itself, which might modify our conception of the thing, “forming and changing it.” Even if the medium of our cognition is passive, i.e. not changing the thing, we can still never access the object directly or ‘in itself’ but only through a medium, the medium of our cognition.
To get around this, one idea is that if we understand how the instrument of our cognition works, we might be able to subtract the effects of the instrument to get at the truth. Hegel believes this would not work and explains: “If we […] subtract from a formed thing what the instrument has added to it, then the thing […] is again for us exactly as it was prior to this consequently superfluous effort,” and gives two supporting arguments to explain why subtraction would not do what we hope it does:
1) It is not the case that all that cognition is doing when encountering reality is simply bringing the object under examination a bit closer. Cognition itself makes effort to tell us that it is not just bringing about a direct perception.
2) Even if we know the effects that our cognition has, through studying our cognition, it remains useless to subtract the effects since we end up subtracting all perception. The sensory data that impinges on our sensory faculties still require some kind of processing for us to make sense of it, and if we get rid of that processing, we end up with no information whatsoever.
74. So far, Hegel is agreeing with Kant. However, Hegel thinks Kant is wrong. He thinks Kant’s motivation in claiming that all we can know are representations or phenomena of reality and not the noumena or reality itself is driven by a fear of error. “This fear of erring is already the error itself,” he writes. He accuses Kant of begging the question. When begging the question, one assumes without proof what the question is asking about. It takes for granted what it should instead be proving. In this case, Hegel thinks Kant presupposed that our cognition is a medium which creates representations of reality and that there must be an irreconcilable difference between the reality and our representations of it. Kant then concluded that those are the findings when in fact they are his presuppositions, i.e. he assumed to be true what instead he needed to prove.
Hegel points out the irony of this: “it presupposes that cognition, which by being outside of the absolute, is indeed also outside of the truth, is nevertheless truthful.” Kant seems to think that we cannot know reality or the truth because we perceive reality through the medium of our cognition. Hence all we know are the representations that our cognition makes of the reality and not the reality itself. How then does Kant know that the representations created by our cognitions are truthful even of themselves as representations? Or, how can Kant know that what he portrays is how our cognition works since he is using cognition to think about cognition and if cognition cannot get at reality, how can he know that what he is cognising about cognition even correct? Hegel is showing here that Kant is caught in a paradox and suggests that Kant’s fear of error is in fact a fear of truth.
75. There seems to be then two possible paths leading from Kant’s theory:
1) Even though our cognition cannot cognise reality, what it does come up with may nonetheless be true.
2) Cognition despite being unable to grasp reality might be capable of grasping other truths.
Hegel thinks that the concepts of reality (or what he terms the absolute), the concepts of cognition and other concepts Kant use, presuppose a clear understanding of what they mean when in fact Kant have not elucidated these concepts that are in use in his theory, simply considering that they are already well-understood when that is not the case.
76. Hence Hegel thinks that we need to clarify what those concepts mean. If we abide with Kant’s idea that all we can know are representations or appearances, then it seems that the knowledge or science we have is a science of appearances, which is a science of what is untrue, alongside a Kantian science of consciousness which is a kind of truth but not the truth of appearances. However, science or knowledge needs to get beyond appearances to be a true science, a science of truth, and because of this contradiction, science turns against itself. Already we can see Hegel’s concept of sublation at work here.
77. Hegel suggests that the knowledge of appearances is just a station on the “path of natural consciousness pressing forward towards true knowing […] the path of the soul wandering through the series of ways it takes shape […] so that it purifies itself into spirit by arriving at a cognition of what it is in itself through the complete experience of its own self.”
78. Kant’s theory gives us a concept of how we know but it tells us that what we know is not reality. Hegel calls this the “path of doubt, […] the path of despair.” However, this path of doubt is not one that leads us to investigate, which finally leads us to truth or knowledge. It is not a preparation or initial step making us ready for science where we investigate and test things to find the truth. Hence it is a path of scepticism and despair in ever being able to find the truth. However, Hegel also sees Kant’s theory of scepticism as us “working out” the project of science in a dialectical movement. He writes: “the scepticism which is directed at the entire range of consciousness as it appears, makes spirit for the first time competent to test what truth is, by this kind of scepticism bringing about a despair regarding the so-called natural conceptions, thoughts, and opinions.” Consciousness however is burdened by this seeming incapacity to achieve what it wants to do, which is to find truth.
79. Hence our consciousness remains incomplete. This state of consciousness, in which we are aware that we cannot know the reality or truth, is just one stage on the path towards absolute spirit. According to Kant’s theory, when we cognise something, through our understanding of how our consciousness works, we know that it is just a representation, and is not the reality. Hegel sees a way out. When we cognise nothing, because there is in reality nothing there and we have cognised that, it is then a nothingness that has content, it is a “determinate nothing.” A new form can now emerge leading us further on the path of the dialectical movement.
80. We want to know things, and Hegel posits that the goal of our knowing is reached when knowing no longer has to go beyond itself. He writes: “the goal is the point at which knowing no longer needs to go beyond its own self, where knowing itself finds itself, and where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept.” Our concept of ourselves is of our own consciousness, we are self-conscious, we have a self-consciousness. Yet in conceptualising a self-consciousness, we already go beyond the limits posited by Kant’s theory, that we cannot know ourselves (but only the appearance of ourselves). So consciousness is already going beyond its own self in knowing itself. In that way, thinking about our own consciousness is a violence consciousness does to itself. Hegel suggests that this gives us an anxiety over truth and we might try to hold on to the truth that we think we have, by trying to not think but even thinking about not thinking is already thinking which “spoils the thoughtlessness.” Our reasoning prevents us from achieving that rest or peace.
He alludes that Kant’s seemingly “ardent” search for truth, which concludes that we cannot know reality but only appearances, is a pretence which prevents him from finding out any truth other than his vanity which thinks that in his system of representations that it is cleverer than any thought that could be received from others or even himself. Hegel thinks this vanity thwarts every truth just so that it can retreat back into itself and revel in how it can bring all thoughts to dissolution and find only a solipsism. It is a flight from the universal and from knowledge.
81. Hegel turns to the method of gaining knowledge or the method of science. To investigate or test something, we need to test it against a standard. “Testing consists in the application of an accepted standard, and in the resulting equality or inequality between the standard and what is tested lays the decision as to whether what is tested is correct or incorrect,” he writes. The standard is what is the essence, the in-itself, of what represents that kind of thing that we are examining. However, when we first begin doing science, there is no standard established yet and hence no investigation can take place. So how do we ever embark on doing science?
82. The way to get out of this paradox is to understand that consciousness distinguishes things from itself while relating to them. The object under study becomes a being-for-another, a being for my consciousness which is different from the being-in-itself. The being-in-itself is the truth and essence of that being while being-for-us is what we determine of that being when it appears to us.
83. What we have grasped is the being-for-us and the in-itself of knowing. What we know of the object is not its essence, its truth, but only our knowing of it. The standard is then only our knowing of the object, a standard that is within us but the object will not necessarily have to recognise this standard.
84. Hegel explains: “Consciousness […] provides its own standard, and the investigation will thereby be a comparison of [this standard] with itself.” This difference arising from the comparison is only within consciousness. Consciousness declares what is within itself to be true and uses this as the standard. We might designate our knowing of the object as the concept and the essence of that object. What we do in the comparison in our consciousness is to check if the concept corresponds to the object. We might on the other hand designate the essence of the object, the in-itself of the object as the concept while the idea we have of that object as the object, and we check if the object corresponds to the concept. Hegel calls these notions of concept and object, this being-for-an-other and being-in-itself, moments. All these moments “fall within the knowing that we are investigating” and hence we do not need further or external standards to apply our ideas and thoughts.
85. Hegel says that since the concept and object are both present in consciousness itself, we can then be elevated above this comparison between concept and object to a higher examination, where “consciousness examines its own self.” When we examine the external world of objects, we have a consciousness of the objects but in our questioning of whether we properly know the true nature of the object, we become conscious of our own consciousness. In our examination of objects, we are conscious of what is the true and in our questioning of whether we know the true nature of the object, we are conscious of our consciousness’s knowing of the true. Both the object and our knowing of it conceptually are for our consciousness and our consciousness have “an issue […] whether or not its knowing of the object corresponds to the object.”
Recapping, our consciousness only knows of the object as the object is for us; we cannot get to the object-in-itself. In that way, consciousness cannot test its knowing or concept of the object with the object-in-itself. But yet since consciousness knows that there is an object at all, it realises that there is an object-in-itself and an object-for-consciousness which is what it knows. These two objects have a difference but this difference is only in our consciousness. If the object does not correspond to our concept of it, then “consciousness must alter its knowing in order to make it adequate to the object.” However, in altering our consciousness’s knowing of the object, the object itself is altered in our consciousness. How can this be, you may ask.
Hegel explains his idea again in a different way. When our consciousness cognise an object, it at first thought it was cognising the object-in-itself. However, in reasoning about the situation, it realises that what it did cognise is not the in-itself but the “in itself only for consciousness” or the object-for-us. When our consciousness realise that the object is not as we had thought, our concept of it will change, but in that way, the object itself seems changed (to us). The standard, that we used to compare our knowing of the object to the object, changes.
86. This changing of the object and consciousness is a dialectical movement and is what consciousness is experiencing, and these experiences form the path of its journey. The object itself has its essence, which is in-itself. The consciousness has two objects, the in-itself of the object and the being-for-consciousness of this object. The latter, this being-for-consciousness of the object, at first seems to be just the reflection of consciousness on the object, consciousness’s knowing of the object. However, the object itself is altered by consciousness ceasing to be the in-itself and becoming the for-consciousness. “This new object contains the nothingness of the first; it is what experience has learned about it,” writes Hegel. We have learned from this dialectical movement about the object what the object is not, its nothingness.
87. Each new result that emerges as we progress from our previous knowing of what is at first untrue does not end up in scepticism, where we realise we know nothing. Instead, this nothingness, of what the object is not, is the result of the previous steps. Our consciousness is likewise changing, with new shapes of it coming onto the scene. According to Hegel, this series of new shapes of our consciousness and the new objects emerging happens ‘behinds our backs.’ Consciousness is “comprehended in the experience itself,” i.e., we come to understand our consciousness through what it experiences. Here, Hegel makes a distinction between our consciousness and ourselves. What emerges for consciousness is the truth of the object while what emerges for us through this experience of consciousness is “movement and coming-to-be” of spirit.
88. Hegel thinks that these stages are necessary ones, as we progress towards Absolute Spirit, which will have Absolute Knowledge, and hence this path to a science of knowledge is itself science, the “science of the experience of consciousness.”
89. According to Hegel, “the experience through which consciousness learns about itself can, according to its concept, comprehend within itself nothing less than the whole system of consciousness, or the whole realm of the truth of spirit.” The moments or experiences of consciousness are the shapes of consciousness. Consciousness in its journey towards its own truth will be able to put aside what is alien to it, is an other to it and is only for-it and not its true essence. It will reach a point when appearances to it will be indeed the true essence of the objects so that at that point, it will have real knowledge of objects and finally also real knowledge of its own essence and absolute knowing.
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