Akademik

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Robert C.Solomon G.W.F.Hegel (1770–1831) was the greatest systematic philosopher of the nineteenth century. As a young man he followed and was (at least at first) enthusiastic about the French Revolution. Then came the Reign of Terror of 1793, and Hegel, like many early followers of the revolution, had second thoughts. With the new century came Napoleon. Hegel and all of Germany watched with mixed fascination, anticipation, and anxiety as Napoleon began his political and military campaign eastward, forming alliances with many of the tiny principalities and city-states of Germany, threatening and swallowing others. By 1806, Napoleon was at the height of his powers, and in the battle of Jena in October of that year, he put an end to the 800-year-old Holy Roman Empire. The international success of French revolutionary liberalism impressed Hegel, who was then teaching at the University of Jena. The battle also put him out of a job. But in the wake of Napoleon Hegel envisioned the birth of a new world, and he announced in the Preface of the book he was completing, albeit in rather ponderous philosophical terms, the ultimate liberation and final unification of the human spirit. The book was called The Phenomenology of Spirit. Its influence in philosophy would be as profound and as enduring as Napoleon’s bold ventures in European history, in terms of both its positive impact and the reactions it engendered. It is Kant, perhaps, whose “Copernican revolution” is usually compared to the upheaval in France, but it is Hegel who deserves credit for consolidating and spreading that revolution. If Heine could compare Kant to Robespierre, then Hegel, with comparable philosophical hyperbole, deserves comparison to Napoleon.1 Hegel began studying and writing philosophy soon after Kant had redefined the philosophical world, and just as Europe was entering the turbulent new century. As a young man, Hegel was educated in the Tübingen seminary but seemed to have little religious ambition or theological talent. In fact, his first philosophical essays were somewhat blasphemous attacks on Christianity, including a piece on “The Life of Jesus” which went out of its way to make Jesus into an ordinary moralist, who in his Sermon on the Mount espoused Kant’s categorical imperative.2 As a student, however, Hegel entertained the idea of inventing a new religion that stressed our unity with nature, a “synthesis of nature and spirit” drawn from the ancient Greeks and crudely formulated with great poetic flair by Hegel’s college friend and room-mate Friedrich Hølderlin. Hølderlin was without doubt one of the poetic geniuses of his generation and a powerful influence on young Hegel. Drawing from not only the ancient Greeks but the romantic culture that surrounded them, Hølderlin promulgated a grand metaphor of effusion, cosmic spirit making itself known to us and to itself throughout all of nature, in human history, and, most clearly of all, in poetry and the “spiritual sciences.” Their younger friend Friedrich Schelling had already converted that metaphor into philosophical currency by 1795, and when Hegel finally decided to turn to serious philosophy in 1801, it was with the encouragement and sponsorship of Schelling. He sought and obtained a teaching position, and, in opposition to the clear polemical tone of his earlier, “anti-theological” essays, he began to write philosophy in a terse, academic style.3 Hegel joined Schelling in his bold attempt to forge a new form of philosophy, following Kant and the radical neo-Kantian Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and together they published a journal, the Critical Journal of Philosophy. His first professional essay was a comparison of the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling, making clear the superiority of the latter.4 For several years, Hegel was known in the German philosophical world only as a disciple of Schelling. But then he published his Phenomenology.5 Hegel’s original intentions and initial approach to the Phenomenology were rather modest and for the most part derivative of earlier efforts by Fichte and Schelling to “complete Kant’s system.” The idea of a “system” of philosophy comes from Kant, who aspired to provide a unified and allencompassing “science” of philosophy. But according to Fichte and Schelling and several other philosophers who greatly admired and emulated Kant, he had not succeeded. He left us instead with a fragmentary philosophy which, however stunning in its individual parts, failed to show the unity of human experience. In particular, Kant left a gaping abyss between his theory of knowledge—in the first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason—and his conception of morals in the Critique of Practical Reason, and so left the human mind as if cleft in two. The third Critique was supposed to be a synthesis of the two, but in the opinion of many of Kant’s closest followers, some of whom preferred the third Critique above all, that book failed to provide the synthesis required for a genuine system.6 Moreover, Kant’s conception of the “thing in itself,” while central to his philosophy and the key to his division between the phenomenal world of knowledge and the noumenal world of free will, morality, and religion, was greeted by these post-Kantians as a mistake, a serious flaw that threatened to undermine the whole critical enterprise. The idea that there could be any intelligible conception of things as they are in themselves and not as phenomena—that is, as experienced by us— left room for the skeptic to’ dig in their wedge with the challenge: How can we know that we really know anything at all? How can we have true or “absolute” knowledge—that is, self-reflective knowledge that does not permit the possibility of skepticism? How does the world of practical reason tie in with what we know, and vice versa? In his philosophy, therefore, Hegel would argue against the intelligibility of skepticism, against the intelligibility of any conception of the “thing in itself” as distinct from things as we know them, and against the bifurcation of human experience into incommensurable theoretical and practical realms. The fact that Hegel expresses this reasonably modest and academically well-established set of problems and their solution in the language of “absolute knowing” has understandably led to much misunderstanding and considerably exaggerated claims on behalf of Hegel’s efforts. What Hegel was after, however, was a continuation, a correction, and the “completion” of some of Kant’s key themes, die unity of knowledge, the unintelligibility of skepticism, the importance of the first-person, “subjective,” Cartesian, or “phenomenological” standpoint as the origin of all knowledge, and the a priori necessity of certain forms of consciousness. It was not a particularly ambitious program, and Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, among others, had clearly shown the way.7 What emerged in 1807, however, was a book very different from anything that had been seen in philosophy before. True, the Kantian themes and the post-Kantian ambitions were still in evidence, and the book did conclude with a modest chapter entitled “Absolute knowing.” But in between the introduction and opening chapters, on the one hand, in which these themes were quickly dispatched, and the brief conclusion, on the other, in which the post-Kantian ambitions were summarily concluded, the book grew into something of a beautiful monster. There are chapters on various Greek philosophies and on various eccentric movements in ethics, as well as an open attack on Kant’s categorical imperative, commentaries on contemporary history including the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, bits of literary criticism, philosophy of science, and an oddly shaped survey of the world’s religions, all put forward in a barely intelligible abstract neo-Kantian jargon that makes even the Kantian Critiques read like vacation novels by comparison. The Phenomenology is not, as originally intended, merely a demonstration of “the Absolute.” It is a magnificent conceptual odyssey which carries us through the most elementary conceptions of human awareness to some of the most allencompassing and complex forms of consciousness. Its stated purpose is still to comprehend the truth—the absolute truth—but this should not be understood as a merely epistemological enterprise. What Hegel comes to mean by philosophical truth is an all-encompassing vision, and this will include not only a variety of philosophical theories but much material from religion, ethics, and history as well.8 THE SPIRIT OF THE PHENOMENOLOGY The fact that Hegel so obviously followed in Kant’s great footsteps too easily misleads us into thinking that Hegel, supposedly like Kant, was just another academic philosophy professor, worried about abstruse and abstract problems that an ordinary person would neither comprehend nor care about.9 The truth is, of course, that this picture is unfair to Kant, and it is mistaken about Hegel as well. Kant was moved in philosophy not only by David Hume, who famously awakened him from his dogmatic Leibnizian slumbers, but by his religious piety, his firm moral convictions, and his enthusiasm for Newtonian science. He was troubled by the conflict between science and religion, and he was deeply interested in such speculative questions as the meaning of life as well as the basic Socratic question of what it meant to be a genuinely good human being. To read Kant merely as the answer to skepticism or the grand synthesis of the warring schools of rationalism and empiricism is to miss what is most important and exciting about him. So, too, to see Hegel as the continuation or “completion” of Kant is to deny what is most fascinating about his philosophy. And to read the Phenomenology as if it were only a wordy and difficult introduction to the mature “system” that followed is to miss what is most important and exciting about that book. For the “spirit” of the Phenomenology is nothing less than an all-embracing conception of the world, an attempt at synthesis, yes, but nothing so meager as a mere collaboration between (as Schopenhauer called them) “irritated professors.” In the Tübingen seminary or Stift, Hegel, Schelling, and Hølderlin had dreamed of a new religion.10 They despised much of their theological training, dismissing it with those familiar vulgarities with which students have always dismissed the dogmatic studies they were forced to mouth and respect in the classroom.11 They had deep misgivings about German culture as well, torn between the cosmopolitan clarity and free-thinking of the French and British Enlightenment (represented in Germany by Kant) and the romantic nationalism mixed with mysticism that marked the German romantic reaction to the Enlightenment.12 The Enlightenment seemed to many Germans to be vulgar, overly concerned with economics, and contemptuous of religion and the “spiritual” aspects of social life.13 And yet the promises of the Enlightenment seemed so attractive, and the dead weight of feudalism, Lutheran theology, and the medieval church, by comparison, seemed to have philosophy as well as German life pinned down in a decidedly most unenlightened past. Reconciling the cosmopolitan demands of the Enlightenment and their regional pride and piety seemed essential to the young Germans, and the events across the French border made these conflicts very real and very urgent. In the years between his graduation from the seminary and his first university post, Hegel wrote his early essays on the nature of religion.14 Most of them were hostile to Christianity and held up the spiritual life and the “folk religion” of the ancient Greeks as an attractive alternative.15 Hegel’s early essays were often sarcastic, sometimes clumsy attempts to revise and reconcile Christianity with Greek folk religion, insisting on a “natural” religion rather than one based on authority, and a “subjective” religion—a religion of ritual and social participation—rather than the “objective” religion taught by theology.16 Religions, Hegel surmised, are and ought to be particular to particular people and a particular time, part of the life of a people and not merely abstract beliefs with no practical manifestations.17 And yet, it makes sense to speak of “religion” in general, and of certain universal features that all religions and all people share in common.18 Hegel here is an evident disciple of Kant. In his Critique of Practical Reason and his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant had insisted on the rational defense of religion and the bond between morality and Christianity.19 Hegel does find much to criticize in Christian morality, in particular its unworkability in large groups and whole societies. He finds much to criticize in Kant too, notably Kant’s neglect of local custom in ethics in favor of universal categorical principles, but he makes it clear nevertheless, in straightforward Kantian terms, that “the aim and essence of all true religion, and our religion included, is human morality.”20 To this end, Hegel tries to revise Christianity as a folk religion concerned first of all with the cultivation of morality, culminating in his awkward but amusing attempt to have Jesus preach the categorical imperative.21 But as these early unpublished efforts deepen in their thought and their sophistication, Hegel drops much of his hostility and begins to suggest that in all religions one can discern a kind of necessary development of the human spirit.22 He begins to focus not just on the failings of Christianity but rather on its internal contradictions, “disharmonies,” or “alienations” (Entfremdungen).23 He finds fault with the idea that God and man are separate and distinct, in which God is infinitely superior and we are mere “slaves.”24 He also finds fault with the distinctions between and separation of reason and the passions, theology and faith, theory and practice. And here we find the seeds of two of the most dramatic and central themes of the Phenomenology, the grand conception of Spirit or Geist as immanent God incorporating us all, and the all-important place of local customs and affections in ethics. Like so many other thinkers and poets in Germany of the time, Hegel found his inspiration and alternative visions in the fascinating life of the early Greeks. But with the close of the century and the French Revolution in tatters, with German culture in ascendancy and his young friend Schelling already engaged in a very contemporary philosophy that would change the way we think about ourselves, Hegel abandoned his nostalgic posture and moved into the moment. For what he saw happening was just what his youthful essays had been suggesting to him. The world was filled with contradictions and disharmony, but philosophy would make a difference. Only a few years later, ending his lectures at Jena in 1806, the manuscript of the Phenomenology in hand, Hegel announced to his classes: We find ourselves in an important epoch, in a fermentation, in which Spirit has made a great leap forward, has gone beyond its previous concrete form and acquired a new one…. A new emergence of Spirit is at hand; philosophy must be the first to hail its appearance and recognize it.25 The concept of Spirit or Geist is clearly the key to Hegel’s philosophy. It is important not to translate “Geist” as “mind,” as some early translators have done, not because it is literally incorrect but because it is extremely misleading. “Spirit” has a religious significance which is missing from “mind,” and, more important, “spirit” suggests something larger about a person while “mind” suggests something merely internal and private. We typically speak of the spirit of a group or a nation and “team spirit” as a way of indicating unity and fellow-feeling, and we may also note that “spirit” thus indicates passion, whereas “mind” suggests rather only thoughts and intelligence—not, we should quickly add, that the two are or need be opposed. But what Hegel has in mind by Spirit is nothing less than the ultimate unity of the whole of humanity, and of humanity and the world. It is the concept in which he seeks to synthesize or at least embrace the various contradictions and disharmonies of religion and morality and reconcile humanity and nature, science and religion. Hegel rarely talks about God, but it is quite clear as we trace our way through the labyrinth of the Phenomenology that it is God, God as Spirit, who is our subject and who is our guide. Not a God within, and certainly not a transcendent God without, but the God who ultimately we are emerges from its pages. Thus Hegel’s work has often been touted as a “theodicy,” an account of God’s revelation on earth, and Heinrich Heine, one of Hegel’s less pious students, ironically commented: “I was young and proud, and it pleased my vanity when I learned from Hegel that it was not the dear God who lived in heaven that was my God, as my grandmother supposed, but I myself here on earth.”26 What makes Heine’s comment so outrageous, of course, is his mocking usurpation of the role of God himself, but what is essential to Hegel’s concept of Spirit is precisely the loss of individuality and the gain in comprehension that it requires. The realization of Spirit is not the recognition that I am myself God but that we are all God, that Spirit pervades and defines all of us. In this, Hegel’s notion is much like Spinoza’s pantheism, the realization that we are all one, a claim repeated by Schelling and criticized brutally by Hegel in his Preface with the sarcastic comment “the night in which all cows are black.”27 What Hegel is getting at is the necessity to demonstrate his thesis through reason and by way of a lengthy demonstration of its necessity, not by way of mystical experience or dogmatic insistence. And that is what the Phenomenology does or tries to do, to demonstrate by actually guiding us through the emergence of Spirit from its various individualistic guises to the recognition of the necessity of larger, more comprehensive forms. One can understand here the political as well as ontological imagery which pervades Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel is not an individualist. In the Phenomenology he comments that much less should be thought of and expected of the individual, and in his later Philosophy of History he famously tells us that even the greatest individuals follow unwittingly “the cunning of reason” and find themselves pawns in the hands of a larger fate, a dramatic idea that is embodied in flesh and blood by Tolstoy in his later account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign in War and Peace. One can imagine Hegel envisioning the great battles of that war, in which hundreds of thousands of undifferentiated “individuals” in identical uniforms moved in waves and slaughtered one another for the sake of larger and dimly understood ideas and loyalties. So viewed, the individual does indeed count for very little, and it is the larger movement of humankind that comes into focus instead. And yet, Hegel is no fascist—whatever ideas or inspiration Mussolini and his kind may have drawn from him. Hegel insists on this larger view of human history but nevertheless insists throughout his work that the ultimate aim and result of that history has been human freedom and respect for the individual. But it is the individual as an aspect of Spirit that impresses us, not the ontologically isolated and autonomous individual of Hegel’s liberal predecessors, notably Kant. There is a more philosophically profound way of making this point, which makes much more sense of the imagery of Spirit than the usual quasi-mystical accounts. Among the many borrowings of Hegel from Kant was the basic orientation of his philosophy, variously described as “subjective” or “Cartesian” or “phenomenological,” although all of these characterizations have the potential to be misleading. (For example, both Kant and Hegel found much to criticize in Descartes, so the “Cartesian” designation has to be much qualified.) This orientation, common to the empiricists as well as most other modern philosophers, might simply be described as “the first-person standpoint,” or the attempt to understand the world beginning with one’s own experience. Thus the familiar questions, entertained by Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, such as: How do I know that the world conforms to my experiences? Although Hegel will reject this question, as did Kant, they share this phenomenological approach to philosophy and the world in terms of one’s own experiences. But, we must ask, whose experiences? Are they the isolated and perhaps eccentric experiences of a single individual? Or are they in some sense more general and shared? Kant identifies the subject of all experiences as what he called “the transcendental ego,” distinct from the merely empirical ego that we normally refer to as the self, a particular person. The transcendental ego imposes the categories and processes our sensory intuitions into our experience of the phenomenal world, but—and this is the crucial point—it does not experience itself through those same categories. In a famous but somewhat obscure chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues against the “paralogisms of psychology,” in which the self or soul is misinterpreted as a “thing,” a potential object of consciousness. But the self, Kant argues, can never be the object of consciousness; it is always the subject. And because it is therefore immune from the application of the various categories of number, substance, and identity, it cannot be specified as “yours” or “mine,” but remains the transcendental ego, “consciousness in general.” What lies behind this technical move, of course, is Kant’s insistence that the forms of experience cannot be matters of personal idiosyncrasy and must be universal and necessary. But Hegel rather easily takes the notion of a “consciousness in general” and converts into a literally general consciousness. That general consciousness is Spirit, the self that pervades and ultimately embraces us all.28 The importance of Spirit, however, lies not only in its shared immanence but in its development. The Phenomenology is, from beginning to end, the phenomenological account of that development. To put it in an expanded way, the Phenomenology adds a new dimension to philosophy, and that is the dimension of history. Not that the Phenomenology as such is a historical account—although it contains quite a few such accounts, some easily recognizable, some not—but the idea that ideas and movements can be understood only through their development is a bold conjecture, and one rarely appreciated before Hegel (and still too rarely). In his later lectures, this insight becomes the centerpiece of Hegel’s philosophy, as he traces the origins and development of the various religions, the course of human history, and the evolution of philosophy itself. Religion, he had recognized toward the end of his early essays, was not abstract dogma but the expression of certain basic human needs and tendencies, and these are not to be found whole in any single religion, nor are they ever entirely absent, but it is in the interplay and development of religions that the ultimate nature of religion emerges— eventually, he suggests, in philosophy. Human history, he will later write, first appears to be a “slaughter-bench,” on which whole nations as well as millions of individuals are butchered. But to one who “looks with a rational eye,” Hegel argues, “history in turn presents its rational aspect.” The history of humanity, brutal as it has been, nevertheless displays an ineluctable sense of progress and increasing freedom.29 Finally, in philosophy, Hegel teaches us not to see the history of the subject as merely competing answers to the same ill-formed questions but rather as a growth of certain ideas and their importance at certain times into subsequent, improved ideas that have benefited from the conflicts and confrontations of the past. The name of this process or confrontation and improvement, as everyone knows, is dialectic, and we shall have more to say about it shortly. But the point to be made here is that the form of the Phenomenology, its complex organization in terms of some sort of conceptual development, is not just an oddity of Hegel’s authorship but, perhaps, the most single important feature of the book. And yet, the Phenomenology is not history, and it is not as such an empirical study of the development of anything, philosophy, humanity, or religion. To be sure, various movements in philosophy are traced in more or less historical order in the first few chapters of the book, and there are bits of actual history spread through the later sections. But one also notes with some consternation that the Greeks are discussed after the moderns and Sophocles after the Stoics, and one would be hard pressed to formulate a historical interpretation that would account for such chronological oddities. What the Phenomenology is doing, therefore, is not tracing the actual order of the development of various “forms of consciousness” in history but rather ordering them and playing them against one another in such a way that we see how they fit and how they conflict and how a more adequate way of thinking may emerge. Dialectic is not just development but a mode of argument, and the order of the Phenomenology is not just a demolition derby, a process of elimination and the survival of the fittest, but a teleology, a genuine progression from less adequate ways of thinking to more adequate and more comprehensive and, finally, to the most comprehensive way of all. THE PHENOMENOLOGY: PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION The Preface to the Phenomenology is one of the best-known, leastunderstood documents in modern philosophy. Like most prefaces, it was written after the text as a whole was completed, and what it tries to do is to describe the point and purpose of the entire monstrous manuscript. Or, less sympathetically, the Preface is Hegel’s attempt to force an interpretation on his book that the text itself does not easily sustain. It is a rambling, convoluted, grandiose monologue punctuated by some striking passages which do, indeed, give considerable insight into Hegel’s whole philosophy. It is there that he argues (or insists, at any rate) that “the truth is the whole,” that it is a process and not merely a result, and that philosophy must be systematic, scientific, and developmental in its form. But he also insists that such comments are inappropriate in a preface and that, in any case, their whole meaning must be demonstrated in the text, not simply declared beforehand. It is in the actual “working out” of various one-sided positions and “forms of consciousness” that we come to understand how truth emerges in philosophy and how that truth is the history of philosophy itself. One must see ideas and philosophies and whole stages of history as an organic, developing process. In one of his most striking metaphors, Hegel writes, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they do not only not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other, and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (PG, 2) Hegel also announces in the Preface and in the wake of Napoleon his vision of a “birth-time” and the beginning of a new era, and in philosophy he announces the emergence of what he calls “the concept” (Begriff), a holistic comprehension of the world through reason.30 Indeed, philosophy properly developed should exist wholly in the realm of the concept. But that philosophy would be more in evidence in the works and lectures that followed the publication of the Phenomenology rather than in the Phenomenology itself.31 The Introduction to the Phenomenology, by contrast, is short and straightforward. It is indeed an introduction. It sets up the standpoint from which the Phenomenology will proceed. The Introduction begins where Kant’s first Critique ends, with the rejection of skepticism and a declaration of transcendental idealism. The history of modern epistemology from Descartes and Locke through Kant’s grand synthesis is very much in evidence there, as it will be in the opening chapters of the Phenomenology. What concerns Hegel in the Introduction is a metaphor, or rather, a pair of metaphors, whose consequence is skepticism. The irony is, of course, that the metaphors in question originated with philosophers who could not tolerate skepticism and sought to lay it to rest once and for all. The metaphors concern the seemingly contingent relationship between knowledge and truth. The first and more prominent is the metaphor of knowledge as a tool, through which we “grasp hold” of the truth. The second is the metaphor of knowledge as a medium through which the “light of truth” must pass. Both Locke and Descartes attempted to examine this tool or medium, and the ultimate result was the skepticism of David Hume. Kant was “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers” by Hume but only pursued the metaphor further with his “critique” of reason and the understanding. Hegel’s argument, simply stated, is that the metaphor itself is mistaken. Skepticism can be laid to rest, as Kant had tried and seemingly succeeded in doing, only if the contingency of knowledge and the metaphors of knowledge as instrument and medium are rejected from the outset (PG, 73). In Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley, the distinction between our knowledge and “the external world” had made way for Hume’s devastating skepticism. Kant had solved the problem, in the eyes of many philosophers of the time, by incorporating the external world into the realm of knowledge itself, constituted by the categories of the understanding and the forms of intuition. But with Kant’s further distinction between phenomena and noumena—the world-as-we-know-it and the world-as-it-is-in-itself—it remains impossible for us to know the world as it is in itself. Once the distinction is made between the world-forus and the world-independent-of-us, there can be no escape from the conclusion that we can know only the world as it is for us. Hegel’s pursuit of absolute knowledge begins with the rejection of this distinction.32 In the Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel begins his revision of Kant’s theory of knowledge by attacking just this distinction, which he claims is based on unanalyzed and undefended metaphors in which knowledge is considered a “tool with which one masters the Absolute.” If knowledge is a tool, there must be a certain necessary distortion due to the operations of knowledge on reality, and therefore we can never know reality (the Absolute) itself but only as it has been manipulated and distorted by the instrument of knowledge. We can, therefore, have only mediated knowledge of the Absolute, and never know the Absolute itself. This is Kant’s problem in the first Critique, and his solution to it is the critical doctrine that we never know reality independent of the conditions imposed on it by knowledge. The best that can be done by the philosopher is an exploration of the nature of this tool of knowledge and the demonstration of the necessary conditions it imposes on reality. Kant’s Critique, therefore, abandons the search for absolute reality and simply investigates the tool by which we come to know reality. But why should we accept this metaphor? Kant never examines or defends this metaphorical starting point, and Hegel turns it against itself: If the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn around and mistrust this very mistrust. (PG, 74) By beginning with the investigation of the faculties of knowledge, Kant has already determined the critical outcome of his first Critique. Once the distinctions between things as known and things in themselves and between reality-for-a-subject and absolute reality are introduced, one must conclude that we cannot have any but conditioned knowledge and that the demands of traditional metaphysics are utterly impossible. Kant, according to Hegel, offers no justification for this starting point and, more importantly, fails to see fatal problems inherent in this approach. First, the metaphor simply plays on the notions ‘truth’, ‘reality,’ and ‘knowledge,’ and, given Kant’s distinctions, Hegel argues that what he ought to have concluded was that we can have no knowledge at all, that our cognitive faculties are such that we can never know the truth. Second, Hegel argues that one cannot begin by investigating the faculties of knowledge before one attempts to gain knowledge in philosophy, for the investigation itself already utilizes these faculties and their concepts. Any such analysis is covertly circular, and one might as well try, Hegel suggests, to learn to swim before getting into the water. Thus Kant, on the basis of the instrument metaphor, distinguishes between two different sorts of knowledge, two different kinds of truth. There is limited or conditional knowledge giving us truth limited by the conditions of our cognitive faculties, and there is absolute or unconditioned knowledge of things as they are in themselves which human consciousness cannot have. But even limited truth is indeed truth only if it is the way things really are. If it is an unconditioned or a priori truth that all events must be temporally ordered (for us), then this limited truth is a truth only if all events really are ordered. If events are not really so ordered, but rather ordered by us, then this limited truth is a falsehood, even if it is necessary for us. (Thus Nietzsche will argue that all of our a priori or necessary truths are such ‘falsehoods.’) Similarly, our conditioned or limited knowledge is really knowledge only if it is in agreement with what is really true. If we have conditional knowledge that there exist objects ‘outside’ us due to the nature of our cognition, this knowledge is true knowledge only if there truly are such objects. In other words, truth is Absolute Truth; knowledge is Absolute Knowledge. The ‘real’ world is the world as it is in itself, whether that is the world of our experience or not. But what would it mean to even suggest that it is not? Hegel’s reason for rejecting the dualism between knowledge and reality is not simply its skeptical conclusions; the preliminary investigation of knowledge, which is part and parcel of the “knowledge as tool” metaphor, is logically ill-conceived. Kant argues that philosophy must begin by examining those faculties which purport to give us knowledge, but with what do we examine these faculties? The investigation of cognition must itself be carried out by cognition; thus Kant demands that we examine reason by using reason, but a preliminary investigation of the tool of knowledge is already a use of that tool. Hegel agrees with Kant that philosophy must begin with an investigation of knowledge, but unlike Kant he recognizes that this investigation cannot be independent of the use of the faculties of knowledge. Hegel argues that the investigation of knowledge changes that very knowledge, and that such an investigation can never be preliminary, but constitutes the whole of philosophical investigation. The critique of knowledge is the development of knowledge as well. Once we appreciate this problem as Hegel perceived it, we are in an excellent position to understand the necessity for the peculiar dialectical structure of his work, particularly of the Phenomenology. Knowledge develops with our conceptual sophistication. This is not to say merely that as we learn more, our knowledge increases; rather, the kind of knowledge changes. Specifically, knowledge changes in kind when we turn to focus on our faculties of knowledge, when we question not so much our knowledge of the world, but ourselves. For Kant, self-knowledge was either empirical knowledge of ourselves as phenomenal objects or transcendental knowledge which could disclose only the necessary forms of our consciousness, but, according to Kant, we could not have knowledge of ourselves in any other sense (e.g. as moral agent or as immortal soul). Neither could we have knowledge of things-in-themselves. For Hegel, knowledge of objects and transcendental self-knowledge are but two stages in the attainment of further kinds of knowledge, knowledge of oneself and the world as Spirit. The Phenomenology is just the demonstration and the development of such knowledge, starting with the lowest forms of knowledge, showing how these are inadequate to other forms, and culminating in Absolute Truth in which all of the problems, paradoxes, and inadequacies of the lower forms disappear. Philosophy, for Hegel, is the demonstration of the ‘becoming’ of Absolute Knowledge. Such a becoming need not be the pattern of development of any particular individual consciousness, and the development of knowledge in the system is not the psychological development of an individual. For that matter, it does not faithfully appear in or as the history of philosophy either, although this history is inevitably a close approximation of the development of Absolute Knowledge and Spirit. The “forms of consciousness” or forms of knowledge derived in the Phenomenology lead to Absolute Knowledge, that level of conceptual development where traditional conceptual (philosophical) problems disappear, but it is not at all obvious that there is but one route—the way described in the Phenomenology—from partial or inadequate knowledge to absolute knowing.33 At the ultimate stage of knowledge, traditional philosophical dichotomies are eliminated and nature and Spirit find their place together. The Fichtean antitheses of dogmatism and idealism are synthesized. The development of Hegel’s system is the “working out” of these various traditional forms of consciousness and ordering them in a hierarchy of more sophisticated forms. The purpose of this ordering is to demonstrate how each level corrects inadequacies of the previous conceptual level and how it is possible to correct all these inadequacies once we adopt an all-encompassing vision of the whole rather than limit ourselves to advocacy of this or that particular position. CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE DIALECTIC The Phenomenology is divided into three uneven sections, each representing one type of ‘form’ or ‘level of consciousness,’ in (more or less) ascending order of sophistication. The first and shortest section is called “Consciousness,” which deals with relatively naive epistemological consciousness. It is a critique, among other things, of the narrowly epistemological vision of philosophy that had begun to emerge in the eighteenth century and which still, regrettably, persists today.34 The second is called “Self-consciousness” and traces the first crude beginnings of the awakening of the consciousness of Spirit in its early form of simple antagonistic recognition of other people and the development of paradigms of dominance and submission (“master and slave”) as prototypical forms of self-recognition and awareness. Finally, there is the long, twisting section on “Reason,” which traces the ultimate development of a holistic spiritual-rational consciousness from the most simple sense of community to its penultimate realization of Spirit in art and religion before its ultimate realization in Hegel’s philosophy. We can summarize the progression or dialectic of the section on “Consciousness” in three readily identifiable steps, each of them corresponding to a family of “common-sense” claims and philosophical positions. At the beginning is the common-sense notion which Hegel calls “sense-certainty,” that we simply know, prior to any verbal description or conceptual understanding, what it is that we experience. Hegel demonstrates that such a conception of knowledge is woefully inadequate. He then brings us from this naive realism through a number of theoretical variations in which can be recognized major insights from Leibniz and some of the empiricists, which he abbreviates as “Perception,” to the philosophy of Kant’s first Critique, in which knowledge is demonstrated to be a form of understanding. In “Understanding,” Hegel also tackles the question of the thing-in-itself by way of an extended reductio ad absurdum and, following his opening argument in the Introduction, shows us the nonsense of supposing that the true world might be different from the world of our experience.35 The first section of the Phenomenology develops the role of the understanding in experience, but as an analysis of the entire movement in modern philosophy including such central problems as the nature of substance, the necessity of concepts, and the nature of connections between experiences and the synthesis of objects. In other words, it covers, in a dialectical way, the subject matter of Kant’s first Critique and the major epistemological work of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The stage of consciousness referred to as “sense-certainty” is “knowledge of the immediate” (PG, 90; Hegel’s italics). It is “what is presented before us,” “what is given.” It is “the richest kind of knowledge, of infinite wealth…. It is thought to be pure apprehension without yet any conceptual comprehension, raw experience, without the need of understanding, the experience of a passive sensitive receptacle” (PG, 91). But because it involves no understanding, just a pure knowledge of “This,” the particular thing in front of me, one might say that this stage is not truly consciousness or knowledge at all, but merely “knowledge implicit.” This is the pure data of the senses which so many philosophers, of this century as well as the past, have taken to be the indubitable, secure foundation of human knowledge. It is pure experience, uninterpreted and thus unadulterated by us in any way. Accordingly, sense-certainty also includes the claims of many mystics and intuitive philosophers, including, perhaps, Schelling and Jacobi, who have claimed that the knowledge of the Absolute is not conceptual or rational but strictly intuitive, a pure experience, undistorted by human concepts and categories. Traditional epistemologists have argued that errors in human knowledge, when they arise, must arise after this level. For on this level, our knowledge is certain and becomes fallible only when we attempt to conceptualize or to understand our experiences. Although this section is among the shortest of the Phenomenology, it provides us with some vital clues for understanding the nature of Hegel’s dialectic. Hegel’s argument against this form of ‘knowledge’ as certain knowledge, or even as knowledge at all, is clear and to the point. Briefly, Hegel argues that this knowledge, which he describes as a mere “this, here, now,” is the very opposite of pure, “authentic” knowledge, knowledge which is complete as opposed to all other knowledge which is abstract and conditioned. It is really “the most abstract and poorest truth” (PG, 91). It is what we “mean” only in the sense of pointing (this) and thus not really meaning at all. It might be said to be reference, perhaps, but not sense. In fact, it is not even reference. How does one point to a particular without specifying what it is to which one is pointing? Thus Hegel concludes that there can be no knowledge without concepts, and the supposed certainty of sensecertainty seems certain only because it is not knowledge at all. It is, at best, mere presence. The infallibility of sensecertainty, of pure experience, lies in its failure to assert any claim to knowledge which might be shown to be wrong. This knowledge which “is called the unutterable, is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant” (PG, 110). We can see that Hegel essentially agreed with Kant that there can be no unconceptualized knowledge, that knowledge is essentially a product of the understanding. From this agreement, however, we can also appreciate one of the keys to Hegel’s works, that knowledge is essentially an active process, that mere experience can never give us knowledge, that synthesis of experience by rules or concepts is necessary. To use a common philosophical term, knowledge necessarily consists of universals. This does not mean that it is the same the world over, “for all rational creatures” as Kant would say. It means that all sense and reference relies on concepts, on the recognition of general properties which apply not to this or that particular but to an indefinitely large number of particulars (and possibly to no actual particulars at all). One might note that Hegel’s insistence on universality as the essence of knowledge is already a reply to the Schelling- Kierkegaard criticism of Hegel as a “negative” philosopher (who ignores individual existence) which gathers momentum after Hegel’s death. The Phenomenology is not a running autobiography of Spirit but rather a retrospective of the development of Spirit, an attempt to understand why some forms of consciousness are inferior to others and force us to search for more adequate, more all-embracing modes of comprehension. The transitions between forms of consciousness represent a demonstration and a development, perhaps an explanation, but there is no mechanism which pushes one stage to the next and Hegel does not claim that each stage necessarily leads to the next. What he does claim is that the process itself is necessary, that consciousness is driven by its own inadequacies to pursue other modes of understanding. Sense certainty is not itself a mode of consciousness but, in more modern terminology, a theory about consciousness, a conception of knowledge. Hegel shows that this conception of knowledge is an inadequate conception, and concludes that no such conception of knowledge can succeed. Sense-certainty is inadequate as knowledge because it is not knowledge at all. Therefore, we move along the dialectic to a more adequate form of consciousness, which is that of Perception. Perception is the first appearance of knowledge, for now we can interpret our experiences by applying concepts. In Hegel’s short description, the object of consciousness is now “the thing.” As a thing, the object is characterizable and characterized by ascription of properties, in other words, by the application of universally applicable concepts to a particular. Our experience is therefore no longer “pure” experience but experience of a thing defined by its properties. For example, our perception of a tree consists of a certain unity of colors, shapes, tactile sensations, perhaps sounds, and smells. Over and above this, we suppose that there is the tree, that which “lies behind” all of these experiences and ties them together. In traditional philosophical terms, there is the tree as substance which is responsible for the unity of the tree-perceptions. The problem, familiar from Locke, Hume, and Kant, is what if anything warrants our conclusion that the tree-perception refers to the tree, for any substance ‘behind’ these perceptions is by its very nature not the object of any possible perception. In the recent history of philosophy, this line of questioning sent Berkeley to idealism, the view that there are no material substances, only ideas, although idealism does not yet appear as such in the Hegelian hierarchy of knowledge. In Hegel’s terms, substance would be an “unconditioned universal,” that is, not experienced through the senses. As such, it cannot be an aspect of perception. Thus Locke was forced to some rather ad hoc stipulations to explain how we can make the inference to substance and Hume insisted that we could not justifiably make such inferences in philosophy. Moreover, there was the question, unanswered and even unasked by the traditional empiricists, how the various properties perceived were in fact unified as the properties of an object. Since that general view of knowledge which Hegel calls “perception” does not recognize the extraperceptual, that is, anything but conditioned (sensory) universals, if we are to understand the unity of objects and the idea that we actually know objects and not mere clusters of properties we find ourselves moving on to the next stage of consciousness. The solution to the problem of unity is provided by the understanding. The concept of “understanding” here is clearly taken from Kant’s use of the term and refers to the application of concepts to experience. However, as Kant uses the term, there is a special focus on a priori or “unconditioned” concepts, which Kant calls the “categories.” Among these categories is the category of substance, which is the solution to the problem of unity. The tree-perceptions have a unity of a tree because of our employment of the concept of substance. Similarly, problems such as the coexistence of various objects, the reality of causal interconnections between perceptions, as well as successions of perceptions, all appear at this level of the dialectic, to which one might refer as the Kantian level, for it consists primarily of the conclusions of the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique.36 Of central interest in this section is Hegel’s analysis of the theory of the understanding as culminating in a dual worldview. On the one hand, there is the world as perceived, and the laws intrinsic to that perception. On the other hand, there is the world in itself, which is postulated ‘behind’ this world to ‘explain’ it. In the understanding, we postulate ‘unconditioned universals’ in our experience to represent objects in themselves. But Hegel does not adopt the traditional notion of ‘substance’ for those objects. He prefers a more dynamic vision of experience, and so calls them as ‘forces’ or ‘powers,’ which are related to the “kingdom of laws” which is Kant’s vision of a necessarily unified and ordered (phenomenal) world. But while the chapter called “Force and understanding” is essentially Kantian, it contains a powerful critique of Kant’s Critique and suggests that the laws of nature are not merely imposed but inherent in the world itself. In other words, Hegel rejects the Kantian insistence that we should not look for “the universal laws of nature in nature” but rather “in the conditions of possibility of experience.”37 According to Hegel, there is no valid distinction to be made here. Indeed, Hegel suggests that scientific explanation might better be understood as a redescription of phenomena. Again, Kant’s noumenon-phenomenon distinction is fundamentally wrong; if there is any sense to be made of the notion of “thing-in-itself” it must be as part of the thing-as-phenomenon. Indeed, “the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing else but appearance…in fact, the understanding experiences only itself” (PG, 165; Hegel’s italics). Noumena are not transcendent to phenomena but immanent in them. The closing argument of “Force and understanding” and the “Consciousness” section as a whole consists of one of Hegel’s longest and most peculiar counterexamples. He postulates a noumenal world which happens to be an inverted (verkehrte) world. According to Kant, the world-in-itself is a necessary supposition of the conditions of knowledge but by its very nature cannot be known. Because knowledge depends on the human faculties of knowledge, and because we cannot know that our knowledge is not therefore some distortion of things as they exist independent of our experience of them, we must, while supposing our knowledge to be valid, resort to noumenon which very possibly might have its own principles, different from the world as perceived and known by us. Kant insists that there is nothing more to be known about the world in itself, this unknown “x.” But Hegel provocatively goes on to suggest what the world-as-it-is might be like by suggesting that everything in this world is ‘unlike’ that in our own. “What is there black is here white, what by the first law [of phenomena] is in the case of electricity the oxygen pole becomes in its other supersensible reality the hydrogen pole” (PG, 158). The two-worlds doctrine is carried to the realm of morality, where Hegel argues that the two—worlds view destroys the very concept of morality it is invoked by Kant to protect. For, according to Hegel: an action which in the world of appearance is a crime would, in the inner world, be capable of being really good (a bad action be wellintentioned); punishment is punishment only in the world of appearance; in itself, or in another world, it may be a benefit for the criminal. (PG, 159) Here we have the first reference to Kant’s morality, which begins with the crushing criticism of Kant’s summum bonum and his entire two-world view. The problem, as stated here, is that the summum bonum and Kant’s morality in general require man and his actions to be considered as noumenon. A man and his actions are also part of the phenomenal world where they are evaluated, and Hegel is here briefly pointing out the problem in applying the phenomenonnoumenon distinction to a man acting. Why suppose that what we consider punishment to the phenomenal man will have any such effect on man as noumenon. Here, even in this first section, we have a clear indication of the continuing attack of Kant’s moral-religious philosophy that will be the core of Hegel’s mature writings. The inverted-world passage is essentially an argument by ridicule, for what becomes evident is that, if we take Kant’s notion of noumenon seriously, any sort of nonsense becomes equally intelligible. Either the noumenal world is just like the phenomenal world, or, not only does it not make sense to talk about it, but it does not even make sense to suppose that there might be one. The inadequacy of consciousness, considered in its entirety, is the inadequacy of Kant’s philosophy, which Hegel considers the culmination of all modern philosophies before it. The inadequacy of the understanding as such is a signal to a new move in philosophy, a move which is not simply new knowledge or a new progression in conciousness, but which is an entirely new kind of knowledge and a new kind of consciousness. Insofar as one wishes to interpret the progress of the Phenomenology along philosophical-historical lines, one might say that this new stage was initiated implicitly by Kant and made explicit by Fichte. But the Phenomenology is not intended to be just a history of philosophy. Throughout the Phenomenology, Hegel displays similar inadequacies in one form of consciousness after another, and so we are guided from one form to another in an ongoing “dialectic,” eventually to reach “absolute knowing,” which is the all-encompassing overview of all that has preceded it. The dialectic often proceeds by way of conflict and confrontation, when one form of consciousness contradicts another. But it is a misunderstanding of Hegel to think of the dialectic as a mechanical meeting of “thesis and antithesis,” resolved by a “synthesis.” That formulation, which comes from Kant, Hegel explicitly criticizes. The dialectic is rather a complex interplay of conceptions, some of which are simply improvements on others, some of which are indeed opposites demanding synthetic resolution, but others simply represent conceptual dead ends, which indicate a need to start over. Indeed, it is not at all clear that Hegel’s dialectic is a linear progression from simplicity to the absolute but rather a phenomenological tapestry in which a great many (hardly “all”) of the forms of human experience and philosophy jostle against one another and compete for adequacy. Within that tapestry, however, can be found much of the history of Western epistemology and metaphysics, and a great deal of ethics and social history and the history of religion. Whether or not Hegel reaches the absolute, as he states so proudly in his Preface, he gives us an eclectic but systematic philosophy which boldly demonstrates both the complex life of ideas and the role of those ideas in defining human history and consciousness. SELF AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS The Phenomenology makes what might well seem to be an abrupt turn from consciousness, an essentially epistemological study, to selfconsciousness and “the truth of self-certainty” and an obscure discussion of “desire” and “life.” But the historical linkage here is provided by Fichte, who had charted the move from the theory of knowledge to the importance of a broad, pragmatic conception of self-knowledge several years before. Consciousness becomes self-consciousness when it understands itself as the source of the understanding. To consider the problems of knowledge alone, without reference to the uses of knowledge and the psychological-social world in which knowledge functions, is futile. Thus any adequate conception of knowledge must begin with an understanding of the living self, which is not first of all epistemic but needy, full of demands and desires. “Self-certainty,” like sense-certainty, begins with a commonsense, cocksure conception of the self—in this case clearly reminiscent of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” Hegel goes on to show that the self is not certain at all. To the contrary, in the confusion of desire and the urges of life the self is confused and desperately seeking in identity. As in the preceding epistemological chapters, Hegel will bring us from a naive view to a more complex and sophisticated philosophical standpoint, but in contrast to the preceding chapters he will now insist that there is an essentially “practical” dimension to knowledge. But “practical” here means, as in Kant, the self conceived as a true self, not just the self of appearances. Accordingly, what emerges in the section on “Selfconsciousness” is a reappearance of the old dichotomy of appearance and reality. But instead of rending the world in two, as in the “upside-down” world, the self is shattered into the most “unhappy” of consciousness. Following Hegel’s brief opening comments on the supposedly selfcertain “I” and its relation to desire and life, we find the bestknown and most dramatic single chapter in the Phenomenology, the parable of the “master and slave.” The point is to show that selfhood develops not through introspection but rather through mutual recognition. The self is essentially social or, more accurately, interpersonal, and not merely psychological or epistemological. But Hegel is also concerned to speculate on a certain kind of “natural” relationship between primitive, “strippeddown” human beings. It is an imaginary situation envisioned by many philosophers (notably Hobbes and Rousseau) in their hypotheses about the “state of nature.” Their common assumption is that human beings are first of all individuals and only later, by mutual agreement, members of society. Hegel thinks that this assumption is nonsense, for individuality begins to appear only within an interpersonal context. The confrontation of two consciousnesses is the key to the masterslave relationship, which Marx would later take up as a model for his social theory and Jean-Paul Sartre would borrow as a paradigm for his analysis of “Being-for-others” in Being and Nothingness. Hegel tells us that “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another selfconsciousness” (PG, 175), and that “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself when and by the fact that it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (PG, 178). These cryptic sentences are the crux of “self-consciousness”; they spell out for us the first appearance of Spirit—the recognition of the existence of a universal consciousness in the primitive form of the recognition of consciousness other than one’s own. But Hegel is also arguing a radical thesis about the nature of origin of selfhood. First, there is the suggestion that the concept of “self-consciousness” or “self-identity” can only arise in confrontation with others. Hegel’s thesis might thus be construed as the claim that a person has no concept of self, cannot refer to themselves and cannot say things about themselves (for example, ascribe states of consciousness to themselves) until he is shown how to do so by someone else. This thesis has remarkable affinities with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and later P.F.Strawson’s claim that psychological predicates can only be learned through learning to apply them to someone else. Second, there is a more modest thesis that one can only develop selfconsciousness, that is, a particular concept of oneself, through confrontation with other people. This weaker thesis does not insist that one cannot have concepts of self-reference before social confrontation but rather that the particular image one has of oneself is acquired socially, not in isolation. It is this sort of thesis which occupies much of Sartre’s quasipsychological efforts in Being and Nothingness. The first claim, that concerning the concept of self-reference, is not pursued by Hegel, for he considers self-reference as such to be “merely formal” and “entirely empty,” hardly worth the title of “self-consciousness” at all. (Compare his discussion of the “knowledge” of sensecertainty.)38 The second thesis, however, seems to fit precisely into the overall ambition of the Phenomenology, to show how an inadequate conception of oneself is forced into some remarkable and surprising twists and turns. The first part of the master-slave parable is quite simple and straightforward: two self-consciousnesses encounter each other and struggle to “cancel” each other in order to “prove their certainty of themselves” (their independence and freedom) against the other, who appears as an independent and therefore limiting being.39 Each selfconsciousness originally tries to treat the other as object, but finds that the other does not react as an object. Each demands that the other recognize them as an independent consciousness. But recognizing another as independent limits one’s own independence, and each becomes determined to prove their own freedom and independence. Hegel tells us: they have not yet exposed themselves to each other in the form of pure being-for-itself, or as self-consciousness. Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own selfcertainty still has no truth. (PG, 186) Hegel suggests that it is solely by risking one’s life that such a truth is established, and, indeed, the two self-consciousnesses fight (almost) to the death. The other must be “cancelled” because their otherness contradicts one’s view as self-conscious, free, and independent. However, it becomes clear that the role of the other in this life-and-death struggle is not only that of a threat or purely destructive. The recognition by the other of one’s self is at the very crux of the conflict. Thus it is gaining the recognition of the other that is the point of the battle, not the extinction of the other. Hegel says that “trial by death does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally” (PG, 188). Thus Hegel argues that self-consciousness requires the presence of another for one’s own self-consciousness. In fighting for recognition, each tries to save their own life, but each tries also, if possible, to preserve the life of their opponent. If one consciousness is victor, and neither loses their life, then one becomes a consciousness “for itself,” independent, a master, while the other becomes a consciousness ‘for another,” a slave whose essence, Hegel comments, is “life,” suggesting that all that the slave has salvaged, at least for the moment, is their life. The lord or master “is the consciousness that for itself, which is mediated with itself through another consciousness” (PG, 190). But the master, although self-sufficient in the sense of having the slave dependent on him, is also dependent on this dependence. Because the master maintains the power, they are the master, but because they are now selfsufficient only through the industry of the slave, they are also dependent on the slave. Hegel stresses the importance of a Lockean relationship to “the thing”—presumably land, food, or some craft—which the slave has immediately (“he labours upon it”) but “the master only mediately, except that he gets the enjoyment of it” (ibid.). In the course of the dialectic, the slave, because of their direct relation to the thing, becomes self-sufficient, while the master, because of their dependence on the slave, becomes wholly dependent. (From this reversal Marx is to take his central theses of class struggle and the ultimate degeneration and self-destruction of the economic master classes.) Furthermore, the problem of the continued need for the recognition of the other breeds a further instability into this relationship. The master, who depends on the slave for the recognition that they are indeed the master, now finds that the slave is a totally dependent creature without an independent will, incapable of giving them the recognition of an independent other. The slave, in other words, becomes a “yes-man,” whose recognition is irrelevant precisely because it is coerced. In the master-slave relationship, we first see the striving for freedom of Spirit, the ultimate truth of self-consciousness. In the master-slave relationship, we see only the inadequacy of the attempt to derive this truth from human relationships which treat persons as independent and opposed. Hegel will go on to argue that the way to freedom, the goal of self-consciousness, lies not in such relationships but in the direction of increased civilization. Rousseau had famously argued that society takes a man and turns him into a citizen. For Hegel, too, individual freedom will be found not in isolated independence but in citizenship. But none of this, the explicit recognition of Spirit, appears in the section on “Self-consciousness.” The master-slave relationship rather gives way to the wholesale rejection of the master-slave situation and the mutual dependency it entails, denying all external reality and rejecting all action as meaningless. Here Hegel locates the impressive philosophy of Stoicism, which flourished in the ancient world for more than 600 years. The Stoic rejects both slavery and mastery, and Hegel makes much of the fact that two of the leading Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Auelius, were a slave and the master of the Roman Empire respectively (PG, 197–203). In an even more extreme form, selfconsciousness attempts to get beyond the frustrations of the masterslave relationship by taking everything as meaningless, which Hegel interprets along the lines of the ancient (not the modern) philosophy of Skepticism (PG, 204–5). Ultimately, the contradictions or disharmonies of all possible forms of self-consciousness become explicit in a selfconsciousness that is so alienated that it conceives of itself as nothing, or as worse than nothing, in contrast to a holy ideal before which it humbles itself. This unhappy consciousness is the primitive Christian ascetic who believes himself to be both part of this world and essentially divine, but the “creature of the flesh” and the “soul before God” cannot coexist (PG, 206–30). The master-slave relationship, which became an impossible relationship between two people, here becomes internalized in a single schizoid individual. A decade after Hegel’s death, Hegel’s Danish critic Søren Kierkegaard would return to this disharmonious Christian for his “knight of resignation.” Where Kierkegaard will insist that this incomprehensible schizophrenia is a necessary condition for Christianity, however, Hegel insists that we go beyond this internalized master-slave relationship with its self flagellation and self-denial. At the very end of the discussion of the “unhappy consciousness” and the section on “Self-consciousness,” Hegel anticipates a new and happier conception of Christ and Christianity, but not through self-consciousness alone. It is rather in “the idea of Reason, of the certainty that, in its particular individuality, it has being absolutely in itself, or is all reality” (PG, 230; Hegel’s italics). REASON AND SPIRIT Rational consciousness is the goal of the Phenomenology, a final “unification of the diverse elements in its process” and “the consciousness of the certainty of being all truth” (PG, 231). Reason resolves by harmonizing and elevating (autheben) the disharmonies between self and others, between God and man, between morality and personal inclination, between nature and knowledge. The Spirit of Absolute Knowing is both immanent God and human society. It is also nature, which one might think of as the material aspect of Spirit. There is no separating God from nature or from man and it is folly to separate freedom from nature, reason from passion, or morality from society, as Kant seemed to have done in his philosophy. Reason in the Phenomenology marks the synthesis of a number of conflicts that have been introduced in the dialectic of the Phenomenology itself, the inadequacies of traditional epistemological thought, the resolution of the master-slave relationship, and interpersonal conflict (including the internalized conflict of the unhappy consciousness); and, most ambitious of all, the Phenomenology is Hegel’s first attempt to integrate and harmonize all human forms of consciousness and find the proper conceptual place for each of them. The long section on “Reason”—considerably more than two-thirds of the Phenomenology—appears to have no organizing principle or straightforward argument, such as one can discern in the first two sections on “Consciousness” and “Self-consciousness.” The first part of the section is a lengthy discourse on the philosophy of nature, including what we would now call the philosophy of science, and it culminates in a particularly peculiar discussion of the oddball sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, the claims that personality and deep psychology can be “read” from certain facial features or the bumps on a person’s skull. What occupies Hegel throughout the entire discussion, however, is an attempt to emphasize the nature of the organic, rejecting the familiar Cartesian divisions of mind and body, “inside” and “outside,” and the reductionist conceptions of nature. The argument about faces and skulls is not so much a defense of dubious sciences as it is a defense of the integration of our conceptions of psyche and expression, much as he had argued for the organic integrity of nature earlier in the discussion.40 Immediately following this discussion we find ourselves suddenly steeped in certain perennial questions of ethics, “the actualization of rational self-consciousness through its own activity” (PG, 347ff.). If there is a principle of transition here, apart from the holistic impetus that motivates all of reason, it is not at all easy to discern. In rapid succession, Hegel considers hedonism, what we would call moral self-righteousness, and a certain tragic conception of integrity or “virtue,” but the discussion here seems to follow more or less directly from the unhappy resolution of self-consciousness. Indeed, one of the more familiar channels of denial for the unhappy consciousness is the soon jaded road of hedonism. The predictable reaction, a stubborn asceticism and the rejection of “the way of the world,” is equally familiar in both literature and life (PG, 381). In these short chapters, as so often for the rest of the book, Hegel seems to be incorporating any number of more or less contemporary themes and controversies, rarely identified as such, from the psychology of Rousseau to the world-weary asceticism of the Jansenists. Nevertheless a general theme is perceptible through the details and meanderings, and that is the inadequacy of any conception of ethics that remains restricted to the isolated individual. Thus the emphasis in this discussion is on the phrase “actualization through its [one’s own] activity,” which leads inevitably to new versions of the frustrated, unhappy, divided consciousness. The discussion culminates in Kant and a discussion of the categorical imperative. This is, perhaps, the most enduring argument of the Phenomenology, some aspects of which are routinely trotted out in introductory ethics classes as criticism of Kant without recognizing their source in Hegel. But before we actually get to Kant, Hegel slips in one of the oddest chapters of the entire Phenomenology, a covert discussion of university life under the title, “The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or ‘the Matter in Hand’ itself” (PG, 397–418). To explain just the title would take several pages, but the upshot of the chapter is as easy to understand as it is amusing. Professors love to conceive of themselves as independent individuals, but they really are the ultimate conformists, utterly dependent on each other and on their mutual opinions of one another. Whereas the unhappy independent spirits of the “Actualization” chapter erred in their efforts to remain wholly isolated, the rather selfsatisfied creatures in the “academic zoo” simply pretend to be isolated and independent, whereas in fact they are nothing of the kind. It is from here we suddenly leap into the ethical thinking of the greatest professor of all academic zoos, Immanuel Kant. For he, too, likes to feign an autonomy that is more imagined than actual. Ever since Kant, autonomy has been the watchword of ethics. Autonomy is the ability of each of us, as rational creatures, to ascertain for ourselves what is right and, in words drawn from Rousseau, impose the moral law on ourselves. Ethics in general and Kant’s categorical imperative in particular concern the recognition of our moral autonomy. Indeed, one of the three formulations of the categorical imperative appeals explicitly to the notion of autonomy.41 But Hegel criticizes this notion of autonomy, and he does so on two different grounds. The arguments are quite succinct, perhaps because Hegel had already published them at length elsewhere.42 The primary criticism, still the focus of much critical discussion today, is the illusory nature of Kant’s moral self, which is no particular self with no particular properties but simply a confused abstraction from the social life of bourgeois or bürgerlich Prussian morality (PG, 419f.). Moreover, the basic Kantian distinction between reason and the “inclination” unwisely divides the moral self in two and gives unwarranted precedence to formal laws rather than particular moral contexts (PG, 425f.). But those formal laws, Hegel argues (like our best undergraduates today), cannot be so readily applied to our concrete, often ambiguous everyday situations. There is no satisfactory criterion for “testing laws,” as Kant had argued; there are only the ad hoc stipulations of the “maxim” of one’s actions such that the moral law can be made to fit as needed (PG, 429–37). But behind these brief hit-and-run attacks on Kant, Hegel has an alternative conception of ethics, which will soon appear. What he really objects to is the bogus individualism and a priori universality of Kant’s notion of morality (Moralität). In its place, he will emphasize the social foundations of ethics, or Sittlickkeit, much as he had in his first youthful essay on Greek folk religion over a decade before. The notion of Sittlichkeit stands at the center of Hegel’s ethics, and with it we are finally informed that we are now on the home ground of Spirit. The master-slave relation may have in some sense appeared to be a social encounter, if by that one means only the joint appearance of two or more mutually aware creatures, but society and the social are much more than a collection of individuals. They presuppose mutual attachments and dependencies—just those attachments and dependencies that those antagonistic self-consciousnesses denied. They presuppose a sense of community, a shared identity. Ethics, in other words, is based on community values, on shared customs (Sitte), not autonomy. And reason, in Hegel’s philosophy, refers not to that abstract a priori ability to calculate and deliberate so much as the very concrete conception of oneself as part of the whole. Reason is not an individual “faculty” but a social process. And ethics as an exercise of practical reason means not working it out for oneself so much as understanding one’s duties and obligations to one’s community. But, of course, there are different communities, with different customs, and sometimes these communities come into conflict. Nothing could have been more evident to Hegel, who as he wrote watched the tragedy of Europe tearing itself apart in the name of competing ideologies, just as Germany had torn itself apart many years before in the name of what would appear from a distance to be a couple of theological nuances.43 Thus the upshot of Hegel’s philosophy and the grand hope of the Phenomenology, announced with great fanfare in the Preface, is the birth of a new, international world, in which cultural differences might be preserved but the harmony of the whole would be assured. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. At this point in the Phenomenology, Sittlichkeit has just appeared, and it is immediately rent apart by tragedy. Within communities, as well as between them, conflict is always possible. And as so often in Hegel’s writing, particular conflicts have great philosophical consequences. At this juncture, Hegel chooses to write about Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, one of his favorite plays (which he would discuss at length again in his Philosophy of Right, fifteen years later). The point of the play is taken to be the clash of two sets of laws, human and divine. The divine law, defended by Antigone, is the law of the primitive tribe, blood law, the ultimate sanctity of the family. The human law, or what would later become civil law, was represented by Creon, the king. In the battle over the burial of Antigone’s brother, required by sacred law but prohibited by Creon, the two laws meet in mortal conflict within the individual person Antigone. She is simultaneously embedded in two societies, the “divine” tribal society of her family, in which family duty and honor were all, and civil society in which law and obedience were essential. Her individual case is tragic and unresolvable, but the movement of history and the dialectic provide a resolution to the conflict which was not available for the tragic heroine. With the development of modern civil society, individuals and families are integrated under the law of the land. Hegel then goes on to speculate on the development of civil society and the concept of culture, as he would again in his Philosophy of Right.44 He discusses the Enlightenment as the embodiment of a false because antispiritual effort to build a truly universal society, and he introduces the almost current-events topic of the French Revolution and in particular the Terror of 1793–4 and the character of Robespierre as something of a reductio ad absurdum argument against the Enlightenment pretense of pure reason against the more humble security of traditional spirituality and community. And at this point Kant comes back into the dialectic, not Kant of the categorical imperative but the Kant who defended the religious “postulate” of “the moral worldview” and the grand teleology of the third Critique. According to Hegel, Kant had earlier argued for the importance of autonomy and his narrowly described notion of morality only at a terrible cost, a one-sided picture of man as separated from nature and his own desires and happiness, concerned only with the imperatives of duty. Hegel now argues (as he had in his earlier writings) that morality and happiness cannot be separated: “enjoyment lies in the very principle of morality.” Hegel thus restates what Kant called the summum bonum as a necessary condition for morality: “The harmony of morality and nature, or… the harmony of morality and happiness, is thought of as necessarily existing” (PG, 599). This “harmony of morality and objective nature” Hegel refers to as “the final purpose of the world” (PG, 604). Postulation, however, is not proof, and Kant’s belief in a divine moral Legislator and the Kingdom of Heaven, his “postulates of practical reason,” cannot be left to mere postulation. Thus the dialectical movement fron Kant’s ethics to religion is an attempt to broaden the field of ethics and get away from Kant’s overly restrictive notion of duty and the ultimately self-defeating distinction between duty and reason on the one hand and the inclinations, including both the moral sentiments and the pursuit of happiness, on the other. In the Phenomenology, as in his early writings, Hegel suggests that a more sophisticated and harmonious conception of morality can be found in Sittlichkeit, but now expanded to global and even cosmic proportions. After one final, unusually harsh attack on Kant, Hegel resurrects the early Christian ideal of conscience, in which, he argues (following Fichte), the commands of duty and the incentives of the inclinations are synthesized.45 Conscience acts on implicit principle, yet it is also specific to particular situations. It is individual yet derivative of a person’s upbringing in society. Conscience finds its living ideal in the figure that Hegel identifies as the “beautiful soul,” a holy figure whose “pure goodness” makes them “lose contact with social reality.” One immediately thinks of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin (The Idiot), or more aptly, it is the conception of the historical Jesus who best characterizes the beautiful soul and the perfect voice of conscience. It is the person of Jesus who moves the dialectic to that penultimate level of consciousness known as religion (PG, 632–71). “The concept of Religion,” according to Hegel, “is the consciousness that sees itself as Truth” (PG, 677). After a brief excursion through primitive and ‘artistic’ religious consciousness, Hegel brings us back to Christianity, whose Judaic origins have already promoted the conception of God as Spirit, but an objective or transcendent Spirit, “out there.” What Christ represents, according to Hegel, is not a concrete manifestation of God in the form of one man. Christ is rather the symbol of the conception that God and all men are a unity. That spirit is “substance and subject as well” means that the Christian Spirit and we ourselves are the same (PG, 18, 748). Here is the resolution of the disharmony between man and God which had caused Hegel to renounce Christianity in his early writings, but it is not to be thought that this is an unambiguous endorsement of traditional Christianity either. Christianity has failed to become Absolute Truth, according to Hegel, because it has become obsessed with figurative thinking in stories and pictures. To become Absolute Truth, Christianity must reject such thinking and become wholly conceptual. Needless to say, this entails a rejection of many of the teachings and most of the ritual storytelling of the Christian church. The Absolute Knowing of the Phenomenology can thus be interpreted as a reconceptualization of the basic themes of Christianity. But it is, apart from its trinitarian jargon, a notoriously weak vision of Christianity.46 The insistence that Christianity become totally conceptual does not mean that it must dispense with any content, but its content is ultimately the content of the Phenomenology rather than the theological constructs that Hegel occasionally imitates but just as often lampoons. It has been said that the end and the purpose of the Phenomenology and the justification and end of all human activity rest in Hegel’s revised Christianity, but, as Kierkegaard bitterly points out, this alleged Christianity is far more Hegelian than Christian. So, too, what Hegel means by “reason” may be no more than nominally related to what most philosophers designate by that term. The tricks and twists of the Phenomenology, not to mention its often impossible language, belie the claim that this is a work of, indeed the very embodiment of, reason. Nevertheless, it is a masterpiece of a very different kind, and philosophy would certainly never be the same without it. CONCLUSION Hegel intended his Phenomenology as the “introduction” to a system of philosophy. It was supposed to establish the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge from which the system itself could be formulated. That task occupied Hegel for the rest of his career. The conclusion always seems to be: We do experience Absolute Reality, but we conceive of it in many different ways and these various ways can be contrasted, compared, and fitted into a single, overall system of philosophy. Nietzsche later urged us to “look now through this window and now through that one,” but where Nietzsche would insist (against Hegel) on the inevitable conflict and incommensurability of these various forms of experience, it is Hegel’s project to show us how they grow from and complement one another as well as conflict. A sufficiently broad, indeed “absolute”, perspective will absorb (which is not to say resolve) all of those conflicts as well. NOTES 1 H.Heine, German Philosophy and Religion, in Werke, Vol. V, trans. J.Snodgrass (Boston: Beacon, 1959), p. 137. 2 Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M.Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). For an excellent treatment of Hegel’s early years and philosophical development, see H.S.Harris, Hegel’s Development: Towards the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 3 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi is said to have commented, reading one of Hegel’s early unsigned academic essays: “I recognize the bad style.” See R.C.Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 147ff. 4 The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, or “The Difference Essay,” published in the Critical Journal of Philosophy in the summer of 1801, English trans. H.S.Harris and W.Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977). 5 All references to the Phenomenology in this essay are based on the A.V.Miller translation of Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), henceforth referred to as PG; citation numbers refer to paragraph numbers, not pages. My account of the Phenomenology is based on two earlier treatments in R.C.Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism (New York: Harper & Row, 1972; Savage, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), and, at much greater length, In the Spirit of Hegel, op. cit. 6 Among the fans of the third Critique were the great German poet Goethe, his equally talented playwright friend Friedrich Schiller, author of Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), and many of the young romantics of the day. 7 Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre; Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism; see Daniel Breazeale’s excellent introduction to these works in Chapter 5, “Fichte and Schelling: the Jena period.” 8 The notion of “truth” employed here was obviously not strictly an epistemological notion, but one based on the original German root “Wahr” (like “treowe” in Old English and “veritas” in Latin) which means genuine, not simply “true to the facts.” See Hegel’s own etymology of “truth” in his Encyclopedia, Logic, trans. W.Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 24, p. 172, where he distinguishes philosophical truth (Wahrheit) from mere “correctness” (Richtigkeit); and my analysis in “Hegel: truth and selfsatisfaction,” in R.C.Solomon, From Hegel to Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 37–5 5. 9 Nietzsche once wrote that “Kant’s joke” was the defense of the common man in language that the common man could not possibly comprehend. 10 Harris, op. cit., pp. 258–310; J.Hoffmeister, Hølderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt (Tübingen, 1931). 11 See Harris, op. cit., p. 140; and Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, op. cit., pp. 115–16. 12 Notably, in the work of Johann Herder, F.H.Jacobi, and Kant’s close friend, Hamann. See Lewis White Beck’s discussion of this period in Chapter 1, “From Leibniz to Kant,” esp. his discussion of the Spinoza dispute, pp. 28–32. 13 Hegel defended such a position in the Phenomenology, ch. 6B, but evidently held it much earlier. See Harris, op. cit., e.g. pp. 140, 299. Years later, Nietzsche caught the German attitude with a quip against utilitarianism: “Man does not live for pleasure: only the Englishman does.” 14 Knox, op. cit., and in Harris, op. cit., pp. 488ff. 15 Notably, “Hegel’s Tübingen essay” of 1793, trans. in Harris, op. cit.; and his notoriously hostile “The Positivity of Christianity” (1795), in Knox, op. cit. 16 Harris, op. cit., pp. 504–5. Cf. Kierkegaard, Hegel’s posthumous nemesis: “The way of objective reflection makes the subject accidental.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. W.Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 173. 17 Harris, op. cit., p. 499. 18 Ibid.; also Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” in Knox, op. cit., pp. 182–301. 19 Hegel, Critique of Practical Reason; Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. 20 Hegel, “Positivity” essay, op. cit., p. 68. 21 Hegel, “The Life of Jesus,” also written in 1795. 22 A theme he clearly borrowed from Lessing’s Education of Mankind, which he read in 1787 and again in 1793. See W.Kaufmann, Hegel: A Re-examination (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 67f. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” op. cit., markedly shows this change of temper. 23 See also Hegel’s fragment on “Love,” in Knox, op. cit., pp. 302–8. 24 Hegel, “Positivity” essay, op. cit., pp. 185–7; Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, op. cit., pp. 142–3. Cf. Nietzsche’s later argument in On the Genealogy of Morals, Book I, trans. W.Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967). 25 Quoted from Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, op. cit., pp. viii–ix. See also Leo Rauch’s discussion of Hegel on “Spirit” in Chapter 8, “Hegel, Spirit, and Politics.” 26 Quoted in Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 366. 27 PG, 16. Hegel denied making personal reference to Schelling in that comment and in a crack about “monochromatic” and “schematizing formalism” a bit later (PG, 51–2); but compare his only somewhat more diplomatic comments on Schelling in his later Lectures on the History of Philosophy. “His defeat is that the idea in general [is] not shown forth and developed through the concept [Begriff],” p. 242. He also distinguishes himself from Spinoza’s pantheism—a dangerous position to be associated with in those days—in his Encyclopedia, op. cit., p. 573. 28 See my “Hegel’s Concept of Geist,” in Solomon, From Hegel to Existentialism, op. cit., pp. 3–17. 29 See Leo Rauch, Chapter 8. 30 The “concept” is opposed to “intellectual intuition” and represents an argumentative or “dialectical” conception of philosophy compared to the emphasis on mystical insight that fascinated many of the romantic philosophers. Just after the publication of the Phenomenology, Schelling wrote to Hegel: “I confess that I do not comprehend the sense in which you oppose the concept to intuition. Surely you do not mean anything else by it than what you and I used to call the idea, whose nature it is to have one side which is concept and one from which it is intuition” (from Munich, 2 November 1807). 31 For Hege’s mature notion of “the self-development of the concept,” see Willem deVries’s acount in Chapter 7, “Hegel’s logic and philosophy of mind.” 32 See Daniel Bonevac’s discussion of Kant’s first Critique in Chapter 2, “Kant’s Copernican Revolution.” 33 I have suggested elsewhere that one could begin the route traced in the Phenomenology at any number of different starting points and, presumably, cover much of the same territory and arrive at the same conclusion. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, op. cit., ch. 4C, pp. 235ff. 34 One of the most outspoken advocates of this attack on epistemology today is Richard Rorty, who perhaps gives too little credit to Hegel in this regard. Despite his systematic pretensions, Hegel would seem to be a much more palatable ancestor than Heidegger, for example. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 35 Cf. Nietzsche, “How the True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. W.Kaufmann, The Viking Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), pp. 485f 36 Again, see Daniel Bonevac’s chapter on the first Critique, Chapter 2. 37 Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), p. 66. 38 An extended discussion of this empty self-reference can be found in Part III of the Encyclopedia, op. cit. 39 This conception of the individual as essentially independent but limited by others cornes to Hegel from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who influenced Hegel in many ways as much as he influenced Kant. 40 PG, 309ff. See A.Maclntyre, “Hegel on Faces and Skulls,” in Maclntyre (ed.), Hegel (New York: Doubleday, 1972). 41 See Don Becker, Chapter 3, “Kant’s moral and political philosophy.” 42 In Hegel’s essay on “Natural Law” in the 1802–3 volume of the Critical Journal and in his System of Sittlichkeit based on the lectures of that same period, trans. H.S.Harris and T.M.Knox (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979). 43 Cf. Hølderlin: “I can think of no people as torn apart as the Germans…. Is it not like a field of battle where hands and arms and other limbs lie scattered in pieces while the blood of life drains into the soil?” Hyperion, trans. W.Trask (New York: Ungar, 1965). 44 See Leo Rauch, Chapter 8, on Hegel’s social and political philosophy. 45 PG, 625. Cf. Fichte, Science of Ethics, pp. 15off., and his Vocation of Man, pp. 136, 154, both in Science of Logic (Wissenschaft), trans. P.Heath and J.Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970). 46 See my “Secret of Hegel,” in Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, op. cit., ch. 10. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Original language editions 6.1 Hegel, G.F.W. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Hamburg: Meiner, 1968–. 6.2 Hegel, G.F.W. Sämtliche Werke, 20 vols, ed. E.Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. 6.3 Hegel, G.F.W. Theologiscbe Jugendschriften, ed. H.Nohl, Tübingen: Mohr, 1907. English translations 6.4 Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M.Knox, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. 6.5 Hegel, G.F.W. The Difference between Fichte’s and Spelling’s Systems of Philosophy, trans. H.S.Harris and W.Cerf, Albany: SUNY Press, 1977. 6.6 Hegel, G.F.W. The Phenomenology of spirit, trans. A.V.Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Books on the Phenomenology 6.7 Fackenheim, E. 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