Summary Of The Phenomenology Version 2

A Brief Introduction to the Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology

Robbert A. Veen © 2009

Preliminary remarks As I have stated elsewhere, the Phenomenology analyzes the "experience" of the Spirit in its appearance to itself, as it develops into self understanding and approaches this experience as a dialectic movement of consciousness. That already implies that the Phenomenology is not just an introduction to the System as J. Hyppolite and R. Kroner thought it was. The primary object of the Phenomenology is the immediate knowledge of the Spirit. The Spirit in its appearance for short. The greek word phainomenon means "appearance" so that explains the title: Phenomeno-logy, science of the appearance. The -logy part of course refer to "logos" in Greek meaning "science of." But what does it mean that knowledge appears to itself? It appears to itself in the sense that every instance of knowing that we have implies some awareness of what knowledge is. If it were not so, we would not in our everyday lives know what it means to be in error and correct mistakes or understand that we sometimes do not know. We can go even beyond that. To know always means to know at the same time the act of knowing itself. There can be no unconscious knowing - a dim awareness of a presPagina 1 van 15

ence maybe, but no unconscious knowledge. All knowledge must express itself as "I know this or that and I know that I know this." You cannot say: "I know this table is white, but I don't know that I know it." That presupposition is distantly related to one of Descartes' great discoveries: percipere est se percipere. In a free translation: knowledge always implies knowledge of the knower. In other words: all knowledge is reflective. Ultimately it is Plato that in his Theaetetus developed this idea for the first time. When we talk about "consciousness" we must make an important distinction. We are not talking about the "mind" here as some "thing" that is conscious of something. It's not about "a" conscious individual or one of its mental faculties. Consciousness is to Hegel a complete idea of knowledge, a structured subject-object relationship expressed in words and offered as a truthful understanding of our knowledge and the world. It is therefore incorrect to speak about these modes of consciousness as "epistemologies" unless one understands that Hegel focuses on the ontological implications of such epistemologies at the same time. Consciousness in the Phenomenology stands for the totality of the reality of Spirit, that appears in separate, seemingly independent modes of consciousness. Because it is consciousness that functions in the Phenomenology as the primary mode of knowledge, - and not the concept and not the historical reality as such - each of its forms always appears with an emphasis on the (ever-changing) object. Every form of consciousness, every specific claim of a subject-object relationship, posits its truth as residing in its object. It has a concept of its object and of itself as correlated to that. It appears as the expression of the totality of the subject as well as its object. Its claim is a claim about the totality of the knower and the known. Every consciousness says: this is what knowledge in general really is, because this is what the knowing subject essentially is and that is what the known object essentially is. I have said that these modes of consciousness appear to say it all. They seem to be independent and exclude one another. Precisely this independence however of every specific consciousness, i.e. every claim of a particular consciousness to express the to-

tality of knowledge, is being tested at every stage. Not by any presupposed and external standard or criterion, because that would mean we already have jumped to a conclusion about what knowledge really is, before we examine the various claims to knowledge, but by its own claimed standard. The examination of modes of consciousness resembles an interrogation in a philosophical dialogue: Someone claims "X" as a standard and when asked it offers proof by demonstrating it in a form of knowledge, "Y". If I can show that consciousness actually does "Z" and not "Y" then it follows that the claim "X" is in error. Sensuous certainty e.g. claims "immediate knowledge" and shows that with the aid of its understanding of the object: "it is essentially always here and now." If I can show that its actual object is something that is mediated by a subjective activity, in this case the actual pointing to an object in the here and now, "Z", then this claim of immediacy is shown to be in error. Its claimed object is not understood properly. Then I move on to the next consciousness, that solves the former problem by claiming a new standard "X2" that consists of "X" and the result of the objection, "Z" and offers proof in the form of "Y2". And then I can show that it actually does something else "Z2" and so on. The resemblance to Plato's dialogues where Socrates moves the discussion forward by asking questions, is not accidental. The Socratic dialectics is also a real (or idealized) conversation and of course that is highly formalized in the Phenomenology. But Hegel would agree with Plato on the intersubjective nature of all thought, even when it is not executed in the form of a real dialogue. There are no isolated thinkers. [Maybe in Plato, but in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the changes in consciousness come from the contradictions in the concept of the object itself, not from intersubjective exchanges.] The various different shapes of consciousness are but moments of the self-conscious Spirit, and in that sense they are not independent historical periods or complete philosophical systems but they belong to the whole as abstract elements. As part of the whole they are the logical conditions or determinations of philosophy as a science, or of the self-understanding of the Spirit in the present. But that is not how they appear.

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That appearance or "substance" as Hegel calls their being in itself to consciousness needs to be examined to arrive at the essence - that Hegel calls "subjectivity", what they "really" are for itself. In every stage it is shown in the analysis that consciousness has a claimed objectivity and a real objectivity. Most of the time you can easily see that the claimed object presupposes something else that is not yet part of the definition of the object. When confronted with that fact, consciousness expands its definition of the object and creates thereby a new subject-object relationship. Every new structure that consciousness accomplishes by means of the new definition of its object, is again taken as something independent, as an expression of the totality of knowledge instead of an appearing "moment" of the Spirit as absolute knowledge. Of course, in the form of a claim it always does express that totality. But it does not do so adequately. There is a nice Latin phrase for that: totum, sed non totaliter: the totality, but not totally. That means something like: the whole, but not in its fullness. The limits of the object of any consciousness are correlated with the limits of that consciousness itself. Any concept of objectivity implies a corresponding concept of the knowing subject. In itself, every conceived form of objectivity is a reference to the real world in its totality. In Sense Certainty e.g., the concept of being that is used to express the immediacy of the object in the here and now, on its own does refer to this totality. We can show that easily by examining the concept from a logical point of view. It is the least you can say about the world as a whole, but you can say it truthfully: everything that is, is. There is nothing beyond or outside being. (But the dialectical counter argument will be: there is indeed nothing, i.e. the act of negativity, the power of abstraction that produces this concept, beyond being.) As a category being seems at first to be merely positive. It includes everything. It also excludes any limitation or difference, and in that sense it already expresses the identity of subject and object. It includes everything by excluding nothing. But this exclusion is the problem. That is a logical activity that is not properly expressed in the concept of being itself, that simply says what is, is. The claim of immediacy is in contradiction with the mediation of thought required here. The negativity of the exclusion turns out to be the condition of the positive

nature of the concept of being. There is no such thing as an absolute immediate category, because we need mediation to get there in the first place. Still, "being" does say "everything" so why do we need to move beyond it? Being says it all however in a limited or merely abstract fashion. It says everything, but does not express that in its fullness: totum, sed non totaliter. It leaves out the negative nature of thought which is a condition of its being thought. (Which is shown in Hegel's Logic by the fact it has to exclude "nothing" to be thought and that exclusion is not expressed in the meaning of "being" which is pure immediacy and positivity.) Yet, there cannot be any concept without having this character of immediacy and this claim to express a positive totality. Every concept presupposes and includes "being" as an element of its own determinacy. So we must say that every claimed concept of objectivity, including "being" and "thing" and "force" or whichever concept we are looking at in the Phenomenology, has some truth to it. Not because it really expresses that totality, but because it refers to the totality that it (a) belongs to as one of its determinations and (b) from which it derives its own limited meaning. The development of consciousness is reflected in the development of the concept of an object, i.e. in the changing claims to truth. In the end consciousness reaches the identity of self-consciousness and its object, what Hegel called absolute knowledge. The phenomenology is at the same time a description of a development, and in that sense an historical description, and an analysis of consciousness, and in that sense a systematic or philosophical exposition. The division between subject matter and form, or between subject and object has been sublated here. That is why we are not dealing with a science or philosophy of conscious experience that would deal with the empirical contents of consciousness. That is the difference between Hegel's Phenomenology and the transcendental Phenomenology of Husserl. Pagina 5 van 15

A. Consciousness In the first movement of the Phenomenology, called Consciousness, the opposition between the abstract singular consciousness of the abstract singular object is overcome. By changing its object from the immediate given, moving through the object as "thing" to the concept of the world of laws, consciousness indirectly develops itself: it changes from immediate certainty, goes through perception to reflective reasoning. Every time the object changes, consciousness changes its own relationship to its object, and thereby changes itself to become a new form of knowledge. When consciousness realizes that its object is not a singular object, but a universal, it sees its own nature reflected in its object. What it does finally as consciousness, is to differentiate the universal of the objective world, (the physical reality of force), and the universal as the awareness of universal laws. Consciousness comes to realize that it only has a world that it can understand, precisely by this activity of making a difference between reality and subjectivity and relating them to each other. To understand the world scientifically must mean to discover the universal within appearing reality on the one hand, and to apply the universal to given appearances on the other hand, or rather to do both at the same time. So the relationship between the subject and the object has now become a correlation, and this correlation is the truth of consciousness. But that correlation that is now the truth of consciousness, is as such merely subjective. Or to put it differently: the real or effective object now turns out be the subject itself. Understanding the world implies a subject understanding itself as world, though this is a position that will only be fully understood within the realm of Existing Spirit. B. Self-consciousness In the final movement of consciousness as Explaining Reason a new mode of being of the spirit appears: self-consciousness.

Although self-consciousness understands that it is the truth, it appears at the start simply as Sensuous Desire. As Sensuous Desire the object of consciousness is no longer a separate and independent world, but rather something that is relative to its own desiring. Consciousness is aware of its own lack in its object, and thereby it is aware of itself. By consuming and using the object, it gives itself actively an immediate self-certainty. It experiences itself in the process of negating the object. (In the sensuous certainty it experiences the object passively by negating itself as subject, so here we have reached the opposite.) However, precisely because it consumes its object when it satisfies its desires, it renews itself also. No fulfillment of a desire is final. This bad infinite movement is interrupted when it experiences that the external object can be life and consciousness that appears as a self-consciousness in itself. Now it sees itself fully reflected in its object as such, this "other" subject, which however also means that it is alienated from itself. It is no longer independent. When it desires this other object that is in reality itself a subject, self-consciousness experiences that it also has become the object for another subject. Consciousness now experiences itself as the object for another consciousness and the immediate social relationship is reached. The alienation that occurs here is crucial: by understanding someone else to be another subject, I see myself reflected. That reinforces my understanding of my own subjectivity. But the fact that this other subject is also Sensuous Desire like myself implies that I am at the same time something that is desired. That is the opposite of being a subject and makes me understand that I am also an object to this other self-consciousness. This duality is therefore at the same time recognition and alienation (opposition). Self-consciousness now has two shapes that appear to one another, and what has been a single self-consciousness is now a double subject. (Not "two" subjects as such, but a single self-consciousness doubled in itself. Remember we are talking structures, not individuals.) One and the same true self-consciousness appears to itself as a relationship between two appearing self-consciousnesses. At first it understands this movement Pagina 7 van 15

metaphorically as the struggle for recognition that is a struggle to the death. That movement is only halted in the relationship between Lord and Slave, ultimately however the two movements of Lord and Slave are separate shapes of one self-consciousness, they are in truth the one movement in which self-consciousness recognizes itself in its own otherness. And not in someone who is an other. The metaphor of the struggle to the death is precisely that, a metaphor. Sometimes it is claimed that Hegel refers here to some primordial stage in human history in which people did struggle like this, or it is read as an explanation of the origins of slavery. We find that e.g. in the lectures on the Phenomenology by Kojève. But the passage is not meant to express any kind of real historical event. The closest example of this way of thinking is Locke's abstract thought experiment when he talks about humans having to defend themselves against all others in a war of survival. That wasn't meant historically either. It was a reconstruction of what is fundamental to human behavior in a process of imaginative abstraction. And that is the case with Hegel's text too. Within this new single consciousness that has overcome the duality of Lord and Slave, the contradiction of the two movements continues. In Stoicism and Skepticism and finally within Unhappy Consciousness there is an inner opposition at work between the changeable singular consciousness and the unchangeable universal consciousness, that is now projected outward as the True Essence. C. Free Concrete Reason This secondary opposition must be overcome to reach the truth of self-consciousness which is the certainty that it itself is the whole of reality. That is the stage of Reason. As reason, self-consciousness is the singular subject that now has reached the concrete universal, it is like the "I" in Fichte's Doctrine of Science or the Synthetic Unity of Apperception in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Concrete universal self-consciousness in its immediate form is Reason. It is however at this stage only opinion and awareness. So the movement of consciousness and selfconsciousness is now repeated. Reason as consciousness is present in Observing Reason. Reason tries to describe nature as its universal object. But it does so self critically. Sensuous certainty, observation (perception) and reflective reasoning are now the topics of inquiry. Observing reason assumes that it is only interested in objects of perception, but actually it searches for the universal, essential, within the facts of organic and inorganic nature in order to find itself. Its experience is however, that the concrete universal subject cannot be simply found in nature. Nature has exceptions and defies our categories and though in biology observing reason can understand itself as being the rational faculty of an organic being called human, it does not succeed in understanding its own objectivity like that. It tries to do so by explaining itself through a theory of logical and psychological laws. But because the description always remains external, the inner meaning of these laws remains problematic. Such descriptions of subjectivity do not explain the process of observation and reasoning itself. In a second stage reason understands itself as active, corresponding to the previous moment in self-consciousness as desire. As realizing itself it is reasonable self-consciousness that tries to be the whole of reality by its own action. Reason then finally comes to the understanding that it is the certainty of being all reality, though the carrier of that certainty still remains the abstract individual. Universal is not yet understood as conscious of itself. Only the collective culture of a people can be said to express the self-consciousness of the Universal. Reason in its highest shape is individuality that is in itself and for itself real. It understands itself to be a real, it realizes itself, and understands itself in both these shapes. But precisely because it remains Individuality, it is still merely a consciousness of the Pagina 9 van 15

concrete universal. Only as Spirit can it now in truth be seen as the identity of consciousness and its substance or object. It is therefore necessary to transcend even the perspective of reason. D. (BB, VI) Spirit The ethical community of a people is the adequate shape of consciousness for the concrete universal, because it is in itself a universal mode of consciousness. In other words, if we understand the totality of being as a spiritual entity that is itself and for itself - e.g. if we state that the universal Spirit is the Spirit of a culture or people, we still posit something that is substance, not yet consciousness of itself. Hegel defines what Spirit actually is by positing that the Spirit actually comes to self understanding and self-consciousness within a community of people: the essence that is in itself and for itself is real as a consciousness and has consciousness of itself (though at first only in the form of representations) and that is called the Spirit. (p. 314 Hofmeister.) The truth of the dialectic self movement of the spirit as consciousness is reached in this chapter on the existing spirit, but still only in the form of the in itself. (By the way, it is not right to talk about objective spirit here.) this is a concrete and universal form of consciousness that has its full reality in the life of a people. Within that concrete universal life also the truth of individual consciousness is discovered, implying that now for the first time we find the notion of a history of consciousness that is at the same time the history that is remembered as such, because it is now a history of the consciousness of a people. A movement through stages as for instance in the organic development, is not yet history. In other words, only if we reach a dialectic relationship between the incarnate truth of the universal spirit in a people in opposition to the position of an individual, do we have something that can be seen as immediate history. History after all presupposes the facts that are told and interpreted within the consciousness of people by an individual that reflects on them and passes judgment. Without this difference between events as they unfold in the perspective of an observer or participant that consciously aspires to achieve something, there is no such thing as history.

Though in this existing spirit we again have the basic shape of consciousness yet the world and its history are seen as the immediate objects of understanding. At the same time there is more than we had before, where individual reason remained secluded in its abstract individual energy. Now consciousness is aware of itself as the world and understands the world as itself. Although the Spirit is treated in a later stage of the development of the Phenomenology, going beyond the abstract individuality and equally abstract universal that we had before, we have now reached the real ground and substance of the previous stages. We can now say that consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are the abstractions of the truth of the Spirit as incarnate in the culture of a people. E. Religion At the end of the chapter on Reason we still have a difference between individual concrete reason, and the universal substance. Then in the chapter on the Spirit, Reason discovers that her own truth lies in the universal consciousness of the ethical world. The Spirit therefore, as the concrete existing spirit of a people, is still only the truth in itself. The shape of consciousness in which the Spirit now comes to self understanding or self-consciousness is Religion. The spirit that knows itself finds its adequate form of self-consciousness in religion, because there we have the universal subject and the concrete universal substance united. In Religion the absolute becomes conscious of itself in all its previous manifestations. •

It was already present in the chapter on finite reason and understanding. Unhappy consciousness aspired toward the absolute but did not recognize it as itself.

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Reason overlooked the Absolute because it found itself only in what was immediately before itself.

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In the ethical order the Absolute was an impersonal Fate in which no one could recognize himself. Pagina 11 van 15

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The religion of the Enlightenment had only an empty absolute, which stressed the interest it had in the present.

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Finally, the religious aspect of morality and conscience led to the acceptance of the inner universal self, but now all differentiation and all actuality existed merely outside of itself.

In all of these religious moments, the Spirit was just a part of a finite object. Now in Religion Spirit sees itself objectively as the Universal Spirit that is expressed in an objective natural shape, that is transparent to its own essence. The immediate nature of religion however, implies only a partial connection to the universal substance, or in other words religion in part remains positivist. It does not understand the worldly expression of its essence to be spirit itself. That means that all the previous shapes of consciousness, selfconsciousness, reason, and spirit must be realized in succession, even though as such Religion contains all of them in unity. The religious spirit is at first self-conscious in an immediate manner. The movements of its concrete shapes is driven by the attempt to unify itself with its content. That movement again is a movement from certainty to truth. Ultimately that truth is attained in the self-consciousness of religion. Natural religion is the way in which absolute Spirit appears to itself in the manner of sense certainty, perception and understanding. Hegel refers to be Persian religion of light and darkness, as the first of these. Perception is present in the Indian religions where the absolute appears in a variety of independent vegetable and animal forms. As understanding the Spirit appears in the Egyptian religion, that ultimately expresses an inner duality in the Sphinx which is part animal and part human and as a whole divine. In Egyptian religion the role of the artisan is crucial, but not for itself yet. When Religion reaches the level of self-consciousness, it becomes the Religion of Art I which the artisan is the essential self-consciousness at work. As a product of free spirit, Art is the immediate form in which a society that is simply built on customs and traditions, that has a

culture that is treated as nature, is broken up. Ultimately the artist wants to express himself. The external work of art is basically a form without color - that is how it is remembered because its color was lost! - in which the individual expresses his own content. The Religion of Art then goes through the separate stages of the abstract work of art, the living work of art, and the spiritual work of art. Ultimately self-consciousness is reached in a shape that corresponds to the end of the chapter on Individual Reason. The truth of Comedy is the self awareness of the individual in his own accidental individuality. The religious sense of that is the self knowledge of the absolute within it. The absolute is subjectivity as the identity of the individual to himself within the world of passions and the accidental. In Comedy the individual consciousness now appears to be the basis of the absolute essence, judging and mocking it. Instead of the individual being the manifestation of the absolute, we now have the reversal of that. In that sense we find ourselves now in the opposite corner of unhappy consciousness. When we analyze the structure of Comedy, we can see however that it contains not one but two shapes of self-consciousness. On the one hand we have self-consciousness judging the absolute, on the other hand we have the absolute still being defined as a self-consciousness itself, albeit in a negative form when seen from the first. We have therefore two equal sides of self-consciousness operating in both Unhappy Consciousness and Comic Consciousness. That is why as the basis of Revealed Religion we must picture a dual movement. On the one hand we have a substance going out of itself and becoming self-consciousness, on the other hand we have a self-consciousness going out of itself and producing the Absolute Spirit. Revealed Religion contains the self-consciousness of God within human self-consciousness. It combines therefore both perspectives. As the Father we have the essence or being in itself of absolute self-consciousness. At the same time it is being for itself for that essence. That is the moment of the Son. And finally we have the being for itself which knows itself in the other, the Holy Spirit. Ultimately this Spirit, Pagina 13 van 15

is most essentially itself in the religious community or Congregation where the unity of the absolute self-consciousness and the individual self-consciousness of Christ is transformed into a collective self, a universal self-consciousness of the Universal Spirit. Only as a community can we say that the self-consciousness of the absolute is realized in its other. And only as a community can we say that we actually know this absolute as selfconsciousness. In religion therefore, even though it can never fully identify itself with the object of its consciousness, and has to use narrative and images of that unity or use projections of that unity for the indefinite future, the social shape of knowledge that is the absolute condition of science is finally reached. In that sense one can say that the scientific community is of necessity a religious community. F. Absolute Knowledge In Religion there still is a distinction between the objective form of narrative and image, and the contents of absolute self-consciousness. Again Absolute Knowing must transcend this distinction and become aware of itself in all forms it has successively gone through. Only if the content of religion is understood as the action of the self, only if religion is seen as expressing a stage of its own interior development, can conceptual knowledge transcend it. Systematic science can only appear when self-consciousness has any conceptual understanding of itself and is able to see all objectivity as something conceptual. Only then we have the necessary unity of subject and object within the concept that is essential to both. Therefore substance, what seems to be solidly out there in itself, must be transformed into the conceptual and in that sense become subjective. The Encyclopedia or System will achieve that conceptual understanding. Ultimately, systematic science cannot remaining simply conceptual, because it needs to understand the externalization of the Spirit in nature and political society as well as in

human history. Its ultimate goal is the understanding of Spirit developing itself through a long procession of historical cultures and individuals, producing its self-understanding as philosophy.

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