Phenomenology of Spirit

"The project of the Phenomenology is inseparable from the project of his Logic . The Logic is the start of Hegel’s system. It is his metaphysics but it’s a particular kind of metaphysics that tries to disclose the nature of being through understanding what it is to think properly . It begins from the idea that we can understand the nature of being through thought. But that’s an assumption that was made by Parmenides, Spinoza and Leibniz. It’s a classical metaphysical assumption. Hegel then acknowledges that what he variously calls ‘ordinary consciousness’ or ‘natural consciousness’ – i.e. everyday non-philosophical consciousness – doesn’t share the confidence that one can understand the nature of being through thought. Interestingly, Hegel doesn’t simply dismiss that and say well tough , but he thinks this concern needs to be addressed. In fact, he says in the preface to the Phenomenology that non-philosophical consciousness has a right to be shown why it should move from its point of view to that of philosophy. So the task of the Phenomenology is to take ordinary consciousness – or those who attached to ordinary consciousness – from its own perspective to the perspective of philosophy. The Phenomenology fulfils this task by subjecting consciousness to a rigorously internal or ‘immanent’ critique in which consciousness undermines its own standpoint and thereby leads itself to the position of philosophy. I think that some people believe that in Hegel’s case ‘phenomenology’ is just the name of a book and that phenomenology as a discipline doesn’t begin until Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre . I don’t think that’s right. I think Hegel is doing phenomenology in a strict sense – it is a distinct discipline – and what makes it different from philosophy is that it’s not trying to think the nature of being. Hegel’s Logic is trying to think the nature of being, in the same way Spinoza was trying to tell you what substance is. Phenomenology is not doing that. What it is doing is examining the internal coherence of various modes or ‘shapes’ of consciousness and seeking to discover whether those shapes can sustain the idea they have of their own object and indeed sustain their own self-image. Hegel argues that they can’t and that through a dialectical process – the experience that each shape undergoes – the object of each shape of consciousness gets transformed into a new one. This new object then becomes the object of a new shape of consciousness and in this way the shapes form a chain – a chain that takes us from the simplest consciousness (sense-certainty, which we will discuss shortly) to the standpoint of philosophy. Phenomenology thus justifies the standpoint of philosophy by showing how ordinary consciousness is led by its own commitments, when their implications are worked out, to that standpoint. The Phenomenology is an introduction to Hegel’s system, but it doesn’t tell you what’s going to come later. In this sense it is somewhat like Descartes’s first meditation. It’s a process of breaking down certain assumptions that ordinary consciousness has, and in so doing leading consciousness to philosophy. However, in Hegel’s case, the process of breaking down assumptions is immanent: it’s carried out by consciousness itself (rather than by the doubting ‘I’). But don’t go to the Phenomenology thinking that it’s just about epistemology, or (if you start with the later chapters) that it’s mainly about practical philosophy or history or about art or religion, because it’s about all of them. If you think it’s going to be a work in just one of these areas, you’re going to be very confused and you might conclude that you can’t take it seriously as a work in any of the areas. But it’s not meant to be about any one of these in particular. It’s meant to be a study of a range of different shapes of consciousness, in which consciousness changes and mutates into different forms in a logical order. Hegel claims that you start with shapes of consciousness that are more usually seen as the objects of philosophy of mind or epistemology, but that you are then taken on to new shapes, such as desire, mutual recognition, the life or death struggle and the master-slave dialectic. Those are much more practical. Then you get to the standpoint of reason which is initially that of science, though within reason you also come to a section on ‘virtue and the way of the world’, which examines the problems encountered by virtue when it seeks to realise itself in the world without, as it were, getting its hands dirty. And then later in the text you encounter discussions of Antigone , the French Revolution, religion and so on. What have these to do with sense-certainty? Nothing, if you approach the text in terms of certain fixed categories. But if you focus on the way each shape of consciousness transforms itself into a subsequent shape, you can see that the later, more practical or historical shapes are in fact made necessary by the earlier, more epistemic ones. “It’s meant to be a study of a range of different shapes of consciousness, in which consciousness changes and mutates into different forms in a logical order.” The work thus has a definite coherence to it, but the coherence is a logical one, guided by the self-transformation of consciousness. As such, it’s not subsumable under the traditional categories of philosophy. What it is to look at consciousness in the ‘right way’, for Hegel, is to look at consciousness in the terms that consciousness itself sets. Hegel says in the introduction that the standard that consciousness uses to evaluate its own standpoint is what it sets up itself as being the truth. So he identifies what each shape of consciousness takes to be its object and he then traces the experience that’s made necessary by that object – an experience in which the nature of the object is changed. By ‘object’, by the way, he doesn’t just mean a table or a chair: clearly, a table doesn’t transform itself into a chair in our experience. What Hegel means is that each shape of consciousness has in view a different kind of object: a simple this , or a more concrete thing with properties, or an object of desire, or an object of art or religion, and so on. And he claims that the experience of one shape of consciousness transforms it into a new shape with a new kind of object. ‘Sense-certainty’ is the first shape of consciousness that Hegel looks at. If we look at a pen, the sensory material that we’re dealing with is the same for the different stages of sense-certainty, perception, understanding, and desire. But the kind of object consciousness takes the pen to be – its conception of what it is to be an object – is different. Sense-certainty looks at the pen and doesn’t think ‘pen’, it just thinks ‘this here’, because it takes itself to be in direct, immediate contact with the thing. So, the form of its object is simple immediacy: this, here, now. But in experience, that simplicity gets lost and the object becomes more complex. When we get to perception, the same sensory material is understood as a thing with properties: it is a thing with a feel, a look, etc. Then when we get to understanding, the object is now taken to be held together by certain forces and also governed by laws. What understanding wants to do is understand the relationship between those laws and those forces. And that generates a new transformation of both consciousness and its object. When we get to desire, the object is then understood to be something that feeds my sense of self. I thus assert myself through consuming the pen in some way, perhaps by breaking it or destroying it. “ Each shape of consciousness has in view a different kind of object: a simple this , or a more concrete thing with properties, or an object of desire, or an object of art or religion, and so on. ” So different shapes of consciousness have different conceptions of what it is to be an object. For aesthetic consciousness, the object might be a work of beauty, and for religion it might be an object of veneration. What Hegel is interested in is always the conception of an object that a certain shape of consciousness has and the experience that that very conception generates. And he claims that in each case the way the object is first taken to be produces a distinctive experience of it. Hegel demonstrates this by rendering explicit what is implicit in the object as it is first taken to be. Indeed, if there’s a general method to Hegel’s philosophy it is this process of rendering explicit what is implicit. The paradox – and what makes it difficult for people to follow – is that in each case the very conception of an object with which consciousness begins produces an experience in which that conception is altered. In fact, it’s turned into its exact opposite. That is the dialectical moment in the experience Hegel describes. If this change happens, and if Hegel can show that the change is indeed generated by the initial conception of the object, then there’s nowhere else to go. You can’t say I’ve made a mistake and revert to the initial conception of the object because it’s that earlier conception which led to the later experience in the first place. Hegel stands under the self-imposed obligation to be as immanent as possible in thinking about consciousness and not to import his own views about what consciousness should be saying. Each shape of consciousness is governed by a norm that it sets for itself, namely its own conception of its object. Consciousness has a certain conception of what it counts as the truth or the object, but it undergoes an experience of that object in which the latter is changed and in which consciousness itself is changed too. That injects a dynamism into the whole thing, which is part of why people find Hegel’s Phenomenology exciting. You start by looking at the world in a certain way, but then find both that world and yourself transformed by the experience you undergo. But note that Hegel is not describing an empirical process, such as thinking about Brexit in one way on one day and then thinking something different about it the next day. It’s a logical process that works out how a shape of consciousness must change – should change – if it takes its own conception of its object seriously. Of course, in life people do not always follow the logic of their standpoint. There are, for example, ‘masters’, who do not understand that their dominance is logically self-contradictory – because it depends on the subservience of another – but who carry on seeking to dominate others. In other respects, however, the logical process described by Hegel can be seen to work itself out in history itself. The French Revolution is a good example. Hegel describes the conception of freedom that drives the French Revolution as ‘absolute freedom’. He recognises that this is, indeed, a certain kind of freedom, but it’s a freedom that takes itself to be very abstract. So it works against particular institutions and associations of people and deems all individuals to be free in the same way as citizens ( citoyens ). We’re all equal before the law and equal bearers of rights. But Hegel thinks that such freedom abstracts from the particular differences that make us human, and that this abstractness reveals itself in death: for the revolutionaries begin to discover that they can have only one relationship to those who are against the revolution, namely that such people should not be. Death thus becomes the conclusion. That is not what the original revolutionaries of 1789 want, but, for Hegel, it is the dialectical consequence of taking freedom in such an abstract way. So Hegel thinks that the Reign of Terror in 1793-4 is an intrinsic, necessary consequence of the revolution. And that is really interesting and thought-provoking. How can you be committed to genuine freedom, and yet this good turns out to be bad? Hegel’s insight into this connection between the French Revolution and terror is, of course, poignant when one recalls his early enthusiasm for the revolution. “ You start by looking at the world in a certain way, but then find both that world and yourself transformed by the experience you undergo. ” Hegel thinks that tragedy presents a similar dialectic. Tragedy is in many ways about doing the wrong thing while doing the right thing, where doing the right thing itself turns out to be the wrong thing and proves to be destructive and self-destructive. This dialectical element is what either frustrates you when you read Hegel or excites and exhilarates you. It just caught me. Right from the very beginning, I thought it really exciting. In his phenomenology Hegel is not self-consciously personal, as Descartes is in his Meditations . Hegel is doing something that in principle anybody can do and discovering the same transformations as anyone else would see. In fact, he thinks of phenomenology as something that ‘we’ do, and this is one of the problems we encounter in Hegel’s new discipline: who are ‘we’? But whoever we are, we are ‘we’ and not ‘I’. Furthermore, the whole thing is driven forward by the logic that is inherent in consciousness, and consciousness itself becomes more than just an ‘I’. It starts off as ‘I’ and ‘this’, but when you get to self-consciousness, you soon have two self-consciousnesses together. Then when you get to ‘spirit’, you’ve got a whole world – a society, family, and the state. ‘Spirit’, by the way, is not some disembodied transcendent entity governing the lives of people. It is human self-consciousness in its many social, political, historical and religious forms. But it is not merely human self-consciousness, for the latter is itself the self-consciousness of being – and of the reason or ‘logos’ at the heart of being. ‘Spirit’ is thus being itself – the world – that has come to self-consciousness in humanity, above all in humanity that lives a social, communal life. So the consciousness that is under examination in the Phenomenology proves to be a shared, communal consciousness, not just an ‘I’. And the examination of consciousness is itself carried out by a ‘we’. Phenomenology is thus not an activity of private introspection – a study by a solitary self of itself. It is on the contrary, as Hegel puts it, an ‘exoteric’ discipline: it is something that is publicly understandable. It traces an inexorable logic within consciousness, but one that is publicly understandable. It’s not esoteric or private in any way. But can such a discipline be challenged by solipsism or scepticism? That depends. On the one hand, scepticism is itself undermined by phenomenology, for scepticism, of a radical Greek kind, is one of the shapes of consciousness that Hegel examines. It’s the penultimate shape of self-consciousness. But it proves unable to sustain its self-understanding and transforms itself into a new shape of self-consciousness. Such scepticism, Hegel claims, always seeks to undermine whatever it puts forward. Initially, it’s sceptical of the evidence of the senses on the basis of the abstract freedom of the self. But then it’s sceptical of that on the basis of the senses. So he says that the sceptic ends up like two naughty children squabbling with one another – one of whom says yes when the other says no – just for the sake of being stubborn. In Hegel’s view, therefore, what’s going on in the sceptic is that there are in fact two selves bound together in one, but they can’t think of themselves together as one. One’s always replacing the other. I say this; but I say not this; then I say not not this, and so on. If, however, we render this implicit two-in-one explicit, we are taken on to a new shape of consciousness that is no longer that of scepticism. The logic of scepticism thus carries us forward to a new shape in which the two selves in the sceptic are no longer just two, but are explicitly bound together as two- in-one : the shape Hegel calls ‘the unhappy consciousness’. So, in Hegel’s view, scepticism undermines itself, and transforms itself into an ‘unhappy’ self, in the course of the Phenomenology . Furthermore, solipsism undermines itself as well. If we look at the start of phenomenology, you could say that sense-certainty is trying to be just itself, and so is trying to be solipsistic, if not sceptical – it is saying, as it were, ‘I know this , everyone keep out, it’s just me and this ’. But Hegel thinks that the very immediacy of that experience turns it into something vacuous and universal. Consciousness thus can’t get the specificity it wants, and so it retreats back into what ‘I’ mean by this, but this doesn’t capture the specificity it seeks either: for if I just say ‘I’ and focus on what ‘I’ mean, I turn myself into the same ‘I’ that you are, and so I haven’t specified anything about me. I can’t capture the specificity of my object, therefore, by simply insisting that it is what ‘I’ mean by this, for the thought of ‘I’ is indeterminate: it doesn’t pick out me in particular. Here, I think, you’ve got the seeds of an argument against a form of solipsism. If solipsism withdraws completely out of any public discourse into the immediacy of itself, it ends up not being immediately itself at all, but an ‘I’ just like any other self: completely empty and vacuous. So there are arguments in the Phenomenology against both scepticism and solipsism. On the other hand, Hegel also recognises that what he calls the ‘barren ego’ may not be persuaded by such phenomenological arguments. In that case, Hegel thinks, however strong one’s arguments may be, if someone insists on solipsism or scepticism – just as if someone insists that 2 + 2 = 5 – then you have to leave them to it. Hegel argues that the ‘solipsism’ of sense-certainty proves to be empty and indeterminate and that scepticism turns itself into an unhappy consciousness, and he clearly regards the logic that leads to these conclusions as compelling. But his aim is not to persuade every last person that he’s right. There’s a lot you can say to challenge the sceptic’s point of view, but if ultimately the sceptic insists on that point of view, then there’s not much you can do except leave the sceptic to his insistence and see how he gets on. In one sense, however, you can regard the Phenomenology itself as a work of scepticism. Not stubborn, wilful scepticism, but what Hegel calls ‘sich vollbringender Skeptizismus’ (self-completing scepticism). The relation to Descartes is interesting. Think of Descartes’ first Meditation as taking a set of ordinary assumptions such as ‘I can rely on what I see’, ‘I’ve got a body’, ‘there is a God’, and as gradually whittling those assumptions away. The Phenomenology is also the process of gradually and sceptically undermining certain standpoints that we take to be obvious: I’m here and the world is there; the world is made up of things with different properties; selves are essentially distinct from one another. There is, however, an important difference between Cartesian and Hegelian scepticism. In Descartes’ first Meditation the scepticism is driven forward by the doubting self, not by the ordinary assumptions themselves. In Hegel’s phenomenology, by contrast, each shape of consciousness is subjected to an immanent scepticism, so the whole work turns out to the process of immanently self-induced scepticism about our ordinary assumptions – a work that eventually leads beyond such scepticism itself to philosophy. Phenomenology is thus not Hegel’s work. I think that something similar is true of the thought of Kant and Spinoza too. There are some philosophers for whom philosophy is their philosophy – Nietzsche is one of those, and Descartes in certain moods – but Hegel is exactly the opposite. Hegel doesn’t think of his philosophy or phenomenology as specifically his . When he’s dead, other people can do it just as well. So it’s not at all personal, it’s not at all solipsistic. Hegel’s phenomenology is an immanent scepticism that seeks to show, in a way that is exoteric and publicly understandable, how both solipsism and wilful scepticism, like other shapes of consciousness, undermine themselves through their own experience. One thing it isn’t is knowledge of the Absolute. Your readers need to know that. Absolute knowledge is knowledge that’s been absolved from the distinction between object and subject. To put it simply, ordinary consciousness in its various forms has one thing in common: it takes there to be a clear distinction between the knower and the known, a distinction between me and the world. Hegel, however, doesn’t regard this distinction as absolute, because he thinks that we can know the world through pure thought. For Hegel, it is true that I am not the world, but in another sense I am the world because I am – we are – the world that has come to consciousness of itself in thought. So thinking is able to understand being because thinking is itself a form of being. For Hegel, that’s the philosophical point of view. ‘Absolute knowledge’ just is this philosophical standpoint, for which the distinction between subject and object is no longer absolute. This distinction begins to be broken down earlier in the book, but at the end – in absolute knowledge – it is undermined most thoroughly. Absolute knowledge is thus not some grand knowledge of everything, nor is it knowledge of some ‘thing’ called the ‘Absolute’. It is simply consciousness or thought that no longer regards the distinction between itself and being as absolute, and so now knows that it can understand being through thought alone. The distinction between self and object is at its sharpest in the shape of ‘sense-certainty’, but as we move through different shapes of consciousness, shapes begin to emerge that understand the active role that their own consciousness plays in disclosing, or in some cases transforming, their object. Understanding, for example, recognises that, in order to comprehend not just of the play of forces we see around us but also the deep structural laws that govern it, we’ve got to move from ‘passive’ empirical perception to ‘active’ understanding. Understanding as a way of thinking has got to disclose those laws through its own activity. That’s already beginning to undermine the sharp distinction between the knowing subject and its object. Of course, all practical consciousness does that, too, by transforming the object that it knows. So there is no sharp distinction between subject and object there either. Later on the object I engage with becomes another self-consciousness or, indeed, my own self-consciousness, as in the ‘unhappy consciousness’. So, once again, there is no sharp distinction between the self and what is other than it. Then with absolute knowledge consciousness recognises that the form of its own thought and the form of being itself are one and the same, and that thought can thus understand being through its own autonomous activity. It should be said, though, that the chapter on ‘absolute knowledge’ can be a bit disappointing for readers, because for the most part it just goes through all the shapes that we’ve already been through. This is because part of what absolute knowing does is recuperate the path that’s taken us there. Above all, however, absolute knowing is a form of knowing that has been freed from what Hegel calls the opposition of consciousness and so is free to do philosophy. At the beginning of philosophy, therefore, we don’t have a concrete object called ‘the Absolute’. All we have is indeterminate being that is no longer understood to be something other than thought, but is known to be one with the thought that thinks it. Later in the Logic there is a category called the ‘Absolute’, which coincides in some ways with Spinoza’s concept of substance. But there’s no reason why one should choose that as the general topic of Hegel’s philosophy rather than any other category. In saying this, I differ from someone like Frederick Beiser. Absolute knowing, in my view, is not from the start knowledge of the ‘Absolute’. It’s knowing that has been freed from the assumed oppositions of consciousness. Yes, it has some extraordinarily exciting scenarios in it. I’d point to: the ‘life and death struggle’, the master-slave dialectic, the ‘unhappy consciousness’, the account of Antigone in relation to Creon (in Sophocles’ play). There’s also the discussion of the ancien régime, with all the flatterers in the court around Louis XIV, and of the French Revolution. There’s also a wonderful bit that describes a group of moral consciences congratulating themselves on how noble and excellent they all are. These are some of the most engaging parts of the book. You almost think a great filmmaker like Eisenstein could have filmed this. The way we’ve been talking about the Phenomenology so far might make it seem a little dry and abstract, especially if you’re not interested in its relation to Hegel’s Logic . And many people, like Kojève, weren’t interested in Hegel’s Logic . But there are insights into the dynamic of human interaction in the Phenomenology that really make this a remarkable book to study."

"You’re right that I’m not a historical determinist. The one thing that I wouldn’t agree with in what you just said about Hegel is that he’s very scholastic. Scholarly writers tend to be very narrow, they tend to focus on some very specific problems and go into great depth. Hegel was incredibly broad: his subject was the entire sweep of human history worldwide. That’s not scholastic: you don’t find many scholars who say that’s what they’re going to write about; certainly not many philosophers. That’s one of the things that does attract me to him, that he’s prepared to look at that. But another aspect, and the reason why I’ve included him here, is that we are going to talk about Karl Marx (and that’s particularly appropriate in that this very week when we are talking is the two hundredth anniversary of his birth). In order to understand Marx, you really do need to know something about Hegel. It’s a mistake to think you could read Marx as a scientist or an economist without understanding the Hegelian framework of his thought. That’s why I chose to begin with Hegel. “ I do think the nineteenth century was a particularly fertile period for ideas, and one in which ideas were taken seriously by many people” Marx himself said of the Phenomenology of Spirit —which does deserve a lot of those adjectives you used like ‘obscure’ and ‘difficult’ and is also very long, 750 pages—that it’s ‘the true birthplace and secret of Hegel’s philosophy’. That’s why I chose this particular book, rather than some of his other works, to try and see what’s going on in Hegel’s philosophy and how that links to Marx and his thinking, which of course was tremendously influential in the late 19th and much of the 20th century. Yes, absolutely. He has a number of works, he has a History of Philosophy and also a work called The Philosophy of History , in which he presents his views on that. But the work that I’ve chosen is one in which he is describing all of human history as progress towards the self-consciousness of Mind. That’s what I want to talk about. But already just in mentioning the title, there’s one thing that has to be clarified. I used the word ‘Mind’ just now, to translate the German ‘Geist’. That word can be translated that way, in German. Mental illness, for example, is ‘Geisteskrankheit.’ But we can also translate ‘Geist’ as ‘Spirit’—it’s closer etymologically to the English word ‘ghost’. So, when Hegel says that all of history is a progress towards self-consciousness or self-awareness, we can understand it as this collective sense of Mind. We might represent that sense by talking about a ‘World Spirit’ or Weltgeist. Does that mean a single collective mind, or a sort of spirit that animates the world? That’s an initial difficulty for any translator of Hegel. “These are areas of philosophy that make a difference to the world and to the lives of individuals” The ambivalence between ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ conveys this idea that somehow all of our minds are part of a single mind or spirit, and are drawn in the same direction towards an outcome that will be freedom or liberation for Mind. The fact that Hegel thinks of all our minds as part of a whole means that he is not thinking of freedom in the modern liberal sense, in which we might think of many distinct, individual minds all having political freedom. You’re right that here is that immense hubris or, if you like, chutzpah of Hegel because the liberation of Mind occurs when it actually understands itself. You can imagine Mind or Consciousness existing in the world when it doesn’t really understand itself, it’s just responding to circumstances, and so on. It goes through this long and elaborate process of trying to achieve knowledge, and then self-knowledge. You can see this in ‘Know thyself’ as a motto of philosophy. You can tell the story of our journey to self-understanding that way. But what’s crucial for Hegel is that we are, in a sense, all one, there is a unity of Mind. When we understand that, we are free because now we no longer see ourselves as opposed by and limited by other humans. Instead we see ourselves as all part of this whole, and that, for Hegel, is the achievement of freedom. How does that happen? Well, it happens when Hegel shows it to us by telling us the story of where we’ve come from and showing us that we are all in this part of a united Mind or Spirit. So, that’s the idea, that this is the achievement of freedom, and it is actually brought about by Hegel himself writing The Phenomenology of Spirit , or perhaps thinking the thoughts that constitute it. I don’t accept this idea of the collectiveness of Mind, but it’s an interesting thought. And it sets the framework for Marx’s transformation of Hegel’s thought. It’s a good example of the dialectic, the way Hegel thinks history moves forward, which is also something that Marx took over. It’s the idea that you have one situation, a thesis, and that somehow is not self-sufficient and it gives rise to its opposite, the antithesis, and that somehow leads to a synthesis that transcends the two. Then, that in turn sets up a new thesis, followed by anti-thesis and synthesis, and so it goes on. “In order to understand Marx, you really do need to know something about Hegel” So, in the case of the Master/Slave dialectic, you start with two humans encountering each other. Hegel discusses it in the abstract, but we could imagine them meeting in the jungle somewhere and encountering each other, and each of them sees the other as a limitation on his power (for Hegel, they are men, of course), and perhaps a competitor for resources. Therefore they fight. In this fight one of them is the victor and the other is subdued. So the victor becomes the Master, and the one who is subdued is the Slave. You might think that would be a stable situation, the stronger one has emerged as the Master, the weaker as the Slave, and the Slave will always have to serve the Master. But, no, Hegel says, the Slave is the one who is working on the world, the slave is the one who is developing his powers, because he has to labour, he has to work, he has to transform the world. The Master, let’s say, might want him to cut down a tree and shape the wood into a chair for him, but it will be the Slave who develops his skills and powers in doing that, and feels that he can transform the world; whereas the Master, not having to do this work, loses these skills and powers. So, the Slave now becomes more powerful or stronger and eventually rebels against the Master, and overcomes him, and liberates himself, and abolishes slavery. Then, you might think this will now be a stable situation. But it turns out that it’s not, because that again is the starting point of the next stage of the dialectic."