BENJAMIN BAS

My explanation here will be either incomplete or oversimplified, and I would much rather it be incomplete. What I will try to cover here is the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to give a primary understanding of the concepts of Truth, Begriffe and dialectics within Hegelian thought.

The preface begins with a critique of the concept of a preface itself, most of the time prefaces concern themselves with things like grand sweeping statements, goals, ends and results. For philosophy, this will not work says Hegel, we can not begin at the end and expect it to make any sense. A preface skips what he calls die sache selbst, the flesh of the matters that we are concerned about. We can not present the reader with the end and say, for instance, we will prove here that the absolute is not abstract universal but a concrete universal… because, as of this moment, this does not mean anything to the reader. We have to unfold the concept slowly, which is a laborious task, but understanding is always a laborious task.

The second part of his critique on prefaces is that it forces the philosopher to immediately place his work within the historical context of philosophy, it creates a situation in which the work is held against already existing philosophical systems. It expects a simple agreement or disagreement with other philosophical systems, it gets thrown into this binary of right and wrong. If Hegel’s preface would say: this is a reaction to Kant’s system, and it explains why Kant was wrong, one would be enticed to say: why would I even bother reading Kant then? What we miss with this is that Kant’s ideas were absolutely necessary in order for Hegel’s system to develop. You have to take yourself through this laborious movement from previous philosophers like Kant to Hegel, in order to really understand how Hegel’s system emerges out of Kant’s system.

Hegel then glides into the subject of what truth is and what it is not, and what philosophy should be if it wants to concern itself with the truth. Knowledge is not concerned with a simple antithesis of truth and falsity that a lot of people get hung up on. To say Kant was merely wrong is not representative of how truth develops and gradually unfolds as Hegels says. The example he gives is that of a bud that disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom, as if the bud is refuted by the blossom as being false and that when the fruit emerges the blossom is shown as being a false representation of the plant. No, there is an organic unity in the plant of which its moments are not false but necessary in its development. The truth works the same way, the truth is not this fixed content for Hegel but a form. The truth develops, and in order for us to get an understanding of this developing truth, we need a scientific system of knowledge.

The truth can not be represented to us as content but only as form, it asks of us to do the labour of working through the sache selbst, the things of concern. The only element of truth in existence for Hegel is the Notion (or concept and in German it’s Begriff). This is something that goes against a lot of other thinkers in his time and this brings us to a critique of these thinkers who we will call the intuitionists.

For the intuitionists, Truth lies only in what can be called intuition, an immediate sensation of the absolute, which is not supposed to be comprehended but only felt. There is no Notion (begr) of it, only a feeling. Spirit has gone past substantial life, because of the enlightenment we can not get the feeling of the divine anymore via the immediacy of faith, we have surpassed that. At this time we notice that the connection between the subject and essence is severed and now instead of asking philosophy to lead us in understanding, we ask it to mend this severed connection. We want to keep feeling this connection to this essence. He says:

The spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshments only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.”

This forcibly trying to mend the severance of subject and essence or spirit is what Hegel calls edification. Philosophy has to not give in to his thirst for divinity and the hazy vague structureless whole that it brings with it. An empty breadth Hegel calls it, an intensity without content. Spirit does not belong in this realm but in the realm of scientific discursive knowledge. Now is the time for Hegel to make this change, his time is, according to him, a time of birth for the new world and for science, the moment of the qualitative leap out of a quantitative development. Science is here still an in its simplicity cloaked whole or a simple notion. It misses the richness of expansion of content, it feels esoteric, folded in, where it needs to become exoteric or folded out. If we do not develop it and fold it out it has the risk of getting stuck in this simple notion. It has to get fully determined, cause only in its full determinacy can it be fully comprehended.

Here we have come to a crucial section in the preface, in paragraph 16 Hegel makes some remarks towards Schelling and Fichte, but maybe also to Kant, with regard to their concept of the absolute. The main characterisation of the claim is that the absolute for them takes the form of A=A, a tautological identity. For Hegel this doesn’t do justice to the absolute, the absolute becomes the night in which all cows are black. This A=A for Hegel is hurling things into vacuity. Instead, we need concrete universality, not an absolute one. But it feels as if absoluteness is a necessity for something to be universal. But does it really need to be?

Hegel says we have to grasp and express the True as subject and substance. The True is here the fully determined concrete notion not the simple notion of an absolute.

So on the one side, we have subject which is this dynamically active thing that is like us and on the other hand, we have substance which is an essence, that which underlies everything else. This implies that we have to grasp the truth as us being implicated in it somehow. Substance and subject have a dialectical relation to each other. How does this relationship work?

Before he explains this, Hegel refers to Spinoza: God as one substance shocked us. The Spinozismusstreit being proof of this, everyone was concerned with Spinoza’s pantheism. Why? According to Hegel because with this move, the self-consciousness (subject) was brought under in substance, god becomes the pure subject. This becomes the question to answer for Hegel, how can we think of substance, something stagnant, as subject, something dynamic?

Truth is here not an origin or simple unity as it is with Schelling or Fichte. He describes it as follows: The living substance is being which is in truth subject is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself or is the mediation of itself othering with itself. Subject/substance posits itself in actuality, but at the same time posits itself as other from itself. It determines itself and by that determination calls into actuality that what is other to it. It is only through this self-othering motion of this negativity, that it can have dynamism or activity, he says this subject/substance’s being is pure simple negativity.

It puts itself forward, but at the same time negates itself without just vanishing. It is a doubling that sets up opposition, a tension. This tension is antithesis, a being set at odds with each other. At the same time the subject/substance is overcoming this antithesis through the self-restoring sameness. And via this process we come back to a unity, this is what truth is, this process in its becoming. Becoming because it has its end, unity, as its goal, but it also has its end as its beginning. So this movement is not a threefold movement but essentially fourfold, where 1 and 4 are the same but different. 4 is the sublated Notion or Concept, or the aufhebung of 1. That is what preserves, changes and advances. This is the logic of the becoming of Truth, a dialectical logic.

Good to notice is, is that negativity is the motor behind all of this movement, and that this negativity is not something external but internal to Truth. It is this negativity that we have to look at. We can not throw externals at a developing notion, you can not say that is false because that idea over there is correct. You have to see how its own internal contradictions arise, you have to give it enough rope to hang itself. This is how a system of science develops, and it is only through this system that knowledge of the True can be possible. This is what phenomenology is, a science of what is appearing, a tedious working through. It is not a simple introduction to science or a foundation of it, we do not have this luxury because in a sense we are building the boat while we are sailing it.

So now we have an understanding of what the phenomenology part is in the title of the book, which leaves us with spirit. In German the word would be Geist which both has a spiritual connotation and a mental connotation which is why in english it is both translated as either spirit or mind. Hegel describes spirit as being the most sublime Notion, it is that which has being in itself, that what has essence. But it is also that which relates itself to itself, and that makes it also being for itself. This is the process of self othering or vermittlung (mediation) to use another Hegelian term that we discussed earlier. Spirit takes on determinacy, it becomes something real and actual. It is not just abstraction. In Greek culture for example their sculptures, their plays but also their organisation of democratic principles are all spirit that has taken on a determinate form. But in this determinate form, it does not lose being in itself (or essence), it is in this determinate form being in and for itself or in other words, it is here essence in appearance. And more importantly, spirit is for itself only for us. We are part of this process, we are how spirit can become conscious of itself. And spirit that knows itself as spirit is what Hegel calls science. Spirit is the unity of the system that we have to see working through appearance, as it does not exist outside of appearance.

What this also means is that we can not do science without seeing ourselves as always already implicated in it.

Now lets skip a couple of paragraphs to paragraph 32 Where one of Hegel’s most famous phrases resides. We need to look at knowing differently, we need to stop looking at knowing as something rigid, as familiarisation. Instead, we need to defamiliarise ourselves and break the spell of familiarity. We need to start questioning things again and really see what these things tell us in their becoming. We cant crystallise knowledge, knowledge is movement, a movement powered by the power of the negative. Hegel says: “ Life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death, but that life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when in utter dismemberment it finds itself” staring the negative in the face and tarrying with it. Authentic substance (Truth, essence) is mediation itself, this is where our freedom lies, we are free to determine ourselves, but we need to also reflect on our determination. And with that reflection we lose our fixity but gain movement and activity, with this we become Notions. Fixed determinations have to turn into self-moving Notions.

To end I want to discuss paragraph 47 as it also contains one of Hegel’s famous concepts, namely that of the Bacchanalian revel. Hegel poses the question: if philosophy is concerned with essential determinations and not the abstract, how can we think the essential if it is this fleeting notion? He presents here the imagery of a party where there are people dancing being drunk passing out leaving but also new people entering. There is this flow to this or a continual process that is judged in the court of his movement. This is exactly how the True works for Hegel. The single shapes of spirit (partygo-ers) do not persist as the only essence of the party, yet they are all necessary for the truth of the party in its whole to show itself. In the same way, we can not look at a single moment in history outside of its context and get Truth out of that. We need to look at how this moment entered the world stage and how it left and how a new thing entered the stage, only this process can show us Truth.