Phenomenology of Spirit

Overview

Six hundred pages, finished in Jena in October 1806 while Napoleon’s army was taking the town, and by Hegel’s own admission rushed at the end. It is generally agreed to be the most difficult major work in Western philosophy, and it is difficult in an unusual way: the sentences are long but the real obstacle is that the book will not tell you where it is going or what its terms mean until after you have been through them.

The project is this. Ordinary philosophy asks whether our knowledge matches reality, and immediately faces the problem that you cannot step outside knowledge to check. Hegel’s solution is to stop testing consciousness from outside. Each shape of consciousness has its own idea of what knowing is and its own object to know. Watch it try, and it will fail by its own standard. That failure is not the end; it is information, and it yields a new shape with a new criterion. The series of these failures, conducted without any external judge, is the book. He calls the route a highway of despair.

The other thing to grasp early is what Geist means. Miller renders it Spirit and Pinkard also uses Spirit, but it is closer to the mind of a community: the shared self-understanding that makes a people’s practices intelligible to itself. When the book moves from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness to Spirit, it is moving from an individual knower to a social world, and the later chapters are therefore a history of European culture in philosophical disguise.

The argument

The Preface. Written last, after the body of the book, and it is the most famous preface in philosophy. It contains the claim that the true is the whole, the demand that the absolute be grasped as subject and not only as substance, the image of the bud, blossom and fruit as moments that displace one another and belong to one life, and an attack on philosophies that present results without the labour of getting there. It is also nearly impenetrable on first reading, because it summarises conclusions you have no way of understanding yet.

A. Consciousness (I to III). The most disciplined part of the book and the best place to start. Sense-certainty claims the richest and most immediate knowledge: this, here, now, without concepts. Hegel asks what happens if you write down what now is, and shows that anything sayable about a bare this is already general. Perception then takes its object as a thing with properties, and gets tangled in how one thing can be many qualities. The Understanding posits forces and laws behind appearances, and discovers that the supersensible world it has constructed is its own doing, at which point consciousness is looking at itself.

B. Self-Consciousness (IV). The most read, most translated, most borrowed forty pages in modern philosophy. Self-consciousness wants to be certain of itself and can only get that certainty from another self-consciousness, so two of them meet, and each stakes its life to be recognised. One prefers life to recognition and submits. Now the master has what he wanted, except that the recognition he receives comes from someone he does not regard as a person, and so is worthless. The bondsman, meanwhile, has been through absolute fear, which loosened everything fixed in him, and works on things under a discipline that is not his own. In the object he shapes, he sees his own mind made external and permanent. Then Stoicism, which is free in thought while chained in fact; Scepticism, which denies everything and must keep speaking; and the Unhappy Consciousness, split between a changeable self here and an unchangeable perfection elsewhere, which is Hegel’s account of medieval Christianity.

C. Reason (V). Consciousness now claims to be all reality and goes looking for itself in the world. Observing reason studies nature, then organic life, then, in a famously savage passage, tries to find the mind in the shape of the skull. Active reason pursues pleasure, then the law of the heart, then virtue against the way of the world, and each attempt to impose an individual ideal on a social world fails in its own manner.

Spirit (VI). The historical chapter. Greek ethical life, where family law and civic law are both absolute and collide, read through Antigone. Its collapse into the legal status of the Roman person. Then self-alienated culture, the world of court society and wealth and power, Enlightenment against faith, and the absolute freedom of the French Revolution, which Hegel argues must end in a Terror because a freedom that refuses all particular institutions can only destroy. Then morality: Kant’s postulates, conscience, and the beautiful soul who keeps its purity by never acting, ending in confession and forgiveness.

Religion (VII) and Absolute Knowing (VIII). Religion is spirit’s self-understanding in the form of picture and story, moving from natural religion through Greek art to revealed religion. Absolute knowing is the same content held in the form of the concept, with the series now comprehended as a whole. The last chapter is short, and readers disagree sharply about whether it earns what it claims.

How to read it

Do not start at the beginning. Read the Introduction, which is clear and states the method; then Section IV, which is gripping; then go back for the Preface much later. Starting with the Preface is how most people stop reading this book.

Read it with a commentary open. This is not a failure of nerve. Standard companions are Hyppolite, Kojève for the master-slave section specifically and tendentiously, and Pinkard’s own study. Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard are the modern reference points.

Read for the movement rather than for doctrine. The right question at every stage is not is this true but what did this shape promise, where exactly did it fail, and why does the next one follow. If you can say that in three sentences per section, you are reading it correctly.

If you have time for only a few pages, read the Preface’s account of the bud and the blossom, the whole of Section IV A, and the Antigone pages in Section VI. That is the part of the book that the next two centuries actually used.

Two warnings. The thesis, antithesis and synthesis formula is not Hegel’s and is not in the book; it comes from a summary by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. And Kojève’s influential reading, which makes the master-slave struggle the key to everything, is a brilliant distortion: those pages are one moment in a long series, not the centre.

Questions it raises

• Hegel claims each shape of consciousness fails by its own standard. Is that actually how the transitions work, or does he supply the standard that makes them fail?
• The bondsman gains through work and fear what the master cannot get through victory. Is that an observation about labour, or a consolation offered to the defeated?
• If self-consciousness requires recognition by another, what follows for someone nobody recognises?
• The Terror is presented as the necessary result of absolute freedom. Is that historical explanation, or the appearance of one?
• Does the book’s series describe how thought must develop, or how it happened to develop in Europe?
• Absolute knowing is said to be the same content as religion in a different form. Has anything been preserved, or has the content been replaced?