Introduction

Every philosophy is complete in itself, and like an authentic work of art, carries the totality within itself. Just as the works of Apelles or Sophocles would not have appeared to Raphael and Shakespeare – had they known them – as mere preparatory studies, but as a kindred force of the spirit, so Reason cannot regard its former shapes as merely useful preludes to itself.

Hegel’s Project

In October 1806, as Napoleon and his forty-thousand soldiers invaded Jena, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was nearby, finishing his famous book: The Phenomenology of Spirit. The book has the intended purpose of introducing the reader to Hegel’s overall philosophical project, the ‘science of logic’. Though it might seem strange today, when we associate ‘logic’ with symbolic languages or the rules of good argumentation, it makes sense to call Hegel a logician, in a unique sense that we will come to understand. Things are even stranger when we open the Phenomenology and find in it quotations from poetry, allusions to the Haitian revolution, Ancient Greek cults and Martin Luther’s health conditions, prose that randomly alternates between dramatic, profound imagery and opaque, abstract concepts, and philosophical interpretations of practices as basic as sense-perception and as complex as organised religion.

Nonetheless, the book has a purpose. It is a phenomenology insofar as it tries to make sense of the phenomena of humanity’s various attempts throughout history at absolute, certain knowledge of the world and of themselves. Of course, this is a very ambitious project, and as such it is no surprise that the book is often very difficult to understand. The two-hundred years of its existence have brought no consensus on its overall meaning: it has been interpreted as a metaphysical Bildungsroman, a systematic defence of orthodox Christianity, a revolutionary critique of Christianity, and as a text that is proto-existentialist, proto-communist, proto-fascist, or proto-nihilistic. Contemporary ‘analytic’ philosophy originally emerged out of British and Austrian philosophers completely rejecting Hegel, while ‘Continental’ philosophy – in the work of Michel Foucault, Simone De Beauvoir, or Jacques Derrida, for instance – has always had Hegel as an influence, at least in the background.¹

The original aim of these notes was for me to keep track of my own thoughts on the Phenomenology as they developed through my reading of it. But I also hope that they can be of some use to other people as well. So, the more general aim of this writing is to provide a commentary on Hegel’s book, with frequent reference to other texts both from the contemporary era and from Hegel’s time. Many books – not just in philosophy – seem to be almost infinitely deep, and the same is true for the Phenomenology of Spirit. It would presumably be possible to research this book (and any other great book) for the rest of a lifetime and still find something new every day. I am restricting myself to the purpose of hopefully making the Phenomenology a little easier to read and putting it in some degree of historical and philosophical context. This introductory chapter refers to the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Preface’ of Hegel’s book, as well as some other writings by him, in order to establish the context and general workings of his project.

So … what is the Phenomenology of Spirit about? What kind of ‘logic’ is it an introduction to? One way of describing the book is that it attempts to prepare us (that is, people living in modernity) to adopt a completely new way of knowing ourselves and the world around us. In Hegel’s own words, his task is for philosophy to ‘lay aside the title of love of wisdom and be actual wisdom.’² This ‘actual wisdom’, for Hegel, is not just a set of facts to be accumulated; it is not even a method for ascertaining facts. Rather, Hegel’s project has concrete ambitions as well as theoretical ones, and all of these ambitions come out of the problems that he saw in modern life. To give an idea of the motivation behind the Phenomenology, some of these ambitions can be introduced.

Taking great influence from the Hellenistic philosophers, Hegel sees philosophy as being fundamentally concerned with living a good life. Life in modern society, as he sees it, is to some significant degree characterised by the notion of ‘unhappy consciousness’: the human spirit is homeless, living an objectified existence in a world that it understands but in which it feels no sense of belonging. ‘Spirit, so to speak, floats over the waters of the void: it is in one sense a god, but more fundamentally, an impotent god.’³ Subjectivity is born out of the awareness of one’s separation from objectivity (the world), and until an individual can overcome this separation and see themselves reflected in the world, they will remain unhappy.⁴ It is central to Hegel’s project that philosophy has a role to play in overcoming this unhappiness; however, in doing so, it faces the challenge of the many forms of separation that dominate modernity.

Dualism

Hegel sees modern life as rife with dualisms, just like that of the individual and the world that they are separated from. In his view, the transformation of religion throughout history was one way that these dualisms came to be dominant. While the Ancient Greek and Roman gods ‘were individual and incomplete beings’ like humans, and ‘could not satisfy the demands of a universal ideal’, the impact of Christianity on modernity introduced a rift between God, the perfect and unchangeable being, and humanity, who must remain conscious of our apparent nothingness.⁵ In the Christian worldview, happiness is found only in the Kingdom that awaits us after death. This is not just applicable to religious people, however: Hegel relates the spirit of Christianity to a concrete social cause. It was when ‘the despotism of the Roman emperors had chased the human spirit from the earth’, leaving people oppressed and with no hope for earthly life, he argues, that real misery on earth ensued and ‘compelled men to seek and expect happiness in heaven.’⁶

There is thus a modern unhappiness that mourns humanity’s separation from the world, from divinity, and from the universal. As Hegel sees it, the unhappiness of dualism exists in science and philosophy as well – and these problems, just like the spiritual and religious ones above, can also be understood by considering modernity’s development upon ancient thought. In the modern age, science underwent a huge revolution, which Alexandre Koyré describes in broad terms as

the disappearance … of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being…), and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental concepts and laws.⁷

The ‘infinite universe’ cannot be fit into a closed hierarchy, like that of the Aristotelian picture that dominated in the premodern world, and is thus understood as a mechanistic (or ‘corpuscular’) totality. It is impossible to know everything about a cosmos that is infinite, but it is possible to construct a method by which anything can be known. This is what gives rise to the image of the universe as an ‘all-encompassing book’, as Galileo described it, ‘written in mathematical language’.⁸ Now, the idea that all phenomena can be explained mathematically implies that, behind the appearance of the universe, there is some mathematical essence that guides everything. Stanley Rosen calls this ‘a kind of materialistic version of Pythagoreanism.’⁹ For everything to be essentially mathematical means that either there is a Platonic realm of mathematical essences, or that mathematical structure is imposed by the subjective mind. In either scenario, we are left with a dualism: one of appearance and essence, or of subjective and objective reality.

These scientific and philosophical dualisms – dualisms of knowledge, rather than of culture or religion – are a problem for Hegel because they separate the mind from its objects, the intellect from the ‘Absolute’ (that is, ultimate and unconditioned reality). When Kant, for example, claims that we can only have objective knowledge if we severely limit the scope of our cognition, and apply it only to objects as they appear to us, he leaves an ‘impassable gulf’ between thought and its objects.¹⁰ Hegel is thinking of this kind of philosophy, which he calls ‘reflective philosophy’, when he writes:

The intellect, as the capacity to set limits, erects a building and places it between man and the Absolute, linking everything that man thinks worthy and holy to this building, fortifying it through all the powers of nature and talent and expanding it ad infinitum. The entire totality of limitations is to be found in it, but not the Absolute itself.¹¹

In the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel gives a more specific critique of reflective philosophy in philosophers like Descartes and, most especially, Kant. Such philosophers, he writes, regard cognition as ‘the instrument by which one seizes hold of the absolute’; it is an instrument in the way that it ‘goes about forming and changing’ the objects of thought so that they comply with the structures of intelligibility.¹² The problem with cognition in the instrumental sense is that it leaves behind a ‘thing in itself’: the absolute remains completely unknown. If we subtract from our thoughts all the modifications that cognition places on its objects, we are left with what we had prior to these modifications: namely, nothing. Likewise, if we understand cognition as a ‘medium’ through which we experience the world (like a set of glasses that make objects intelligible to us), then we cannot ‘undo’ the qualification of this medium without ending up where we started: with an indeterminate, unintelligible nothingness.

Hegel was opposed to this epistemological dualism, wherein ‘the absolute stands on one side and … cognition stands on the other’, and the task of the philosopher is therefore to ‘fuss about’, establishing the structure and rules of thinking before actually getting on with thinking itself.¹³ ‘Fear of erring,’ he says famously, ‘is already the error itself.’¹⁴ His discomfort with this strategy of establishing rules and concepts before they enter their living context explains some of the Phenomenology’s difficulty: its concepts and ideas are not established prior to being put to use; rather, it is up to us to realise what they mean through the very manner in which they are used.

Hegel wants philosophy to help us overcome the prevalence of dualism, which ‘crystallizes the modifications of nature, the relationships of life, into mundane realities,’ and extracts all spirit from life and places it in an unknowable figure (God, the thing in itself, etc).¹⁵ He wants philosophy to bring us back to the earth and find happiness not in a divine other world, but in ourselves and our society. Accordingly, he favours a speculative philosophy over a reflective one; ‘The principle of speculation’, he writes, ‘is the identity of subject and object.’¹⁶ His approach to overcoming the dualisms described above – dualisms of the individual and the world, the knower and the known, and so on – is to reconcile subject to object, and vice versa. In fact, he sees this as the task of philosophy as such: though he claims that ‘life eternally forms itself by setting up oppositions’, ‘what Reason opposes … is just the absolute fixity which the intellect gives to the dichotomy.’¹⁷

When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises.¹⁸

If the dualisms of culture and knowledge are not to be overcome by a philosophy whose structure is worked out ahead of time, then philosophy must instead enter into the problems, in medias res, and work them out from within. This is how the Phenomenology’s Preface begins: like Aristotle often did, Hegel begins by looking out upon his contemporary landscape and assessing its various ways of thinking. How have other philosophers tried to find unity against dualism? Why have they failed (in Hegel’s view)?

The Preface

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what has to be put first.

Hegel’s Romanticism and Anti-Romanticism

At the start of Hegel’s philosophical career, a trend of counter-Enlightenment thought was growing in Germany, with the ‘Sturm und Drang’ group – influenced by Shakespeare and Rousseau, represented by J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder and, to a lesser degree, Goethe and Schiller – and the later Frühromantik (early Romanticism) movement, represented by the Schlegel brothers, Caroline and Friedrich Schelling, and the poet Novalis, among others.¹⁹ These thinkers worked not only in philosophy but also in literature, literary criticism, and theology, and their shared commitment was to challenge the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and mechanism with heartfelt appeals to emotion, passion, love, and so on. The general spirit of German Romanticism can be ascertained through a few quotations.

Love is the final goal of world history – the One of the universe.²⁰

Since practical spirit was locked into a monotonous world of objects, and there further restricted by formulation, the free whole receded from view, becoming likewise impoverished. … Consequently, the abstract thinker very often has a cold heart, since he dissects the impressions that can touch his soul only in their entirety.²¹

To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.²²

Romantic philosophy is opposed to dualism, opposed to the abstract objectification and analysis that Enlightenment philosophy imposed upon nature, and seeks to remedy this mistake by appeal to a grand unity, which could be love or even life itself. As Charles Taylor puts it, the Romantics were ‘responsible for developing an alternative anthropology, one centred on the categories of expression’.²³

As one of the above quotations shows, the Romantics were also profoundly influenced by Ancient Greece and Rome – or, at least, their idealised version of them. This influence had in part been brought about by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), the first ‘art historian’ in the modern sense, who idolised Ancient Greece and attributed a universal, timeless value to its artwork. Incidentally, Winckelmann never travelled to Greece, and was often unaware that the artworks he studied were in fact Roman replicas; nonetheless, his aesthetic veneration of Greek antiquity and his insistence that art should be studied as an expressive part of life (and not as an object of detached analysis) had an enormous effect on German artists and writers, leading to what has been called ‘the tyranny of Greece over Germany.’²⁴ Winckelmann’s writings accompanied Goethe on his trip to Italy, and Herder claimed to read them ‘with a feeling like that of a youth on a fine morning, like the letter of a far-distant bride, from a happy time that is past.’²⁵

As mentioned above, Hegel shared this attitude about antiquity. His belief that Ancient Greece and Rome enjoyed a greater unity of individual and society, life and art, and so on, was inherited from the generation of Winckelmann-inspired Romantics. In an essay on love, written nearly a decade before the Phenomenology, Hegel’s early Romanticism is plain to see:

True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power … This genuine love excludes all oppositions. It is not the understanding, whose relations always leave the manifold of related terms as a manifold and whose unity is always a unity of opposites [left as opposites]. It is not reason either, because reason sharply opposes its determining power to what is determined. Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling.²⁶

Like the Romantics, the early Hegel sees love and the passionate phenomena of life as the real source of unity – not the intellect. His insistence that true love exists only among beings ‘alike in power’ is a criticism of the Christian notion of love, between human and God. It is difficult for a finite human to love a being that is infinite and unknowable; such a relationship is more comparable to that of a master and slave. Thus, while Christianity has ‘oscillated to and fro’ between the dualism of God and world, ‘it is its fate that … piety and virtue, spiritual and worldly action, can never dissolve into one.’²⁷

So, rather than trying to appeal to God, or to first establish the structure of knowledge, the Romantics claimed that a kind of immediate, intuitive knowledge was the criterion for truth. The absolute must be felt, not proven or intellectually comprehended. This was also the view of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819), who had such a radical emphasis on faith that even the Romantics were too rationalist for him. Jacobi argued that, in attempting to prove any of our beliefs, we must eventually stop somewhere; there must be some final, unproved point upon which our beliefs rest. He thus urged his contemporaries to take a salto mortale, a daring leap, to embrace the faith upon which our knowledge rests.²⁸

Hegel is set apart from Jacobi, the Sturm und Drang movement, and the Romantics by his refusal to rely on an immediate, foundational grounding for knowledge. While he was influenced by the Romantic admiration for antiquity, and by their attempts to overcome dualism and disunity, Hegel came to insist that only logic – rather than faith, imagination, or feeling – has the power to establish unity. Thus, Richard Kroner writes:

While the Romanticists were content with denying ultimate separation, indulging in pictorial language and paradoxes to give force to their negation, Hegel tried to demonstrate that distinctions break down before the tribunal of logic. He was convinced that the more accurately we think, the clearer becomes the impossibility of drawing clearly defined boundaries between our concepts.²⁹

Romanticism, as Hegel came to see it, was not concerned with accurate thinking at all. In the Phenomenology’s Preface, he suggests that the Romantics were reacting against the disenchantment brought upon the world by the science of modernity. (Indeed, when the term ‘disenchantment’ was brought into sociology by Max Weber, it was borrowed from the writing of Schiller, the Romantic.) However, instead of finding an alternative to this disenchantment by progressing through modernity and developing human thought, Romanticism called for a return to the spirit of pre-modern religion. ‘What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification,’ Hegel remarked.³⁰ The task of Romantic philosophy, in Hegel’s terms, is just ‘to take what thought has torn asunder [that is, dualisms] and then to stir it all together into a smooth mélange, to suppress the concept that makes those distinctions, and then to fabricate the feeling of the essence.’³¹

In other words, the Romantics did nothing to cure the dualisms of modern life and thought; instead, they suppressed them and covered them up with a quasi-religious feeling which, beyond its apparent majesty, is nothing more than a vacuous ambiguity, an ‘inflamed inspiration’. Hegel empathises with the Romantic hostility to disenchantment and dualism. His break from Romanticism is in his rejection of an immediate, anti-intellectual response to these problems – no matter how much it makes sense for such a response to come about in the time of modernity, when ‘Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity.’³²

Against Formalism

During much of his career, Hegel was academically overshadowed by his contemporary F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854), who was five years younger than him but nonetheless rose to philosophical prominence more quickly. While Schelling was also interested in overcoming dualism – especially that of subject and object, knower and known – he took a wildly different approach to the Romantics. Where writers like Schlegel and Novalis were fragmentary, poetic, and spiritual, Schelling was unrepentantly systematic and focused predominantly on nature, rather than the religious or spiritual dimensions of life. It was thought by Schelling that, if we are to understand how subjectivity is a part of reality in the first place, we must try to understand the natural world from which subjectivity emerges. In this regard, Schelling’s philosophy took the opposite direction to that of his predecessor, Fichte, for whom subjectivity (‘the I’, or das Ich) was the fundamental fact of philosophy, from which everything else – nature included – had to be derived.

Schelling’s influence led to a ‘school’ of students working under his influence: philosophers who took Schelling’s work as though it was a catalogue of clean-cut concepts, ready to be applied to any domain of reality. These philosophers are among those that Hegel criticises in his Preface, accusing them of formalism. (Hegel claimed that he did not intend to criticise Schelling, who was his close friend, specifically. Nonetheless, Schelling seems to have taken the criticism personally, and Hegel went on to name Schelling explicitly in his Encyclopaedia.) Formalism, in this context, refers to the moment when philosophy is turned into a rigid and insular play of language: a ‘language game’ in the most disparaging sense. Complicated, incredibly specific concepts and terminology are devised, which after a point seem to refer to nothing except themselves. Formalism praises itself for its wide scope and range of applicability, but amounts to little more than ‘the shapeless repetition of one and the same thing’. Any philosophical truth is lost, ‘ensnared in its origin’, insofar as ‘its development consists in nothing but the repetition of the same old formula.’³³

It is all the easier to speak in [a formalist terminology], because if I have no sense of personal shame, I can permit myself to utter every possible nonsense and triviality when I am talking to people in a language that they do not understand.³⁴

Hegel criticises formalism not only for introducing a foreign terminology, but also for giving no account of its emergence in history, and its relation to the history before it. How did Schelling, Reinhold, and anyone else arrive at their conceptual frameworks which are so divorced from everyday language? It is a mystery, only to be known by the practitioners of these arcane systems. Without making the historical development of one’s thinking clear, Hegel claims, ‘science has no general intelligibility, and it seems to be the esoteric possession of only a few individuals.’³⁵ To try and understand the origins and intentions of a formalist system of philosophy is akin to trying to see an acorn in an oak tree.³⁶

Hegel insists that philosophy must be intelligible to everyone, which is no surprise when we recall that, for him, philosophy has the anti-elitist concern of finding the conditions for a good life. Consequently, he believes that philosophy should be concerned with everyday language and concepts. We should avoid the formalist temptation of devising our own conceptual vocabularies from scratch. Instead, Hegel predicts that when we correctly comprehend ordinary concepts, we will find that everyday life contains philosophical, religious, and spiritual riches hidden away – repressed – within it, already there. In this way, he wants to show that conceptual content is already present in the phenomena of experience; by doing so, he is able to avoid the dualisms of ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’, ‘appearance’ and ‘thing in itself’, etc., that appear in philosophers like Kant.

Hegel’s insistence on comprehending everyday concepts is also a rejection of formalism’s ahistorical nature. Philosophy should not do away with ordinary concepts (like the formalists do), but nor should it simply take them for granted; rather, as one commentator puts it,

Science itself must take us by the hand and lead us from our ordinary concepts in their ordinary usage, through all the forgotten and remembered phases, back to those same concepts in the philosophical system.³⁷

Far from taking these concepts at face value, Hegel wants to situate them within the story of their development. Unlike the development of an oak tree, which can be drawn on a simple timeline between an acorn and the tree itself, human thought’s logical development is not chronological. At any one time, multiple philosophical views confront us and compete with one another. How do we know which view is the most coherent and accurate? Which one is the acorn, the sapling, or the tree? The philosopher’s task, Hegel thinks, is to acquaint themselves with the ordinary views of the present and all the views of the past, and comprehend them in their logical development. This is what happens in The Phenomenology of Spirit: it begins (and frequently returns to) views that might be considered ‘common sense’, and situates them in a line of development towards more sophisticated views. The progression in the Phenomenology is logical, but not chronological, since the changes in philosophy throughout history have not always been moves ‘forward’. As Stanley Rosen remarks,

No competent observer would question the superiority of Galileo’s mechanics to that of Aristotle. The same cannot be said, however, about the relative merits of the ethical and political teachings of Aristotle on the one hand and of Machiavelli or Hobbes on the other.³⁸

This developmental, anti-formalist approach to philosophy is why Hegel begins his work in medias res, as mentioned above. The aim of the Phenomenology is to begin amidst our ordinary understanding, and show how knowledge of ‘the Absolute’ (a concept which Hegel takes from Schelling and transforms) emerges from the development of this ordinary thinking. The Absolute, like a repressed thought, is already there, waiting to be discovered and unveiled.

Substance and Subject

In Spinoza’s system of philosophy, everything begins with a set of definitions. Basic, fundamental propositions are expanded upon to arrive at a comprehensive philosophical view. In keeping with his anti-formalist view of philosophy as a developing process, Hegel is highly critical of this approach: ‘No philosophical beginning could look worse than to begin with a definition as Spinoza does,’ he remarks.³⁹ Of course, this is in keeping with his avoidance of the Romantic trend of resting knowledge upon one immediate foundation. In the Phenomenology’s Preface, he explains his criticism:

It is only as a science or as a system that knowing is actual and can be given an exposition; and that any further so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, if it is true, is for this reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition or a principle.⁴⁰

A first principle, like one of Spinoza’s definitions, is false because it is true. What does this mean? The answer is in Hegel’s emphasis on development and history in philosophy, that we have already established. A first principle or definition, expressed in propositional form, is completely rigid and unchanging; as such, it resists the development that is required to comprehend things in their concrete actuality – that is, in their development. To grasp something in a proposition is to capture its truth only in one moment, only on one side – and ‘truth’ that is only momentary and one-sided is no truth at all. Static, propositional philosophy ‘is incapable of expressing what is concrete (and what is true is concrete) and speculative’, Hegel writes in the Encyclopaedia; ‘because of its form, the judgment is one-sided and to that extent false.’⁴¹

In spite of all of this, the Preface contains some aphoristic remarks which appear, at the very least, to be ‘first principles’ of Hegel’s thought. They have clearly been interpreted in that way by many people, since they have become some of the most notorious quotations in Hegel’s work. The first is as follows:

According to my insight, which must be justified through the presentation of the system itself, everything depends upon comprehending and expressing the true not as substance but just as much as subject.⁴²

Once we understand what this remark means, we will see that it does not contradict Hegel’s criticism of aphorisms and first principles. To start with, the ideas of substance and subject can be compared.

1. ‘Substance’ is an ancient concept in philosophy, typically traced back to Aristotle, for whom a substance (οὐσία) is that which predicates can apply to, and which is not itself a predicate.⁴³ In this sense, substance is understood to be the ‘bottom layer’ of concrete reality. The English word substance comes from Latin substantia, literally ‘to stand under’. Underneath the changes and various appearances in experience stands substance, which persists through time. According to Spinoza, there is just one substance: God – or nature, which for him is the same thing. This led to a huge controversy, with Jacobi famously accusing Spinoza of atheism and determinism: if God/nature is the single cause of everything, then there is surely no room left for individual subjects who cause their own actions.⁴⁴
2. ‘Subject’ is less of a clearly-defined concept. It is typically associated with thought, perception, and so on: the subject is the being who perceives and thinks about objects, regarding them as separate to them. An important contrast to substance is that a subject plays some role in constituting itself, determining what it is. Hegel believed that ‘all determinacy is negation’, and he attributed this idea to Spinoza (with questioning accuracy): ‘omnis determinatio est negatio, as Spinoza says.’⁴⁵ Accordingly, subjectivity – the very fact of being a subject – is for Hegel based on the activity of negation. A subject is a being that is able to ‘step outside of itself’: to recognise an Other, be recognised by an Other, and to contrast themselves with the Other. So, while substances are persistent and self-same, subjects are developmental and determined by what they are not, just as much by what they are.

A philosopher can choose to give particular priority to substance or subject in their work. Those who choose the former might be classified as materialists, those who choose the latter as idealists. Many of the philosophers preceding Hegel fit into one of these groups: Walter Kaufmann suggests Spinoza and Fichte as representatives of materialism and idealism and J. B. Baillie adds Kant and Schelling to the idealist side.⁴⁶ Hegel sees both sides as unsatisfactory: for materialism, it seems that ‘self-consciousness only perishes and is not preserved’: as in Jacobi’s criticism of Spinoza, to reduce everything to substance precludes the possibility of free subjects. Moreover, it seems impossible to entirely rule out the existence of ideal things: since ‘matter’ cannot be perceived with the senses, and is a universal derived from various different things, is it not itself an idea?⁴⁷

Even the idealists, who put the subject and its thought at the root of all things, are in a difficult situation regarding freedom. An idealist can go the route of Leibniz, who endows our knowledge with certainty by suggesting that the mind has a pre-established harmony with the unchanging, self-sufficient nature of God, but in doing so makes everything determined and completely undermines freedom. Alternatively, one can go the route of Kant and Fichte, who maintain a belief in subjective freedom, but only via an act of faith (in Kant) or an ‘intellectual intuition’ (in Fichte): for neither philosopher is freedom established as a fact of subjectivity.

Materialism-idealism is thus another dualism that Hegel wants to overcome, and to understand ‘the true not as substance but just as much as subject’ is his attempt at doing this. By attributing subjectivity to substance, Hegel is claiming that negativity, which has been established as central to subjectivity, is also central to substance itself. That is to say, substantial reality itself involves self-othering, involves its own negation, and is inherently a development and a process: ‘the true is not an original unity as such … it is the coming-to-be of itself’.⁴⁸ As such, ‘substance is subject’ is permissible as a ‘first principle’ precisely because it is an anti-principle; to equate substance (what is) with subject (what is becoming, in and through what it is not) is to avoid the rigidity of propositional first principles. To understand exactly how substance is subject can never be done in a proposition; it ‘must be justified through the presentation of the system’, as Hegel writes. The Phenomenology will thus show the inherence of negativity within reality, the process through which things become.

This reading can be pushed even further, however. Not only does ‘substance as subject’ imply that substantial reality is developmental and processive, but that it is also permanently incomplete, just as the subject is. The Phenomenology will show that the self-conscious subject never reaches complete satisfaction in its self-awareness. The threat of the Other is always there, the subject can always be undermined, and so on, and it is the very nature of subjectivity to live with this inconsistency.⁴⁹ As such, to recognise ‘substance as subject’ is to recognise the impossibility for substance to be stable and identical with itself. As Slavoj Žižek explains, this is the most direct way that Hegel distances himself from the subject-focused idealists like Fichte: ‘the subject does not come first, it is not a new name for the One which grounds all, but the name for the inner impossibility or self-blockage of the One.’⁵⁰

For this reason, there is no ‘clean beginning’ to philosophy, like Spinoza’s definitions, Fichte’s self-positing I, or Jacobi’s salto mortale. The drive to begin one’s philosophy with a certainty free of error is itself an error, because ‘error’ and ‘falsehood’, typically regarded as exclusive to the domain of subjectivity, are built into the substance of reality itself.⁵¹ As Žižek goes on to say:

At its most elementary, the Real [i.e. substantial reality, the Absolute] is non-identity itself: the impossibility for X to be(come) “fully itself.” The Real is not the external intruder or obstacle preventing the realization of X’s identity with itself, but the absolutely immanent impossibility of this identity. It is not that X cannot fully realize itself as X because an external obstacle hinders it – the impossibility comes first, and the external obstacle ultimately just materializes this impossibility. As such, the Real is opaque, inaccessible, out of reach, and undeniable, impossible to by-pass or remove – in it, lack and surplus coincide.⁵²

Of course, as Hegel has himself pointed out, the real insight of this idea must be justified and demonstrated through the presentation of his whole system. The idea of a universe that is at its heart incomplete is one that will (hopefully) become more plausible to us as the Phenomenology progresses.

Dialectical Thinking

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

At this point, we are left with the question: how is the development of the Phenomenology – the ‘voyage of discovery’, as Hegel called it – supposed to progress? What makes it move? Deep into his long Preface, Hegel finally gives us some answers, by distinguishing ordinary ‘argumentative thinking’ [Räsonnement] with his own ‘conceptual thinking’ [begreifende Denken].⁵³ The conceptual thinker, he claims, submerges their thought ‘into the immanent rhythm of the concept.’⁵⁴ This is Hegel’s rather opaque way of saying that conceptual thought, rather than trying to represent its object and to develop this representation when it sees fit, instead recognises its object as containing development within it, and gives itself over to this development. In other words, conceptual thought is the kind of thinking that comprehends substance as subject.

Hegel clarifies what he means by further distinguishing conceptual thinking from argumentative thinking. Typically, he claims, argumentative thinking is ‘merely negative’.⁵⁵ It tells us what is false, but doesn’t tell us how to get towards the truth. In this regard, the argumentative thinker is akin to the person in a childish argument who, when presented with an idea, simply says ‘no!’ and offers no correction or alternative. This is an empty negation which is simply imposed on the content of discussion by the thinker: when presented with any thoughtful idea, argumentative thinking only ‘knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothing.’ In conceptual thinking, on the other hand, negativity is not imposed by the thinker but, instead, ‘the negative belongs to the content itself.’ This allows for what Hegel calls a determinate negation.

Determinate negativity is not arbitrarily applied by a thinker; rather, it belongs to a thing (or a situation, or whatever else) and plays a positive role in determining what that thing is. It is a negation ‘with a positive content’, as Hegel puts it.⁵⁶ As an example of this, consider two atheists. One was raised as a Muslim, and came to reject their theistic upbringing; the other was raised in a Catholic setting, which they also came to reject. While both of these people are atheists, their atheism is different because of what it rejects (what it negates): to be a ‘non-Muslim atheist’ involves a different set of (non-)beliefs to being a ‘non-Catholic atheist’. The negative ‘non-’ in the identities of the two individuals plays a positive role in defining who they are. Another example of determinate negativity is given by Alenka Zupančič, based on a joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka:

A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “Coffee without cream, please.” The waiter replies: “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re out of cream. Could it be without milk?” The waiter’s response introduces an additional, paradoxical spectral entity in the very dimension of negativity. The presupposition of his response is that “without” something actually means “with the lack of something,” or with-without something.⁵⁷

For conceptual thinking to be able to grasp determinate negation is of great importance since, as noted above, all determination for Hegel – that is, all particularities and qualities of an object – is made possible through negativity.⁵⁸ For this reason, only conceptual thinking can carry actual, positive content; and it does so by negativity and development in the very thing it is thinking about. The negativity that conceptual thinking acknowledges in reality is central to what we established above as the subjectivity of substantial reality. All this is what makes Hegel’s work dialectical.

Despite what many misconceptions and misrepresentations would have us believe, ‘dialectics’ is not a readymade method which can be applied universally to any problem of philosophy. The idea of a ‘thesis’ being followed by an ‘antithesis’, and the two being followed by a greater ‘synthesis’, is wildly inaccurate and to be found nowhere in Hegel’s writing. Rather, philosophical thinking is dialectical when it refuses to trail behind its objects, desperately shuffling propositions and concepts in an attempt to grasp a reality that is constantly changing. A non-dialectical, argumentative thinker will throw away their ‘concepts’ as soon as the contradictions of reality challenge them. In dialectical philosophy, on the other hand, we are concerned with ‘the concept’ [der Begriff] as such: the constantly moving account we keep of reality as a whole.⁵⁹ The concept is not supposed to ‘match’ reality or ‘signify’ it, as someone like William of Ockham would have us believe; rather, the concept is reality, in the same way that Plato’s ‘ideas’ or Aristotle’s ‘essences’ are. ‘The “nature” of a thing is something thought, but it also is something operative in the thing,’ Richard Kroner writes.⁶⁰

As such, when dialectical philosophy encounters contradictions in experience, it takes these moments as determinate negations. Contradiction is not a failure for Hegel; rather, it is a sign of success. A contradiction in the concept’s development allows the concept to account for something previously unaccounted for. This is precisely the way in which the Phenomenology progresses: Hegel (or the narrator, or the protagonist, for this is a ‘voyage’, after all) expresses his concept – a claim to grasp reality with absolute certainty – and elaborates upon it until a contradiction is found. It is at these moments of contradiction that the concept embraces the negativity it was repressing, and reaches a more holistic stage. In the rest of this commentary, I hope to demonstrate how this holism evolves from the simple naivety of sense-perception into the sophistications of drama and politics.

Today’s intellectual atmosphere is skeptical of any grand accounts of ‘The Truth’. It is more comfortable to concern ourselves with tiny, trivial problems that remain safe among the few people who speak the right academic language. A world in which philosophers have something substantial to say about how we live, and how we should live, seems almost ancient. But The Phenomenology of Spirit isn’t yet old enough to be forgotten, and Hegel, despite living in an atmosphere comparable to ours, had the courage to be ambitious. It is left to the reader to decide whether or not he was successful.