Phenomenology of Spirit - Philosophy of Right PDF

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Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel Summary “Shapes of Consciousness”

Hegel attempts to outline the fundamental nature and conditions of human knowledge in these first three chapters. He asserts that the mind does not immediately grasp the objects in the world, concurring with Kant, who said that knowledge is not knowledge o f “things-inthemselves,” or of pure inputs from the senses. A long-standing debate raged in philosophy between those who believed that “matter” was the most important part of knowledge and those who privileged “mind.” Rationalists, such as Descartes (and before him, Plato), believed that we can only trust the truths that the mind arrives at on its own, while Empiricists, such as Locke, argued that all of our knowledge comes from our perceptions of actual objects, through our senses. Kant had sought to put this debate to rest by arguing that the meaning of objects derives from ideas, or “concepts,” that stand between mind and matter. The information entering the mind via the senses is always “mediated” by concepts. In the first part of the Phenomenology, Hegel demonstrates that though concepts do in fact mediate matter, as Kant maintains, Hegel’s own understanding of the way concepts come into being implies a certain instability or insecurity in knowledge, which Kant overlooks. Whereas Kant seems to imply that an individual’s mind controls thought, Hegel argues that a collective component to knowledge also exists. In fact, according to Hegel, tension always exists between an individual’s unique knowledge of things and the need for universal concepts—two movements that represent the first and second of the three so-called modes of consciousness. The first mode of consciousness—meaning, or “sense certainty”—is the mind’s initial attempt to grasp the nature of a thing. This primary impulse runs up against the requirement that concepts have a “universal” quality, which means that different people must also be able to comprehend these concepts. This requirement leads to the second mode of consciousness, perception. With perception, consciousness, in its search for certainty, appeals to categories of thought worked out between individuals through some kind of communicative

process at the level of common language. Expressed more simply, the ideas we have of the world around us are shaped by the language we speak, so that the names and meanings that other people have worked out before us (throughout the history of language) shape our perceptions. Consciousness is always pulled in two different directions. Our senses give us a certain kind of evidence about the world, and the categories through which we make sense of the world, categories that we learned when we learned language, tell us what the input of our senses means. The fact that a difference exists between perceptions and the meanings we give to them gives rise to a feeling of uncertainty or skepticism that is built into the very mechanism by which minds come to know objects. That is, to the extent that consciousness can grasp categories of thought, it is at the same time aware of the inadequacy of these categories and thus moved to find new ground for sense certainty, generating new concepts that smooth over the contradictions. This striving is constantly frustrated, the categories of thought reveal their inner contradictions, and consciousness is moved to posit more adequate categories. Although sense certainty is in some ways always elusive, this process of moving from less satisfactory to more

satisfactory

categories

entails

a

kind

learning

process.

Hegel

calls

this

process understanding, the third and highest mode of consciousness.

“Self-consciousness” Hegel moves from the discussion of consciousness in general to a discussion of selfconsciousness. Like the idealist philosophers before him, Hegel believes that consciousness of objects necessarily implies some awareness of self, as a subject, which is separate from the perceived object. But Hegel takes this idea of self-consciousness a step further and asserts that subjects are also objects to other subjects. Self-consciousness is thus the awareness of another’s awareness of oneself. To put it another way, one becomes aware of oneself by seeing oneself through the eyes of another. Hegel speaks of the “struggle for recognition” implied in self-consciousness. This struggle is between two opposing tendencies arising in selfconsciousness—between, on one hand, the moment when the self and the other come together, which makes self-consciousness possible, and, on the other hand, the moment of difference arising when one is conscious of the “otherness” of other selves vis -à-vis oneself,

and vice versa. Otherness and pure self-consciousness are mutually opposed moments in a “life and death struggle” for recognition. This tension between selves and others, between mutual identification and estrangement, plays out in the fields of social relations. Hegel explains that the realization of self-consciousness is really a struggle for recognition between two individuals bound to one another as unequals in a relationship of dependence. One person is the bondsman and one is the servant. The bondsman, or servant, is dependent on the lord. Because he is aware that the lord sees him as an object rather than as a subject (i.e., as a thing, rather than as a thinking, self-aware being), the lord frustrates his desire to assert his pure self-consciousness. He is stuck in a position of reflecting on his otherness. The independent lord, on the other end, is able to negate the otherness that he finds reflected through the subordinate bondsman, since the bondsman does not appear as a conscious subject to him. As the independent and superior partner in this relationship, his otherness does not bear down on him. The lord occupies the position of enjoying his dominant status, whereas the bondsmen must continuously reflect on his status as a subordinate “other” for the lord. At the same time, the lord does not find his position completely satisfying. In negating his own otherness in the consciousness of the bondsman, in turning the bondsman into an object unessential to his own self-consciousness, he has also to deny a fundamental impulse toward recognizing the bondsman as a consciousness equal to himself. At the same time, the bondsman is able to derive satisfaction in labor, a process of working on and transforming objects through which he rediscovers himself and can claim a “mind of his own.”

“Free Concrete Mind” and “Absolute Knowledge” At the end of chapter 4, Hegel describes the “unhappy consciousness” that arises from individuals having to struggle for recognition from one another to realize themselves as selfconscious subjects. He asserts that various religious institutions and philosophical systems serve as a refuge from the fear and objectification that arise in this struggle. By turning toward a transcendent being (God), one can take comfort in a being that exists purely for itself, rather than in a struggle for recognition between beings, and thus isolate oneself from that struggle. This turn toward a transcendent being follows from the initial attempt of consciousness to grasp the nature of the object. The striving for sense certainty leads to perception and to the social nature of universal concepts.

Hegel’s understanding of the dialectical movement of thought leads him to take issue with the idealist notion of reason. Reason is not, as the Kantian idealists claim, a matter of fitting isolated objects into universal categories. Reason involves a self-conscious ego struggling to assimilate objects while having to fend off their otherness, which it sees as a threat to its existence as a self-conscious being. Like Kant, Hegel believes that reason leads consciousness to fit particular phenomena into universal categories. However, this process is not smooth and always involves an element of uncertainty and vagueness, since objects exist in a fluid spectrum of variations and do not readily conform to distinct universal categories. Thus, insofar as consciousness is oriented to those stable categories of thought, it is also aware of a set of standards governing how phenomena conform to such categories. These standards, or Laws of Thought, reside neither in the objects nor in the mind but in a third dimension, in the “organized social whole.” When looking at the social dimension, we can see that every individual self-consciousness belongs to one collective self-consciousness, a locus of identity existing outside of every individual in the collective. Laws of thought, morality, and conventions belong to social life. Individual activities and interpretations conform to these laws as having a taken-for-granted existence, as “matters at hand,” and individuals see these common laws not as alien but as emanating from their own selves, as a law of one’s own heart. Hegel calls this dimension of collective consciousness Spirit. Spirit is the location of the ethical order, the realm of the laws and customs, to which individual consciousnesses assent but that exist outside of individuals in the social being. Individuals interpret and act out laws and customs in an individual way, but they do so in tension with this communal spirit. The ethical communal spirit has two manifestations. First, it is the basis of the deep-seated ethical orientation of individuals, as an object of faith. Second, it has an outward existence as the culture and civilization of a given historical age. These two moments of ethical spirit, or ethical life, are in tension with each other. In modern Enlightenment culture, for example, the external cultural expression of ethical life, or Spirit, is a kind of individualism. An emphasis on education and the acquisition of wealth actually orients consciousness away from the social being and the deep ethical life of which it is a part. In its most extreme negative form, individualism in the modern world finds expression in despotism and political terrorism. When political life is no longer a true expression of common ethical life, factions merely pretending

to represent the collective will enforce their rule through terror and the annihilation of opposing factions. In its more positive guise, individualism finds expression in individual rights. The next stage in the development of consciousness is religion. Religion is essentially a collective Spirit conscious of itself, and as such it reflects a given culture’s expression of ethical life and the balance between individual and collective. There are different phases in the development of religion represented in the various world religions and reflected in art, myth, and drama. But religion is not the highest stage of consciousness. This place is reserved for Absolute Knowledge. Whereas with religion, spirit is conscious of itself in pictorial or poetic form, in the state of Absolute Knowledge, consciousness combines attention to subjective knowledge with attention to objective truth. That is, in absolute knowledge, spirit becomes aware of its limitations and seeks to correct its contradictions and inadequacies by moving to a higher plane of understanding. Absolute Knowledge is self-conscious and critical engagement with reality. It is the standpoint of science and the starting point of philosophical investigation.

Analysis “Shapes of Consciousness” For the unprepared lay reader, Phenomenology of Spirit, the earliest of Hegel’s major “mature” works, can be a frustrating introduction to his highly idiosyncratic and difficult philosophical style. The difficulty arises in part because Hegel, working within the tradition of German idealism, was attempting to grapple with dimensions of human experience that lie largely outside the scope of this tradition, which was established above all by Kant. While deeply indebted to Kant, Hegel did not find the language of idealism wholly adequate to explain what he felt needed explaining, and he had to invent his own philosophical terms, which at first seem unfamiliar and strange. The difficulty of Phenomenology also lies in the work’s extraordinary ambition. In one dizzying gesture, the twenty-seven-year-old Hegel attempts to outline and define all the diverse dimensions of human experience as he sees them: knowledge and perception, consciousness and subjectivity, social interaction, culture, history, morality, and

religion. The result is chaotic, and his points are often difficult to grasp, but the work is ultimately highly rewarding for those with the right mix of patience and imagination required to “decode” Hegel. “The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things” is the dramatic but fitting statement with which Hegel introduces Phenomenology of Spirit. Here he sets out his agenda for a systematic philosophy the subject of which is not simply the knowing and perceiving individual mind, as it was for his immediate philosophical heirs such as Kant, but social beings who are oriented to the world collectively through culture. The individual is not simply standing directly opposite objects but rather is forced to mediate between the subjective and the collective moments of understanding—that is, between his own immediate perceptions and the ideas about the world that he shares with the people around him. In these early sections of Phenomenology of Spirit, we get an early glimpse of this approach, the famous dialectic, the idea that knowledge is a process of striving to arrive at stable and truthful categories of thought. Knowledge-as-motion is a recurrent theme in Hegel’s writings and forms the core of his highly original approach to epistemology.

“Self-consciousness” This section of the Phenomenology, and for that matter the rest of the book, is difficult because of its abstractness. Hegel writes about lords and bondsmen (or masters and slaves, as it is sometimes translated), and it is hard at first to see whom he is talking about and whether this is meant to describe social relations today or at some period in the past when slavery was more widespread. Precisely because it is so abstract, the section has been interpreted in many different ways. It is possible to view the lord and bondsmen relationship as an early stage of history, since the Phenomenologydescribes the evolution of Spirit throughout the course of human civilization, culminating in modern society. However, the dialectical evolution of Spirit throughout history may also be seen as a metaphor for the process through which each individual develops psychologically. Thus, the images of the lord and bondsman may be interpreted not literally, but as metaphors for positions in which we all find ourselves throughout life—sometimes as the objectified bondsman, sometimes as the objectifying lord. The Lordship and Bondage section is among the most widely cited in all of Hegel’s writings. The struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman inspired Marx’s account of how class

struggle naturally arises from the exploitation of one social class by another. A diverse array of twentieth-century thinkers, including psychoanalysts and existentialists, have drawn on Hegel’s ideas here. Earlier idealists, such as Kant, pointed out the difference between subject and object, but Hegel believed that the subject, or the self, is aware of its self only as a distinct entity through the eyes of another self. The radical idea inherent in this view is that consciousnesses are inextricably interwoven and that one cannot have any concept of oneself without having actually experienced a moment of identification with the other. Many readers have found his notion of self-consciousness easier to grasp intuitively than many of Hegel’s other concepts. His account seems to ring true with everyday experience. People come to know themselves through the image they suppose others hold of them. This image is positive or negative depending on who that person is, where he or she stands in society, and so forth, and gives rise to familiar stresses as individuals strive to assert their free individuality against the objectifying images that others have of them.

“Free Concrete Mind” and “Absolute Knowledge” The religious connotations of the Hegelian term Spirit have led many to believe that Hegel understands Spirit as a kind of supernatural or divine force guiding human civilization and history. As noted, Spirit is a translation of the German word geist, which can also mean “mind,” and while spirit is reflected in religion, in itself it is actually something more like culture, or the collective mind of a social being. “Ethical life” is an expression of spirit in everyday reality. The ethical encompasses the common understandings, customs, and moral codes of a culture, a supraindividual communal source of interpretation determining how people act, what they believe, and how they relate to the world and to the divine. Hegel says that even reason, which Kant treated as abstract and universal, is deeply embedded in collective culture....