Course of the book consists of the following generl clim- thinking must fil to ttin the truth of the object being thought s long s it ignores tht the fundmentl dynmic structure or substnce of the objec
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Allegra de Laurentiis
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Absolute Knowing: an End and a Beginning
Preliminaries
Despite its formal weaknesses (tumultuous historical circumstances as well as systematic hesitations prompted Hegel to send to the presses an atypically disorganized text), the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology fulfills two pivotal functions. First, it spells out a fundamental thesis underlying all previous chapters; second, it provides a transition to the envisaged and announced “part two” of the System of Science containing the sciences of logic, of nature and of spirit—what would eventually become the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.
The fundamental thesis common to the various types of relation of consciousness to object that have been described in the course of the book consists of the following general claim: thinking must fail to attain the truth of the object being thought as long as it ignores that the fundamental dynamic structure or substance of the object is the same as its own structure or substance. (This is a modern, critical version of Scholastic realism, the medieval, anti-nominalist re-interpretation of fundamental theses of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics.) Though this is explained in some detail below, we shall already note here that for Hegel “substance” denotes a dynamic “relation of substantiality” (SL, GW 11, 394-96). Keeping this in mind will facilitate an understanding of his fundamental claim that “substantiality” must eventually be explained in terms of “subjectivity.”
In this chapter, Hegel formulates the connection between the experience and the conceptual grasp of “knowing” as follows:
[N]othing becomes known unless it is in experience...because experience consists precisely in the fact that the content—which is spirit—in itself is substance and therefore object of consciousness. But this substance that spirit is, is the latter’s becoming what it is in itself (PS 429:20 – 26).
A brief clarification on Hegel’s conceptions of thinking and spirit is in order. For Hegel, “thinking” does not refer primarily to one cognitive faculty alongside perceiving, willing, desiring and so forth. It is rather a much broader category: it embraces “everything human” (Enc. § 2), thus including human perception, desire, will and action. And because thinking has always a content (it is always thinking of something), it is also synonymous with knowing—though not necessarily true knowing. Having analyzed basic forms of thinking or knowing in the course of the Phenomenology, Hegel is now interested in finally determining the concept of thinking as “knowing of the true” (Wissen des Wahren) or “true knowing” in the emphatic sense (wahrhaftes Wissen), as announced in the Introduction:
[In] making its appearance, the science is itself an appearance...not yet science proper...And since the present exposition has only phenomenal knowing for its object...it can...be regarded as the path of natural consciousness urging towards true knowing...Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the concept of knowing, not real knowing. ...[T]he realization of the concept counts for [natural consciousness] rather as a loss of itself; for on this path it loses its truth (PS 55:12 – 56:5).
Determining the concept of thinking, as of anything else, means for Hegel providing its essential logical structure. Accordingly, he views the Phenomenology as having paved the way to a grasp of the logical structure of thinking or knowing as such.
With regards to the notion of “absolute knowing,” two features that derive from Hegel’s conception deserve particular attention. First, since thinking is an activity, its structure, just like the structure of substance, must be a complex of relations, and the adequate concept of thinking will have to reflect this. Second, since “thinking” always means “thinking something,” the so-called object is thought’s content, that is, the object is integral part of thinking itself.
Hegel’s criticism of traditional and common acceptations of “thinking” is concisely expressed in Enc. § 20. Das Denken, we read there, is often taken to refer to a subject’s faculty whose activity produces a plurality of thoughts or abstract universals. Thus, thinking is called the universal faculty or the activity of universalization par excellence. This is not wrong but one-sided because, just as attributes presuppose and differ from their substances, a faculty presupposes a subject whose faculty it is and from which it differs. Accordingly, the subject of thinking would have to be a subject independently of this so-called faculty. But subjectivity and thinking are for Hegel inextricably connected. For logical reasons, there cannot be a substratum or hypokeimenon for thinking that is not thinking itself. Hence, traditional substantialist conceptions either conflate thinking with one of its guises, representation (Vorstellung), so that the subject of thinking is pictured as having ideas like a canvas has images; or they lead to the conversion of “thinking” into a “thinker.” By taking Denken to mean Denkendes, the universal activity is transformed into a singular substance. (The most immediate expression of this transubstantiation is the Cartesian “thinking thing” discussed, inter alia, in Enc. § 64).
Hegel’s metaphysical claim of the structural identity of thinking and its object or content has radical repercussions in his theory of knowledge. Perhaps pivotal among these is Hegel’s explicit reformulation of the idealistic thesis that objects of perception, understanding or intuition owe their unity to the nature of the subject for which they are objects. Put differently: the reason why every object must be thought of as a paradoxical oneness of multiple qualities and relations that inhere in it (and without which it would not be an object at all), lies in the fact that thinking itself consists of the permanent referral of multiplicity back to oneness—an activity that representational and psychological theories of thinking refer to as “the ego.”
“Spirit” is, in Hegel’s use, a noun for the activity of thinking (in the comprehensive sense given above). It is a general category embracing simple or natural consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit proper and the respective forms of each. The cognitive disappointment that concludes each phase of phenomenal or “apparent” knowing in the course of Hegel’s book is but a symptom of spirit’s repeated failure to comprehend its structural identity with the object. Note, however, that while every form of spirit (thus also every shape of consciousness) has exhibited this failure, the meta-phenomenological thinking that has made the description possible does not. “Consciousness” is by definition a form of spirit that implies an unresolved distinction between itself and its object: it is, as Hegel says (PS 431:37), spirit still caught in the medium of difference. However, “we” who investigate consciousness do not and could not do so from that same perspective.
The negative performance of each shape of consciousness vis-à-vis their common goal, namely knowledge of what is true, has an overall positive effect. Each shape’s inadequacy is the reason for it to evolve into the next. (In the context of an analogy, strongly reminiscent of Aristotle’s De Anima, between knowing and feeding as kinds of assimilation, Hegel would later speak of thinking as “instinct:” just as lack of food does nothing to tame hunger, he writes in an 1820 Introduction, repeated truth “abstinence” does not reinforce skepticism but rather succeeds in stimulating “hunger and thirst for truth”: GW 18, 43:15 – 26.)1
Chapter VIII provides a way out of the recurring inadequacies of thinking. It paves the way for the insight that truth is not volatile in principle and knowing is not reducible to its phenomenal or appearing forms. As just mentioned, however, these judgments can only be formed from a perspective that differs from the phenomenological one. This last chapter is intended to make just this perspective explicit.
To repeat: by definition, “natural consciousness” (PS 55:35 and 56:1) implies at all times an incongruence between itself (or the Self: das Selbst) and the object it experiences as “standing opposite” (der Gegenstand). Knowledge of their shared structure cannot be provided by yet another shape of natural consciousness—though the emergence of that knowledge is entirely predicated upon the actualization of the powers of natural consciousness, that is, through exhaustion of all its phases. The previous chapters have proven precisely that the structural identity of thinking and object cannot be sensed, perceived, nor understood (verstanden). Neither can it be “produced” or “intuited” as argued—in Hegel’s eyes, unsuccessfully—in other idealistic systems. This identity can only be grasped or comprehended (begriffen). It is purely conceptual and results from a reflection upon, not within, phenomenological consciousness. (For Hegel as for Plato, grasping the truth differs from understanding, opining and believing because it involves providing the logical account of what is grasped.)
Thus we glimpse the intrinsic reasons for the infamous obscurity of this chapter, the one that best embodies the “unholy confusion” that, according to one of Hegel’s letters to Schelling, “dominated the handling and printing process as well as, in part, the composition itself” of the book.2 The philosophical culprit is the epistemologically hybrid status of its subject-matter. On the one hand, knowledge of thought’s structural identity with its object does belong to the phenomenological investigation of forms of consciousness insofar as it has been implied by it all along—a fact that also explains why it can now emerge from the investigation itself. On the other hand, knowledge of this identity cannot itself be one of the phenomenal forms because each of these implies precisely lack of identity between thought and object. Thus, the identity has to be grasped conceptually. This, however, can only be accomplished in a theory of the “pure” structure of thinking or Science of Logic. It will also have to be validated in a broader account of thought’s many relations to its objects, that is, in a Realphilosophie of nature and spirit that will include a phenomenology of consciousness as one if its parts (see below, chapter 14).
The subject matter of Hegel’s present chapter, absolute knowing, is not a type of psychological, moral, scientistic, aesthetic or religious cognition. The meaning and validity of each of these depend upon their respective experiential content and the in-principle separability of this content from the corresponding mode of knowing. In other words, since knowing is a relation, all of these types of knowledge depend upon upholding the distinction between the objective (ontological) and subjective (epistemic) poles of the relation. With regards to truth, moreover, the poles are asymmetrical: either the mode of cognition is considered valid because it adapts itself to the object, or the object is called true because it is made adequate to the mode of cognition. But “absolute knowing” denotes precisely a knowing that is “unconditioned” (Lat. ab-solutum) by anything that is other from it. There is no “absolute experience” in the sense in which there is perceptual, scientific, aesthetic, moral or religious experience. Absolute knowing denotes an “absolute relation” in which the ground of experience and the experiencing agent are one and the same: the object known is explicitly the subject who knows.
Though not explicitly, this peculiar epistemic constellation has already surfaced at nodal points in the Phenomenology. It constitutes, for example, the spiritual (geistig) core of artwork production and of religious representation. More importantly for our present concern, this peculiar relation has already made its appearance in chapter IV under the title “The truth of self-certainty” (see above, chapter 2). The introductory paragraphs of that chapter display the kind of paradoxical formulations that is logically required by an accurate description of its subject-matter, namely self-consciousness (see PS 103:11 – 16). Self-consciousness is thinking in self-relating mode, that is, thinking as simultaneous subject and object of itself. This implies a distinguishing (“dirempting” or differentiating) of thought from itself. Self-consciousness instantiates the logical configuration of identity with difference. Ultimately, grasping this configuration will imply grasping the category of “identity of identity and difference.” Only the Science of Logic will make intelligible the pure concept of the identity of thought and object.
The fact that self-consciousness is already an absolute form of knowing seems to contradict the claim just made that absolute knowing cannot be a phenomenal form of consciousness. But the double nature of the “absolute relation” central to chapter VIII is indeed already implied in chapter IV. Self-consciousness is only improperly called a shape of phenomenal consciousness. Hegel has referred to it in chapter IV as a radically new constellation “that did not occur in these earlier relations” (PS 103:12), namely in sensation, perception and understanding. Self-consciousness is neither only an accompanying feature nor merely a condition of consciousness’s relation to the object. It is already an absolute form of spirit, though “only” at the level of consciousness. While chapter IV has described the absolute relation as phase in consciousness’ development, chapter VIII endeavors now to explain its dynamics independently of any phenomenal manifestations. This structure (which will be discussed below) is said by Hegel to be “syllogistic.”
To investigate the dynamic structure of an object of thinking by abstracting from its temporal or developmental features amounts for Hegel to investigating its “logic.” This is analogous to the way in which we think of an inference as opposed to the psychological event of inferring: an inference is an a-temporal process despite the fact that the term does refer to a flow or “movement” of thought. If, now, the object of thinking is thought itself, their dynamic structure or logic will be one and the same.
The Phenomenology’s last chapter both summarizes crucial aspects of the development that has led the relation of knowing to its absolute form, and provides a sketch of the logic of the absolute relation when abstracted from that development. This sketch anticipates, in other words, the logic of spirit’s form as Self, whose concept (the Concept par excellence) is analyzed in detail in the Doctrine of the Concept of the Science of Logic.
The following three sections discuss Hegel’s recapitulation of spirit’s movement along with his outline of spirit’s logic.
Apparent knowing and its absolute ground
Hegel dedicates the first half of this chapter to a selective recapitulation of the general pattern of thinking described in the Phenomenology up to and including revealed religion. Thus, this portion of the text consists of Hegel’s own summary of pivotal configurations and transitions. He runs through this summary twice (422:29 – 428:15 and 430:5), each time highlighting two pivotal aspects of spirit, namely its logical structure and its historical existence. In both summaries, the aim is to explain the distinction as well as the connection between phenomenological knowing and the kind of knowing it ushers in: purely conceptual grasp.
The spiritual configuration immediately preceding our chapter is that of revealed religion (see above, chapter 11). This expression refers to the community-forming beliefs and practices of theistic religions (principally, for Hegel, Christianity) whose object of worship is not hidden but manifested in divine-human figures and made explicit in historical events, scriptures and dogmas.
As in its other forms, spirit as revealed religion is unable to grasp the true. For Hegel, “the true” in religion refers to the actual object of faith and worship beyond its manifold physical and symbolic representations. Furthermore, Protestantism, the form of revealed religion most congenial to the spirit of modernity, also expresses a radical form of spirit’s alienation. In Protestantism, consciousness takes itself to be the highest tribunal in ethical matters, all the while proclaiming its complete dependence upon the divine will. The task of philosophy is to overcome these kinds of religious antitheses or “schisms” of spirit: inborn sinfulness versus sanctity of the individual, worldliness versus withdrawal, autonomy versus absolute dependence.
Epistemically, revealed-religious alienation harbors a fundamental incongruity. While the object known through religious faith is meant to be limitless and unconditioned—the divine is the absolute—simultaneously the subject of faith is confined to forming finite representations of it. Revealed religion cannot provide an adequate concept of its object, lest it become speculative philosophy.
The transition from religious representation to philosophical comprehension follows a pattern of movement ubiquitous in the Phenomenology: an imbalance between spirit as knowing subject and itself as known object compels it to overcome its present state. In every instance, the gap is crossed through spirit’s realization (that is, its self-conscious reflection) that the object is its own content rather than something radically alien to it. In its theistic form, the gap yawns between religion’s finite representational form and its objectively infinite content. The Christian worshipper bows to a human image but means to adore god. Monotheism cannot say what it means. Judaism, its most intellectual form—“the religion of the sublime” as it is called in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion— expressly forbids such misrepresentations. The truth of the logically perplexing figure of a human son of God is that God is human or that man is divine. (Hegel’s interpretation of the Protestant tradition is best understood by keeping in mind that the German term for “reconciliation,” Versöhnung, has the literal meaning of “begetting a son.” Thus, a god that begets a human represents the reconciliation of divine and human principles.) However, this truth is not immediately available to thinking. It takes a new phase of alienation for spirit to be able to reflect upon and return to its true self—after all, this alienation is self-alienation, so that it produces not a generically other but its own other (PS 422:10 – 20).
In “Absolute Knowing” Hegel presupposes his readers’ familiarity with the general principle underlying all transitions of spirit, including that from revealed religion to absolute knowing. And yet this principle does require some elucidations.
For one, it is useful to keep in mind that Hegel’s conception of spirit as activity (epitomized in § 343 of the Philosophy of Right in the words: “the history of spirit is its deed, and it is only what it does”) is Aristotelian in essence. Aristotle’s dialectical conception of the relation of potency (dynamis) and first actuality (prote entelecheia) in the soul (see De Anima 412a27)3 thoroughly informs the self-differentiations and self-unifications of Hegel’s spirit, the distinction of its in-itself and for-itself modes, as well as (with qualifications) their further actualization in spirit’s in-and-for-itself or absolute mode. In one of his most important uses of the potency-actuality dialectic, Aristotle explains how so-called matter and form, despite being logically distinct, are not ontologically separable. Every extant being, whether natural or man-made, must be a unity of both (De Anima 412a9). Similarly, in his conception of soul, potency and actuality are logically related in such a way that, while neither subsists without the other, they do no collapse into an undifferentiated one—just like the concavity and convexity of a curved figure. Actuality is always actualization of a potential, and potentiality exists only in actualization. Aristotle himself recurs to hierarchically differentiated modes of knowing, episteme and theorein, to illustrate different levels of actualization of the thinking soul (see De Anima 412a10 and 22).
This background explains first of all the general sense in which for Hegel the movement of knowing is self-necessitated. It also sheds light on Hegel’s system as a whole, because the Aristotelian principle operates in it in a fractal pattern: it regulates the relations intrinsic to every subordinate part as well as those of the entire system. In our context, this explains how every shape of apparent knowing can be said to be in-itself, though not yet for-itself, a moment of absolute knowing. (Hegel borrows “moment” from the physics of motion: momentum indicates an intrinsic feature of a body’s position whose observable manifestation is its actual motion). At the level of natural consciousness, for example, mere sense-certainty already implies absolute knowing in that the subjective and objective sides of sensation, the sensing and the sensed, coincide. Towards the closing of our chapter, Hegel repeats that absolute spirit’s self-certainty is already present in sensibility, though only in the qualified sense in which a form of consciousness can be said to harbor absoluteness:
Spirit that knows itself is, for the very reason that it grasps its own concept, the immediate equality with itself that, in its [condition of] difference, is the certainty of what is immediate or sense-consciousness—the beginning from which we started (PS 432:33 – 36).
Similarly at the more general level of spirit proper, the whole of natural consciousness implies self-consciousness. If that were not the case, natural consciousness would never experience its own inadequacy and thus never initiate correction and self-sublation. (This internal negative experience is what Hegel often calls the “negativity of the object for consciousness.”) Precisely on account of its implicit self-reflexivity, natural consciousness can eventually reflect upon itself (be “for-itself”) and become self-consciousness (become “in-and-for-itself”). The same pattern is at work in the internal and mutual relations of the three major forms of absolute spirit: art, religion and philosophy (in the Phenomenology, however, art is still treated as a form of religion.)
Applied to our present concern, this conception of spirit means that religion already has the absolute as its content but in a representational form inadequate to actualizing it. This is why revealed religion is necessarily deceitful: it must always mean something else than what it says. Thus, it turns upon itself in an epoch-making act of self-reflection and becomes sublated into speculative philosophy.
Discovery and structure of the Self
The most general lesson learnt from the journey heretofore is that no one shape of consciousness or form of spirit proper has yielded, by itself, true objective cognition. This recurrent inadequacy does not however preclude that knowledge of the true could result from the complete series of the shapes (PS 422:22 – 423:1). This is indeed Hegel’s claim, accompanied however by the all-important specification that the totality of phenomenal forms of knowledge cannot itself be a kind of phenomenal cognition. It is rather knowledge of what is true in apparent knowing. Hegel argues that phenomenal knowing necessarily grows into philosophical science just like, in the system, he argues that nature is necessarily sublated into spirit, or natural forms of spirit into forms of spirit proper. A phenomenology “is not knowing as pure grasp of the object” (PS 423:5). Although its moments are indeed articulations “of the Concept proper or of pure knowing,” they are so merely “in form of shapes of consciousness” (PS 423:8 – 9). Hegel’s present reconstruction of the phenomenological journey aims to explain this relation between shapes of knowing and conceptual comprehension.
A reflection on the phenomenological journey as a whole shows that spirit and its object share, in every phase of their respective development, fundamental features. For example, the content of immediate consciousness (or Sense Certainty) is being in its immediacy, that is, thinghood without relations; the content of mediated consciousness (or Perception) is being in its mediation, that is, thinghood as a web of relations; the content of essential consciousness (or Understanding) is being as essence—thinghood as both immediate and mediated (see PS 422:29 – 423:1). Each fundamental feature of objectivity depends at once upon a corresponding feature of the thinking of objectivity.
It appears then that objectivity, or being-object, is determined (bestimmt) by thinking. Grasping this general rule amounts to grasping that the object is “a being of spirit” (“ein geistiges Wesen,” as in PS 422:26, or “geistige Wesenheit,” as in 423:10). The essence of objectivity is spiritual rather than the opposite of spirit. (This is Hegel’s version of Aristotle’s claim that the object proper of thinking is always a thought, because intelligence does not assimilate the object as such but only its intelligible form. In this sense, the intellect is always thinking itself.)4 Accordingly, the kind of adequate cognition sought in vain throughout the Phenomenology can be provided by another form of thinking, one that has its starting point in the discovery that the essence of the object is its logic. Adequate knowledge of the object of sensation, perception, understanding and so forth will be provided by the concept of its logical structure.
Of course, the object has been in-itself (or for us, the scientific observers of consciousness) “a being of spirit” all along. But this is an insight of speculative philosophy, not of phenomenology. The spiritual nature of the object becomes known only by grasping that each of its determinations is a facet of the knowing Self (see PS 422:25 – 28). Hegel calls the logical structure of the Self “the Concept” (der Begriff). In our text, he now claims that this structure is syllogistic. In other words, he likens the concept of objectivity (the concept of a world) to that of selfhood, and the latter to that of syllogistic inference—not to a specific syllogistic form or figure, although the categorical syllogism is the paradigm of all such inferences.
Hegel’s theory of the syllogism cannot be treated here in detail (and neither does Hegel in this chapter). His theory is found in the Logic’s Doctrine of the Concept, in particular in Enc. §§ 180 – 93 and in SL, GW 12, 90 – 126. In the present context, Hegel merely highlights the way in which the notion of syllogistic inference can be used to explicate the fundamental dynamics of selfhood.
In the classical syllogisms of formal logic (collectively called “the syllogism of understanding,” Enc. § 182, see below, in contrast to the “syllogism of reason”) the singular, particular and universal terms are represented by symbols for subjects, middle terms and predicates (S, M, P) that have arbitrary referents. But the Self can be determined precisely as the activity of permanently mediating between singular, particular and universal aspects of the world. Accordingly, the concept of Self (“the Concept” or “the syllogism of reason”) reflects this mediation as effected by the Self as mediator. Hegel’s preliminary or “abstract” definition of the Concept is found in Enc. § 163:
The Concept…contains the moments of universality,… of particularity,…and of singularity, [the latter being] the inward reflection of…universality and particularity. This negative unity with itself is the in and for itself determined and at the same time the self-identical or universal.
The Remark to this section explains that the singularity of the Concept, as opposed to that of a singular being, does not depend upon other beings external to it, that is, it does not result from external causes. The Concept is not just potentially real or actual, but absolutely so: “the singularity of the Concept is what acts absolutely [schlechthin das Wirkende], namely...what actualizes itself [das Wirkende seiner selbst]” (ibidem).
Put differently: Hegel’s “syllogism of reason” denotes the very concept of syllogistic inference, a concept underlying not only formal logical reasoning but also the rational aspects of reality, including the reality of selfhood. Thus a thinking subject is best described as the “mediating ground between the singularity and universality of what is real” (Enc. § 180). “The Concept” refers to the dynamics of a thinking subject who, like a living syllogism, permanently distinguishes and unifies what is universal, particular and singular. The copula in the apodictic judgment (S is P) that concludes the categorical syllogism (S is M, M is P, thus S is P) is the linguistic expression of the identity with difference of singularity, symbolized by the subject, and universality, expressed by the predicate. The syllogism holds the terms asunder (S, M and P differ from one another) all the while proving their identity and stating it in the copula.
If what is rational in reality is best expressed in terms of a syllogism, this applies a fortiori to the reality of the Self. Indeed, if the subject-term of a syllogistic inference refers to the very author of the inference, this subject can be said to be “concluding itself with itself ” (Enc. § 182). The Cartesian idea of a substance that in virtue of its own activity proves itself not just valid but true is the most famous expression of this self-conclusion in the history of philosophy.
At the end of the Phenomenology, then, the logical structure of thinking and of its object is recognized as syllogistic. And yet phenomenal consciousness per se knows nothing about this. It is “not pure grasp of the object,” though the object is in truth nothing but its concept. This truth is present in the various perspectives described in the previous chapters, but always in distorted form. One kind of distortion consists of one-sided objectifications of subjectivity. For example, when spirit as Observing Reason recognizes itself in nature, it misunderstands this identity by taking itself to be a “thing” of nature (PS 423:23 – 25). From this derive the most abstruse claims, as for example that the “soul” must be a thing, though one that cannot be sensed. (In the Science of Logic, judgments expressing similar claims are classified as “infinite judgments” of the kind “spirit is not red, not yellow…,” that is, not false but senseless judgments: see SL, GW 12, 69:12). Conversely, other distortions of the identity of subject and object in knowing consist of one-sided subjectifications of objectivity. In these cases, thinghood is declared to be nothing in itself and only a relation in the thinker. As in culture-theoretical and utilitarian world-views, the object ends up being simply what the subject wants it to be, a mere “construct” produced by its self-alienation, or simply what is useful to it. The world does not subsist: there is only consciousness. To these distortions belongs also, Hegel thinks, the modern world-view for which the moral value of an action resides exclusively in the kind of consciousness from which it springs, namely pure knowledge and pure will—a view that threatens to render the “beautiful soul” so transparent to itself as to “disappear into empty vapor” (PS 425:35 – 426:6).
Despite the misrepresentations, each major phenomenal form of knowing instantiates in its own way the syllogism by which spirit “concludes itself with itself.” Real self-conscious individuality (concluding chapter V), moral conscience (concluding chapter VI) and religious revelation (concluding chapter VII) are all self-conclusions of spirit, or forms of its absolute self-knowing, albeit in a still inadequate form. The only adequate knowledge of spirit’s selfhood is knowledge of its logical structure, that is, conceptual grasp. Since selfhood is nothing but self-comprehension, knowing the concept of selfhood is equivalent to realizing it. Thus knowing this concept is being the Concept.
All other ways in which spirit relates to itself involve self-alienation, as when sensibility feels or reason finds itself in another, apparently spirit-less, object. Only in the absolute relation does spirit know the object to be “its own doing” rather than the “representation of an other” (PS 427:18 – 20). This doing, as we have seen, consists of Self’s permanent inference of itself in the syllogism of reason. Its existence consists of this inference: spirit is what it does.
The Phenomenology has produced a series of forms of knowing (Wissen); with the comprehension of their totality, absolute knowing, begins philosophical science (Wissen-schaft). As mere observers of spirit’s manifestations, we do not yet grasp absolute knowing as such. And yet we are more than familiar with its singular form of existence: the ego, that Hegel defines in these pages as “pure being for self of self-consciousness” (PS 428:5), “the equality of the Self with itself ” (PS 430:38), and “subject [that] is equally substance” (PS 431:1).
Thus, the phenomenological journey as a whole appears now to have been a preparatory exercise for comprehending the logic of the ego. Just like spirit in general, whose self-conscious singular existence it is, ego is an activity of relating. Contrary to the relation that is simple consciousness, however, ego’s relation is primarily to itself. It is the incessant activity of preserving the oneness of self and its content vis-á-vis their enduring difference (see PS 428: 4 – 15). In this sense, ego is negativity: it consists of diremptions and sublations. But these are self-diremptions and self-sublations. The activity is absolute. Like a Möbius strip, ego is “spirit that traverses itself, and does so for itself as spirit by having, in its objectification [Gegenständlichkeit], the shape of the Concept” (PS 428:14 – 15). Its object has the form of selfhood, that is, its own form.
It is improper to represent the Self as an identifiable substance or as simple self-identity. It must rather be grasped as self-identifying substance, that is, as active subjectivity. The sameness that characterizes selfhood is not adequately expressed in the static terms of tautologies like “I = I.” It must rather be understood as a movement, a balancing act. Hegel speaks of it as the “labor” of “leveling out” (PS 428:18 – 22) the share of self-consciousness vis-á-vis that of simple object-consciousness in the advance of knowing towards absolute form. In its incipient stages, simple consciousness appears to have the lion’s share in knowing, but in the course of the journey, Wissen increasingly involves consciousness of self. For example, the role of self-consciousness in perception is less conspicuous than in understanding; in the production of art, less dominant than in speculative philosophy; and in the opening lines of the present chapter, the fundamental limitation of revealed religion is located in the fact that “[religion’s] real self-consciousness is not the object of its consciousness” (PS 422:4 – 5).
To recapitulate: the self-reflective, speculative dimension of knowing subtends all modes of knowledge acquisition, but it is only properly grasped once their dynamic connection, their series, is comprehended. As a whole, this movement has traced nothing less than “[spirit’s] becoming what it is in itself” (PS 429:26). Thus, though spirit’s becoming must precede its being in-and-for-itself, and acquaintance with its manifestations (in the Phenomenology) must precede the grasp of its concept (in the Logic), it is equally true that this concept is the logical foundation of those manifestations:
In reality knowing substance is there before its form or conceptual shape, because substance is the still undeveloped in-itself,…concept in its…simplicity,...also spirit’s inwardness or Self that is not yet there. What is there is…the object of representational consciousness per se. Knowing...has thus at first only a poor object...,[and] substance…is the still selfless being...At first only...abstract moments of substance belong to self-consciousness; but [then]…the latter enriches itself until it has wrested [entrissen] from consciousness and absorbed in itself [in sich gesogen] the whole substance…Accordingly, in the Concept that knows itself as concept the moments appear earlier than the completed whole…In consciousness instead the whole is earlier than the moments, though un-comprehended (PS 428:26 – 429:7).
The transition from simple consciousness, for which even the self is an object, to self-consciousness, for which even objectivity is selfhood, has exhibited “the transformation of that in-itself into the for-itself, of the substance into the subject, of the object of consciousness into object of self-consciousness” (PS 429:28 – 30). These formulations describe as well the main subject-matter of the present chapter, namely the progression from phenomenological consciousness as a whole to self-knowing spirit.
Hegel’s further remarks on the necessarily temporal dimension of phenomenal cognition versus the timelessness of absolute self-knowing (PS 429:7 – 19) cannot be dealt with here in adequate detail. (Hegel’s metaphysics of time is somewhat developed in the Philosophy of Nature, Enc. § 254 – 259. We will return briefly to his conception of time and space in the exposition of the last paragraphs of the chapter.) Here, it must suffice to notice that the stress put in these passages on the logical patterns of spirit’s “absolute” movement ought not to conceal that for Hegel precisely this a-temporal, purely logical movement grounds the temporal, both historical and ontogenetic, developments of human thinking. To give but one indication of the latter, Hegel’s account of the relation of consciousness to self-consciousness provides a much needed theoretical foundation for contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic theories of ego development, of consciousness and of the unconscious—from the notion of the initial “selflessness” of consciousness to that of its enrichment by forced separation from (entreissen) and imbibing (in sich saugen) of the substance, to that of spirit’s movement as a traversing of itself (see for example Lacan, 2002, p. 187 n. 14).5 Hegel’s epitome of this development as “spirit’s becoming what it is in itself” lends itself as metaphysical underpinning for Freud’s summation: “Where id was, there I shall become” (Lecture XXXI of the Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1932 – 36).
Hegel’s own pressing concern, however, is with the connections between the logical and the real (natural and historical) dimensions of absolute spirit. To these he dedicates the final passages of the Phenomenology.
Absolute knowing as science of the Self
As we have seen, the process by which spirit acquires self-knowledge is couched by Hegel in terms of its “becoming what it is in-itself,” which in turn can be described, in broadly Aristotelian terms, as actualization (Hegel’s Verwirklichung) of a potentiality. For Hegel, this actualization is a bi-directional process.
On the one hand, the process consists of an exteriorization (Entäusserung) of spirit, occasionally also called its “objectification” (Vergegenstaendlichung). This constitutes the content of spirit’s outward experience. Knowledge derived from this experience is an acquaintance (Bekanntschaft) of spirit with itself, but is not yet knowledge proper (Erkenntnis). The experience, however, is integral part of knowledge proper or, as Hegel prefers to say, it is the substance of spirit, because experience both precedes knowledge in time and is logically grounded in it: “the substance that spirit is…is the circle returning into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginning and attains it only in the end” (PS 429:25 – 32).
On the other hand, the becoming of spirit displays as well a contrary direction, namely inwardization (Insichgehen): with increasing knowledge of its own manifestations, spirit also learns its innermost workings, the logic of its Self.
Hegel’s second recapitulation of the phenomenological journey (beginning at 430:5) centers upon the connection between these two opposite and complementary developments, as well as upon their envisaged function in the System of Science.
The history of the ethical, legal, political, moral and religious reality of human societies is to be understood as the “labor,…actual history” (PS 430:6) by which spirit pursues self-knowledge. (In the Encyclopaedia, the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of History, Hegel reiterates that the Socratic command gnothi seauton is the intrinsic telos, motive force, and regulative principle of human thinking in general and of philosophy in particular.)6 Spirit begins its existence in a crude state in which the Self is dull, and life barbaric (see PS 430:6 – 10). But this existence (Daseyn) is incompatible with the essence (Wesen) or concept of spirit: in this condition, “its own essence [is to the Self] an alien content” (430:9 – 10). Thus begins the series of separations and unifications between spirit’s essence on the one hand, and its modes of being on the other—the process that culminates in absolute knowing.
In this second overview, Hegel emphasizes a perspective that has surfaced only briefly in the preceding pages. According to this view, since spirit is on the way to becoming for-itself what it is in-itself, we have to understand the movement described in the Phenomenology as “movement of the Self” (PS 431:15 – 16). It takes place in the two contrary directions just mentioned: while the Self expands into the world as its substance, it also intensifies its inwardness. Every objectification of its activity in space and time is accompanied by a deepening of its interiority. This is a thought upon which Hegel insists time and again in the years to come. In 1820, for example, he argues that the history of philosophic systems signifies not just the expression but equally the deepening of thinking (GW 18, 47:19 – 48:4).
Hegel argues now that the dual direction of the development of selfhood is necessitated by its logical structure. We have already seen that, far from being an immediate identity, the Self is a relation, that is, a mediating between its identity and its difference (or self-differentiation). The Self’s identity taken abstractly, namely in isolation from its difference, consists of its spatial extension. For example, the Self exists only as an extended body (from a logical point of view, space is for Hegel nothing but simple self-identity or “pure equality with itself:” PS 430:36 – 37). In the same way, the Self’s differentiation taken abstractly consists of its existence in time (logically, time is the perpetual restlessness of what self-differentiates: see PS 430:35). But these are of course only abstractions from the reality of the Self. In the concrete Self, their relation explains its nature as at once substance and subject, res extensa and cogito, or better yet, substance that is subject. If the Self were reducible to mere self-identity, it would have no interiority and thus no content. It would be thought without content, knowledge without object or, in Hegel’s expression, “content-less intuiting” (431:2). Similarly, if the Self were reducible to mere differentiation, there would be nothing—no Self—for it to differ from. It would be nothing at all. Only in relation to one another can self-identity and self-difference explain the existence of the Self, just as the simpler logical categories of identity and difference explain the existence of the real in general.
Selfhood, says Hegel, begins as “self-differentiating of the subject from its substance” (PS 431:19 – 20). In this “negativity” (PS 431:26) intrinsic to simple substance begins the series of stages of natural subjectivity that eventually issues into spirit’s “form of Self” (“selbstische Form,” PS 432:8).
If “substantiality” and “subjectivity” are terms respectively for the “in-itself” and “for-itself” conditions of spirit, then the Self-form is spirit’s “in-and-for-itself” condition. And since spirit is the activity of thinking, the Self-form refers to a condition of complete transparency of thought, or spirit as absolutely known to itself. We see here that Hegel’s Selbst signifies not just the logical self-sameness of the ego but selfhood as self-knowing. As selfhood is the “purest” form of thinking, that is, the form in which it is only mediated through itself, it is precisely what “absolute knowing” is.
Despite being the result of a movement, the Self develops, too, but in a different “element of its existence, [namely] the Concept” (PS 432:1). Compared with the previous medium of phenomenal manifestations, this is an entirely new element for the unfolding of self-knowledge. It is the conceptual medium of metaphysical categories and their logical relations. Only in this medium does spirit attain its genuine actualization, namely as Self. In these dense passages, Hegel borrows generously from Aristotle’s analogy between pure intellect and light as actualization of a transparent medium (De Anima II,7 and III,5:430a15 – 16). Hegel writes:
In this knowing, then, spirit has concluded the movement of its formation, insofar as the latter is affected by the unresolved difference of consciousness. It has attained the pure element of its existence [Daseyn], the Concept. The content [of this knowing] is...the self-externalizing Self, or the immediate unity of self-knowing...[I]n this Self-form, in which existence is immediately thought, the content is Concept. Accordingly, having attained the Concept, spirit unfolds [its] existence and movement in this ether of its life, and is science (PS 431:36 – 432:10).
In other words: thinking in the “absolute relation,” freed from its manifestations and thus from difference, is a knowing that is both certain and true. It “unifies the object-form [gegenständliche Form] of truth with that of the knowing Self” (PS 432:18 – 19). What thinking now knows is its nature, an sich, or Self. It is the Concept. But, as we have seen in the discussion of the syllogism, the innermost workings of spirit are the innermost workings of reality. Their study is the study of metaphysics. For Hegel, prima philosophia is the science of the logic of Self and world: the “science of logic” tout-court. Getting to know the pure structure of the Self means getting to know the objective logical relations among concepts (metaphysical categories) independently of their subjective presence in a particular form of consciousness: “the [logical] moment” is “freed from its appearance in consciousness” (PS 432:21 – 22).
Up to this point in the chapter, Hegel has been mostly highlighting the contrast between phenomenology and logic of spirit. It is now time for him to explain their continuity, as he must give a rationale for the system as a whole, which is not only science of logic, but also philosophical science of nature and of subjective and objective spirit.
Hegel begins with what he already argued in the first recapitulation: although it is not an event in time, even the bare logical Self is a dynamic relation or a relating. As all movement, even this relating is due to internal difference. In phenomenal consciousness, this was the (apparent) ontological difference between thinking on the one hand, and its recalcitrant content on the other: despite being consciousness’s content, the object always appeared to it as completely “other.” In the logical science, instead, this difference will be shown to be part of the very structure of the Self: “the difference [of consciousness] has gone back into the Self” (PS 432:12 – 13). The logic, in other words, will account not just for the dynamic structure of thinking per se but also for its ontological difference from the object. This is the sense of Hegel’s statement according to which in the “medium” or “ether” of its logic, thinking is transparent to itself, or knows itself “absolutely.”
Hegel argues now that every shape of spirit’s appearance corresponds to a category of its logic and vice versa, that is, that phenomenological and logical moments are different guises of the same reality (thinking). The Science of Logic will be the conceptual disclosure of thought’s experiences in consciousness. Sensing, for example, is a form of acquaintance with the category of pure being, namely the experience of the unity of thought and being in a primordial, un-mediated manner; or the postulation of invisible forces “behind” visible phenomena is a form of acquaintance with the essence of being; and so forth. It is precisely on account of the necessary relation of logical categories with their phenomenological forms that Hegel justifies here the future developments of the philosophical science from logic of the Concept (or “logical Idea”) to science of nature and spirit—thus announcing the systematic sequel to the Science of Logic: the Realphilosophie.
Hegel’s argument (spanning PS 432:31 – 434:9) for the necessity of spirit’s self-externalization into nature, mind, and its creations, is best understood in the light of the transitional sections between the major parts of the later system: from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature (see especially Enc. §§ 238 – 240) and from the latter to the Philosophy of Spirit (see Enc. §§ 376 – 381). In the interest of exegesis, however, we will remain as close as possible to the claims actually made in these closing paragraphs of the Phenomenology—despite their merely programmatic value at this early point in the development of the system.
In the third to last paragraph, Hegel states that absolute knowing, the science of and by spirit’s Self, must by inner necessity divest itself of its abstractness, that is, of its purely logical form, and make a “transition…into consciousness” (PS 432:22). This is at first surprising, because absolute knowing has been presented as resulting from the phenomenological form of spirit called “consciousness.” The pure Self of spirit, Hegel has written, is a form of thinking “liberated” from the inherent shortcomings of consciousness. Hegel must be arguing now from a different perspective, namely the perspective of the system to come. The Logic, as we know, exhibits the abstract, purely logical form of the Self. This, however, is not the full reality of selfhood, because the latter exists only as “I” and “I” implies also extension, permanence in time, self-identity: “Ego is not only the Self, but is the equality of the Self with itself…a subject that is as well substance” (PS 430:37 – 431:1). Thus, the Self that grasps itself as conclusion of the “syllogism of reason” grasps not only a thinking activity (a cogito) but also a reality (a res extensa). The Self knows itself as unity of thought and being. Accordingly, the science of the Self will have to be developed further than its merely conceptual exhibition in the Logic. It will have to account for the reality of selfhood, whose epistemologically first form is the most opaque, least reflected relation of knowing: “sensible consciousness—the beginning from which we started” (PS 432:35 – 36). (In the Logic, Hegel will use the same argument to explain why the logical as well as historical beginning of philosophy must be made with the category of “to be” (Sein): a thinking without external presuppositions cannot but start from itself as its own object, that is, from pure being. Thus the Science of Logic begins in the same way as the history of philosophy: with the pure, abstract, Parmenidean “to be.” See GW 21, 53 – 68 and 76:24 – 34).
From the perspective of the (future) system, then, phenomenal forms of spirit are grounded in the logical nature of spirit’s Self. They are, in this sense, its “result.” For example, sense-certainty may be understood to be a crude manifestation of the absolute self-certainty of the purely logical Self. As in all further manifestations, (potentially) absolute spirit “knows not only itself but also its own negative, its limit” (PS 433:4).
The role of the “limit” in the syllogistic activity that we call thinking or spirit is made perhaps clearer by Hegel in a passage from the Encyclopaedia that discusses the relation of subjectivity to objectivity. Objectivity, Hegel argues here, is not the outside of subjectivity (just like my body is not outside of me), thus it is also not a content “filling” an otherwise empty subject: “on the contrary, it is subjectivity itself which, being dialectical, breaks through its own barrier, and opens itself up into objectivity by means of syllogism” (Enc. § 192 Z).
The kind of knowledge that is instantiated by thinking the limits of thinking is, in Hegel’s present terminology, intuition (Anschauung). When thought thinks its limits, it intuits itself in space and time. The intuitions of space and time represent the limits of thinking to itself. And since, in itself, thinking is a non- spatial, a-temporal activity, Hegel refers to these intuitions as forms of externalization (Entäusserung) of thinking. To chose an illustration from the realm of the ontogenetic development of singular consciousness: a human individual’s first intuition of herself as part of a spatial-temporal continuum can be said to be her first self-externalization or, as we also say, her first “realization” of herself as existent in a world. As we know from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel thinks of epochal developments of spirit as taking place according to the same pattern: an epoch’s intuition of itself as part of a natural and historical continuum enables it to attain for the first time a full grasp of itself—namely in form of a philosophic system.
Just as thinking must always have a content, so intuiting is always intuiting something. The content of the spatial self-intuition of spirit is what is commonly called “nature.” The content of its temporal self-intuition is “history.” Nature and history are, then, objects of spirit’s intuition of itself. And since Hegel has characterized this intuition as spirit’s first externalization, nature and history are to be counted as second externalizations (in the manner in which, for instance, acceleration is a derivative of speed and thus a second derivative of motion).
Nature subsists by constantly externalizing itself: inorganic nature becomes organic, living nature becomes natural subjectivity (the “soul” of Hegel’s Anthropology), simple subjectivity becomes consciousness and mind. The production and reproduction of subjectivity in nature represents the natural aspect of spirit’s “eternal” (PS 433:10) return to its Self.
History, on the other hand, is the object of spirit’s self-intuition in time. Like nature, history consists of a perennial series of externalizations. These are the epochs of human history, replacing one another by assimilation and sublation: “This becoming presents itself as a slothful movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of pictures each endowed with the whole wealth of spirit,” though none equipped with the adequate knowledge of it. Spirit’s movement through history is so slow “because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance” (PS 433: 15 – 18).
The argument underlying the elaborate metaphors of these passages may be reconstructed as follows: The goal of spirit’s movement is its completion. Completion (like the entelecheia of Aristotle’s intellect) means the full actualization of a potency. Since spirit is knowing, its completion cannot be other than absolute knowing, that is, the knowing of knowing and its content. (The goal is a condition of spirit analogous to that in which Aristotle’s intellect becomes “capable of thinking itself:” De Anima III,4:429 b 9.) The path leading to this goal consists of a transference of the external experiences of spirit into inwardness. In other words: what absolute knowing knows is the being, Dasein or substance of its Self. As it directs its gaze outward, it gains insight inwards. To inwardize (insichgehen) means also to recollect or remember (erinnern) one’s past being, and thus to preserve what lacks external reality. A known past is a state of affairs that has vanished from time and space, but exists nonetheless. It is active in that it forms the material and spiritual substrate of the present and future:
In its inwardization, [spirit] has sunk in the night of its self-consciousness, but its vanished existence [Daseyn] is preserved in that night, and this sublated being—past, but reborn in knowing—is the new being, a new world and shape of spirit (PS 433:21 – 23).
In this new beginning, it may seem as if spirit had nothing to build upon, but in truth it is building upon the sublated forms of existence of its own past. Epistemically, experience is the content, and thus integral part, of knowing in general. Past ways of thinking, expressing and producing human life are the historical correlative of experience in knowledge: they are the content or “substance” of the presently dominant forms of human life. Both in natural and in human history, spirit’s spatial and temporal unfolding is a circular movement. But while (according to Hegel) individuals and species in nature are born and die out in a merely circular pattern, the rise and fall of historical epochs of cultural and political dominance is best represented as a spiral figure. The history of spirit’s epochs (“the realm of spirits:” PS 433:31) forms a series in which each phase replaces by sublation the preceding one in world-dominance. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes that history is not an irrational succession of world powers in the grip of blind fate (PR § 342) but rather the unfolding of spirit in the rational process of taking hold of (or grasping: erfassen) itself as this unfolding (PR § 343). In the closing passages of the Phenomenology, the same conception is couched in terms of an internal goal explaining the very fact of human history. We can call this the entelechy of human thinking (in Hegel’s comprehensive use of this term): making the Self transparent to itself, or revealing “the absolute Concept” (PS 433:34). As for the apparent contingencies of human history, the “rightfulness and virtue, wrongdoing, violence and vice, talents and achievements, passions weak and strong, guilt and innocence” (PR § 345) of states, peoples and individuals are realities in which the actors are altogether “unconscious instruments” (PR § 344) of spirit’s movement of self-knowing. As a discipline, history may well recollect events as if their succession in time had no raison d’ètre except time itself. But philosophical science is able to reveal the organic order of the real succession, the logic of its being, the rational explanation of human history. Together, then, the recollection and the logic of spirit’s deeds form “comprehended history” (PS 434:4 – 5): philosophical science proper.
ALLEGRA DE LAURENTIIS
1 G.W. F. Hegel. Vorlesungen zur Geschichte Der Philosophie. Einleitung 1820. GW 18.
2 Quoted in Werke in zwanzig Bänden (MM) vol. 3 (Phänomenologie des Geistes), p. 597.
3 References to Aristotle’s De Anima are to the translation by R.D. Hicks. Aristotle. De Anima (with Bekker’s Greek text). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907. References to the Metaphysics are to the translation by W.D. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1924.
4 See Metaphysics XII, 7:1072 b 20 – 22; De Anima III, 4:430 a 1 – 9 and 8:431 b 16 – 432 a 2.
5 See for example Jacques Lacan, Écrits, B. Fink trans., New York: 2002, p. 187 n. 14.
6 See Encyclopaedia § 377; Philosophy of Right (PR) § 343 R; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, MM vol. 12 p. 272.
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