Transcription
Few philosophers have more obviously changed the world than Hegel. Yeah, but of course, Wilhelm Frederick Hegel has a good claim on being the most influential philosopher of all time. He's a philosopher of change, of progress, of history, of how our consciousness itself has changed over time. And more than anything, he's a philosopher of freedom. Every philosopher that came after him has drawn on or responded to him in some way. But more than this, the Cold War, communist regimes, liberal interventionism, conservative politics, are all marked by the fingerprints of Hegel's bold ideas. To know Hegel is to know us, to know yourself. And as we'll see, to really know a world will come to interrogate is a world-spanning, soul-penetrating, painful, joyous, and fulfilling journey that will change the way you think.
His most well-known work, 1807's *The Phenomenology of Spirit*, is a modern epic, a heroic story, a heavenly ladder to, well, absolute freedom and absolute knowledge. It's an education that spans the ages, a road map to the history of human thought, a story about how to become a philosopher, and a humble claim to know the mind of God and the universe too. He summed up much of what was happening in the opening chapters of the Modern Age: what it means to be rational, to be empirical, to be romantic, to be emotional, to be modern and religious, to be heroic, and to do one's duty all at the same time. He wanted to unite the individual with the universal.
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His dense, impenetrable, infuriating, some say just plain bad writer. Some idealize him, others despise him. But to journey with him, as one commentator has said, to take on the task is the most serious thing you can do in your life. I want to show you, while avoiding complex language as much as possible, how Hegel can change how you think, can help you see the personal in the historical, and the biggest movement in the smallest of actions. Fellow travelers will be ancient Stoics, medieval Christians, modern scientists, unhappy souls, and beautiful ones, romantic idealists, Napoleon himself, the reasonable thinker, the servant, and the master. And we'll do it all by starting from a single, simple thought, your simple thought, and developing it into an entire universe. This is also the story of a man lost on the moors, searching for civilization, on a journey to find the meaning of human history.
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By the end of the 18th century, the Enlightenment had swung wildly between rationalism and empiricism, between atheism, religion, and deism, between reason and emotion, individualism and communalism, culminating in a violent attempt to put philosophy itself into practice: the French Revolution. For many thinkers of the period, Immanuel Kant had provided the best answers about many of the controversies of the time. He argued that we could reason about the world, we could think logically, but only about what was in front of us, only about what we could perceive, see, smell, hear, touch with our senses. Beyond that, Kant says, on the big questions about the beginnings of the universe or knowledge of God, speculation is folly. In a sense, Kant puts up a wall. We know what we see, we know what we smell and hear and perceive, and we could think logically about things like mathematics, but we cannot go beyond that. In fact, Kant says, we use our innate reason to construct a representation of the world around us. We bring our minds to bear on an object and we recognize it by its properties. A leaf is a concept we have made up of greenness, leafiness, softness, born by trees. Through our reason, counting, judging, analyzing its composite parts, we make our idea of a leaf. Laying all this out to making that case was very bold and new for the religiously infused societies of Europe at the time. We do this with everything, and I mean everything. It goes on behind the scenes. But Kant said, we only have limited senses, a limited ability to perceive certain spectrums of light and sound, certain smells, certain sensitivities to the touch. Other animals have other limited senses. But we are all subjective, finite, limited creatures. We cannot really know what Kant called the "thing in itself." We're like worms hitting into rocks, literally. Think about how different a worm's idea of the rock is than ours. What evidence do we really have to assume that our perception of the rock is any truer than the worm's? To some ultra-intelligent species, we could be that worm. In short, for Kant, our experience is our experience. We have a perspective. This means we can have truth, but not absolute truth.
And this is where Hegel begins, and what he rejects: the idea that we cannot access the world in itself, "Ding an sich" in the original German, the thing in itself. Hegel found this to be counter-intuitive. Why do we feel like our knowledge of the world is true, mistaken sometimes, faulty, difficult, hard-earned, but potentially, at least, true? We do feel like, as moderns, we're progressively painting a more thorough, nuanced, and accurate picture of the world. We know more about the worm and its senses, the rock it's perceiving, the bird that eats it, its digestive system, how it flies, whether it's healthy for us to eat it or not, how to track it with technology we've built, and on and on and on. We seem to be able to expand our knowledge outwards, maybe infinitely. And it's this "on and on and on," this infinity, that Hegel's interested in. As a romantic in his younger years, and being friends with many in the Romantic Movement in Germany, he believed that we weren't just mechanical, separate things like cogs, but that we were part of the universe and the natural world, that we are nature reflecting on nature itself. We're part of it all. This means that there cannot be a separation between us and the world, between subject and object, between our reason and Kant's "thing in itself," because we're a part of it, a continuation of it. We're formed, like clay, from it.
The 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a big influence here because he also said that we're all made out of the same stuff, the same substance. Hegel said, "When one begins to philosophize, one must first be a Spinozist. The soul must bathe itself in the ether of this single substance in which everything one has held dear is submerged."
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It is to work out the relationship between the substance of the universe, the universal, that which goes on and on and on, and the individual, particular finiteness of little old us. The philosopher Frederick Beiser writes, "Hegel affirms what Kant denies: that it's possible to have a knowledge through pure reason of the absolute or the unconditioned." Let's pause for a minute and think about that: absolute or unconditioned. Spinoza was scientifically minded. The universe is deterministic. Causes lead to effects, which lead to more causes, which lead to more effects. The seed grows into a tree, the sound wave hits the eardrum, the wind blows the leaves. Everything is conditioned by something else. To understand the worm, you have to understand its relationship to the soil, the wider moorland, the bird that eats it, the bird's history, where it migrates, the physics of flight, the biology of breathing. To have absolute knowledge, we want to know those wider causes, more detailed knowledge, the contexts, the relationships. Now, if we go one way down the line of dominoes, we get to the first causes: geology, chemistry, the Big Bang, beginnings of the universe, questions about God, the absolute. We follow the finite to the infinite. The absolute is a net that's cast as wide as possible. For Spinoza, the absolute and God and nature were essentially synonyms. They meant the same thing. It wasn't that God was out there, transcendent, separate from the universe. God was immanent, revealed, part of every atom and every thought, because all is conditioned by the absolute first cause. This is why Schelling defined the absolute as "that whose existence is not determined through some other thing." It's the ultimate answer to the ultimate question. But remember, Kant says, "No, stop. Why are you talking about God and metaphysics and absolute answers? Philosophy needs to stick to what's directly in front of its senses. Only then can a true science be built up."
Like Hegel disagreed. In fact, he said Kant was scared, petrified of the "thing in itself," of going beyond his own nose. Kant, he said, builds a fence, a "quote boundary," between cognition and the absolute because he says he fears it. Hegel sees Kant and Spinoza as two ends of the same problem. If, as Spinoza, we're all part of one substance, we all came out of a first cause, or to our mind, a Big Bang, if we're marbles being knocked about by our desires, hungers, physics, biology, then how is it that we seem, in our hair, that's in our minds, to be free, to be separate from all of that? On the other hand, if, as Kant argued, we're free because we're separate from that world out there, that "thing in itself," the phenomenal world, if there's a dividing line, like Descartes said, between mind and body and the rest of matter, then how is it that we interact with the world at all? What's the relationship between the "in here" and the "out there"? Beiser writes, "Since freedom involves choice, the power to do otherwise, and since everything in nature is determined such that it's necessary and cannot be otherwise, freedom is possible only if it's taken outside the sphere of nature entirely and placed in an intellectual or numeral realm." That's what Kant called that separate sphere, that we seem to have, the numeral realm. But this cannot be separate from this, cut off like a guillotine. It's part of us, we're part of this. We do stuff, stuff's done to us in the world. The Hegelian question about the subject and the substance: how do we get from one to the other? How does one become the other?
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The Romantics had this idea too: we're all one. But modern life neglects this, it alienates us from nature, from ourselves, from different parts of ourselves, and from each other. The right question should be, how do we adequately formulate what this means? If we're part of nature, what's special about humans? What does freedom mean at all? Alternatively, if we are free, if we're separate from the cause and effect of the rest of the universe, separate from nature, what does this mean? Beiser sets the scene for Hegel's influence from the Romantics by writing that "the Romantic ideal of excellence, of unity with oneself, consists of three basic components: one, totality, that a person should develop all of his or her characteristic human powers; two, unity, that these powers can be formed into a whole or unity; and three, individuality, that this whole or unity should be individual or unique, characteristic of this person alone." Hegel is looking for absolute unity, complete knowledge, a contented happiness that finds itself not alienated, but at home in the world, not here in this barren place. Hegel sees the world as an organic unity, and that includes us, ideas, others, animals, history, and everything else in that history. I desire fullness. We want to be at home in a way that we don't understand knowledge as something separate from the world, subjects with ideas about an object and ideas of something that are ultimately out there, separate from us. Instead, we want to have ideas of objects and knowledge that's both true, total, real, connected, and mine. In short, how do we get from this to this?
We must end at the beginning and begin at the end. I want you to imagine the absolute as bathing in the totality of the universe. All is one. But this also seems like a beginning. Let me explain. It's like we can imagine everything is together in one firework. Then the firework is set off, and we are, as individuals, one single spark sent spiraling away, living brightly, then fading, dying, grasping, looking towards the center at all of the other sparks, knowing that we were, are, can be part of something bigger. The beginning is an end that we want to get back to. And this points to another part of Hegel's beginnings: that people like Kant and Spinoza had got a lot right. They were analytical, rational, meticulous, but they were very abstract, as if to know what a firework spark is is to analyze its trajectory, its brightness, its chemistry and combustion. None of that explains what it's like to be at a fireworks display, what that means.
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What philosophers seem to have left out is life, process, history, and connecting that analytical piece of knowledge to the totality as a movement. Hegel thinks that if we attend carefully to process, we can understand how we're part of that great historical movement. *The Phenomenology* is a picture gallery of shapes of consciousness as they move through that process. Each shape posits an absolutely true shape of truth, puts itself out there, risks and asserts itself, says, "This is what I believe about the world." One entry point into Hegel is to ask what it means to reflect on the world. Reflection, like a mirror, suggests a doubling. In thinking about what I think about the world, I'm thinking about thinking, a kind of circular movement in which consciousness reflects on itself as self-consciousness. Reflecting suggests going outside of oneself to look at oneself, but also to be outside of the world so as to reflect on the world. Reflecting suggests a kind of unfolding. This is why Hegel is an idealist, in the sense that he's thinking about our ideas of the world, that all of our experience is shaped, like a prism, through those ideas, and those ideas, those shapes of consciousness, shift somehow throughout history. The question is, how does that shifting occur? Does it have a logic? He's always taking an idea "in itself," as if it can be neatly and completely filed away in a folder, and asking, "Is the way I think about this idea complete and adequate, or is there something missing, something that I haven't put in the folder?" Beiser says that "reason must grasp each thing as if it were the entire world, as if nothing else existed outside of it." Hegel's point is that we're limited if we accept things in isolation. No discipline, set of practices, set of ideas, job, or hobby makes sense on its own. We can't understand language from a dictionary. The knowledge of the lumberjack and the meteorologist and the carpenter and the architect don't make sense desperately. They rely on each other, and knowing how they relate produces a greater, more absolute system of thought.
Okay, so let's see what we've got so far. We've got the limited individual and the total universe or substance, the subject and the object, the finite and the infinite, and the idea that as limited creatures, our knowledge between these two rough poles is limited, that we cannot know the "thing in itself." And we have the question of what makes true knowledge, of taking what we know completely and absolutely and filing it away in this folder. And so, this is where Hegel starts. We'll follow him now on his journey from simple conscious thoughts to self-consciousness, to reason, to spirit, to religion, and ultimately to absolute knowing. And we'll see how each shape of consciousness grows from the preceding one.
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Where to start this journey? We could, like Descartes did, ask, "What is the most certain, immediate, sure type of knowledge? Something we can be absolutely sure of that appears to consciousness simply and clearly, no questions asked?" And by the way, we're going to get quite abstract for a moment, but bear with it, and we'll soon emerge out of the other side into something a bit more concrete. Hegel says that as thinking, truth-seeking beings, we want to know the world immediately. There's a sense in which we tend to trust our sensory experience more than other types of knowledge. "I was there, I know what I saw." We have a witness. Immediate knowledge is privileged against mediated knowledge, and this difference between immediate and mediated is of fundamental importance for Hegel. So let's start with that, what he calls sense certainty.
Hegel presents to us a simple point in space and time, a "here" and a "now." It's stripped of everything else. It's as simple as you can get. It's here in space and now in time. He calls it the punctual present. But he says, straight away, something odd happens when we try to do this. No sooner than I identify a moment in time, it recedes and is replaced by another moment in time. We constantly have to include a new moment in our concept of "now." We have to expand the idea of "now." However we define our "now," he says, it's never immediate, it's always mediated. That "now" is related to the "not now," to other "nows." Without a corresponding idea of "not now," "now" would be a single, totalizing, all-encompassing mass. Nothing would make sense.
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To ask what this means, we have to be able to say that this "now" was after the "now" when I was stood over there, and this "now" was an "I" after I picked some grass. In other words, "now" exists as a relation, and within it, there's a positive, a minus, and a negative "not now." "Now" us. The same thing happens with "this." If we think of a single "this," we quickly realize we need a "not this" to understand it. A tool, otherwise we'd be in this big blank box of "thisness" for all of time. A line is a line by not being a curve. Black is black by not being the white that surrounds it. So, so far, the structure of sense certainty is a "this or no" and a "not this" or a "not no," a positive and a negative included in that definition of positivity. This shape of consciousness seems to have another feature: the proposition is, "I am certain that there is a moment called 'now' and a thing called 'this'." Think about what's happening when you do this, and I really encourage you to do so, to try and follow along in your head and try to take notice of how the shapes of consciousness seem to you. We're already missing something. We're missing the "I" that accompanies the "now" and the "this."
This means that not only is there a "now" and a "not now," a "this" and a "not this" together, but there's also a "me" and "now" and a "not now" and "me," "this" and a "not this." Our absolute sense certainty has three parts, then, at least, and each part seems to leak into the other parts. So it seems crucially that there's no such thing as sense certainty. It's always mediated by something outside of it. I'm certain of this rock going in my folder right now, but there's the question of where it came from, what's outside the folder, and then there's me putting it in the folder. This is the beginning of the dialectical process. We have to go outside to come back in, and we can see that the first proposition, that first shape of consciousness, the idea that simple, direct sense certainty tells us anything or everything, has already become something inadequate, and then something different. We're not going to go through every single shape of consciousness, that's not the point anyway, and this video is already going to be long enough. But Hegel suggests that the next shape is perception.
Sense certainty jumped outside of its confidence in the "this" and the "now" in another way. It couldn't avoid thinking about particulars and universals. By saying "this now, not that now," I have an idea of a universal "now," a concept of "now" that all particular "nows" sit under, a category of "nows." The same applies to "thisness," and as we'll see, the same applies to "I-ness." If I say, "I sense through my fingers that this is hard because it's not soft," I've formed concepts of hardness and softness, which aren't about sense certainty, but our ideas, concepts, universals. As it turns out, particulars move outside of themselves into universals. The immediate becomes mediated. All attempts at sense certainty turn into universal ideas, universal concepts. And so, instead, perception tries to look at things as a collection of properties, simply: "This seems hard, brown, here, now, not pink. It's got a roundish shape. It's not alive. I'll call it a rock." Perception is a gathering of sense certainties into a coherent whole. Hegel writes that "perceptual objects are: a, the indifferent, passive universality, but also of the many properties; b, simple negation or the one, the exclusion of contrary properties in the many properties themselves. The relation of the two initial moments." Perception is a common sense idea that there are "holes" made up of parts, but the contradiction is already beginning to appear. How can a whole be made up of parts? It's not really. When we really think about how we're perceiving it, it just is. And then it's me that's doing the analyzing and breaking it down into parts and putting it back together as a whole. There's nothing in the actual object that's doing this. I'm saying this is brown, rough, cold, is found here and here too. But all of these ideas of properties, their relations and universals, are really something that's in me.
The problem with perception for Hegel is that "the thing is a one reflected into itself; it is for itself, but it is also for another, and moreover, it is an other on its own account just because it is for another." He says that the object leads a double life, that it doesn't quite stand on its own. And this is true for everything. This rock has a relationship to the ground, but only for me, the perceiver. The tree has the relationship with the wind and the birds, but again, only I seem to be seeing it. This idea that we can perceive an object simply and truly without any relation to outside ideas and concepts and things quickly seems to fall flat. Perception is not simple. Objects exist in a kind of web, in relation to other things. And like sense certainty, we end up going outside of the object to understand it. The philosopher Peter Kalkovich calls perception "ontic liberalism," is in an individualistic approach, objects and properties cut off from their surroundings. But it doesn't seem to work. But this makes no sense. There are always individual properties related to universals, always us. There's always relation to other: the rock to the ground, the bird to the tree. There becomes importantly, instantly, a lot of background information. Kalkovich says, "Trying to stay inside an individual thing, taking it as something essentially for itself or on its own, as absolute, pushes me outside the bounds of the thing."
Hegel's profound point is that we often think that direct experience is the purest, most immediate, most untainted form of knowledge. We drill down into the details of the evidential here and now. But Hegel reverses this. It's in fact the vaguest type of knowledge. Even at the simplest beginnings, we always have to go outside of direct experience to something else to explain that direct experience. If we go outside of perception to think of relation, we have an idea of a kind of network. Things are conditioned by other things, things interact with one another. We explain things in reference to other things. Things have a history, they come from somewhere, they often go somewhere. We relate heaviness, for example, to our concept of "downness." Things seem to get pulled to the ground. Day is warm, fire is warm, rubbing is warm. These concepts are built up together. We start to see that there are laws that relate the so-called inside of an object to its outside. Hardness, for example, isn't in the object; it's a relationship between two objects pushing on each other. Sand too. In fact, everything again. Objects seem to live a double life, he says. There's something going on behind the scenes that can be understood.
One of Hegel's fundamental theses is that "the particular comes first in existence, and the universal comes first in explanation." I make sense of this by appealing to a wider universal idea like lightness, or greenness, or causality, where it's found, or summer, or the sun, or a bird, or photosynthesis, and so on. Kalkovich says, "By now, this has been so thoroughly mediated that the sensuous world has lost all claim to being independent or for itself, something on its own. It's now only a flux and play of ever-shifting relations, sheer otherness." In other words, to understand any object and its history, we're beginning to have to pack quite a lot in our folder. And whatever we put in positively so far seems to be driven in some way by what negates it, what's outside of it. To simplify, if I don't include this tree does not grow in arid conditions because of X, and so on, then I haven't got absolute knowledge of the tree. But Hegel's talking about this concrete example in a more conceptual, abstract sense. Remember, we're searching for the absolute truth. It might be helpful to recall Schelling's definition of the absolute as "that whose existence is not determined through some other thing." If it is determined by something else, we have to expand our definition outward. The absolute cools us. Sense certainty was determined by some other thing. Single objects were determined by some other thing. So we keep casting the net wider. But in all these shapes of consciousness so far, it's always us casting the net, thinking about particular properties and universal ideas, organizing, thinking, understanding. Every attempt to find the truth out there in the object fails. And so Hegel turns us around to focus instead on us, the subject.
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Let's take a little break and think about a question: Did Hegel have a method? Hegel argues that you don't need to impose a method, but that if you attend carefully to experience itself, to being, to logic, to ethics, a process emerges nonetheless. It emerges as movement, as organic engine, as life and thought itself. As we just saw, each time consciousness tries to settle on an absolute way of understanding an object, and remember, an object here can be anything, including an idea, the concept we have seems to be propelled on by its own logic. Hegel describes a pressing forward or a striving towards "true knowledge," and he talks about this as desire itself, that we have an innate desire, a love of knowing. Kalkovich says, "Hegel's goal is to transform philosophy as the love of knowing into actual knowing." By having to refer to something outside of itself, a concept develops to include what was excluded. Hegel says that the result of this dialectical process is "a new concept, but one higher and richer than the preceding, richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it's the unity of itself and its opposite." As we move from simple sense certainty to perceiving objects with properties to forces and laws, the previous shape of consciousness was what Hegel calls "sublated" (in German, "aufheben"). This word is difficult to translate because it means to cancel, but also to preserve and to lift up. Sublation is the process through which we take the negation, the part that negates the positive definition of the concept, and include it in a new shape of the concept. He calls it the negation of the negation, or determinate negation. Negation is that which intrudes. We could think in terms of fragility. What negates the idea of a window? A brick smashing through it. How to negate that negation? Make the window stronger. What negates life? Illness. How to negate that negation? Pursue healthiness. These are concrete examples, but Hegel's claim is that if you look carefully at the structure of a concept, an idea, if not stable, will fall apart from within. Kalkovich says, "This is the key point that in the genuine dialectical thinking that is the concept, thought generates its own content by producing differences from within itself." Our concept of the world pushes up against the Kantian "thing in itself," but if it's not quite right, the real, the substance of the universe, intrudes and pushes on the edges of our ideas. This is dialectical movement. One famous book on Hegel is called *The Restlessness of the Negative*. Philosopher Sebastian Gardner writes that "the negative is that which is different from, opposed to, other than." Negation is for Hegel determinate. It is determinate as what is negated, and the phrase "determinate negation" figures often in Hegel's thought. Characteristically observes the dialectical sequence: one, affirmation; two, negation; three, negation of negation equals affirmation of something new.
In the first part on consciousness, any attempt to conceptualize the object without referring to myself as involved in the process failed. I am that negation. Without me looking, searching, touching, perceiving, the object is nothing. Which is why Hegel needs to turn to the subject. I negate myself as negation by including myself in the process. I need to ask, "What am I doing here? What is this process? Where am I going? What does it mean to be self-conscious?" It's difficult to get your head around. Consciousness was a simple subject perceiving an object. Each time consciousness did this, it realized that there was also a self doing the perceiving. Try and think about this yourself, really try and imagine it in your head, in the abstract. It's really difficult. It's the subject being aware of itself as a subject perceiving an object, kind of like this.
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Despair. Despair that it cannot get a grip on simple objects out in the world without thinking about itself. And so it turns its attention to itself. It sees objects as objects, always for another, for itself. The taste is for me, the image is for me, the touch is for me. If we're building that absolute knowledge, that "I" is involved in the concept of any object of experience. Beiser says that "now this ego wants to show that it is all reality and that everything exists only for it." Which is true, right? If we're honest, your entire life, every experience, from a certain perspective, is just given to you. It's all for you. You can't get outside of yourself. It's for you. And that all of your senses are directed by you, and they dictate what your concepts and experience are. You move here, look at this, smell that. What directs this? Hegel asks, "Simple will? Choice? Desire?" Hegel says, "Self-consciousness knows itself only through actions directed by desire." My desire moves me. It's like energy. It's restless. In doing all the things we did in the consciousness section, I myself, in Descartes' words, "become the master and possessor of nature." We have a command over objects. We can hold them in thought, discard them. We can destroy or even consume them. Knowledge is about commanding the world. The will is free.
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But there's already a problem. Our desire, our self-consciousness, seems to have no content of its own. Kalkovich says, "It's driven from within by a dynamic nothingness that compels me to fill the void that is myself and transform it into a something." Desire is always desire of some object or idea, an "X." So desire is dependent on something alien to it. I want to move my eyes to this object, I want to think of this, I want to eat this, I want to drink that. The terrifying realization that while I have command of things, I also need things. What's incredible about self-consciousness is that it has the same structure that we saw in objects. To analyze ourselves, we have to jump outside of ourselves. Two objects. If we direct conscious experience to the self, back in, it's nothing but pure desire. And now the thing that negates the self is all other things. Remember, we're talking about an idea of the self, pure and simple. And so we have to remove trees and landscape, even bodies and ideas, from the picture. The only way to understand the self is to try and get rid of all thoughts of objects and ideas that are given to it. Kalkovich says, "Desire is the negative force by which the self seeks to counsel the otherness of the external world in order to affirm itself as absolute." But when I focus on myself after doing this, I am nothing. I am an empty concept with nothing of my own. The self, he says, repels itself from itself. "I am a circle, I just equals I." Hegel's view of self-consciousness is that in searching for a self, we find only a rolling conveyor belt of objects and thoughts in consciousness. But this is not a self at all. Where is this "I"? It seems to be nowhere.
And this is one of his bold claims: that true self-consciousness requires two self-consciousnesses. At some point, wandering through the desert of self-consciousness, we come across an object that we cannot discard, destroy, or consume: another self-consciousness. Recognition here is fundamental. That in seeing someone recognize me, I have a concept of myself as recognized. I'm now an object myself to myself, out there in the world. Before, when I thought of me, I thought of empty consciousness or a train of objects in my thoughts. Now, when I think of me, I think of an object, an idea of me that the world has too. The two selves, he says, recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. Only in recognizing itself, being recognized in another, the self-consciousness comes out of itself. The philosopher Jean Hyppolite says, "When life becomes for me another self-consciousness, a self-consciousness which appears to me at once alien and the same, a self-consciousness in which desire recognizes another desire and bears on it, then in this splitting and reproduction of itself, self-consciousness reaches itself." This difficult part of the book is integral to Hegel because it's the beginning of spirit, the beginning of the idea of "I" becoming "we" as a determining object in the world. But this is a whole world of trouble for self-consciousness.
Let's return to Schelling's formulation of the absolute: "that whose existence is not determined through some other thing." But here I find that the idea of me is determined by other things, by my own desire, yes, but also by objects in the world, and by an idea of me that another self-consciousness has. I'm trying to prove myself as the basis of everything, of all ideas and knowledge. But here I have an idea of an "I" as an idea that I cannot control. Hegel writes, "For itself, it is absolute self-certainty; for the other, it is a living object, an independent thing. In the medium of being, a given being, it is therefore seen as an outside. Now this disparity must disappear. On each side, for each self-consciousness is both a living thing for the other and absolute self-certainty for itself. The basis of self-consciousness, we should recall, is desire itself, autonomous, self-grinding, object-destroying desire." Victor had said of idealism that "my will alone shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe." But Hegel says, "Each self-consciousness must acknowledge the other as an autonomous subject, as something that has an independent existence of its own, which therefore it cannot utilize for its own purposes if that object does not of its own accord do what the first does to it." As each self-consciousness tries to prove its own desire as absolute, this is Hegel's famous struggle for recognition, the life and death struggle.
The Hegel claims that I want to see myself recognized by another, but that requires keeping the other around, and vice versa. For the other that is recognized by me, they're two self-consciousnesses watching each other, registering each other's movements, leading, following. But which one leads? Which one follows? Which one is stronger? Which one has the right ideas? He claims that it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won. Multiple self-consciousnesses ask, "Whose apple is this? Whose land is this? Who will dominate?" When it comes down to it, what will I really truly do to prove that I'm the one that's right? His idea of recognition has been hugely influential as a kind of proto-psychological theory. Hyppolite writes, "Historians can cite many causes for the struggle against others, but those causes are not the genuine motives of what is essentially a conflict for recognition." In short, we want to be recognized as free, as for ourselves. Recognition is acceptance by another. I stake a claim, I move here, the other watches, it doesn't do anything, it recognizes that I've moved. I take a berry, I watch the other do the same. A country expands its borders. Someone asks a friend a favor. The child goes from being absorbed in the world of conscious experience of objects to a self-consciousness that's own will is opposed to parental authority. We'll push the boundaries of what we can do, what will be accepted and recognized by the other. We all prod and inspect and poke at boundaries. In mutual recognition, we build up pictures of what's possible in a world of self-consciousnesses. Hegel's point is that our idea of autonomy is based on recognition. It's inter-subjective. It only develops with other selves.
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And sometimes we get the upper hand, and sometimes we don't. But for Hegel, to truly test the limits of what I can do absolutely requires going the distance. We end up battling for recognition: who can go where, who can do what, who can win this argument, who can win this fight? And in the end, always one comes out on top, and one on bottom. One command, and one follows. One is the master, and one is the servant. He writes, "Self-consciousness is this standpoint. It must resist recognizing another as a free being, just as on the other hand, each must concern itself with eliciting recognition within the other. Self-consciousness being posited as an independent being, the single self is not able to bear the other's being independent of it, so that they necessarily drift into a struggle. Inevitably, one comes out on top, the other follows. One asks, the other answers." And throughout history, one becomes master, and one becomes servant. But Hegel says this shape of self-consciousness is unsatisfactory to both the master and the servant. If I want to be recognized, I want to be recognized by someone I respect. Otherwise, what's the point? But the master is only recognized by their servant. The servant does what the master commands, but the servant is inessential, without their own autonomy. Could be discarded or killed. Again, what's the value in being recognized by a thing that's not valuable, worthy, respectable? We begin to see that autonomy here is complicated because while the servant has lost some of its autonomy, its freedom, they see that they have their own value. They are doing the master's bidding, but have command over the world of objects. They know work, they know their world, they know food and cooking, horses, and the procedures that they have to get on with. In fact, they know, in some ways, more than the master. Hegel says that "the fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom." This is characteristic of that Hegelian sublation: out of fear, something that negates comes work, attending to the world, something that posits something positive, and out of that comes insight. Out of unfreedom, the servant realizes that they are free in many ways, one of which is their inner life, their thoughts. Spinoza said that "the thing is said to be free which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature and is determined to action by itself alone." And so, while consciousness may not be recognized as free, maybe limited in where it can go, what it can say, how it acts, one thing is "determined to action by itself alone": thinking.
Hegel begins exploring historical examples as self-consciousness becomes inter-subjective, that is, the "I" that is "we." In other words, it's only then that consciousness becomes a historical being in the proper sense. But it also inevitably becomes a historical being. History begins to happen to consciousness with the master-servant relationship. History becomes about domination, but also inward reflection on the nature of freedom, inter-subjectively. He points to Stoicism and Skepticism in the ancient world as a response to this kind of shape of consciousness. Autonomy is contradicted everywhere. Self-consciousness is not free, but is pushed and pulled around by forces exterior to it. In response, the Stoic and the Skeptic turn inwards into their own fortress of solitude. They say "no" to everything, deny that everything outside of them is essential to them. They cut themselves off from the world, saying to themselves that the only thing that can be relied on, the only thing that they have that is free, is their own thought. They searched for what the Greeks called "ataraxia," unperturbedness. For the Stoic, he says, "the principle is that consciousness is a thinking being, and that something is essential for it or is true and good only insofar as consciousness conducts itself in it as a thinking being." The Stoic says, "It doesn't matter what happens to me from the outside. I am absolute. I can choose what to think about." He says, "Whether on the throne or in chains, in the utter dependence of its individual existence, its aim is to be free and to maintain that lifeless indifference which steadfastly withdraws from the bustle of existence."
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The skeptic, on the other hand, holds no content of their own. They also turn inwards, away from the world. It's just, "Yes, but what about?" or "No, I don't believe that because of X." Everything is a confused medley, the dizziness of perpetually self-engendered disorder. Stoics and Skeptics negate everything that's posited to them. He writes that "point likeness or identity to it, and it will point out unlikeness or non-identity, and when it is now confronted with what it has just asserted, it turns around and points out likeness or identity. Its talk is in fact like the squabbling of self-willed children." The Stoic looks around, and in Rome, Hegel says, "the world is sunk in melancholy, its heart is broken." In another work, he calls ancient Rome "the universal unhappiness of the world." This is, he says, "the dark night of the soul." Self-consciousness is hopeless, disillusioned.
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And the Skeptics use the world as contingent, changing, uncertain. Nothing is universally unchangeably true. If I say, "This is hard," you say, "Well, only to you." If I say, "This is tasty," you say, "It's disgusting." If I say, "A bottle is something that carries liquid," you say, "Well, it's still a bottle without the liquid in it." Nothing is universally unchangeable except its own self-consciousness. That is a thread running through this: the rise of a new shape, the unhappy consciousness. It yearns for certainty and wisdom, but it's in a miserable state. It's cut off from the world and uses its own self to question everything it experiences. It experiences a world of bondage and despair and uncertainty, but it also has a feeling of certainty. It knows itself, it knows its power. Hegel says, "This new form is therefore one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of the self-contradictory nature of itself." The unhappy consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being. Section talks of working, acting, willing, and giving thanks. He talks about a changeable, inessential, the contingent, and the unchangeable, universal. Here's a key, difficult passage: "To both of these moments, the feeling of its wretchedness and the poverty of its actions, is linked the consciousness of its unity with the unchangeable. For the attempted direct destruction of what it actually is is mediated by the thought of the unchangeable and takes place in this relation to it, and will bring consciousness itself to an awareness of its unity with the unchangeable."
Okay, let's take an example. In acting to satiate hunger, we hunt in the same place, for example. We're hungry. We hope the same method works each time. We desire the unchangeable, universal idea of finding deer here. But the skeptic, unhappy consciousness, doesn't know whether food is not there one day. It senses deceive it. Another day, we forget where to go. In short, we're limited creatures, but we have an idea of the universally guaranteed act and knowledge, the absolute truth, but it's beyond us.
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And so, this realm of Platonic-like forms arrives on the scene: of the unchangeable, the perfect, the Godlike, the absolute. This is why Hegel says, "We give thanks to the unchangeable." Kalkovich says, "The unhappy consciousness, more than any other spiritual shape, reveals the problem that must be solved if man is to achieve absolute divine knowing." It's here that religion comes in for the first time. If I can be skeptical about everything, but I know that there isn't everything, an absolute universal, there must just be faith, a pure feeling through the heart. He says, "The unhappy consciousness fills their own feebleness as sinful and puts their faith in a God of the universal." We renounce our being for self, we renounce money, property, we renounce gluttony. We're ashamed of ourselves and our limited selfhood and look towards the universal idea. Everything comes from this universal beyond. Now, a mediator comes on the scene, a priest. They claim that they have the special connection to the universal. We sacrifice our own will and put it in the hands of the priest, a mediator between the singular, limited person and the universal, infinite God, the absolute. "The absolute you giveth and the absolute you take us away." It's here that Hegel starts to analyze Christianity. Consciousness posits a God that is gone, not present, that I, as an unhappy consciousness, cannot have access to. Beiser writes, "The death of Christ means that God has withdrawn from the world, and that there are no longer direct mediators between individual and God." Hence, the unhappy consciousness, in the death of despair, concludes that God himself is dead. But this cannot stand. Remember, for Hegel, the absolute is not transcendent, not separate, out there, but immanent. It runs through everything. We cannot be separate from God, secularized or theological, because God contains all relations within, is omnipresent, omnipotent. In the priest, we see a unity between the particular and the universal. Kalkovich says, "This comes about because the priest, as representative of the universal church, has absolute certainty that he speaks for God, for the universal. He enjoys a privileged, universalized individuality." Hegel rejects traditional Christianity because it separates the self from the transcendent. The priest still interprets, interprets biblical texts, moral decisions, community matters, weddings, funerals. The priest cannot be a skeptic. The priest cannot be a Stoic. The priest acts.
A priest, in a strange way, is the most reasonable person in an unhappy world. This is the power and the importance of the historical category of the priest.
What is reason? It's a more difficult question than it first appears. Was reason really the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment? This is a difficult transition that we don't really have time to cover in detail and is open to a wide range of interpretations. So instead, I'll raise two points that Hegel makes.
The first is that the unhappy consciousness cannot successfully separate themselves from the universal, i.e., God, because, as Hegel writes, "in this movement it has also become aware of its Unity with this Universal, a Unity which for us no longer falls outside of it." In other words, "I do, I will, I think not as a finite being, but as one that engages with universal ideas."
The second important point is that for Hegel, the unhappy consciousness has some similarities with Kant's idea of reason, and that's because reason, as a shape of consciousness, arises out of a religious way of thinking. Both posit a "beyond" that separates a privileged place that's split apart from the real world. The unhappy consciousness says, "I am nothing; God is everything." The reasonable person says, "The world is nothing; reason is everything." Both posit a similar structural relationship between the particular and the universal, the finite and the infinite.
If we take medieval Christianity, which many have argued is what Hegel was talking about when he was thinking about his unhappy consciousness, the regulating idea is that Jesus has died, God has abandoned us. We might reach heaven, but we're sinful, we're stuck here on Earth, and the spiritual is transcendent. It transcends everyday experience; it's beyond, separate, above, unreachable compared with the concrete here and now.
And for Kant, reason is transcendental, which is slightly different to transcendent. In a way, Kant agreed with the religious person that when we think in universals, we're doing something pretty special that separates us from the earthly world. He believed that because we're creatures that possess rationality, we're able to take the particularity of the finite world and systematize it in a transcendental way that thinks in universal concepts. "Yes, this grass is here and now, but it fits into my universal idea of what grass is."
But for Kant, there was still a separation between that real thing called grass in front of me. Remember, for Kant, I only know it through my own human faculties and through my transcendental reason. So I don't know what it's really like to be grass, or what grass is really like, or how a worm, or a bird, or an alien, or a super-sensible being understands grass and grassiness.
Both are unhappy consciousness. Kant and reason separate us from the world. And Hegel, to put it simply, says no. For him, reason cares; it's engaged; it's part of the world. "It cries, 'The world is mine!' It strides forward," Hegel says, "and plants the sign of its sovereignty on every height and in every depth."
Now, Hegel agrees with Kant about a lot. Kant thought we had that framework that we fit our experience of the world into because without it, the world would not make sense. It's a chaotic mass of data and information. Half a billion photons, for example, hit the retina each second. How do we make sense of all of this without some kind of organizing set of folders, an operating system to fit everything into? The basis of this, Kant says, is that we can count, recognize differences, think in terms of cause and effect, and these things are baked into us a priori, before experience. In short, this operating system is ours, but it bends along with our senses, how we perceive the world. We are stuck viewing the world through our framework. To know the "thing in itself" is impossible.
But remember, Hegel says that Kant built a boundary between cognition and the absolute because he fears it. Kant is criticized as an abstract formalist. He says we need to experience the world to fit it into our framework, but still, like a coward, says we cannot really connect to that world. Hegel points out that we need the "thing in itself," that the dialectical process takes the logic of the "thing in itself" and slowly unfolds in a relationship to it. Kant might be right that our perspective bends the world, but for Hegel, he neglects to explore how the perspective is, throughout history and through logic, unbent.
He looks at Enlightenment reason and says, "I want to know about falling bodies, chemical reactions, animals, plants, planets, how the human body works, and much more." Knowledge, for him, is directed towards the essence of things qua things. Through reason, we are deeply implicated in the world. But we're already seeing a contradiction that we first saw with consciousness. I study the world carefully, empirically. I study geology, oceanography, meteorology, zoology, chemistry, physics. I look at all those particulars, and through my reason, I rise once again to universals. I see the rabbit has sharp teeth, not because of what it knows itself, but because of its wider relationship to the environment, the concept of food, to the idea of sustenance, or the idea of sharpness itself.
Reason is already beginning to get away from the empirical world. Reason develops concepts that stand above life. Reason becomes something more than simple empirical nature. In our study of nature, we see that animality falls from its universal, from life, directly into the singleness of "da sign" or "being there," and the moments of simple determinateness and the single organic life united in this actuality produce becoming only as a contingent movement. In other words, the universal, the wider, is what matters. The rabbit's gnawing into the carrot with its sharp teeth is a chance moment, a contingent moment. It could disappear, and the wider rules would still apply to another type of sharpness, to another rabbit, to another type of food. And his point is that the rabbit has no idea why it has sharp teeth. The rock has no idea why trees can't grow on it. The bird has no idea about the physics of flight. But reason does.
Hegel says that nature has no history. His point is that reason seems to organize what it empirically studies into a wider and wider system of thought that goes beyond alphabet, simple nature. It's something more than it. But reason does something else too. We try to use reason to study reason itself, in the same way that self-consciousness tried to study self-consciousness. So reason looks inwards; it comes home to itself. But when we look for reasons within, Kalkovich writes, what do we see? Not logical ducks all in a row, but, in the words of William James, "a booming, bustling confusion of this half-thought, that memory, this regret, that image." Is reason reasonable?
Or do we see, "given circumstances, situation, habits, customs, religion, and so on"? Reason, in other words, sees two worlds: the outward phenomenal one that seems to comply reasonably to the laws of cause and effect, to physics, chemistry, biological processes, and so on. But then we look inwards at our own psychologies, and we don't see much of this at all. We see passion, we see freedom, we see choice. The term "psychological necessity," Hegel says, when we turn inwards, thus becomes an empty phrase.
For Hegel, reason isn't cold and detached; it's interested, it's subjectified, it has a persona, it becomes romantic, it has motivations. It's both reaching out into the world and embodied in us. Kalkovich says, "I go out into the world not to observe, but to act, to make, rather than find myself." Reason wants to be happy. It finds that to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but it wants to see its own happiness manifested in the world around it.
This is why Romanticism and Enlightenment are so closely intertwined. Both revolt against unjust and irrational laws made by arbitrary aristocrats and monarchs. Rousseau comes along and talks of the "law of the heart." Reason feels itself to be right. "I know I am right because I feel it." Others are cold-hearted, others don't understand, others don't know how I feel about doing this thing. But Hegel says the consciousness that sets up the law of its heart meets with resistance from others because it contradicts the equally particular laws of their hearts. We all want our own things; we all feel we are right. And so morality cannot come from the inner heart.
Instead, Kant inverts morality and describes it as what is universalizable. Morality isn't a warm feeling, but a rational calculation. The law of the heart becomes the law of duty. "I give myself over to the idea that what is right can only be what can be made into a universal rule." My own desires are suppressed; I submit to the discipline of the universal. We see the same finite-infinite logic again. I have what I want to do, and what we should all do. I want to sit on the sofa and do nothing, but we all have to help out with tidying up.
The idealist posits a world where we all do the right thing. The problem for the idealist, although virtue is on their side, is that they have to suppress their selfish desires, their individuality. What if I don't want to be nice today? What if they want to sit around? What if you don't want to work at the moment? The world isn't animated by duty, by ideas, by idealism, by universal rules, by abstract ideas. It's, Hegel says, animated by individuality. And so virtue is brought back down to earth.
In a similar way to unhappy consciousness realizing that the universal inevitably moves through the individual, the particular, the finite, the idealist says, "Don't be selfish. Selflessness is virtue. Selflessness is the ideal. Selflessness is the universal aspiration." The idealist says the world would be a better place if everyone was selfless. But here, Hegel introduces its negation, what he calls "The Way of the World." The Way of the World whispers, "Sometimes you need to be selfish."
Selfishness can be good. As we all act in self-interest, sometimes in working hard to earn a living, to be comfortable, for example. Selfishness is the same as selflessness. The particular individual interest is the same as the universal, wider communal ideal. Selflessness is contradictory because we are, after all, selves. Because we're connected in this wider system, we're all "being for another" at the same time as "being for ourselves." High-minded out-there idealism becomes physical down here. Action. Idealism must get its hands dirty. Kalkovich says, "Action itself is the good as individualized universality." The cultivation of gifts, capacities, and strengths becomes the end itself. And so reason here becomes embodied in active reason. Reason again is interested in the world for its own good and for the good of the rest. Reason, even positing a universal idea of, say, selflessness, must act that selflessness out through the self.
The dialectic posits the universal, then returns again to the particular. Active reason becomes self-confident. It uses its reason to act. It doesn't need kings or priests to tell it what to do. It's modern. "I have my interests, my activities, my reasons for acting." We make ourselves little gods using the gifts and talents that we have. We use our own individual talents for the good of the wider world.
I see the good in being a stone mason, in building houses for everyone, in helping in a universal idea. Then I return to myself and I do it. I posit a universal ideal of something like stone masonry. Again, I'm using a concrete example, and then I return through myself into the particular instance of doing it.
But something new nags at me. Carpentry is a universal idea. There are lots of carpenters. What am I? Can I not just be replaced? Does the universal idea really speak through the particular me? Kalkovich says, "I become a ripple in the talent pool. The ripple is nothing; it's gone, and the pool remains." What is this pool? How do I relate to it? I build and chop wood and construct musical instruments, but then they're gone, off into the pool for other people to use, to do what they will with. We're just cogs in a machine, a single subject being moved around by the invisible hand of the market. From this, Kalkovich says, reason learns that "my action cannot be mine alone, and that what is for me must also be for others."
Hegel's time, there wasn't much of an intellectual idea of what social consciousness was. There was no concept of the unconscious, for example. There was no idea of pre-conscious experience. There was no sociology either. Rousseau had only just come up with the idea of a "general will." It's difficult, then, to pin down precisely what Hegel means by Geist, because really, it's the entire process. But the philosopher R.C. Solomon writes that what clearly emerges from Hegel's writings is that Geist refers to "some sort of general consciousness, a single mind common to all man."
We can start by thinking about self-consciousness needing to self-consciousness. Then her traditions and customs arise from there. We can see what Hegel calls the "unity of different independent self-consciousnesses," or the "I that is we, and we that is I." Geist, or spirit, is that "I that is we." It's consciousness going outside of itself, but still finding itself in the universal work of all, and then the universal returning back into consciousness. It describes not just the social idea, but the movement of a social idea. Vizza says that spirit is when finite selves become conscious of themselves as infinite, and when the infinite becomes self-conscious through finite selves. The infinite is the concept of the "I," not this "I" or that "I," but these "I"s. The concept of the "I" that goes beyond itself, but returns to itself to think, use, act, and understand.
Hegel writes, "The Phenomenology sets itself a double task: to lead naive consciousness to philosophical knowledge, and to lead individual consciousness to emerge from its would-be isolation, its exclusive being-for-self, so as to raise it to Spirit." Hegel's point is that by thinking through the infinite "I," we become something more than this particular "I."
In other words, Hegel looks to the Persians, Egyptians, China, and other civilizations. But for Hegel, ancient Greece is the beginnings of world history. He says that in Greece, the "we," ethical life, was experienced like sense certainty, as a simple "thisness," what he describes as "the unwritten and infallible law of the Gods." Here, he says, is ethicality, or the "we" in its simplest, purest form. It's childlike, naive, but beautiful. The Greeks just take their communal ethical life as it is, not something to be analyzed or questioned. It's something that they just do, that they live in, that they bathe in, that they are.
For Hegel, Greek ethical life was harmonious and balanced. There was a simple freedom; each individual was a law unto himself, what he calls a "beautiful individuality." And there was a simple palace. For the briefest of moments, democratic ancient Greece was idyllic. It was like a work of art in which all of the elements come together harmoniously in balance. Each had a democratic right to participate in the affairs of government, and other than that, were left to their own devices. But Greeks lived for the state; the state came first. When it had to, he said, "the Greeks and their immediate actuality lived in the happy middle between both self-conscious subjective freedom in the ethical substance." But while all seems whole, he says, reason here must withdraw from its happiness. Like sense certainty, things just cannot be this simple.
There are several contradictions that led to its decline. Greece was a slave society; slaves and women could not participate in public life. Freedom was defined as self-sufficiency, which mostly meant not being a slave. As Aristotle says, "it is the mark of a free man not to live at another's beck and call." There was also no way for Greek city-states to grow for a universal idea of citizenship. They couldn't incorporate conquered territories like the Romans did. And face-to-face democracies needed to be small to function. Hegel says, "Democratic constitutions are possible only in small states, in states that do not exceed the extent of a city by very much." Living together in a city, the circumstance of seeing one another daily makes possible a common education and a vital democracy. And the philosopher Terry Pinkard has written, "Because of the necessity of the ideal of self-sufficiency, the polis had to be small enough to enable face-to-face interaction. This made the Greek polis too small to defend itself, and when another well-organized, powerful empire showed up at its door, it no longer had the power, motivational or otherwise, to resist."
Third, there were no mediating institutions between the individual and the collective. The ethical, the polis, the collective was considered absolute. For the Greeks, the polis dealt with the collective, and the family were left to deal with their own problems. But what's decided politically goes unquestioned. The tensions that arose from this can be seen in the Greek playwright Sophocles' play *Antigone*. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, decrees that Polynices is to be held to blame for betraying the city and fighting his brother in the Theban Civil War. He demands that Antigone, Polynices' sister, leave Polynices' dead body to rot on the battlefield rather than be buried. Burial, though, was divinely important for the Greeks; it "wets the blood relation to the bosom of the earth." So Creon's decree was the severest punishment imaginable. So Antigone ignores it; she cannot leave her brother to rot; it goes against everything she believes in.
In this, Hegel sees a contradiction between two laws: public human law, the law of the ruler or the polis or the collective, and the divine right that families and individuals also felt compelled to live by. Each sees the other as wrong, and their own law is absolute. Kalkovich says, "Each knows, in the sense of recognizing as absolute, only one side of the law, and consequently, neither knows the whole of divine right." It's the best example of Greek tragedy because both the right and both are wrong; they're stuck. Antigone commits suicide, and Creon goes into exile because they both feel correctly that they're guilty. Hegel sees this story as archetypal of the problems of ancient Greece. Pinkard writes, "Even the most ordinary citizen would have to be able to think for himself about which law, the divine or the human law, or even which among many divine laws, he was required to follow." That left citizens at odds with themselves and potentially at odds with each other.
But the idea of freedom was the breakthrough and the beginning of the idea that whereas previously only one was free, a ruler, and everyone else followed, now many, slaves and women excluded, might be free together. For Hegel, following on from the master-servant relationship, freedom consists in recognition: recognition that as a free man, as an Athenian, one had certain rights. As ancient Greece declines, Hegel writes, "Greek ethical life is the historical Eden from which modern man has fallen."
Individuality is important. Rome developed a complex legal system. The individual had certain rights to property and the right to a trial. In Rome, citizenship was granted to some conquered territories. As Rome expanded through this system, Rome could grow in a way Greece could not. For the first time, the idea of being a citizen was potentially universal, theoretically. Certain aspects of citizenship were open to all. Even women could legally own property, and even someone from a distant city could become a citizen with rights that were protected. Rome could create a universal mission in a way that Greek city-states could not.
But Rome was oriented around the idea of conquest; that was its purpose. Hegel thinks that without conquest, there were few ethical, public, communal "we" principles holding the spirit of Roman life together. He said that Roman life lacked content. The Greeks found meaning and purpose in public life in a way that Romans could not. Pinkard writes that what it denied was "something like the necessity of having a bounded social space that provided its members with a fundamental orientation in life, that is, a social space in which determinate goods are available to people, which are made up of the elements of a common way of doing things and institutions transmitting that into practical knowledge of the world." Greek was poetic; Rome pragmatic. Greece warm; Rome cold. Power and meaning voices decisions. The Zeitgeist was centralized in the will of the Roman Emperor, the "lord of the world," as Hegel calls him. Pinkard writes, "For the Roman shape of life, being a subject was simply being a member of the Roman legal order with all of its complicated divisions among local laws, Imperial laws, and the like. There was no further essence, as it were, to subjectivity."
This is why, for Hegel, Stoicism rises out of Rome. It was natural for Romans to want to distance themselves psychologically from the arbitrariness, the brutality, the slavishness of the Roman world and instead focus on inner life, inner thought, inner virtue. This was both an insight and a contradiction of Rome. But ultimately, it contributed to its collapse. The ancient world's problem was that they struggled with the question of how individuals come together into a collective, cohesive whole. But they did at least begin to pose the question; they made it one of importance, one that we should think through. Kalkovich writes that "the absence of an ethical whole is the soil out of which culture grows."
What does culture have to do with spirit? The idea of what it means to be cultured is important to Hegel. It's a question of meaning. What does it mean to be Greek? To be Roman? To be Christian? To be cultured means to leave my individuality and become something else. To become cultured is to become something that comes from the "we," something spirited, to be civil, to become polite, to speak French, to read prayers, to think about custom and laws, to become a universal being. Culture speaks quite clearly of that divide between individuality and universality. Remember, though, for Hegel, we're talking about the idea of culture, a construct that we posit ourselves. He says, "It's that which consists precisely in being conscious of two different worlds, and which embraces both." And so he calls it "self-alienated spirit." It's both external and internal, but because it's an idea, the external is internal too. It's the self's alienation from itself, positing its own negation as outside of itself, but as part of its ethical constitution, how it thinks. He writes, "Nothing has a spirit that is grounded within itself and indwelling, but each is outside itself in something alien." When we think about the out there of communal spirits, we go outside of ourselves in ourselves. But what we crave, what we desire, what fuels dialectical movement, is the idea of subject and object, individual and culture, being one, so that we feel no painful divide between our own desires and what's imposed culturally.
What consciousness wants, Kalkovich says, is that through the general will, the individual obeys laws that he himself has authorized. Law, in this sense, is not external to the individual, but emanates from him. This is evident in the Enlightenment when it was argued that it wasn't kings or gods or even tradition that was the source of right, that people themselves, that we as "I"s together are the source of culture, the source of rights and ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as the French revolutionaries said. In this, they are universal and individual at the same time.
For Hegel, culture leads to thinking morally, and morality is where we find the self and the universal united. He writes, "Like culture and faith, morality is absolute mediation." As a moral, self-reflective being, I make myself other than myself. The central example is Kant's categorical imperative. Kant said that I should make my actions conform to a universalizable rule, so as to ask, "What would happen if everyone, i.e., the universal, did this?" What if everyone stole? What if everyone lied? What if no one was generous? The "I" that is "we" is one motivated by duty, forgetting the immediate sensuous here and now, the pull of pleasures and individual desires, and thinks instead about the larger universal idea.
Hegel says self-consciousness knows duty to be the absolute essence. But here's where we get that Hegelian inversion. If Kant, acting dutifully, doing the right thing, is a product of our reason, "a become a carpenter, say, because the town needs houses and chairs and tables," it's a universal need that I dutifully fulfill. But Hegel says this leads to a new problem: "What about me? What about my desires, my impulses, my inclinations, my needs?" Didn't we learn from previous shapes of consciousness that there's no universal object out there without looking at the subject in here? Kant's morality has much in common with the unhappy consciousness; it posits the good in some transcendental region that is almost separate from me. Instead, Hegel says, "We must look for the source of culture, morality, the good, and duty within." It must align with our own impulses, our own individual ideas, our own talents, wants, and personal preferences. Duty must become an individual drive rather than an abstract thought. Personal will and communal duty must become the same. He says, "It's now the law that is for the sake of the self, not the self that's for the sake of the law."
We see this expressed in the great interest in emotion, passion, and moral sentiment during the Enlightenment. We forget that this was a period of individual expression and an interest in overflowing emotion as much as it was about reason. We need to place morality so that it aligns with the individual's desire, the driving force of spirit. We need, in Kalkovich's phrase, a "moral will to power." We see this idea most notably in Hegel's admiration of Napoleon. Napoleon, for Hegel at least, is the embodiment of both Enlightenment values and individual glory. He called him "the world soul on horseback." He was concrete moral spirit. He acts from intuition and conviction, but he's not a king or a priest; he's self-made; he creates his own world. We return to Victor's phrase: "My will alone shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe."
But we've returned again to the subject with no concrete object. Ethics, morality, the "we," all arises from the "I." Kalkovich nicely summarizes Hegel's dance with spirit: "Greek ethicality fails because it cannot incorporate the serpent of knowledge into the garden of custom, piety, and trust. Modernity falls because man eats from the Tree of Knowledge and becomes, as we shall see, perverse, self-alienated, and ultimately life-denying as a so-called Beautiful Soul." Hegel's chapter on Spirit thus slaves bear the fundamental problem of the modern world: how to reconcile substance and subject, to infuse life with knowledge and knowledge with life.
Hegel's interpretation of religion is where he is both most profound and probably the most controversial today. For some, this is where Hegel's metaphysics becomes outdated. To others, it's integral to the entire system. What this means is that for non-metaphysical Hegelians, we can focus on his ideas about dialectics and change, etc., as something going on in here. But for metaphysical Hegelians, that part makes no sense without acknowledging that it rests on wider, more fundamental metaphysical beliefs about the nature of God, the universe, time, and so on.
So far is that starting from the simplest of ideas about an experience, a process emerges or unfolds. However, it's only as we grasp that process towards the end that we see that the unfolding makes sense from a wider point of view that you cannot see from the beginning. It's like looking around on the ground and then slowly zooming out and seeing the Earth from space. In many ways, it's about reversing the idea of the concept in your head. What if rather than the finite leading to the infinite, it's the infinite that's drawing out the finite all along, beckoning it, attracting it like a force, whispering, "This is what's reasonable, rational, logical. This is what makes sense. This is the way we should go."
Substance empties itself through time; it becomes more complex, fuller, more concrete, more realized. What does this have to do with religion? Well, Hegel makes the case that it's a perfectly rational result of reason as it unfolds. What's significant about the religious shape of consciousness is that it's almost proto-rational; it's a shape of reason as reason proper unfolds from it. He says it's the shape of abstract spirit made concrete in the form of myths, stories, community, morality, festivals, procedures, routines. It brings people together as spirit to ask the most fundamental metaphysical, universal, and ethical questions about God and the universe as such. We tend to forget its importance today. The philosopher Robert Wicks, commenting on all of the previous shapes of consciousness, as Hegel realized, "that none of these forms, either intrinsically or explicitly, are oriented towards foundational realities of a metaphysical kind. None are inherently geared towards the deepest human questions that concern our presence in the universe and the meaning of existence." Religious communities embody this kind of awareness in Hegel's view, and in this respect, are more advanced in social awareness than moral and political communities.
Thus, we pass from Spirit to Religion. He moves through many world religions, commenting on art and statues and myths and beliefs. But for Hegel, Christianity, albeit a modified Christianity, is the most important. Writing as he is towards the end of the Enlightenment, he sees attacks on religion all around him. "Don't follow blindly," it says; "use your own reason." The church is corrupt; the Bible is full of error. But the Enlightenment fails to see something integral; it too has a foundation based on faith. The Enlightenment says God is but an image in your mind, the creation of humans. Religion is an idea, just a picture. But it fails to see that for reason too, the world is a product of the human mind perceiving through subjectivity, through its own reasons. All of our perspectives are based on concepts and ideas. Reason and empiricism cannot tell us anything about first causes or the nature of God because it focuses on the here and now.
"What Enlightenment declares to be an error and a fiction is the very same thing as Enlightenment itself is. On the other hand, the Enlightenment can bring religion back down to earth because the Enlightenment quite illuminates that heavenly world of faith with ideas belonging to the world of sense and points out this finitude that faith cannot deny." Again, here he makes his characteristic inversion. He asks, "What's theological about science, and what's scientific about theology? What's finite about the infinite? What's universal about the particular?"
This is where his critique of traditional Christianity comes in. What he means is that faith is not transcendent, separate, up there in heaven or in an afterlife, not just about universality and infinity, but is invested in and through the finite, through people, objects, habits, images, art, the sensuous, the immediate here at night. But on the other hand, the finite, the finite "I" is always going beyond the immediate here and now, thinking the universal, the eternal, the infinite, positing, theorizing, hypothesizing. Both turning on the same wheel. It's also the case that Enlightenment is new and abstract, and religion is old and full of the concrete. Kalkovich says, "Whereas Enlightenment is nascent and empty, faith is long-standing and full of content. Insight must be invented, whereas Christian faith has been around for centuries." And what he's arguing is that reason reaches out for full knowledge of substance, but substance is God. God and substance are just the totality of all things, of all meaning. And so the shape of reason, of truth, of knowledge, can be found everywhere: in history, in culture, in religion.
But this is where he makes his deeper critique of Christianity. Substance unfolds through everything, but as subjects, we are part of that substance; we've been torn from it, separated from it in some way, so that we're subjects perceiving substance, but the universe perceiving itself. The ultimate question is to make sense of this gap: why has the universe separated itself from itself? Why is it reflecting on itself? What we are is a process of the objective world moving beyond being merely objects in themselves and becoming self-aware. We are, in Kalkovich's phrase, "life becoming knowledge." What is knowledge if not the universe waking up?
What does this have to do with Christianity being rational? Hegel argued that this gap of the subject partially separated from substance but moving back towards it is the framework of Christianity. We are both part of God, made from God, but separate from God and become responsible for our own salvation. We learn this from God himself, who separates himself in the form of Jesus and teaches us about our finite sinfulness, but in dying for them too, and dying for us, shows us that this is also his, God's, suffering. Kalkovich says that Christ is a religious symbol for Spirit at work in time and history. If substance is to reflect on itself as subjects, if the universe is going to have knowledge of itself, then God as substance must separate itself from itself, and this can be seen metaphorically or not in the story of Christianity.
Theology is the logical story of a God who empties himself into time for our own benefit. But in doing this, God himself must suffer. Hegel says that without the world, God is not God. And Kalkovich writes, "The Phenomenology is thus the logical reconstruction of God's suffering in time; it's the process by which God comes to know himself and fully be himself." In an early work, Hegel posed as the ultimate goal of philosophy what he called the "speculative Good Friday," and this also contains the logic of why forgiveness is essential to Christianity. Because God, or substance, is infinite and all-knowing, and we are finite and limited, it follows that we have limited knowledge, limited ideas, limited senses, and so we are inevitably going to get things wrong, make mistakes. We are all going to sin. So forgiveness is essential to finite human life. Jesus dies to show us this, to show that God is implicated in this, to teach us that forgiveness is necessary, and to teach us that God, in separating itself from itself, suffers with us. Christianity, in short, is the humanization of the divine essence.
What do you have when you understand the dialectical process just laid out? How do you think when you understand the logical shapes of consciousness: self-consciousness, reason, Geist, and religion? What happens when you comprehend where you stand and understand what your place is in this great unfolding? You have speculative philosophy. Absolute knowing is that speculative philosophy, but now it's systematic, the science. What the Germans called *Wissenschaft* during Hegel's time, science didn't just mean how we think of science today: empirical science, experiments, inventions, physics, and so on. Science and philosophy were still used interchangeably. *Wissenschaft* was about the systematization of knowledge, and that included ethics, metaphysics, and so on. It was the idea that all could be understood if placed on adequate foundations as a full scientific, philosophical system.
Absolute knowing knows that all is in a process of becoming under a certain systematicity. Wix writes that "as time goes on, everything becomes more integrated, unified, rational, balanced, free, reconciled, and self-aware." Absolute knowing understands the rationality of all previous shapes of consciousness as the self-differentiating work of the concept. It's the perspective of the concept that knows itself as concept. As Hegel says, "What is a concept?" It's not just the universal ideas that I have: chairs are objects for sitting, cats are mammals with fur and four legs, democracy is governance by the people. But it's the question of the development of the concept as a dialectical process between the finite object and the absolute idea, in which all concepts are incorporated and makes sense and understand itself as the concept.
In his *Encyclopedia*, Hegel writes, "Philosophy is a knowledge through concepts because it sees that what on other grades of consciousness is taken to have being and to be naturally or immediately independent is but a constituent stage and the idea." A concept, in short, is what contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. It's important to say that this doesn't mean knowing everything; an impossibility, but the awareness of a shape of consciousness that is itself aware of the process of knowing the shape of knowing desire as the shape of knowledge itself. Once you understand how concepts relate to one another, sense can be made of them. This applies to thinking through what democracy means, why a journey from the wilderness happened in the way that it did, how a weather system works, history itself, and how each fits with the other and with the process of thought as desire.
Kalkovich writes, "The phenomenologist must first identify the shapes of knowing that are spread out in time and then reorganize them to bring out their logically necessary connections." Think about your own life: things that you did that sometimes only make sense in retrospect. But with some insights and analysis and some self-understanding, you can work out why you did the things you did, what was important, what was formative, what wasn't, and you can string it all together with some perspective at the end. Kalkovich says, "Absolute knowing is when the self is finally transparent to itself through all previous shapes." It knows that it is the truth of substance, and substance is the truth of it. Absolute knowing rises out of religion, retains the truth of the shape of religion while reconfiguring it as philosophy. Christianity, for all of its truth and shape, for all the good it's done, still thinks of God as separate; it misunderstands itself.
Absolute knowing knows that the thinking subject is divine. Wix writes that "art, in Hegel's view, characteristically expresses the deepest interests of humanity in an external sensory form. Religion characteristically expresses them through sensuous mental imagery and feeling. Philosophy does so in pure concepts." For Hegel, previous forms of consciousness were engaged in what he called "picture thinking." There was truthfulness, but because the ideas were complex, they were expressed in things like religious images and ceremonies, art and sculpture. The philosopher of absolute knowing interprets the previous shapes of consciousness philosophically, conceptually, and in doing this, that division between subject and object, between reason and Kant's "thing in itself," between the finite and the infinite, dissolves into a unity. Kalkovich writes, "It's replaced by the unity of pure thinking which communes only with itself and at the same time expresses all that is. It is subject that knows itself as the enduring substance of all things." Self becomes object, and object becomes self. It's a reminder again that we are the universe, and if the unfolding of the universe, the unfolding of the relationship between subject and object, leads to the development of knowledge about the universe, then there's meaning and purpose to history. But its meaning and purpose that can only be seen after the myriad of different shapes and events, battles and processes, ideas and actions have happened. Only then, only at dusk, only at the end of the day, can we look as an observer over and above what's happened and say, "This might have happened because of this, and this idea relates to this concept, and I can move forward with understanding." He said, "The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk; only after things have happened can we look retroactively; only then can some kind of sense be made out of what's occurred." There's a pattern, but it's a messy one. Reason, he says, is cunning.
Hegel meant the journey of the Phenomenology to be but an introduction, a preface to his system of mature works: his *Science of Logic* and *Philosophy of Right*, his work on ethics and political philosophy, because what it is really is a great biography of philosophy, a painting of thought itself. Kalkovich's *Spirit* is like an artist engaged in self-portraiture, and what emerges from the portrait is something so big, so all-encompassing, that it becomes open to an unfathomably wide range of interpretations. Hegel is claimed as an ally, a defender, a thinker of Christianity, of post-Christianity, of modernity itself, of the conservative 19th-century Prussian state, of Marxism, of the liberal 19th-century Prussian state, of liberalism, of modern conservatism, of well, anything you can think of, maybe except simplicity, atomization, of the idea that we can think locally without any reference to the whole. Which is why Wix says, "What's slowly emerging from this consideration of Hegel's influence is that he is among the most powerful advocates of social integration and equality on a global scale." Of course, critics would and do say that he's Eurocentric, or that integration on a global scale is precisely what we need less of, that what arises out of it is a dialectic of domination or a justification of horrific events in history as reasonable.
And over the last century or so, it's become fashionable to agree with the metaphysical side of Hegel's work: the bits on God and spirits and wider ideas about the meaning of time and space in the universe. Others have argued that without those parts, there's no Hegel at all; he makes no sense. And there's also been a resurgence of Hegelianism, partly because of Marx and Marxism and a desire to understand the 20th century, but partly, I think, as well, because there's a cunning return of a taste for the bigger questions, for broader meaning, for metaphysics, for synthesis, for interdisciplinary ideas. People say that there's a feeling that something might have gone wrong in partitioning the world up into self-contained subjects and scientific experiments and individual pursuits, or singular focus on data, on the empirical, on individualizing everything, on neoliberalism, on secularization, because I think when you go back to beginnings in science, when you go back to first knowledge, first books or writings, first art, first consciousness, first life, first planets, first suns, first atoms, first Big Bang, first space, first time, and really try and grapple with what that means, you get to a scientific, metaphysical moment that's not too different from the lines that Hegel chooses to end the Phenomenology with from his friend Schiller: "They go, friendless was the Great Master of the world; he felt a lack, and so he fashioned spirits, blessed mirrors of his blessedness. The highest being found no equal; from the chalice of the whole realm of souls, they phoned forth for him infinitude."