What is the “Phenomenology of Spirit”? — Cadell Last

This article is Part 1 of a series.
See Part 2: “Phenomenology of Spirit” as Philosophical Event
See Part 3: Death in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”

For the past 3-4 years I have spent a countless number of hours with G.W.F Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (See: Phenomenology of Spirit on YouTube).  The text is notoriously difficult and even reading one page can feel like arduous labour.  When we think that in total PoS is 492 pages, and 808 passages, why bother with this dense and abstract work of incomprehensible philosophy?  

The short answer is: in reading PoS we “gain” a complete understanding of historical spirit in its development to knowing what it is for-itself as no different from the truth of the in-itself.  This is important because all of our classical training in philosophy and science teaches us that the in-itself is somehow different and separate from the for-itself.

The long answer is a little more complex.  

In classical philosophy we have a radical divide between thought and being, and in the classical sciences we have a radical divide between our mental knowledge and the truth of reality.  As a consequence of this metaphysical set-up, thinking/knowing is always striving to grasp or recover the truth of the in-itself of being, feeling as though it is what it is cut off or severed from.

In reflecting upon this philosophical/scientific rift, it may be productive to think about it in terms of a metaphor for birth itself qua Mother and Child: i.e. thought/mind (Child) cut off or severed from being/reality (Mother), constantly striving to grasp and recover this truth.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it is the very division itself, between thought-mind and being-reality, that is articulated as the gap allowing a dialectical process between the two.  There is no singular principle that can bring the two together.  There is simply the singular and absolute division opening the infamous “absolute is substance, but also subject”.

Consequently, in surrendering to this text, we oscillate back and forth between substance and subject, through the logical developmental stages of spirit: from the first certain sensations of consciousness (momma!), to the formation of the notion of self, to the workings of reason, the embodiment of projects and community, the experience of God, and beyond to the truth of this self search in-itself as always-already for-itself.

This oscillation is always basically between the knowledge of cognitive processes and the truth of being or reality.  While “in” the phenomenological drama ─ what Hegel sets up as Chapters running from Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and finally, Absolute Knowing ─ what cognition takes as knowledge of the truth, always flips into its opposite, becoming other to itself, stimulating a new search for knowledge of truth.

The weird dialectical oscillation, the paradoxical twists and turns, has itself a type of “negative logic”.  The negative logic is simply that, what the subject understood as the substantial truth at a certain level of the phenomenological drama, is always not-all (not the whole story or picture).  Rather, it is the gap in the subject’s understanding where an otherness forces the subject to a deeper self-knowing, and thus, a deeper truth of substance.  For example, in the series Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, Absolute Knowing: consciousness “understands”, but it does not have an “understanding of self”; or reason has a total view, but it has not embodied that view in a social network, and so forth and so on.

When we finally reach the stage of Absolute Knowing, it is not so much that the division between thought/mind and being/reality is reconciled into a perfect unity, but that the very division itself is experienced as unproblematic, or even joyful: the subject-substance split itself is self-similar.  Another way of saying this is within the logic of negation of negation: what was a gap in the subject’s self-understanding of substance opens it up to otherness, is understood as the self itself.

Thus, one perhaps useful formula to add to the otherwise flawless meta-principle “absolute as subject, but also substance”, is the meta-principle of “I = Other”, or the “I” finds its truth in “otherness”.  There is “no one” that will “close the otherness”, it is rather, paradoxically, that the “closure” on the otherness in being, allows the spirit to be one (self-similar), and truly open to otherness. 

So this is what is worth 3-4 years, countless hours of labour, 492 pages and 808 passages?

Yes.

The reason is that reaching such a level of self-understanding is what allows one to truly be a scientific consciousness.  What we consider as scientific consciousness today is not scientific consciousness, but rather a low stage in the dialectical drama of spirit as such (typically oscillating around the levels of Self-Consciousness and Reason, attempting to intimate Spirit, but certainly not Religion or Absolute Knowledge).

Now Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is not about science, but it is about the historical appearance of science, and the meaning of this historical appearance for consciousness.  One could argue that a science that has no understanding and inclusion within itself of the historicity of spiritual development, is the major problem of our age.  Indeed, the whole tension between naive scientific realism and social constructivism, from quantum cosmology to textual analysis, is located here.

Hegel offers us a way out.  It is for this reason that Slavoj Žižek, in his latest book, Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020), claims that, while the 20th century was Marxist (with its dialectical conflict between capitalism and communism), the 21st century will be Hegelian.  What would a Hegelian century look like?  A Hegelian century would mean that the “absolute” will finally be understood in the present moment of its subjective mediation, as opposed to being a substantial opposite to consciousness (e.g. World Communism in the necessary future, God in the Heavens above, some idea of Nature independent of humans).  Or said in another way: the “I” will finally be brought to confront its truth in the “otherness” of substance (a totally alien world to our moment).

The Phenomenology of Spirit could only have existed in the very birth pangs/pains of the modern world, as the true analysis of spirit’s historical developmental situation in a scientific universe.  Think again back to the idea of the split itself between Child (thought/knowledge) and Mother (being/reality).  The split itself is where the Father can appear, and Hegel may in fact be the rightful Father of the modern world.  What exists beyond the Phenomenology of Spirit is utterly other to humanity.  We can only intimate this otherness in the present, not with science, but with reference to scientific fantasy. 

Cadell Last is a philosopher with a background in anthropology, history, and psychoanalysis.  He is leading and offering a course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit starting January 15th 2022.  For more, see: Philosophy Portal.  

Works Cited:

Žižek, S.  2020.  Hegel in a Wired Brain.  London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Note: The image refers to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)