Death in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” — Cadell Last

This article is Part 3 of a series.
Part 1: What is the “Phenomenology of Spirit”?
Part 2: “Phenomenology of Spirit” as Philosophical Event

In Part 1, I argued that the Phenomenology of Spirit prepares the subject or “ordinary consciousness” to find the truth of self-knowing in the split between conscious knowledge and the reality of being, after it has both traversed and purged the stages of its own natural logical development.

In Part 2, I argued that the Phenomenology as a philosophical event, violently breaks with old presuppositions about religious society (eternal forms and its supernatural hierarchy), and scientific naturalism (certain thought and its determinism), and casts an immense shadow on history that has yet to fully comprehend the meaning of the immanence of absolute knowing, and its relation to the truth of being.

Absolute knowing is neither a perfect form in the Platonic sense, nor certain thought in the Cartesian sense, even if both Plato and Descates can be retroactively included within Hegel’s revolutionary philosophical project.

In this third (and final) installment on the Phenomenology, I will attempt to argue that the key to absolute knowing is its critical relation to death.  Here death can be understood as the “ultimate other” to self-reflexive identity, a non-being capable of “inaugurating” spirit into the truth of being.

Consider that throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology, thought is taken on an adventure that often includes finding truth in the dissolution of a certain identity-form.  This can often be experienced or perceived by ordinary consciousness as catastrophic and ultimately as something that can scare it away from truth.  However, for the phenomenal dialectician, there is a logical continuity in form that allows one the “strength” to stay with the deeper truth and inner necessity of spiritual process.

Consequently, I will also argue that one of the greatest failures of the modern project is that, instead of reconciling itself with the point of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it has had a rather childish or immature relation to death.  The result is an inability to cultivate a standpoint of absolute knowing in the age of science.  This can perhaps explain many of the horrifically violent events of the 20th century (World Wars, Cold War, genocides, holocausts), which certainly demonstrate a failure to maturely relate to death; and also the spiritually naive and unreflective tendencies to techno-utopian thinking, which certainly demonstrates the strangely persistent nature of immortality ideology beyond traditional transcendental metaphysics.

In order to make my case, I will focus on Hegel’s clear, exceptional, and brilliant descriptions of spirit in the Preface to the Phenomenology (a stand alone must-read even if one does not have the patience for the main work itself).  Hegel makes the point in the Preface that consciousness often thinks of a form of absolute knowing that is not only very different from what absolute knowing in fact is, but precisely its opposite.  Conventionally, cognition assumes absolute knowing as a thought-image of oneness, what Hegel calls the intuitive seeking of “A=A” where “all is one” (.16).  One could think of this formula as a magical conjuring act of an imaginary home that banishes otherness (again, since “all is one”).

However, for Hegel, absolute knowing cannot be found in this isolated self-positing of self-identical being.  Instead, absolute knowing can only be found in the type of thinking that gets caught up in the “sheer unrest of life” (.46).  Thus, absolute knowing finds the truth of its positing, aims, and presuppositions in this very involvement, where it must surrender to “its limit”, its “stopping”, and “what the thing is not” (.3).  What this requires of thought is the labour to be with the negativity of truth, that is the self-relating labour in seriousness, suffering, and patience, which Hegel calls the “life of God” and “divine cognition” (.19).  Here one may think about the type of thinking that can withstand the most brutal otherness of the real, and yet can still maintain a type of wisdom, dedicated restraint, careful observation, and if necessary, delicate speech capable of confronting the truth of being.

Thus, against the metaphysics of A=A, or what Hegel called “the circle that remains self-enclosed” and “has nothing astonishing about it”, he would call its opposite, the “tremendous power of the negative” which finds its truth in “utter dismemberment”, the “most astonishing” and “mightiest power”(.32).  Hegel locates here a form of knowing that can “detach” from its self-enclosed circle, purging itself of both the contingency of its sensuous origin, as well as its abstract formal training, and reach the necessity of the “pure I” (what he calls an “energy of thought”).  This “pure I” (which, importantly, is not the same as the “I” of ego-identity) is something like a “magical being” of transformation and creation.  One way of understanding this is that one who understands how to truly “cease to be”, is also one who understands how to truly “come to be”.

What is the practical key to this absolute knowing?  For Hegel, the best name spirit can give to the practical key is it’s self-relation to death (or “the non-actuality”) (.32).  In other words, no matter the contingency of spirit’s sensual origin, nor the contingency of spirit’s formal education, death awaits for us all as a concrete universality.  The truth is being and non-being are fundamentally a unity, and thus the knowing of identity cannot rest properly as the energy of the pure I, until it rests in the truth of non-being.  This is another way of saying that there is no A=A (which we may say is the essential formula of ideology).  There is no self-enclosed circle.

So what is there?

Hegel will suggest that what there is positively is both true motion, and also true self-knowing in the “disparity” or the “void” between the ego I and substance (.37).  Hegel suggests that this disparity or void was known by the ancients as the “moving principle”, but it was not known by the ancients as the “negative is the self” (ibid).  Thus, what ancient philosophers (or theologians), failed to address, was this disparity or void that opened up the space for grounding philosophical or religious axioms about truth.  Instead of addressing this disparity or void, the ancients would posit axiomatic presuppositions, and build ontologies with logic that would leave the actual ground, thought and knowing itself, unthought and unknown.

Consequently, what Hegel’s Phenomenology represents to the modern world as something “new” or “different” from the metaphysical projects of the past, is a real confrontation of thought with death.  The form of thought that can achieve this knowing, is a form of thought, we might presuppose, that can start to approach the truth of being since it has “purged” itself of its own bright ideas and can observe and work with what really is the case.

Here we can repeat the deadly practicality of this philosophical project.  Our 20th century society sought to ground axiomatic truths of being that led to World Wars and genocides (here think of the axiomatic grounding of World Communism which contributed to the Cold War, or the axiomatic grounding of a Master Race which contributed to World War 2).  Instead of maturely confronting the disparity of the void, we fill it up with false images and charge forth into immature wars.

This continues today, albeit in a different form.  Consider our identitarian sociopolitical projects that are based on grounding axiomatic truths of essential difference, say of race, gender or sexuality.  This paradoxically creates a universal homogeneity obfuscating the essential importance of death for self-relation.  Or alternatively, consider our scientific-technical society labouring under the techno-optimist delusions of immortality, either of the literal body via robotic manipulation, of the mind via computational uploading, or socially via endless fame and attention seeking.  This paradoxically creates a society more and more drawn into illusion without depth of self-relation.

Thus, I will end this series in the same way I ended Part 1 and Part 2, and suggest that what we really need today is to think, what would a society based, or at least including within itself, the structure of the Phenomenology, really look like?  I claim it would be a society that can stabilize the proper developmental relations between the various stages of the phenomenal drama (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion), while, most importantly, cultivating a telos to absolute knowing for those who are capable and ready.  Such a structure could only be achieved via a metaphysics, not of World Communism or a Master Race (20th century), nor of essential difference or technical immortality (21st century), but in a metaphysics that maturely understood the importance of death for self-relating identity.

Finally, the standpoint of absolute knowing in-itself (independent of the logical form of the social structure), seems to be the only way that spirit could wisely walk the path opening in the 21st century.  This is not because absolute knowing allows some power of control or anticipation, but because our knowing must be able to let go (of our own ideational reification, control and prediction), and take a real interest in the truth of being (which should be as surprising as it is mysterious).

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:

Hegel, G.W.F.  1979 (1807).  Preface.  In: Phenomenology of Spirit.  Translated by A.V. Miller, with Foreword by J.N. Findlay.  Clarendon Press.