Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) is G.W.F. Hegel’s first and most important work. It is also arguably his most incomprehensible and mysterious work. I’d go as far as to claim that the book itself is not accessible to anyone who doesn’t understand Kant and the pre-Socratic philosophers. Why? Because Hegel’s magnum opus deals with the questions of Being, Truth and Knowledge and the pre-Socratics (mostly Parmenides and Heraclitus), and especially Kant, are Hegel’s positions in contradistinction to which he develops his own theory.

To understand Hegel’s main ideas, one has only to understand the title of the book: Phenomenology of Mind. It is a study of the phenomena in which the Mind appears to itself. And the ultimate goal, for Hegel, is to understand how absolute knowledge is possible. That is, how is it possible to know the truth of Being – reality as it is itself – without knowing all the particular instances of reality? This is the fundamental quest for Hegel in his Phenomenology and it is a direct reaction to Kant’s system of metaphysics and epistemology.

Kant claimed that, ultimately, the world as it appears to us is a world that we ourselves create. We process sense experiences and in so doing order it in terms of categories – we literally project space, time, causality, quantity, quality, etc. onto the world. Science then studies this phenomenal world as continuously stumbles unto the same old question: What are the underlying principles of this world? This is a false question, Kant says, because we ourselves – or more precise: our Ego as unified Self – create this phenomenal world – we ourselves are the principle of all of science.

But then, if our intellects create the world around us, what does it create it from? The whole Kantian approach starts from the premise that there is sense experience coming in – the raw data, so to speak. Where does this data come from? Well, according to Kant, this emanates from the world as it really is, the world at it is in itself, and which is un-knowable to us. Why? Because our intellects are finite, limited and in itself phenomenal manifestations of this underlying world.
This metaphysical world, the noumenal world, then is postulated as the main spring from which everything develops – Kant sees in this noumenal world the roots of such things as reality, morality and beauty. It is, in a sense, one big metaphysical trash can in which we can throw all the non-sensible (or non-sensical) concepts like God, Immortal Souls, Free Will, etc. etc. and then be content with claiming: these concepts exist, just not in the phenomenal world – the only world we can actually know and say something about – so we should just accept this as a bare fact and be silent.

For Hegel, this whole approach is rather unsatisfying, so he starts off his own quest for True Knowledge from a totally different path.

First off, for Hegel the noumenal world doesn’t exist. He claims that since it is unknowable it is non-existent. This leaves the subjective experience of reality, or to say it in Hegelian fashion “the real is rational; the rational is real” – meaning that is real which is thought and that which is thought is real. So, in a sense, Hegel continues the German Idealism of Fichte, Schelling & co. But in another sense, he discontinues this line of thought. For the Romantic idealists, who radicalized Kant’s idealism, reality was irrational – passionate faith and blind emotions were what’s real – something which Hegel clearly rejects.

So, now to Hegel’s system. Again, the main thing to keep in mind is Hegel’s objective: finding out what’s Truth, how ‘reality’ is. Hegel starts his quest with the most basal, simplistic experience of reality: sense-certainty. I see an object and exclaim: This, here, now! This seems to be pure, unmediated knowledge, but reflection brings us to the problem that ‘now’ and ‘here’ are not particular things, but universal terms. This realization leads the mind to the next stage, which Hegel calls perception. The mind perceives a unified particular object, but then reflection brings to light a new antagonism: while the object seems unified, its characteristics seem to be manifold. So after the antagonism particular-universal we have another antagonism, unity-manifold.

This antagonism is resolved when the mind realizes its own activity is what’s creating these dualism. Hegel call’s this stage understanding. The mind perceives the objective world and it realizes it projects itself unto these objects. For Hegel, force (like in Newton’s universal force of gravitation) is the mind’s projecting unto nature an order. But soon, another dualism arises: the objects are only objects for the mind, and not objects as such. There seems to be an underlying substratum unifying all of the objective world and creating an identity between subject and object(s).

The mind enters the stage of self-certainty. It starts to recognize itself as a source of the existence of objects. It starts to assimilate and appropriate all objects around it, tries to grasp them and in this grasping to ‘own’ them. But pretty soon the mind becomes aware of the fact that there are objects in the world pretty similar to itself, which cannot be assimilated and seem to have the same intention of grasping and assimilating. At the stage enters the infamous master-slave dialectic – but which should really be translated as master (Herr) – aide (Knecht) dialectic.

Anyways, the minds enter a struggle of life and death, seeking recognition of the other minds by destroying them. But in destroying them, this recognition is lost as well. To resolve the antagonism, a master-slave relation arises. The master cuts himself off from the world and sets the slave to work on the objective world for him. This seems to be favourable to the master, but (as always with Hegel) things turn out the reverse: the master grows lazy and doesn’t get the recognition he craves, while the slave submits to the master, assimilates and grasps the world and through this interaction internalizes the master-slave antagonism. This internal strife leads to stoicism (which literally was practices by a slave [Epictetus] and a master [Emperor Marcus Aurelius]) which offers only temporary remittance, since it cuts off the subject from the world. This also holds for religion that promises salvation as well as scepticism, which basically is a retreat from everything altogether. What remains is a unhappy consciousness – it is unhappy since it has Christianity as temporary cure for its internal and external strife, yet it perceives a higher idea of freedom.

Through many dialectical twists and turns the self-conscious mind finds itself identical with nature, with the world. It realizes that the totality, the world, is a unified whole, of which itself is both a particular objects as well as a unified object. This stage Hegel calls Reason. Once Reason is realized, the whole social world comes into play. Reason shows the mind the rational approach to grasping and manipulating the world around it, including itself. This stage is characterized by social phenomena like institutions and social forms of living. Within society the self-conscious mind interacts with other self-conscious minds and is moved from within by reason, in the form of morality, and is restrained and guided from without by the reason, in the form of the state (law, government, religion, etc.).

This state is the final stage in Hegel’s dialectic, which is characterized by the self-conscious mind realizing it is nothing but a partaker in a mind on a higher level, that of the state, and this collective mind (so to speak) is itself part of a historical process in which it clashes with other collective minds (states, civilizations). Through strife and struggle history progresses, and the final destination, the end-goal, is the self-conscious collective mind realizing itself both in itself and for itself. This final stage is the infamous ‘Geist’ (which is non-translatable in my opinion) which as knowledge of both the infinite and the finite, the universal and the particular, of the whole and its parts – in short: it is knowledge of all, absolute knowledge.

So we have here a process of dialectical antagonisms and resolutions on ever higher levels of abstraction, starting from the sense-experience of single unknowing individual and ending with the self-realization of the totality of reality, Geist.

(It is interesting to note that within this dialectical framework Hegel integrates both the conception of reality as the unchanging [Parmenides] and the conception of reality as the changing [Heraclitus]; ending in a conception of reality of both the unchanging and the changing; in Kantian terms: both the noumenal and phenomenal world. The emergence of the idea of the totality, the unity of subject and object, is reality.)

Geist, then, is the emerging end-product of the process of consciousness knowing itself, first partially and finally in totality. This process, of course, can only happen in an existing mind, and reading Phänomenologie des Geistes, one sees the process unfolding itself before one’s eyes. This means that one literally reads Hegel’s own mind climbing the abstract ladder towards absolute knowledge. Since knowledge of totality is both infinite and finite, both subjective and objective, both universal and particular, both undetermined and determined, it is easy to see how Hegel can claim that this is, in essence, God. For Hegel, God is Geist, and Geist is the contemplating mind (of the philosopher, of Hegel) reaching absolute knowledge. So for Hegel, God is a God who is realized through the contemplation of a philosopher.

This certainly is not the God of Christianity, as conceptualized by both Protestants and Catholics, but it resembles in many ways the God of Spinoza, who claimed that God is Nature, hence totality, and every object in the world is a manifestation of a different mode of this Godly substance. But there is one key difference: Spinoza was a materialist and hence could identify God with material Nature, while Hegel’s God is only an idea, emerging from a process in which a mind grasps ever more abstract and including ideas.

And this final conclusion leads me immediately to some important remarks on Hegel’s philosophy.
First, Hegel’s metaphysical system was received by contemporary and subsequent philosophers in different ways, but in general there are three lines of direct development here. (1) Schopenhauer rejected Hegel’s main principle (Geist) altogether and claimed the main principle of metaphysics was the Will to life, while Nietzsche developed Schopenhauer’s Will into the Will to Power. While Schopenhauer claimed the response to this Will should be denial, Nietzsche claimed the proper response is acting on this Will. (2) Kierkegaard (although I have only superficial knowledge of his ideas) claimed Hegel worked out his system and then sat down beside it. What he meant was that Hegel’s system is an empty formalism; it lacked any opportunity for people to participate in it – it is conceptual theology. For Kierkegaard God should be believed in, we should make the leap of faith. (3) Then we have Karl Marx who, inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach’s theology, claimed that religion is just a projection which blinds man to the fact that reality is ‘acting’ in this world. History is the progress of human action, driven by human instincts and desires. Hegel claimed that ideas determine the world, but in truth the world determines ideas.

All three lines of development are unique, but have in common that they find Hegel’s philosophical system of the world to be empty, abstract and formal. All three lines of development claim that existence precedes essence (as in perception of objects and determining their essence). This realization, that reason (even logic and mathematics) is not the first step in knowledge, is fundamental in the development of continental philosophy. Edmund Husserl, for example, develops his tremendously influential phenomenological method as a scientific method to grasp the pre-scientific world, the world that is the foundation of reason. In this sense, Hegel is the last metaphysical, systematic philosopher and self-destructs this whole philosophical attempt, leaving existentialism and phenomenology as two future orphans.

Second, Hegel is often criticized by people for his aim to develop a system of totality, a system that encompasses the totality of things and that is rigid and determinate. These critics often aim their arrows at Hegel’s philosophy of right (his view on the perfect state) and partially his philosophy of history (his view of historicism, history following deterministic laws). It is easy to see how people see in Hegel’s blueprint for the ideal state an attempt to subjugate individuals and to only count development on the state level. And to be fair, throughout all of Hegel’s philosophy is the continuous attempt to resolve particulars into universals and to see highest, loftiest stages of Geist on the level of states and, ultimately, God.

In short, Hegel discounts concrete individuals and seems to be only concerned with abstract total ideas – when he is concerned with freedom, he is not concerned with individual freedom (individuals have to offer themselves on the altar of history) but with the abstract idea of freedom in the state on the world-political stage. For Hegel, “Das Wahre ist das Ganze” – the real is the whole.

Hegel’s philosophy is a totalitarian system in that it seeks to subjugate all particulars and lower levels with the aim of reaching a final goal (i.e. the realization of something absolute). In this sense, it is a blueprint for the later totalitarian systems in politics, although to be fair to Hegel, the tendency to completely eradicate the individual and to offer them for the greater good or God has been with us throughout our history. And ultimately, you can’t hold someone responsible for the acts of someone else, especially a future someone else. (The same type of senseless critique is often levelled at Darwin in relation to social Darwinism and Nazi eugenics, and Nietzsche in relation to Nazi ideology.)

Third, and this is my main problem with Hegel, is that he commends contradiction. Contradiction always was used as a formal criterion to separate senseless from sensible concepts. Something that is internally contradicted or contradicted by something external cannot be true. With Hegel this formal criterion of truth is not only done away with but is actually reversed: now truth is that which can be contradicted!

Hegel’s conception of knowledge is the dialectical process in which contradictions are integrated in new contradictions on a more abstract level. So Hegel actively seeks out contradictions to discover truth and he seems so obsessed by contradictions that he seems to see them everywhere – meaning he contradicts certain things that are nonsensical to contradict (more on that in the next remark).

So from Hegel onwards we see a destructive trend developing in philosophy where truth is not to be looked for through rigorous analysis but, in ultimo, in everything. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is already a faint glimmer (truth does not exist, all that exist are perceptions from different perspectives) but postmodern philosophy is the real fraud here. This school of philosophy radically dismantles all truths and ends with the relativistic claim that truth is nothing but the power of some person or group over others. Truth becomes a question of discrimination and now, anno 2019, we have women’s studies, black history and gender studies – along with the denial of scientific claims and the erosion of public trust in science.

Anyway, back to the review. A fourth and final remark is the imaginary relations Hegel seems to see between all kinds of different phenomena. He starts off with sense experience and ends up with a theory of how states battle it out on the world-historical stage and end in the philosopher grasping absolute knowledge. Admittedly, this is a simplistic and slightly caricaturistic representation of Hegel, but ultimately it *is* what Hegel is doing. He continuously moves from the particular, the individual to generality and when he has reached his destination, a new individuality, this time on a higher level, pops up, to allow him to repeat this process. In short: Hegel sees contradictions and generalizations everywhere.

This generality allows him to parallel his theory of the developing self-consciousness with history (for example, seeing the stage of Reason being manifested in the period Reformation-French Revolution), but this at once makes his philosophical system so vague and so speculative that it fails miserably in convincing us of the truth of Hegel’s claims. Hegel was a man who knew what he wanted to find before he set out on his quest for truth, this is why he ends up with his own grasp of absolute knowledge as both God and the destination of World-History. This is why he had to develop his own system of logic, basically one huge apology for using the dialectical method. This is why literally everything in the world, from science to state government and from sense-experience to religion, fits neatly into one grand system.

I cannot conclude otherwise but Hegel was either a very solipsistic individual, an autistic person (who views himself as literally the centre of everything and mostly uses reason to manoeuvre through life), a Lutheran apologist (who had to re-create a place for God after the Enlightenment and Kant), or else a philosophical charlatan. I don’t know which one of the options it was, but Hegel’s philosophy is so speculative that it borders the absurd – I honestly don’t understand how this way of doing philosophy has found so many followers over the years. And this is the feeling I get every time I try to understand (open-mindedly) one of the most renowned of these continental philosophers. I understand their goals, their methods and their perspective on philosophy, even their answers, but I simply don’t get the point. It seems to me to be much ado about nothing…

As for Hegel: I can see the attractiveness and even beautify of his philosophical system, but we should not forget that he set out this whole undertaking in order to answer the questions of Truth and Knowledge. And we shouldn’t forget his severe criticisms of Kant and the German idealists either. Whereas Kant was someone who seems to be rigid yet honest, Hegel seems to be flexible and fraudulent. He simply doesn’t deliver on his promises. He offers such a speculative system and ambiguous method, that basically anything can be fitted into it and which can explain everything.

This is not philosophy; this is theology. Add to this fact that this is a 500 page book which is written in such an absurd and incomprehensible style, that it is very hard to see how this book deserves a recommendation, let alone a reading attempt. No I simply detest this book and I find it truly bothersome – I am glad I am done with it and I am glad I have grasped Hegel’s system to such an extent that I will never have to read him anymore. Sorry to end this review on such a sour note, so to end with a more positive fact: I am done, yeah!

Yikes.

My German isn't at the level of reading this monster - at least, not on my first try. So I used this as a constant reference and went through key passages in the original, which is vital for anyone reading it in translation, if you know some German.

For my review of Hegel's Phenomenology, see here.

don't ask me about this book I will not be able to answer

I despised reading most of this, and yet I'm happy I did. One must begin with the obvious: Hegel is such a bad writer, it almost feels like a joke sometimes. Yes, the decision to capitalize special concepts (every noun is capitalized in German, so the decision to capitalize some rather than capitalizing them all or none requires justification) doesn't help, but you can't get around the fact that reading Hegel so often feels like talking to the guy who took speed all night at 4 am at the party you've been drinking at. It sounds extraordinarily complicated and yet ridiculous and you just want to say "shut the fuck up!" and sleep.

And then it doesn't sound like that at all. Despite how absolutely punishing the text was, one must also admit that Hegel follows a path of thought that is so compelling and overwhelming it baffles the mind to imagine how he could even begin to conceive of such a project. There was at least one shining insight in every section that bursts through in its illumination past the stilted prose. Among these are the discovery of sense-certainty's abstract metaphysics (mercifully early), the fight to the death in the lord-servant dialectic, the underrated critique of phrenology's confusion around the "inside" and "outside" of the body (that is 100% still valid for contemporary scientific reductions in neurology and psychiatry), most of the movement of spirit, and the tortured beautiful soul's dissipation into vapor. The guy even knows how to write a gorgeous turn of phrase! He just hides them atop mountains of needles and forces you to stab yourself thousands of times in the climb to find them.

There's no other book of philosophy that follows a path of determinations so closely. You will understand what the dialectic method and speculative philosophy is after reading, but it absolutely forbids skipping even a single paragraph, and harshly punishes skimming. This took me longer than any book in memory to read. The path of argumentation is foolproof (as it's presented), logical, and seductive. It follows the path of necessity without implying it's the only possible path. I am so so happy to be done, for so many reasons.

Colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide academic philosophy something to argue about the meaning of all posterity. A pseudo-philosophy, an outrageous misuse of language. A splendid example of skillful intellectual masturbation. Hegel spent his entire life, from childhood to death, in academia... and it shows.

A writer once said, “In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.”

Na bijna twee jaar zwoegen dan toch eindelijk uit. Ik doorzie de geschiedenis der mensheid als de zelfbewustwording des Geestes. Was het het waard? Misschien. Begreep ik het? Nee. Was het een grind? Ja.

Het is moeilijk om aan te duiden wat je overhoudt aan het lezen van een werk als dit. Wat neem je nou uiteindelijk mee? Tuurlijk, voortaan herken ik de talloze verbijzonderde bewustzijnsgestalten die de revue zijn gepasseerd: de Stoïcijn die zich vrij waant in de innerlijke citadel zijner zelfbewustzijn, om zodoende juist door de uiterlijke wereld bepaald te worden; de Heer die dat alleen is dankzij zijn Knecht en zich daardoor zelf Knecht toont; de verlichtingsdenker die zichzelf tegenspreekt door de Religie te verwijten enerzijds een autoriteit buiten zich te erkennen en anderzijds zelf zijn eigen bron te zijn - kortom, het was een bonte parade van zichzelf altijd weer verkerende denkmomenten. We hebben gebeven voor de Absolute Meester die de Dood is. God moest dan ook zelf sterven: de kruisdood betekent de negatie van het abstracte godsbegrip "aan gene zijde." Het ware leven in Zijn opstanding is Geestelijk.

Maar kun je zo'n filosofie als de Hegeliaanse nou echt geloven? Waarschijnlijk niet, maar ik kan de Scepticus voortaan wel wijzen op de onvermijdelijke zelfnegatie van zijn denken.

La fenomenología del espíritu de G.W.F. Hegel, publicada por la prestigiosa Oxford University Press, es una obra monumental que sigue siendo una piedra angular en la filosofía. Esta edición, meticulosamente preparada y presentada, ofrece a los lectores una oportunidad inigualable para sumergirse en el pensamiento profundo y complejo de Hegel.

Uno de los mayores méritos de esta edición es la cuidadosa traducción y el rigor académico que la acompaña. Miller ha hecho un trabajo sobresaliente al presentar el texto de Hegel de una manera que mantiene la integridad del original alemán mientras lo hace accesible para quienes lean en inglés. Además, algunas notas al pie de página proporcionan el contexto necesario para comprender las intricadas argumentaciones de Hegel.

Es importante mencionar también que "La Fenomenología..." es conocida por su densidad conceptual y su estructura dialéctica casi criptica. Hegel explora el desarrollo de la conciencia a través de una serie de etapas, desde la percepción sensorial hasta el conocimiento absoluto. Este viaje filosófico es tanto una meditación sobre la historia y la cultura como una exploración de la experiencia individual y colectiva de la conciencia. La profundidad y la amplitud del análisis de Hegel son impresionantes y desafiantes, ofreciendo una riqueza de ideas que sigue inspirando y provocando reflexión, aunque, por supuesto, también sigue provocando críticas devastadoras como las que Schopenhauer y Kierkegaard ofrecieron en su momento.

Así pues, la edición de Oxford se destaca no solo por la calidad de la traducción de Miller, sino también por los recursos adicionales que ofrece. La introducción detallada y la interpretación un tanto poética de Findlay también proporcionan una guía esencial para navegar por el texto, iluminando los conceptos clave y situando la obra en el contexto más amplio del pensamiento idealista alemán y la filosofía en general.

En resumen, ésta obra de Hegel, en esta excelente edición de Oxford University Press, es una obra fundamental que merece una calificación de cinco estrellas. La combinación de una traducción precisa, un aparato crítico exhaustivo y la presentación cuidadosa hacen de esta edición una herramienta invaluable para estudiantes, académicos y cualquier persona interesada en profundizar en una de las obras más importantes de la filosofía occidental, la cual trae consigo un sinnúmero de dificultades y retos que pone sobre aviso a quién se proponga leer semejante libro.

If you'd like to listen to this review, I recorded a podcast version, which you can find here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is easily the most controversial of the canonical philosophers. Alternately revered and reviled, worshiped or scorned, he is a thinker whose conclusions are almost universally rejected and yet whose influence is impossible to escape. Like Herodotus, he is either considered to be the Father of History or the Father of Lies. Depending on who you ask, Hegel is the capstone of the grand Western attempt to explain the world through reason, or the commencement of a misguided stream of metaphysical nonsense which has only grown since.

A great deal of this controversy is caused by Hegel’s famous obscurity, which is proverbial. His writing is a great inky cloud of abstractions, a bewildering mixture of the pedantic and the mystic, a mass of vague mysteries uttered in technical jargon. This obscurity has made Hegel an academic field unto himself. There is hardly anything you can say about Hegel’s ideas that cannot be contested, which leads to the odd situation we see demonstrated in most reviews of his works, wherein people opine positively and negatively without venturing to summarize what Hegel is actually saying. Some people seem to read Hegel with the attitude of a pious Christian hearing a sermon in another language, and believe and revere without understanding; while others conclude that Hegel’s language plays the part of a screen in a magician’s act, concealing cheap tricks under a mysterious veil.

For my part, either dismissing or admiring Hegel without making a serious attempt to understand him is unsatisfactory. The proper attitude toward any canonical thinker is respect tinged with skepticism: respect for influence and originality, skepticism towards conclusions. That being said, most people, when confronted with Hegel’s style, will either incline towards the deifying or the despising stance. My inclination is certainly towards the latter. He is immensely frustrating to read, not to mention aggravating to review, since I can hardly venture to say anything about Hegel without risking the accusation of having fundamentally misunderstood him. Well, so be it.

The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel’s first published book, and it is widely considered his masterpiece. It is a history of consciousness. Hegel attempts to trace all of the steps that consciousness must go through—Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, and Religion—before it can arrive at the point of fully adequate knowledge (Absolute Knowledge). Nobody had ever attempted anything similar, and even today this project seems ludicrously ambitious. Not only is the subject original, but Hegel also puts forward a new method of philosophy, the dialectical method. In other words, he is trying to do something no one had ever thought of doing before, using a way of thinking no one had thought of using before.

The Phenomenology begins with its justly famous Preface, which was written after the rest of the book was completed. This Preface alone is an important work, and is sometimes printed separately. Since it is easily the most lucid and eloquent section of the book, I would recommend it to those with even a passing interest in philosophy. This is where Hegel outlines his dialectical method.

The dialectical method is a new type of logic, meant to replace deductive reasoning. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have mainly relied on deductive arguments. The most famous example is the syllogism (All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, etc.). Deduction received renewed emphasis with Descartes, who thought that mathematics (which is deductive) is the most certain form of knowledge, and that philosophy should emulate this certainty.

The problem with syllogisms and proofs, Hegel thought, is that they divorce content from form. Deductive frameworks are formulaic; different propositions (all pigs are animals, all apples are fruit) can be slotted into the framework indifferently, and still produce an internally consistent argument. Even empirically false propositions can be used (all apples are pineapples), and the argument may still be logically correct, while failing to align with reality. In other words, the organization of argument is something independent of the order of the world. In the generation before Hegel, Kant took this even further, arguing that our perception and our logic fundamentally shape the world as it appears to us, meaning that pure reason can never tell us anything about reality in itself.

Hegel found this unsatisfactory. In the words of Frederick Copleston, he was a firm believer in the equivalence of content and form. Every notion takes a form in experience; and every formula for knowledge—whether syllogistic, mathematical, or Kantian—alters the content by imposing upon it a foreign form. All attempts to separate content from form, or vice versa, therefore do an injustice to the material; the two are inseparable.

Traditional logic has one further weakness. It conceives of the truth as a static proposition, an unchanging conclusion derived from unchanging premises. But this fails to do justice to the nature of knowledge. Our search to know the truth evolves through a historical process, adopting and discarding different modes of thought in its restless search to grasp reality. Unlike in a deductive process, where incorrect premises will lead to incorrect conclusions, we often begin with an incorrect idea and then, through trial and error, eventually adopt the correct one.

Deductive reasoning not only mischaracterizes the historical growth of knowledge, but it also is unable to deal with the changing nature of reality itself. The world we know is constantly evolving, shifting, coming to being and passing away. No static formula or analysis—Newton’s equations or Kant’s metaphysics, for example—could possibly describe reality adequately. To put this another way, traditional logic is mechanistic; it conceives reality as a giant machine with moving, interlocking parts, and knowledge as being a sort of blue-print or diagram of the machine. Hegel prefers the organic metaphor.

To use Hegel’s own example, imagine that we are trying to describe an oak tree. Traditional logic might take the mature tree, divide it into anatomical sections that correspond with those of other trees, and end with a description in general terms of a static tree. Hegel’s method, by contrast, would begin with the acorn, and observe the different stages it passes through in its growth to maturity; and the terms of the description, instead of being taken from general anatomic descriptions of trees, would emerge of necessity from the observation of the growing tree itself. The final description would include every stage of the tree, and would be written in terms specific to the tree.

This is only an example. Hegel does not intend for his method to be used by biologists. What the philosopher observes is, rather, Mind or Spirit. Here we run into a famous ambiguity, because the German word Geist cannot be comfortably translated as either “mind” or “spirit.” The edition I used translates the title as the Phenomenology of Mind, whereas later translations have called it The Phenomenology of Spirit. This ambiguity is not trivial. The nature of mind—how it comes to know itself and the world, how it is related to the material world—is a traditional inquiry in philosophy, whereas spirit is something quasi-religious or mystical in flavor. For my part, I agree with Peter Singer in thinking that we ought to try to use “mind,” since it leaves Hegel’s meaning more open, while using “spirit” pre-judges Hegel’s intent.

Hegel is an absolute idealist. All reality is mental (or spiritual), and the history of mind consists in its gradual realization of this momentous fact: that mind is reality. As the famous formula goes, the rational is the real and the real is the rational. Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is to trace the process, using his dialectic method, in which mind passes from ignorance of its true nature to the realization that it comprises the fabric of everything it knows.

How does this history unfold? Many have described the dialectic process as consisting of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The problem with this characterization is that Hegel never used those terms; and as we’ve seen he disliked logical formulas. Nevertheless, the description does manage to give a taste of Hegel’s procedure. Mind, he thought, evolved through stages, which he calls “moments.” At each of these moments, mind takes a specific form, in which it attempts to grapple with its reality. However, when mind has an erroneous conception of itself or its reality (which is just mind itself in another guise), it reaches an impasse, where it seems to encounter a contradiction. This contradiction is overcome via a synthesis, where the old conception and its contradiction are accommodated in a wider conception, which will in turn reach its own impasse, and so on until the final stage is reached.

This sounds momentous and mysterious (and it is), but let me try to illustrate it with a metaphor.

Imagine a cell awoke one day in the human body. At first, the cell is only aware of itself as a living thing, and therefore considers itself to be the extent of the world. But then the cell notices that it is limited by its environment. It is surrounded by other cells, which restrict its movement and even compete for resources. The cell then learns to define itself negatively, as against its environment. Not only that, but the cell engages in a conflict with its neighbors, fighting for resources and trying to assert its independence and superiority. But this fight is futile. Every time the cell attempts to restrict resources to its neighbors, it simultaneously impedes the flow of blood to itself. Eventually, after much pointless struggle, the cell realizes that it is a part of a larger structure—say, a nerve—and that it is one particular example of a universal type. In other words, the cell recognizes its neighbors as itself and itself as its neighbors. This process then repeats, from nerves to muscles to organs, until the final unity of the human body is understood to consists as one complete whole, an organism which lives and grows, but which nevertheless consists of distinct, co-dependent elements. Once again, Hegel’s model is organic rather than mechanic.

Just so, the mind awakes in the world and slowly learns to recognize the world as itself, and itself as one cell in the world. The complete unity, the world’s “body,” so to speak, is the Absolute Mind.

Hegel begins his odyssey of knowledge in the traditional Cartesian starting point, with sense-certainty. We are first aware of sensations—hot, light, rough, sour—and these are immediately present to us, seemingly truth in its naked form. However, when mind tries to articulate this truth, something curious happens. Mind finds that it can only speak in universals, which fail to capture the particularity and the immediacy of its sensations. Mind tries to overcome this by using terms like “This!” or “Here!” or “Now!” But even these will not do, since what is “here” one moment is “there” the next, and what is “this” one moment is “that” the next. In other words, the truth of sense-certainty continually slips away when you try to articulate it.

The mind then begins to analyze its sensations into perceptions—instead of raw data, we get definite objects in time and space. However, we reach other curious philosophical puzzles here. Why do all the qualities of salt—its size, weight, flavor, color—cohere in one location, persist through time, and reappear regularly? What unites these same qualities in this consistent way? Is it some metaphysical substance that the qualities inhere in? Or is the unity of these qualities just a product of the perceiving mind?

At this point, it is perhaps understandable why Hegel thought that mind comprises all reality. From a Cartesian perspective—as an ego analyzing its own subjective experience—this is true: everything analyzed is mental. And, as Kant argued, the world’s organization in experience may well be due to the mind’s action upon the world as perceived. Thus true knowledge would indeed require an understanding of how our mind shapes the experience.

But Hegel’s premiss—that the real is rational and the rational is real—becomes much more difficult to accept once we move into the world of intersubjective reality, when individual minds acknowledge other minds as real and existing in the same universe. For my part, I find it convenient to put the question of the natural world to one side. Hegel had no notion of change in nature; his picture of the world had no Big Bang, and no biological evolution, and in any case he did not like Newtonian physics (he thinks, quite dumbly, that the Law of Attraction is the general form of all laws, and that it doesn’t explain anything about nature) and he was not terribly interested in natural science. Hegel was far more preoccupied with the social world; and it is in this sphere that his ideas seem more sensible.

In human society, the real is the rational and the rational is the real, in the sense that our beliefs shape our actions, and our actions shape our environments, and our environments in turn shape our beliefs, in a constantly evolving dialogue—the dialectic. The structure of society is thus intimately related to the structure of belief at any given time and place. Let me explain that more fully.

Hegel makes quite an interesting observation about beliefs. (Well, he doesn’t actually say this, but it’s implied in his approach.) Certain mentalities, even if they can be internally consistent for an individual, reveal contradictions when the individual tries to act out these beliefs. In other words, mentalities reveal their contradictions in action and not in argument. The world created by a mentality may not correspond with the world it “wants” to create; and this in turn leads to a change in mentality, which in turn creates a different social structure, which again might not correspond with the world it is aiming for, and so on until full correspondence is achieved. Some examples will clarify this.

The classic Hegelian example is the master and the slave. The master tries to reduce the slave to the level of an object, to negate the slave’s perspective entirely. And yet, the master’s identity as master is tied to the slave having a perspective to negate; thus the slave must not be entirely objectified, but must retain some semblance of perspective in order for the situation to exist at all. Meanwhile, the slave is supposed to be a nullity with no perspective, a being entirely directed by the master. But the slave transforms the world with his work, and by this transformation asserts his own perspective. (This notion of the slave having his work “alienated” from him was highly influential, especially on Marx.)

Hegel then analyzes Stoicism. The Stoic believes that the good resides entirely in his own mental world, while the exterior world is entirely devoid of value. And yet the Stoic recognizes that he has duties in this exterior world, and thus this world has some moral claim on him. Mind reacts to this contradiction by moving to total Skepticism, believing that the world is unreal and entirely devoid of value, recognizing no duties at all. And yet this is a purely negative attitude, a constant denial of something that is persistently there, and this constant mode of denial collapses when the Skeptic goes about acting within this supposedly unreal world. Mind then decides that the world is unreal and devoid of value, including mind itself as parts of the world, but that value exists in a transcendent sphere. This leads us to medieval Christianity and the self-alienated soul, and so on.

I hope you see by now what I mean by a conception not being able to be acted out without a contradiction. Hegel thought that mind progressed from one stage to another until finally the world was adequate to the concept and vice versa; indeed, at this point the world and the concept would be one, and the real would be rational and the rational real. Thought, action, and world would be woven into one harmonious whole, a seamless fabric of reason.

I am here analyzing Hegel in a distinctly sociological light, which is easily possible in many sections of the text. However, I think this interpretation would be difficult to justify in other sections, where Hegel seems to be making the metaphysical claim that all reality (not just the social world) is mental and structured by reason. Perhaps one could make the argument on Kantian grounds that our mental apparatus, as it evolves through time, shapes the world we experience in progressively different ways. But this would seem to require a lot more traditional epistemology than I see here in the text.

In a nutshell, this is what I understand Hegel to be saying. And I have been taking pains to present his ideas (as far as I understand them) in as positive and coherent a light as I can. So what are we to make of all this?

A swarm of criticisms begin to buzz. The text itself is disorganized and uneven. Hegel spends a great deal of time on seemingly minor subjects, and rushes through major developments. He famously includes a long, tedious section on phrenology (the idea that the shape of the skull reveals a person’s personality), while devoting only a few, very obscure pages to the final section, Absolute Knowledge, which is the entire goal of the development. This latter fact is partially explained by the book’s history. Hegel made a bad deal with his publisher, and had to rush the final sections.

As for prose, the style of this book is so opaque that it could not have been an accident. Hegel leaves many important terms hazily defined, and never justifies his assumptions nor clarifies his conclusions. Obscurity is beneficial to thinkers in that they can deflect criticism by accusing critics of misunderstanding; and the ambiguity of the text means that it can be variously interpreted depending on the needs of the occasion. I think Hegel did something selfish and intellectually irresponsible by writing this way, and even now we still hear the booming thunder of his unintelligible voice echoed in many modern intellectuals.

Insofar as I understand Hegel’s argument, I cannot accept it. Although Hegel presents dialectic as a method of reasoning, I failed to be convinced of the necessary progression from one moment to the next. Far from a series of progressive developments, the pattern of the text seemed, rather, to be due entirely to Hegel’s whim.

Where Hegel is most valuable, I think, is in his emphasis on history, especially on intellectual history. This is something entirely lacking in his predecessors. He is also valuable for his way of seeing mind, action, and society as interconnected; and for his observation that beliefs and mentalities are embodied in social relations.

In sum, I am left with the somewhat lame conclusion that Hegel’s canonical status is well-deserved, but so is his controversial reputation. He is infuriating, exasperating, and has left a dubious legacy. But his originality is undeniable, his influence is pervasive, and his legacy, good or bad, will always be with us.

É difícil começar um review desse. Não vou me prestar aqui ao papel de resenha 101, mas comunicar algo que se passou na experiência da leitura desse livro que supera avaliações sobre os momentos e figuras desse livro - sem dúvidas, a leitura mais decisiva de todas.
Começamos a ler em abril de 2020, um mês de quarentena. O João Pedro me chamou pra ler, já que estávamos concluindo a leitura do livro II do Capital. O grupo inicialmente tinha mais gente, mas ao final se reduziu a mim, o João, o Fabio e o Zé. Gostaria de agradecer também ao Dr. Sadler com sua maravilhosa série 'Half Hour Hegel' que me salvou até o fim do Espírito.
Hegel veio pra ser um arqui-inimigo. Não por mera discordância, mas pela árdua tarefa que é contrapor-se ao Hegel e pensar com ele. Pensa-se "com" ele. Talvez "em meio a", ainda não decidi.
A questão sempre foi entender para onde ele ia. Com o 'Saber absoluto' nos olhando de longe (quase ou totalmente um olho de Sauron, perdoe a referência), íamos avançando com a dialética por vezes como máquina de criação, por vezes como rolo compressor. Não que haja uma diferença intransponível entre ambas, em certo sentido.
As três figuras centrais - Certeza Sensível, Percepção e Entendimento - entram em um processo que dá pra descrever como um transtorno pós-traumático sem referência ao episódio do trauma; por vezes questiona-se se ele realmente está lá - incerteza tal que mais revela o poder da rememoração que a referência. Certamente está lá, não há como não estar.
Hegel discute tudo, e lhe cansaria se contasse aqui. Acho que o próprio contar seria inadequado. O que mais deixa marcas (ou não, como Hegel indica) são os grandes finais de cada capítulo, onde Hegel explode nossas bases: resta a absoluta incapacidade de totalização, o contrário Absoluto - que se mostra, momentos depois, mais um passo necessário a ser tomado para a reconciliação. Chegar ao saber absoluto e confrontar a alteridade radical sem reduzi-la a identidade, à mera representação - o próprio sistema rejeita tal procedimento. O meta-sujeito em que o Espírito se transforma produz uma abertura no finito e no infinito; para um sujeito que sempre se dissolve no processo, sua identidade no tornar-se outro. Os caminhos são brutais, quase sempre; a necessidade lógica é por vezes luminosa como o estouro de um míssil. Mas não há como dizer que as problemáticas que Hegel toca não nos apontam os problemas que nos forçam a pensar - não apenas em suas soluções, mas nas próprias instâncias problemáticas. Todo colapso tensiona mais o universal e o singular, a consciência e o objeto.
É possível dizer que Hegel busca organizar a Forma e formalizar o Sujeito (como diz Deleuze) - mas o que sobra desses conceitos rejeita certas conclusões. Ou que busca a sujeitação da Forma e a formalização do Sujeito - como bem aponta Fabio.
O fim da Fenomenologia é catástrofe absoluta: com o caminho aberto para a Ciência da Lógica, nos perguntamos o desafio ético que esse livro nos aponta: como apreender o novo? A maior produção dessa leitura foi nossa produção coletiva como grupo. Os encontros semanais no formato 8 páginas-3 horas ao longo de um ano (pandêmico) foram extremamente intensos. Não havia um encontro que Hegel nos deixava mastigar o texto com facilidade: comer era sinônimo de guerra. Entre nós, com e contra Hegel. O que gritamos no livro ressoa nos ecos de suas paredes (submersas na Sinfonia Eroica e por isso constantemente derrubadas). Como arqui-inimigo, prezo muito por Hegel. E que venha a Lógica.

DID NOT EVEN REALIZE PINKARD'S TRANSLATION OF THE PHENOMENOLOGY HAD BEEN FINALLY PUBLISHED THIS YEAR I'VE NOT BEEN HANGING OUT AT GOODREADS ENOUGH ACK

Wer im Theoretisieren nur von Begriffen ausgeht, erlangt zwar unter den zahlreichen Einfältigen schnell den Glorienschein der Genialität, kommt aber eben nur zu mittelmäßigen Leistungen, da sein Schöpfen nicht aus der Anschauung als Urquelle aller Erkenntnis hervorgeht und der Endzweck nicht das Wahre, sondern das Ruhmreiche sein soll. Im Praktischen ist es gleichsam umgekehrt.
Hegel's Werk ist von allergrößter Wortgewandtheit die ich je gelesen habe, aber wer sich nur durch Begriffe in ihrer abstraktesten Form allein bestimmen läßt, hat Mühe auf ein starkes Gemüt wie das meine zu wirken, auf welches die vorliegende nächste Außenwelt mit ihrer zu anschaulichen Realität gewaltsam eindringt.

Ich muss gestehen, das Werk nur zu 3/4 durchgelesen zu haben und es dann, gleichsam befreit von einem Gaukelspiel und Verworrenheit des Kopfes, habe weglegen müssen. Noch nie habe ich ein Buch wie dieses gelesen, welche von einem abstrakten, fasziniered-begriffgewaltigen Idealismus strotzt und die Geschichte als ein stetiges Steigern aller Formen, auch der der Geisteskräfte versteht. Laut Hegel und seiner Anhänger gehört die Historie an die Hauptstelle aller Philosophie, welchem gemäß alles zum besten aller gelenkt wird und zum Schluss dann eine große Herrlichkeit eingeführt werden wird - ob Hegel die modernen Zeiten so definieren würde? Der Zweck der Welt soll das armselige Erdenglück fördern, durch die Leistungen und Steigerungen der Wissenschaft. Verständlich daher, dass er schnell zu Ruhm kam, was mich schon wieder skeptisch macht.

Hegel ist keineswegs dumm und liegt immer falsch. Vieles in seinem Werk hat mich zum Nachdenken angeregt, wenngleich, wie gesagt, nicht im anschaulichen Sinne, aber gleichzeitig verwirrt es einen Kopf wie den meinen mit allzu überspannten Sätzen, in welchen der Inhalt nur schwer zu fassen ist. Erreicht man aber einen Faden, welcher traurigerweise hauchdünn ist, vermag man durchaus Hegels Ausführungen in sein Philosophie- und Weltverständnis zu folgen.
Man weiß, Plato hätte ihm in vielerlei Hinsicht widersprochen, denn er war überzeugt, dass die Philosophie nicht im Werden aller Dinge, sondern im dem was allen Zeiten gleich ist, also das Wesentliche, Zuhause ist und dem stimme ich zu. Die Devise der Geschichte und ihrer Stellung in der Philosophie lautet meiner Meinung nach folgendermaßen: "dasselbe, aber auf andere Weise". Hegel sieht das idealistisch anders und könnte, wie ich finde, dabei gerade unter modernen Menschen mit ihrem Aberglauben an den "Fortschritt" höchst beliebt sein, wären sie alle keine zu großen Toren um ihn verstehen zu können. Diese greifen ihrer Natur gemäß erst zu Büchern gewisser Autoritäten in diesen Themen, weil sie wissen, dass sie ihnen sonst nicht zu folgen vermögen.

Hegel's Glaube an die Geschichte ist zwar träumerisch, aber deswegen keineswegs durchweg mangelnd an Logik: denn so behauptet er z.B. auch dass die meisten Menschen nichts aus der Geschichte lernen, was gerade auch das Treiben der Weltmächte perfekt beweist.
Aber nur wegen solcher Allgemeinplätze, welche auch den Durchschnittsköpfen erklärlich und daher bei ihnen beliebt sind, muss man sich nicht daran machen in allem sein und werden eine göttliche Vernunft walten zu sehen, welche zum Endzweck unser aller Glück und Muse hat, denn wer die Menschenwelt wirklich anschaut, wird viel mehr Elend, besonders da wo sie unter Prunk und Illusionen am sorgfältigsten versteckt wird, als wahre, also durchweg simple, aber geistig üppige, Glückseligkeit erkennen.

Trotz meiner Vorbehalte empfehle ich Hegel allen Philosophie interessierten, da die Majorität hier das finden wird, was die eitle, menschliche Kreatur von heute wirklich sucht.