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This is the third translation of the Phenomenology that I’ve read, starting with Baillie’s translation (which dates back to 1910), then the Miller translation from 1977, and now this new one from Terry Pinkard. No translation will make the Phenomenology readable. There’s actually something to be said for reading multiple translations, to get more perspectives on what Hegel is doing.
What makes the Phenomenology hard is, at its core, the revolution that Hegel is attempting in philosophy, both in philosophical method and in the philosophical positions he takes.
I wouldn’t deny either that Hegel just was not a writer with understandability at the top of his priorities. The Phenomenology in particular reads as if it were written as much for self-clarification as for communication. This stands to reason, given that this was Hegel’s first major philosophical work, written when his thought was very much still in formation.
Hegel is inventing a new philosophical method. Even in Plato’s dialogues, often characterized as “dialectical” in method, a question is taken up, a position (or more than one) examined, objections raised, refinements made and/or a new position proposed, and a result presented. With the Phenomenology, Hegel superficially does something similar. He undertakes one motivating question: what is knowledge? And he examines innumerable positions, historically taken, finding each lacking or failing, but each leading to the next, which is also found to be lacking or failing, but leading again to another. It is the entire “movement” from initial position to ultimate position that is the argument.
His method presents a philosophical position as an outcome. “Wrong” positions are part of the process of reaching each new position. As far as I’m aware, Hegel is the first to place historical genealogy at the heart of philosophical thinking — no philosophical position is what it is outside the context of its historical genealogy.
That method has implications not just for philosophical thought, but for what thinking and knowledge themselves are, and for the very nature of conceptual thinking entirely. Thought and rationality, from Hegel’s perspective, are inherently socio-historical in nature. To say that everyone is a product of their age is a superficiality that covers an important Hegelian insight — not a simple relativistic one, but one that does volatilize and historicize concepts and standards of argument, presaging modern debates on conceptual schemes, constructivism, scientific revolutions, and the nature of meaning.
For Hegel himself, the stages or “moments” of the development of knowledge are a progression, not a wandering from historical era to era or an unordered jumble.
That sense of order is, I think, a key to understanding why Hegel’s actual position, which is often oversimplified as “rationalist” or “idealist,” is itself so revolutionary.
No actual position taken by a philosopher is really simple. But Hegel’s idealism stands out from the crowd. Idealism can be construed as a relatively straightforward metaphysical claim that reality is made up of some sort of mental stuff — a world constructed of thoughts or ideas. As an epistemological position, idealism can leave the metaphysical question of what the world in itself is ultimately composed of open. Kant arguably does this, with an account of knowledge as knowledge of a world formed by rational cognition, but any world of “things-in-themselves” outside the reach of understanding.
Hegel’s own idealism brings another level of complexity altogether, I think. What is most distinctive is that, for Hegel, idealism is something that has to be achieved — it isn’t simply “true.”
The Phenomenology begins with a naive account of knowledge as “Sensuous-Certainty” (in Pinkard’s translation). “Sensuous-Certainty” is a kind of simple model of knowing, a philosophical position but also a stage in the evolution of what knowing is, that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Its failure to stand up isn’t the result (again referring to Hegel’s method) of holding up an independent standard of validity against the position and finding it lacking. It fails to stand up to its own tests — it doesn’t make the kind of sense of knowledge that it tries to make. It collapses.
To advance beyond that collapse, knowledge as “Sensuous Certainty” has to evolve. And this pattern of movement from stage to stage, of the “shapes” that knowledge takes, repeats. Each stage develops in response and in continuity with the previous stage, and each tests itself, only to find itself lacking but leading on to the next stage, the next shape that knowing takes.
That’s the sense in which I think that idealism, as an epistemological position in the Phenomenology, has to achieve itself. Knowledge must change and evolve to the point at which it becomes possible. Knowing must become something that, borrowing an Hegelian term, is “adequate” to its object. And this adequacy itself it not so different from a Kantian-inspired insight that for the world to be intelligible to us, it must be made intelligible by and for us. In rough Hegelian jargon, knowing must recognize itself in its object.
Just about the first half of the Phenomenology is that evolution of what knowing is, and it progresses towards Hegel’s nuanced idealist epistemology. But then Hegel makes an interesting turn. Pinkard, in his Introduction, calls attention to this turn, even saying that Hegel appears to have thought the work complete before making it but then deciding otherwise.
The succeeding parts of the book are much more tied to historical periods and events than the previous ones. In the previous sections we could recognize, often explicitly by name, philosophical positions taken in historical contexts, e.g.., stoicism. But now entire historical periods step onto the stage — the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, . . .
I think that this turn is part of another distinctive sense in which Hegel’s idealism is something that must be achieved. Knowing, in Hegel’s epistemological idealism, has become knowledge of the knower itself, us. In making knowledge of ourselves adequate to ourselves, we undertake the task of making knowledge of ourselves knowledge of ourselves as we really are, as opposed to misperceptions or misrepresentations of ourselves. To do so requires that we square ourselves and the world we create around us with an adequate conception of ourselves.
Trying to shed at least some of the awkward, jargony dressing, Hegel’s epistemology has joined the knower and the object of knowing together — to reach knowledge of the world, the knower must recognize himself in the world. This world contains both the world of nature — familiar objects — and the world that is explicitly of human making — the world of morality, politics, art, and religion. In order for us, the knowers, to recognize ourselves in that human-made world, that human-made world must adequately reflect us.
If you’re still following my tortured reconstruction, you can understand why then Hegel takes us on a journey through an evolution of the human-made world. Each stage now takes us through a self-understanding, as embodied in the social-political-moral world, that again stands or falls on its own. These self-understandings are not just thoughts per se but actual historical stages in which we, historically, build those social-political-moral worlds — doing so is our attempt to understand ourselves, and, to put it in terms that draw Hegel closer to the existentialists who come after him, become ourselves.
The Phenomenology thus becomes something much bigger and more ambitious than it looked like it was going to be, and probably bigger and more ambitious than Hegel had initially planned. We set out with the question, what is knowledge? And we were led to a theory of human history, morality, politics, art, and religion. What had been an “introduction” to a philosophical system looks like a system in itself.
I can’t pretend to do justice to Hegel — the Phenomenology is difficult to understand, but rewarding to try. Hopefully, on reading Pinkard’s translation, my review might be helpful.
I won’t try to evaluate Pinkard’s translation as a translation. That would be pretty arrogant, in my own case. I do think that every translation, including Baillie’s, is helpful. Each gives you some sometimes subtly different views on what Hegel is saying, and in the case of the Phenomenology in particular, it’s probably more helpful to get multiple provocations to explore what Hegel is thinking than it is to strive after something definitive.
What makes the Phenomenology hard is, at its core, the revolution that Hegel is attempting in philosophy, both in philosophical method and in the philosophical positions he takes.
I wouldn’t deny either that Hegel just was not a writer with understandability at the top of his priorities. The Phenomenology in particular reads as if it were written as much for self-clarification as for communication. This stands to reason, given that this was Hegel’s first major philosophical work, written when his thought was very much still in formation.
Hegel is inventing a new philosophical method. Even in Plato’s dialogues, often characterized as “dialectical” in method, a question is taken up, a position (or more than one) examined, objections raised, refinements made and/or a new position proposed, and a result presented. With the Phenomenology, Hegel superficially does something similar. He undertakes one motivating question: what is knowledge? And he examines innumerable positions, historically taken, finding each lacking or failing, but each leading to the next, which is also found to be lacking or failing, but leading again to another. It is the entire “movement” from initial position to ultimate position that is the argument.
His method presents a philosophical position as an outcome. “Wrong” positions are part of the process of reaching each new position. As far as I’m aware, Hegel is the first to place historical genealogy at the heart of philosophical thinking — no philosophical position is what it is outside the context of its historical genealogy.
That method has implications not just for philosophical thought, but for what thinking and knowledge themselves are, and for the very nature of conceptual thinking entirely. Thought and rationality, from Hegel’s perspective, are inherently socio-historical in nature. To say that everyone is a product of their age is a superficiality that covers an important Hegelian insight — not a simple relativistic one, but one that does volatilize and historicize concepts and standards of argument, presaging modern debates on conceptual schemes, constructivism, scientific revolutions, and the nature of meaning.
For Hegel himself, the stages or “moments” of the development of knowledge are a progression, not a wandering from historical era to era or an unordered jumble.
That sense of order is, I think, a key to understanding why Hegel’s actual position, which is often oversimplified as “rationalist” or “idealist,” is itself so revolutionary.
No actual position taken by a philosopher is really simple. But Hegel’s idealism stands out from the crowd. Idealism can be construed as a relatively straightforward metaphysical claim that reality is made up of some sort of mental stuff — a world constructed of thoughts or ideas. As an epistemological position, idealism can leave the metaphysical question of what the world in itself is ultimately composed of open. Kant arguably does this, with an account of knowledge as knowledge of a world formed by rational cognition, but any world of “things-in-themselves” outside the reach of understanding.
Hegel’s own idealism brings another level of complexity altogether, I think. What is most distinctive is that, for Hegel, idealism is something that has to be achieved — it isn’t simply “true.”
The Phenomenology begins with a naive account of knowledge as “Sensuous-Certainty” (in Pinkard’s translation). “Sensuous-Certainty” is a kind of simple model of knowing, a philosophical position but also a stage in the evolution of what knowing is, that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Its failure to stand up isn’t the result (again referring to Hegel’s method) of holding up an independent standard of validity against the position and finding it lacking. It fails to stand up to its own tests — it doesn’t make the kind of sense of knowledge that it tries to make. It collapses.
To advance beyond that collapse, knowledge as “Sensuous Certainty” has to evolve. And this pattern of movement from stage to stage, of the “shapes” that knowledge takes, repeats. Each stage develops in response and in continuity with the previous stage, and each tests itself, only to find itself lacking but leading on to the next stage, the next shape that knowing takes.
That’s the sense in which I think that idealism, as an epistemological position in the Phenomenology, has to achieve itself. Knowledge must change and evolve to the point at which it becomes possible. Knowing must become something that, borrowing an Hegelian term, is “adequate” to its object. And this adequacy itself it not so different from a Kantian-inspired insight that for the world to be intelligible to us, it must be made intelligible by and for us. In rough Hegelian jargon, knowing must recognize itself in its object.
Just about the first half of the Phenomenology is that evolution of what knowing is, and it progresses towards Hegel’s nuanced idealist epistemology. But then Hegel makes an interesting turn. Pinkard, in his Introduction, calls attention to this turn, even saying that Hegel appears to have thought the work complete before making it but then deciding otherwise.
The succeeding parts of the book are much more tied to historical periods and events than the previous ones. In the previous sections we could recognize, often explicitly by name, philosophical positions taken in historical contexts, e.g.., stoicism. But now entire historical periods step onto the stage — the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, . . .
I think that this turn is part of another distinctive sense in which Hegel’s idealism is something that must be achieved. Knowing, in Hegel’s epistemological idealism, has become knowledge of the knower itself, us. In making knowledge of ourselves adequate to ourselves, we undertake the task of making knowledge of ourselves knowledge of ourselves as we really are, as opposed to misperceptions or misrepresentations of ourselves. To do so requires that we square ourselves and the world we create around us with an adequate conception of ourselves.
Trying to shed at least some of the awkward, jargony dressing, Hegel’s epistemology has joined the knower and the object of knowing together — to reach knowledge of the world, the knower must recognize himself in the world. This world contains both the world of nature — familiar objects — and the world that is explicitly of human making — the world of morality, politics, art, and religion. In order for us, the knowers, to recognize ourselves in that human-made world, that human-made world must adequately reflect us.
If you’re still following my tortured reconstruction, you can understand why then Hegel takes us on a journey through an evolution of the human-made world. Each stage now takes us through a self-understanding, as embodied in the social-political-moral world, that again stands or falls on its own. These self-understandings are not just thoughts per se but actual historical stages in which we, historically, build those social-political-moral worlds — doing so is our attempt to understand ourselves, and, to put it in terms that draw Hegel closer to the existentialists who come after him, become ourselves.
The Phenomenology thus becomes something much bigger and more ambitious than it looked like it was going to be, and probably bigger and more ambitious than Hegel had initially planned. We set out with the question, what is knowledge? And we were led to a theory of human history, morality, politics, art, and religion. What had been an “introduction” to a philosophical system looks like a system in itself.
I can’t pretend to do justice to Hegel — the Phenomenology is difficult to understand, but rewarding to try. Hopefully, on reading Pinkard’s translation, my review might be helpful.
I won’t try to evaluate Pinkard’s translation as a translation. That would be pretty arrogant, in my own case. I do think that every translation, including Baillie’s, is helpful. Each gives you some sometimes subtly different views on what Hegel is saying, and in the case of the Phenomenology in particular, it’s probably more helpful to get multiple provocations to explore what Hegel is thinking than it is to strive after something definitive.
