We will at last be breaking open the most notoriously obscure, fantabulous work of philosophy ever: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
We'll focus on the most famous portion of the work: Part B on Self-Consciousness, though I can't see how we'll entirely avoid talking about earlier sections of the book. (The Introduction is an easier point of entry if you're reading along than the Preface.)
We tend to think of people as basically selfish, which implies that we are fully formed, autonomous individuals by nature with certain needs. Hegel argues that instead, "the self" is an achievement. We only gain a sense of who we are, or even that we're a being distinct from other beings, by interacting with other people, and it's really their treatment of us that determines what we initially take ourselves to be. So far from being these balls of greed that Hobbes makes us out to be, we are initially not all that differentiated from our surroundings and have to build ourselves up to be individuals and figure out what we really want.
The most famous part of the text is on the "master and slave" relationship. This is Hegel's substitute for the idea of the Social Contract: instead of people forming together to make a deal of some sort, when people recognize each other as more than just objects, they perceive a threat: society starts with someone enslaving someone else. But as far as development of the self goes, the resistance the slave encounters actually allows the slave to develop a real "self" (in opposition to the master's will), whereas the master has no reason to be reflective and so doesn't develop a self. So ha, master! Bite it!
Buy the book,
I just bought this book and began reading. Obscure is an understatement. The upside was after reading it for a while, reading anything else was easy; like swinging with two bats before stepping into the batter’s box in basebal.
Glad to hear that you and your crack team are going to unravel it for us. Can’t wait!
As a freshman in a phil 101 course at Texas A&M in 1974, I was blown away by Berkeley and what little Hegel we saw.
Lookin forward to another process guy/
If I ever write a mamoth work of philosophy I will make sure to draw my readers’ attention to whatever impotant insights I am making.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have an annotated version of this work by Hegel himself with lucid comments in plain language about what he’s talking about.
The quintissential case study for the “should philosophy be accesible” debate.
What I wasn’t aware of before this go-round with it is that apparently the writing was very rushed, and I believe published in installments, so there isn’t a lot of cross-referencing between sections. He reportedly wanted to make sure to get the whole structure out and so didn’t delve as much as would be desired into the individual pieces.
What we’re seeing here, I think, is more or less a philosophical journal elaborating this overall outline (i.e. the progression of legitimate epistemological positions through history to his present day), which means you can see his (brilliant) mind at work, but it’s hard to get into his head and make sense of it all.
In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead does a sweep of history showing what unified and led up to each epoch (era) in time, but his is readable.
I recall Rorty likes to make grand sweeps of the floor of history with the broom of philosophy — before declaring the broom used-up and urging us to just get on with the dirty floor.
Maybe I shouldn’t say “history,” because Hegel doesn’t talk about any historical figures, and presents the progression as a logical (well, dialectical) progression from less to more complex. So it’s like: “You ,might think knowledge is adequately characterized as a momentary grasping of something by the senses; even if you interpret what you’ve grasped incorrectly, still you can’t doubt the grasping itself. But ha, on further examination you find that in this case you can’t say WHAT you’ve grasped, and in fact when you described this supposedly singular experience, you can only use general (universal) terms, i.e. “the I” and “the object” which apply to different things at different times. So, this initial model of knowledge fails; let’s consider one that seems to better take the facts into account.” (…and the next model similarly fails, and the next one, and we find by part B that we can only account for our experience of knowledge with reference to other people existing… Husserl had a similar progression in his Cartesian Meditations, where it took him until Meditation 6 to get to other people.)
Ouch. I couldn’t even try.
I’ll need to listen to figure out how that “self” realizing there are other selves (threatening existence?) makes any sense…people have families right?
Ah, pardon, but where is episode 34, the Frege episode?
Wait, don’t reply, I’m an idiot. I thought that this was the episode posting, not the posting for the reading. Sorry!!
Unfortunately, Hegel is does not sit down and explain it like Rousseau does in terms of a coherent story of social development that can be easily understood and evaluated.
Secondary sources do this, however, though I’m inadequately familiar with them. In interpreting this myself, I personally don’t see the point of the “struggle unto death” part of this. The fact that your parents treat you in a certain way and this gives you a start on your sense of self does. So yes, children are obviously needy and inconsiderate, but “selfish” is the wrong way to describe them, because they’re not acting out of rational reflection on who they are and what they need. “Wanton” is a more apt word. Whimsical. Like a force of nature, or a hungry animal, not like a human looking to his or her “self.”
This might seem like just a choice in wording, but when a philosopher tries to build ethics on this native selfishness, that doesn’t work. “Rational selfishness,” i.e. analyzing what it is you really are and consequently need/want, is a move away from the unreflective childhood state, and once you start holding your own impulses up to reason, reason does not unequivocally tell you that you just have to make those impulses coherent and call that your “self” and serve it. You can in the act of examination decide that any number of things/goals/values is “really” you (meaning of course that the act of finding yourself is mostly just constructing yourself, not that it need feel like it’s under your control or even be under your control), including goals that have no straightfoward benefit for my individual body or enjoyment.
I’m very much looking forward to this podcast and this may be the first podcast wherein I’ll read the text (or some of it) before you guys take it apart for me.
On a side note I understand Zizek’s next book is going to be all about Hegel. Have you considered doing a Zizek episode?
There’s a small but interesting link at the bottom of the page for Terry Pinkard’s new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
An advertisement for the book that was run in German newspapers and literary journals in 1807 and was “probably penned by Hegel himself”.
Full text of the ad:
This volume is the exposition of the coming-to-be of knowledge. The phenomenology of spirit is supposed to take the place of psychological explanations and also those of abstract discussions about the grounding of knowledge. It examines the PREPARATION for science from a standpoint through which it constitutes a new, interesting philosophy and a “first science” for philosophy. It comprehends within itself the various SHAPES OF SPIRIT as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge, that is, absolute spirit.
Consequently, the principal sections of this science are examined in terms of the following divisions, which themselves are divided into even more sections: consciousness, self-consciousness, observing and acting reason, spirit itself as ethical, as culturally maturing, and as moral spirit, and finally as religious spirit in its distinct forms.
The wealth of the appearances of spirit, which at first glance seem to be only chaotic, is brought into a scientific order, exhibiting them in terms of their necessity and within which the imperfect modes fall into dissolution and pass over into the higher forms which are their proximate truth. They find their final truth at first within religion and then, as the result of the whole, in science.
In the PREFACE, the author explains what the current standpoint regarding the necessity of philosophy seems to amount to; further, he explains the presumptuousness and nonsense of philosophical formulas which belittle contemporary philosophy, and he explains what is at stake in contemporary philosophy and the study of it.
A second volume will contain the system of LOGIC as speculative philosophy and the two other parts of philosophy, namely, the SCIENCES OF NATURE and OF SPIRIT.
http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page_files/Hegel%27s%20advertisement%20for%20the%20Phenomenology.pdf
Cheers,
Tom
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes seven varieties of phenomenology, including Husserl’s ‘transcendental’ (where ‘reality’ is bracketed) and Heidegger’s ‘existential’ (from one’s own Dasein) approaches. One of the seven they call “generative historicist phenomenology”. This can help to differentiate Hegel’s concept of phenomenology from the 20th century Husserlian model. The SEP describes this branch thus:
“Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time.”
No doubt one of Hegel’s aims in the Phenomenology of Spirit is to show how such concepts as self, agency, reason-giving, freedom, conscience, and science are not exactly discoveries but genetic creations of the human historical socializing process. These concepts define what Hegel means by spirit, which he thinks has to be self-generating and ultimately self-comprehending. BUT…
Does this mean that the world and everything accounted for here is subjective or intersubjective only? No.
Although Hegel is appropriated for his insight in social areas, it has to be said that he was not a subjectivist about nature, and could perhaps even be described as a qualified defender of Aristotle. For Hegel the virtue of modern philosophy against the ancients is the development of subjectivity and freedom, i.e. the realm of spirit or normative rationality, however this cannot excuse the abandonment of realism or the classical idea that reason is ultimately continuous with nature. On this point Hegel is radically different from 20th century phenomenology.
Hegel has a philosophy of nature. In its patterns, repetitions, and reproductions, nature displays the germ of rationality as identity-in-difference. But of course this can only be recognized as such from the standpoint of a developed world of human rationality, which makes it difficult for us to discern the objective from the subjective.