PHENOME'NOLOGY OF SPIRIT Tr/ A. V. Miller

PHENOME'NOLOGY OF SPIRIT https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/philosophie/hegel/phaenom/einleit.htm
BY 
G. w~ F.  HEGEL 
Translated by A.  V.  Miller with Analysis of the  Text 
and Foreword by 
J. N.  Findlay,  F.B.A., F.A.A.A.S. 
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This translation of Hegel's Phdnomenologie des Geistes has been made from the fifth edi- tion, edited by J. Hoffmeister, Philosophische Bibliothek Band [14@Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1952 
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Phenomenology of spirit. Index. 
ISBN -13  978-0-19-8!.l4597-rPbk 
I. Title 2. Miller, Arnold Vincent 3. Findlay, John Niemeyer 
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FOREWORD  - J.  N.  FINDLAY 

 

THE Phenomenology of Spirit, firs t pu blished in 1807, is a work seen by Hegel as a necessary forepiece to his philosophical sys- tem (as later set forth in the Encyclopaedia of the  Philosophical Sciences in Outline of 1817, 1827, and 1830), but it is  meant to be a forepiece that can be dropped and discarded once the student, through deep immersion in its contents, has advanced through confus~ons and  misunderstanding  to  the  properly philosophical point of view. It~ task is to run through, in a scien- tifically purged order, the stages in the mind's necessary pro- gress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy, showing thereby that this position is the only one that the .mind c;;t.n take, when it comes to the end of the intellectual and spiritqaJ adventures described in the book. But this sort of history, he tells us in Encyclopaedia §2S, necessarily had to  drag in,  more or less  out of place and inadequately cQaracterized, much that wOl,lld afterwards be adequately sC':t forth in the system, and it ~lso had to bringjn many motivating connections  of w~ich the  adventuring  mind  was  unaware, which explained why it passed from one phase of experience Of action to another, and yet could not be set forth in the full manner whicp. alone would render them intelligible. 
Heg~l also, in preparing for repubJication of the work before his death in 1831)  wrote a note which throws great light on his ultimate conception of it. It was, he writes, a peculiar earlier work (eigentumlichefr#bere Arbeit) which ought not to be revised, since it related to  the time at which it was  written, a  time at which an abstractAbsolute dominated philosophy, (See the final pOlragraphof the first section of Hoffmeister's Appendix Zur Feststellung des  Textes in the 1952 edition.) This note indi- cates that, while Hegel undoubtedly thought that the sequence of thollght-phases described in the Phenom~nolQgy-phases ex- perienced by humanity in the past and recapitulated by Hegel in ~is own thought-adventures up to and including his own ad- vance to the position of Science in about 1805-was a necessary

 

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sequence, he still did not think it the only possible necessary sequence or pathway to Science, and certainly not the pathway to Science that would be taken by men in the future, or that might have been taken in other cultural and historical settings. For Hegel makes plain by his  practice, as  well as in some of his utterances, that he does not confuse the necessary with the unique, that he does not identify a necessary sequence of phases with the only possible sequence that can be taken. Hegel was obviously familiar with the branching variety of alternative proofs, all involving strictly necessary steps,  that are possible in mathematics, and it is  plain that he did not think that a similar branching of proofs was  impossible in his  dialectical reasoning. Dialectic is, in fact, a richer and more supple form ofthought,.advance than mathematical inference, for while the latter proceeds on lines of strict identity, educing only what is explicit or almost explicit in some thought-position's content, dialectic always makes higher~order comments upon its various thought-positions, stating relations that carry us  far beyond theif obvious content. What is obvious, for example, in Being is not its identity with Nothing, and what is obvious in Sense- certainty is ootits total lack ofdetermin:::tteness. If mathemati- cal identities can thus follow different routes to the same or to different goals, dialectical commentaries can even more obvi- ously do the same, and Hegel in his varying treatment of the same material in the two Logics andin the Phenomenology shows plain recognition of this fact. A necessary connection, whether mathematical or dialectical, is not psychologically compUlsive: it represents a track that the mind mayor may not take, or that it mayor may not prefer to other tracks, on its journey to a given concJusion. Thereis no reason then to think that Hegel thought that the path traced'in the Phenomenology, though con- sisting throughout of necessary steps, was the only path that the conscious spirit could have taken in rising from sensuous immediacy to a bsolu te knowledge, I t was the pa th that had been taken by the World Spirit in past history, and that had been rehearsed in the consciousness of Hegel, in whom the notion of Science first became actual. But this involved no pronounce~ ment as to what pathway to Science would be taken by men in the future, nor as to what pathway would have been taken in other thinkable world~situations. For Hegel admits an element of the sheerly contingent, and therefore also of the sheerly possible, in nature and history. 
The sequence of phases to be studied in the Phenomenology therefore involves a fine blend of the contingently historical and the logically necessary. Its successive phases bring out what is logically implicit in its earlier phases, in the Hegelian sense of representing throughout an insightful, higher-order comment on previous contents, but they also only bring out a series of implications actually embodied in past history and in Hegel's own thought-history. Hegel, we know, did not desire to step out of his own time and his own thought-situation: the philos- opher, as he was later to say on page 35 of the Preface to the Philosophy qf Right, is necessarily a son of his own time, and his philosophy is that time 'comprehended in thought. To seek to transcend one's time is only, he says, to venture into the 'soft element' of fancy and opinion. The pathway to Science taken in the future may therefore differ profoundly from  the one studied in the Phenomenology: it may involve many abbreviations and a1ternative routings. It is not, however, profitable to con- sider such for us empty possibilities. The path to be considered is  the one actually taken in the past and terminating in the present. It is, however, for all that, a path involving necessary implications and developments which will be preserved in all paths taken in the future and in the terminus to which these lead. For, on Hegel's view, all dialectical thought-paths lead to the Absolute Idea and to the knowledge of it which is itself. 
It is  necessary, in considering the Phenomenology,  as in con- sidering al1  Hegel's other writings, to stress this initial point that, though Hegel may mention much that is contingent and historical, and may refuse to break wholly loose from this, his concern is always with the BegrijJe or universal notional shapes that are evinced in fact and history, and with the ways in which these align themselves and lead on to one another, and can in fact ultimately be regarded as distinguishable facets ofa single all-inclusive universal or concept.  (See, for example, Phenom- enology, §§6,  12 (pp. 12, 16)1; Encyclopaedia §§I 63-4.) For Hegel 
1 Page references to Hegel's Phmommo!ogy oiSpirit given within parentheses in the Fore· word are to the German edition edited by J. Hoffmeister (F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1952). The paragraph numbers arc those used in A. V. Miller's translation published in this volume,

 

viii 
the universal is no strengthless, arbitrary distillation of the com- mon features of what is individual and empirical; it iSI rather what must be conceived as realizing itself in what is individual and empirical, and as responsible both for the being and intelli- gibility of the latter. But what is thus universal will not neces- sarilyalign together what are contiguous in space and history, and hence in the Phenomenology  the conceptual treatment can jump wildly from one factual, empirical scene  to  the other, from, for example, the scientific universals behind phenomena 
to the fellow minds which discover them in phenomena, from the antique Stoics and Sceptics, who entrenched themselves in cogitative abstraction from contingent content, to the medieval devotees who located their explanatory abstractions beyond all such content, from the compassion which enables the man of conscience to forgive the sin-soiled man of action to the religious spirit which can see the divine in all men, and so on. 
It is also necessary to stress here that the dialectical develop- ment which Hegel sees  as  connecting his  phenomenological phases is a logical growth of notions out of notions, given to 
us who consider the cultural past of humanity as  resumed in ourselves, but not given 'as a l'ogical growth to those who, includ- ing ourselves, went through the actual cases of such notions, and not even exactly following the order of the corresponding particularizations. The mind of humanity in the past did not, for example, see the necessary logical step from  the kingdom of laws behind nature to the kingdom of subjects who consider nature, nor did they in fact historically pass from the one to the other. It is we, the phenomenological students of the shapes of Spirit, who see the logical connections between them, and therefore  also  for  phenomenological  purposes  the  order in which they must be arranged. It is important, therefore, that from tbe very beginning we frame viable conceptions of the logi- cal 'movements' our notional shapes of Spirit must undergo, movements of which temporal sequences are often only inade- quatelyand misplaced reflections.  (See, for example, Phenom- enology,  §80 I)  (p.  558); Encyclopaedia  &258.)  Subjectively,  of course, as we have said, all these movements involve a species of reflection, a retreat to the vantage-point of a higher-order and, as  we  might now say,  metalogical examination, and the consequent bringing into v

iew of what can be truly predicated