Notes on Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit

A book review and the case for reading Hegel

I usually don’t write reviews, but I happened to write the skeleton of a review to Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit to my friend in an email thread, so I figured I would close the loop and flesh this out more. As a precaution, I am being recklessly loose with my philosophical reasoning for the sake of summarization and concision. For a more rigorous treatment, read the book!

One way to introduce Hegel is to describe what it’s like to read him. And the most succinct way I can convey that is that this is a 200 page book which offers an introduction to a preface of a treatise that Hegel wrote. Yirmiyahu Yovel is an excellent guide, offering a magisterial but accessible introduction to Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. His inline commentary is at least twice the text of the Preface itself, but is much-much needed to tackle sentences like the following (this is quite representative of most of the Preface):

Further, the living substance is being which is truly subject — or, to say the same — which is truly actual only in so far as it is a movement of self-positing, or the mediation of itself with its becoming-other. As subject, substance is pure simple negativity, and precisely thereby it is the splitting of the simple in two, or an opposition setting duplication which again is the negation of that indifference difference of its opposite: only this self-reconstituting identity, this self-reflection in being other, and not some original unity as such, or an immediate thing as such — is the true. The true is the becoming of its own self, the circle whose end is presupposed as its goal and constitutes its beginning, and which is actual only through its development and end.

By the end of this brief review, hopefully I will have covered some of the core conceptual tools that Hegel uses in the rather unintelligible excerpt above, and you’ll have an appreciation for how Hegel is a prism through which one can illuminate the philosophical import of Ancient, Modern, and 20th century (especially Marxist) thought.

Hegel’s overarching aim in his prime years was to address what he saw as critical defects in the Enlightenment project. For Hegel, the Enlightenment and its focus on individual freedom and subjectivity was a great step forward in the history of ideas, but it also left the baggage of abstractions that excluded emotions, feeling, and history from the remit of reason. In a very literal sense, Hegel saw his project as synthesizing the Enlightenment — its elevation of reason and the centrality of the individual subject — with history, art, mysticism, and religion. Hegel’s goals were essentially shared with religion and mysticism: to understand humanity and the individual human’s place in the universe, to understand God, and to know Being. He rejected, however, their method, which relied on the defective modes of art and analogy. Hegel believed that Reason was capable of synthesizing a guiding meaning for humanity, the individual, and God, but only if one moved beyond the scaffolding provided by the Enlightenment.

In the context of his time, Hegel wanted to move beyond three major schools of thought in modern philosophy in the wake of the Cartesian turn — the discovery of the cogito and therefore the importance of the subject in philosophy. The first two are rationalism and empiricism, which Kant — a critical launching point for Hegel, had attempted to unite in his Idealism. Rationalism held that abstract, a priori metaphysics could lead the way to understanding the world (eg, Spinoza). Empiricism held that sensory experience of the material world was primary, and that abstractions like causality were customary (eg, Hume). Kant united the two with his “Subjective Idealism”, which essentially held that the question to be asking is not “what is reality like?” but rather “What needs to be true of the knowing subject such that it can know what reality is like?”. This is the idea behind Idealism, which holds that the nature of the knowing subject both conditions and constitutes reality (eg, Kant holds that the a priori categories of time and space condition what we can know — we simply cannot understand things without these categories). The last was Romanticism, which especially in Hegel’s Germany had taken off with the works of Schelling and Holderlin (actually his two friends from university), who basically held that Being was an absolute and indefinable entity, by which one could only access through intellectual intuition or poetry.

Hegel’s project was to build off of Kant and move beyond him (sublation in Hegel’s terms — the idea is that by negating a concept, you do not abandon it but instead take its positive essence and incorporate it into a new, better concept). He did not agree with Kant’s creation of a priori categories like space and time that conditioned reality. He also did not agree with the existence of Kant’s noumena, the thing-in-itself that remains inaccessible to philosophy. Kant also implicitly created a dualism between subject and substance, a dualism that Hegel would reject. Hegel believed his Idealism could do it all. He would reconcile the Romantic/religious impulse for meaning, bridge the empiricist/rationalist divide between substance/”Being” and knowing, and incorporate human history and the contingencies of daily, secular life as an essential part of philosophy. Having lived through Kant’s revolutionary contributions, the French Revolution, and literally watched Napoleon invade his university town and the rest of Europe¹, Hegel believed that his system would bring to culmination the history of philosophical thought (Not a very ambitious guy, Hegel would probably have done B2B SaaS today.)

Having laid out the general aims and backdrop of Hegel’s system, here are a few precursory comments on his overall ideas:

• “The Absolute is Subject”, and the “True is the Whole”:

  • These are two axioms of Hegel. The very high level idea here is that there is no distinction between material reality and the realm of thought: all being and thinking is immanent. Thinking and being (substance) are two moments or perspectives of a single absolute subject, a single totality. Reality itself is subject-like: we are consciousnesses within reality that interact with, build relationships with, transform, and come to understand reality. There is no thinking vs being, the thinker is material substance and the substance is thinking. This is Hegel taking from Kant’s contribution: the structure of the subject is critical in conditioning and constituting reality. Except in this case, the subject is the object, the subject is aware not of some separate material reality but of itself. History is humanity’s journey through self-consciousness, and all individual things, including humans are particularizations of the world-spirit. History is then a becoming, in which being comes to understand itself.

• Dialectic:

  • Unlike Kant, Hegel does not believe in a priori categories or the formalism of Fichte’s “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” (this is one of the most commonly misattributed ideas to Hegel, who actively rejected what he saw as a rigid and formulaic 3-step process). Knowledge comes from dialectic, which is the interaction of concepts with each other in an organic way. One way of illustrating this is that in Hegel’s dialectic, A=A does not hold. Formal logic and mathematics assume a fictional reality in which there are identities. In reality, no two things are exactly alike. The negation of a negation does not return one to the point of departure, but rather to something new. As an example, an organism could be in a diseased state, a negation of its healthy state. Once it recovers, it is not simply identically healthy again, but rather healthy in a different way, with new antibodies to prevent future diseases. Hegel sees reality operating rationally in this way. Growth in understanding emerges when concepts sublate each other, when negation of an older idea does not destroy it entirely, but merely lifts its essential contribution into the embrace of an idea more rich in Being. Thus history contains memories, one cannot simply start afresh with new ideas, because the process of creating them is latent in the ideas themselves. Just as learning a fact does not mean one truly understands it until they’ve gone through the process of discovery, so too with history and the unfolding of knowledge in Hegel.

• Teleology and Becoming

  • A controversial belief of Hegel is that history is teleological, driven from the beginning by the force of Reason to understand itself. History is simply the process for achieving that understanding, which is latent from the start, like a circle that presupposes its end, or a sprout that contains the organic principle from its beginning. In the state of absolute knowing, all concepts are sublated. Man is fully self-conscious, he sees himself as both a subject of the world but also a substance within it. The process of becoming and the end of history arrives with this completed understanding.

• History and Social/Political Life

  • History is critical to Hegel. One can colloquially say that Hegel essentially takes Plato and historicizes him. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates undergoes a dialectic with his interlocutors, negating their ideas over time to bring them to knowledge of the Form or the true. In Hegel’s system, this is the role of history — “the human race creates history as the subject of a process in which it both manifests and constitutes itself.” - Yovel. Institutions like family, the state, and property are concepts that are both products of and further inputs to this world-historical telos of absolute knowing.

Further, the living substance is being which is truly subject — or, to say the same — which is truly actual only in so far as it is a movement of self-positing, or the mediation of itself with its becoming-other. As subject, substance is pure simple negativity, and precisely thereby it is the splitting of the simple in two, or an opposition setting duplication which again is the negation of that indifferent difference and of its opposite: only this self-reconstituting identity, this self-reflection in being other, and not some original unity as such, or an immediate thing as such — is the true. The true is the becoming of its own self, the circle whose end is presupposed as its goal and constitutes its beginning, and which is actual only through its development and end.

Now with some basic ideas in mind, we can get the gist of this excerpt, which happens to be a decent summary of Hegel’s system:

Substance (material reality) is a subject (or plays a role in constituting reality and being conscious of reality) only insofar as it engages with itself (the material world), becoming self-conscious by reflecting upon itself and mediating differences and relations between its concepts (eg, State vs Family). This is an organic, self-reconstituting self-identity in which the subject (humanity, and particularized, individual humans) over time recognizes itself in the other (both other people but the entire world at large), developing throughout history more powerful concepts and more awareness of its own nature, culminating in absolute knowing in the historical process of becoming.

To finally conclude, this may make philosophy seem like a total waste of time, but here’s some reasons for why this is not only interesting (if painful) but also important.

From Hegel comes the idea that history has an ordered, rational telos. Marx inverted Hegel, prioritizing material conditions over the march of Concepts. But the idea of a necessary proletariat revolution and the emergence of Communist utopia are distinctly Hegelian, just turned materialist.

From Hegel comes the idea that dialectic, a dynamic interplay that synthesizes and negates ideas in an organic way, is the proper mode of knowing. In contrast to formal logic, which presumes that identities and rules hold force in the messy world where no two things are ever the exact same, Hegel’s dialectic accommodates a different approach to philosophy that hugely influenced thinkers that came after him.

From Hegel comes the idea that the State and other political and social institutions embody a rational concept and in an almost Burkean sense, embody knowledge from history.

All of these ideas, and more, are made (more) accessible by Yovel’s wonderful exegesis.

1. Hegel, unlike his contemporary Schelling, was not a German nationalist, and therefore saw in Napoleon a powerful agent of the unfolding of Being and the self-consciousness that humanity would have of itself through new concepts and institutions. He memorably quipped of Napoleon that he was world-spirit on horseback: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” (Banger.)