Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Martin Heidegger, Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1988
• ISBN:
  9780253004413
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The text of Martin Heidegger's 1930-1931 lecture course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit contains some of Heidegger's most crucial statements about temporality, ontological difference and dialectic, and being and time in Hegel. Within the context of Heidegger's project of reinterpreting Western thought through its central figures, Heidegger takes up a fundamental concern of Being and Time, "a dismantling of the history of ontology with the problematic of temporality as a clue." He shows that temporality is centrally involved in the movement of thinking called phenomenology of spirit.

FIRST PART

Consciousness

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Chapter One

Sense Certainty

The history of spirit happens in a movement characterized as coming to itself, a movement which shows a remarkable monotony and uniformity, often to the point of the constant application of certain specific formulae. But we should not fail to see, over against precisely such a monotony, that each stage of that history always has its own actuality. Our interpretation cannot therefore follow a rigid schema into which we would force the individual chapters each in its turn. Rather, each section demands to be thought through, interpreted, and clarified in its own way. This is so not only because each section has its own content in itself, but also because this content is in each case different, depending on the already transmitted history of the absolute spirit.

According to what we have said so far, it is clear that the first section of the Phenomenology of Spirit—“A. Consciousness”—and particularly its first part—“Sense Certainty”—demands an interpretation which is entirely peculiar to it but in which it nevertheless must then avoid losing itself. Here we must try to see whether we can succeed in awakening the inner law of the work, enabling us to attain the depth and fullness of the whole. It would be easy—or at least it is not the most difficult thing—to drag a whole profusion of historical and systematic issues into individual sentences and concepts and so shape the interpretation in such a way that the lawfulness proper to the work and its problem would disappear from view.

The first long section of the work is entitled: “A. Consciousness” and has three parts: “I. Sense certainty; or the this and intending/meaning,”* “II. Perception; or the thing and deception,” “III. Force and Understanding, appearance and the supersensible world.”

§6. Sense certainty and the immediacy

a) Immediate knowledge as the first necessary object for us who know absolutely

Hegel begins by saying: “The knowledge which is at first or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of a being. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it.”¹

Hegel begins with this short passage, which succinctly outlines what “our object” is “at first”—and not just is our object, for this or that reason, but what our object must be at first (it “cannot be anything else …”). This already assigns the task of saying how this object must be our object. We are in general clear about what the overall pervasive object presented by the unfolding of the Phenomenology of Spirit is: it is knowing. That is why Hegel begins by saying: “The knowledge which is at first.…” But which knowledge? What does knowledge mean when taken formally? We “know” something when this something exists for a consciousness. For this reason Hegel says in the introduction: knowledge is the relation “of the being of something for a consciousness.”² That knowledge and not something else is our object is not discussed further. Rather, question and answer aim at once at that knowing which “at first” must be “our object.”

In which sequence within which progression should this “at first” be understood? What the “at first” means can be determined only on the basis of this question. But Hegel himself already gives an explanation: he says, “at first or immediately.” This “or immediately” is not idly written down to crowd out the foregoing expression, but is rather its interpretation. However, what does “immediate” mean? Does it mean simply what we have before us accidentally without further ado? At times that can be a different knowing. One person is in the midst of an ethical decision, another is involved in a religious debate. One person is immersed in a work of art, the other philosophizes. One person keeps a head count, the other observes the stars in a telescope, and another drives a car. In every such case each person finds himself in a different knowing. How can one say which knowing is immediately our object? Obviously this question can never be settled in a way which is valid for everyone. But does “immediate” here mean what anyone would simply hit upon if he wanted to pinpoint knowledge in himself? The question is not about a knowing which suggests and presents itself simply to anyone. Rather, the question is about “the knowing” which must be “immediately our object.” “Our”? Who are the “we” for whom this “our” is meant—“our object,” object for us? Does the “we” refer to us who sit here and think about this or that, who now read the Phenomenology of Spirit, just as earlier we were reading a text in middle high German or a medical textbook, just as later we shall be reading Pindar or a newspaper? No. Rather, the “we” refers to those who already from the outset know absolutely and who apprehend and determine things in the manner of this knowing. The manner of this knowing is not to know relatively, not to know merely by constantly fastening precisely on what is known, but rather detaching oneself from what is known, to know the knowing of this known. It means, not to be absorbed in what is known, but to transmit it as such, as what is known to where it belongs as known and from where it stems, i.e., to transmit the known to the knowledge of it and so to know the mediation between what is known and knowledge. This is to say that this mediating knowledge itself now takes in its turn what it knows only as a means, so that with its help the mediating knowledge knows what is known more originally as such. Mediation is in its turn transmitted into the means by which the mediation knows what is its known, etc.

The object for us, our object, is the object for those who from the outset know in such a way as to comport ourselves mediatingly, in the manner of sublating that has already been characterized, a sublating which is itself the way absolute knowledge occurs and is the character of that restlessness which is the absolute and which Hegel also calls “absolute negativity” or “infinite affirmation.”³ What this means is shown in the Phenomenology of Spirit. It suffices for now to say that so far as this knowledge is concerned, the knowing attitude is never a simple affirmation or a simple obstinate denial. It is not the denial of an affirmation, or the affirmation of a denial. Rather, this attitude is what serves as the inner law of the negation of the negation.

According to what has been said, what is im-mediate for us, the mediators, is for our mediation not yet mediated. To the extent that from the outset we basically and constantly comport ourselves mediatingly, to the extent that we in principle and actually know everything as mediated or mediatable, we come across what is im-mediate only when we, who know absolutely, fail to take ourselves seriously enough, when we as it were condescend only to immediate knowledge. We do not surrender ourselves and our way of knowing by this condescension. The immediate to which we, the mediators, condescend always already stands under the dominion of mediation and sublation. The latter in turn can of course be what it is only when it condescends to what is un-mediated, precisely in order to mediate it. The im-mediate is already the im-mediated of mediation.

It thus becomes clear who the “we” are who right at the beginning say “for us.” “We” are those who know in terms of the science of absolute knowledge. From the beginning the “we” has lost the option of being this or that person and thus of being, randomly, an ego.

It is only from this perspective that we can and must ask which knowledge must at first be our object. In order to mediate absolutely, we must comport ourselves immediately, in keeping with the character of our mediation. Our non-mediation at the beginning amounts to our postponing all sublating and mediating; we comport ourselves toward knowledge absolutely relatively—receptively only—in that we do not as yet “get thought moving in manifold ways.”⁴ “Getting thought moving in manifold ways” does not mean thinking back and forth, but means rather the movement of absolute restlessness. To some extent this movement rests for a moment in knowing what is immediate. But it should be noted how the character and necessity of the possible first object is determined in terms of the knowledge of the knowers. It is not at all as if one were seeking some vague immediacy. Rather, the sense of the immediacy is determined from the very beginning, thus circumscribing the scope for what can and must be the first object of this knowledge. We the mediators must necessarily take as our first object that knowledge which as such is knowable in such a way as to demand on its own basis nothing else but pure apprehension. That is why the first object for us—which is knowledge as such—must be “knowledge of the immediate.”

A being is what Hegel calls this immediate as the object of that knowledge which is the immediate object for us who know absolutely. Accordingly, we have in our knowledge two objects, or one object twice. This is the case necessarily and throughout the entire Phenomenology, because for us the object is basically and always knowing, which in itself and according to its formal essence already in its turn has its object which it brings along with it. Hegel expresses this relation exactly by distinguishing the “object for us” from the “object for it”—for it, namely, for that knowing which is in each case the object for us. Insofar as the knowing which is our object is only a knowing because something is known for it, the object for this knowing belongs precisely to the object for us.

Now, the experience which consciousness undergoes with itself in the Phenomenology is just that it comes to know that the object for it is not the true object. It learns that the truth of its object lies precisely in what this object is for us—for us who know knowledge and its known already in its character as sublated, knowing it this way fundamentally although it is still under wraps. The object for it must develop through us into the object for us. Through us does not mean that as random subjects we would arbitrarily set to work on that object, but rather that from out of knowledge itself (for which it is always an object) the possibility is given to the object for it to become what it is, namely, absolute knowledge. Thus, knowledge reveals itself as that which at the time it is not and as that which in this not-being it simultaneously is in truth. Knowledge itself (as what is known in absolute knowledge) brings to light the measure by which it at any given time measures and finds its truth. But the respective measure itself then enters into knowledge as the truth for it.

However, we are still not yet entirely clear about the relations and how they become manifest, inasmuch as knowledge appears for the science and is presented by means of science, a presentation which constitutes the coming-to-itself of the science.

b) The being-in-and-for-itself of the subject-matter and the contemplation of absolute knowledge. “Absolvent” absolute knowledge

The object for us, who know the science, is always a knowledge. In this objectified knowledge lies knowledge’s own relation to its known: the object for it. However, for it, for immediate knowledge, the object is at first and immediately not yet for it, but is in itself. For it, for totally immediate knowledge, the object simply returns into itself. Or more accurately stated: The object has not yet at all gone out of itself as what stands opposed [as Gegen-stand]. It has not gone to oppose knowledge of it in order to stand opposed to this knowledge. Remaining entirely with itself, this object is a being-in-itself. The object [Gegen-stand] “stands”, but not as opposed to knowledge. Immediate knowledge in itself has just this feature and this character of knowing, that it surrenders the object entirely to itself. The object stands in itself as that which does not need to be for a consciousness. And consciousness grasps the object immediately, precisely as something invariable in itself. Thus, we have the object of the known knowledge in three ways:

1. The object in itself, as it is immediate for it (consciousness);

2. The being-for-it of the in-itself;

3. The being-for-us of what is a being-for-itself as such.

And yet what the object is as object for us is only the anticipated true for-it of the in-itself. For being-for-it is already the first step of dissolution from immediate absorption in the in-itself; it is already the mode of mediating and no longer immediate knowledge. Immediate knowledge returns to this mediating absolute knowledge. Immediate knowledge begins the return, not to something alien, but to something which exists for itself. That is why the object is known absolutely only when it is not only in-itself and not only for it (that is, for consciousness that comes to know itself in that way), but also when the for-it becomes for itself and the in-itself follows thereby—in other words, when the object is known in and for-itself.

To put it differently and at the same time to anticipate an important aspect of Hegelian terminology, we can say that being-in-itself and being-for-another “fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.”⁵ They fall within that knowledge insofar as we who know absolutely know it. For abstract knowledge, by contrast, they fall apart, falling out of knowledge. Hegel likes to speak of the “falling out” and the “falling in” of what seemingly falls out into the truth of absolute knowledge, a knowledge which was previously still unevolved.

Regarding the difference between that which is in itself and that which is for another—in other words, for knowledge of the former—Hegel also uses the words object, concept, and essence as technical terms. Indeed, he interchanges these terms in a way which is characteristic of the entire problematic. That which is in itself can be called object, and what is for another—what is known or knowledge—can be called concept. But being-for-another is called object—in the sense of that which stands against—and accordingly, what the object is in itself, is called its essence or its concept. In both instances we are to experience, in the Phenomenology, whether and how the object corresponds to its concept or the concept corresponds to its object. As Hegel states: “It is evident that the two cases are the same. But the essential point to retain throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, concept and object, being-for-another and being-in-itself, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating. Consequently, we do not need to import standards, or to make use of our ideas and thoughts during the investigation; it is precisely when we let these go that we succeed in contemplating the subject matter as it is in and for itself.”⁶

We let our ideas and thoughts go: we who know absolutely do not become so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translators’ Foreword
• Introduction: The Task of the Phenomenology of Spirit as the First Part of the System of Science
• First Part: Consciouness
• Second Part: Self-consciouness
• Conclusion
• Editor’s Epilogue
• Glossary of German Terms