These lectures will present a close reading of the preface, introduction, and conclusion to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The approach will be primarily textual, providing a step-by-step guide to Hegel’s argument, its construction, and its implicit points of reference. Rather than summarise the entire work, the lectures will focus on its paratextual chapters to highlight the conceptual framework by which it is structured, the speculative perspective from which Hegel attempts to write it, and the difficulties he encounters in merely stating these elements at the outset. The reading will be supplemented by a structural overview of the book’s composition and an account of its place in the rest of the Hegelian system. Though the lectures will be concerned in the main with the explication of Hegel’s writing, reference will also be made to the foundational commentaries of Hyppolite, Lukacs, and Rose (among others), as well as the critical receptions of Marx, Althusser, and Derrida.
Readings: The only prescribed readings will be selections from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirt (trans. Michael Inwood) for weeks 1-4, and Gillian Rose’s “The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy” (in Mourning Becomes the Law) for week 5.
Week 1 – Outlines of a Speculative Thought: The Opening of the Preface (§1-35)
This week will cover the first half of the preface to the Phenomenology, examining Hegel’s abstract statement of his project. We will begin with the irony of the chapter’s opening, where Hegel hedges against prefaces as a sub-philosophical genre of writing, even as he carries on writing one himself. This will be followed by an explication of Hegel’s polemics against formalism, with its implicit targets of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Finally, having moved through these initial critical moves, we will see how Hegel’s absolute idealism begins to take shape as the recognition of substance as subject, and vice versa.
Week 2 – Thinking the Absolute: The Rest of the Preface (§36-72)
The second week will turn to the rest of the preface, where the abstract polemical statements of the first half are complicated by Hegel’s ambition to not only state the path to absolute knowing, but show it in its own terms. We will follow Hegel through a series of philosophical oppositions: true and false, understanding and reason, abstract and concrete. Then, we will see how even these oppositions must become complicated in the work of their exposition, which may give them as results but cannot depend upon them at the outset.
Week 3 – Negative Experiences: The Introduction (§73-89)
In week three we will perform the same process of close reading on Hegel’s introduction, where he presents his concept of experience and offers some explanations of what makes his work specifically phenomenological. The reading of this short chapter will be supplemented with a structural overview of the rest of the work, detailing the orders of logic, narrative, and historical reference around which the key moments of the Phenomenology cohere.
Week 4 – Estrangements: The Conclusion (§788-808)
Jumping from the Phenomenology’s introduction to its conclusion, we will see how the notions of abstraction, experience, substance, and subject presented in the opening of the book are transformed by the exposition of the intervening chapters. Moving beyond the Phenomenology, we will also see how the work takes up multiple places as the introduction to Hegel’s system: first as the bridge into the Science of Logic (the shape of which is already modelled in the forms of Spirit), then as the groundwork for absolute ethical life rearticulated in the Philosophy of Right, and lastly as the first draft for what would later become the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Mind.
Week 5 – Two Narrative Perspectives on the Phenomenology of Spirit
In the final week we will take a step back from reading the Phenomenology to examine the cohesion of its narrative overall. This will be performed with reference to the conventions of two genres: tragedy and comedy. The tragic reading of Hegel’s work lends itself to his labours of the negative, in which the many forms of Spirit must inevitably succumb to the contradictions of their inner character. But such a reading of the Phenomenology as a drama of fate tends to put the cart before the horse: presupposing its conclusions and reducing the moments of Spirit from independent beings to fleeting stage-masks. The comedic reading, on the other hand, is one turned to the ironic reversals and unexpected resolutions that motivate the work. As absolute comedy, the Phenomenology attempts to incorporate the negativity of its moments into a narrative that does not justify but fulfils them. To make sense of this comedy of Spirit is to recognise the contingency of its moments, the critical stance it takes toward its subject matter, and its intention toward a conceptual coherence that cannot be presupposed.