These lectures will present a cover-to-cover commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, with the goal of making clear the argument, structure, and reference points of this notoriously difficult work. As we attempt to decipher the intricacies of the Phenomenology step-by-step, we will take as a guiding theme Hegel’s modernity, or the question of how we now live and what forms of thought are necessary for making sense of our present ways of life. One side of this is Hegel’s concern with the social and economic basis for philosophy, which presents in its metaphysics a mirror of the legal and class relations that govern society, producing forms of thought fitted to the historic shapes of servitude, governance, and ownership. Hegel’s account of modern life and modern thought therefore involves a great excavation of the history of human culture, the shapes of ‘ethical life’ that have emerged and disappeared over the centuries, and asks what lessons we may take from them for the fate of our present epoch.
We will also see how the Phenomenology not only examines the sources of modernity, but presents in its style a modernist impulse to new forms of literary representation. Rather than a history of spirit, which would narrate the cultural past from an objective, third-person perspective, Hegel writes his phenomenology in a novelistic manner, presenting the many forms of consciousness on their own terms. This free indirect discourse is one reason for the difficulty of Hegel’s text, but it is also the key to its dramatic irony, as it takes us through a philosophical picaresque, inhabiting one mental model after another, revealing how each undermines itself in its attempts to become stable and self-sufficient. Though the endpoint is ‘absolute spirit,’ we will find that there are no shortage of textual, conceptual, and literary hurdles which Hegel tries to surmount in his attempted inauguration of philosophical modernity.
Readings – The only prescribed readings will be selections from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. Inwood). This text and supplementary commentaries by Jean Hyppolite, Gillian Rose, and H.S. Harris will be provided.
Course Schedule
Week 1 – The Project of the Phenomenology (Preface & Introduction, §1-89)
The first week will introduce the project and goals of the Phenomenology of Spirit as outlined in its paratextual opening chapters. We will see how Hegel situates his work within the revolutionary context of Napoleonic Europe and states his goal of presenting a comparable revolution in thought. In this sense, the Phenomenology may be understood as a work of cultural revolution, of bringing the life of the mind up to speed with modern political and economic life. To achieve this goal, Hegel attempts to work through the amassed detritus of modern philosophy, with all its formalisms and its abstractions, to show that the time is ripe to sweep away the old regime of thought. But at this stage of the book, in its introductory material, this transformation of thought can only be stated as a result in need of demonstration, and so must be accompanied by a discourse on style and method, laying out the manner in which the rest of the work will present this revolutionary narrative.
Week 2 – Ain’t It Just Like the Night (chs. I-III, §90-165)
As we enter into the Phenomenology proper, we are dropped into the thick of Hegel’s literary style. Rather than present a treatise on the forms and faculties of thought, the chapters on consciousness introduce us to ‘sense-certainty,’ ‘perception,’ and ‘the understanding’ as figures in a comic drama of misunderstanding and epistemic embarrassment. Though each of these subjective positions claims a privileged access to the objective world, each is shown to undermine itself and transform into the next figure. What the senses are supposed to simply show, is then perceived as filtered though mental categories, and still later understood as reflections of hidden laws. As satiric portraits of the empiricists, rationalists, and idealists, these chapters show the follies of modern philosophy’s search for a sovereign faculty of thought, because each form of consciousness only presents its object as it has been shaped by the predominant faculty.
Week 3 – Blood and Guts in High Theory (ch. IV, §166-230)
Continuing the satire of modern thought that began in the chapters on consciousness, the chapter on self-consciousness takes on the forms of social thought that predominate under modern economic life. Though the chapter begins with an apparent scene of the state of nature, followed by the infamous depiction of society’s beginnings in servitude, it is a mistake to read ‘self-consciousness’ as an anthropology. Rather, we will see how Hegel reconstructs the basic social divisions imagined by modern, bourgeois culture, which projects its relations of use, value, and contract into the primordial past. Hence, we will read ‘self-consciousness’ as an ethnology of economic man, which traces the forms of social relation that govern modern life and culminates in a critique of the ideological subject-positions that hold sway over its isolated individuals.
Week 4 – Critique of Natural Reason (ch. V #1, §231-346)
The fifth chapter of the Phenomenology returns us to the discussion of the mental faculties begun in the section on consciousness. Whereas in those chapters the faculties of sensation, perception, and understanding laid claim to the certainty of the objective world while presenting only their own forms of objectivity, here we find the faculty of reason offering another solution: that thought and reality are not separate domains but rather that rationality inheres in the world. However, this unity of reason with reality tends toward a bare identity, in which the laws of thought are considered unfounded unless matched to their exact counterparts in the natural world. And so, this chapter enumerates the ways that reason oversteps its claim to reality, searching through the natural world for some sign of itself, making reality rational but itself unreal.
Week 5 – The Individual and the Universe (ch. V #2, §347-437)
This week we will examine the second half of the chapter on ‘reason,’ where Hegel turns from the natural and psychological sciences to the social realm and the hypocrisies of public life. By way of literary figures seemingly borrowed from Cervantes, Moliere, and Goethe, Hegel shows how the antinomies of reason intercede on and undermine individual attempts to create stable social relations. To understand this section we will pay special attention to the economic character of its social portraits, which reveal the bourgeois ideals of propriety, utility, and autonomy as rationalisations of unethical life.
Week 6 – Because We Suffer (ch. VI #1, §438-483)
In week six, we turn from the first half of the Phenomenology – the five chapters on ‘Subjective Spirit’ – to the massive sixth chapter that makes up the section on ‘Objective Spirit.’ Hence, we depart from the mental faculties of consciousness and reason to examine their historical counterparts in the institutions of political life, beginning with the classical forms of community, cult, and state. Rather than look to the ancient world as a model for the ideal state, and against any classicism that would dare attempt a return, Hegel wants to show the contradictions that lay suppressed in the Greek polis and brought its ruin under the legal empire of Rome.
Week 7 – Courts and Courtesy (ch. VI #2, §484-537)
This lecture continues Hegel’s history of ‘objective spirit’ into the feudal era, where the personal relations of the court become the basis for political life. In this setting, it is no longer the decayed legal empire that holds sway, but the complex of feudal obligations whereby each subject swears fealty to another. But what is the value of an oath? What ensures the translation of words into action? In Hegel’s account, the royal court must be understood as a culture of willed self-alienation, composed of subjects who give their allegiance to a sovereign, knowing that the sovereign’s power extends only as far as their performance of vassalage allows. In thought, this alienation is redoubled by the confessions of religious faith, which takes solace in representations of a beyond, ensured only by the word of God’s intermediaries on earth. In this manner, the first and second estates – the clergy and nobility – are given their places in a regime that is as cynical as it is untenable...
Week 8 – Doomed to Freedom (ch. VI #3, §538-595)
This week we will see how Hegel accounts for the moment of intellectual and political modernity in the collapse of the old regime. On the one side, the culture of faith finds its nemesis in the interrogations of the Enlightenment, which demands proofs for the other-worldly only in the signs of this world. But in stripping faith of its beyond, enlightenment turns upon itself: pitting the godless piety of Deism against the pious atheism of the materialists. On the other side, the political life of the nobility is overthrown, replaced by a confederation of equal citizens. But whereas the nobility sublimated their lust for power in their allegiance to a sovereign, the bourgeoisie can only take power as individuals over and against a collective mass. Hence, the revolution of the third estate begets the Terror, which removes the heads of any who would raise them above the revolutionary crowd.
Week 9 – Confessionals (ch. VI #4, §596-671)
The chapter on ‘spirit’ draws to a close with a portrait of Hegel’s contemporary world: not the life of revolutionary France but that which the Reformation had created in Germany. Rather than turning outward to abolish the culture of the old regime, this form of life takes its professions of faith and alienation further inward, seeking a purer relation between the self and the beyond. What results is a dialectic of morality and hypocrisy, as each subject claims insight into the proper form that ethical life ought to take, while denouncing the insight of all others. Hence, the final figure of ‘objective spirit’ is the ‘beautiful soul,’ who forsakes the world for their private confession, though without a world to speak of this confession must be as empty as it is absolute.
Week 10 – In Monuments and Marble (ch. VII #1, §672-747)
Hegel’s history of ‘objective spirit’ concluded with the form of absolute spirit sans content. To supplement this empty form, a second history is provided, which runs back through world history from the perspective of religious consciousness. For Hegel, religion describes the ways that the absolute is represented, whether in artwork, doctrine, or acts of devotion. Because these representations do not provide direct visions of the god, but are images fashioned by human hands, religion must be understood as the reflection of a culture upon its own notions of the absolute. Refusing the pious atheism that would dismiss religion as mere superstition, Hegel wants to show that the image of divinity is an alienated image of the humans who made it, who present to themselves an absolute ideal that they do not yet recognise as their own creation.
Week 11 – The Kingdom is Within (chs. VII #2, §748-787)
The penultimate lecture will take us through the final section on ‘revealed religion.’ Here, we will see how Hegel treats Christianity not as the pinnacle of religious consciousness but its self-sublation. Though represented in icons, ritual, and the prose of the gospels, the teachings of Christ transpose the divine from a ‘beyond’ into the community of believers, who live in imitation of a god who became human. Decades before Nietzsche, Hegel declared ‘god is dead’ – and ‘man’ has taken his place! A critical reading of Hegel’s recuperation of Christianity as humanism will allow us to place the Phenomenology as a precursor both to Nietzsche’s Genealogy and to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, where the spirit of religion is shown to persist in the ‘disillusioned’ ideologies of modern, secular culture.
Week 12 – Conclusion (ch. VIII, §788-808)
Finally, we will take a look at the brief chapter on ‘absolute knowing,’ where Hegel attempts to summarise his project and knit together the form of the absolute found in ‘spirit’ (chapter VI) with the absolute content of ‘religion’ (chapter VII). We will see how Hegel brings the lessons of these last two chapters together to answer the problems left unresolved in chapters one to five. That is, the contradictions of ‘subjective spirit’ (chapters I-V) cannot be resolved by theoretical reason alone, but necessitate a reformation in philosophical culture and a revolution in practical thought. The Phenomenology therefore attempts to place thought in history, revealing the basis of theoretical reason in the real transformations of collective life. Concomitantly – and problematically – it brings this history to thought, surveying the past to find a rational structure even in its long stretches of destruction and disorder. If the modern spirit of the Phenomenology is realised, it must be the redemption of history in thought, which is finally able to look upon the shapes of the past and recognise them as stages in its long journey toward absolute self-knowledge.