Phenomenology of Spirit

In the summer of 1806, as Napoleon Bonaparte was crushing the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, nearby at the University of Jena, Georg Hegel was finishing one of the greatest philosophical meditations in the Western canon, his Phenomenology of Spirit (Geistes)(1807). In the grand tradition of Augustine, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, Hegel sought to ground all knowledge in the certainty of careful introspection into the contents of consciousness and the Absolute Spirit that he discovered as a result. For some 50 years, his Phenomenology and later works dominated Western philosophical thought. Then Darwin published his Origin of Species, and for a half century Hegel’s dominance vanished. If there are no hard borders to the various species, then there are no essences attached to them. If species evolve through the crucible of natural selection, then humans have evolved, and human minds have evolved also. So human concepts about our world don’t reflect timeless, immutable essences. And phenomenological analysis of our consciousness of these concepts and mental contents can’t reveal the timeless essence of human consciousness. However, as the 1800’s came to a close, Darwinian science had yet to be matched with Mendelian genetics and eventually with Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA, so until then there was a sense among many philosophers that the Darwinian experiment had reached a blind alley in terms of providing an empirical basis for explaining the human mind, and thus that the Hegelian-based introspective methods of investigating the mind should be adopted again. Accordingly, interest in Hegel’s work was revived through the influence of the Englishman Francis Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 1893) and the Germans Edmund Husserl (Ideas, 1913) and Martin Heidegger (Being and Time, 1927), among others. Such contemporary Anglo-American philosophers as John Searle, Wilfrid Sellars, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and many others roughly follow this theme of using introspection to analyze human thinking and consciousness. It is illuminating to go back to the source of this traditional analysis – Hegel’s Phenomenology – to uncover the philosophical basis for this certainty among many that only the ‘first-person point of view’ is valid as an analysis of mind. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is beautifully written, as are all really great philosophical works; however, the elegance of Hegel’s language and the confident tone of his argumentation belie the difficulty of penetrating his work. A.V. Miller’s translation, on its own merits, is very readable, and J. N. Findlay’s Foreword is indeed helpful, but close reading of Hegel requires use of ‘companion’ works to assist the non-specialist reader. In the late 1940’s, as Francis Crick was beginning to perform his X-ray experiments to determine the crystalline structure of DNA, and as Alan Turing was formulating his thought experiment for determining whether a computing machine could exhibit intelligence, Martin Heidegger gave a series of lectures to his students on Hegel’s Phenomenology, published in 1950 in German and in 1970 in English under the title “Hegel’s Concept of Experience.” It’s an English translation of Hegel’s Introduction (by K. R. Dove) with line-by-line commentary by Heidegger on each short section of the Introduction, and it shows Heidegger’s scrupulous adherence to Hegel’s philosophical analysis of mind. Be forewarned: Heidegger can be as obtuse as Hegel in his ‘hermeneutical’ commentary on Hegel’s Introduction (e.g., “Unconditional self-awareness, being the subjectiveness of the subject, is the absoluteness of the Absolute.” Heidegger, pg. 34). Heidegger says at the start of his explication of Hegel’s Introduction, “’Experience’ states what ‘Phenomenology’ is.” Hegel begins his Introduction with the pronouncement that “one must first come to an understanding concerning the nature of knowledge before taking up the real subject matter, namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is.” He shortly thereafter follows with, “Natural consciousness will show itself to be merely the Concept of knowledge, or unreal knowledge. . . this road is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. . .” The first step of this process is to take “the abstract determinations of knowledge and truth [as they] are called to mind as they exist in consciousness.” This process is a “dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises on itself—on its knowledge as well as its subject—[and] is, in so far as the new, true object emerges to consciousness as the result of it, precisely that which is called experience.” Heidegger comments, “Philosophy now is unconditional knowledge within the knowledge of self-certainty.” Another useful guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is Gadamer’s Hegel’s Dialectic (1976), which is an English translation by Christopher Smith of five essays penned by Gadamer in the 1960’s and published in the original German in 1971. Gadamer holds that Hegel’s deep theme in the Phenomenology is to treat self-consciousness, “not as something previously given, but as something to be specifically demonstrated as the truth in all consciousness.” Gadamer claims that, to accomplish this task, Hegel ‘demonstrates’ the conversion of consciousness into consciousness-of-itself. Gadamer shows that Hegel’s demonstration of the ‘doubling back’ of self-consciousness into itself is “not self-consciousness as an individual point,” but rather a ‘spirit-world.’ Hegel first shows the initial state of this universal spirt-world is that of ‘Perception,’ i.e., the ‘immediate dependency’ of consciousness on sense data (the “sense certainty” that a thing has qualities such as whiteness, hardness). Hegel then shows that this universal spirit-world transitions to the higher state of consciousness of ‘Understanding,’ i.e., to knowledge of a universe of objects standing in ‘force relationships’ to each other. “What exists are forces and their interplay.” This supersensible residual world is the ‘inverted world’ that is hidden behind the world of appearances. It is what remains after the world of constant changes disappears from consciousness. Hegel says, “The supersensible world is thus a tranquil realm of laws” – beyond the perceived world, but present in it as “its immediate, still image.” This universal spirit-world is the product of Hegel’s ‘dialectic of self-consciousness.’ It is the still image of constant change. This true spirit-world is not in opposition to the world of appearance. The true, supersensible world contains both aspects, it maintains itself in infinite change, it is continually differentiating itself from itself. It is consciousness of itself as infinite differentiation.

The book is really needed by me and the markings in it aren't a problem in this case. It's as if the philosopher himself marked it exactly in the spot I needed to note first to understand something really important that's rare to encounter at the right level if one is in the academic field of literary study and not Philosophy.

The Phenomenology is quite possibly the best work of philosophy ever put to paper. It’s also the bane of many a philosophy grad due to its complexity. Hegel is difficult, sure, but I can’t imagine reading anything other than Miller’s translation aside from the original German. Findley’s notes at the end are fantastic for reading comprehension (but do yourself a favor and don’t treat them as a crux, this is a text to be savored and thoroughly worked through on its own terms). Kant’s first critique and the Phenomenology are the gateway to understanding modern thought. In the Anglo-American world, Kant has clearly been more influential, and Hegel has always been considered “the continental”, solely for Germans and the French. Readers and students who deny themselves this, though, are doing themselves a disservice and missing out on half of our rich philosophical tradition. Regardless of what you hear, work through the preface, On Scientific Cognition, first. He overviews his whole system with the qualification that the true is both substance, the objective, stuff, a bone, and subject, the subjective, the self. Absolute idealism means just this: we do not interact with things, objects, but our ideas of those objects. When I take something as my object, I’m taking my understanding of it, my ideas, a photocopy made of pure thought. That is, I AM MY IDEAS and I exist insofar as I partake in acts of mind. I aim at the object, a glass of water, to quench thirst, but what I find, through Aufhebung (sublation) is my own metaphysical lack, that I exist insofar as I require water. I have thus changed, my understanding of the object qua object has changed, and my understanding of myself qua subject has changed. I AM NOW A DIFFERENT SUBJECT BECAUSE MY OBJECT HAS SHIFTED. I desire to know more about myself, but I see how my nature is to always direct my focus outside of myself for self-completion. This is the dialectic, going outside, coming back, learning, going out again. It’s process, not a “thing”, a ready-to-hand instruction. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing is actually Fichte, a predecessor of Hegel’s, and while he refers to it several times, Hegel would warn against trying to collapse his work (or any body of philosophical knowledge) into a particular, fixed, determination. The dialectic is everything. Also, all the conspiracy theory stuff is insane antisemitic propaganda. Hegel’s a philosopher’s philosopher, not a boogeyman for people whose worldview is motivated by a deep terror of anything that doesn’t look and behave exactly like them.

Let me start by addressing some misconceptions you'll see as you roam around these reviews. First of all, there are a couple of low reviews that refer to Hegel as being "anti-reason," "anti-truth," a socialist, a collectivist, etc. These are written by Objectivists - followers of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand has about the same relationship to serious philosophy as McDonalds does to good cooking. She hated Hegel (as all who consciously or unconsciously know they do not have sufficient intelligence to understand him), but never quite seemed to understand him. No surprise - he's hard. Which is the second point. This is not an easy book at all. That's why it's most often assigned to graduate students. Even undergrads can easily get a philosophy degree without ever touching this book. It's bloody hard. This is because, well, its ideas are radical and difficult, and because Hegel is a careful philosopher. It is not, and this is my third point, because Hegel is a bad writer. Quite the opposite. He's a great writer. The fact of the matter is, though, that his subject matter is not exactly a page-turner. But, I mean, what do you expect. You're reading academic philosophy. There are a handful of academic books that are both worthwhile and fun to read, and that's just a fact of life. Hegel, however, is quite clear - indeed, believe it or not, his style is didactical! (As another reviewer pointed out). Unfortunately, it's all too common on Amazon to bash academic books because they're (supposedly) hard, obscure, or poorly written. The fact of the matter is that these books are not for everyone. They're for specialists and scholars (or enlightened auto-didacts), and are written in a language that is appropriately technical to that task. You don't go and bash medical and scientific books for being too hard for you. Give philosophy a break, and recognize this book as what it is - one of the most important contributions to a scholarly field ever

Is this book easy to read? Absolutely not. But is it worth purchasing and coming back to? Yes. Very much so. It’s a struggle until it there are moments when it comes together, and then one loses it again. There is no shame in using secondary literature as a clarifier. But one must struggle, reflect, and keep coming back.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is one of the most notoriously difficult texts ever written. It’s also one of the most misunderstood due to its susceptibility to mistranslation. (For example, “Spirit” in English has more ghostly/superstitious connotations than it does in the German “geist”; the meaning here is closer to “mind”, but “mind” implies brain/psychology in English, which is not intended in German. Various terms throughout the book are thus translated in a muddy and confusing way for accuracy, ironically). An EASY example of what to expect on any given page: “Although, as consciousness, it does indeed come out of itself, yet, though ‘out of itself’, it is at the same time kept back within itself, is ‘for itself‘, and the self outside it, is for it. It is aware that it at once is, and is not, another consciousness, and equally that this other is ‘for itself‘ only when it supersedes itself as being for itself, and is for itself only in the being-for-self of the other.” It’s not that the passage doesn’t make sense—the logic is technically flawless, in context—it’s that it’s worded in the most excruciating way possible. After just a couple pages of this you’ll be squirming in your seat. For the general reader, this text is most useful as a reference to use while studying Hegel through secondary texts. I highly recommend ‘Introduction to the Reading of Hegel’ by Alexandre Kojève (himself a renowned philosopher). I tried to read Hegel’s famous master-slave passage unsupplemented, and I understood very little; then I read Kojève’s chapter on it, which includes the whole thing but inserts bracketed clarifications after nearly every sentence, and everything clicked beautifully. I suddenly understood not only the concepts but why they matter. The contrast between Kojève’s lucid writing and Hegel’s tortuous prose was almost jarring. Still, if you’re seriously interested in Hegel, this is a must-have, if only for reference. Just don’t expect to get beyond the preface and introduction (which are the best parts anyway), unless you really want to feel, well, enslaved.

I love purchasing my books for school used off of amazon. I am a philosophy major and this was the perfect addition to my collection of books for school. It came in good condition in an orderly time frame. The book definitely had signs of previous owners but nothing too drastic. It had some annotations (which I actually find helpful sometimes and fun to read) and a few small stains. The pages were a bit yellowed but they were all held securely within the books binding. The binding had signs of wear but was not broken. Especially for the great price offered I would recommend purchasing used books from this company!

It's such a easy read 📚

I have absolutely no problem with this translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. What I do have a problem with—and why I’m giving this product a three-star rating—is the printing quality. It feels cheaply produced, and the hardcover edition is generally very low quality. When my copy arrived, it was already in somewhat damaged condition. That’s partly to be expected, since I bought it secondhand from the marketplace listed as ‘very good’ condition. But looking at the book, it seems like a structural issue with the binding itself, not just wear from this particular copy. At the normal price—around €30–€35—I don’t think it’s worth buying. For that amount of money, I’d recommend the Cambridge edition in paperback instead. It’s better printed and also has a more up-to-date translation.

Good

精神現象学の邦訳を、より理解するために英訳版を二冊参考にしています。ひとつはＪ・Ｂ・Baillieです。バイリーの訳はどちらかというと現代英語的な感じで、これはこれで文意がとりやすいので悪くはないと思いますが、原書に忠実という点になると、やや古典的な英文ながらこのMillerの本を推薦したいと思います。ドイツ語版で勉強するのがベストでしょうが、邦訳と対称しながら読むときにその正確さを実感します。パラグラフごとに番号がつけてあり、さらに巻末にはAnalysis(分析）として、訳者による要約的なコメントがパラグラフごとに付けられているという点でも充実していると思います。

Are you sick of the feeling that you're beginning to grasp the nature of reality? If your answer is "yes," then this book is for you! Have you found yourself thinking: "the world makes sense, I totally get it now." Well, my dear sweet summer child, you get nothing. Yes, nothing. My man Hegel here is going to shatter all the things you hold as true and good into tiny little shards of your broken dreams. "What's this master-slave dialectic? I've read so much about?" you ask. Again, I don't mean to shatter your already delicate disposition, but the 'master-slave dialectic' is your life--in case I'm not being clear, you're the slave, Donny Lord-Emperor Cheeto is one of the lords. Remember Marx? Yeah, Marx was Hegel's boy. Freud? Yeah, that's Hegel too. <Insert a Literary Theorist or Philosopher's Name Here> is drawing his/her/xer/they inspiration directly from the work of Hegel. "Wow, that's incredible," you say. "I'm going to read this book right now!" So... here's the problem. Hegel is freaking hard, like FREAKING hard. I'd start with Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel." And, before you ask, yes, there is a book about learning how to read Hegel. Many smart people have spent their whole lives trying to dig meaning from Hegel's prosaic prose, most of them fail. Best of luck my young padawan, you're going to need it. May the fourth be with you.

Llegó rápido y en excelentes condiciones, recomendadisimo!