- Length
- 640 pagesPinkard, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Cambridge, 2018
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Phenomenology of Spirit
The most difficult book in this section and the one with the longest downstream consequences. Hegel takes consciousness through a sequence of positions, each destroyed by its own internal contradiction, and argues that the sequence is not a record of failures but the way understanding actually develops.
- Date
- 1807
- Author
- G. W. F. Hegel
- Region
- Jena and Bamberg
- Language
- German
- 1910 English, J. B. Baillie Public domain and unreliable Attested
- 1977 English, A. V. Miller Long the standard; in copyright Attested
- 2018 English, Terry Pinkard From the modern critical text; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 39 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 26 years
Regarded as impenetrable from publication onward, including by admirers, and the single most consequential book in continental philosophy.
What the book says
A book that follows consciousness through every position it can take about knowledge, showing each one collapsing under a contradiction it generates itself, and treating the collapse as progress. It begins as simply as possible: with the claim that the richest knowledge is what the senses deliver immediately, this thing, here, now. Hegel shows that the moment consciousness tries to say what it knows it must use words - this, here, now - that apply to anything whatever, so the supposedly richest knowledge turns out to be the emptiest. Each subsequent shape fails in its own way and yields the next. Perception, force and understanding give way to self-consciousness, where the argument becomes famous: a self needs recognition from another self, two such beings meet, and the struggle that follows produces a master and a servant - after which the servant, through work on the world, develops a self the master cannot have. Then come stoicism, scepticism, the unhappy consciousness, reason, and the long section on spirit, which runs through Greek ethical life, Roman law, the Enlightenment and the Terror before arriving at religion and absolute knowing.
What it argues
That truth is the whole, and that a position can only be shown false by being followed through until it undoes itself. The method is what matters. Ordinary criticism measures a claim against an external standard, which invites the question of where that standard came from; Hegel instead takes each shape of consciousness on its own terms, holding it to the criterion it sets for itself, and shows that applying its own test produces a result it cannot accept. What emerges is not scepticism but a new position that contains what was right in the old one - which is why the sequence is a development rather than a series of demolitions. The lordship and bondage section supplies the general shape: self-consciousness needs another to be a self at all, so subjectivity is social before it is individual.
What it answered
Critique of Pure Reason 1781Immanuel Kant
Kant on the limits of knowledge, and Fichte and Schelling on how to do without the thing in itself. Hegel's preface attacks Schelling by name - not quite by name, but unmistakably - for an absolute in which all differences vanish, the night in which all cows are black, and the two men never spoke again. What he offers instead is an absolute that is a process rather than a starting point, arrived at through the determinate failures rather than posited before them.
What answered it
The German Ideology written 1845-46Marx and Engels
Marx first and most consequentially, by keeping the dialectic and denying that its subject is spirit. Kierkegaard attacked the system for having no place for an existing individual who has to choose. Schopenhauer called it charlatanry in terms that have rarely been matched. In the twentieth century the book was read in two quite different ways: Kojève's Paris lectures of the 1930s made the master-and-servant section the centre of French thought for a generation, and the analytic reception since the 1970s has taken the arguments about concepts, norms and recognition seriously on their own terms.
How it argues
By immanent critique, which is the innovation, in prose that is notoriously punishing even in German. Hegel does not argue for his conclusions; he stages the self-destruction of positions and lets the reader watch. The vocabulary is technical, the sentences are long, the key terms shift meaning as the argument develops - deliberately, since the whole claim is that concepts are transformed by what happens to them - and there are almost no examples. The preface, written last, is the most quoted part and is a defence of the method rather than a summary of the contents.
The moment
Jena in October 1806, with Napoleon's army in the town. Hegel was thirty-six, unsalaried, in debt, and had a friend who had guaranteed the manuscript's delivery to the publisher and would be liable if it missed the deadline. He finished it as the French arrived, wrote to a friend on the thirteenth that he had seen the emperor riding out on reconnaissance and described him as the world-soul concentrated at a single point, and worried mainly that the last pages would be lost in the post. The battle that destroyed the Prussian army was fought the next day.
How it travelled
Slowly, then in two waves. Hegel's death in 1831 was followed by a rapid decline in his reputation and the splitting of his followers into a right and a left, of which the second produced Feuerbach and Marx. Britain had a Hegelian generation around 1900 that Russell and Moore then defined themselves against. The French rediscovery through Kojève in the 1930s reached Sartre, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, and the master-and-servant dialectic became a template used in colonial and feminist theory. Pinkard's translation of 2018, more than two centuries after publication, is the first by a specialist working from the modern critical text.
The strongest objection
That the necessity of the sequence cannot be shown. Hegel claims that each shape of consciousness gives rise to a determinate successor, so the order is not one Hegel chose but one the material required - and this is what distinguishes his procedure from an arbitrary tour of positions. But no reader has ever been able to demonstrate that the transitions are forced rather than arranged, and where a transition looks weak the standard reply is that the reader has not yet understood it, which is unfalsifiable. Kierkegaard's version of the complaint is different and sharper: whatever the system explains, it cannot include the position of the person reading it, who has to decide something and cannot wait for the whole.
Why read it
Not alone and not first. The preface and the section on self-consciousness, which contains lordship and bondage, are what almost everyone means by the Phenomenology and can be read with a commentary in a few sittings. The rest requires a course or a guide. Pinkard's translation is the one to use, and reading Fichte first makes the problem the book is solving considerably clearer.
- First printed
- 1807
- First in English
- 1910
- Digitised
- Yes
The original title was Science of the Experience of Consciousness; Hegel changed it to Phenomenology of Spirit midway through printing, and copies survive with the old title, the new one, and both together. He planned a revised edition, judged it necessary in 1829 and abandoned the idea in 1831.
Baillie's 1910 English is public domain and unreliable. Miller's 1977 and Pinkard's 2018 are in copyright and are what scholarship uses.
Where it stands
Live in a way few nineteenth-century works are. Recognition is a standard concept in political philosophy, the account of concept development is taken seriously in analytic epistemology, and the book supports a large and still-growing scholarly literature in several languages.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain and Baillie's English is too, but it is unreliable at exactly the points people quote, and the accurate versions are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the transitions are necessary is the central and permanent dispute. Whether the book is an introduction to Hegel's system or already contains it is argued, and Hegel's own view shifted - he later made the Encyclopedia Logic the system's starting point while continuing to regard this as essential preparation. Whether the master-and-servant passage is about actual social relations or about a structure of self-consciousness divides the French and the analytic receptions. And the claim that he finished the book under the cannon fire of the battle is Hegel's own, made later, and is regarded by his biographers as embellishment.