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To Read Hegel

Part 1



Robbert A. Veen @ 2009

All rights reserved



The Structure of Hegel's Philosophyand

the Idea of the Phenomenology of Spirit

by

Robbert Veen



To Read Hegel

5

ForewordLet me start by saying what you will not find in this volume. I will not

provide you with any references to Hegel's biography, historical circums-

tances or dealings with other philosophers. Not only because this has

been done before - Pinkard's excellent work on Hegel treats the philoso-

phy as well as the man as did Rosencrantz before him in his volumes on

Hegel and the State - but because Hegel himself warns us in the opening

paragraph of the Preface to the Phenomenology, that all of this is super-

fluous in understanding the nature of the concept.

In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view

of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writ-

ers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the

circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer

takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predeces-

sors or his contemporaries.

In this series under the title "To Read Hegel" I will do exactly this: read

Hegel and show you what I found. This first volumes of the series are

devoted to the Phenomenology, especially its position within Hegel's

philosophy as a whole, and I will try to give you an understanding of its

method. In a summary of the Phenomenology I will try to outline the

whole of the work, providing a road map for what lies ahead. Much of this work was already available on the internet, with the exception of the

final essay on Substance and Subject that was especially written for this

volume.

R.A. Veen, September 2009

Huizen, the Netherlands



Robbert Veen

6



To Read Hegel

7

1. Why Do We Still Need to Read Hegel?

Summary Hegel can be read in order to improve one's skills at inter-

preting difficult philosophical texts, to improve one's own understanding

of the world and to appreciate much of modern philosophy that is in di-

alog with him. To understand Hegel one needs a "voice" that can provide

the necessary context for deciphering Hegel's sometimes obscure ways of

thinking.

A Personal Response

You can make a delicate and complex argument why it is necessary to

understand Hegel's philosophy. You can write about the importance of

his logic, his dialectics, to the understanding of human communication

and social institutions. You can show elaborately how Hegel was the first

to understand the nature of modern society, and construct a critical posi-

tion on current issues from his philosophy of right. And even though we

have found Hegel to be incorrect in many of his positions on the natural

sciences and history - he found no room e.g. for the concept of biological

evolution1 - the way he constructed a philosophy of nature and the history

of the Spirit is still exemplary in many ways.

Even if you cannot accept Hegel's approach and findings, it's still a good

thing to know about him anyway, because so many contemporary philo-sophers have taken his insights as a starting point. Slavoj Žižek is certain-

1

Apparently however he did understand the necessary "reflective" character of chemical processes long before these were discovered to be essential for the

understanding of biology, in what we now know as the capacity of DNA mole-

cules to replicate themselves.

http://ravhegel.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-do-we-still-need-to-read-hegel.html

http://ravhegel.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-do-we-still-need-to-read-hegel.html



Robbert Veen

8

ly the best known of them in the present - he compared his relationship to

Hegel, with that of Martin Luther to St. Paul - but you could also men-

tion Jacques Derrida, Vitorio Hössle and many others.

The Complexity of Hegel is Fascinating

What makes Hegel so fascinating? I am not ashamed to say that I be-

came obsessed with Hegel because it takes so much time and effort to

understand him. It would seem that the complexity of his work and some-

times even the obscurity can be fascinating on a personal level, but that in

itself is not very inviting. To me personally however it was and still isquite true. The art of interpreting a philosophical text reaches its highest

level in the case of Hegel's writings.

All of the labor that you need to put in to understanding Hegel has how-

ever also a solid revenue. Understanding Hegel is always accompanied by

an improved understanding of the world, our culture and ourselves. One

might disagree with him in every respect, but you get the feeling that

nothing is overlooked. It's dazzling. Everything is there. There is hardlyany original thought that we have, that Hegel did not anticipate, formulate

and showed to be inadequate. Some people, especially in the Dutch tradi-

tion of neo-Hegelianism, didn't even try to be original. Philosophy to

them meant rewriting and editing Hegel, applying the system to new

problems. "Understanding Hegel means understanding that he cannot be

surpassed," said German philosopher Richard Kroner in the 1920s. That

goes even beyond the famous dictum that the entire history of philosophyconsists of nothing but footnotes to Plato.

It doesn't mean that Hegel is the only philosopher one should read. I

have read Plato, Aristotle, Thomas and Kant extensively, and I try to keep

up with contemporary philosophy as well. I always had a special interest

in the Jewish philosophy of Martin Buber, Immanuel Lévinas and Emil

Fackenheim. I like reading Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, Agamben and

Žižek. And lately I had a renewed interest in English philosophy: Locke,



To Read Hegel

9

Hume but also Rawls and others. I am indebted to all of them. But none

of them have pages that are so delightfully complex, so cramped with

obscure brilliance as Hegel's.

Understanding the World Better

All of these arguments however remain rather superficial. If philosophy is

about understanding the world, then the only good reason for reading

Hegel must be that he makes us understand the world better than anybody

else. Ultimately there is no fun in interpreting texts just for the heck of it.

Now does he do that? I think there are at least three basic principles inHegel's philosophy that we need in our contemporary efforts.

First of all, though mostly misunderstood, we need to understand He-

gel's thesis about the identity of the concept and its reality. It is badly

misunderstood if we just take that as a statement of principle by itself.

That is, if we mean by that, that the subjective idea that we have is iden-

tical to the material reality out there. Hegel never said that. Understand-

ing what he did say turns out to be a very prosperous enterprise.Let me try briefly to sketch it out to give you a preliminary idea. At least

you can say that our modes of thinking and the reality that we live in are

not fully divergent . Our way of thinking and knowing is part of the world

we know. You can approach that from many perspectives: as a specimen

of nature we find within ourselves a growing understanding of the world,

that is in some way a product of the world itself. Nature comes to self

understanding within us. Hegel himself stressed the idea that the Absoluteis Spirit, and that this Absolute Spirit is involved in a process in which it

realizes itself both in nature and in the historical cultures of humanity.

(Here Hegel might have been tempted to understand "nature" in its own

specific historicity, as natural selection and biological evolution, but un-

fortunately for him as well as for us, Darwin came too late.) But there are

many other ways to approach this.

Second, and to me quite important, is Hegel's analysis of European cul-



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10

ture, society, religion, and history. All of these have "objective" characte-

ristics, and yet they are derived from and dependent on human thought.

At least here it is safe to say that thought and reality are in identity.

That is not without consequences! Especially because the concept in

Hegel is not just a justification of things as they are. The concept for in-

stance of property is not simply an expression of the status quo, but it is

also a basis for critique. Critique of the way we think, act and live within

our contemporary social institutions. Critique of current ideologies (in-

cluding the so-called neo-liberalism that Fukuyama ascribed to Hegel),

critique of the illusions of our modern political culture. This critical aspect of Hegel social philosophy and ethics is not immediately apparent,

but it is required by the very nature of Begriff , the concept. And by the

way, this explains why Hegel could say that whenever the concept dif-

fered from reality, it was too bad for reality. That was not an expression

of subjective idealism, but a strong affirmation of the normative value

inherent in the pure concept.

My third point is the most personal. Of course philosophy is and should be a science. As such its aims and contents go beyond the purely person-

al. Nevertheless philosophy remains a search for wisdom, and it attracts

many people beyond the pale of academic pursuits precisely because it

expresses the universal human quest for truth, goodness and beauty. Of

course Hegel warns against any philosophy that tries to be reassuring or

comforting or entertaining. Not because those aims are unworthy, but

because comfort can only be found in the truth, and truth can only befound in the hard labor of the concept. I found that understanding Hegel

also meant understanding my own life. Of course not in its psychological

and social particulars, but in its universality as a social being, as a product

of European culture, as a spiritual being.

That is why, ultimately, Hegel is worth the effort. And there is a simple

dialectical argument to prove that, even if you're not convinced by my

three previous arguments. They say that Hegel is the most important phi-



To Read Hegel

11

losopher that ever lived. He is certainly the most difficult to refute. So

there you have it: precisely by arguing with and against Hegel, you can

develop your own position to its highest possible level. Hegel is the best

sparring partner you can imagine. He is the most critical interrogator you

can ever hope to find. If you really understand why you need to differ

from Hegel, chances are that you have stumbled upon a meaningful truth

for the present.

How to Study Hegel?

How best to study Hegel? Just reading him would be a nice start. But thatis an awesome task. The 500 odd pages of the Phenomenology alone,

with its often obscure style and condensed - and sometimes mystifying -

references to contemporary history, might turn you away from Hegel for

good. Nevertheless, with some stamina it can be done, say, in a year.

You could rewrite paragraphs in your own style, you could try to write

down the flow of his arguments, you could make small lists of the various

meanings of Hegel's terminology, you could read series of introductionsto the Phenomenology. Your notebooks would soon be filled with a lot of

question marks.

I remember sitting down with a friend when I just started reading phi-

losophy at the University of Amsterdam. We tried to read the preface to

the Phenomenology together. We couldn't understand what Hegel meant

after the fifth or sixth paragraph of that preface. So we skipped that part,

and tried the introduction. We couldn't understand the first paragraph.Then we decided to go straight for the first chapter on consciousness.

And then of course we found that we couldn't agree with anything Hegel

said. It did not fit in with what we thought we had learned from Kant,

Wittgenstein and Heidegger, who were popular at the time in Amsterdam.

But at least we thought that now we had some understanding of what he

was trying to say. But the chapter was so complex that we wanted to drop

it too and then we looked at the table of contents to find something a little



Robbert Veen

12

easier to read. We discovered that Hegel had written a chapter on phre-

nology. We began to laugh at the silliness of this 19th century philoso-

pher who believed in the science of measuring skulls to reach a psycho-

logical understanding of human nature. Needless to say that after just

three sessions we decided to skip Hegel.

Fortunately we had a wonderful teacher in our second year whose

classes were compulsory who showed us where we went wrong. When he

explained the preface and introduction and the section on consciousness,

it was as if Hegel himself was among us. Hegel needed a voice! To this

day I have found no better way to understand Hegel than by becoming"initiated" by someone who went before us, but it also holds for Plato,

Aristotle, Thomas or Kant for that matter. Classical texts of such com-

plexity require the knowledge of a body of literature, a context in which

you can understand what is going on. Hegel needs a personal guide. I had

the good fortune to be taught Hegel by two of the cleverest minds I've

ever encountered: professors of Modern Philosophy at the University of

Amsterdam Jan Hollak and Kees-Jan Brons.I will end this chapter on a personal and contingent note. I have been

teaching classes on Hegel on the internet since may 2009. The experience

described above is what prompted me to do so. For me it is a privilege to

teach (or rather read together with others) Hegel in this manner. WiZiQ,

Sclipo, Edufire and other educational facilities on the Web gave me the

opportunity to reach out to people in the world that already have gained

some access to Hegel, but now search for a living dialogue to advancetheir understanding. In teaching Hegel and sharing ideas with such a di-

verse and select company, everything becomes new again.

The World Wide Web may be one of the objective realizations of what

Hegel called the world spirit. 19th century thought and 21st-century tech-

nology come together. We live in a fascinating age. Now it is up to us to

really understand it.



To Read Hegel

13

2. And Now to Move OnA Recent Perspective in Understanding Hegel

Summary The structure of Hegel's philosophy as a whole cannot simply

be described from Hegel's own statements. Hegel was still wrestling with

the general outline of his work when he died. In Hollak's thesis of 1962

the matter - though dealt with by others before him like Richard Kroner,

Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Busse - the issue was resolved. Hegel's

System as a whole consists of three parts: Phenomenology, Encyclopedia

and the Philosophy of History.

In the current stage of reflection on the meaning of Hegel's philosophy, it

is no longer necessary to focus on the understanding of the process and

method of speculative dialectics as such. In the work of Kroner, Lasson

and Hyppolite and many others we can safely say that the general laws of Hegel's dialectics and system are fairly well known.

The next stage of reflection was opened up by Nicolai Hartmann's ques-

tion in 1935, concerning the inner structure of the whole of Hegel's sys-

tematic works. Hartmann contended that although each of the various

disciplines of philosophy was clearly understood by Hegel himself - their

methods and objects being sharply defined and distinguished from each

other - the whole system of Hegel's thought was still "in-it-self" and not"for-it-self". From the external shape of Hegel's dialectics, we needed to

turn to the inner dialectics at work between the various "sciences" that

make up Hegel's philosophy as a whole.

This inner dialectic structure of Hegel's philosophy became the theme of

the 1962 thesis of a Dutch (then) assistant professor of philosophy called

Jan Hollak (1915-2003), who taught History of Modern Philosophy at the

University of Amsterdam and the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In



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14

his thesis entitled The Structure of Hegel's Philosophy (De Structuur van

Hegels Wijsbegeerte) Hollak for the first time went beyond what he

called the one-sided responses to Hegel's philosophy, present in the

works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Marx. They approached

Hegel's system not from within, but from without by assessing it with an

external yardstick - a procedure that according to Hegel was the handi-

work of finite reason. Even though Hegel's system was admired greatly

in the 1960s - especially his Phenomenology was present in most philo-

sophical debates in Europe from 1920 up to the 1970s - without an ade-

quate understanding of the structure of Hegel's dialectics, it would beimpossible to make any significant connection between Hegel's thought

and the problems of our contemporary philosophical reality.

What came out of the Hegel-renaissance in France and Germany were

for the most part straightforward denials of single propositions that were

represented as Hegel's views on particular issues, without examining

structure and method of the system they were derived from. The stifling

result was that Hegel became a philosophical milestone of the past. Butthat of course made Hegel at the same time irrelevant and contradicted

one of his major theses, that in contemporary philosophy as well as in the

history of philosophy we do not deal with the past as such, but with the

present.

We cannot say that his thesis effectively changed the paradigm of con-

temporary understanding of Hegel. The work done by Hollak on Hegel

remained mostly unknown even in the Netherlands, where only a handfulof his students examined and applied his findings. One-sided responses

to Hegel remained with us, from the interpretation of dialectics by neo-

Marxist humanism in the 50s, through attempts to reinterpret Hegel's

dialectics as a theory of intersubjectivity and communication under the

influence of Habermas (Theunissen and others), to Slavoj Žižek 's reinter-

pretation of Hegel with a theory of concrete subjectivity as found in La-

can. In between there were many attempts to use Hegel in contemporary



To Read Hegel

15

reflection: either dealing with the actuality of Hegel's philosophy of na-

ture (Vitorio Hössle) or to turn Hegel into the institutionalized foe: the

need for a straw man produced the well-known image of Hegel as the

champion of abstract identity and systematic totalitarianism.2

Is it possible now to enter a third stage? Or rather, do we see the dawn

of a new stage in the interpretation of Hegel? In this stage we would no

longer look for a critical response to Hegel from a fixed standpoint or

principle, nor would we need again to deal with questions concerning the

inner dialectic structure of Hegel's work. It would require us to accept at

least these two principles as adequately established foundations for anyreflection on Hegel:

1. The whole of Hegel's philosophy consists of the dialectic unity of

three basic shapes of the idea. The first of them, and not to be considered

just the extrinsic introduction to the system, would be the Phenomenolo-

gy of Spirit that deals with the appearing concept, the experience of the

Spirit coming to itself, arriving at an understanding of it self. Secondly,the Encyclopedia contains the pure logic as it realizes itself in nature and

spirit, and finally, the synthesis of these both, we have the philosophy of

history in which logic and consciousness come together as the under-

standing of the history of the world.

2. Hegel's philosophy, though a closed system like any other consistent

effort at understanding the world, is in principle not only open to the appearance off a new stage in the history or humanity, about as such its

2Derrida or Lévinas can be mentioned here. But note that it is not so much in

these responses as such that Hegel has been misunderstood, but by the attempt todeliver a reconstruction of Hegel that grounded the response. Arguing against a

possibility of thought that derives from Hegel is not the same as arguing against

Hegel.



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16

announcement. Precisely the finality with which Hegel managed to phi-

losophically understand the history and principle of the Germanic-

Christian world (i.e. Europe), announces a new principle without either

prophesying it nor demanding it to be realized in practice (as in Marx-

ism), signifies the emergence of a new era. To us, for whom this era has

already appeared in political history, art, science and technology, the

understanding of this new principle allows for something other than ab-

andoning Hegel as being outdated.

In this series I will try to present Hegel's Phenomenology from this

perspective. Diverging from Hollak, I will try to raise also some objec-tions to Hegel's position. But to contradict Hegel is no mean task. Most of

what is said against Hegel is simply irrelevant and doesn't get to the issue.

A true contradiction to Hegel is a dialectic achievement of the first order.

But to phrase the matter in distinction to Kroner: to understand Hegel is

to (truly) contradict him.

That qualifies my position as standing within the large realm of so-

called left-Hegelianism. I'm not an orthodox neo-Hegelian, certainly notin the honorable tradition of Dutch Hegelianism that merely tried to pa-

raphrase the Master. In many respects I side with Theodor Adorno and

Slavoj Žižek who emphasized the concreteness of Hegel's critical and

negative dialectics. Ultimately I will have to make clear what my position

is regarding Hegel as a whole. But is it really relevant? Maybe it is im-

portant first and foremost to try and understand Hegel. And to that end I

have to make clear how important Hollak's thesis is for this endeavor.How then must the structure of Hegel's philosophy be understood and

why does it matter?

How Not to Construct Hegel's System

The usual structure of Hegel's philosophy as taught in Universities all

over the world, is sometimes at least based on a (flawed) reading of the

last paragraph of the Encyclopedia. There we find the three logical syl-



To Read Hegel

17

logisms of philosophy.

(Par. 575) The systematic treatment of the nature of the concept ultimately de-

velops into the idea of philosophical sciences and thereby affirms the beginning:

the circle is complete. This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking idea, truth

aware of itself or logic with the significance that it is generality preserved in

concrete content. In this way science returns to its beginning, with logic as the

result. The presupposition of its concept, or the immediacy of its beginning and

the aspect of its appearance at that moment, are suspended.

Now, does this paragraph deal with the separate Phenomenology, as

many have argued? Or is it about the specific concept of philosophy as

contained in the Encyclopedia? Or is it about philosophy in a general

sense? I would choose the second option. What Hegel seems to be refer-

ring to is the circular movement of the encyclopedic system. The "self-

thinking idea" is both the start of science and the end result of science.

The concept is part of a syllogism - as is obvious from the basic structure

of the System, starting with the Logic, moving through nature to Spirit -

but also its mean and its result, its other extreme. The three possiblemovements within the System show that and these are expressed as syl-

logisms. Each of them expresses the whole with a different emphasis.

These are then the three logical syllogisms of the System (Encyclope-

dia), and they express philosophy as (1) subjective knowledge, (2) objec-

tivity, and their synthesis as (3) complete self-knowledge (=philosophy).

Most often however the second syllogism is interpreted as the Phenom-

enology of Spirit, the first is correctly identified with the Encyclopedia asa whole, and the third is thought to be the summary of a philosophy of

Absolute Spirit that Hegel never wrote.

Let's take a look at each in turn.

§ 575 This initial appearance is formed by the syllogism, which has logic basi-

cally as its starting point, with nature for the middle term and is linked ultimately

to spirit. Logic becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit. Nature, which stands



Robbert Veen

18

between the spirit and its essence, divides itself though not to the extremes of

finite abstraction. For the syllogism is in the idea and nature is essentially deter-

mined as a transition point and negative moment. But the mediation of the con-cept has the external form of transition, and science takes the form of being.

So in essence we have here the whole of the movement of the Encyclo-

pedia, starting from the Logic, going through the philosophy of nature

and ending with the concept of absolute Spirit as it is being expressed in

the concept of philosophy as the self-understanding of the Absolute Spi-

rit.

§ 576 In the second syllogism this appearance is suspended, for the spirit is the

mediating factor. This is a syllogism which is already the standpoint of the spirit

itself, presupposes nature and joins it with logic. It is the syllogism of reflection

on the idea; science appears as subjective cognition.

So now we start with nature (the Spirit presupposes nature), go through

Spirit and then end with the Logic. This is the same as the Systenm or Encyclopedia, only now the syllogistic structure of the whole is different:

Spirit is the intermediate, and logic the conclusion.

And finally:

§ 577 These appearances are suspended in the idea of philosophy, which has

self-knowing reason, the absolutely general (the logic), for its middle term a

middle which divides itself into spirit and nature, with the former as its presup-

position (spirit), and the latter as its general extreme (nature). Thus immediate

nature is only a posited entity, as spirit is in itself not a presupposition, but rather

totality returning into itself. In this way the middle term, the self-knowing con-

cept, has as its reality primarily conceptual moments and exists in its determina-

cy as general knowledge, persisting immediately by itself.

So in this case we start with the Spirit, go through the logic of the (self-

knowing) concept which is now the middle term and end with nature.



To Read Hegel

19

Why the System is Not the Whole

The system of Hegel's philosophy as a whole cannot be identified howev-

er with the “system” that is expressed in and as the Encyclopedia of Ph i-

losophical Sciences. Hegel's entire philosophy should be seen as the di-

alectic unity of three major disciplines:

the separate Phenomenology of Spirit,

the System of Philosophy or Encyclopedia,

the Philosophy of History

All three of these disciplines have the notion of the Idea in common. But

in each the Idea is treated differently, in such a way that these three again

form a single syllogism:

1. In the Phenomenology the idea moves from its immediate shape as

substance (immediacy for and of consciousness) to self-reflecting sub-

jectivity and produces the notion of pure science. (The self-thinkingidea.)

2. In the System the idea is expressed as science, as systematic know-

ledge, i.e. as the pure concept , moving from the subjectivity of the

concept in logic, through the externalized objectivity of the concept in

nature to the complete and absolute self-expression of the Absolute

Spirit as (the concept of) Philosophy.

3. In the Philosophy of History however, the Idea is understood as ab-solute Spirit and shown to be actively realizing itself within and as the

history of humanity and the world, in the course of which it also devel-

ops its self-understanding as the history of philosophy.

Starting from the appearance of the Spirit as consciousness ( Phenome-

nology of Spirit ) we move through the middle term of philosophy as con-



Robbert Veen

20

ceptual science ( Encyclopedia; the "System") to its other extreme: the

absolute Spirit realizing itself as coming to its self-understanding through

its own real history ( Philosophy of History and the History of Philoso-

phy).

Only in that perspective the whole of reality is expressed without leav-

ing out any essential perspective. That is why Hegels philosophy as a

whole should be seen as an attempt to understand the Idea as History

(self-realizing Spirit).

That is also why the separate Phenomenology of Spirit is so different

from the section on the Phenomenology of Spirit within the Encyclope-dia.

In the separate Phenomenology the totality of all reality is conscious-

ness, and the independent shapes of the idea are present as constantly

changing objects. In these different objects we find a reflection of a pre-

supposed subjectivity. In a continuous process of the self-correction of

consciousness, the dialectic identity of the consciousness and its object

appears.The systematic Phenomenology on the other hand merely discusses the

logical elements of the Phenomenology. That is why it only deals with

three separate categories: consciousness as such, self-consciousness and

reason.

The separate Phenomenology then continues beyond reason with a more

"substantial" notion of reason, i.e. immediate Spirit. Here consciousness

is seen as embedded in the life of a people. Only by remembering theshape of consciousness as it existed in Greek civilization - but still only

by remembering it as it is present in contemporary culture i.e. as part of

contemporary Bildung , as cultural awareness or education - it begins to

understand that consciousness is not a property of an individual, but basi-

cally a collective awareness mediated within an historical society.

In the following chapters Roman culture, the Renaissance, the Enligh-

tenment and the French Revolution are used to provide the historical pa-



To Read Hegel

21

radigms in which the inner structures of consciousness can be expressed.

Even though these historical stages are also to be understood as stages in

which this type of consciousness was produced, they are not dealt with as

such. They are remembered or immanent history, not history understood

in a conceptual mode. That is left to the Philosophy of History.

It stands to reason that in the so-called syllogisms of the System, at the

end of the Encyclopedia, only the concept of philosophy as such is dealt

with. Philosophy is the method of understanding that is presupposed at

the beginning of the Logic and has to move on toward understanding

itself - which is identical to the construction of the whole of philosophy.(That is, it is not an introduction to but an integral part of philosophy.) At

least in the sense that the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences

presents the main concepts of philosophy in their intrinsic order and im-

manent relationships.

Obviously, one cannot identify the separate Phenomenology with any

one of these syllogisms at the end of the System. The meaning of the

syllogisms is to show, how the System of Speculative philosophy must beEncyclopedic: one can start from the logic going through nature and end-

ing up with Spirit. One can also start with the external concept, nature,

then develop a philosophy of Spirit and finally end up with the concepts

of the subjective science of logic. And equally we can start with the pure

concept of the Spirit, then develop the formal concepts of the logic and

then finally reach nature as the external realization of those concepts.

The system of Hegel's philosophy however is not complete if we justconsider the Phenomenology that produces the notion of consciousness as

science, nor if we identify philosophy with the system of philosophy, i.e.

the Encyclopedia. In both cases the concept of the absolute Spirit is part

of the analysis yet as such it is not developed . We would be left with the

idea that Hegel worked towards the notion of Absolute Spirit without

ever reaching it. The Absolute within the other parts of philosophy is

fragmented to say the least.



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22

In the separate Phenomenology e.g. a whole chapter is devoted to the

demonstration of how all the previous modes of consciousness, i.e. con-

sciousness, self-consciousness, reason and Spirit, should be understood

through the medium of the absolute, in this case the absolute as it is in

and for consciousness, as religion. Likewise in the System, the notion of

the absolute Spirit is present when Hegel discusses objective spirit in its

highest shape, i.e. the State and the political history of states. Remem-

bered history as education and the political history of the objective Spirit

however do not exhaust the infinity of absolute Spirit.

Only in the Philosophy of History does Hegel deal with the absoluteSpirit (the Eternal Spirit developing itself through time to its present and

opening up a future) realizing itself as world history. Only in world histo-

ry we have the reality of the Spirit in its totality, both subjectively and

objectively - including the perspective that was worked out separately as

the philosophy of (the history of) religion.

The system of Philosophy as a whole is therefore for Hegel a triad of

three different disciplines:

The Idea in its appearance as consciousness: Phenomenology

The Idea in its pure conceptual form as philosophy: Encyclopedia

(or “System” of Philosophical Sciences.)

The Idea in its historical realization: the philosophy of History.

In these three books, the basic topic is the idea in its development, andall three of them develop the whole of philosophy in a specific aspect.

"History" is present in each of them.

1. The separate Phenomenology of Spirit deals with the history of con-

sciousness, but gives a linear development. What the Spirit experienced

in separate stages is now remembered as succeeding momentswithin one



To Read Hegel

23

movement of thought.

2. The Encyclopaedia treats history as a logical concept of the interac-

tion between states (within the transition of objective to absolute Spirit).

The basic viewpoint of the System is static: the concepts are set in their

order and remain for-themselves. (The separate Science of Logic shows

that there is an inner dialectic to it that can be expressed as such. A sep-

arate philosophy of nature or a philosophy of Spirit never reached ma-

turity.)

3. And finally the Philosophy of History deals with the spirit as the

whole of the developing reality of humanity and the world, i.e. with his-tory as a whole and as such.

The other works can then be understood from this basic concept as sepa-

rate or minor philosophical disciplines, focused on a single element of the

system as a whole.

* The Science of Logic. The first section of the Encyclopedia gets a sep-arate treatment in the Science of Logic. Now the dialectical deduction is

presented that was not worked out in the Encyclopedia.

* The Philosophy of the Fine Arts deals with the notion and reality of

Fine Art in various ways. Its starting point and premise is not the notion

of Art as it is present in the Encyclopedia! The status of this work is not

completely clear.

* The Philosophy of Right develops the idea of “Objective Spirit” a

l-ready scrutinized in the third section of the Encyclopedia. History is

present as the relationship between States and the World-Judgment.

* The Philosophy of Religion does the same with the second stage of

Absolute Spirit, Religion, which is mentioned both in the Phenomenol-

ogy (as the antithesis to Consciousness – Spirit) and in the Encyclope-

dia. History is present in the sense that there is an order in which various

shapes of religion ultimately come to full expression in the revealed Re-



Robbert Veen

24

ligion of Christianity.

* The History of Philosophy deals with the historical process, part of

world history, in which the self-understanding of the Absolute Spirit

realizes itself. In a way it is the "subjective" mode of the Philosophy of

History.

I think this overall picture of Hegel’s whole philosophical enterprise is

crucial in understanding its elements.

3. The Method of the Phenomenology

As I have stated elsewhere, the Phenomenology analyzes the "expe-

rience" of the Spirit in its appearance to itself, as it develops into self

understanding and approaches this experience as a dialectic movement of

consciousness. That already implies that the Phenomenology is not just

an introduction to the System as J. Hyppolite and R. Kroner thought it

was.

The primary object of the Phenomenology is the immediate knowledge

of the Spirit. The Spirit in its appearance for short. The greek word

phainomenon means "appearance" so that explains the title: Phenomeno-

logy, science of the appearance. But you might wonder if it doesn't also

mean: the appearance of science. The -logy part of course refer to "logos"in Greek meaning "science of." We have therefore a science of the ap-

pearance, and the appearance of science. So what do we have? The Phe-

nomenology is the science of the appearance of (or becoming of) science

to itself.

To know always means to know at the same time the act of knowing it-

self. There can be no unconscious knowing - a dim awareness of a pres-



To Read Hegel

25

ence maybe, but no unconscious knowledge. All knowledge must express

itself as "I know this or that and I know that I know this." You cannot

say: "I know this table is white, but I don't know that I know it." That

presupposition is distantly related to one of Descartes' great discoveries:

percipere est se percipere. In a free translation: knowledge always im-

plies knowledge of the knower. In other words: all knowledge is reflec-

tive. Ultimately it is Plato that in his Theaetetus developed this idea for

the first time.

But what does it mean to say that science appears to itself? It appears to

itself in the sense that every instance of knowing that we have impliessome awareness of what knowledge should be. We are not just aware of

our act of knowledge, but we are also aware of the requirements of know-

ledge when we claim something to be true. So when we talk about

science we are talking about a method in which our knowledge is justi-

fied with reference to its origin and the process in which we reached it. If

it were not so, we would not in our everyday lives know what it means to

be in error and correct mistakes or understand that we sometimes do notknow. Scientific knowledge is knowledge of things in which explicitly

we know about our act of knowing it. We have an explicit method by

which to arrive at the truth, an explicit criterion of truth with which to

measure the truth of statements and principles. The 'self-awareness' of

knowledge is the basis for its claim to truth.

In the Phenomenology this "science" appears as "consciousness". We

must make an important distinction right at the outset. We are not talkingabout the "mind" here as some "thing" that is conscious of something. It's

not about "a" conscious individual or one of its mental faculties. Con-

sciousness is to Hegel a complete idea of knowledge, a structured subject-

object relationship expressed in words and offered as a truthful under-

standing of our knowledge and the world.

This inclusion of the 'world', of an ontological dimension, is important

as well. Hegel understood the Phenomenology to be the explanation of a



Robbert Veen

26

reality. It is confusing to speak about these modes of consciousness as

"epistemologies" unless one understands that Hegel focused on the onto-

logical implications of such epistemologies at the same time. Conscious-

ness in the Phenomenology stands for the totality of the reality of Spirit,

that appears in separate, seemingly independent modes of consciousness.

Because it is consciousness that functions in the Phenomenology as the

primary mode of knowledge, - and not the concept and not the historical

reality as such - each of its forms always appears with an emphasis on the

(ever-changing) object . Every form of consciousness, every specific

claim of a subject-object relationship, posits its truth as residing in itsobject. It has a concept of its object and of itself as correlated to that. It

appears as the expression of the totality of the subject as well as its ob-

ject. Its claim is a claim about the totality of the knower and the known.

Every consciousness says: this is what knowledge in general really is,

because this is what the knowing subject essentially is (e.g. immediate

sensuous awareness) and that is what the known object essentially is (e.g.

the immediate given here-and-now).

Testing consciousness

I have said that every one of these modes of consciousness appear to say

it all. They seem to be independent and exclude one another. Precisely

this independence however of every specific consciousness, i.e. of every

claim of a particular consciousness to express the totality of knowledge,

is being tested at every stage. Not by any presupposed and external stan-dard or criterion, because that would mean we already have jumped to a

conclusion about what knowledge really is, before we examine the vari-

ous claims to knowledge, but by its own claimed standard. The examina-

tion of modes of consciousness resembles an interrogation in a philosoph-

ical dialogue: Someone claims "X" as a standard and when asked it offers

proof by demonstrating it in a form of knowledge, "Y". If I can show that

consciousness actually does "Z" and not "Y" then it follows that the claim



To Read Hegel

27

"X" is in error. Sensuous certainty e.g. claims "immediate knowledge"

and shows that with the aid of its understanding of the object: "it is es-

sentially always here and now." If I can show that its actual object is

something that is mediated by a subjective activity, in this case the actual

pointing to an object in the here and now, "Z", then this claim of imme-

diacy is shown to be in error. Its claimed object is not understood proper-

ly. Then I move on to the next consciousness, that solves the former prob-

lem by claiming a new standard "X2" that consists of "X" and the result

of the objection, "Z" and offers proof in the form of "Y2". And then I can

show that it actually does something else "Z2" and so on.The resemblance to Plato's dialogues where Socrates moves the discus-

sion forward by asking questions, is not accidental. The Socratic dialec-

tics is also a real (or idealized) conversation and of course that is highly

formalized in the Phenomenology. But Hegel would agree with Plato on

the intersubjective nature of all thought, even when it is not executed in

the form of a real dialogue. There are no isolated thinkers.

Maybe for Plato the real (Socratic) dialogue is essential to method -even though metaphysical insight is not construed as dialogical, because

it is the lonely insight of the philosopher who has gone beyond the con-

fines of the Cave. If anywhere, dialogue is to be found superficially in

the rhetoric of the Sophists who explain the shadow images to a literally

captive audience. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the changes in conscious-

ness come from the contradictions in the concept of the object itself, not

from any dialogue of truth as such. That is, the real dialogue is the devel-opment over time of a self-consciousness that includes others in itself and

is truly universal. The participants in such a dialogue would be the histor-

ical agents through which the Spirit speaks to itself.

The various shapes of consciousness are but moments of the self-

conscious Spirit, and in that sense they are not independent historical

periods or complete philosophical systems but they belong to the whole

as abstract elements. As part of the whole they are the logical conditions



Robbert Veen

28

or determinations of philosophy as a science, or of the self-understanding

of the Spirit in the present. But that is not how they appear .

That appearance or "substance" as Hegel calls their being in itself to

consciousness needs to be examined to arrive at the essence - that Hegel

calls "subjectivity", what they "really" are for itself . In every stage it is

shown in the analysis that consciousness has a claimed objectivity and a

real objectivity. Most of the time you can easily see that the claimed ob-

ject presupposes something else that is not yet part of the definition of the

object. When confronted with that fact, consciousness expands its defini-

tion of the object and creates thereby a new subject-object relationship.Every new structure that consciousness accomplishes by means of the

new definition of its object, is again taken as something independent, as

an expression of the totality of knowledge instead of an appearing "mo-

ment" of the Spirit as absolute knowledge. Of course, in the form of a

claim it always does express that totality. But it does not do so adequate-

ly. There is a nice Latin phrase for that: totum, sed non totaliter : the total-

ity, but not totally. That means something like: the whole, but not in itsfullness.

The limits of the object of any consciousness are correlated with the

limits of that consciousness itself. Any concept of objectivity implies a

corresponding concept of the knowing subject. In itself, every conceived

form of objectivity is a reference to the real world in its totality. In Sense

Certainty e.g., the concept of being that is used to express the immediacy

of the object in the here and now, on its own does refer to this totality.

The Example of 'Being'

We can show that easily by examining the concept from a logical point of

view. It is the least you can say about the world as a whole, but you can

say it truthfully: everything that is, is. There is nothing beyond or outside

being. (But the dialectical counter argument will be: there is indeed noth-

ing , i.e. the act of negativity, the power of abstraction that produces this



To Read Hegel

29

concept, beyond being.)

As a category 'being' seems at first to be merely positive. It includes

everything. It also excludes any limitation or difference, and in that sense

it already expresses the identity of subject and object. But this positive

universal is not a given but a result. It includes everything by excluding

nothing. This exclusion is in contradiction to its claimed absolute posi-

tive nature. Exclusion is a logical activity that is not properly expressed in

the concept of being itself, that simply says what is, is. Being means the

positive universal, but we can only mean that, by doing something that is

not included in the category. Being turns out to be based on a negation(the exclusion of limitations) that is itself negated (because we state it as

a pure positive). The claim of immediacy is in contradiction with the

mediation of thought required here by this double negation. The negation

of the negativity of the exclusion turns out to be the condition of the posi-

tive nature of the concept of being. There is no such thing as an absolute

immediate category, because we need mediation to get there in the first

place.Even if we accept its pure positive nature, the category is also deficient

in another, more "metaphysical" sense. We could run into this counter

argument: "being" does say "everything" so every determination is a

determination of being. All other categories could be said to express

modes of being. So why do we need to move beyond it? The answer lies

in the pure content of the category that is unable to express what it means.

Being says it all but it does so in a limited or merely abstract fashion. Itsays everything, but does not express everything in its fullness: totum, sed

non totaliter . It leaves out the negative nature of thought which is a con-

dition of its being thought. Which is shown with regard to being in He-

gel's Logic by the fact it has to exclude "nothing" to be thought and that

exclusion is not expressed in the meaning of "being" which is pure im-

mediacy and positivity.

This notion of expressivity is vital. A notion that refers to the totality is



Robbert Veen

30

just a 'name'. What we need is a category that expresses that totality in its

inner development, including all its previous stages. In such a category

the totality would become explicit .

This does not mean that the notion of being is completely set aside.

There cannot be any concept without having this character of immediacy

and universality and this claim to express a positive totality. Every con-

cept presupposes and includes "being" as an element of its own determi-

nacy. We can even say in general that every claimed concept of objectivi-

ty, including "being" and "thing" and "force" or whichever concept we

are looking at in the Phenomenology, has some truth to it - that truth will be analyzed as such in the Logic that follows the Phenomenology. Not

because it really expresses that totality, but because it refers to the totality

that it (a) belongs to as one of its determinations and (b) from which it

derives its own limited meaning.

The development of consciousness is reflected in the development of the

concept of an object, i.e. in the changing claims to truth. In the end con-

sciousness reaches the identity of self-consciousness and its object, whatHegel called absolute knowledge. The Phenomenology is at the same

time a description of that development , and in that sense an historical

description, and an analysis of consciousness, and in that sense a syste-

matic or philosophical exposition.

The division between subject matter and form, or between subject and

object has been sublated here. That is why we are not dealing with a

science or philosophy of conscious experience that would deal with theempirical contents of consciousness. That is the difference between He-

gel's Phenomenology and the transcendental Phenomenology of Husserl.



To Read Hegel

31

4. The Movement of Consciousness

A. Consciousness

In the first movement of the Phenomenology, called Consciousness, the

opposition between the abstract singular consciousness of the abstract

singular object is overcome. By changing its object from the immediate

given, moving through the object as "thing" to the concept of the world of

laws, consciousness indirectly develops itself: it changes from immediate

certainty, goes through perception to reflective reasoning. Every time theobject changes, consciousness changes its own relationship to its object,

and thereby changes itself to become a new form of knowledge.

When consciousness realizes that its object is not a singular object, but a

universal, it sees its own nature reflected in its object. What it does final-

ly as consciousness, is to differentiate the universal of the objective

world, (the physical reality of force), and the universal as the awareness

of universal laws. Consciousness comes to realize that it only has aworld that it can understand, precisely by this activity of making a differ-

ence between reality and subjectivity and relating them to each other. To

understand the world scientifically must mean to discover the universal

within appearing reality on the one hand, and to apply the universal to

given appearances on the other hand, or rather to do both at the same

time.

So the relationship between the subject and the object has now become a

correlation, subject and object determining each other and this correla-

tion is the truth of consciousness. But that correlation that is now the truth

of consciousness, is as such merely subjective. Or to put it differently: the

real or effective object now turns out be the subject itself. Understanding

the world implies a subject understanding its ways of thinking and its

experiences or more to the point itself as a (physical) world, though this

is a position that will only be fully understood within the realm of Exist-



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32

ing Spirit.

B. Self-consciousness

In the final movement of consciousness as Explaining Reason a new

mode of being of the spirit appears: self-consciousness.

Although self-consciousness understands that it is the truth, it appears at

the start simply as Sensuous Desire. As Sensuous Desire the object of

consciousness is no longer a separate and independent world, but rather

something that is relative to its own desiring. Consciousness is aware of

its own lack in its object, and thereby it is aware of itself. By consumingand using the object, it gives itself actively an immediate self-certainty. It

experiences itself in the process of negating the object. (In the sensuous

certainty it experiences the object passively by negating itself as subject,

so here we have reached the opposite.)

However, precisely because it consumes its object when it satisfies its

desires, it renews itself also. No fulfillment of a desire is final. This bad

infinite movement is interrupted when it experiences that the externalobject can be life and consciousness that appears as a self-consciousness

in itself. Now it sees itself fully reflected in its object as such, this "oth-

er" subject, which however also means that it is alienated from itself. It is

no longer independent. When it desires this other object that is in reality

itself a subject, self-consciousness experiences that it also has become the

object for another subject. Consciousness now experiences itself as the

object for another consciousness and the immediate social relationship isreached.

The alienation that occurs here is crucial: by understanding someone

else to be another subject, I see myself reflected. That reinforces my un-

derstanding of my own subjectivity. But the fact that this other subject is

also Sensuous Desire like myself implies that I am at the same time

something that is desired. That is the opposite of being a subject and

makes me understand that I am also an object to this other self-



To Read Hegel

33

consciousness. This duality is therefore at the same time recognition and

alienation (opposition).

Self-consciousness now has two shapes that appear to one another, and

what has been a single self-consciousness is now a double subject. (Not

"two" subjects as such, but a single self-consciousness doubled in itself.

Remember we are talking structures, not individuals.) One and the same

true self-consciousness appears to itself as a relationship between two

appearing self-consciousnesses.

At first it understands this movement metaphorically as the struggle for

recognition that is a struggle to the death. That movement is only haltedin the relationship between Lord and Slave, ultimately however the two

movements of Lord and Slave are separate shapes of one self-

consciousness, they are in truth the one movement in which self-

consciousness recognizes itself in its own otherness.

And not in someone who is an other . The metaphor of the struggle to

the death is precisely that, a metaphor. Sometimes it is claimed that Hegel

refers here to some primordial stage in human history in which people didstruggle like this, or it is read as an explanation of the origins of slavery.

We find that e.g. in the lectures on the Phenomenology by Kojève. But

the passage is not meant to express any kind of real historical event. The

closest example of this way of thinking is Locke's abstract thought expe-

riment when he talks about humans having to defend themselves against

all others in a war of survival. That wasn't meant historically either. It

was a reconstruction of what is fundamental to human behavior in a process of imaginative abstraction. And that is the case with Hegel's text

too.

Within this new single consciousness that has overcome the duality of

Lord and Slave, the contradiction of the two movements continues.

In Stoicism and Skepticism and finally within Unhappy Consciousness

there is an inner opposition at work between the changeable singular con-

sciousness and the unchangeable universal consciousness, that is now



Robbert Veen

34

projected outward as the True Essence.

C. Free Concrete Reason

This secondary opposition must be overcome to reach the truth of self-

consciousness which is the certainty that it itself is the whole of reality.

That is the stage of Reason.

As reason, self-consciousness is the singular subject that now has

reached the concrete universal, it is like the "I" in Fichte's Doctrine of

Science or the Synthetic Unity of Apperception in Kant's Critique of

Pure Reason.Concrete universal self-consciousness in its immediate form is Reason.

It is however at this stage only opinion and awareness. So the movement

of consciousness and self-consciousness is now repeated. Reason as con-

sciousness is present in Observing Reason. Reason tries to describe na-

ture as its universal object. But it does so self critically. Sensuous cer-

tainty, observation (perception) and reflective reasoning are now the top-

ics of inquiry.Observing reason assumes that it is only interested in objects of percep-

tion, but actually it searches for the universal, essential, within the facts

of organic and inorganic nature in order to find itself. Its experience is

however, that the concrete universal subject cannot be simply found in

nature. Nature has exceptions and defies our categories and though in

biology observing reason can understand itself as being the rational facul-

ty of an organic being called human, it does not succeed in understandingits own objectivity like that. It tries to do so by explaining itself through

a theory of logical and psychological laws. But because the description

always remains external, the inner meaning of these laws remains prob-

lematic. Such descriptions of subjectivity do not explain the process of

observation and reasoning itself.

In a second stage reason understands itself as active, corresponding to

the previous moment in self-consciousness as desire. As realizing itself it



To Read Hegel

35

is reasonable self-consciousness that tries to be the whole of reality by its

own action.

Reason then finally comes to the understanding that it is the certainty of

being all reality, though the carrier of that certainty still remains the ab-

stract individual. Universal is not yet understood as conscious of itself.

Only the collective culture of a people can be said to express the self-

consciousness of the Universal.

Reason in its highest shape is individuality that is in itself and for itself

real. It understands itself to be a real, it realizes itself, and understands

itself in both these shapes. But precisely because it remains Individuality,it is still merely a consciousness of the concrete universal. Only as Spirit

can it now in truth be seen as the identity of consciousness and its sub-

stance or object. It is therefore necessary to transcend even the perspec-

tive of reason.

D. (BB, VI) Spirit

The ethical community of a people is the adequate shape of conscious-ness for the concrete universal, because it is in itself a universal mode of

consciousness. In other words, if we understand the totality of being as a

spiritual entity that is itself and for itself - e.g. if we state that the univer-

sal Spirit is the Spirit of a culture or people, we still posit something that

is substance, not yet consciousness of itself. Hegel defines what Spirit

actually is by positing that the Spirit actually comes to self understanding

and self-consciousness within a community of people: the essence that isin itself and for itself is real as a consciousness and has consciousness of

itself (though at first only in the form of representations) and that is called

the Spirit. (p. 314 Hofmeister edition.)

The truth of the dialectic self movement of the spirit as consciousness is

reached in this chapter on the existing spirit, but still only in the form of

the in itself. (By the way, it is not right to talk about objective spirit

here.) this is a concrete and universal form of consciousness that has its



Robbert Veen

36

full reality in the life of a people. Within that concrete universal life also

the truth of individual consciousness is discovered, implying that now for

the first time we find the notion of a history of consciousness that is at the

same time the history that is remembered as such, because it is now a

history of the consciousness of a people. A movement through stages as

for instance in the organic development, is not yet history. In other words,

only if we reach a dialectic relationship between the incarnate truth of the

universal spirit in a people in opposition to the position of an individual,

do we have something that can be seen as immediate history. History

after all presupposes the facts that are told and interpreted within the con-sciousness of people by an individual that reflects on them and passes

judgment. Without this difference between events as they unfold in the

perspective of an observer or participant that consciously aspires to

achieve something, there is no such thing as history.

Though in this existing spirit we again have the basic shape of con-

sciousness yet the world and its history are seen as the immediate objects

of understanding. At the same time there is more than we had before,where individual reason remained secluded in its abstract individual

energy. Now consciousness is aware of itself as the world and under-

stands the world as itself. Although the Spirit is treated in a later stage of

the development of the Phenomenology, going beyond the abstract indi-

viduality and equally abstract universal that we had before, we have now

reached the real ground and substance of the previous stages.

We can now say that consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are

the abstractions of the truth of the Spirit as incarnate in the culture of a

people.

E. Religion

At the end of the chapter on Reason we still have a difference between

individual concrete reason, and the universal substance. Then in the



To Read Hegel

37

chapter on the Spirit, Reason discovers that her own truth lies in the uni-

versal consciousness of the ethical world. The Spirit therefore, as the

concrete existing spirit of a people, is still only the truth in itself. The

shape of consciousness in which the Spirit now comes to self understand-

ing or self-consciousness is Religion. The spirit that knows itself finds its

adequate form of self-consciousness in religion, because there we have

the universal subject and the concrete universal substance united.

In Religion the absolute becomes conscious of itself in all its previous

manifestations.

It was already present in the chapter on finite reason and under-standing. Unhappy consciousness aspired toward the absolute but did not

recognize it as itself.

Reason overlooked the Absolute because it found itself only in

what was immediately before itself.

In the ethical order the Absolute was an impersonal Fate in which

no one could recognize himself.

The religion of the Enlightenment had only an empty absolute,which stressed the interest it had in the present.

Finally, the religious aspect of morality and conscience led to the

acceptance of the inner universal self, but now all differentiation and all

actuality existed merely outside of itself.

In all of these religious moments, the Spirit was just a part of a finite

object. Now in Religion Spirit sees itself objectively as the UniversalSpirit that is expressed in an objective natural shape, that is transparent to

its own essence. The immediate nature of religion however, implies only

a partial connection to the universal substance, or in other words religion

in part remains positivist. It does not understand the worldly expression

of its essence to be spirit itself. That means that all the previous shapes of

consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit must be realized in



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38

succession, even though as such Religion contains all of them in unity.

The religious spirit is at first self-conscious in an immediate manner.

The movements of its concrete shapes is driven by the attempt to unify

itself with its content. That movement again is a movement from certain-

ty to truth. Ultimately that truth is attained in the self-consciousness of

religion.

Natural religion is the way in which absolute Spirit appears to itself in

the manner of sense certainty, perception and understanding. Hegel re-

fers to be Persian religion of light and darkness, as the first of these. Per-

ception is present in the Indian religions where the absolute appears in avariety of independent vegetable and animal forms. As understanding the

Spirit appears in the Egyptian religion, that ultimately expresses an inner

duality in the Sphinx which is part animal and part human and as a whole

divine.

In Egyptian religion the role of the artisan is crucial, but not for itself

yet. When Religion reaches the level of self-consciousness, it becomes

the Religion of Art in which the artisan is the essential self-consciousnessat work. As a product of free spirit, Art is the immediate form in which a

society that is simply built on customs and traditions, that has a culture

that is treated as nature, is broken up. Ultimately the artist wants to ex-

press himself. The external work of art is basically a form without color -

that is how it is remembered because its color was lost! - in which the

individual expresses his own content.

The Religion of Art then goes through the separate stages of the abstractwork of art, the living work of art, and the spiritual work of art. Ulti-

mately self-consciousness is reached in a shape that corresponds to the

end of the chapter on Individual Reason. The truth of Comedy is the self

awareness of the individual in his own accidental individuality. The reli-

gious sense of that is the self knowledge of the absolute within it. The

absolute is subjectivity as the identity of the individual to himself within

the world of passions and the accidental.



To Read Hegel

39

In Comedy the individual consciousness now appears to be the basis of

the absolute essence, judging and mocking it. Instead of the individual

being the manifestation of the absolute, we now have the reversal of that.

In that sense we find ourselves now in the opposite corner of unhappy

consciousness. When we analyze the structure of Comedy, we can see

however that it contains not one but two shapes of self-consciousness.

On the one hand we have self-consciousness judging the absolute, on the

other hand we have the absolute still being defined as a self-

consciousness itself, albeit in a negative form when seen from the first.

We have therefore two equal sides of self-consciousness operating in both Unhappy Consciousness and Comic Consciousness.

That is why as the basis of Revealed Religion we must picture a dual

movement. On the one hand we have a substance going out of itself and

becoming self-consciousness, on the other hand we have a self-

consciousness going out of itself and producing the Absolute Spirit. Re-

vealed Religion contains the self-consciousness of God within human

self-consciousness. It combines therefore both perspectives. As the Fa-ther we have the essence or being in itself of absolute self-consciousness.

At the same time it is being for itself for that essence. That is the moment

of the Son. And finally we have the being for itself which knows itself in

the other, the Holy Spirit. Ultimately this Spirit, is most essentially itself

in the religious community or Congregation where the unity of the abso-

lute self-consciousness and the individual self-consciousness of Christ is

transformed into a collective self, a universal self-consciousness of theUniversal Spirit.

Only as a community can we say that the self-consciousness of the abso-

lute is realized in its other. And only as a community can we say that we

actually know this absolute as self-consciousness.

In religion therefore, even though it can never fully identify itself with

the object of its consciousness, and has to use narrative and images of

that unity or use projections of that unity for the indefinite future, the



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40

social shape of knowledge that is the absolute condition of science is

finally reached. In that sense one can say that the scientific community is

of necessity a religious community.

F. Absolute Knowledge

In Religion there still is a distinction between the objective form of narra-

tive and image, and the contents of absolute self-consciousness. Again

Absolute Knowing must transcend this distinction and become aware of

itself in all forms it has successively gone through. Only if the content of

religion is understood as the action of the self, only if religion is seen asexpressing a stage of its own interior development, can conceptual know-

ledge transcend it.

Systematic science can only appear when self-consciousness has any

conceptual understanding of itself and is able to see all objectivity as

something conceptual. Only then we have the necessary unity of subject

and object within the concept that is essential to both. Therefore sub-

stance, what seems to be solidly out there in itself, must be transformedinto the conceptual and in that sense become subjective. The Encyclope-

dia or System will achieve that conceptual understanding.

Ultimately, systematic science cannot remaining simply conceptual, be-

cause it needs to understand the externalization of the Spirit in nature and

political society as well as in human history. Its ultimate goal is the un-

derstanding of Spirit developing itself through a long procession of his-

torical cultures and individuals, producing its self-understanding as phi-losophy.



To Read Hegel

41

5. Why Substance Has to Become Subject

toward a negative dialectics

Summary. Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is determined as “su bstance

needs to be expressed also as subject.” In the Preface, par. 17 and 18, this is

explained as both an epistemological and an ontological principle. Substance

means the immediacy of the object and of consciousness, but it also means the

“living substance”, i.e. reality as absolute. But what if the Subject that is the

Truth and goal of Substance is not understood as divine and infinite? What if thisDivine Subject is a way of expressing the excess in human subjectivity? Sub-

stance that should also be expressed as subject then comes to mean these three

things:1.Being is only present within human discourse about being. 2. Being

speaks about itself in the human discourse about being. 3. Being is continuously

falsified by a subjectivity that is finite and false or rather mad , i.e. posits itself in

an exclusive particularity. Without the onto-theological presumption of Hegel’ssystem – the idea that religion teaches us that the absolute is divine to which

Hegel remained fettered – we can discover the full critical and “negative” poten-tial of Hegel’s dialectics again.

According to the preface of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit the True

should not only be conceived and expressed as Substance but equally as

Subject. Now what does that mean?

If we start from the position of Immanuel Kant we can ultimately find

three distinct meanings of this thesis.To summarize the philosophy of Kant we can say: there is no reality

without activity by the human subject. To which Hegel would reply: quite

true, but the human subject is not a neutral and universal agency, what

Kant called transcendental self-consciousness, that constitutes reality

directly. According to Hegel, human subjectivity is in itself finite and

imbalanced, limited and confused. (Verstand ) Precisely for that reason

the human subject tends to see reality as something that is completely



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42

external to him, a position that is still relevant to Kant in as far as he po-

sits at least the notion of absolute (and distinct, external) reality as the

Thing in Itself. In other words, human subjectivity is divided in itself

between a consciousness that is prone to accept whatever it is immediate-

ly given as positive reality and a transcendental reflective subjectivity,

that understands the world as being constituted by itself. Nevertheless,

despite the insight that reality is constituted by the subject, we somehow

need the concept of the thing in itself to prevent us from thinking that

human cognition is productive. (This duality of consciousness is basically

what Hegel's chapter on Lordship and Bondage is all about. )The first meaning of the thesis is therefore epistemological : what con-

sciousness accepts as reality as such (substance in the metaphysical

sense) is actually merely formal, i. e. it is the fact of the object being

given to consciousness, in particular the immediacy of what is present to

consciousness. (Because consciousness knows its object to be other than

itself, the difference between objective reality and consciousness becomes

an obsession!) This epistemological reading of the thesis repeats the mainKantian thesis but also prepares for its destruction. If the presupposition

of the duality of object and subject can itself become questionable, at

least in so far as we begin to doubt the deduction of a metaphysical prop-

osition from a phenomenological observation, we can move to another

level of questions.

What if there is no such duality? What if this duality is merely an ap-

pearance? What if the presupposition of this duality is not vital to main-taining the meaningfulness of human cognition? And beyond that, what if

the duality between the thing in itself and the reality as constituted by the

subject is in itself a part of reality? That would lead to an ontological

transformation of the thesis. Substance as such must be expressed as

Subject because it truly is subjectivity in itself, and subjectivity is truly

Substance. But that would somehow combine Kantian subjectivity with

Spinoza's substance and would draw on insights derived from the Chris-



To Read Hegel

43

tian tradition. If we take a look at the preface we can see how Hegel

moves forward from the first to the second meaning of his theses.

In paragraph 17 he says:

In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself,

everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only at Substance, but

equally as Subject. At the same time, it is to be observed that substantiality em-

braces the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge itself, as well as that which

is being or immediacy for knowledge.

In these sentences Substance is reduced to something formal, both theobject for consciousness, and the consciousness for which it is the object,

are now called substantial. There is no substance, i. e. no immediate ob-

ject for consciousness, without the activity of consciousness, i.e. what in

its repressed or abstract form is the immediacy of consciousness. Both

being and consciousness of being in their separateness as well as in their

unification are immediate, i. e. positive, expressed without the conditions

of their possibility.In paragraph 18 Hegel goes beyond this epistemological and Kantian

interpretation to give an ontological twist to his thesis. Now both the im-

mediate separateness and unity of being and consciousness is inscribed

into the fabric of reality itself. Hegel writes:

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the

same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is

the mediation of its self-othering with itself.

What Hegel here calls the living Substance is reality, absolute being. It

is this substance that posits its self in language, as concept, as subject. In

human language being speaks about itself. It is actual in so far as it reach-

es truth because without it is simply not there, and it is true because what

is expressed is indeed actual. But it speaks in such a way that the appear-



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44

ance is created that it is just man speaking about being. This appearance

however is part of the reality, it is an element of the way that being

speaks about itself. The alienation of being in its other, that creates this

appearance, is vital to its own dynamics. That is why Hegel could say that

we should express the true not only as substance but equally as subject.

That does not constitute a complete denial of the possibility to express the

true as substance. Moreover, the phenomenology of Spirit is actual evi-

dence that humanity has to speak about the world in various ways of im-

mediacy. Immediacy is not something that can be discarded or surpassed.

Or in other words, philosophy can never divest itself from all traces of human subjectivity nor should it try to do so.

How can there be a third meaning to this thesis? Such a third meaning

would have to be about the nature of subjectivity. Let's summarize what

we have so far. We have the Kantian thesis that being is only meaningful

because the human subject speaks of being. There is no reality without

the activity of the subject. We then have the Hegelian turn, that points to

the duality contained in the Kantian thesis of being on the one hand andconsciousness on the other, ultimately maintained by the empty gesture of

the thing in itself. Now the duality is inscribed into reality itself. Sub-

stance truly is expressing itself as subject. The absolute substance is di-

vine subjectivity. But what does that say about the human subject?

To Hegel this second meaning of the sentence was the ultimate thesis

that opened up the possibility of his philosophy. I would suggest that just

as in Kantianism an empty gesture (the notion of the thing in itself) pro-tected the system from falling into an one-sided subjectivism, the empty

gesture of the divine absolute prevents Hegelianism from doing the same.

Let's consider this argument. What can prevent us from repeating the

question as to the ground in reality of the thesis? The ontological inter-

pretation of the thesis merely posits that human subjectivity is the way in

which substance, i.e. absolute reality, comes to self understanding. It

promises that the system as a whole provides for the evidence. It guaran-



To Read Hegel

45

tees that human subjectivity is constitutive of reality without becoming

subjectivist, because that subjectivity is itself constituted by the absolute.

But this is merely a contention, even after the systematic Darstellung has

run its course. The notion that human subjectivity is ultimately consti-

tuted by the absolute itself, is itself a subjective idea. It remains in es-

sence analogous to the Cartesian argument, that a finite human being is

unable to conceive of an absolute being – because the finite cannot be the

cause of the infinite - and that thereby the objective reality of such a

being is guaranteed by the presence of such a concept itself. Hegel him-

self pointed to the fact that this could be construed as an illusion precisely because the idea of absoluteness here was abstract, i.e. reached by simple

negation. The weakness of the theological presumption must therefore

necessarily bring us back to the first meaning of the thesis.

Hegel can only prevent this subjectivist outcome by arguing that the ab-

solute substance that constitutes us and reality is in itself subjective, i.e.

Spirit and that human subjectivity is the fragmented way in which it ap-

pears to itself. The revolutionary thesis of Christianity, that God has become human, is thereby exploited to the full. In the way his entire

system becomes analogous to the ontological argument for the existence

of God as was presented by Anselm. The totality of reality that surpasses

human subjectivity, is not dependent upon human cognition to be there.

The incarnation is a representation of that fact. Human subjectivity is the

embodiment of the divine. The common origin of substance and subjec-

tivity in the divine substance that is in itself subjectivity guarantees the possibility of speculative philosophy itself. By identifying reality with

the divine substance, Hegel can evade Kantian skepticism.

What however if the thesis in both its meanings does not refer to a

process that has an ending, but to a continuous movement? Substance,

i.e. immediate reality, is continuously being sublated by a new shape of

subjectivity that tries to posit itself in its exclusive particularity and the-

reby falsifies both its object and itself. But this exclusive particularity is



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46

precisely its untruth. Every mode of consciousness and every human act

of cognition is therefore both true and false at the same time. And the

same goes for the presumed object of human consciousness. By inscrib-

ing human subjectivity into reality, reality as such becomes untrue. The

impossibility of cognition is no longer a failure of human subjectivity nor

a weakness of reality, but precisely a precondition of knowledge. We

know because we don't know. Without the guarantee of divine subjec-

tivity, Hegel system boils down to the most damning critique of all pre-

tended knowledge. The negative force of Hegel’s system needs only be

turned against its theological presuppositions, to become this fully nega-tive dialectic.

You might say that we try to move away from both the Platonic and the

Aristotelian presuppositions of Hegelian philosophy. A daring but never-

theless intriguing prospect! The Aristotelian connection between scien-

tific knowledge and the divine absolute is intrinsic to his definition of the

objects of metaphysics. Being as being defines the perspective of the

gods that philosophy can achieve. Plato before that defined the idea or concept as the inner essence of reality, by which the latter is measured.

The immortality and universality of the soul was a mark of a divine lega-

cy and origin as well as a precondition of mathematical and philosophical

insight. Hegel's dialectical philosophy reaches its apex where it criticizes

the ontological and epistemological roots of Western philosophy, and in

that sense moved beyond its Greek roots. Hegel's critique of essentialism

in the second part of the science of logic deconstructs both the Platonicand Aristotelian metaphysics. The analysis of the Greek city state as

immediate Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit, shows it to be self-

contradictory. Of course Hegel never renounced on the importance of

Greek philosophy as a constituent part of its methods and tradition and

neither do we. But it is important to stress the radical renewal of philoso-

phy that came to light within German idealism instead of allowing the



To Read Hegel

47

gravity of history to confuse the revolution of Hegel's project with its

failed execution.

Can we then produce an Hegelianism that moves beyond Aristotle? It

would require us to reinterpret the notion of divine substance as a social

construct, that derives its reality from social and political mechanisms. In

his Philosophy of History Hegel comes very close to expressing the view

that the notion of God is expressive of the self understanding of a people

or a community. In his early work he considered Christianity to be a

religion of the people, in which statehood, i.e. the legitimacy of power,

and social morality were firmly rooted. In Hegel's philosophy religionwas the representational form of the collective awareness of historical

truth in a particular people. Nowhere do we find any “realistic” affirma-

tion of a transcendent divine being.

And why not also epistemologically? If we accept the Hegelian thesis,

that being is only expressed through its other or rather its becoming its

other, we are one step away from accepting that otherness or difference is

crucial to being as being. We can say that being can only be expressed asits other, i.e. the concept, without at the same time arguing that it magi-

cally returns to its own identity in the concept. The relationship between

being and its concepts must be maintained as dialectical itself, which

signifies that at the same time the concept or human cognition remains

other , i.e. the alienated or negated form of being. The discarding of the

moment of otherness as if it were a ladder that we can dispose of when

reaching a higher level, relegates negativity to the status of a provisionaryinstrument. What if this negativity truly is the essence?

The idea that substance has to become subject, would ultimately mean

that the human endeavor to understand the world is a continuous transi-

tion between substance and subject. A movement that can never come to

rest, and is therefore marked by an unsurpassable historicity. Substance

inevitably has to become subject, not just because then alone it realizes its

truth, but also the opposite. Only the negativity of the subject produces



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48

the untruth of substance. And of course the opposite of both would be

that subjectivity that realizes itself as social substance can never be fully

true either.

Huizen, the Netherlands, May - July 2009



To Read Hegel

49

Contents

Foreword ......................................................................................... 5

1. Why Do We Still Need to Read Hegel?........................................... 7

A Personal Response ................................................................ 7

The Complexity of Hegel is Fascinating .................................. 8

Understanding the World Better ............................................... 9

How to Study Hegel? .............................................................. 11

2. And Now to Move On ................................................................. 13

How Not to Construct Hegel's System ................................... 16

Why the System is Not the Whole .......................................... 19

3. The Method of the Phenomenology ............................................ 24

Testing Consciousness ............................................................ 26

The Example of 'Being'........................................................... 28

4. The Movement of Consciousness ................................................ 31

A. Consciousness .................................................................... 31

B. Self-consciousness ............................................................. 32

C. Free Concrete Reason ........................................................ 34



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50

D. (BB, VI) Spirit ................................................................... 35

E. Religion.............................................................................. 36

F. Absolute Knowledge.......................................................... 40

5. Why Substance Has to Become Subject ....................................... 41



To Read Hegel

Still to come:

Prefacing a Philosophy - To Read Hegel - part 2

Analysis of the Preface of the Phenomenology.

About the author:

Robbert Adrian Veen was born in Amsterdam in 1956. After his studies

in philosophy, theology and Semitic Languages he became a minister for

the liberal Mennonite Church in the Netherlands. After teaching philoso-

phy for many years as a fellow of the Dutch Philosophical Society, he

received his doctorate in the Humanities in 2001 on a dissertation called:

The Law of Christ, Christian ethics from a Mennonite perspective. In that

same year he was appointed assistant professor in Christian dogmaticsand ethics at the Free University of Amsterdam, a position from which he

resigned in august 2008. Since then he has worked as a freelance author

and teacher of philosophy and theology, for Philosophy.org and the Ol-

terterper Kring in Friesland, and recently also on the internet

(www.WiZiQ.com).

Besides his studies in Hegel and Barth he is also working on his third

novel, the first to be published in English.

http://www.wiziq.com/




how to read hegel part 1

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