Lecture: Hegel

NCTU Graduate

From “Preface” to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit [A. V. Miller, trans.]:




[4] For the Absolute is not supposed to be comprehended, it is to be felt and intuited; not the Notion of the Absolute, but the feeling and intuition of it, must govern what is said, and must be expressed by it.



[5] Philosophy is to meet this need [viz. the ‘lost sense of substantial being], not by opening up the fast-locked nature of substance, and raising this to self-consciousness, not by bringing consciousness out of its chaos back to an order based on thought, nor to the simplicity of the Notion, but rather by running together what thought has put asunder, by suppressing the differentiations of the Notion and restoring the feeling of essential being: in short by providing edification rather than insight.”



[6] Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward.



[6-7] The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change.



[15] Knowledge in its first phase, or immediate Spirit, is the non-spiritual, i.e. sense-consciousness.



[17] But the length of this path [of Spirit coming into what knowing is] has to be endured, because, for one thing, each moment is necessary; and further, each moment has to be lingered over, because each is itself a complete individual shape, […]



[19] […] this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’. Death, if this is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates Understanding for asked of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it [i.e. death, devastation] and maintains itself in it. […] Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it [i.e. the negative itself] into being. This power is identuical with what we earlier called the Subject […]



[43] For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Life and Thought



German philosopher of idealism born in 1770 and died in 1831. He was a student with fellow philosopher Schelling and also the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. After graduation and after tutoring for a few years he, in 1800, went to Jena where Schelling had taken over the post held by Fichte and was embarking on a speculative idealist philosophy of nature and metaphysics.

At Jena, and in the very year Napoleon's victory over the Prussians, Hegel wrote his first important work, the Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit). Afterwards, he became the editor of a daily paper in Bavaria. In 1808 he went to Nuremberg where he wrote the monumental Wissenschaft der Logic(Science of Logic). From 1816 to 1818 he was a professor at Heidelberg where he published the Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse(Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline.). In 1818 he became an influential professor at Berlin and published the Naturrecht und Staatwissenschaft im Grundrisse(On Natural Right and the Science of the State) or the Grundlinen der Philosophie des Rechts (Outline for a Philosophy of Right).

He dies during a cholera epidemic.



After Kant it is no longer intelligible to ask if our thought is an accurate representation of reality. What we call reality is always already informed by thought, conditioned by thought. To go beyond the thinkable is to enter into antinomies. Does the world have a beginning or not? Reason can provide perfectly cogent arguments either way.

For Kant we only know representations, phenomena. But Kant retains the thing-in-itself. For infinite Being things really would appear as they in fact are. Only in Infinite Mind is Being equal to Thought. But we, alas, are finite. The Absolute is beyond us. However, we can speculate. Thus speculation became a calling for philosophers of the Jena school: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Here, idealism became absolute.

The originary structure of the Absolute Subject is Cartesian: the cogito experience of the finite subject is the same as the experience of an Absolute Subject: the Subject experiences itself in-itself and for-itself. But Descartes' subjective certainty is separated from reality. In Hegel, the ego is part of the process of reality itself insofar as reality is the thought of God, Geist, Spirit, Infinite Being. For Hegel Geist [Spirit] is God is Absolute Being. The Cartesian subject is projected onto Being in its Totality. Being-in-its-Totality is insofar as it knows itself, reflects itself, projects itself. In Descartes, I am insofar as I reflect myself in thought [i.e. every thought such as "here is a tree" is implicitly an "I think here is a tree" and every "I think" is an "I am." I think is not a reasoned outcome, not a premise/conclusion, but an immediacy: I think/I am. For Descartes, thinking and being are the same subjective certainty]. But, now, Absolute Subject must separate itself from itself and must become its own object. This is a departure from Descartes. Self-Knowledge cannot be conceived the immediate identity of thought and being as in Descartes because this excludes time. (We will come back to this, to the necessity of difference, below.) Hegelian knowledge takes time, history. But not human history; the history of Spirit, of which human history is only a moment.

For Hegel, Self-knowledge will require difference. Self-differentiation is reflection: Absolute Knowledge must reflect itself in order to be for-itself what it is in-itself. The Absolute knows itself only by seeing itself outside itself. It needs a mirror, in other words.

The Hegelian Absolute is not content with Being--it must know that it is, must become conscious (of itself). It must be for-itself what it is in-itself. It must become itself, in short, through mediation. So it alienates itself from itself. It divides and departs from itself. The Dialectic is the very unfolding of Being (of the Absolute, of God). But first there is self-negation. It must negate what it is in-itself to become other than itself in order to know itself in that other, in that object. In the end of its journey it will return to itself. I see myself in the mirror (I alienate myself), in order to recognize myself in the mirror (in the object) and thus to see myself as I am in myself. (God alienates Himself in Christ. God, the Absolute and Infinite alienates himself from himself in becoming finite and carnal in Christ in order to recognize himself in this other (that he in fact is).)



Truth in the sense of subjective certainty requires alienation in an object until it can recognize itself in that object.





In-Itself



For-Itself......................................................................................In-Itself



Subject...........................................................................................Object



In-Itself-For-Itself

(or, Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis)



This diagram describes the outline or Grundrisse of the whole Science of Knowledge which Hegel divides into (of course) three parts: 1. Logic 2. Philosophy of Nature 3. Philosophy of Spirit.



Logic. Concept. A concept is a essence, an identity. A concept of a tree gives what trees have in common. Their identity. That which will be found in any tree whatever. Hegel shows, and this is breathtaking, that identity presupposes difference. A = A only because A is different from not-A. Sheer identity (A = A) is unthinkable. It is “the night when all cows are black”. (For Schelling, A = A was the supreme principle of all thought, was that without which no thought of any kind would be possible; it is simply the "identity principle" and Hegel, points out that this supreme principle of thought is in itself unthinkable.) So, any logic whatsoever must become a dialectic. The identity of A is a result of its own negation and then a negation of that negation. Therefore, following this logic, the concept must become other than what it is. And what is other than the concept? The thing in its existence outside the concept. Nature proves to be the truth of the concept. Nature is the becoming other, the alienation of, the concept. What is more, the thing can only be what it is if it is thought in the concept as what it is. Spirit or Geist is the name for the identity of thing and concept, or subject and substance. Spirit is Being knowing what it is. Now this colossal achievement is that we no longer have merely formal, abstract identity but concrete identity: the incarnation of logic. The real is now rational and the rational is real. (This bridge or identity is what Kant sought to provide in the third Critique, and Hegel is known to have said that the third was the most interesting of Kant's three critiques).



Now, human being is no different from Spirit, is a part of Spirit and so also alienates itself in order to know itself, in order to achieve self-consciousness. For Hegel, from the Phenomenology of Spirit, self consciousness is desire. (As a matter of fact, Hegel never mentions man, human being. He only speaks of self-consciousness and this must mean man, human being.) Self-consciousness is desire. Life, for Hegel, is the subjective aspect of nature. It is something that develops itself autonomously: plants grow, stones do not. Unlike inanimate matter, the animate grow and change over time, by themselves. In nature, life grows freely. Life is selbstständischkeit. Life does not know its other. It is independent from any other. It assimilates the other or is itself assimilated. Plants do not know water, plants assimilate water. So, in nature, life remains unconscious of itself: it knows no other, it is immediately itself and life, it lives/it is without mediation. Animal life does not know itself to be free, to be alive. It is unconscious of itself (but not like Freud's unconscious). It has no mirror in which to behold itself. No cogito. So, it must mediate itself to know itself. Free life must discover the independence of objects. Life must confront its absolute other, death. Only then can it know itself as life. Death is the truth of life.

For Hegel, man or human being is only a name for the becoming conscious of life. Thus he speaks of self-consciousness in general. Human being, although a moment of self-consciousness, is still life not essentially different from plant life. Human being is just at the juncture between animal life and self-consciousness. So, insofar as man negates his animality, he is self-consciousness. And, as man is essentially life, he will only find his self-consciousness in death. Only in death does man break with given reality, only then does he negate given reality. The power of negation is the work of death in the world. Man is the becoming-conscious of nature. Man is difference internal to life. Why and how? Because Man negates given reality in order to behold himself outside himself: the woodworker finds himself in the product of his labor of transforming the given slab of wood into a rocking chair or bed frame. The cat merely crawls up on the slab of wood and naps.

That which human being produces is human reality, as opposed to given reality. Given reality, or pure and simple being, is negated by human being. It is simply in-itself. When it is transformed its reality is for-human being. Human reality (the reality of self-consciousness) is for-itself. Absolute Being divides into the in-itself and the for-itself thanks to the intervention of human being who desires to know himself. Thanks to human being who negates. Absolute Being is now different from itself. The Hegelian dialectic will differentiate this difference since, at the end of History, at the end of time, the in-itself and the for-itself will join. Dialectical synthesis, or the aufhebung, the negation-lifting up, or the sublation, is the identity of identity and difference.

The difference between human being and given being is its work, its ability to negate and reflect on itself. It's desire to negate the given, the merely vorhandensein and know itself. Human being is desire. Desire is human being. Desire, to put it simply, desires itself. Desire desires desire. In the object, desire has transformed the given into something for-desire, for-itself. The negated and transformed object is a path for human being to come to know itself. (Consider the pleasure children take in their accomplishments; "It was me, I did this!") Desire in-itself is likewise and at the same time transformed, alienated from itself in order to know itself. Desire, in negating the given reality, also negates itself, transforms itself. Desires knows itself in negating itself. I become what I desire, what I do, make, transform. But, this is only the first moment of the dialectic. Ultimately, self-consciousness wishes to know itself, to reflect itself as self-consciousness. Thus it seeks in another self-consciousness a mirror for itself in order to see itself for what it is in-itself. That which I desire is, yes, to see myself in my work (I did this!) but also to be recognized as he who did this by another self-consciousness. Hence that which desire desires is the desire of the other desire. Because desire is not an object, like the bed I made in which I can behold myself. I wish for recognition from the other self-consciousness which mirrors my own. The object of desire is not the object, but the non-object, the other desire. But Desire is no object, no thing, nothing, void, negative. For self consciousness to know itself as self consciousness, for desire to know itself as desire, it must go beyond the given reality. And what is beyond? Only desire, desire itself. In negating given reality, desire manifests itself as non-objective, as beyond the given. In the given reality transformed into the object, it seeks itself, desires itself. But it finds only the object, a trace of itself, a memorial to desire, its past. It does not find desire as such. Desire as such will be reflected in the desire of another for my desire, or, in my desire for the desire of the other. History is the history of desired desires. I desire this woman because she is desirable, that is, desired by others. The other who desires what I desire in fact desires my desire, mirrors my desire, steals my desire, alienates it from me. Sooner or later, there will be conflict. My wish to be recognized as free, independent desire, my wish to reflect on myself as desire, inevitably leads to violence. Ultimately to a struggle for supremacy. One or the other will yield. Who yields is enslaved. Who does not is Master. The Master is he who does not yield to death, who does not fear death.

This is the dialectic of desire. Self-consciousness is not theoretical, it is desire in general and it devours the given reality in order to have itself for-itself. But it itself is non-natural, non-object. It is subject, active, negating. It is sheer no-thing-ness. So to desire itself is to desire its own nothingness, its sheer freedom. Hence the conflict or struggle to the death is necessary for it to manifest it's nothingness, its sheer gratuitousness. But, if I am dead, I can't be free. So one yields and one triumphs. One is slave and one is master. radical negativity--death--is overcome (aufhebung) by dialectical negativity--the Master/Slave relation. The slave fears his own desire, his own freedom, realizes that life is important to him as is self-consciousness. The slave now recognizes the master's mastery and his own dependency. The master is free, absolute negativity (will kill or be killed) and knows itself as for-itself. The slave, poor fellow, is for-another, is dependent. The slave goes to work for the master. And the slave recognizes the master as truly human. The master is for the slave what he is for himself. His desire has become the law of the slave's desire. No one resists him. He can enjoy himself. There is nothing he cannot negate, kill, eat. The master only consumes, he no longer works. He does not find his desire in objects but in the frightened eyes of the slaves who work for him. In their eyes, in their fear, he reflects himself and knows himself and is for them what he is for himself. But, the slave remains necessary to the master. No longer working, the master only consumes what the slave produces for him. His negativity is abstract, the slaves is still concrete. What is more, in the slave, the master recognizes himself but he does not recognize the slave as human. So, he has achieved reflection but that which reflects his desire is not equal to him, is not human, fears death, is still animal. His victory is a trap, an impasse.

The slave feared death. That is, the slave experienced death in his fear. In his very fear the slave experienced himself as not being and shrunk in terror from the fear. The slave thus experience his nothingness, realized in the concrete the negative that makes him human (even if the master does not recognize him as human). The slave has realized his freedom, but appears to be un-free. The master, willing to die, did not confront death and is now therefore only apparently free.

The master is for-himself but his truth is in the slave. The slave has relinquished his for-himself to the master whom he serves but prior to that, to the Absolute Master, death. The slave now realizes that he, not the master, is the synthesis of nature and freedom. Why? Because he works. The slave was not destroyed by death or by the master--he was transformed. He survived death in his fear, in his experience of himself as not being there any longer. The slave sets to work transforming nature, the very nature that originally dominated him. The master's mastery resulted in nothing, in consumption. The slave is able to realize his freedom concretely in making things, in finding himself in the things he makes, in the second nature he constructs out of his technique, skill, art. The slave's freedom is realized precisely because of his repression, his fear of death. The master's freedom is immediate and abstract: he only devours, he become an infant. The slave postpones enjoyment in work. The slave sublimates his own desire. The slave capitalizes on his own fear of death. Non-satisfaction of desire becomes the route beyond, the Aufhebung of, the dialectic of desire. Desire is now satisfied in repression.



Master/Slave Dialectic in Detail (based on Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel):



Human being is conscious of himself, of his reality, dignity and freedom. In this he differs from animal who have only a sentiment of self. Man is conscious of himself in the “I” of speech; the origin of the “I” is the subject of the lectures. Self-consciousness is essentially different from Subjectivity, or consciousness in general, which merely contemplates an object. (Descartes ego cogito, e.g.) The man who contemplates is absorbed by what he contemplates. He is passive, a spectator who at best wishes to uncover the rule by which and through which consciousness is able to be conscious of something or other. For, to return to himself and become conscious of himself requires Desire. Man is not merely someone who knows. He also eats, for example. He eats, he desires to eat and he is conscious of this desire. In Desire, “I want…” In Desire Man is brought out of his contemplative attitude and returns to himself. It is Desire that reveals an object to a subject, not knowledge: “I want to eat that.” Desire dis-quiets the contemplative attitude, interrupts it. But what is specifically human Desire?



Man, the self-conscious being, presupposes Desire. Desire is born and is maintained within a natural being, within an animal, biological reality. But animal Desire is not sufficient for Self-consciousness, it is merely necessary.



Desire is action. “I want to eat that” so I eat it, I act, I make it possible to eat, and I eat. That is, I destroy the given object, or transform it into what it was not, into amino acids in my stomach. All action is negating. This is abstract negativity. The being that eats creates and preserves his own reality by devouring another reality. He transforms, alienates, assimilates another reality. Essentially, Desire is an emptiness that reveals itself as real in the act of negation, transformation, assimilation.



If Desire is directed at a natural not-I then the I of Desire would also be natural. An animal eats, and eats, and eats—then, it itself is eaten by another animal. Animal Desire remains within nature. It is merely living. For there to be Self-consciousness there must be directed toward a non-natural object. That which is par excellence non-natural is Desire. Desire is but revealed nothingness, emptiness that realizes itself only in action. Human Desire is directed toward another Desire. Man appears on the earth as a herd animal with multiple Desires. But for the herd to become a society, multiple Desires are not sufficient. Animal Desire is directed toward an object, Human Desire toward another Desire—i.e. not an object, a nothingness. Something must redirect the herd’s multiple Desires away from things and toward each other. Humans must Desire each other, not as objects, however. Humans must Desire each other’s Desire. Human Desire desires Desire. An enemy’s flag has value not in its materiality but in the fact that it is desirable to the enemy. In love I do not Desire the other person as a body, I Desire that she Desire me. I Desire her Desire. Human history is the history of desired Desires.



To be truly human, human Desire must win out over animal Desire. Desire is desire for a value. To the animal the value is life. Man comes to be Man when he risks his animal life for a non-vital end. Human being comes to be Human is risking life. Now, to desire the Desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I represent is the value desired by the other: I want him to recognize my value as his value. Thus the truly human Desire the generates Self-consciousness is a function of the desire for recognition. Specifically, to be recognized as he who is willing to risk life in order to be recognized: this is what is truly Human Desire. Human Desire is only realized in the purely gratuitous fight to the death. To each the life of the other has no more, or less, value than his own. Man separates himself from the herd in this fight and becomes truly human and at the same moment History is born, but on one condition.



The fight to the death cannot end in death. If both die, there is no consciousness at all. If one dies, there is no one to recognize the other’s value. There is only a corpse. Instead, during the battle one side surrenders. One side realizes mortal fear and decides to stay alive. He becomes a Slave. The winner becomes the Master. Both adversaries remain alive but one fears the other, gives in, and recognizes him as superior, as truly human, as Master. Further, the loser recognizes himself as inferior, animal, dependent. In this nascent state, man is no longer herd animal, he is either Master or Slave.



Now, Kojève will demonstrate that the true victor is the slave. Why? Because the master remains at the level of abstract negativity. The master does not fear death. The slave will achieve concrete negativity, in the end, at the end of history, he will master the master and become truly free.

1. The master is recognized by the slave as the truly human being. The slave is still contaminated by the animal desire merely to stay alive. No one resists the master. He is feared as death itself is feared. The master consumes the slaves’ freedom. The master enjoys himself. He consumes what the slave works for. The master does not work—why should he? He does not fear death, he does not merely want to stay alive. He terrifies other ‘half humans’ who do want to stay alive. The master’s abstract negativity depends on the slave’s concrete negativity. The slave negates the given reality and builds the palace for the master who uses it, consumes it, enjoys it. The work of the slave is the truth of the master’s enjoyment. Moreover, the slave is still tied to nature: he works in it, transforming it for the master, and he fears death and thus retains his animal desire. Hence, the master cannot recognize the slave as a human being. The slave has proven in his cowardice that he is still part animal. This part human creature recognizes the master as master, but, all in all, the slave is a mere thing. That which the fight was all about, the fight for pure prestige, was a fight to be recognized by another human desire. That’s why it must be a fight to the death. But the result is that the master is now only recognized by a thing. Poor master. The master certainly has achieved freedom from his animal desire, but there is no one to recognize this hence he remains only subjectively free. He is at the same level as the consciousness that gazes at the pyramids because only another human self consciousness can recognize a human self consciousness.

2. The slave does become truly conscious of his own freedom, however. He does not fear the master per se: he fears himself, his own death. In surrendering to the master, he alienates his freedom. He is an animal. In the master, the slave recognizes his own freedom. Afraid of his own freedom to die (that was what the fight was all about: the desire to be recognized as free to die by another whom the first recognizes as free to die), the slave freely decides not to be free. Not this master, but death itself is the Absolute Master. This master is a free, human desire only because the slave has surrendered his own freedom to him. Servitude is always voluntary. You cannot subjugate someone who does not fear death. The slave decides to be a slave, consciously. He freely negates his own freedom and becomes conscious of it thereby. The master is the slave’s negation which the slave recognizes. In the master is the slave’s death living a human life. But he is but a master. The slave did not fear him, but death itself. Further, the slave alienates abstract desire and hence his own humanity which he too recognizes in the master. That is, the slave lives and experiences his own death and his own humanity—which he freely surrendered—in the master whom he serves. In the master he sees his own humanity outside himself. The dialectic has worked. The master was willing to die but did not die, did not confront death, because the slave gave up too soon. The master now depends upon the slave for his enjoyment. He is only apparently free. The slave really is free, but apparently un-free.

3. The master is the for-itself of consciousness but his truth is in the slave. The slave has alienated his for-itself to the master. But now the slave begins to recognize himself as the true victor, because he works. K returns to basic Hegel. The slave transforms the given reality into a subjective reality. What was wood is now my table, a human reality, a subjective-object. It is the product. In the transformation of nature into products is history. Because of the slave, nature become history and the slave, in transforming nature also transforms himself. The natural world is slowly transformed into the human world in which the slave sees himself and in which the slave knows himself. The slave lives in the very world that he himself has transformed, built, made. Not just a pyramid being finished but the whole world is transformed in the course of history. The slave educates himself in this way. Furthermore, originally afraid of his own death, his own nature, the slave has now completely transformed natural being and dominates it. It is via work and that the slave lives and thence overcomes his own fear of death. The trick that the slave performs on the master is this: yes he alienates his desire in the original confrontation, but he does not completely abandon the desire. He represses his desire. The slave still desires what the master desired: to be fully human, but the slave is willing to wait. It is precisely in work that “desire is held in check”: that is, in work, not the confrontation, desire is transformed into truly human desire. The slave has capitalized on desire. He is the man of repression. Work requires the sublimation of desire. The artist is satisfied in work, in repression. The artist enjoys repression of desire. In work, abstract desire achieves the aufhebung. The worker who enjoys work enjoys himself because he has alienated his desire in work. For the slave, the concrete world that he himself builds is the realization of himself/desire.



The world itself is entirely transformed. The whole of given reality is now essentially for-man, for the human because of the work of the slave. History has hence ended. There is nothing given left to transform. The slave is now equal to the master because the slave is master of the world the master must live in. The slave comes to know that he never feared the master but only feared his own death—which fear he has transformed into human history—the history of the transformation of given reality into human reality. Nothing fundamentally new can happen. Likewise, philosophy is over: there is nothing fundamentally new to think. That which caused the Slave to fear, his animal or given nature, has now been completely transformed. The Slave has Mastered Nature itself but not by consuming it, by transforming into human reality. And each Slave recognizes in each other the same transformative power as essentially equally valuable. There is nothing more to fight for. Terror is the origin of the wisdom of History which the Slave realizes and the Master never does.



Slight problem, however. There is nothing fundamental left to do. Human being, human desire is “out of a job”. What happens? K was not sure about this. He was convinced that human history had ended. The world would be transformed into a world of liberal democracies that were production oriented. Essentially, the world we live in now. And what do we do at the end of history? We become American. We play golf, watch TV, eat the foods we like, enjoy--life. In short, we become animal again, but now in a world no longer “given”. Bataille prodded his teacher on this question. He asked simply: what happened to abstract negativity? Does it just “go away”? Even if I have nothing fundamental left to do, I still, on the basic definition of human desire, desire nothing. Which is not exactly to be satisfied, hence not exactly animal. Is it possible to envision a purely gratuitous desire? K decided that it was and that at the end of history we become, not American, but Japanese. We live a purely human life of pure prestige that he finds examples of in Japanese gardens, flower arranging, and ritual suicide. We become snobs and k never really could decide if the snob is really human or not. At the end of history the essence of desire is revealed: still to desire when there is nothing to left to desire.