Hegel's Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit

4. Hegel’s System: Dialectic of “Andness”

Hegel published four books, and posthumously there appeared the volumes of lectures on the philosophy of history, the history of philosophy, philosophy of art, and philosophy of religion. In addition there are early and miscellaneous writings. These make up Hegel’s corpus. In the lectures, Hegel is inventing whole fields of study that have become the center of the humanities in the contemporary world. Except for the philosophy of history, the lectures present the historical material behind Hegel’s divisions of absolute spirit: art, religion, and philosophy. Hegel’s little writings are interesting in themselves and in some instances provide insights into how his system came to be. There are Hegel’s so-called Differenzschrift, on the difference between Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s and Schelling’s systems; Glauben und Wissen, Hegel’s little treatise on faith and knowledge ; the early theological writings; the fragment of a system of 1800; the fragment on love; the lesser political writings that have been collected in English by Z. A. Pelczynski; and the “Jena System,” the system as Hegel first sketched it out, while teaching at Jena. There is also Hegel’s correspondence, a good portion of which has been translated by Clark Butler in a large volume, Hegel: The Letters. The four volumes upon which Hegel’s mature system rests are Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic (1812–16), Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences in Outline (in the original and two revised versions—1817, 1827, 1830), and Philosophy of Right, published in 1821, ten years before Hegel’s death. The Philosophy of Right is an expansion of sections on forms of moral and political life from the Philosophy of Spirit 31 C H A P T E R 4 Hegel’s System: Dialectic of “Andness” of the Encyclopaedia. Both the Philosophy of Right and the whole of the Encyclopaedia contain Zusätze attached to each of their sections. Both of these works were written directly as textbooks and used in various periods of Hegel’s teaching. The Zusätze are summaries of points, taken from Hegel’s lectures, that amplify the original text. These four major books of his system were all closely connected with his teaching. In Jena he announced the Phenomenology as a course, prior to writing it, and the Science of Logic was connected to his teaching in Heidelberg . When Hegel was not lecturing on the history of philosophy , which he did throughout his career, or on other fields, he was teaching his own system directly. What is the system? I wish to give a basic overview of its paradoxes and possible general order. One thing is clear: Hegel conceived the system as having two parts—the phenomenology or the doctrine of appearance, showing the ways in which phenomena are known, and the science of logic or the doctrine of the real idea, showing the forms of metaphysical or categoreal knowledge. The “science of the experience of consciousness” results in the “science of logic.” By “logic” Hegel means, not logic as an organon or instrument of thought, but metaphysics —logic as the rational form of the actual. At the beginning of the Science of Logic Hegel says that the categories, which are the subject matter of the Logic, are nothing more than what is already present in language. In this Hegel is following Aristotle, in that the categories are the most universal predicates, but he does not accept Aristotle’s notion of the organon. At the end of the section on sense-certainty in the Phenomenology Hegel writes of the “divine nature” of language, which is its power to take thought to the universal. Hegel understands language as the embodiment of rationality in regard to this power. Any language is implicitly a logic and hence a metaphysics. Language itself as the form of spirit is the power to grasp the actual in thought, to form it as the idea. Ordinary logic, that taught to philosophy students and as the instrument needed to think well in all fields of inquiry, focuses only on certain aspects of language and how these can be used 32 Hegel’s Absolute to guide thought in its formal endeavors, the forms of the proposition, the syllogism, logical analogy, etc. These are subsumed within Hegel’s full sense of logic and are explicitly treated in the Science of Logic. Hegel is clear, in the preface to the Phenomenology, which falls between the completion of that...