A History of Philosophy | 58 Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind

how're you finding it the report I got right away at the beginning from Robert Fitch down here is that he's awful after can't after all after can't if somebody's awful and sounds strange I would think after card everything would be easy but I suggested two verbs that the the difficulty is not a translation he was blaming it on the translation I think the difficulty is rather than mode of thought Oh somewhat vocabulary but you get used to that but the mode of thought you see Kant was still involved in what nowadays has become known as linear thinking tracing out a line of argument trying to identify the underlying presuppositions or the transcendental presuppositions those hidden concepts and then in the dialectic he's simply examining the logic of the argument and finding where there are non secular tools and you're accustomed to that sort of thing what he's using is basically Aristotelian logic engaged in linear inference step by step and so you can follow step by step but that's not Hegel you see Hegel is more like diving into a pool and trying to get your bearings and I mean that because it's sort of like a pool and you've lost sight of the the perimeter you're trying to get some sense of what's in this direction what's in that direction you're trying to locate yourself but to do so you have to find points of reference in all sorts of different directions and so it's as if what Hegel is doing is lending clump in the middle of something and sending our feelers in all directions vectors to try and locate himself in relationship to other things in the environment so it's a different kind of reading experience putting it more formally tying it back into what we were saying last time Kant is engaged in deductive thinking tracing the logical connection between propositions his is a logic of propositions and of a logical inference from one proposition to another Hegel is not dealing with propositions he's dealing with concepts he's analyzing concepts unpacking concepts it's a different ballgame that's mixing the metaphors after being in the pool but but it's a it's a different mode of thinking you see that that grand layout of his system which I I gave you an outline form with all of the one two three thesis antithesis synthesis you see all of it begins with the most abstract conception being everything else is trying to explore the concept of being make it more concrete don't what do you mean being oh it's as if Kant has told us that existence being is not a predicate it's not a concept to which Hegel responds that's what you think I'll show you then oh boy it takes him a whole book there shows and then some yes a the the bare fact of existence that may not be cons being it's just given that it's that bear fact you ality fact without meaning existence without essence but you don't find that in hegel hegel as I intimated last time is much more back into the the Greek ethos in that regard because the concept of of being is loaded with all sorts of implications he's trying to unravel them unpack them how do you get inside a concept well his way to get inside it is to sort of meander asking himself well in this sort of free-floating mode of reflection if I say being what comes to your mind yeah not big to be or not to be that's the question isn't whether it is better to being non-being is or it is not but is it that way because if you ask whether somebody is or is not in what respect do you make at what time do you mean and immediately you begin to see that that being and non-being while they seem to be like antitheses either or neutrally contradictory they they sort of combine when you think of becoming because in anything that's in process of becoming it is what it was not and it is not what it was you say it is what it is not quite yet but it is that almost you see there's no such thing as static being in a world of change and so you realize that what is not is just about to be it and what is it's about to be is that this is the nature of becoming which is the concrete conception of being and so what he's doing is trying to make that a little bit more concrete and then you have the via the outline there he moves on through other dimensions of the concept of being not just affirmative or negative but how much quantity all some so forth but then from existence to essence yeah because while on the surface in a static kind of logic it looks as if efforts and existence stand over against each other the bare fact of what the bear fact that it is as distinct from what it is existence you might say precedes essence that's what Sartre is going to say yes he and such is breaking with Hegel because for Hegel is know s existence without essence so that well the two concepts in the abstract stand over against each other as officers in concrete reality they come together see and so he has to move in his logic to the real concept of being notice he says the concept yes being is a concept not an empty meaningless fact but a meaning Laden concept and so he works on in that way so this is the the mode of thought you'll see bother and if you if you keep this in mind as you read then you come a lot closer to what he's doing and we'll get some illustrations of this as we go along but for the moment let me just if I can find it read you one short snatch from his logic from the section on essence and I I think you can see what he's doing here this is he in the doctrine of contradictory concepts one notion say blue stands over against the other notion not below this other would not be an affirmative like yellow but merely kept in the abstract negative not blue the negative in its own nature is something quite positive but the inane opposition inane is his word the in main opposition between what are called contradictory notions is fully exhibited in the grandiose formula of a general law that everything which has the one and not the other of all predicates which are in such opposition in this way everything is either blue or not below URI the blue or not blue white or not like yellow or not light informative isn't it you know it's empty it's a name it doesn't tell you anything it's forgotten that identity and opposition are themselves opposed and that there is the principle of contradiction but in contrast to this doctrine of contradictory z-- he talks about the conception of polarity so that if you like being and non-being are at the two poles of a continuum yes a and by implication this is a much more correct definition of our position on the polarity and he he therefore talks of a whole variety of polarities not only being and non-being that finite and infinite ideal and real one and many universal and particular appearance and reality reason and reality using the the stand in the aesthetic logic as antithesis but in reality everything but partakes in box of every polarity well we see that in Hague all right after a break we'll be reading whitehead and I'll draw your attention to this again because in the preface to his major work process and reality he says that he is very much influenced by F H Bradley the British had a lien in rejecting all of these polarities so keep in mind then that the Whitehead you're going to be reading is like Hegel rejecting these polarities and working with something of a dialectic and the big difference is that he's not a metaphysical idealist Whitehead isn't a whitehead is transferring the Hegelian scheme onto a more naturalistic basis you'll see under a more naturalistic basis in terms of natural processes of evolution and development and the same can be said of John Dewey whom will be reading the week after whitehead you see they both started with their philosophical roots in the Hegelian tradition and then moved into a kind of naturalistic metaphysic so so keep this in mind it's tremendously important if you remember the course syllabus you remember that everything on now into existentialism I've called 19th 20th century heirs of Hegel yes that's true of right head and process theology it's true of John Dewey and American pragmatism it's true of European phenomenology and existentialism it's true of Marxism and it's this dialectic that that's a significant thing now keep in mind what the word dialectic means literally dr leg-oh to think something through it's not to follow a chain of inference it's to think something through analysis so what the dialectic does this mode of thought is to think through the concept of being and then of subsidiary concepts that emerge in the process as aspects of being does that help a bit hopefully gives you some context for what you're doing all right let me mention one other book that's helpful I may have referred to it along the way but it's a book by one of our graduates merrill Westfall and to my mind is one of the most readable things written about Hegel it's called history and truth in Hegel's phenomenology of mind history and truth in Hegel's phenomenology of mind Westfall has a more recent book on Hegel's philosophy of religion that I haven't read yet but this one I found particularly helpful okay any comments before we move on comments queries okay did everybody get a copy of the Hegel outline from last time anybody not everybody has it okay so let's turn our attention then to the phenomenology of mind or diced the term the old anglo-saxon word ghost spirit if I say keep in mind what he is meaning by mind I'm not trying to pawn but reflect for a moment that by mind or spirit his primary reference is not to some kind of soul substance because Hegel isn't working with a substance metaphysic his as a process metaphysic that's an important distinction that goes all the way back to the pre-socratics where you remember some of them were looking for the basic stuff the underlying substance unchanging and I suppose substance metaphysics in that sense is epitomized by Parmenides and others of them were more concerned with understanding process and took process to be more ultimate than unchanging substance Heraclitus remember Heraclitus who never stepped into the same river twice okay well that alternation those offices between process and substance have been with us ever since but by and large the philosophical movement that began with Descartes is substance oriented now that may have been because of the influence of mechanistic science where matter was often conceived as inert stuff permanent unchanging indivisible pellets of inert stuff well with that concept of unchanging stuff it's easily transferred to the concept of mind or soul as a unchanging substrate of music well III think it's fair to say that can't put paid to that one of the things Kant did was of course to more than suggest that the concept of substance is our idea it's a subjective conception we superimpose on things and Hegel isn't concerned with that that question he's interested rather in in mind spirit as in the sense of creative vitality in the sense of emerging consciousness and self-consciousness the creative spirit that pulsates through everything to pick up the romanticist notion so that if we are trying to characterize Hegel's metaphysic and I've already characterized it last time several ways but you could well characterize it as a romanticist idealism yes a conception of everything ultimately of the nature of mind or spirit but understood in a romanticist sense of creative freedom busting out all over thing or if you like it's an evolutionary idealism where everything which is potentially creative spirit is moving towards a full manifestation of its creativity a spirit its freedom of spirit and so not only is biological evolution seen in those terms vitalism but at the same token cultural evolution is seen in those terms historical development is seen in those terms the history of art is seen in those terms the history of religion is seen in those terms more and more unfolding of the freedom of spirit reflected in religious belief imagery practice so forms so it's evolutionary ideas and dialectic is simply the traces the process not the logic that traces the process thesis antithesis synthesis is the process of reflection and it's the process of reality you see the rational is the real so that the reflective process is also the real process it matches again well it's with that in mind that we've seen that Hegel moves from the original grand thesis of logic which is the abstract for to nature which is the unconscious manifestation of thought bearing that form to spirit which brings the abstract form and the unconscious manifestation together in developing consciousness and he's concerned with the development of the individual self consciousness he's developing concerned with the development of social consciousness both in the sense of your social consciousness and the developing self identity of a society state a nation and he's concerned with the development of the the full self-freedom self-consciousness in history of the the absolute the all-inclusive spirit all three so that while the first looks like a piece of introspective psychology reads like that and the second reads like a book of ethics yes II the third sounds like a treatment of cultural history art religion philosophy and their unfolding until you come to the consummation of it all if philosophy down here art religion philosophy if philosophy is the synthesis over here well what's the culmination the grain synthesis in philosophy but Hegel's philosophy you see we're in the flowering of the German spirit and German nationhood and German culture you get a concept finally grasped clearly unpacked fully so in a in a sense Hegel views his philosophy not as a philosophy to end all philosophies but as a philosophy everything after which is such a series of footnotes to Hegel yeah yeah you see the you get to the final synthesis and the details all of the wheels within the wheels have to be worked out but there's nothing after the final synthesis now you know you chuckle but that's the way the Hegelian dialectic was even when transferred into Marxist theory which is on a materialistic rather than idealistic basis you see the the Marxist view is that you move from the thesis of capitalism to the antithesis of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the synthesis of a classless society what comes next nothing because in the classless society you have embraced all opposites it's now classless there's now no class conflict no dialectic left and so that's the end that's the Millennium so this is the evolutionary optimism of the 19th century and this is where the evolutionary optimism of the 19th century came from Hegel this is where it came from yeah if we can resolve all of the dialectical opposition then we've achieved okay so that's the that's the overall picture and we want to look a little more closely at some of the things within it what's going on within subjective spirit is the gradual freeing we said to this was the unfolding of freedom the gradual freeing of reason from the census the gradual freeing of reason from the census now that's the kind of idealism he's conservatives know what why this freeing of reason from the sense is one he's obviously not going to be an empiricist why not well because empiricism as Plato realized as the world of change and if were what trying to do is to move on towards the unchanging conception the grant and synthesis you'll see then in the final analysis the process of change is not governed by the sensory it's governed by the source of for or the unchanging and so Hegel understandably is interested in seeing reasoned freed from its bondage to the senses and that reaches its culmination you see when in the arts oh yes you are working creatively with sensitive material if a reason is really working and particularly if you're the romanticists imaginatively not slavish ly imaginatively working with sensory Madhu they did a religion even more so and in philosophy yes that's where you get most concrete yeah most concrete thought comes in philosophy because thought is dealing with concept not with sensory objects so this is this is what he's after the the the avoidance of what is static abstract the development of the concrete now when he's dealing with this remember that the the lens through which he sees things on this vast screen is the lens of our own self-consciousness okay so what he's doing in this phenomenology remember phenomenology is a description what is engaged in is sometimes impersonation role play empathetic description he's entering into these the reflection the feelings of the individual of the situation he's describing entering into it empathetically not standing outside describing behaviors but entering insight to capture what is it like in the emerging consciousness phenomenology will find as it moves on into the 20th century is concerned with the structures of our conscious being in the world he's trying to trace out the dialectical structure of our conscious being in the world he's not trying to deal with the consciousness in abstraction from the world that was des cartes mistake shutting himself in a stove heated room of all things and asking if the world exists how abstract can you get a William temple who was a new hog alien philosopher in England became Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s he has a chapter in one of his books entitled des cartes faux pas his faux pas was to shut himself up in a room and ask himself if anything existed you can't you imagine take heart stoking the stove to keep warm while wondering if his body exists you know self-contradictory nurse at the abstract but know the concern is with the the structures of conscious being notice the term being you see the concept of being what being is is revealed through our self-consciousness so you look at our self-conscious being in the world relationship to now you see there was a tendency back in the 17th 18th century for the individual to be regarded as a Robinson Crusoe Robinson Crusoe was a social philosopher he wasn't just a kid story rider what he was writing was a piece of social satire when he wrote Robinson Crusoe in his more philosophical writings what Daniel Defoe writes about is the isolated individual ruled by Reason self-sufficient living alone on his island with his goats and his guard yes he and he doesn't need others he's able with the route to bring nature under the rule of Reason provide for himself when the savages can he keeps away from them until he sees them just about to make dinner of Friday so he rescues men Friday but keeps him in submission until he becomes rational enough that they can enter into social contract when the Spanish sailors come they keep away from them they're not rational when the British sailors come it's another story the inter inter social contract and sail back to England that default knew what he was doing the individual is an isolated island self-sufficient not so for a goal there's no such thing as an individual in isolation even self-consciousness does not exist in isolation you see he's interested in the structures of our conscious being in the world there's no other being then in the world for the individual I just wish Hegel had written another Robinson Crusoe to depict this it would have been a little analogy of mind wouldn't it Bob maybe you should do that well he starts then with the subjective spirit and if you have the outline with you you notice that the realm of subjective or individual spirit begins with a thesis having to do with the with since consciousness now you say since consciousness is not the same as self consciousness since consciousness is something which indeed the animal has in fact that level of the dialectic simply carries over from the end of the grand antithesis of out nature dealing with organisms that worked down to description of physiology which physiology gives rise to consciousness on the part of animal life so since consciousness is simply the if you like part of the synthesis in nature now becoming the thesis for a new antithesis okay since consciousness rooted in the biological brain processes sensory awareness but since consciousness is simply consciousness of the other consciousness of the other and that stands in antithesis to consciousness of oneself since consciousness self consciousness but you don't really have mind spirit reason at work three until that self-consciousness in dealing with the world of sense consciousness achieves its freedom in that world of sense consciousness and so it's not just self consciousness isolated but rather self consciousness at work reflectively rationally freely creatively doing something to shape the world of sense consciousness and that is the stepping stone over into objective spirit into talking about law and order in society because what is law and order but the work of Reason ordering the world since consciousness get the transitions now you have in the anthology two pieces taken from the from the sector section on subjective spirit one is the master servant and the other is the stoic skeptic unhappy consciousness what's going on in those selections well I think in the light of what I've said you can already anticipate what's going on the master servant piece is famous you find it referred to again and again the concept of alienation arises out of this concept of alienation that was at work in the early existentialists at work in Marx and Engels at work even in the the political correctness movement today yes a asserting political correctness to overcome alienation of a firm minority groups concept of alienation will find insult that we come back to this basically what it's about is the fact that one only achieves self-consciousness in relationship to the other you think you only achieve self-consciousness in relationship to the other so this is if you like a phenomenology of emerging self-consciousness it's an empathic description and what the master goes through what the servant goes through what they go through in relationship to each other you see even in terms of the meaning of the words master and servant there is no such thing as a master who doesn't have a servant he's not a master if he doesn't have one there's no such thing as a servant if he doesn't have a master you see what is he he doesn't know he's out of work so that one's identity is dependent on that relationship Wednes identity is dependent on that relationship but the same token there is no subject without an object there's no object without a subject that it's the object art these are relational terms these are polarities there we go polarities the dialectic is what he's tracing the dialectic within this polarity the isolate itself is always incomplete we have to see the individual self in relationship to the other now in order then to achieve self identity the one standing in opposition to the other thinks he has to cancel out the other negates the other I'm the master whereupon the servant proceeds to make the master utterly dependent on him the servant now who's the master you see the the self-destructiveness the self contradiction in affirming that i am the master independently because to be a master i have to have a servant on whom I depend who thing is the master there's a self-contradiction involved master-servant relationship so that in order to be certain of myself i negate the other but in doing so I negate myself now that would negate you'll find used a lot in Hegel and in literature on Hegel it simply means there is an antithesis the antithesis negates the thesis they're opposites the German term is alpha Haven which means literally as you can translate it to have had it to have had it you've had it you're negated you're done with the thesis that's that - the antithesis the antithesis does that to the thesis but then gradually their interdependence begins to emerge the master thinks of himself as independent the servant is dependent the master is what he use for himself the servant is what he is for another but the master is only independent through his dependence on another and the servant in his being for the other achieves not only his dependence but something of an independence he is for himself what he is do you remember the upstairs-downstairs movers are they from before your era blank looks you must have been well it was a an Edwardian scene in England where the aristocratic family upstairs had family servants downstairs of whom the butler stood out so when European nobility came to dinner they wanted to meet the butler you see that Butler in being the servant to his master had achieved such an identity that the nobility wanted to meet him couldn't have done it by himself and the master couldn't have been the master he was without dessert final scene in the series was a very happy synthesis where the servant the butler is so sick he's having to retire and be pensioned off and the master goes and sits down beside his bed in the basement and they talk like old buddies and the barriers of God yes and there's a relationship a synthesis that's achieved now I don't know if the author Upstairs Downstairs read Hegel but it sure sounded like it to me master-servant relationship the interdependence you see it's not a matter of individuals being dependent it's not a matter of individuality meaning independence that's what so broken up marriages with the development I'm afraid of some aspects of the feminist movement because the feminist movement has tried to achieve independence rather than mutuality of interdependence they've tried to avoid dependence and have striven for independence rather than interdependence music and it's been very problematic in our society I think we have to overcome over dependence but not in a impossible independence that's the individualistic eighteenth-century note its interdependence whether thing comes together the synthesis well you get the same sort of picture in the stoic skeptic unhappy consciousness the the stoic that's really the thesis stage because a stoic in the freedom of his thought asserts his independence of all externals remember the stoic attitude yes he in the freedom of my mind I'm independent of whatever may happen to my body remember epictetus the slave whose master broke his leg he stoic Lee took it okay so there's the the thesis staged the stoic the the skeptic takes that freedom even further the skeptic negates the very reality of the other in his thinking rolls him out treats them in a fickle way but then where does that leave you move from the stoic kind of thing to the skeptic kind of thing denying the other altogether to the unhappy consciousness that's the individual alienated from himself yeah because in denying the other I'm denying my own identity in relationship to the other and so the skeptic who knows nothing about anything in relationship to himself is going to be a mighty unhappy consciousness you know it makes me think that Hegel must have taught undergraduate since abstraction because I think that's a phenomenon that we all observed you see that a person who for a while moves into some skeptical phrase in process of developing finds a lot of inner dissatisfaction because there's no identity in relationship to what is we're not isolated individuals in a vacuum in a stove he did wrote but in relationship to others so that divided self then incomplete self is the unhappy consciousness well the synthesis then within subjective spirit is a truly rational spirit reason that gets beyond simply observing the world of the senses and the other gets beyond simply contemplating his own independent identity and becomes a reflective rational being addressing the ordered nests of the world to which were related if there is Liberty for Kant it's always going to be Liberty within a framework of law it's never Liberty to do anything at all whatever you want it's Liberty within a framework of law that's the rational one and that because there's no such thing as existence without essence because there is log-off's structure running throughout all being so you have to have the individual in relationship to the other in a law strategy way well does that help to make sense of what's going on comment I have to leave you to unravel the more detailed aspects of the dialectic as they master-servant relationship but I think if you can see what's going on you can unravel it fairly though okay then a few words about objective spirit objective spirit and here you notice the Triad moves from the abstract concept of law okay the concept of law is after all an abstraction to the antithesis dealing with matters of individual conscience and morality nor the abstract to the most concrete the to the synthesis of social morality social order as I say law in the abstract provides the context for dealing with freedom the law in the abstract is the rule of reason it's the Kantian conception of universal duty and you have to admit that Kant's conception of duty is an abstraction very abstract the line the abstract has to do with rights human rights conceived as being something objective rooted in reality sure that's the abstraction but you have to unpack the concept you have to unravel the concept and you begin to do so when you turn from that those universalized abstractions about law and rights to questions of individual consciousness from something like law which is completely objective to something like conscience which is very inward very subjective in the sense of in witness from talking of objective duty to talking of myiasis now of course Kant works with both acting out of a sense of duty here's a sort of like a moral sense philosophy as well as one of objective rights and Duty the thesis and the antithesis but what Hegel tries to do is to bring these two together in the synthesis of a social ethic addressing the social order musi that's where he makes a big step forward at least a big step beyond kant and Kant's predecessors for the simple reason that cants predecessors and Kant himself thought of individuals as three individually thought of individual rights as the last point of reference Robinson Crusoe Theory Hegel on the other hand sees individuals achieving rationality only in relationship and so which is the more ultimate concern individual or social institution well of course social structure ordered relationships which is what we mean by social institution a law governed pattern of relationships among individuals social institution and so in the synthesis he sees it getting much more concrete it's in social structures that we live out our morality it's in social structures that we have to act rationally there is where the rule of laws pertains and so he has a lot to say about family and if social structure predominates over the individual in terms of concreteness and level of development he's not very much in favor of divorce in fact he's very much against it and it's there in that context that he talks about the state and his political philosophy begins to emerge and he wants to say that we we find our our individual consciousness our individual freedom maximized in the context of the sovereignty of the state yes you can say if you like that you have much greater freedom within marriage than outside it and you have much greater freedom within the state then in some anarchistic realm and the ideal for a state as far as he is concerned is some kind of constitutional government where the representation comes not from just individuals amassed according to their population density but the representation comes from different social groupings from different social orders structures from corporations from estates as well as from you municipalities and because spirit finds its free expression in the freedom of those groups as well as in the individual but the fullest embodiment of absolute spirit is the state the fullest manifestation of freedom is the sovereignty of the state and it's in that sort of way that his philosophy of history develops because if the emergence of the nation-state which was the phenomenon of 19th century Europe okay if the emergence of the nation-state is the growing manifestation of the freedom of the absolute spirit then those nationalistic movements represent the the work of divine providence as he understands that in the course of history yes he and the nation-state embodies that to which our highest loyalty belongs and there's the philosophical roots of nineteenth-century nationalism well it's in that context the British a galleon FH Bradley wrote that essay I referred to on my station and its duties you see my duty is to fulfill the expectations that society has for me my duty overriding everything else is to my family and beyond that to my nation you see and beyond that to the absolute it's God well if this affects then his view of things like war so he speaks of war as a manifestation as an expression of the spirit of the nation of the sovereignty of the state a war is what helps to develop the spirit of a nation and I think it's in that her Galleon emphasis that you see Tennyson's famous poem about a Crimean War the charge of the Light Brigade did you know it I remember I had to memorize it in school as a kid and I don't remember all of it but the chart of the Light Brigade was one of those stupid strategic blunders in which the cavalry charged right into the cannons of the the Russians so it goes something like this cannon to left of them cannon to right of them volleyed and thundered even though they knew someone had blundered you know and it's held up as the most glorious history because it manifests the spirit of a nation one big stupid blunder yeah that's the Hegelian view well I said that out of the Hegelian philosophy emerged some extremes of statism particularly italian fascism in the 20th century okay and you have then a couple of pieces in the anthology dealing with his philosophy of history and you'll be able to catch what's going on in that quite readily okay question correct you see the way in which it unfolds how it's going this is a surveyor sketch and the anthology gives you depth at selected points all right then on Monday we'll deal with absolute spirit which will include getting into his philosophy of religion and that will wrap up our time with table

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Published: Tue Jun 16 2015