For Hegel, philosophy requires systematic exposition. It should not be a matter of feeling or intuiting. Nor should philosophy undertake the task of “edification,” a kind of “fog” of “inflamed inspiration.” Rather, philosophy has as its aim material completion that opposes “utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition.” This kind of systematic, complete, ultimate truth is not in substance but in subject, namely the universal individual, the world spirit. Science consists not in an end, but rather in the reflection: the process is of absolute importance.
Hegel begins his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit by disavowing the very task he is undertaking. Not only is an external account of philosophy “superfluous, but in light of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and counterproductive.” Why? Because philosophical truth “essentially is in the element of universality,” such that “what is indeed salient about its subject matter, even in its perfect essence, would be expressed in the goal of the work and in its final results, and that the way the project is in fact carried out would be what is inessential” (9).1 This captures Hegel’s view of what doing philosophy is: systematic, universal, scientific, and not in the least concerned with motivations, relations with other treatments of the topic, et cetera. Hegel did indeed lay down precisely such a system. But it is strange that today, what is most often read is properly an introduction to that system (a “ladder” (23) to be thrown away after using it, to borrow Wittgenstein’s later formulation), the Phenomenology, rather than the Encyclopedia — and even of that Phenomenology, the preface is the most prized, even though Hegel disavows the whole notion of a preface.
But let us take Hegel on his own terms for now. Philosophy, he says, develops historically. The “battleground” of metaphysics that Kant had spoken of us is not to be understood as “contradiction” but rather as “the progressive development of truth” (10). Hegel uses organic metaphors to express this notion of development. Successive philosophical systems succeed each other much like how the blossom replaces (and “refutes”) the bud, and in turn “the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom’s truth as it comes to replace the blossom itself” (10). But the fruit is not “the actual whole itself; rather, the whole is the result together with the way the result comes to be” (11). In other words, “the subject matter is not exhausted in its aims; rather, it is exhaustively treated when it is worked out” (11). To use a different metaphor, “when we wish to see an oak with its powerful trunk, its spreading branches, and its mass of foliage, we are not satisfied if instead we are shown an acorn. In the same way, science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not completed in its initial stages” (15). Where exactly does the truth lie? Not in the statement of the truth itself (the proposition) but rather in “the scientific system of that truth,” the dialectic (11). The task of the philosopher, the task Hegel claims as his own, is “to participate in the collaborative effort at bringing philosophy nearer to the form of science” (11).
So this is the task of philosophy: to participate in the process that is the form of science. What activity must be undertaken to complete this task? Hegel says that it might seem that “the true exists only in … what is at one time called intuition at another time called … religion, or being”; “the absolute is not supposed to be conceptually grasped but rather to be felt and intuited” (6). No! This is all nonsense, Hegel thinks — so many “left-over dregs” stirred “into a smooth mélange” (12–13). This kind of philosophy does not offer insight so much as it offers edification — “not the concept, but ecstasy”; “not the cold forward march of the necessity of the subject matter, but instead a kind of inflamed inspiration” (13). Hegel understands this kind of philosophy to be the worst sort of missionary activity: “it wishes to direct people’s eyes to the stars … as if they were like worms, each and all on the verge of finding satisfaction in mere dirt and water” (13). Hegel doesn’t so much argue against this as dismiss it as so much “science-renouncing self-satisfaction” and “prophetic prattle” (14). If someone looks for this “intensity without content,” “he will quite easily find the resources to enable him both to get on his high horse and then to rant and rave.” But philosophy “must keep up its guard against the desire to be edifying” (14).
So much for what philosophy is not. What is the activity of doing philosophy as science? Well, Hegel thinks that “everything hangs on grasping and expressing the true not just as substance but just as much as subject” (18). More precisely: “the living substance is the being that is in truth subject” (18). This subject is “actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing.” It is “the estrangement of what is simple … the doubling which posits oppositions and which is again the negation of this indifferent diversity and its opposition” (18). The subject is precisely “this self-restoring sameness, the reflective turn into itself in its otherness.” This is an understanding of the subject profoundly marked by Kant’s transcendental turn, the reflection of the subject on itself. For Hegel, the subject (that is, philosophy as science) is “the coming-to-be of itself”; the Kantian act of reflection not as an end but as a process. Truth lies in the whole. The whole, in turn, “is only the essence completing itself through its own development” (19). The nature of truth “consists in just this: to be actual, to be subject, … to be the becoming-of-itself.” Reason, Kant’s subject-matter, “is misunderstood if reflection is excluded from the truth” (19). Indeed, “reflection is what makes truth into the result”; it “sublates the opposition between the result and its coming-to-be” (20).
Fine, so the truth of philosophy as science consists in the systematic, reflective, subject. But what is the activity of doing philosophy? Hegel says that “reason is purposive doing” (20). Philosophy consists in “movement and unfolded coming-to-be” (20); philosophy is activity. To put it in terms of logic again: truth is not the proposition itself. Rather, “it is only as a science or as a system that knowing is actual and can be given an exposition” (20). For this reason, a “so-called fundamental proposition,” even “if it is true, is for this reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition” (21). The truth as science or system includes the proposition and its refutation, for “such a refutation would thus genuinely be the development of the fundamental proposition itself” (21). This is what Hegel wants to stress by talking about negativity. When we negate the fundamental proposition, we are also making positive advances. Hence why the “reflective turn into itself” of the subject is “pure negativity” or, equivalently, “simple coming-to-be” (20). Science is the subject knowing itself in this way; “science is the realm it [spirit] builds for itself in its own proper element” (22).
The activity of the spirit in building this realm is what the text presents: “this coming-to-be of science itself, or, of knowing, is what is presented in this phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system of science” (24). It is not a set of instructions from first foundations, as with Descartes; nor is it, as with Kant, “the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge, and which has already finished with all the other standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them” (24). But at the same time, it is not simply the development (Bildung) of an individual. Instead, truth is expressed in the Bildung of “the universal individual, the world spirit” (24). Any particular individual “runs through the culturally formative stages of the universal spirit … as shapes which spirit has already laid aside, as stages on a path that has been worked out and levelled out in the same way that we see fragments of knowing, which in earlier ages occupied men of mature minds, now sink to the level of exercises, and even to that of games for children” (25). As Hegel puts it in one of those brilliant, short formulations that pop through his text all too rarely: “In this pedagogical progression, we recognize the history of the cultural formation [Bildung] of the world sketched in silhouette” (25). The science or system that Hegel proposes “is the detail and the necessity of its shaping, as what has been diminished into a moment and a possession of spirit” (25).
Science is the totality of this Bildung of world spirit. This encompasses proposition, mediation, and negation; it is both proposition and reflection. Spirit indeed becomes the truth precisely “by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it”; this lingering is the “magical power that converts it into being” (27). So finally we can ask: what is required for this activity of doing philosophy? Hegel says it is no longer, as Descartes did, a matter of “purifying the individual … and in making him into a thinking substance.” Instead, “it consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal through the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts” (28). We must give up the fixity of “self-positing, … of the purely concrete.” Instead, pure thoughts are “self-moving movements, circles.” The “nature of scientific rigor” is constituted by precisely this “movement of pure essentialities.” What is required for the activity of doing philosophy is letting go of fixity and accepting negation, movement, coming-to-be as a process.
When read generously, I strongly resonate with this understanding of philosophy. There is something profoundly shallow to proffering pros and cons — the “clever argumentation” that Hegel discusses. When I am in a philosophy class, I don’t learn by absorbing a list of propositions; I learn in dialog. This much is a pedagogical commonplace that stretches back to Socrates. But Hegel offers something even more profound and appealing. Philosophy, he says, consists in this dialog. The back-and-forth does not produce philosophical truths; truths are in this back-and-forth. I profoundly appreciate this refusal to make dialog a means to an end. Here, though, we get to two divergent interpretations. On the one hand, Hegel seems to be saying that even as the process is of paramount importance, it is all subsumed in this horrible totalizing world-spirit. My preference, and a reading I think Hegel gives at least some grounds for, is understanding this dialog as founded in plurality. Perhaps Hegel is not open to a kind of metaphysical plurality, of the sort I think Arendt proposes. But we could at least claim a plurality of subjects, something like Spinoza’s many modes of the one Deus, sive Natura. In either case, what is lacking for me with Hegel is a sensitive, profound account of human freedom. Hegel seems absolutely enchanted with his scientific system. I am with him on many points, but I feel like he lacks that spirit that Kant has. Would Hegel, too, say that he thinks of himself as “more useless than a common labourer” if his work does not offer something to establish the common rights of mankind? I think not. For me, Hegel is useful for reading but must be treated with caution, lest we descend into the worst sort of Eurocentric totalitarian authoritarianism. I am not convinced that the ingredients for going beyond such dangerous philosophy lie in Hegel himself, but I am glad that so many over the past two hundred years have found profound sustenance and inspiration in this person’s thoughts. I am reminded of the story of Martin Luther King, Jr., who read Hegel avidly and was profoundly marked by the seminars on Hegel he attended at Boston University; King wrote in Stride Toward Freedom that dialectics helped him see that “growth comes through struggle.” In a 1956 interview, King even remarked that Hegel was his favourite philosopher. I can see the appeal, but I myself still cannot share that opinion.