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Hegel and his times
It is often said of Hegel (1770-1831) that he lived an uneventful life at an eventful time. Certainly his biography is relatively humdrum compared to that of Kierkegaard or Marx, for example. However, its uneventfulness can be exaggerated: he did, after all, have an illegitimate son at a young age; know many of the leading intellectual figures of his period, including Goethe, Schelling, and Holderlin; and have a career with contrasting lows and highs, from a long period of relative anonymity up until his late forties, to national and growing international renown by the time of his death less than two decades later. It may be that Hegel's life has generated little interest because the character who lived it has been seen as rather unprepossessing: Hegel the man is commonly viewed (even by some of his admirers) as dogged, conformist, bombastic, and careerist. However, once again this assessment must be treated with caution, as he also clearly had his virtues, including loyalty, intellectual integrity, fortitude in the face of adversity, an awkward charm, and a capacity for joy, humour and deep emotion, hidden behind the rather forbidding exterior that looms out at us from the portraits we have of him. Thus, while clearly prone to irritate, offend, and puzzle those with whom he came into contact, he was also capable of inspiring devotion and reverence, and abiding affection. His life and character are certainly more complex and interesting than is often assumed. (For a thorough study, see Pinkard 2000a.)
Nonetheless, it is probably right that priority in considering Hegel's work should be given to the times in which he lived, rather than to his life and character: for his work was more obviously shaped by this, than by biographical circumstances or the nature of his personality. Despite the apparent abstractness of much of his writing, Hegel was deeply engaged with the political and historical events around him, to which he sought to respond in philosophical terms. This is the meaning of his famous image of the owl of Minerva: the sacred bird of Minerva (or Athena), the goddess of wisdom, flies at dusk, after the happenings of the day, for only then can philosophy reflect on what has occurred, and fulfil its role as 'the thought of the world'.
Now, while it may be misleading to emphasize the ordinariness of Hegel's life, it is not misleading to emphasize the extraordinariness of his times: these were indeed remarkable, on several levels. First, at the historical and political level, Hegel and other thinkers of his generation witnessed the French Revolution, the bloody aftermath of the Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the July Revolution of 1830, whilst living through the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the reorganization of political and social life in many German states, as the tide of liberal reform ebbed and flowed around them. The events in France were of particular importance to all German intellectuals of this period. Even as a student, Hegel formed part of a clandestine political club to discuss the revolution of 1789 (giving rise to the story that he joined others in planting a 'Tree of Liberty' to mark the event), while he claimed that he always took a toast throughout his life to celebrate the falling of the Bastille on 14 July (in 1820, less than one year after the passing of the repressive Karlsbad Decrees, he startled his companions by buying them the best champagne so that they could do likewise). It is therefore no surprise that Hegel gave the Revolution a prominent place in his discussion of freedom and modernity in the Phenomenology, as well as in his other works on history and social philosophy.
Second, Hegel lived in a period of philosophical as well as historical and political upheaval, where it seemed that new and exciting possibilities for thought were opening up, and where competing conceptions of these possibilities were emerging. Hegel was a major figure in the movement of German Idealism, which runs roughly from the publication of the first edition of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, to the eclipse of Hegelianism in the 1840s, a movement that some see as rivaling classical Greek philosophy for originality and significance. German Idealism was inaugurated by Kant's 'critical philosophy', with its attempt to set metaphysics on 'the secure path of a science', and to balance the competing perspectives of determinism in natural science and freedom in morality. However, Kant's successors came to feel that his actual achievement was to leave philosophy vulnerable to scepticism, while failing to overcome this central dualism between freedom and determinism, morality and the scientific picture, the autonomous subject and the natural self. They therefore sought to go 'beyond Kant', in seeking to find another philosophical system that would achieve what he had set out to do, and on a comparable scale, encompassing the natural sciences, the arts, and history, as well as epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. (See Ameriks 2000a for a helpful overview of German Idealism as a movement.)
Third, Hegel lived in a remarkable cultural period, situated at a kind of crossroads between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Thus, on the one hand he was fully aware of the range of new ideas the Enlightenment had brought to the sciences, political life, ethics and religion, as well as the reaction to those ideas by a variety of critical forces. On the other hand, he was also exposed to the more recent developments associated with Romanticism, which offered a distinctive approach to the issues raised by the debate between the Enlightenment and its critics, with its own organicist conception of nature, redemptive picture of history, and faith in the power of art. Hegel may be seen as taking up many of the concerns raised by the Romantics such as Schiller, Novalis, and others, but in a way that sought to give a new direction to the basic ideas of the Enlightenment (such as
'reason', and 'progress') rather than setting them aside. In Hegel's work, therefore, we find the confluence of the two major intellectual currents of his era.
With these events and issues in the background, it is hardly surprising that Hegel's philosophy has a depth and complexity not often seen in calmer times, when the waters of intellectual and political life run more still. It is at this point in history that many of the paradigms of modern thinking were to be formed; and Hegel was to begin his own contribution to shaping them with the writing of the Phenomenology.
The place of the Phenomenology in Hegel's life and works
The publication of the Phenomenology in 1807 marks the beginning of Hegel's 'mature' philosophy: everything written and published before then is classified among his early or preparatory writings. The Phenomenology is taken to mark a watershed in Hegel's intellectual development for three reasons.
First, it was through this work that Hegel started to emerge as a distinctive figure within the movement of post-Kantian German Idealism, as he began to set himself apart from other philosophers of this period. In his publications prior to the Phenomenology, Hegel seemed content to follow the lead of his more precocious friend and mentor F. W. J. Schelling . Hegel's association with Schelling began in their student days, when both attended the Protestant Seminary at the University of Tobingen (together with Friedrich Holderlin , who would much later come to be regarded as one of Germany's greatest poets, and who also influenced Hegel in this period). While Hegel's stolid virtues earned him the nickname 'the Old Man' from his classmates at Tobingen, and while he was slow to establish his reputation, Schelling's rise was meteoric: his System of Transcendental Idealism was quickly seen as moving beyond the post-critical philosophy of J. G. Fichte , in the same radical manner that Fichte himself had tried to take Kant's critical
philosophy further forward. Both Schelling and Hegel had shared the dismal fate of leaving Tobingen to become private tutors in wealthy families (Hegel in 1793 and Schelling in 1795); but while Schelling was appointed a professor at the University of Jena in 1798 at the age of 23, and was well known as the author of the System of Transcendental Idealism as well as other works, Hegel remained a private tutor until 1801, when a legacy from his father at last enabled him to follow Schelling to Jena, at the latter's invitation. There he qualified as a Privatdozent (unsalaried university teacher) with a thesis on natural philosophy, a subject close to Schelling's concerns; after obtaining his licence to teach, the two began running courses together. Hegel's first published work under his own name appeared that year, under the unwieldy but descriptive title of The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy.1 In 1802 Hegel joined Schelling in editing a philosophical periodical, the Critical Journal of Philosophy, to which he contributed his second major publication, 'Faith and Knowledge', as well as writing the long introduction to the first issue, entitled 'The Essence of Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular'. In these essays, Hegel seemed to identify himself as a follower of Schelling, and clearly put forward his friend's position as the best hope for post- Kantian philosophy. Other publications of this period that appeared in the Critical Journal - 'The Relationship of Scepticism to Philosophy' (1802) and 'On the Scientific Way of Dealing with Natural Law' (1802-1803) - are less explicitly Schellingian in subject-matter and argument, but they are not particularly distinctive taken on their own. Schelling left Jena in 1803, going first to the University of Wflrzburg, and then on to Munich in 1806; with Schelling's departure, Hegel began to be more openly critical of his friend's position, and to achieve a greater distance from it . However, Hegel's rather modest reputation at this stage meant he found it harder than Schelling to move on from Jena, and he was eventually forced to leave academia altogether, becoming a newspaper editor in Bamberg in March 1807. In the same year, he published the Phenomenology, which he hoped would revive his academic career, by establishing him as a thinker in his own right. (however, it took some time before the originality of the Phenomenology came to be clearly recognized, as 'ten years after [its] publication . . . [Hegel] was still trying to convince much of the literary public that his philosophy was an advance on Schelling's and not just another version of it'. )
But the Phenomenology represents a watershed not just because here some critical distance between Hegel and Schelling can clearly be identified for the first time in Hegel's published writings; it is also the first work in which Hegel began at last (aged 37) to lay out his own distinctive approach to the problems that had concerned his predecessors and so to adopt an outlook that is recognizably 'Hegelian'. Thus, the position Hegel puts forward in the Phenomenology on a variety of issues is the one he will go on to defend in the remainder of his mature publications, while in his pre-Phenomenology writings his ideas were still in a state of flux. There is therefore a considerable degree of intellectual continuity between this work and those that follow: first, the Science of Logic, which appeared in three parts, in
1812, 1813, and 1816 respectively, written after Hegel had moved from Bamberg to become headmaster of a gymnasium in Nuremberg in 1808; second, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the first edition of which he published in one volume in 1817 after his appointment as professor at the University of Heidelberg, and which became a three volume work by the time of its third edition in 1830; third, the Philosophy of Right of 1821, published three years after Hegel's move from Heidelberg to the professorship at the University of Berlin in 1818; and finally his lectures on aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, and history of philosophy, which were published as works edited by his students after his death in 1831. Neither in his pre-Jena writings of 1793 to 1801 (which focus more on ethical and religious questions, and issues of contemporary politics), nor in the published Jena writings of 1801 to 1806 (which focus on critiques of other thinkers) is it possible to see anything more than the seeds of what was to be a fully developed philosophical position in the Phenomenology and the rest of the works that followed it. The Phenomenology is thus the initial step in the intellectual journey that was to take Hegel from the obscurity of his early career in Jena and Bamberg, where he struggled to make any kind of mark, to the eventual triumph of his period in Berlin, where 'what does Hegel think about it?' was the first question of the chattering classes .
A third reason why the Phenomenology is considered the first of Hegel's mature writings is that it is also given a systematic place in his thought, in a way that the earlier works are not. Hegel was most insistent about the need for system-building, declaring that '[a]part from their interdependence and organic union, the truths of philosophy are valueless, and must then be treated as baseless hypotheses, or personal convictions' . The first published version of Hegel's system as a whole, with its division into Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit (Geist),2 is the edition of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences that appeared in 1817, while the earlier Science of Logic is a detailed elaboration of the first part of the system, and the later Philosophy of Right develops some of the ethical and political issues dealt with in the third part, under the section 'Objective Spirit'. But Hegel had begun his attempt to articulate a rigorously articulated philosophical system after his move to Jena in 1801, so that although this project was not finalized at the time (and continued to develop through the various editions of the Encyclopedia), Hegel was already thinking in a systematic way when he came to compose the Phenomenology. Thus, while the Phenomenology was published some years before the Encyclopedia system appeared, it was written while Hegel was working on its predecessors, and so is shaped by the same concerns and fundamental ideas. (The Jena lecture materials and unpublished notes in which Hegel made these early attempts to work out a satisfactory philosophical system are now to be found in the Jenaer Systementwurfe (Jena System Drafts) from 1803 to 1804, 1804 to 1805, and 1805 to 1806: see JS I, JS II and JS III.) Moreover, the Phenomenology reveals Hegel's systematic concerns not just because he was already thinking in this way while in Jena; he also felt at this time that any system he was to complete would need some sort of introduction, a role which the Phenomenology was designed to fill. Initially, Hegel planned to publish an introduction to his system of around 150 pages, together with a 'Logic' as the first part of his system, in a single volume at Eastertime in 1806; but this never appeared, and instead he quickly completed the Phenomenology as a much longer and independent work. His first title for this work was a 'Science of the Experience of Consciousness'3 (which was the title originally envisaged for the projected earlier, shorter introduction to the system), but after the proof stage he altered the title to the one we now have. However, the publisher of the first edition saw fit to include both titles so that it first appeared as 'System of Science: First Part: the Phenomenology of Spirit', with a further title inserted between the 'Preface' and the 'Introduction', which in some copies read 'Science of the Experience of Consciousness' and in others read 'Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit', also as a result of confusion on the part of the publisher created by Hegel's vacillations. As well as trying to signal its place within his system in its title, Hegel's 'Preface' also highlighted the Phenomenology's role as a necessary introductory work, as being required if we are to see things in the way that Hegel's fully developed philosophical science demands:
Science on its part requires that self-consciousness should have raised itself into this Aether in order to be able to live - and [actually] to live - with Science and in Science. Conversely, the individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself . . . When natural consciousness entrusts itself straightway to Science, it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwonted posture and go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity. Let Science be in its own self what it may, relatively to immediate self-consciousness it presents itself in an inverted posture; or, because this self- consciousness has the principle of its actual existence in the certainty of itself, Science appears to it not to be actual, since self-consciousness exists on its own account outside of Science . . . It is this coming-to-be of Science as such or of knowledge, that is described in this Phenomenology of Spirit.
In constituting a 'ladder' designed to take us towards the standpoint of the kind of philosophical system which Hegel was working on in Jena and which came to be articulated later in the Encyclopedia, the Phenomenology therefore has a claim to be considered as vital to a proper understanding of Hegel's mature systematic work, in a way that his previous publications do not. However, whilst everyone recognizes that the Phenomenology marks a turning-point in Hegel's philosophical career, in terms of its originality, its depth and sophistication, and its systematic significance, certain remarks by Hegel himself have led some to warn that we should not expect to fit the Phenomenology into his final philosophical outlook without remainder (where some go on to claim that that final outlook introduced certain deplorable elements that are thankfully missing in the Phenomenology as an earlier work, while others go on to disparage the Phenomenology as a misleading guide to Hegel's ultimate position). This dispute has come about for several reasons. First, while Hegel certainly stresses the Phenomenology's systematic importance in the work itself and in its various titles and subtitles, in later presentations of the system he appears to downplay this role (for example, commenting of a projected second edition of the Phenomenology that he did not live to complete, that it would no longer be called the 'first part' of the system of science: ). In the second place, the third part of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Spirit, contains a long section in which the earlier parts of the Phenomenology (the three chapters on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness and parts of that on Reason) reappear in much the same form, suggesting perhaps that the Phenomenology was now supposed to lose its status as a self-contained and independent work. Third, some commentators have been puzzled that Hegel should have supplied the Encyclopedia itself with its own introductory apparatus in §§26-78 of the Logic, if the Phenomenology was meant to serve that role.
Behind these matters of scholarship (which are hardly conclusive:), there is a deeper and more significant concern, namely, that the haste in which the Phenomenology was written inevitably lends to the work an unconsidered and ungoverned quality (typified in confusions surrounding the title page, Preface, and table of contents), which disqualifies it as a settled statement of Hegel's position. The story of the Phenomenology's composition in this respect is the stuff of philosophical legend. Hegel was forced to finish the book in great haste because his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer had promised to pay the publisher's costs if he failed to supply the completed manuscript by 18 October 1806. As Hegel was rushing to meet this obligation, Napoleon moved to capture Jena, and Hegel entrusted part of the manuscript to a courier who rode through French lines to the publisher in Bamberg. Although he completed the manuscript (except the Preface) the night before the battle for the city, he did not dare to send the last installment, and so missed his deadline (although he was not held responsible for the delay, as this had occurred due to an act of war). Given the extraordinary circumstances of its composition, the question naturally arises how far the work can properly be presumed to provide us with a coherent and properly worked out account of Hegel's position. Hegel himself seems to have recognized that at the very least, the Phenomenology needed reworking, and hence planned a second edition, which he began preparing immediately prior to his death - although the fact that at this late stage he still felt a second edition was needed perhaps itself suggests that for him the Phenomenology had never lost its status as an important work with its own unique role in the system. Hegel expressed his sense of dissatisfaction concerning the text as we have it in a letter to Niethammer on 16 January 1807, written after reading through the proofs: 'I truly often wished I could clear the ship here and there of ballast and make it swifter. With a second edition to follow soon - if it pleases the gods! - everything shall come out better' . Given Hegel's own apparent qualms, there has always been some support for the view - expressed with varying degrees of sophistication and scholarly subtlety - that the Phenomenology cannot be taken as a unified and properly structured work, and so should not be taken as a reliable statement of Hegel's final view. (that 'the Phenomenology is a psychology brought to confusion and disorder by history, and a history brought to ruin by psychology'. For a helpful brief discussion of this issue, with further references to the current scholarship,.) It is certainly the case that perhaps the greatest challenge to any reading of the Phenomenology is to show how it can be understood as a coherent and well-ordered work, and to fit its bewildering range of topics into a satisfactory and unified philosophical conception. While recognizing that the Phenomenology is far from flawless (which, as we have seen, Hegel himself accepted), I would nonetheless claim that it still has an underlying unity of purpose and method, which can be brought to light once its overall approach is clarified. It is to be hoped that this unity will become clearer as we proceed through the work, once we grasp how Hegel understood the Phenomenology's role as an introduction to the system, and what he intended that system as a whole to accomplish.
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