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The role of the Phenomenology
We have therefore seen in a general way what Hegel wanted his philosophical system to achieve, and how he hoped it would achieve it: by enabling us to think dialectically and so to resolve certain 'blindspots' in how we take the world to be, it will allow the world to look back in a rational way, to manifest its rational structure to us. The question now arises: what role is there for the Phenomenology within this enterprise, and how does that role come about?
As we have already seen, Hegel himself characterizes the Phenomenology as an introduction to the system. and now it can be made clearer why such an introduction is needed, and how it might proceed. Hegel takes it that in order for his system to succeed in showing how we can find rational satisfaction in the world, we must enter into a process of conceptual therapy (undertaken in the Encyclopedia); but he recognizes two preliminary difficulties here. The first is that we may feel no need for this therapy, because we do not see the problem for which this therapy is the solution, or because we do not see that nondialectical thinking is the source of the problem, or because we think the problem is intrinsically irresoluble. The second difficulty is that we just may not know how to go about making the kind of dialectical revisions that Hegel believes are required to follow through the transitions of the Logic.
As an introduction to the system, the Phenomenology therefore has two fundamental tasks, one motivational and the other pedagogic. The motivational task is to make us see why we are required to undertake the kind of reflective examination of our categories that takes place in the Logic. Hegel points out that though we use categories all the time (such as being, cause and effect, force) we do not usually recognize that the categories we adopt in this way have a vital influence on how we view and act in the world, and thus we do not see the importance of critically reflecting on them: everyone possesses and uses the wholly abstract category of being. The sun is in the sky; these grapes are ripe, and so on ad infinitum. Or, in a higher sphere of education, we proceed to the relation of cause and effect, force and its manifestation, etc. All our knowledge and ideas are entwined with metaphysics like this and governed by it; it is the net which holds together all the concrete material which occupies us in our action and endeavour. But this net and its knots are sunk in our ordinary consciousness beneath numerous layers of stuff. This stuff comprises our known interests and the objects that are before our minds, while the universal threads of the net remain out of sight and are not explicitly made the subject of our reflection.
Hegel thinks that the best way of getting us to move to the Logic, and to turn from merely using categories to affording them the rightful 'honour of being contemplated for their own sakes' is to make vivid to us exactly how important it is to think dialectically, by showing what goes wrong for a consciousness when it does not. Thus, as we shall see, the Phenomenology operates by tracing the development of a consciousness through various ways of thinking about the world (including itself and other consciousnesses), where this consciousness is faced by apparently intractable difficulties in making the world a 'home', until at last it comes to recognize that what underlies these difficulties is its failure to think dialectically: at this point, it is ready to make the transition to the Logic, where instead of merely being shown why conceptual therapy matters, we undergo the therapy itself, by making 'thoughts pure and simple our object' . The Phenomenology therefore portrays consciousness in three modes, where at first it is blithely oblivious to any potential problem and so is characterized by a self-confident 'certainty'; it is then faced with a problem, but is unable to resolve it given the conceptual resources at its disposal; it then succumbs to despair, and reifies the problem by treating it as unresolvable, as inherent in the world. Only when all these three stances are exhausted will consciousness be ready to reflect on the particular assumptions that are causing it the difficulty, and only when all these assumptions have been shown to be problematic, will consciousness be ready to undergo the kind of profound analysis of the categories of thought that is proposed within Hegel's speculative philosophy:
Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature, Understanding, sensibility, and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid, and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface . . . Hence the task nowadays consists ... in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. Hegel thus characterizes his approach in the Phenomenology as '[a] scepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness [which] renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is', by forcing consciousness to question 'all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, . . . ideas with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is, in fact, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake' . However, ordinary consciousness may resist this 'task' of speculative philosophy not merely because it finds no need for it (the motivational problem); it may do so because (as Hegel recognizes) it finds it too counter-intuitive and intellectually demanding, as its conceptual certainties are overturned and it is required to 'walk on its head' (the pedagogic problem): 'The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it, and, when transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is' . Hegel therefore gives the Phenomenology a role here too, helping consciousness to gradually question those conceptual certainties and thus to move to a position where it can see what it might mean to give them up. Thus, as it proceeds through the Phenomenology, consciousness does come to set aside some of its 'familiar ideas', so that by the end it is prepared for the kind of explicit examination of those ideas that is achieved in the Logic. This is the pedagogic function of the Phenomenology: it helps ordinary consciousness face up to the fact that it can no longer take the apparently obvious distinctions of the understanding for granted, and so makes speculative philosophy possible for it.
The Phenomenology is therefore written in a distinctive style, in so far as it has a story to tell from two points of view: the point of view of ordinary consciousness, which is undergoing this experience of moving from confident 'certainty' to despair, to renewed certainty as it revises its position and sees things in a different way; and the point of view of Hegel (and us) as observers of this consciousness, who already occupy the speculative standpoint, and who can therefore see, in a way that consciousness itself cannot, what is going wrong for it and why. Thus, Hegel will often 'step back' from merely describing the experience of consciousness itself, to comment on what is really going on, or to anticipate how eventually consciousness will come to resolve a particular problem, where at that point in the narrative this is not apparent to consciousness itself. For consciousness itself, therefore, the Phenomenology is a via negativa, as it responds to some failed position with another position that is equally one-sided, and so equally doomed to collapse. But at the same time we (as phenomenological observers) learn a great deal from seeing what is going wrong, and when (at the end of the Phenomenology) consciousness is ready to adopt our standpoint, then it too will be in a position to learn these lessons for itself. Given this conception of the Phenomenology, it is therefore possible to see why the Phenomenology forms an introduction to the system set out in the Encyclopedia and associated works, and why also material from it is repeated within that system, in the Philosophy of Spirit: for in the Phenomenology we just experience the difficulties caused by our non-dialectical use of the categories, while in the Philosophy of Spirit which follows the Logic in the system, we are able to put those difficulties more explicitly in the light of the categorical discussion of the Logic, and so diagnose them fully in a way that is not yet possible in the Phenomenology itself. As well as linking the Phenomenology to the rest of his system, and particularly the Logic, in a natural way, I hope that another advantage of this emphasis on the dialectic will become clear as we proceed: namely, it will allow us to treat the Phenomenology itself as a unified work, but without having to distort the text in order to do so. One difficulty is that the Phenomenology discusses consciousness both at the level of the individual, and at the social level (most particularly in Chapter VI on 'Spirit', in its treatment of the Greek world and the Enlightenment, for example), where some commentators have seen this as problematic (for references and further discussion, see Pippin 1993:
55-6). But, on my account there is nothing particularly troubling here:
for, as Hegel himself stresses , just as we can see that individuals employ categories in how they think about the world, so too do cultures and world-views in which individuals participate, in the sense that these can also be characterized as involving certain categorial assumptions (as when Hegel says, for example, that the Greeks lacked the modern concept of 'the person'). From the perspective of my reading, therefore, it is hardly surprising that the discussion operates at both the individual and the cultural-historical level. This in my view explains why in Chapter VI, Hegel feels able to make his notorious move from 'shapes merely of consciousness' to
'shapes of a world'. Another difficulty that has faced many commentators is that they have sought for unity by seeing the Phenomenology as focused on one problem or issue: for example, that Hegel is here offering a theory of knowledge, designed to overcome the familiar problems of scepticism, relativism and subjectivism; but then they have struggled to integrate more obviously ethical or social parts of the text into this reading (, where he tries to give an epistemological account of the master/slave section, which in my view is more naturally read as addressing issues in social philosophy; and Rockmore 1997, which starts by treating epistemological issues as fundamental, but then fails to locate such issues in large parts of the text). Once again, however, on my approach this problem does not arise: for, on this approach, what unifies the Phenomenology is the consistency of its diagnostic method, which is then applied to a number of different problem areas. Once this is accepted, there is no need to look for one key issue, or to treat the Phenomenology as a contribution to one area of philosophy (as a contribution to epistemology or ethics, or philosophy of religion, or whatever): rather, the unity of the work comes from its attempt to show that a similar difficulty is common to a range of concerns, which all show the same kind of distortion in our thinking Nagel , who takes the problem of reconciling subjective and objective standpoints to underlie fundamental issues in ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics). Thus, in answer to Haym's question, how one work can include a discussion of sense perception and also 'the madness of Diderot's musician . . . [and] the fanaticism of Marat and Robespierre' , we can reply (rather prosaically, perhaps) that all reveal dialectical limitations at different levels and to different degrees.
Finally, I hope that my approach may shed some light on the notorious problem of explaining Hegel's transitions in the Phenomenology, from one form of consciousness to the next. Some readings require these transitions to be extremely rigorous. For example, those readings that treat the Phenomenology as a transcendental argument are committed to the view that each new form of consciousness is introduced as a necessary condition for the possibility of the previous form of consciousness. (I myself have followed Taylor in arguing that Hegel's treatment of 'Perception' contains some interesting transcendental claims about the content of perceptual experience ; but I am doubtful that this procedure can be made to fit the Phenomenology as a whole.) On other readings, Hegel is seen as aiming to establish his position as uniquely coherent by showing all other possible world-views to involve some sort of incoherence, and that this requires him to be exhaustive in moving through these world-views, so that every transition must involve the smallest possible alteration from one perspective to the next. (, '[T]he "necessity" of a transition from a shape of consciousness A to a shape of consciousness B just consists in the complex fact that while shape A proves to be implicitly self-contradictory, shape B preserves shape A's constitutive conceptions/concepts but in a way which modifies them so as to eliminate the self-contradiction, and moreover does so while departing less from the meanings of A's constitutive conceptions/concepts than any other known shape which performs that function.') The advantage of readings of this sort is that they take seriously the things Hegel says in some of his programmatic remarks, for example that 'the goal' as well as the 'serial progression' from one form of consciousness to the next is 'necessarily fixed' . The difficulty, however, is that it is hard for these readings to show that the rigour they demand is actually to be found in the development of the Phenomenology (as Forster, for example, implicitly concedes, when he comments that the text might need to be 'reconstructed' in order to fit the method he proposes for it: see Forster 1998: 187. Cf. also K. R. Westphal 1998b: 94-5). Faced with this difficulty, other commentators have gone to the opposite extreme, and denied that there is any real method at all underlying the order in which the forms of consciousness develop. (, 'And the Phenomenology is certainly unwissentshaftlich: undisciplined, arbitrary, full of digressions, not a monument to the austerity of the intellectual conscience and to carefulness and precision but a wild, bold, unprecedented book that invites comparison with some great literary masterpieces.') Readings of this kind have the advantage of not trying to hold Hegel to a methodological ideal that he failed to meet; but on the other hand they make a nonsense of Hegel's own claims for the systematic nature of his work, and ignore the kind of structure that can be found in it. Now, on my approach we can take the transitions seriously, but are not committed to these being more rigorous than a realistic interpretation of the actual text allows. On this approach, there is indeed a 'necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness' , in the sense that its fundamental limitations force consciousness to face certain difficulties, and to handle these difficulties in a particular way. Consciousness will therefore find itself caught up in a characteristic movement: starting from one position, it comes to see that that position leads to problems that are unresolvable from that standpoint. Consciousness will therefore be plunged into despair, as it now finds no satisfaction in the world, but only puzzlement and frustration. However, Hegel claims that consciousness cannot remain content with this sense of dissatisfaction, as 'thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia' ; it must therefore move to a fresh standpoint, in order to recover its sense of being 'at home in the world'. It will therefore adopt a new perspective by questioning some of the assumptions of the position from which it began. However, as a merely 'unreal' (natural, ordinary, unspeculative) consciousness, it does so in a onesided or undialectical manner, and so arrives at another position which (because of this one-sidedness) is no more workable; so it then plunges into despair once again, only then to question the assumptions of this position in an incomplete manner, and so on. Thus, for example, after finding Sense-certainty to be inadequate, consciousness moves to Perception, which no longer thinks of objects as mere individuals, but instead thinks of them as bundles of property-universals; but this makes it difficult to capture the unity of the object as an individual, so it regards these universals as instantiated in a substratum; but this makes it difficult to see how the substratum relates to the properties, so it moves to a conception of objects as the appearance of a holistic structure of interconnected forces; but this sets up a problematic dualism between a world of sensible phenomena and the supersensible beyond of theoretical understanding; so consciousness rejects this beyond and instead sees the world as something it can master through action; and so on. Or, to take some examples from later in the Phenomenology: Hegel argues that problems with Greek ethical life lead consciousness to question the perspective of the Greeks and to introduce new notions of individuality and freedom, but these concepts are themselves developed one-sidedly, in a way that leads to fresh difficulties highlighted in various ways through the chapters on 'Reason' and 'Spirit'. Likewise, he argues that while modern consciousness has become dissatisfied with a certain kind of dogmatic religious belief, it moves beyond that in a limited way, thereby introducing the kind of Enlightenment standpoint that is merely materialistic and utilitarian. Thus, in all these transitions, Hegel wants us, as phenomenological observers, to see that the moves consciousness makes are inevitable given its dialectical limitations; likewise, we are supposed to see that these limitations mean that it cannot properly escape the difficulties of one standpoint when it moves to another, because it does so in a merely one-sided manner. Only at the end of the Phenomenology, when the 'natural' consciousness we have been observing at last feels this dissatisfaction for itself, will it be ready to reflect on the categorial assumptions that have led it to this impasse, thereby finally understanding the need for the kind of philosophical self-examination required in order to achieve 'absolute knowing'. Thus, at the end of the Phenomenology, consciousness can see that far from the world itself being irrational or alien, 'what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing' ; at that point it is ready to begin the kind of categorial examination that we find in the Logic, and the preparatory role of the Phenomenology is at an end.
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