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The Preface and the Introduction
Given that Hegel thinks that the ordinary consciousness will be ready and able to face up to the ordeal of dialectical thinking (to 'take on . . . the strenuous effort of the Notion' ) only after it has been through the chastening experience of the Phenomenology, it is not so surprising that he holds that any attempt to tell us what such thinking involves before we have had that experience would be wasted effort: we would inevitably misunderstand what was required, and be unable to grasp what is demanded of us. The Preface and the Introduction to the Phenomenology are therefore notorious for failing to assist its readers by telling them anything in advance about the conclusions to be reached, as those conclusions will only be properly grasped at the end of the work, and not the beginning: 'the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about' . Thus, as many commentators have complained, Hegel seems to set out deliberately to make the preliminaries to the Phenomenology hard to understand until one has been through the work as a whole, so that they are more suitably read at the end rather than at the outset; this seems particularly true of the Preface, which only came to be written after the work was complete, so that it serves more as a coda to the text (or perhaps even to Hegel's entire system) than as a preamble. (As Hegel remarked rather superciliously, 'The usual royal road in philosophy is to read prefaces and book reviews, in order to get an approximate idea of things' . This is a shortcut he seems determined to deny us.)
The Preface
Nonetheless, though the Preface does not give much away concerning the content of the Phenomenology, and is certainly far from transparent and fully explicit, it is still highly relevant to Hegel's main theme, which is that we must satisfy reason in our conception of the world, and further that philosophy as a speculative science can help reason find that satisfaction: 'The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title "love of knowing" and be actual knowing - that is what I have set myself to do' . Much of the Preface is therefore taken up with polemicizing against his contemporaries who (Hegel believes) have failed to achieve what he sets out to do, either because they have held that satisfaction can only be attained by abandoning reason in favour of faith, or because they have mistaken the kind of world-view in which true intellectual satisfaction can be found.9 With regard to the first group, he launches a scathing attack on those who argue that consciousness must seek immediate awareness of the divine and abandon thought altogether, if it is to feel at home in the world; these critics of philosophy blame it for undermining former certainties through its excessive rationalism, for which it must now make amends by committing itself to 'edification rather than insight' . Hegel is scornful of what seems to him to be a merely anti-philosophical mysticism:
The 'beautiful', the 'holy', the 'eternal', 'religion', and 'love' are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite; not the Notion, but ecstasy, not the cold march of necessity in the thing itself, but the ferment of enthusiasm, these are supposed to be what sustains and continually extends the wealth of substance . . . Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of [the divine] substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams.
Hegel declares that thankfully the period of such irrationalism has passed, and that 'ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era' . However, he also states that when it first appears on the scene, this renewed commitment to reason is flawed by a certain intellectual immaturity, as this new way of thinking is 'no more a complete actuality than is a new-born child; it is essential to bear this in mind. It comes on the scene for the first time in its immediacy or its Notion . . . Science, the crown of a world of Spirit, is not complete in its beginnings' . The result of such immaturity, Hegel says, will be that it is claimed that rational insight is said to be 'the esoteric possession of a few individuals', whereas in fact (as the Phenomenology is intended to show) '[t]he intelligible form of Science is the way open and equally accessible to everyone'. Moreover, in the early stages of its development this programme has taken a shape that has made it an easy target for its critics, as it has sought to satisfy reason with a 'monochromatic formalism' in which philosophy tries to pin down the bewildering variety of phenomena in a few simple schema, and hence ends up declaring that 'all is one'. Hegel states that we are right to be dissatisfied with this outcome, and to be successful philosophy must provide us with a deeper form of rational insight than this: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment, is to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' . However, although he accepts that some of the contemporary critics of philosophy have a point in attacking the philosophical sciences in their current state, he nonetheless insists that this is because in this state they are not properly developed, and that further philosophical progress will show that such attacks are premature: 'Science in its early stages, when it has attained neither to completeness of detail nor perfection of form, is vulnerable to criticism. But it would be as unjust for such criticism to strike at the very heart of Science, as it is untenable to refuse to honour the demand for its [i.e. Science's] further development' .
This section of the Preface, and a later one on the same topic , are clearly designed to alert the reader to the fact that Hegel's position is not to be aligned with Schelling's identity- philosophy and its associated philosophy of nature. Rather, while Hegel acknowledges Schelling's importance as a pioneer in giving contemporary philosophy a renewed intellectual optimism and respect for reason, he also plainly wishes to warn his readers that such optimism cannot find its fulfilment in the work of Schelling and his followers, for although Schelling tries to avoid irrationalism, his conception is too formulaic and empty to make the world properly comprehensible to us. If reason is to find satisfaction, Hegel argues, it must preserve the distinctions that Schelling simply collapses, but in such a way that these distinctions become unproblematic:
Whatever is more than such a word, even the transition to a mere proposition, contains a becoming-other that has to be taken back, or is a mediation. But it is just this that is rejected with horror, as if absolute cognition were simply surrendered when more is made of mediation than in simply saying that it is nothing absolute, and is completely absent from the Absolute. But this abhorrence in fact stems from ignorance of the nature of mediation, and of absolute cognition itself . . . Reason is, therefore, misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the True, and is not grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute.
Hegel diagnoses Schelling's mistake here as based on a desire for a form of intellectual satisfaction that is blissfully unaware of the problems faced by ordinary finite understanding, modelled on 'the life of God and divine cognition . . . [where] that life is indeed one of untroubled equality and unity with itself, for which otherness and alienation, and the overcoming of alienation, are not serious matters' ; but Hegel argues that this is a mistake, for the divine intellect must be able to work through these problems if such intellectual satisfaction is not just to be 'insipid'. For philosophy to succeed against edification, for reason properly to answer its irrationalist critics, Hegel claims we must move from the identity-philosophy of Schelling to the properly dialectical outlook of his own speculative system; in this way, Hegel seized the torch of progressive thinking from his friend and former colleague, and began a rift between the two that was never to heal. In this section of the Preface, Hegel comes out with some of his most notoriously dark sayings, namely that 'everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject', and that 'The True is the whole' . As Hegel himself points out , it is only through 'the exposition of the system itself' that he can properly justify these claims, or even render them fully intelligible; but the fact that they come in the course of his skirmish with Schelling (or perhaps, as Hegel himself always insisted, with Schelling's less able followers) makes them somewhat easier to interpret. For, as we have seen, it is clear that what troubled Hegel about Schelling's approach was its tendency towards monism, that is, to the view that 'all is one' . In claiming, therefore, that 'the True' is not only substance, but also subject, Hegel may be taken as rejecting this monistic position, on the grounds that it collapses the subject/object distinction, whereas (in Hegel's view) the subject can be both distinguished from the world and find itself in it: 'This Substance is, as Subject, pure simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself - not an original or immediate unity as such - is the True' . In declaring that 'The True is the whole', Hegel thus associates himself with holism as against monism; for while he rejects atomism or radical dualism, he is happy to accept 'identity-in-difference', whereas (in his view) the Schellingian takes reality to be fundamentally self-identical and lacking in differentiation. Hegel calls Spirit the subject that embodies this relation of identity-in-difference to the world, by finding itself in its 'other', so that while it is not cut off from the world (radical dualism), it is not indistinguishable from it either (monism): 'The spiritual alone is the actual; it is essence, or that which has being in itself; it is that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, it is otherbeing and being-for-self, and in this determinateness, or in its self-externality, abides within itself; in other words, it is in and for itself' . (It is a matter of some dispute as to whether Hegel was right to associate Schelling with monism here, and to claim that Schelling's doctrine of 'intellectual intuition . . . fall[s] back into inert simplicity' by submerging subject into substance : see Bowie
1993: 55-6. It is also frequently argued that Hegel himself fails to show how this doctrine of 'identity-in-difference' avoids either incoherence or itself ending up as monistic as the position he is criticizing: cf. James 1909, Russell 1956: 21.) Hegel then goes on to consider at some length why his dialectical outlook cannot be grasped by consciousness immediately, and so why we cannot proceed to it directly 'like a shot from a pistol', in the way that the Schellingian system 'begins straight away with absolute knowledge, and makes short work of other standpoints by declaring that it takes no notice of them'. Hegel here makes clear what is distinctive about the therapeutic nature of his approach: consciousness has to see that its own way of understanding the world has failed, before it can grasp the significance of Hegel's way of looking at things: 'But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself'. Hegel therefore contrasts his approach to that adopted by history and mathematics, where the outcome of these inquiries can be understood and defended without going through any such 'labour of the negative' : he argues that this is the wrong model to use for his form of therapeutic enquiry, where here 'truth therefore includes the negative also, what could be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract' . As a consequence, he rejects the mathematical method as inappropriate for philosophy, observing in his defence:
'If this comment sounds boastful or revolutionary and I am far from adopting such a tone it should be noted that current opinion itself has already come to view the scientific regime bequeathed by mathematics as quite old-fashioned - with its explanations, divisions, axioms, sets of theorems, its proofs, principles, deductions, and conclusions from them' . (by 'current opinion' Hegel probably means Kant and Jacobi, judging by his comment at SL: 816 that they had 'exploded' the Spinozistic more geometrico as a philosophical method.) On the other hand, he warns that in rejecting the 'pedantry and pomposity of science' we should not be tempted towards the anti-rationalistic 'non-method of presentiment and inspiration, or by the arbitrariness of prophetic utterance, both of which despise not only scientific pomposity, but scientific procedure of all kinds' . Hegel therefore claims that his project puts him between two extremes: on the one hand 'the inadequacy of common-sense' with its 'habit of picture-thinking' , but on the other hand a purely esoteric and mystical philosophy that cannot be articulated (what he calls 'the uncommon universality of a reason whose talents have been ruined by indolence and the conceit of genius' ); rather, Hegel says, his is 'a truth ripened to its properly matured form so as to be capable of being the property of all self-conscious Reason' . He therefore criticizes a philosophy that is non-speculative in that it merely sets out to overturn common-sense without putting anything in its place: such a philosophy mistakenly 'imagines that by establishing the void it is always ahead of any insight rich in content'. On the other hand, he also stresses that genuine philosophical thought will always represent a challenge to non-philosophical consciousness, 'which makes comprehension difficult for it'. To illustrate this, he focuses on the way in which the ordinary subject-predicate form is tested by philosophical propositions like
'God is being' or 'the actual is the universal', where the predicate is not being attributed to the subject in the normal way: 'The philosophical proposition, since it is a proposition, leads one to believe that the usual subject-predicate relation obtains, as well as the usual attitude towards knowing. But the philosophical content destroys this attitude and this opinion'. Thus, though he does not doubt that the public is 'ripe to receive [the truth]' , Hegel in the Preface warns the reader not to be misled into accepting a nonHegelian view of what that truth is, but also not to expect grasping it to be easy: 'True thoughts and scientific insight are only to be won through the labour of the Notion' .
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