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Conclusion
Perhaps because Hegel was himself a historicist, who believed that 'each individual is . . . a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts' (see Preface), it is customary for commentators on his work to conclude by asking how far his thought has significance merely in its own historical context, and how much of it continues to be relevant for us. For many of Hegel's works, including the Phenomenology, it has been suggested that though we may admire them, we cannot now take them in the way Hegel himself intended them to be taken, as our perspective is crucially and fundamentally different from his (post-Darwin, post-Marx, post-Auschwitz, post-modern, or whatever): we must therefore distinguish clearly between the 'rational kernel' and the 'mystical shell' (Marx), between what is 'living' and what is 'dead' in Hegel's thought (Croce). How much of the Phenomenology, then, should we conclude is lost to us in this way? Some will claim that we cannot now take the Phenomenology seriously as a whole, precisely because the central Hegelian ideas around which it is constructed - such as 'Spirit', 'absolute idealism', and 'absolute knowing' - are too extraordinary to have plausible currency in modern philosophical consciousness. These are seen as concepts rooted in parts of Hegel's background that are least acces- sible to us (his Romanticism, Christian mysticism, or rationalistic Platonism), and which led Hegel to adopt a position in the Phenomenology and elsewhere that is incredible in the modern context (Taylor). On this view, while there may still be things we can learn from the Phenomenology - in its critique of other thinkers, for example, or as a historical analysis of the cultural and philosophical origins of modernity - we cannot hope to recapture its underlying argument for a positive doctrine in so far as it intrinsically involves these problematic notions. It may be, however, that such a historicist approach does Hegel a disservice, in failing to interpret properly Hegel's understanding of these key ideas, and making them appear more peculiar than they really are: certainly many current commentators now offer so-called 'non-metaphysical' readings of terms like 'Spirit' and 'Idea' that bring them much closer to contemporary perspectives (where Spirit is understood in terms of intersubjectivity, for example: see Williams). And even if these readings are dismissed as merely re-readings or reconstructions, it could also be argued that these concepts play a far less central role in Hegel's thinking than might at first appear. Thus, for example, in the account I have offered above of the Phenomenology, I hope to have shown that it is possible to follow Hegel's text without any very rich conception of Spirit being required, even if this rich conception was the one he actually held. We can learn from Hegel, even if what we learn is not everything he actually taught. However, even if it is admitted that the Phenomenology is not historically inaccessible to us in this way as an independent text, it has often been claimed that Hegel's system as a whole remains alien to us, and that this will cut us off from the Phenomenology at least in so far as we try (as I have done) to integrate it into the system in general, and the Logic in particular. Thus, many have claimed that for the Phenomenology to remain 'living', it must be divorced from the first book of the Encyclopedia, which is assuredly 'dead'. Reasons for rejecting the Logic out of hand in this way vary, but two are commonplace: the first is that it is a product of essentialist metaphysics which attempts to deduce being from essence, the world from thought; and the second is that the dialectical method it employs sets it at odds with the principles of logic (such as the law of non-contradiction) on which modern logical theory relies (Wood). Given this damning indictment of the Logic, the commentator on the Phenomenology would appear to face a stark choice: either take Hegel at his word and attempt to integrate the two texts, while robbing the latter of its vitality; or try to avoid this, but at the cost of depriving the Phenomenology of its apparent rationale and organizing scheme.
Now, here is not the place to attempt to offer a more positive account of the Logic, but obviously this would be one way out of the dilemma we have just been posed. For, once again, many commentators would hold that the Logic itself is neither so 'metaphysical' and essentialist, nor so bizarre in its methodology, as it is here assumed to be: in that case, the Phenomenology is not necessarily moribund even when its relationship to the Logic is taken seriously. As I hope to have shown, giving the Phenomenology an introductory role to the Logic conceived of as a dialectical investigation of categories shows it to be more than just a collection of observations on philosophical history, or on political and social theory, or on the problems of modernity: because I see no reason why the Logic interpreted this way should be 'dead' to us, I have not felt afraid to associate these two texts directly with one another.
A third historicizing argument to be considered concerns not the alien nature of the concepts Hegel employs in the Phenomenology, nor of the other parts of the system with which the Phenomenology can be linked, but rather the goal of his whole project, and the underlying outlook and aspirations which that goal expresses. It is this, perhaps more than anything else, that may be felt to separate us from Hegel: in his claim that 'to him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back', and in his desire to enable us to feel 'at home', Hegel may seem profoundly out of touch with contemporary sensibilities. (See Geuss for a helpful and lucid account of how thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Adorno came to reject this view.) To us, the goal itself may appear troubling in its apparent quietism and conservatism, while Hegel's hopes that it could be achieved may seem naive, or foolish, or plain self-deluding; and, even if the goal and the hopes are accepted, Hegel's suggestion that philosophy (and not science, or art, or religion, or politics on their own) can accomplish such aims may seem absurd, and little more than a function of his overblown ambitions for his own chosen career as a 'systematic' philosopher.
This objection is a large one, and perhaps more difficult to assess than it initially appears. For, once again, Hegel's position can be presented in a way that may avoid some of these concerns ( Hardimon ), while it could also be argued that the faith in reason and progress that Hegel's project is said to embody is not entirely lost to us (although perhaps his grandiose conception of philosophy is: see Stern). Fortunately, there is no need to resolve these issues here, because while Hegel's aim as a whole may be one of 'reconciliation', and while this may well seem unrealizable or even undesirable to us, it does not in my view affect the value of the Phenomenology, whose negative role has been to show just how hard this reconciliation is to achieve, and what obstacles stand in our way. We can therefore learn a good deal from Hegel's critique of what he sees as one-sided claims that aspire to provide satisfaction for consciousness in the Phenomenology, while reserving judgement on whether he himself can avoid these shortcomings in the positive programme he builds on this approach in the system proper. (In this respect, Adorno's words offer a permanent challenge to the Hegelian project: 'Dialectics serves the end of reconcilement . . . but none of the reconcilements claimed by [Hegel's] absolute idealism - and no other kind remained consistent - has stood up, whether in logic or in politics and history' (Adorno).) Of course, this is not to deny that certain aspects of the Phenomenology make it very much a work of its time, so that parts of it are of merely historical interest; but for such a dense and in many ways idiosyncratic work, this is the case surprisingly rarely (for example, even in the Observing Reason section, where Hegel's focus is obviously on the scientific outlook of his period, the problem he is interested in is one we can still take seriously and reinterpret in our own terms). And of course, a historicist critique of any work has its own dangers: for, as has so often happened with Hegel, despite the repeated suggestion that his time has irrevocably passed (by Marxist materialists, by post-modernists, or by analytic philosophers, for example), he has repeatedly returned to speak to us once again, in ways that were previously unimagined. It seems likely, therefore, that as long as Hegel's problems remain our problems, it is to the living present rather than the dead past that the Phenomenology will continue to belong.
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