The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Between 1801 and 1806 Hegel taught at Jena, first as an unsalaried ‘Privatdozent’, and experimented with ways of constructing his philosophical system. By the end of 1806 he had completed the first mature expression of his distinctive philosophy, the Phenomenology of Spirit, but by the time of its publication in 1807, he had been left jobless by the closing of the university after Napoleon’s troops had occupied the town. For the next nine years Hegel worked outside the university context, first as a newspaper editor at Bamberg, and then as headmaster of a ‘Gymnasium’ (high school) at Nuremberg, but this did not prevent him from publishing the two volumes of his Science of Logic (‘Volume One, The Objective Logic’ made up of books 1 and 2, published separately in 1812 and 1813, and ‘Volume Two, The Subjective Logic’ published in 1816). In 1816 an appointment at the University of Heidelberg marked his return to academic philosophy and two years later he accepted the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. While in Heidelberg he published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a systematic work prepared for teaching in which an abbreviated version of the earlier Science of Logic (the ‘Encyclopedia Logic’ or ‘Lesser Logic’) led into the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. In 1821 in Berlin, Hegel published his major work in political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, based on lectures given at Heidelberg and ultimately grounded in the section of the Philosophy of Spirit dealing with ‘objective spirit’.

  During the years up to his death in 1831 Hegel came to enjoy great celebrity at Berlin, and published subsequent versions of the Encyclopedia in 1827 and 1830. From 1832 versions of his various lecture courses started to appear in print, with second editions appearing in 1840. Tolstoy’s reminiscences of his university days in Russia in the 1840s give a sense of the scope of Hegel’s influence in that decade: ‘Hegelianism was the foundation of everything. It was floating in the air; it was expressed in newspaper and periodical articles, in historical and judicial lectures, in novels, in treatises, in art, in sermons, in conversation’.4 But already in the 1830s Hegel’s followers were starting to fragment over the question of religion, and from 1841 Hegel’s philosophy was being attacked from his own lectern in Berlin by his former friend and colleague, Schelling. The collapse of progressive politics with the failure of the 1848 revolutions is often said to have deprived Hegelianism of its support, but whatever its cause the decline of Hegel’s influence was dramatic. As Tolstoy goes on, ‘all at once the forties passed, and there was nothing left of him. There was not even a hint of him, any more than if he had never existed’.5

  In the second half of the century ‘Left-Hegelianism’ eventually transformed into Marx’s claim to invert Hegel’s idealism into a form of materialism which nevertheless kept the ‘dialectical’ form of his thought. However, Marx’s materialism was only one expression of a wide-spread turn against idealism. What exactly had been its perceived problems have by now largely been forgotten, and certain common misconceptions of idealism have made it difficult to appreciate what had seemed attractive about such a form of philosophy.

  3.1.1 What was ‘Idealismus’?

  Within the analytic tradition, the term ‘idealism’ is typically associated with the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley, but attempting to understand the German tradition from such a starting point is hopeless. Berkeley had characterized his own position as ‘immaterialism’, not idealism, and immaterialism was not a significant feature of any version of German idealism. It might be said that the core difference between ‘idealism’ as understood in Anglophone philosophy and the Germans’ Idealismus resides in the difference between the ways each tradition conceived of the nature of the ‘ideas’ referred to by these respective names. Crucially, in the German tradition ‘Idee’ (plural, ‘Ideen’) did not refer to the sort of subjective mental representations that Berkeley, in common with the British empiricists, called ‘ideas’ (for this notion, the Germans reserved the term ‘Vorstellung’, usually translated as ‘representation’). Rather, the ‘Ideen’ of the German tradition had a distinctly Platonic provenance: such ‘ideas’ (or ‘forms’) had not originally been conceived of as entities within any enclosed mental sphere, not even the mind of some world-creating god—such a conception characterizing only the late antique Platonism that had informed early Christian thought. Moreover, Aristotle in particular was significant for Hegel,6 and for Aristotle ‘ideas’ had been rendered as the ‘forms’ that primarily informed the matter of corporeal substances.

  In appealing to the speculative categories of the ancient world against those of the early modern world, neither were the idealists advocating some simple affirmation of ancient philosophy: the break of natural science and other features of modernity with the ordered Aristotelian cosmos had eliminated that as a possibility. As Hegel was to put it: ‘once the substantial form of the spirit has inwardly reconstituted itself, all attempts to preserve the forms of an earlier culture are utterly in vain; like withered leaves they are pushed off by the new buds already growing at their roots’.7 Rather, idealists from Leibniz through to Hegel sought somehow to accommodate or incorporate into a form of broadly Aristotelian speculative thought the distinctly unAristotelian conceptions of modern life, together with the distinctive role given to individual ‘subjectivity’ within it. Thus German ‘Idealismus’ might be better described in terms of the increasing attempts to locate the phenomena associated with the modern ‘subjective’ conception of consciousness and the emerging ‘mechanical’ worldview within a more encompassing framework that was seen as in some ways continuous with the outlook of both everyday life and Greek speculative thought. For Hegel, in particular, this came to take an historical dimension in which Greek speculative philosophy could be seen as set on a trajectory in which the modern conception of an atomic subject standing opposed to its ‘object’—a conception also linked to the rise of Christianity—was somehow generated from the matrix of ancient thought, bringing about both the freedom and alienation that characterized modern life. For Hegel, the task facing moderns was that of somehow bringing about a reconciliation of the alienated modern subject with the world without sacrificing its unique form of freedom.

  3.2 THE METHOD OF A ‘PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT’ AND THE ROLE OF ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ IN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT

  Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has since become one of the major works of the western philosophical canon—many readers, especially since the turn of the twentieth century, finding in it a more acceptable philosophy than that contained in Hegel’s systematic works. But that is not how Hegel or his contemporaries saw its significance. The term ‘phenomenology’ predated Hegel, having been coined by the eighteenth-century mathematician J.H. Lambert, and having been used by Kant, in a letter to Lambert, to suggest a type of methodological ‘propaedeutic’ to the actual doing of scientific philosophy. With this Kant seems to have meant by ‘phenomenology’ what he later characterized as ‘critique’ in the Critique of Pure Reason—a work which Kant regarded as enabling further properly scientific approaches to both theoretical and practical philosophy.

  Such a sense of a propaedeutic to philosophy was central to Hegel’s use of the term, and while we find in the Phenomenology many philosophical ideas that are clearly Hegel’s own and that recur in other works, the text itself was not meant to be an expression of philosophical thought, but a type of intellectual activity in which ordinary ‘consciousness’ is to be led to a position from which it can start to think philosophically. According to the text’s original title, Hegel had conceived of phenomenology as a ‘science of the experience of consciousness’, but the ‘experience’ involved here is meant to lead to the abandonment of the position of ‘consciousness’ itself. Genuine philosophizing, then, would start in earnest with the Science of Logic, and would be continued in the system of ‘real philosophy’ that would be constructed on the basis of the ‘thought determinations’ worked out in the Science of Logic. But what can be meant by the idea of thought going beyond th
e structures of ‘consciousness’ in this way?

  3.2.1 Consciousness

  With the idea of the need to surpass ‘consciousness’, Hegel was in no way suggesting that philosophical thought should be unconscious: ‘the distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free one’, he notes, is that ‘the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done…spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a fundamental determination of its actuality’.8 Hegel’s thoughts on ‘consciousness’ are subtle. First, he was not tied to the Cartesian identification of thinking and consciousness, and even seemed to recognize a place for unconscious mental processes.9 Nevertheless, he held that for free thought the thinker has to rise to a consciousness of those determinations that structure thought—determinations of which one would not normally be conscious. Rather, the sense in which he denies that consciousness is the appropriate cognitive medium for philosophy is the sense in which consciousness is conceived in terms of a fundamental and fixed separation and opposition between the individual thinker (the ‘subject’) and that which is being thought (the ‘object’ of which that subject is conscious)—a structure that had been elaborated by Reinhold. While this oppositional ‘subject–object’ structure does characterize an essential phase of thinking for Hegel, it cannot be taken to be the defining characteristic or the essential nature of thought.

  With this in mind, some of Hegel’s motives for denying that consciousness can be the medium of philosophy become apparent. For example, philosophy could never aspire to the comprehensiveness proper to it (there being nothing beyond the proper scope of philosophy; its subject matter is ‘the Absolute’) were its subject matter construed as an object for a subject. Clearly then there would be something excluded: the very subject doing the thinking. While what Hegel had in mind as an alternative to this intuitively plausible subject–object model of thought is not immediately obvious, a few possible candidates suggest themselves. He might be appealing to philosophy on the model of a type of self-knowledge, in which the subject-over-against-an-object conception seems wrong as subject and object are here identical, or he might be thinking of a type of collective thinking, undertaken by a community, say, in which the unity of the ‘thinking subject’ is distributed over a plurality of different subjects, or he could have in mind something closer to a religious conception of some sort of ‘participation’ of the individual conscious subject in the mind of a god. All of these elements play a role in Hegel’s alternative to the simple subject–object model, but to select out one image in preference to the others gives a distorted impression as Hegel attempts to integrate these three dimensions into a uniquely structured single account.

  3.2.2 Following the ‘Experience’ of Consciousness

  Hegel’s Phenomenology commences with a consideration of variously articulated structures (or ‘shapes’) of consciousness. Everyday subjects, Hegel thinks, in the first instance tend to understand themselves as individual conscious subjects who experience and know particular kinds of objects. The experience involved in reading the text will co-opt such subjects (the readers) for philosophical thought by getting them to divest themselves of the idea that the oppositional structure of consciousness is ultimate. But phenomenology does this not by offering arguments to persuade the reader to somehow relinquish their self-conception (this is one sense in which phenomenology is not philosophy proper). Rather, it simply appeals to the experience of following the consequences for a represented consciousness (the ‘object consciousness’) of that consciousness’s attempting to take seriously the normative shape within which it functions. It will be within and on account of this experience that the limitations of each shape of consciousness become apparent, thus forcing the object consciousness to move on to another shape. At the end of the process, the readers having themselves experienced the limitations of all particular shapes of consciousness now come to abandon the overarching subject–object opposition of consciousness itself, thereby becoming freed for thought proper, and hence for philosophy. While Hegel’s interpretation of ‘phenomenology’ is a highly innovative one, we might think of the basic conception behind his idea as a Kantian one.

  In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had argued that since empirical knowledge is conditioned by structures contributed by the knower (both intuitional and conceptual), the ‘objects’ thereby known cannot be thought of ‘realistically’ as what makes up the world as it is ‘in itself’. In the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ Kant argued that this confusion of objects (in his jargon, confusing ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’) characteristically results in the generation of contradictions such as those that have traditionally plagued metaphysics. For this reason, he implied, we must refrain from the attempt to know the world ‘as it is in itself’. This project of traditional metaphysics was then to be replaced by a type of self-knowledge—knowledge by the thinker of its own constitutive conditions as a thinker.

  In Hegel’s Phenomenology, each of the steps within the experience that consciousness goes through will present micro-instances of the generation of the contradictions Kant had alluded to, but the contradictions are afforded resolutions that Kant would not have recognized. Thus in the ‘sense-certainty’ examined in chapter 1, this shape of consciousness takes as its true objects bare sensuous presences, somewhat like the ‘ideas’ that early modern empiricists thought could be known with certainty. We readers then follow the attempts of the subject of this shape of consciousness to make these initially implicit criteria defining its objects explicit—that is, consciously available to it. By the end of the chapter, however, we have seen that this consciousness has learnt from experience that its own initial conception of objecthood was contradictory. Rather than being immediate and singular as assumed—something immediately present like this, here, now10—its objects have been experienced as having some implicit universal (conceptual) aspect. To be consciously aware of what is present to the mind as this is now to be aware of it as an instance of a kind—it is now a this. A new criterion concerning the nature of the object known emerges from this realization that makes this conceptual dimension explicit—one that defines the new ‘shape’ of ‘perception’, the experience of which is in turn observed in chapter 2.

  Already a pattern for the ‘experience of consciousness’ has been established. As in chapter 1, consciousness’s efforts to make its implicit criteria for objecthood explicit to itself, by making them, in turn, objects of consciousness, has resulted in contradictions. The objects of ‘perception’ are basically conceived as something like Aristotelian instances of thing-kinds, but once more, experience finds that contradictions undermine this shape, and a new shape, ‘the understanding’, emerges from the rubble of perception. The understanding takes as real not those immediately graspable thing-kind instances of ‘perception’, but something underlying the perceived phenomena and responsible for them—posited (rather than perceived) ‘forces’.11

  Of course ‘the understanding’ will survive its own experience no more than the earlier shapes, but what emerges from its collapse marks a higher-level transition than those seen so far—the transition to chapter 4, ‘The Truth of Self-Certainty’, marking a transition from consciousness to self-consciousness. What we see here is something like a transition from all pre-Kantian conceptions of the objects of philosophy to a Kantian one, or, more specifically, to the form of transformed Kantianism found in the work of Fichte. And in this context we find what is perhaps the most well-known part of the Phenomenology, the ‘struggle of recognition’ of the ‘master–slave dialectic’—a parable meant to reveal the necessity of normative, institutionalizable recognitive relations between individual subjects for the functioning of any form of ‘self-consciousness’.

  Self-consciousness as ‘self-certainty’ initially conceives itself in a negating relation to the object of which it is conscious, as in the intentional state of desire, but experience shows that it ‘achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness�
��.12 We readers are meant to grasp this relation of two mutually recognizing self-consciousnesses as an instantiation of spirit (Geist)—‘an absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousness which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence’.13 But this essentially mutual relation constitutive of spirit is here contradicted by the asymmetry of its instantiation between master and slave.14 A slave ‘does not count as an “I”, for his master is his “I” instead’,15 and this contradiction will become apparent to the protagonists in the experience of the condition of slavery in which the independence of the master turns into dependence on the slave.

  The ‘dialectic’ characterizing these ‘experiences’ through which the reader will progress will eventually be seen within historical configurations of such relations of recognition constituting ‘objective spirit’. Clearly, there is a type of telos envisaged here aimed at a configuration of institutions capable of supporting the type of subjectivity that will itself be capable of truly ‘free’ thought and action, and thus capable of philosophizing. Thus, after tracing the experience of self-consciousness through the more encompassing processes of ‘reason’ (in chapter 5) and configurations of ‘objective spirit’ (in chapter 6), in the hastily sketched final two chapters of the Phenomenology, chapters 7, ‘Religion’, and 8, ‘Absolute Knowing’, Hegel moves to the level of what he calls ‘absolute spirit’, where rather than configurations of actual patterns of intersubjectivity (objective spirit), he focuses on the cultural objectifications of art, religion, and philosophy as they develop through history.