The "Introduction" to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

§§73-7 are concerned with knowledge, specifically as “apparent knowledge.” Hegel replays many philosophical perspectives here without naming them as such. What he finds faulty with the ways that knowledge has been conceived are these:... Whether knowledge is an instrument for relating to the world, or a medium through which we understand the world, then the world in either case must have a different character than knowledge. There is then always a gap of sorts between knower and world, or better said, between knowing and the object to be known. This would be a sort of basic “realism” that he is criticizing. The real problem here (which is a consequence of the dualism implied) is that if we cannot really know the object but only what our medium or instrument can reveal of it, then we must also ask whether we have any direct access to the medium or instrument as well. Thus there is an infinite regress involved in thinking about knowledge in this way. This epistemological problem “goes all the way down.” This is most clearly given in §74. If we assume subject/object dualism this epistemological swamp is unavoidable. Modern philosophy (think Descartes) falls into this trap by assuming that it knows the mind better than it knows the world, that is, that we can know our thoughts directly (rather than inferring them) but that outside of the mind there is great uncertainty. Such a way of starting out that reaches this impasse every time (thus Kant’s phenomena/noumena divide for instance). The consequence of Hegel’s thought here is that epistemology alone can never allow us to reach the absolute. Epistemology is stuck in a neurotic quandry, it wants to know before it can know.

In §76 Hegel begins to give his solution to this problem which is science or better ‘systematic science’ (to use the German, there can be no real Wissen that is not Wissenschaft). Where philosophy had hitherto tended to divide sharply ideas from appearances, Hegel recognizes that philosophy and science must begin from appearances and that the distinction between knowledge and appearance is internal to the world of appearances itself. Science though, gets better, it corrects itself and does arrive at ways of distinguishing appearance from reality - and, as will be thematic throughout this book - this discovering of error is crucial to moving forward and moving forward will allow us to discover truths which will themselves be temporal (not timeless).

§78 (and after) give us “natural consciousness” which we must understand not as ‘common sense’ but as a form of knowing which is presumed to be ahistorical and asocial and which anchors our basic sense of our self as situated, it is our stance toward the world in its immediacy and seeming sufficiency. We try to sustain this, to prove it to ourselves as an adequate knowledge of the objects it knows. There is an erotics here too as our attachment (cathexis) to these ideas sustains us as such. That we find that our concept of knowing does not prove adequate to our concept of the object of our knowing is what leads to the “despair” Hegel mentions repeatedly (akin to when a quilting point ceases to quilt and our fantasy collapses).

While Hegel throughout requires skepticism, he faults Descartes and the Empiricists (it seems) for assuming that they can know their own minds. This too must be doubted. So the progress of the Phenomenology is both bildung and via negativa. It is positively accumulative and insistently negativizing.

Hegel is also parting ways with logic as it has been thought since Aristotle (and still is generally). That is, if a theory is found to be contradictory, for the average logician, this means it is fundamentally wrong. But Hegel in this instance is working more like how a natural scientist works in assuming that every theory will face exceptions and find internal contradictions, but the scientist does not discard everything, rather he tries to correct the theory so that it still explains what it had explained, but now accounts for the variance and provides an explanation of why the preceding version of the account failed to do so. The new account that is produced to solve the issues in the previous account is seen (though only in retrospect) as necessary. It is easy to overdetermine this ‘necessity’ if one doesn’t abandon the logic that Hegel is distancing himself from. That is, if in version 1 of the theory contradictions are discovered, and version 2 resolves them, there is nothing which requires that there might not be other versions which might do so as well, as such version 2 is not necessary in a logical sense, only sufficient. What Hegel seems to be saying is that version 2, while merely sufficient at the time as a solution to the problem, is then built upon until at last the end is reached, and from that vantage it will have become necessary. In Bernstein’s audio lectures he quotes Gillian Rose as having said that “Going forward the Phenomenology is a gamble and retrospectively it is a necessity.” (This is not unlike beginning a sentence, where the punctuation will retroactively constitute what it will have meant.)

§80, here we get some idea, at least formally speaking, of what the “end” toward which knowledge progresses must mean. “...where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion.” Until such a point is reached, there will be no “satisfaction.”

§81-9 are concerned then with the problem of the criterion of truth and how Hegel overcomes it. This was foreshadowed in the “knowing before you can know” above. Hegel solves this problem not by providing an answer but by reframing the question. The dialectical method will be the solution to this false problem. Hegel suggests that all consciousness is minimally self-consciousness, and all self-consciousness requires that I can distinguish myself from the objects I know, so, every form of consciousness has inbuilt within it a concept of knowing and a concept of the object that such knowing requires and an idea about how these two are related. The way the Phenomenology progresses then is by each form of consciousness being driven to despair by realizing that its concept of the object and knowing are inadequate and providing a better concept of each. The dialectical method is thus both how it is that we reach this despair and how we emerge from it.

To conclude with the Introduction we should note that what is unique in Hegel’s thought relative to virtually all philosophy before him, is that rather than seeing appearances as the obstacle to knowledge of essence or Idea or whatever, he makes it the only access we can ever have that could get us there.