The Phenomenology of Mind

Contents

1. Preface: On Scientific Knowledge in General 2 h 23 min 54

   Written last, after the battle of Jena, the Preface sets out what Hegel means by philosophical science. Truth exists only as a developed system, not in summaries, intuitions or edifying feeling; the Absolute must be grasped “not as Substance but as Subject as well”, a reality that becomes itself through negation, so that “the truth is the whole”. Hegel attacks Romantic immediacy and the formalism of Schelling’s followers (“the night in which all cows are black”), contrasts philosophy with mathematics, explains the speculative proposition, and insists that philosophy, like any trade, requires “the labour of the notion” and is open to all who undertake it.

2. Introduction 32 min 12

   The Introduction explains the method of the book. Against Kant’s demand to examine knowledge before using it, Hegel argues that treating knowledge as an instrument or medium presupposes what is in question. Science must instead show how it emerges from ordinary forms of knowing. Consciousness carries its own standard: comparing its knowledge with its object, it finds them unequal, and both change. This movement is “experience”, a “highway of despair” driven by determinate negation, whose necessity “we” observers see behind consciousness’s back, until knowledge and object coincide in absolute knowledge.

3. I Certainty at the Level of Sense: The “This” and “Meaning” 28 min 12

   Chapter I opens “Consciousness” with its simplest shape: the certainty that knows things just by sensing them, without concepts. Asked what “this”, “here” and “now” are, it answers “The Now is night” or “The Here is a tree”. These truths go stale as soon as they are written down or as one turns around. Each attempt to hold on to the unique particular, whether in the object, in the knowing “I”, or in the act of pointing, yields only universals. What we “mean” cannot be said. Language turns the intended particular into something general, and consciousness passes to Perception, which takes its object as a universal.

4. II Perception: Or Things and Their Deceptiveness 39 min 8

   Chapter II examines Perception, which takes its object as a thing with many properties, like a grain of salt that is white, also sharp, also cubical. The thing must be both an indifferent “Also” holding many universal properties and an exclusive “One” distinct from other things. Consciousness tries to save its unity by shifting the contradiction around: taking the many properties on itself, then the unity, then dividing the thing's being-for-itself from its being-for-others. Each “in so far as” collapses, since the thing's distinguishing property is just what relates it to others. Hegel mocks “sound common sense”, which is ruled by abstractions it does not see.

5. III Force and Understanding: The World of Appearance and the Supersensible World 1 h 18 min 15

   Chapter III follows the Understanding, the outlook of natural science, as it looks behind appearances for an inner reality. It first finds force, which turns out to be nothing apart from its expression and its “solicitation” by other forces. It then finds a “kingdom of laws”, which tends towards empty universality, as in universal attraction, and toward tautological “explanation”. A second, “inverted world” makes each thing its own opposite, which leads Hegel to the concept of infinity, self-relating difference. Behind the curtain of appearance the Understanding finds only its own activity: consciousness of objects proves to be self-consciousness.

6. IV The Truth Which Conscious Certainty of Self Realises 22 min 7

   Chapter IV begins “Self-consciousness”, where knowing and its object coincide. The bare “I am I” is empty; self-consciousness first proves itself as desire, which negates its objects by consuming them. Its object is something living, and Hegel sketches Life as the process of individual forms within a persisting genus. Desire is never satisfied, since it needs new objects again and again. Self-consciousness can find satisfaction only in another self-consciousness that negates itself for it. This introduces Spirit, “I that is We”.

7. IV.A Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage 27 min 10

   Hegel's most famous section. A self-consciousness exists only by being recognised by another. In their first encounter, each must prove it is not tied to life by risking death in a struggle for recognition. Death would end recognition, so one yields and becomes the bondsman, while the victor becomes the lord. The lord's recognition is one-sided, from someone he treats as a thing, and he depends on the bondsman's work. The bondsman, through fear of death, service and work on things, comes to see his own independence in what he has shaped.

8. IV.B Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness 1 h 0 min 23

   The freedom gained through work becomes freedom in thought. Stoicism, the freedom “on the throne as well as in fetters”, withdraws into pure thought but has no content. Scepticism carries the negation through, dissolving every claim, but contradicts itself in practice. The two sides united form the unhappy consciousness: a self split between an unchangeable beyond and its own worthless particularity, read largely as medieval Christianity. Through devotion, through thanks for work and enjoyment, and through ascetic self-denial guided by a mediator, it gives up its particular will. In doing so it reaches the idea of Reason.

9. V Reason’s Certainty and Reason’s Truth 21 min 14

   Chapter V opens with Reason, the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality. Having come out of the unhappy consciousness, the self no longer flees the world but expects to find itself there. Hegel identifies this attitude with idealism and criticises the form of it that merely asserts “I am I” and forgets the path that earned the claim: Kant's categories picked up from the table of judgments, and Fichte's empty “mine”, which needs an external impact to supply its content and so swings between idealism and empiricism. Real reason must give its formal certainty concrete content.

10. V.A Observation as a Process of Reason 1 h 45 min 27

    Observing reason, the attitude of empirical science, looks for itself in nature while believing it seeks the nature of things. Description and classification turn up marks that break down at their edges. The search for laws, helped by experiment, purifies them of particular bodies (resinous and vitreous electricity, acids and bases). In organic nature observation meets purpose but places it outside the organism, and its attempted laws (sensibility against irritability, specific gravity against cohesion) collapse into empty quantity. The earth interrupts the system of species, and organic nature, unlike spirit, has no history.

11. V.A Observation of Self-Consciousness in Its Pure Form and in Its Relation to External Reality: Logical and Psychological Laws 16 min 5

    Observation turns to the mind itself. It first finds the formal laws of thought, which Hegel calls vanishing moments of thinking mistaken for fixed truths. It then finds empirical psychology, a bag of faculties and inclinations, and the attempt to explain individuals by the influence of circumstances, customs and education. Because the individual absorbs, resists or ignores those influences, which influence counts depends on the individual, and “psychological necessity” becomes an empty phrase. Individuality is what its world, as its own world, is.

12. V.A Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to Its Immediate Actuality: Physiognomy and Phrenology 1 h 18 min 19

    Observation now seeks the inner in the body. Physiognomy (Lavater) reads character from the face, but the face is a sign the person can change, and Lichtenberg's jokes expose its pseudo-laws; a person's true being is his deed. Phrenology (Gall) goes further and takes the skull, a dead thing, as the reality of mind. Its correlations are arbitrary and its excuses unfalsifiable. Taken as an infinite judgment, “spirit is a bone” cancels itself, and reason turns from finding itself in things to producing itself through action.

13. V.B The Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness through Its Own Activity 1 h 17 min 18

    Reason turns from observing the world to acting in it. Hegel first names the goal: the ethical life of a free people, in which each recognises himself in the customs and laws of all. But the modern individual has lost, or not yet reached, that harmony, so reason seeks itself in three individual attitudes. The pleasure-seeker of Goethe's Faust finds only blind necessity; the reformer who follows the “law of the heart” meets other hearts and falls into the frenzy of self-conceit; and Virtue, fighting the selfish “course of the world”, discovers that self-interested individuality already realises the universal better than its own empty phrases.

14. V.C Individuality Which Takes Itself to Be Real in and for Itself 1 h 22 min 17

    Individuality now takes its own activity and works to be reality itself. In the “spiritual animal kingdom” each person expresses a given talent in work, but works pass into a shared world where others take them up, and devotion to “the matter itself” proves a mutual deception that reveals a common spiritual reality. Reason then tries to lay down moral laws (“speak the truth”, “love thy neighbour”) and finds they need conditions; reduced to testing laws for consistency, as Kant proposed, it cannot decide between property and community of goods. Like Antigone, true ethical consciousness accepts the laws simply because they are.

15. VI Spirit 11 min 4

    A short introduction to the long chapter on spirit. Reason becomes spirit when it knows the social world as its own: the ethical substance individuals start from, which is also the product of their common action. From here on the shapes of consciousness are historical worlds. Hegel maps the chapter: immediate ethical life, its dissolution into legal right, spirit estranged in culture and faith, the Enlightenment, and finally morality and conscience.

16. VI.A Objective Spirit: The Ethical Order 1 h 28 min 38

    Hegel reads the Greek city through Sophocles. Ethical life divides into the human law of the state, borne by men, and the divine law of the family, kept by women, whose highest duty is burying the dead; war keeps the community from dissolving into private interests. Action breaks the balance: like Antigone and Oedipus, each agent obeys one law and violates the other, so both are destroyed and guilt is inseparable from action. The community suppresses womankind, its “everlasting irony”, and falls by war. What remains is the Roman condition of right: atomised legal persons under an arbitrary “lord of the world”, a reality estranged from the self.

17. VI.B Spirit in Self-Estrangement: The Discipline of Culture 1 h 51 min 38

    Spirit becomes estranged from itself. In the world of “culture” (Bildung) individuals count only by giving up their natural selves. Good and bad take concrete form as state power and wealth, and the “noble” and “base” attitudes toward them change places: feudal service becomes courtly flattery, the absolute monarch dissolves into a source of wealth, and the dependent client comes to despise everything. Rameau's Nephew supplies the self-aware, “torn” consciousness that knows every value inverts. Beyond this world stand belief, a flight into a pictured heaven, and pure insight, which demands that everyone be rational.

18. VI.B Enlightenment 1 h 28 min 28

    Pure insight attacks belief as superstition, priestly fraud and despotism. It spreads like an infection and caricatures faith's objects as stone, wood and bread. It wins because it only shows belief its own scattered thoughts. Its positive result is thin: an empty Supreme Being, the certainty of sense, and a world of mutual usefulness in which even religion is valued as profitable. Enlightenment then splits into deists and materialists, who hold the same abstraction. Utility unites the self-certainty of culture with the truth of faith, and “heaven is transplanted to the earth below”.

19. VI.B Absolute Freedom and Terror 26 min 13

    Utility turns into revolution. The self knows the world as its own universal will, abolishes the estates and refuses any representation or division of powers. Because every institution or deed would be particular, absolute freedom can only destroy. Its work is death without meaning, government is always a faction, and suspicion counts as guilt. Through the fear of death individuals accept limited places again, but spirit learns that universal will is its own pure knowledge and passes into the moral consciousness.

20. VI.C Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality 1 h 3 min 11

    The moral view of the world (Kant and Fichte) takes duty as absolute and nature as indifferent to it, and so needs postulates: a harmony of virtue and happiness, the endless progress of the will toward holiness, and a holy legislator. Under “Dissemblance” Hegel shows that the moral consciousness shifts between incompatible positions, affirming each only to displace it. Its complaints about the wicked prospering are envy, and its holy being is a mere idea. Recognising this hypocrisy, it retreats into conscience.

21. VI.C Conscience: The “Beautiful Soul,” Evil and Its Forgiveness 1 h 23 min 21

    The last section of “Spirit”. Conscience overcomes the Kantian split between pure duty and action. It acts on its own concrete conviction, and its declared conviction is what others recognise. But conviction can sanctify any content, so the acting conscience is judged evil and hypocritical by a judging conscience, which is itself hypocritical: it judges without acting, like the valet to whom no hero is a hero. The refusal to act ends in the wasting “beautiful soul”. The acting conscience confesses and the judge forgives, and this mutual recognition is Absolute Spirit, God appearing in the community, which leads into Religion.

22. VII Religion in General 23 min 6

    A short introduction to the chapter on Religion. Religion appeared earlier only as consciousness of an absolute object (the supersensible, the unchangeable, the nether world, faith). Now spirit becomes conscious of itself as spirit. Its earlier moments (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit) are not stages in time but aspects of every whole spirit. Religion therefore goes over them again, bundling them into determinate religions. There are three forms: natural religion, where spirit knows itself in natural shapes; the religion of art, where it knows itself in shapes it makes; and revealed religion, where it knows itself as a self. Conceptual knowledge is still to come.

23. VII.A Natural Religion 24 min 19

    The first, “natural” forms of religion, in which spirit sees itself in immediate natural shapes. First comes God as Light, the formless light-essence of Zoroastrian Persia, whose forms are mere names of the One. Next come plant and animal religions, from the innocent pantheism of flowers to the warring animal gods of hostile peoples. Last is the artificer, Egyptian spirit working by instinct like bees: pyramids and obelisks, hieroglyphs, the dawn-sounding statue of Memnon, the Sphinx. When inner meaning and outer shape finally meet, the craftsman becomes an artist.

24. VII.B Religion in the Form of Art 1 h 26 min 40

    Greek religion as the religion of a free ethical people that knows the divine in shapes it has made. The abstract work of art runs from the statue through the hymn and oracle to the cult, with its sacrifice, feast, temples and festivals. The living work of art covers the Bacchic mysteries and the beautiful athlete. The spiritual work of art is language: epic, with its gods, heroes and minstrel; tragedy, where heroes who know one ethical power perish by the other; and comedy, where the self sees through the gods. The self alone survives, at ease in everything.

25. VII.C Revealed Religion 1 h 24 min 26

    Christianity as the religion in which the divine is known as spirit. The Roman world’s legal person, Stoicism, Scepticism and the unhappy consciousness (“God is dead”) prepare the turn. Substance empties itself into a self, and the self into substance (kenosis). God appears as a sensible human being, dies, and lives on as the spirit of the community. Hegel reads the Trinity, creation, the Fall, evil, incarnation and death as the moments of spirit. Their defect is form: they are pictured (Vorstellung), not conceived, so the community’s reconciliation stays in its heart, in a past and a future, not in its present world.

26. VIII Absolute Knowledge 48 min 21

    The final chapter. What revealed religion pictured must be known in the form of self. Hegel recapitulates how the object has shown itself to be self: as thing, as useful, as the conviction of conscience. The beautiful soul’s pure self-knowledge, united with religion’s content, gives absolute knowledge: spirit knowing itself as spirit, the standpoint of systematic Science. Spirit appears in time until it grasps its concept. Science must also release itself as nature and as history. History is a gallery of spirits that recollection preserves, “the golgotha of Absolute Spirit”, and the book ends with lines from Schiller.