The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

First published:Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807 (English translation, 1868; also known as The Phenomenology of Mind, 1910)

Type of Philosophy: Epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of history

Type of Ethics: Modern history

Significance: Hegel elaborates the opposition between morality and ethical life in the Phenomenology, thus anticipating the full-scale examination of ethics in his Philosophy of Right (1821)

The Work

The Phenomenology occupies a crucial place in the development of Hegel’s thought. It marks his maturation as a philosopher of the highest rank and anticipates within its own unique format every aspect of his later work. Hence, it is important to understand the overarching themes of the book before turning to its examination of ethics.

A major aim of Hegel in the Phenomenology is to renew classical Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy from within the modern philosophical tradition. It was only through examination and critique of everything that had been thought since the Greeks that a worldview modeled on theirs could become a viable framework from within which modern people could think and act. In striving to fulfill that aim, Hegel developed a view of the subject who experiences, knows, and acts, which was in conscious opposition to any and all views of subjectivity that were empirical (for example, John Locke), naturalistic (for example, much of the thought of the Enlightenment), or transcendental (for example, Immanuel Kant). His view was that the acting and experiencing subject is both self-transforming over time (hence, historical) and fundamentally social (in opposition to any and all individualist models).

Thus, in the book’s first major section, “Consciousness,” Hegel demonstrates that consideration of even the apparently most basic forms of knowing, such as sense perception, produces in the knowing subject an awareness of both itself as knowing and of other knowing subjects. Out of these experiences arises self-consciousness. In Hegel’s famous examination of the master-servant relationship in the section “Self-Consciousness,” he graphically describes the social yet divided character of human experience.

In the remainder of the Phenomenology, Hegel depicts the experiences of this divided human self. In doing so, he examines what are for him the key movements in the development of consciousness in Western culture from the Greeks to Hegel’s own time. Stoicism, skepticism, the unhappy consciousness of religion, the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant, the opportunities and perils of freedom in the era of the French Revolution, the phases of religious development in human history—all these are subsumed into Hegel’s story of the development of Geist, or “spirit.” Geist is the larger rational plan of which all phases of the development of human consciousness are instances. Each phase is therefore a partial revelation of Geist.

Chapter 6 of the Phenomenology, in which Hegel examines the development of Geist from the Greeks down to his own time, is the section of the book that is germane to ethics. It is structured around a distinction crucial to Hegel’s thought, that between morality (Moralität) and ethical community (Sittlichkeit). Morality is that arena of human life in which the individual is thought of as a subject who is responsible for his or her actions. For Hegel, however, moral life attains its highest realization only within the larger life of a society; this is the realm of ethical community. To be truly morally free therefore requires a society within which that freedom can be expressed.

Here, Hegel’s historical reconstruction of Western consciousness becomes crucial. Once there was a historically existing ethical community—that of the ancient Greeks—in which the city-state provided for its citizens the essential meaning of their lives. This primal Sittlichkeit was lost forever in its original form, however, because of developments within Greek culture itself. Hegel’s profound discussion of the tensions between divine law and human law in Sophocles’ play Antigone exemplifies his view that the Greek ethical world had within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Such a natural ethical system, arising spontaneously out of the early developments of Greek cultural life, was inevitably going to be destroyed, Hegel thought, because the ongoing development of Geist toward greater self-consciousness would show such a system to be restricted. Socrates’ inquiries initiate the transformation of this first natural Sittlichkeit: its original unity was shattered by developments within it as Greek thinkers restlessly searched for universal standards of reason and morality—that is, standards greater than the framework of polis life.

Hegel then went on to describe the standpoint of morality as characteristic of the modern spirit. It is crucial to emphasize that the moral standpoint is, for Hegel, an individualist model of human action. Even when this modern individualist morality is developed to its highest point, at which the individual moral self is seen as identical with the universal law of reason, as in the philosophy of Kant, it is still partial or one-sided in Hegel’s view.

Thus, the Phenomenology contains a tension in Hegel’s ethical thought as it had developed to this point: From a historical point of view, modern morality was superior to Greek ethical community because it was a later, higher stage of Geist’s ongoing self-revelation; if modern morality is an advance, however, it is nevertheless a one-sided and partial one, doing scant justice to the social aspects of human communal life. What Hegel would later attempt in the Philosophy of Right was the construction of a modern notion of ethical community that would be historically as well as philosophically superior to both Greek ethical life and modern individualist moralities. The reader of The Phenomenology of Spirit thus catches the development of Hegel’s ethical thought in process and will be led to turn to the Philosophy of Right to encounter his resolution of the tension that so provocatively animates the discussion of ethics in the Phenomenology.

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: Norton, 1971. Though predominantly a discussion of British and German Romantic poetry, the book contains a valuable discussion of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Abrams’ book is also an instructive application of Hegel’s conclusion that art expresses spirit, particularly in chapters 3 and 4.

Butler, Clark. G. W. F. Hegel. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A comprehensive study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that aims not to be merely about Hegel but to communicate the essence of Hegelian philosophy to a wider public by being accessible but not oversimplistic. Approaches Hegel from the cultural standpoint of the present. Contains an annotated bibliography and a chronology of Hegel’s life.

Christensen, Darrell E., ed. Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion: The Wofford Symposium. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. A collection of essays presented at the first conference of the Hegel Society of America, which analyzes many aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Considers Hegel’s historical context by discussing the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx.

Gillespie, Michael Allen. Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Compares and contrasts Hegel’s philosophy of history with that of Martin Heidegger, a twentieth century German philosopher who sought an alternative to Hegel and who eventually supported Nazi ideology under Adolf Hitler. Reveals the role of Hegel in shaping modern philosophies of history.

Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. The authoritative translation. Contains a helpful introduction and an insightful summary of the work.

Hondt, Jacques. Hegel in His Time. Translated by John Burbridge, with Nelson Roland and Judith Levasseur. Lewiston, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1988. Translator’s introduction discusses the author’s perception of Hegel. Translator’s notes also very helpful. Covers Hegel’s life, the political setting of his time, and Hegel’s attack on that setting. Examines the use of Hegel’s philosophy of history by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Discusses the directions Hegel’s thought took after the publication of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Also has key insights about the work’s structure.

Kainz, Howard P. G. W. Hegel. New York: Twayne, 1996. Excellent overview of Hegel’s philosophical system. Includes an autobiographical sketch written by Hegel at age thirty-four. Discusses philosophical influences on Hegel as a student. Has a brief chronology of Hegel’s life. Very readable and attempts to define terms as Hegel used them.

Kaufmann, Walter Arnold. Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. Contains a useful translation of Hegel’s seminal preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as Kaufmann’s scholarly yet clearly written insights.

Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on Phenomenology. Edited by A. Bloom, translated by J. H. Nichols. New York: Basic Books, 1969. The author was instrumental in reviving Hegel’s philosophy, especially on phenomenology of Spirit. Clearly written; appropriate for beginning students on Hegel.

Lauer, Quentin. Hegel’s Idea of Philosophy. 2d ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983. Discusses the works of Hegel and his place as a philosopher. Includes the full text and a good analysis of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (given first at Jena in 1805-1806).

Lavine, T. Z. From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. A survey of six Western philosophers, including Hegel. An easily read review of Hegel’s life and work. Highlights Hegel’s influence on Karl Marx.

Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A detailed account of Hegel’s life that gives a clear sense of what kind of person he was, and a series of lucid analyses of Hegel’s academic career and his writings.

Plant, Raymond. Hegel. New York: Routledge, 1999. An excellent biographical introduction to the thoughts of the philosopher, clearly presented and requiring no special background. Bibliography.

Rosen, Michael. Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Emphasizes Hegel’s dialectic method of seeking truth. Discusses the difficulty in understanding many of Hegel’s ambiguous phrases.

Singer, Peter. Hegel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. A ninety-page pamphlet in the Past Masters series. A broad overview of Hegel’s ideas and major works. Very clearly written.