Til now, I hadn't known that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is one arm of his philosophical system, presented in his 1817 'Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences'. The Encyclopaedia has three stages - Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. Logic grounds the two Philosophies, by showing that any judgment, any claim of an acting agent, implies a reference to Spirit's self-realisation. The Philosophy of Spirit itself is divided into 'subjective Spirit', 'objective Spirit' and 'absolute Spirit'. Phenomenology of Spirit is a component of the subjective Spirit section and is devoted to a systematic account of consciousness.
Anyone sensing an emanatory vibe, Empyrean style, right about now?
Phenomenology of Spirit is the most influential of Hegel's works, and has the structure of a novel, where Spirit embarks on a journey from naivete to maturity. Hegel has a particular view of human subjectivity - as arising as a retrospective self-understanding of our own historical development. When 'Spirit comes to know itself', our nature as retrospective self-knowers is accepted, and achieved.
I'm reading a Cambridge introduction to Hegel. I plan on summarising the juicy bits here.
Encountering the external world, modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant sought to show how a conscious subject is entitled to infer that his own sensations amount to knowledge of an external world of objects. Kant is kind of famous for identifying (via Strawson) that 'reality is supersensible and we can have no knowledge of it'. The point of idealism is not to assert or deny external reality so much as it is to give a new account of authority, an authority that depends on rationality moreso than an appeal to God or nature.
Elusive authority was the thorn in Descartes side - from the senses that he couldn't trust, the deceptive nature of his (almost real) dream experiences, and the possibility that the concepts that exist in our minds are the work of an evil demon, his employment of skepticism stripped a layer from the skepticism of Socrates - while Socrates worried about the proper definition of 'friendship' or 'justice', he never questioned whether these were the right words to use when talking about moral reality. Descartes with his 'evil demon' suggests that these concepts, themselves, actually might be entirely displaced.
Descartes. Still no Hegel. Hmm. Where is Hegel in this Introduction to Hegel?
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