CU Course on Hegel, Part 4c
Preface to the Phenomenology
On scientific
knowledge
This, the Preface to Hegel’s
“Phenomenology” (attached; download linked below) is a full-length,
full-strength reading of the difficult man’s own work. It has 72 numbered
passages and 21485 words. It is longer than a normal Communist University
reading text.
So be it.
For Hegel’s Phenomenology,
MIA gives an Index, a fuller Contents page, the Preface, an Introduction, and
the remainder of the work, in numbered passages up to number 808. In the spirit
of Tony Buzan, let us show here the contents of the preface, listed within the
main Contents:
Headings in Hegel’s “Preface to the Phenomenology”
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Passages
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Head #
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Heading
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1-4
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5-6
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The element of truth is the
Concept and its true form the scientific system
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7-12
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Present position of the
spirit
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13-16
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The principle is not the
completion; against formalism
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17
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The absolute is subject
–
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18-25
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– and what this is
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26
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The element of knowledge
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27-29
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The ascent into this is the Phenomenology
of the Spirit
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30-32
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The transformation of the
notion and the familiar into thought ...
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33-37
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– and this into the
Concept/Notion
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38-40
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In what way the Phenomenology
of the Spirit is negative or contains what is false
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41-46
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Historical and mathematical
truth
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47-49
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The nature of philosophical
truth and its method
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50-58
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Against schematizing
formalism
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58
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The demands of the study of
philosophy
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59
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Argumentative thinking in
its negative attitude ...
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60-67
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... in its positive
attitude; its subject
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68-70
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Natural philosophizing as
healthy common sense and as genius
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71-72
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Conclusion: the author's
relation to the public
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This document is given for
discussion. Like all the others, this
blog-post or covering e-mail message is only intended as a potential opening to
discussion and not as an explanation nor, least of all, as a didactic
prescription. What we will do now is to give some short quotations from the
document, but first just remark that it becomes clear why Andy Blunden (pictured above) recommends this document, because it
contains some quite direct and straightforward statements by Hegel, which may
well help us as we go along.
Extracts from Hegel’s “Preface to the Phenomenology”
Passage 2
“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition
between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either
agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see
reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a
system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the
progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety.”
“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through,
and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when
the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s
existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom.
These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being
incompatible with one another.”
“But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent
nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not
merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the
other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby
the life of the whole.”
Passage 11
“… it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a
birth-time, and a period of transition.”
“The spirit of man has broken with the old order of
things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the
mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own
transformation. It is indeed never at rest, but carried along the stream of
progress ever onward.”
“But it is here as in the case of the birth of a
child; after a long period of nutrition in silence, the continuity of the
gradual growth in size, of quantitative change, is suddenly cut short by the
first breath drawn - there is a break in the process, a qualitative change and
the child is born.”
Passage 12
“In the same way, science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in
its initial stages.”
Passage 13
“Intelligibility is the form in which science is
offered to everyone, and is the open road to it made plain for all. To reach
rational knowledge by our intelligence is the just demand of the mind which
comes to science.”
Passage 17
“In my view - a view which the developed exposition of
the system itself can alone justify - everything depends on grasping and
expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.”
Passage 23
“The need to think of the Absolute as subject, has led
men to make use of statements like “God is the eternal”, the “moral order of
the world”, or “love”, etc. In such propositions the truth is just barely
stated to be Subject, but not set forth as the process of reflectively
mediating itself with itself. In a proposition of that kind we begin with the
word God. By itself this is a meaningless sound, a mere name; the predicate
says afterwards what it is,
gives it content and meaning: the empty beginning becomes real knowledge only
when we thus get to the end of the statement. So far as that goes, why not
speak alone of the eternal, of the moral order of the world, etc., or, like the
ancients, of pure conceptions such as being, the one, etc., i.e. of what gives
the meaning without adding the meaningless sound at all?”
Passage 27
“It is this process by which science in general comes
about, this gradual development of knowing, that is set forth here in the Phenomenology of Mind. Knowing, as it is found at the start, mind
in its immediate and primitive stage, is without the essential nature of mind,
is sense-consciousness. To reach the stage of genuine knowledge, or produce the
element where science is found - the pure conception of science itself - a long
and laborious journey must be undertaken. This process towards science, as
regards the content it will bring to light and the forms it will assume in the
course of its progress, will not be what is primarily imagined by leading the
unscientific consciousness up to the level of science: it will be something
different, too, from establishing and laying the foundations of science; and
anyway something else than the sort of ecstatic
enthusiasm which starts straight off with absolute knowledge, as if shot out of
a pistol...”
As much as Hegel is usually
careful never to give an impression of summarising his work, yet here in this
Preface are many statements of a rather concrete nature.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Preface to Hegel’s
Phenomenology: On scientific knowledge, Part 1 and Part 2.
