Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Singer Peter

Author:Singer, Peter [Singer, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

The task of the Phenomenology

That my presentation of Hegel’s views up to this point has been seriously incomplete can be seen by returning to a question I brushed aside early in the discussion of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Why is the history of the world nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom? The question cries out for an answer. Hegel explicitly denies – and it would in any case be quite out of keeping with his whole line of thought – that the direction of history is some kind of fortunate accident. Hegel asserts that what happens in history happens necessarily. What does this mean? How can it be true? Hegel’s answer is that history is nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom because history is the development of mind. In the Philosophy of History Hegel did not set out to explain this notion because he had already published a very long and very dense volume intended to demonstrate the necessity of mind developing as it does. That volume is The Phenomenology of Mind. Karl Marx called it ‘the true birthplace and secret of Hegel’s philosophy’. Others, defeated by its 750 pages of bewildering and tortuous prose, have been content to let whatever secrets it might contain rest undisturbed. No account of Hegel, however, can decently overlook it.

The obvious place to start is with the title. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that ‘phenomenology’ means ‘the science of phenomena, as distinct from that of being’. That is all very well if we are familiar with the distinction between ‘phenomena’ and ‘being’. For those who are not, the same dictionary obligingly tells us that ‘phenomenon’ means, in its philosophical use, ‘that of which the senses or the mind directly takes note; an immediate object of perception (as distinguished from substance, or a thing in itself)’. The distinction being made here can be illustrated by considering the difference between the moon as it appears in my vision, and the moon as it really is. In my vision it appeared last night as a silvery crescent no bigger than a tennis ball; it really is, of course, a sphere of rock with a diameter of several thousand kilometres. The silvery crescent is the phenomenon. Phenomenology, then, is the study of the way in which things appear to us.

If phenomenology is the study of the way in which things appear to us, a ‘phenomenology of mind’, we might guess, will be a study of the way in which mind appears to us. Such a guess would be correct, but there is a characteristically Hegelian twist to add. When we study how our mind appears to us, we can only be studying how it appears to our minds. Thus a phenomenology of mind is really a study of how mind appears to itself. Accordingly, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind traces different forms of consciousness, viewing each one from inside, as it were, and showing how more limited forms of consciousness necessarily developed into more adequate ones.

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