CU Course on Hegel,
Part 4c
Preface to the Phenomenology
On scientific knowledge
This, the Preface to Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (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.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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