 
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
post-Kantianism in a newvein
’ 
Of all the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel probably has the greatest name
recognition and both the best and the worst reputation. Yet, until he
was thirty-five years old, he was an unknown, failed author and only
dubiously successful academic.

After , though, with the publication
of his Phenomenology of Spirit, he became one of the great figures of the post-
Kantian movement (even though it took him nine more years before
he received university employment), and, at the height of his fame, he
managed to do for himself what Kant had done several generations
earlier by managing to convince a large part of the intellectual world
that the history of philosophy had been a gradual development toward
his own view and that the disparate tendencies of thought at work in its
history had finally been satisfactorily resolved in his own system.
Georg WilhelmFriedrich Hegel was born in  in Stuttgart and died
in  in Berlin. Entering the Protestant Seminary in T¨ubingen in ,
he had befriended and roomed with Friedrich H¨olderlin, and later they
shared a roomand friendship with Friedrich Schelling (who was younger
than them). After graduating from the Seminary, he took a long and
awkward path to philosophy; he became a “house-tutor” for two different
families and experienced a failed independent career as an author before
becoming an unpaid lecturer in philosophy at Jena and a co-editor with
Schelling of the Schellingian Critical Journal of Philosophy, which, when
it ceased publication, turned Hegel simply into an unpaid lecturer at
Jena. After that position also collapsed, he became first a newspaper
editor and then a high-school teacher in Nuremberg (where he married
a member of the Nuremberg patriciate), and finally in , at the age

Fichte’s development of post-Kantian thought failed to understand the
way in which there had to be a deeper unity between subject and object,
how the distinction between the subjective and the objective could not
itself be a subjective or an objective distinction, and that our awareness
of the distinction itself presupposes some background awareness of their
deeper unity. Underlying the rupture between our experience of the
world and the world itself, however, was a deeper sense of a notion of
truth – of “being,” as H¨olderlin called it – that was always presupposed
in all our otherwise fallible encounters with each other and the world.
Hegel took those views with himwhen he left Frankfurt for Jena in .A
small inheritance from his father (after his father’s death in ), and the
awareness that he was now thirty years old and still without a career led
Hegel to move to Jena and to attempt to become a university philosopher.
Although technically Hegel first published a book in  – an anony-
mously published translation of and commentary on a French language

G. W. F. Hegel, Briefe von und an Hegel, vol. ,no.; Hegel: The Letters (trans. Clark Butler and
Christiane Seiler) (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, ), p. .
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 
radical critique of the German-speaking Bernese patriciate (done while
serving as a house-tutor for one of the leading families of the same patri-
ciate) – his first philosophical book (and certainly the first that carried his
name on it as the author) was his  essay, The Difference between Fichte’s
and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy. In it, he offered an argument that
Schelling’s philosophy (which until that point had been generally taken
by the German philosophical public as only a variant of Fichte’s thought)
actually constituted an advance on Fichte’s philosophy. Schelling had ar-
gued that Fichte’s key claim– that the difference between the subjective
and the objective points of view had to be itself a subjective distinc-
tion, something that the “I” posits – was itself flawed, since the line

our cognitive practices must and do play.

Classifying something as a
“concept” or an “intuition,” that is, is already putting it into the place
it plays in the practice of giving and asking for reasons, in what Hegel
(following Schelling’s usage) took to calling the “Idea,” which Hegel
eventually more or less identified as the “space of reasons” (although this
was not his term).

Moreover, in the Difference book, Hegel also signaled to the philosoph-
ical public that he did not take this to be merely an academic issue. That
such oppositions (such as those between nature and freedom, subject and
object, concepts and intuitions) have come on the agenda of philosophers
in  only indicates, he argued, that something deeper was at stake:
“When the might of union vanishes from the life of people, and the
oppositions lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain inde-
pendence, the need of philosophy arises.”

Philosophy, that is, is called to
make good when crucial matters in the lives of agents in a particular his-
torical social configuration are broken; and philosophy is to make good
on these things by looking at what is required of us in such broken times
to “heal” ourselves again. Philosophy, that is, is a response to human
needs, and its success has to do with whether it satisfies those needs.
Although Hegel’s first published (philosophical) book appeared in
, he had already been at work for quite some time on unsuccess-
ful drafts of various other philosophical works. The guiding question
behind almost all of them was one that had been nagging at him since
he was a student at the Protestant Seminary in T¨ubingen: what would
a modern religion look like, and was it possible to have a modern religion

daily the worth of what was left of his inheritance; and, after the scandal
of  involving Schelling and his new wife, Caroline, Schelling traded
his position in Jena for a better one in W¨urzburg, abandoning Hegel to
his fate in the declining university at Jena. Hegel worked on one attempt
after another at developing his “system” of philosophy, finishing some,
cutting off some others in the process, but eventually putting all of them
in the drawer as simply not good enough. As he was finally running out
of money and all hope for any future employment as an academic, he set
to work on his greatest piece, the epochal Phenomenology of Spirit, finished
in  and published around Easter, . He completed work on it
as Napoleon led his troops into the decisive battle of Jena, where the
French routed the Prussian army and threatened the town of Jena itself.
(While writing the Phenomenology, Hegel also managed to engender an
illegitimate son from his landlady, and, despite the success of the book,
Hegel was nonetheless unsuccessful at landing a university position for
himself for several more years.)

PHENOMENOLOGY
OF SPIRIT
One of Hegel’s students in Berlin, Karl Michelet, claimed that Hegel
took to describing his  Phenomenology of Spirit as his own “voyage of
discovery.”

The clich´e in this case was fitting, since working on that
book brought himto the views that he more or less carried with himfor
the rest of his life. Even so, the book’s place in the whole Hegelian system
has always been controversial. Although Hegel originally described the
Phenomenology as the “Introduction” to his forthcoming “system,” there
was confusion about exactly what Hegel intended by that. (His printer


of history, a treatise in Christian theology, and an announcement of the
death of God.
Hegel intended the book to satisfy the needs of contemporary (Euro-
pean) humanity: it was to provide an education, a Bildung, a formation
for its readership so that they could come to grasp who they had become
(namely, a people individually and collectively “called” to be free), why
they had become those people, and why that had been necessary.Inthatre-
spect, the Phenomenology was a completely post-Kantian work: it intended
to show its readership why “leading one’s own life,” self-determination,
had become necessary for “us moderns” and what such “self-legislation”
actually meant.

It was thus not surprising that the book began with a devastating, even
if very ironical, critique of Jacobi’s position against Kantianism(and all
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 
forms of post-Kantianism), namely, that we were in possession of a kind
of “sense-certainty” about individual objects in the world that could not
be undermined by anything else and which showed that there was an
element of “certainty” about our experience of the world (and thus also
of God) that philosophy was powerless to undermine. Hegel called this
a thesis about “consciousness.” If we begin with our consciousness of
singular objects present to our senses (“sense-certainty,” an awareness
of “things” that is supposedly prior to fully fledged judgments), and
hold that what makes those awarenesses true are in fact the singular
objects themselves, then we take those objects to be the “truth-makers”
of our judgments about them; however, in taking these objects to be
the “truth-makers” of our awareness of them, we find that our grasp
on themdissolves (or, alternatively: that in their role as “truth-makers”
they themselves dissolve). The impetus for such dissolution lies in the
way our taking themto play the role of “truth-makers” in that way

world is itself structured by laws and forces that themselves cannot be ob-
jects of direct perceptual awareness but must instead be apprehended –
so we seemto be required to say – more intellectually by the faculty
of “understanding.” The dialectic of “consciousness” comes to an end
when, so Hegel argues, we find that this world which we apprehend by
“the understanding” itself in turn generates a set of contradictory, anti-
nomial results that it cannot on its own terms accept – even the notion
of the world itself fails to be that which plays the normative role (without
anything else accompanying it) of making our judgments about items in
it true. What that requires us to see, so Hegel argues, is that the concep-
tion that there is any object or set of objects (even conceived as the world
itself ) that on its own, independently of our own activities, makes our
judgments about those things true – as it were, something on which we
could rely to keep us on the right track independently of any of our own
ways of taking it, of our “keeping ourselves” on the right track – is itself
so deeply ridden with tensions and contradictions in its own terms that
it is untenable. The whole outlook of seeking the “objects” of some kind
of direct awareness that would make that awareness true independently
of our “taking” it to be such-and-such is so riddled with tensions that it
requires us to acknowledge that part of that awareness has to do with the
ways we “take” those objects. We must acknowledge, as Kant put it, that
it must be possible for an “I think” to accompany all our consciousness of
things. The dialectic of “consciousness” therefore requires us to focus on
how we hold ourselves to norms, and how we cannot rely on something
independently of our own activities to keep us on the straight and narrow
path to truth.
-
The opening chapters of the Phenomenology provided Hegel with a way of
stating some Kantian points without, so he thought, having to commit
himself to (what he regarded as) either the unfortunate and untenable

with what in general could ever possess the authority to determine what
counted as the rules of such a shared, “universal self-consciousness.”
The outcome of the dialectic of “consciousness” had shown that it
depended on how we were taking things, and that, in turn, raised the
issue of what we might be seeking to accomplish in taking things one
way as opposed to another. Thus, the issue turned on what purposes
might be normatively in play (or what basic needs might have to be
satisfied) in taking things one way as opposed to another.
At first, it might look as if “life” itself set those purposes, and the neces-
sary rules for judgment would be those called for by the needs of organic
sustenance and reproduction. However, practical desires are themselves
like sensations in cognition; they acquire a normative significance only
to the extent that we confer such a significance on them(or, in Kant’s
language, only as we incorporate them into our maxims). That means
that agents are never simply satisfying desires; they are satisfying a project
that they have (at least implicitly) set for themselves in terms of which
desires have a significance that may not correspond to their intensity.
The agent, that is, has a “negative” relation to those desires, and thus
 Part III The revolution completed? Hegel
the agent never simply “is” what he naturally is but “is what he is” only
in terms of this potentially negative self-relation to himself – his (perhaps
implicit) project for his life, not “life” itself, determining the norms by
which he ranks his desires.

If not the purposes of life, what else then secures the normative bind-
ingness of any of those projects or basic maxims? It cannot be simply
“reason” itself, since that would beg the question of what purposes the
use of reason best serves (or whether those purposes are to take prece-
dence over any others in any non-question-begging way, or what even
counts as a reason to whom).

Philosophy, () (August ), –.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 
philosophies had to solve; and the solution had to be to face up to the
paradox and to see how we might make it less lethal to our conception
of agency while still holding onto it, all in terms of integrating it into
some overall conception of agency that showed how the paradox was
in fact livable and conceivable. (Following Schiller’s precedent, Hegel
used the German term, “aufheben,” with its triple meanings of “cancel,”
“preserve,” and “raise” to express this goal.)
What the “Kantian paradox” seemed to call for was for an agent to
split himself in two – in effect, for “me” to issue a law to myself that
“I” could then use as a reason to apply the law to myself (what Hegel in
his post-Phenomenology writings liked to call becoming the “other of itself,”
“das Andere seiner selbst,” a phrase he claimed to take from Plato).

Splitting
the agent in two – seeing each as the “negative” of the other, in Hegel’s
terms – does nothing to solve the problem, since such a view cannot
adjudicate which of the two sides of the same agent is to have priority over
the other; it cannot, that is, show how splitting myself in two somehow
“binds” one of my parts because of legislation enacted by the other, nor
can it even show how it would be possible for me correctly to grasp the
rule to which I amsupposedly subjecting myself.

Hegel’s resolution of the Kantian paradox was to see it in social terms.
Since the agent cannot secure any bindingness for the principle simply
on his own, he requires the recognition of another agent of it as binding on
both of them. Each demands recognition from the other that the “law”
he enacts is authoritative (that is, right). In Hegel’s terms, the other agent
must become the “negative” of the first agent, and vice versa; Hegel