The Phenomenology of Spirit
정신현상학
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's first major work, published in 1807 as the first part of his System of Science. It traces the stages of experience through which consciousness, starting from the plainest sense-certainty, passes by way of self-consciousness, reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowing, and it grasps truth not as a fixed substance but as a subject and a whole that unfolds and completes itself. The "lord and bondsman" passage in the chapter on self-consciousness, in which the labouring bondsman rather than the master reaches true independence, left a deep mark on later social theory. In his 1844 manuscripts Marx called the book "the true birthplace and secret" of Hegel's philosophy, crediting it with grasping man's self-creation as a process of labour while faulting it for knowing only mental labour.
In depth
Why does a classic of idealism belong in the Marxist genealogy?
The Phenomenology of Spirit is not a Marxist classic but the representative work of German idealism. It earns its place in this genealogy because Marx went back to it whenever he tried to settle accounts with Hegel. In the last section of the manuscripts he wrote in Paris in 1844, "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole", he put it plainly: "One must begin with Hegel's Phenomenology, the true birthplace and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy."
Man muß beginnen mit der Hegelschen Phänomenologie, der wahren Geburtsstätte und dem Geheimnis der Hegelschen Philosophie.
Engels, too, put the book first when he surveyed Hegel's system in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). He described it as a development of individual consciousness through its stages, conceived as an "abridged reproduction" of the stages human consciousness has passed through historically, a book that "could be called a parallel to the embryology and palaeontology of the mind". This idea of reading the growth of one person against the history of humankind, and the way each form of consciousness collapses under its own contradiction and passes into the next, is the first large stage on which what is usually called Hegelian dialectics was played out.
How was it written and what does it cover?
Hegel wrote the book in Jena. The English Wikipedia reports that the manuscript was completed as Napoleon's army entered Jena in 1806. It appeared in 1807 from the Goebhardt firm in Bamberg and Würzburg as the first part of a System of Science. It was conceived as the introduction to a whole system that was to continue with the philosophy of nature and of spirit, and its first three parts (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) later entered the Encyclopaedia (1817) in shortened form.
The table of contents runs through consciousness (sense-certainty, perception, force and understanding), self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion and absolute knowing. Consciousness first believes that the "this" in front of it is the most certain knowledge, but when it tries to pin it down in words it finds that only universal words remain, and so it passes over into perception. Each stage tests itself by the standard it has itself put forward as truth, experiences that it falls short of it, and that experience gives rise to the next stage. In the chapter on spirit real history appears in the shape of consciousness: the ethical life of the Greek polis, the legal personality of Rome, modern culture and Enlightenment, and the French Revolution's "absolute freedom and terror". Through religion, in absolute knowing, spirit finally learns that every object it has faced was in the end itself.
What do the famous sentences of the preface mean?
The long preface (Vorrede) sets out the method of Hegel's whole philosophy, and some of the most quoted passages in the history of philosophy are gathered there. Hegel first explains the relation between philosophical systems with an image from plant life: "The bud disappears when the blossom breaks forth, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way the fruit declares the blossom a false form of the plant's existence." Yet these forms, while displacing one another, are each equally necessary as moments of an organic unity, and this equal necessity is what makes up the life of the whole. The demand is to understand earlier systems as stages in the unfolding of truth rather than throwing them out as wrong.
Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte sagen, daß jene von dieser widerlegt wird; ebenso wird durch die Frucht die Blüte für ein falsches Dasein der Pflanze erklärt.
Hegel then sums up the core of his philosophy in one sentence: "Everything turns on grasping and expressing the true not as substance, but equally as subject." In a Spinozist view of God as the one substance, self-consciousness sinks into that substance. For Hegel truth is a process that moves itself, divides itself in two and returns to itself. Hence: "The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence completing itself through its development." The absolute is not complete from the outset; it is "essentially result", and only at the end is it what it truly is.
Das Wahre ist das Ganze. Das Ganze aber ist nur das durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen.
In the same preface Hegel mocked an absolute in which all distinctions are wiped out as "the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black". The remark was read as aimed at the identity philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, his ally and co-editor in Jena, and, as the English Wikipedia puts it, the Phenomenology became Hegel's first major public break with Schelling.
Why is the dialectic of lord and bondsman so famous?
The first section of the chapter on self-consciousness, "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage", is usually called the dialectic of master and slave. A self-consciousness truly becomes one only when it is recognised by another self-consciousness. Two self-consciousnesses enter a life-and-death struggle for recognition; the one that draws back for fear of death becomes the bondsman, the victor the lord. But the recognition the lord receives is empty, because it comes from a bondsman he does not recognise as an equal. The lord merely enjoys the things the bondsman has worked on.
The reversal comes through labour. Fear of the lord, Hegel says, is "the beginning of wisdom", but in it consciousness is not yet being-for-itself. He goes on: "Through labour, however, it comes to itself." The lord's enjoyment, the satisfaction of annihilating the object, vanishes at once, but "labour is desire held in check, vanishing held back; in other words, labour forms." Labouring consciousness sees its own independent being in the thing it has shaped. Hence Hegel's conclusion that "the truth of the independent consciousness is the servile consciousness".
Die Arbeit hingegen ist gehemmte Begierde, aufgehaltenes Verschwinden, oder sie bildet.
The passage is a logic of self-consciousness and recognition, not a theory of class struggle. Yet the ideas that labour makes the human being, and that the one who works rather than the one who rules holds the next stage, made it a standing resource for Marxist readings. The German Wikipedia notes that the chapter was an important starting point for Marx's analysis of class relations in bourgeois society. In the twentieth century the book was reread through the French interpretations of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite and through György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness with its focus on alienation.
What did Marx take from the book and what did he discard?
In the 1844 manuscripts Marx summed up the book's greatness: "The great thing about Hegel's Phenomenology and its final result, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is first that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as the transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man, true because real man, as the result of his own labour."
Das Große an der Hegelschen Phänomenologie und ihrem Endresultate – der Dialektik der Negativität als dem bewegenden und erzeugenden Prinzip – ist also einmal, daß Hegel die Selbsterzeugung des Menschen als einen Prozeß faßt, die Vergegenständlichung als Entgegenständlichung, als Entäußerung und als Aufhebung dieser Entäußerung; daß er also das Wesen der Arbeit faßt.
He immediately marks the limit. Hegel "stands on the standpoint of modern political economy": he sees the positive side of labour, not its negative side, and "the only labour Hegel knows and recognises is abstract mental labour". Because the subject is self-consciousness rather than the real human being, overcoming alienation ends not in changing the world but in consciousness taking its objects back into itself. Marx took from Hegel the dialectic of process and negativity and the insight that labour makes the human being, and he replaced its subject, spirit, with real human beings labouring in society. This work continues in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of the same year and in The Holy Family the year after, and the entries on dialectics and alienation follow it further.