Notes of the 8 October 2014 session

Introductory session (J.N. Findlay’s Foreword, v-xxx)*

Notes by Marton Ribary and Neil MacDonald

In this introductory session, we discussed some of Hegel’s key terms and concepts: Geist, Bewusstsein, Phänomenologie, Wissenschaft. We also discussed how Hegel’s Phenomenology relates to the Hegelian enterprise as such (approximately the one embraced by the Encyclopaedia), to Hegel’s predecessors (especially Kant), and to the 20^th century phenomenological tradition.

Geist:

There is no one-to-one good translation of Geist in English. The terms associated with inner/mental life in German and those in English overlap each other, but the semantic maps do not fully cover each other. Geist is not restricted to “mind” and mental processes, it also means the life force driving the self through time. In this sense, Geist comes close to the French esprit. Geist can be understood as the object of psychology and positivist knowledge, but it also means “soul” and “spirit” with all of its psychological and religious connotations. Geist is real and present, yet transcends the sphere of sensory experience.

Bewusstsein:

The term appears in the original title of the Phänomenologie which was Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins. We discussed how Geist and Bewusstsein relate to each other, and how we could distinguish between the possible English translations “awareness” and “consciousness”. One suggestion was that while awareness relates to the crude sensory experience, consciousness is a mentally processed form of it. What is important is that Geist covers much more than the individually constrained Bewusstsein as Geist has the capacity to transcend the individual. Geist is the manifestation of the universal in the uniqueness of the individual.

Phänomenologie:

Hegel rejects the dichotomy between subject and object. Kant had to resort to the solution that the sensing subject can never reach the object themselves, that is, there are such things as the “limits of reason” as described in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. According to Kant, there is no point of breakthrough from the sensing self to the objects. The object is transcendent to the subject, and the subject can only reach them by postulates and by setting the laws of perception.

However, Hegel would rather agree with the words of Alain Badiou who says that “everything is a presentation or else it is nothing”.[1] Hegel rejects that there are such things as noumena existing in a realm outside human knowing. Hegel is a true phenomenologist who, unlike the early Husserl or the early Heidegger, emphasises the historicity of the philosophical enterprise. Phenomenology is a process which needs to be done and done again. Once the dialectical process reaches the end-point (call it Absolute Idea in Hegelian terms), the process has already changed the subject-matter of the inquiry, because the thinking process is inside its subject-matter. The phenomenologist is never an external observer.

Wissenschaft:

The English term “science” is an insufficient translation of the German Wissenschaft which keeps a close etymological tie with the verb “to know” (wissen) and does not convey a positivistic method which is suggested by the English term “science”. Knowledge in a wissenschatlich sense is ordered, it aspires to be systematic, and it includes a method which, yet, this method does not have to be unitary nor needs to be set from the start. In the Hegelian system, finding the method is a result of the thinking process, and not something which is readily available.

*Page numbers in these notes refer to G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) and its reprints. A document collecting the notes of the reading session is available on the group's dropbox. Please e-mail Marton Ribary (marton.ribary@gmail.com) to join the reading group and gain access to the group's dropbox folder.

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[1] A paraphrase by Howard Kelly, but very close to the spirit of Badiou himself.