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Handout 1.
Hegel’s Conception of Spirit
1.
In fact, what we are, we are at once historically. More precisely, just as in respect
of this region, the history of thought, what is past is only one aspect of things, so in what
we are, that which is common and immutable in us is inseparably linked to what we are
historically. Our current possession of self-conscious reason in the modern world has not
sprung up immediately out of the soil of the present. On the contrary it is in essence
something that we have inherited and furthermore it is the result of labour, indeed it is
the work of all previous generations of the human race. Just as the artifices of external
life, the all manner of means and of skills, the accoutrements and customs of our social
and political life in common are a result of the reflection, the invention, of the interest,
the need and the willing and the accomplishment of the history that preceded our
present, so where we are in science, and more specifically in philosophy, is a result of
tradition. This tradition lies behind everything that is transient and that has therefore
passed, and that links together, as Herder said, like a holy chain, which has preserved and
handed down what earlier worlds brought before themselves. This tradition however is
not like a diligent housekeeper who faithfully looks after what she received and
thus preserves it un altered for those who come next. Tradition is not an unmoved
statue, but a living breathing medium which like a mighty stream that grows the
further it advances from its origin. The content of this tradition is what the
spiritual world has brought forth, and the universal spirit remains silent and still,
but essentially it is with the universal sprit that we are concerned here. Sometimes
with one nation or other, it might be the case that her formation [Bildung] art,
science its spiritual capacities remain wholly static – for example as seems to be
the case with the Chinese, who were just as advanced in everything two thousand
years ago as they are now. The Spiritual world however does not sink into this
spiritless slump. This belongs to its very concept; its life is deed and action.
Deeds and actions presuppose a given material content to which they are
directed, and which they do not simply increase by adding to the heap of material
that is already there, but essentially work and transform it. What is inherited is
thus received and succeeded to, and at the same time it is relegated to a stuff
which is to be transformed by spirit. What is received is in this way altered,
changed and enriched and at the same time preserved. This is exactly the
position and the task of our and of every age. We must receive the science and
knowledge that is there before us, grasp it, to build on it and develop it and
transpose it to a higher standpoint. And we do this by making it ours, by making
what was there before into something peculiar and notable. [etwas Eigenes –
Hegel is punning on the meaning of the verb ‘zu eigen machen’ (to appropriate)
and the adjective ‘eigen’ which can mean peculiar or special.] In this nature of
production which presupposes the existence of a present spiritual world and transforms
it through appropriation [Aneignung] lies the fact that our philosophy essentially only
came into existence in tandem with what went before it, and arose from it with necessity.
And it is the course of history which shows us not the becoming or coming to be of
strange things [das Werden fremder Dinge], but the becoming or coming to be of
ourselves, or our science and knowledge.
G.W.F.Hegel Ausgewählte Schriften und Manuskripte 6 eds P. Garniron und W.
Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1994) p.6-9.
2.
What is concrete in the countenance of God, the absolute idea, is this: to see the
mundane in God, to see the other of God in him. To know in God, but not in an
immediate but in a spiritual way. In ancient religions the divine is united with the natural,
what is human, but not reconciled to it and therefore rather only united in a natural way.
The unity of God with what is natural, and with what is human, is thus an immediate and
therefore a spiritless unity, precisely because it is natural. Spiritual unity with God obtains
only when spirit is concrete, living, when spirit brings the process of this unity and
freedom into being within itself. Spirit is not something natural; rather it is only that into
which it makes itself. The natural unity that is not the result of artifice is without spirit;
by contrast only artificial unity is spiritual. The negation of the natural is fundamental to
this production of unity. Because the natural is the immediate and the spiritless, it must
be negated. the flesh – as the theologians call it – the natural is what ought not to be. The
state of naturalness is one in which human beings ought not to be; ought not to stay.
Man is in himself the image of God in existence, only man is not natural. What man is in
himself, must be brought into being for itself, must be brought forth. First immediacy
must be sublated, and [immediacy] must be brought forth and made. This is the
fundamental idea of Christianity.
G.W.F.Hegel Ausgewählte Schriften und Manuskripte 9 eds P. Garniron und W.
Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1994) p. 2-3.
3.
Here are some passages I have translated from the third part of Hegel’s
Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences – his mature Philosophy of Spirit.
§ 377 The knowledge of spirit is the most concrete and therefore th highest and most
difficult. Know Thyself – this absolute command does not in itself, not even where it
historically occurred, refer merely to a self-knowledge of the particular capacities,
character, inclinations and weaknesses of individuals. Its meaning is that of the
knowledge of the truly human, as of the true in and for itself, knowledge of essence itself
as spirit.
(A) The injunction to self-knowledge issued by the Delphic oracle to the Greeks
should not be understood as a command issued by a foreign power external to
the human spirit. The God that strives to know itself is rather nothing other than
spirit’s own abolsolute law. Every act and deed of the spirit is thus only spirits
attempt to understand itself, and the purpose of all true science is just this: that
the spirit in everything that is in heaven and earth, should know itself. There
exists nothing that is completely other and foreign to spirit.
§ 378 The notion of spirit cannot be captured in psychological categories. ‘These kind
of questions conceive the spirit as a thing, for these categories in the typical
manner that the human understanding proceeds, are seen as fixed and stable. So
they are unable to express the nature of spirit. Spirit is not something fixed but
something absolutely dynamic, the pure activity, negation and idealisation of ass
fixed determinations of the understanding…’
§381
Spirit for us has nature as its presupposition, whose truth and thus whose
absolute first principle spirit is. In this truth nature has vanished, and spirit has
mnifested itself as the idea that has finally come to be for itself, of which the
object just as much as the subject is the concept.
(A) We therefore rightly say that in nature necessity rules, not freedom.
For necessity is the purely internal and thus also the purely external
relation to one another of independent existences…This sublation of
externality which belongs to the concept of spirit is what we have termed
its ideality. All activities of the spirit are nothing but the different ways in
which the external can be traced back to the internal, which spirit itself is,
and spirit is and becomes what it is only through this process of tracing
back, of the idealisation or assimilation of the external.
Let us first consider spirit a little more closely. We find that its first and
most simple determination is that it is I. The ‘I’ is a completely simple,
generality….But the I is in spite of its simplicity internally differentiated.
For the I posits itself as something over and against itself,, it makes itself
into its own object and returns from this, albeit at first abstract, not yet
concrete, difference to unity with itself. This being with itself
[Beisichselbstsein] of the I in its differentiation is its infinity or ideality.
This ideality thought maintains itself only in the relation of the I to the
infinitely manifold stuff that stands over and against it. Insofar as the I
attempts to know this stuff, this stuff is as it were poisoned and
transfigured, it loses its singular, independent existence and receives a
spiritual existence.
Theology as is known expresses the representation of this process as
follows: that God the Father (this simple universal being-for-itself ),
through giving up his loneliness, creates nature (that which is external to
itself, outside of itself), begets a son (his other I), and then this other
person encounters himself by dint of his boundless love, recognises his
own image and returns in it to unity with himself.
[However this unity is not] abstract and immediate, but the concrete unity
mediated by difference, which starts from the father and the son but
reaches its complete actuality and truth as holy spirit in the Christian
community, as which God must be understood, if he is to be understood
as the actual idea in and for itself, and not rather in the form of a mere
concept, an abstract being for itself…
Nature as such remains internal to herself, and never comes to be for
herself and to consciousness of herself. The animal is the ultimate form
of this internality. It represents the spiritless dialectical transition from
one particular being, whose soul is replete with the deliverances of
sensibility [Empfindung - i.e. inclinations, sensations and perceptions], to
another, also exclusively ruled by particular sensations. The human being
alone is a thinking spirit and thereby, and only thereby, is essentially
different to nature. What belongs to nature itself, falls short of spirit. Of
course spirit has the whole content of nature in itself, the determinations
of nature are present in spirit in a totally different way than they are in
external nature.
§382
(A) The substance of spirit is freedom, it is not being dependent on any
other; it is the relation of itself to itself. Spirit is the actualised concept
which is for itself, and which has itself as an object. The truth and the
freedom of the concept consists in this unity and objectivity that is
present in it. As Christ once said: truth makes spirit free; freedom makes
spirit true. The freedom of spirit is however not just one that is external
to the other, it is an independence of the other that is achieved in the
other. It comes to actuality not by fleeing from the other, but from
overcoming it.
§383
(A) Absolute spirit knows itself even as what has posited being, as itself
its other, as having brought forth nature and finite spirit, so that this
other loses every appearance of independence from it, and completely
stops being a limit to it, and rather appears only as a means, through
which spirit comes to absolute being-for-itself, to the absolute unity of its
being-in-itself and its being-for-itself, to its concept and its actuality.
4. Hegel: Lectures in the Philosophy of History
World history represents…the evolution of the awareness of the spirit of its own
freedom…Every step, being different from every other one, has its own determined
and peculiar principle. In history such a principle becomes the determination of the
spirit – a peculiar national spirit. It is here that it expresses concretely all the aspects of
its consciousness and will, its total reality; it is this that imparts a common stamp to its
religion, its political constitution, its social ethics, its legal system, its customs but also
to its science, its arts and its technical skills. These particular individual qualities must
be understood as deriving from that general peculiarity, the particular principle of a
nation. Conversely it is from the factual details present in history that their general
character of this peculiarity has to be developed.
Hegel, Sämtliche Werke ed. H. Glockner, XI, Stuttgart 1928 Hegel Werke (Suhrkamp:
Frankfurt 1986, vol. 12 p. 86-7) English tr. Sibree p. 63-4
I like to picture the content of this all important paragraph diagramatically as a wheel
from the hub of which there radiate eight spokes. These spokes represent the various
concrete manifestations of the national Spirit, in Hegel’s words “all the aspects of its
consciousness and will”. They are the nation’s religion, constitution, morality, law
customs, science, art and technology. These manifestations which are visible on the
periphery of my wheel must all be understood in their individual character as the
realizations of the Volksgeist. They all point to a common centre. In other words, from
whichever part on the outside of the wheel you start moving inwards in search of
their essence, you must ultimately come to the same central point. If you do not, if the
science of a people appears to you to manifest a different principle from that
manifested in its legal system, you must have lost your way somewhere.
Ernst Gombrich In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1969) pp. 9-10.
5.
The Aim of Spirit
The sole endeavour of spirit is to know what it is in and for itself, and to reveal itself to
itself in its true form. (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History p.53)