In Which I Try To Understand Hegel By Writing About Him

This is a good post for trying out "jumps" on. Click on Tsukasa for an Holbonic post on Hegel.

From the Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 197, from "Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness":

For the independent self-consciousness, it is only the pure abstraction of the 'I' that is its essential nature, and, when it does develop its own differences, this differentiation does not become a nature that is objective and intrinsic to it. Thus this self-consciousness does not become an 'I' that in its simplicity is genuinely self-differentiating, or that in its absolute differentiation remains identical with itself. On the other hand, the consciousness that is forced back onto itself becomes, in its formative activity, its own object in the form of the thing it has fashioned, and at the same time sees in the lord a consciousness that exists as a being-for-self. But for the subservient consciousness as such, these two moments -- itself as an independent object, and this object as a mode of consciousness, and hence its own essential nature -- fall apart. Since, however, the form and the being-for-self are for us, or in themselves, the same, and since in the Concept of independent consciousness the intrinsic being is consciousness, the moment of intrinsic being or thinghood which received its form in being fashioned is not other substance than consciousness. We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinite of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness. For to think does not mean to be an abstract 'I', but an 'I' which has as at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object]. For in thinking, the object does not present itself in picture-thoughts but in Concepts, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself or intrinsic being, consciousness being immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself. What is pictured or figuratively conceived, what immediately is, has, as such, the form of being something other than consciousness; but a Concept is also something that immediately is, and this distinction, in so far as it is present in consciousness itself, is its determinate content; but since this content is at the same time a content grasped in thought, consciousness remains immediately aware of its unity with this determinate and distinct being, not, as in the case of a picture-thought, where consciousness has specially to bear in mind that this is my picture-thought; on the contrary, the Concept is for me straightaway my Concept. In thinking, I am free, for I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity by being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself. It is essential, however, in thus characterizing this shape of self-consciousness to bear firmly in mind that it is thinking consciousness in general, that its object is an immediate unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The selfsame consciousness that repels itself from itself becomes aware of itself as the element of being-in-itself; but at first it knows itself to be this element only as a universal mode of being in general, not as it exists objectively in the development and process of its being. (I have changed "Notion" to "Concept" throughout, to bring Miller in line with more recent English work on Hegel.)

This passage is preceded by the chapter on "The Lord and The Bondsman", which is not nearly as great as Kojeve seemed to think it is. It is followed by a note that the "freedom of self-consciousness... appeared as a conscious manifestation in the history of Spirit" as Stoicism: "Its principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true or good only in so far as it thinks it to be such."

At the end of the "Lord and Bondsman" chapter, the slave has come to be aware of itself as a being which can alter nature and so as not merely another element of a brute nature which is given to it. When satisfying its own (animal) desires, the slave did not arise to this awareness of itself, for its desires had no unity for it, nor was it aware of anything in its world save the givenness of nature, which either agreed with it and satisfied its desires or disagreed with it and refused them. The idea seems to be that once two such people come into conflict with each other they each wish for the other to be something which satisfies their desires, but since they desire different ends they come into conflict. The conflict either ends with one of the parties dying, in which case the other wasn't made agreeable (but merely removed as an obstacle), or with one party abandoning his desires to the desires of the other -- the one submits himself as a slave to the other. The lord then sits in oafish contentedness as its desires are gratified by the work of others; the lord has not changed by gaining a slave, but still remains a basically bestial character. The slave, on the other hand, is no longer living in a world where things either agree or disagree with his desires, desires which come and go as they please; he now also must become aware of whether or not things agree or disagree with his lord's desires, and so the slave must become able to make use of nature without regard to the slave's own desires: the slave simultaneously must comport himself with nature in a way independent of his own desires (for he must obey his lord whether he wishes to or not, owing to his fear of death if he tries to rebel against his lord), and becomes aware of his ability to mold nature in such a way as to make nature satisfy a variety of desires -- whereas when he was sunk in his own animal desires, there was no need for consideration of any desire except that which was currently being felt, and so with seeking out in nature a way to satisfy that desire, but with the bondage to his lord comes the necessity of seeing the world as able to satisfy any of a variety of desires, depending on what one does with it. It is due to this that Hegel speaks of the slave as being the originator of work, of the transformation of nature to what the slave has set for it to be (in obedience to his lord's command). Before the relationship of master and slave, neither was able to get a perspective on their own desires such as to allow them to arise to the reflective viewpoint needed for work; after the one takes the other as his slave, the master still remains in a world which is characterized merely by whether its elements agree or disagree with him, and so is unable to take the disinterested view of things necessary to view his struggles with nature as transformative of nature, rather than merely as further shifts in whether or not elements in the world agreed with him. Because the slave is forced to satisfy another's desires, it is forced to see the world apart from its agreement or disagreement with him; hence what for the master (or for either individual before the conflict of lord and bondsman) was mere instinctual stirring in a flux of elements which slaked his desire or confounded it becomes for the slave the ability to take nature and make of it something other than it was before, through the slave's own efforts and the power of his thoughtful consideration of nature. (1) The slave, then, is said to come to an awareness of itself as somehow independent of nature, in that it is possible for the nature which is given to it to be made by the slave into something which was not merely given to him. This awareness on the slave's part that it is not utterly subject to nature is, for Hegel, the beginnings of self-consciousness. Thus we reach the beginning of the paragraph I quoted above: The slave is an "independent self-consciousness."

For the independent self-consciousness, it is only the pure abstraction of the 'I' that is its essential nature, and, when it does develop its own differences, this differentiation does not become a nature that is objective and intrinsic to it. Thus this self-consciousness does not become an 'I' that in its simplicity is genuinely self-differentiating, or that in its absolute differentiation remains identical with itself. On the other hand, the consciousness that is forced back onto itself becomes, in its formative activity, its own object in the form of the thing it has fashioned, and at the same time sees in the lord a consciousness that exists as a being-for-self.

The slave has an awareness of itself as something independent of nature, since nature is seen as subject to the slave's skills; nature does not dominate the slave as it did the creature of mere instinct. But the slave's self-awareness stops at the mere fact that it is something which isn't just another part of the nature given to it; "it is only the pure abstraction of the 'I' that is its essential nature." When the slave does alter as part of his own working upon the Earth, this doesn't alter the slave's self-conception, but is merely noted as another factor which must be taken into consideration when molding the world to suit the will of his master. The slave is not yet a living spirit, that which has its identity and liveliness in its making of itself something other than it was in accordance with its own reasons -- that which "in its absolute differentiation remains identical with itself." The slave makes himself what he is, for he works upon nature and in so doing brings himself to have the form he comes to have, but this "form" is for the slave merely another external object fashioned in servitude to the master; the master, on the other hand, is seen by the slave to be something he in fact isn't: a being-for-itself, a being which makes its world (including itself) to exist in agreement with its own reasons. From the slave's point of view, the master controls the world, while the slave is merely a series of products and an abstract 'I'; from the master's point of view, the master does not control the world, for the master does not have the world in view at all in the way that the slave does, but merely feels desires as has them satisfied for him. (Hegel at one point says that the terminus of the master is boredom, whereas that of the slave is freedom.)

But for the subservient consciousness as such, these two moments -- itself as an independent object, and this object as a mode of consciousness, and hence its own essential nature -- fall apart. Since, however, the form and the being-for-self are for us, or in themselves, the same, and since in the Concept of independent consciousness the intrinsic being is consciousness, the moment of intrinsic being or thinghood which received its form in being fashioned is not other substance than consciousness. We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinite of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness.

We (the readers of the Phenomenology) can see what neither the slave nor the master could: Both the 'I' which the slave knows itself to be (and which it takes the master to be -- the 'I' which is independent of nature, as nature serves it) and the slave which the slave produces are a single slave, a single man. We know this because we know that the slave just is constituted by the various shifts and adjustments the man makes as he gets along in the world; his "essential being" is that which he "truly is" in all its richness: the particular living man whom he happens to be. But for the slave, all that constitutes for us his "essential being" is mere accident which has come about as he serves his master; for the slave, his true being is the abstract 'I', that alone which is free (because abstracted away from everything else, it is independent of everything else). The being-for-self of the master which the slave senses is actually only the slave's being-for-self projected onto another (for the master as yet has no cause to become reflective); the slave knows itself as an 'I' and so starts to see others like himself as also 'I's. But then the slave knows itself as 'I' only as an abstract 'I', and so comes the notion that the master, too, is truly an item independent of the world, an abstract 'I'. The world which had been seen as shot through with the will of the master then becomes something independent both of master and of slave -- the Stoic's notion that the world is entirely determined, and freedom is to be found only in thought (and so one's outer circumstances mattered not a whit; the contrast of Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, with Epictetus, Roman slave, as alike being Stoics is common here, and Hegel alludes to it in passing). With this abandonment of the world, however, comes a correlate: there is something other than the world, in which I am free (because not another brute element of nature): Thought, which knows itself to be other than the world, for the world is what is given to it. Thus with the slave-cum-Stoic we have the birth of a "free self-consciousness", of "thought."

For to think does not mean to be an abstract 'I', but an 'I' which has as at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object]. For in thinking, the object does not present itself in picture-thoughts but in Concepts, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself or intrinsic being, consciousness being immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself.

The slave takes himself to be an abstract 'I', but he truly has begun to think not because of the arrival of an "abstract 'I'" but because in his working on nature he becomes aware of his own life in the world (though as a Stoic and as a slave he is alienated from it). Though the slave is not aware that he is producing himself in his service of his master, he (his true 'I' so to speak) is in fact molding both himself and the world around him, and his awareness of the world as suitable for a variety of tasks, as possessing many sorts of things of various natures, including his knowledge of his own body as suitable for carrying out various tasks, is the thoughtful consideration of the world as it is "objectively" -- the way the world is independently of the slave's will, is the way the world is for the slave. Hegel then notes that the slave, in thinking, is not presented with pictures of the world, but with various concepts, various ways in which it can make sense of the world (as hot & dry, as wet & cold, as dangerous or harmless, of two items as looking similar or dissimilar to one another, etc.). The thinking slave is conscious of various "beings-in-themselves" (beings which are given to the slave, as a part of the nature which is in general given to him) through the exercise of various conceptual capacities, through his ability to distinguish fresh fruit from spoiled fruit, apples from oranges, hostility from friendliness, etc. and "consciousness is immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself": The beings-in-themselves are the beings-for-myself. I do not think in representations or images of objects; I think about objects as a way of comporting myself with them.

What is pictured or figuratively conceived, what immediately is, has, as such, the form of being something other than consciousness; but a Concept is also something that immediately is, and this distinction, in so far as it is present in consciousness itself, is its determinate content; but since this content is at the same time a content grasped in thought, consciousness remains immediately aware of its unity with this determinate and distinct being, not, as in the case of a picture-thought, where consciousness has specially to bear in mind that this is its picture-thought; on the contrary, the Concept is for me straightaway my Concept.

Here Hegel attempts to diagnose the cause of the confusion which leads people to think that thought consists in the manipulation of images, rather than interaction with objects. An imagined picture is immediately given to me, since nobody else had to do anything for me to imagine it; it "immediately is". But it is part of what it is to imagine something is that one is not at that point also conscious of it; I can now imagine that I am relaxing by a lake, but I cannot now imagine that I am typing this sentence. I cannot imagine what I am (at that moment) conscious of. If it turns out that I was in fact not conscious of what I thought I was (perhaps because I was mistaken about what was the case), then I may, in retrospect, judge that I was merely imagining that things were so. But if I really was conscious that things were thus-and-so, then I was not then imagining that they were thus-and-so. Because one is either conscious of something or merely imagining it, and because when one merely imagines that things are thus-and-so one's imaginary picture "immediately is", it is taken that what is immediately given is what is imagined, and thus what one is conscious of is not immediately given, and so must be mediated. But the truth of the matter is that via concepts, too, beings are immediately given, immediately are, and that the distinction between imagined pictures and events I am conscious of is not that one is immediate and one mediated, but merely that one is "identical to my consciousness" and one is not -- one is what I am really conscious of when things are thus and so, and the other is what I am (at most) apparently conscious of. As far as consciousness as such goes, that's all that's to be said of it, that's it's "determinate content" -- the consciousness that things are thus-and-so is what it's like when I'm not merely imagining that things are thus-and-so. Consciousness is only interesting, only has any point for us, because this is part of our more general capacity for thoughtfully getting around in the world; that I can make distinctions among items in the world generally is what allows for me to be able to make sense of what I am conscious of. To be conscious that things are thus-and-so is to be able to think that things are thus-and-so, and so to be able to conscious that some thing is such-and-so is to be "aware of one's unity with this determinate and distinct being" since in thought the being-in-itself is its being-for-myself; I am conscious of myself as party to the object I am conscious of. If I do not give any explicit consideration to the fact that I am in relation with the object, this does not diminish my immediate relation to it; it remains my object in that I think of it. Hegel contrasts this to what one merely imagines: If I imagine (perhaps at first that I am merely fantasizing) that there is a burglar in the house, then I may fall under the sway of the illusion and be forced to remind myself that This is all what I imagined, and so it is not what is truly the case -- if I do not keep in mind that the imagined picture is my imagined picture, that I was the one who dreamed it up, then I may lose track of the fact that it is an imagined picture at all. While quite the reverse holds with what I am conscious of, since I can forget myself, losing myself in my work, and still throughout be exercising my conceptual powers, thinking my thoughts.

In thinking, I am free, for I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity by being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself.

Here Hegel takes the "freedom" which the Stoic takes himself to have only in the thinkings of the abstract 'I', and points out that in my ordinary conceptual coping with the world I am already free, for I am acting as myself and not as an element in some other complex. The various objects which I encounter in my thoughtful activities are not something alien to me, but are my objects; they are what I am thinking of, what I am conscious of; what they are for me is not merely appearances or some momentary states, but I know them as they are essentially, for to be able to cope conceptually with them I must be able to notice more about the objects than that they are these objects here and now; if that were all I knew about them, then I would have no notion of whether or not the objects were or were not other objects, and they could be nothing for me, since I could not exclude from my notion of them anything which might be contrary to them, and so could not give any content to my notion of them at all. Thus they are for me as they are in themselves, and I am never struck with anything utterly alien to myself, for there can be no such thing; I am always at home with the others which are given to me, for their givenness is an element in my own life.

It is essential, however, in thus characterizing this shape of self-consciousness to bear firmly in mind that it is thinking consciousness in general, that its object is an immediate unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The selfsame consciousness that repels itself from itself becomes aware of itself as the element of being-in-itself; but at first it knows itself to be this element only as a universal mode of being in general, not as it exists objectively in the development and process of its being.

And then Hegel backs up a bit, returning to the Stoics rather than his own account of thought; "this shape of self-consciousness" is the one which has newly arrived on the scene, that of the abstract 'I' and the world which is set to the side as independent of myself. The whole scene has a tenor of abstractness: The Stoic as abstract 'I' is aware of itself as thinking in general (not thinking that anything, but thinking in abstracta), and is aware therefore of the general identity in objects of their being-for-itself (what it thinks of) with their being-in-themselves, in that the Stoic knows himself to be himself in the sense of "I=I". But the Stoic does not know himself as a being-for-self as he is in himself; the Stoic identifies himself as the abstract 'I', and what he truly is in himself he regards as merely another object alien to him.

After this point, he starts having the Stoics run up against the Skeptics; it turns out that the abstract 'I' which floats free of everything isn't able to manage any thoughts with content when pressed to justify itself, and so the abstract 'I' of the Stoics ends up annulling the world and itself through sheer skeptical negativity; the false division we readers of the Phenomenology saw earlier ends up collapsing in on itself, and the two (apparently) divided poles are reunited (not that they ever were really apart). And in the process you get everything about Kantian ethics, the French Revolution, Protestantism, the Incarnation, the Trinity, fine art, etc. Dissolving dualisms is hard work, even for Absolute Spirit.

(1) Hegel at one point speaks of how it might seem miraculous that what we merely wish for might become reality through our willing it -- if I want to build a house, then the house itself "exists" only in my imagination, my hopes, dreams etc. before I build it, and reality contains only so many planks of wood, shingles, bits of wire and tubing etc. By comporting myself with these myriad items (none of which is a house, certainly not the one I dreamed of having) in accordance with my will, the house might be brought into being; it might then appear, on reflection, that my thoughts had some magical power which allowed them to make it so that things which weren't so come to be, or else how did the house which existed in my dream move to reality? Hegel's point is that thought does have this sort of power, but that when we understand the power correctly it no longer appears as anything miraculous or uncanny: we can do things that we want, some of the time, is all that it amounts to, and only one-sided reflection can make it seem like this is something mystical. The context for this claim is the identity of Absolute Spirit (and Absolute Knowledge) with a finite mind (and our run-of-the-mill knowledge); this identity only seems marvelous, or blasphemous, or supernal when it is not understood.