Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

The aim of our paper is to offer a reading of the systemic significance of Hegel's inclusion of the concept of the sign in the 'Psychology' of his Philosophy of Mind. We hope to explain why it is that the Hegelian system positions a specific form of sign, the meaningless utterance, at the point of Mind's transition from 'mechanical memory' to 'Thinking'. Rather than analyse the subtle advancements in the unfolding of the self-determining activity of 'Theoretical Mind', our strategy will be to focus attention on what we take to be some central aspects of the philosophical system's wider developmental logic and of the general treatment of language in speculative philosophy. We do this by arguing that, according to Hegel's Logic, language provides the element in which persons are drawn together out of their independent subjectivity into a unity that gives expression to their universal nature as in process and, ultimately, as a project to be realized. This argument is supplemented by a reading of the general nature of the movement of Spirit within Hegel's system that draws attention to the significance of what we call 'the absolute potentiality' of Spirit. We argue that the transition from Mechanical Memory to 'Thinking' relies upon the activity of producing the meaningless utterance because this product of Mind reveals its universal nature to be its essential unity with its object. This transition allows us to show how Mind must be understood to return to itself out of its self-loss in Mechanical Memory. Finally we argue that the production of the meaningless utterance fulfils the requirement of reformulating the elementary idea of Spirit through an incorporation of the naturalness of the natural.

2013

A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures provides a clear and philosophically engaging investigation of Hegel's first masterpiece, perhaps the most revolutionary work of modern philosophy. The book guides the reader on an intellectual adventure that takes up Hegel's revolutionary strategy of paving the way for doing philosophy without presuppositions by first engaging in a phenomenological investigation of knowing as it appears. That preliminary investigation observes how the prevailing view of knowing that condemns cognition to operating with presuppositions proves unable to justify its own knowledge claims and ends up undermining the distinction between knowing and its object on which that view depends. Unlike other studies of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the work rethinks the entire argument with sustained attention to the project that gives the work its revolutionary significance. Free of unnecessary jargon and always focusing on clearly unraveling the argument in its entirety, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures, will be indispensable to undergraduate and graduate students of philosophy, Hegel scholars, and anyone interested in tackling the radical project of doing philosophy without foundations.

2011

Hegel and the Language of Philosophy Jon Burmeister Advisor: John Sallis This dissertation attempts to give an account of philosophical language in Hegel, with particular emphasis on his claim that a philosophical exposition must be living and selfmoving. Since Hegel did not provide an extended, thematized account of philosophical language, my primary approach is to take the resources of his thought in general and attempt to construct an account which is consistent with his philosophy as a whole. Thus, a large portion of this dissertation is not directly about philosophical language, but about other determinations such as becoming, indifference, contradiction, life, the understanding, reason, etc., which lay the groundwork for discussing philosophical language in the final chapter. As a preface to all of this, however, I devote Part I of the dissertation to an investigation of Hegel’s view of how one should go about comprehending philosophical determinations, i.e., those things whic...

Despite its central importance in Hegel’s mature system, the section Subjective Spirit in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences has attracted relatively little attention in the reception history of Hegel’s work. The most influential early readers of Hegel were mostly interested in other parts of Hegel’s system; and relatively soon after Hegel’s death more empirically oriented approaches to the topics of Subjective Spirit won the day, displacing the overly ‘speculative’, armchair philosophical approach that Hegel was seen as representing. Hegel’s direct disciples and moderate ‘centre Hegelians’ Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz and Karl Ludwig Michelet did write extensive commentaries on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, but their influence paled in comparison to the more politically astute and independently creative Hegelian ‘left’ who mostly focused on the Philosophy of Right or the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as to the Hegelian ‘right’ who were mostly interested in Hegel’s views on religion and history. The long neglect of Subjective Spirit shows even today in the curious way in which the recent revival of Hegel as an epistemologist and a philosopher of mind, or of “mindedness”, has mostly ignored this text —even if systematically speaking Subjective Spirit is the part of Hegel’s system where issues of knowledge and of the mind are explicitly at stake. There is also a widely spread view according to which Hegel was engaged in his Jena-writings in a project of ‘detranscendentalizing’ the Kantian subject of knowledge and action problematically divided between the empirical and transcendental, or in other words of consistently conceptualizing it as a living individual human person embedded in the natural and social world, in language and in intersubjective interaction. According to this view, after Jena Hegel for whatever reason gave up this project and in his later work regressed into a dubious metaphysics of a ‘spirit’ which obfuscates the concrete lived reality of the human individual. Whatever the truth about Hegel’s metaphysics, this article aims to show that in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Hegel develops a thoroughly ‘detranscendentalized’ account of the human person as the “concrete” flesh and blood subject of knowledge and action, an account which deserves much more attention than it has so far received. In short, whereas the section ‘Anthropology—Soul’ of Subjective Spirit (see previous chapter) deals with the bodily aspects of the concrete subject, the section ‘Phenomenology of Spirit—Consciousness’ deals with the various dimensions of intentionality, or in other word of the subject’s theoretical and practical relation to objectivity, and finally the section ‘Psychology—Spirit’ deals with the intrasubjective or mental processes and activities at work in the various object-relations. Eventually all of the three chapters contribute to a holistic picture of the human person as the “concrete subject” of knowing and acting, yet reconstructing this picture requires a proper understanding of the structure of the text which at first sight, on a simple linear reading, appears rather fragmentary and thus confusing. This article focuses on the Psychology-section, and the thematically closely connected Phenomenology-section. I will first (1.) reconstructs the ‘parallel architectonics’ of the Phenomenology and Psychology, the understanding of which is essential for comprehending the substantial views Hegel puts forth in them. I will then (2.) draw on this reconstruction and introduce central elements of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action as it unfolds in the text.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2007

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2019

The close connection often cited between Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars is not only said to lie in their common negative challenges to the “framework of givenness,” but also in the positive lesson drawn from these challenges. In particular, the critique of givenness is thought to lead to a conceptualist view of perceptual experience. In this essay, I challenge the common idea that Hegel’s critique of givenness provides specific support for a conceptualist view. The notion that Hegel, if anyone, is a conceptualist depends on faulty assumptions about the conceptual character of all language, including the indexical expressions Hegel discusses in “Sense-Certainty.” I first show that these assumptions are often imported into Hegel’s texts but are also out of keeping with his own systematic views of concepts and language. To avoid a merely verbal disagreement, however, I then explore the features of Sellarsian semantics needed to make a thorough conceptualism plausible. Sellars’ “picturing” theory is necessary to show how non-predicate terms (like indexicals) have meaning, but in order to put this feature of Sellars’ semantics in service of a conceptualist view, one must abandon the descriptive character of concepts that is a minimal feature of Hegelian thought.