Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Martin Heidegger

is possible only when consciousness is the subject of experience.

      In the experience which consciousness undergoes with itself consciousness must undergo its experience with itself. Thus, consciousness experiences itself as that which must undergo such experience with itself, i.e., consciousness experiences the inevitability of its own essential character. Because consciousness as knowledge is essentially absolute and not relative, it must undergo the experience that the relative knowledge exists only because it is absolute. Absolute knowledge which is aware of itself purely as knowledge and knows of its self—and through this selfhood knows itself as true knowledge—is spirit. For spirit is nothing but being-alongside-itself which comes back to itself in becoming something other than itself. Spirit is this “absolute restlessness,”¹⁰ but understood properly as absolute restlessness to which nothing more can “happen” in principle. Later Hegel calls this restlessness “absolute negativity,” and “infinite affirmation.”¹¹

      Thus, what emerges out of the experience which consciousness has of itself—what shines forth or appears—is spirit. In experience as the movement of consciousness that has been characterized as becoming-other by coming to itself, there takes place the coming-to-appearance of spirit, or the phenomenology of spirit.

      Thus, by elucidating the first subtitle of the work, “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” we are unexpectedly led to the second subtitle: “Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit.” In this way the inner connection of both subtitles becomes clear.

b) “Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit”

      To understand the second subtitle and thus the entire work, it is crucial that once again we determine correctly what the genitive means in the expression “phenomenology of spirit.” This genitive must not be interpreted as a genitivus objectivus. Easily misled by current phenomenology, one might take this genitive to be object-related, as though here we are dealing with phenomenological investigation of spirit that is somehow distinguished from a phenomenology of nature or that of economics. Hegel uses the term phenomenology exclusively in reference to spirit or consciousness. But he does so without conceiving spirit or consciousness as the exclusive themes of phenomenology. It is Husserl who speaks this way about phenomenology as “transcendental phenomenology of consciousness,” which investigates consciousness in its quintessential self-constitution and in the constitution of the totality of consciousness of objects—an investigation whose agenda would be set up for decades and centuries to come. In Hegel’s conception of the phenomenology of spirit, on the contrary, spirit is not the object of a phenomenology. Here “phenomenology” is by no means a title for an investigation of or a science about something like spirit. Rather, phenomenology is not one way among many but the manner in which spirit itself exists. The phenomenology of spirit is the genuine and total coming-out of spirit. But before whom does it come out? Before spirit itself. To be a phenomenon, to appear means coming forward in such a way that something shows itself which is other than what previously showed itself, in such a way that what comes forward does so in opposition to what previously appeared, and what previously appeared is reduced to mere illusion [Schein].

      Experience, properly understood in Hegel’s sense, as having-to-undergo-an-experience-with-oneself, means appearing as a self-showing of knowledge which comes forward as what becomes-other-than-itself by coming to itself. To appear means to come out in the twofold sense of something’s showing itself and thus showing itself in opposition to what has already shown itself by showing it to be a mere illusion. To appear means that consciousness in its knowledge becomes something other to itself.¹² Accordingly, six years before the publication of the Phenomenology, Hegel writes in the essay of 1801 entitled “The Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling” (in connection with the question as to how the absolute should be posited and conceived): “Appearing and separating are one.”¹³ By separating Hegel means becoming other than oneself in the sense of moving apart and standing in opposition.

      In Hegel, appearing and appearance are also primarily and exclusively related to that which already emerged in his concept of experience: the emergence of something negative, in its contradiction to something positive. The contradiction is what appears, a no and yes with regard to the same thing. Spirit or the absolute appears in the history of appearance. Hence, Hegel states quite clearly in the Differenzschrift of 1801: “… the purely formal appearance of the absolute is the contradiction.”¹⁴ In that the absolute becomes something else, something simultaneously arises and passes away. That is why Hegel states in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is in itself [an sich] and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth.”¹⁵ But truth—if we add what was said earlier about the concept of experience—verifies itself only in the experience of consciousness as absolute knowledge, as spirit. Appearing in the sense of manifesting itself is not something fortuitous and accidental which happens to spirit, but is its essential character.

      Now we see that the complete subtitle—“Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit”—is by no means the tautological expression which one tends to take it to be nowadays. For according to current notions, phenomenology means the science of consciousness, and the Hegelian title means only science of the science of spirit. Such a view is out of the question. In expressions such as science of experience and science of phenomenology, the term “of” is not to be taken as a genitivus objectivus but as an explicative genitive and means: science is absolute knowledge, i.e., the movement which consciousness exercises on itself. This movement is the self-verification of consciousness, of finite knowledge, as spirit. This self-verifying is nothing but the appearance of spirit, or phenomenology. Experience, phenomenology, is the way in which absolute knowledge brings itself to itself. For this reason this experience is called the science. This science is not a science of experience. Rather, it is the experience, phenomenology as absolute knowledge in its movement.

      We have now said explicitly how both subtitles of the first part of the system of science complement each other. The first subtitle indicates what it is that verifies and represents itself in its truth: consciousness—in that it undergoes the experience. The second subtitle indicates as what consciousness verifies itself: as spirit. The manner of verification is experience in the sense of undergoing-an-experience-with-itself, which is what happens in phenomenology. The experience which consciousness undergoes in science—by bringing itself to absolute knowledge—is the experience according to which consciousness is spirit and spirit is the absolute. “The best definition of the absolute is that it is spirit. One can say that finding this definition and grasping its meaning and content was the absolute direction of all education and philosophy, that it was toward this end that all religion and science was driven, and that it is only out of this drive that world-history can be grasped.”¹⁶

      Thus, we have clarified the complete title of the work: System of Science: Part I: Science of the Experience of Consciousness, or Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit. We see now that the proper concept of science is decisive for understanding the title. We arrived at this concept by defining what “consciousness,” “relative knowledge,” and “absolute knowledge” mean. Absolute knowledge and only absolute knowledge is in itself system. Then we had to clarify what “experience,” “spirit,” and “phenomenology” mean. The outcome of all of this was that we had to understand the genitive in the subtitle as subjective—an understanding which at the same time shows the connection of both subtitles. In the preface to his work, Hegel once used a title which connected the decisive terms of the titles we discussed so far. He took the term system (from the major title System of Science) and the term experience (from the subtitle Science of the Experience of Consciousness), and the term spirit (from the subtitle Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit) and formulated a new title, which read: System of the Experience of Spirit.¹⁷ This means that the work represents the absolute whole of experience which knowledge must