The Hegelian self as Spirit

ACADEMIC PAPER

Hegel’s conception of selfhood is amorphous, and gleaning it from the pages of his dense and complex tome, The Phenomenology of Spirit, is no mean feat. However, the picture of Hegelian self which reveals itself to the reader patient enough to tease it out from the idealist Titan’s pages, is as intriguing and it is nuanced and complex.

Introduction

Hegel’s mission to complete Kant’s ‘Copernican Turn’ is familiar enough. “The nineteenth-century is pitifully dirempt”, he might have said, “torn asunder by needless and pernicious dichotomies”. Kant’s philosophy had exiled the object from the subject, thereby imprisoning the mind in a nightmarish solipsism, and rendering the external world alien and unknowable. Hegel would lay the objective of correcting Kant’s error at the foundation of his own philosophy of selfhood, and liberate the self from its lonely tower of consciousness. And the method he would employ is as breathtakingly original as it is baffling. Far from a self-enclosed unity of apperception, the self is open and intimately bound up with the world around it. There is no transcendental impasse for Hegel, nor for that matter a transcendental self – at least not in the Kantian sense. The self is engaged in a symbiotic relationship with something he called ‘Spirit’, an elusive concept to which Hegel himself gives several, subtly discrepant definitions throughout his masterwork, The Phenomenology of Spirit. As it traces its way through history, the Hegelian self, having begun its journey in the humblest of incarnations, expands in ever greater circles to subsume within its substance, all being. The result is a conception of the self that is all-encompassing, and far exceeds in extension all preceding philosophical delineations. It is, in this sense, hard to determine the point at which Hegel’s philosophy of selfhood ends and his philosophy of spirit beings, or for that matter, his philosophy tout court. And yet, an understanding must be gained of the Hegelian self as distinct from his notion of spirit in order to give a meaningful account of it at all. The task, as can be imagined, is a finicky and arduous one – especially considering the extensive overlap between the two notions, an overlap which, though it is at times directly conveyed, more often than not remains implicit in Hegel’s writings, and must therefore be painstakingly teased out, excised for analysis. An attempt at this excision shall be the task of the first two parts of this chapter.

  In the third, we shall take the picture we shall have thus far formed of the Hegelian self and contextualise it historically. The obvious and most useful point of reference shall, of course, be Kant. It can confidently be said that Hegel’s point of departure is the Kantian division between two realms of knowledge – the phenomenal and the noumenal – and, more to the point, its radical disavowal. Hegel’s work, in fact, pulsates with a restless dissatisfaction, one aimed directly at this diremption, at the unattainability of the Kantian thing-in-itself. An attempt to overcome its limitations thus provides the impetus that spurs on much – if not all – of its content. This is already seen in the Preface, where he almost prophetically proclaims that his vision is to ‘stir together into a mélange’ that which has been ‘torn asunder’[1]. What has been torn asunder, here, are the subject and the world in which it sits. Hegel’s aim is nothing short of their complete unification, their ‘stirring together’ into an amalgam, and alongside this, the similar unification of all its subordinates – the subject with the object, concept with object, one’s self with the other, man with nature. The implications for selfhood of this universal mélange are all-encompassing and undeniable. As it makes its way through its various shapes, as it presses on towards its destiny, Spirit at once sheds its former shapes and also subsumes them, reconciling all oppositions that formerly alienated it from itself. By the time it has reached its terminus, the self – and indeed the Spirit which has animated it – has attained a state of absoluteness, one in which its structures and content are virtually indistinguishable from the universe it once placed outside of itself. Reality and consciousness are one, or in Hegel’s words, “what is rational is actual, what is actual is rational”[2]. This amalgamation of the self and reality leaves a few unanswered questions. For instance, is it is the self which loses its finitude and is subsumed within the larger fabric of reality, or the opposite, reality which is suddenly discovered to have resided within the self all along? Or is it perhaps that both the self and the objective world have in fact fused into an all-encompassing oneness? However, for all the important ramifications Hegel leaves somewhat ambiguous, a few are indisputable and clear: the self’s ‘worldhood’, here, is not as nearly as need as clearly demarcated as it is in Descartes, Kant and even Hume. Each of these questioned the epistemological integrity of the world in a number of different ways, but none of them called into question its separateness from the ‘I’, nor consequently the latter’s self-enclosed identity. Even Heidegger, who would later designate the self as the ‘who of Dasein’, located it within the world while at the same time maintaining it as a distinct from it. As we shall see in this chapter, this amalgamation is undoubtedly Hegel’s greatest contribution to the philosophy of the self, as it is to philosophy in general.

Hegel’s conception of Spirit

We begin our analysis of the Hegelian self, necessarily, with that concept which characterises his metaphysic more completely than any other: Spirit. For, as we have already established, the two are intertwined in ways that are both subtle and pervasive. Hegel’s idea of Spirit is something of a semantic shapeshifter, and the picture one has gleaned of it by the end of the Phenomenology is necessarily ambivalent. The closest historical equivalents are the Anaxagorean Nous and, at a stretch, the Heraclitean Logos. Neither is, however, a direct equivalent. It certainly doesn’t help that Hegel himself rarely provides direct definitions of it – quite surprising, given the concept’s centrality in his thought. And yet on the other hand, the work itself can be seen as a continuously unfolding attempt to do exactly this, to delineate its essence, so that the Phenomenology amounts to a broad-strokes attempt to capture that which, at the same time, it is careful to leave partly ambiguous. The closest Hegel gets to a dictionary entry is breathtakingly elegant and uncharacteristically terse: Spirit is the “absolute substance which constitutes the unity of its oppositions.”[3] This reaffirms several of the points we already made in the introduction, namely that Spirit is that universal oneness in which everything is subsumed, and in which, though there may exist many particularities, there are no contradictions: a “union of union and non-union”[4]. It is the reconciled amalgam of all forces which might at first glance be held to be irredeemably dirempt. A Hegelian will correct me here: the above citation is, more properly speaking, a definition of absolute Spirit than Spirit tout court, and this brings me neatly to my next point: Spirit’s historical unfolding.

  For Hegel, Spirit can be said to exist in primary in two ways, and these may at first justifiably appear contradictory. It is, on the one hand, that universal guiding principle which pervades all, and therefore is presumably ‘there’ from the outset. On the other hand, it is that spark of consciousness which at first exists only germinally – or ‘immediately’, as Hegel would put it – and comes to its completeness only after many stages – or ‘moments’ – of progressive self-actualisation. Arguing these two propositions to be true simultaneously is a hard feat indeed to pull off without falling either into dogmatic idealism or arbitrary fiction. For, taken as universal substance, Spirit can hardly be deemed to be progressive, or bound by its nature to claw its way toward its destiny so fitfully, when its truth ought to be plain to itself from the beginning. It is likewise hard to imagine how anything but a deluded solipsism could come to ‘house’ absolute substance, where the Absolute, in this specific conception, would amount to no more than a consciousness that has come to fulfil the potential of its a priori structures – irrespective of their correspondence to reality. The answer that Hegel would provide to this apparent impasse, I would presume, is that Spirit is precisely these two things at once: both a consciousness expanding through time, and a steadfast and ubiquitous substance. Or rather, it is the point at which these two become one. Spirit is a consciousness – a ‘self’, if you will – that is in fact immersed in the absolute, but immediately ignores the truth of its own immersion and only comes to understand it over time, as it presses on through certain historical rights of passage. It is a consciousness that reaches its fullest self-actualisation only when it understands itself as universal and absolute, and the moment of this realisation represents the confluence of absolute substance with absolute knowing, the complete and ultimate amalgam of world with the self, of reality’s radical ontological legitimation and the legitimation of the self’s absolute knowing. This terminal stage in the development of the self is by Hegel called, “absolute Spirit.”

  The intermediate stages along the journey to this final destination – consciousness, self-consciousness and reason – are densely and intricately mapped out, and a comprehensive account of them here is not possible, nor even necessary to our aim. We would do well, however, to at least attempt to sketch them out, so that, in the following section, we can better trace the progress of the Hegelian self, which follows a parallel trajectory. Spirit begins its journey, “immediately”, that is, as a rudimentary form of consciousness called ‘sense-certainty’, one which sees itself as fundamentally distinct from the world, as an objective, passive and detached viewer. In these early stages, consciousness takes its own sense perceptions as rich and full, though they are in fact the poorest[5]. As it presses on toward its next shape, it encounters oppositions in the objects which fall under its purview, like universal and singular qualities[6], which it at first wrestles with but eventually integrates – or ‘sublates’. By the time it passes on to its next shape, self-consciousness, reality has taken on a fullness, an integration it didn’t initially enjoy, and yet consciousness persists in considering it ‘objective’. This error, that is, the false belief that “truth lies in something other than consciousness itself”[7], is then corrected when consciousness begins to move away from the ‘Pure I’, or the self which is mistakenly certain of its self-sufficiency, and then sublates the ‘other’, that is, understands that its self-consciousness, its knowledge of itself, is dependent on the recognition of another consciousness[8]. A life-and-death battle ensues, in which two consciousnesses scuffle for recognition and fail, for that consciousness who had initially considered itself the master has now fallen into servitude, and the enslaved consciousness has inversely now understood the extent of its own power over its erstwhile master[9]. This ‘topsy-turvy inversion’ then leads to a series of moments, two of which take on explicitly historical philosophical names: stoicism, skepticism and the unhappy consciousness. These are intermediate moments along the transition to reason, stages in which, having understood itself as a self-consciousness but failed to fully integrate itself into the world as such, the self then wrestles to attain freedom from the burden of external reality, at first retreating from it into itself, and then denying it altogether, and thus becoming unhappy[10].

  It is curious that, before this point, Hegel mentions ‘Spirit’ only in passing. Immediate knowing, for instance, was for him ‘devoid of spirit’, but the concept barely figures – if at all – in subsequent chapters. However, from the unhappy consciousness on, it is as if Spirit suddenly comes alive. Prompted by its unhappiness, consciousness finally integrates the freedom it has achieved into the unchangeable, or the totality of reality. It is here at Reason that we achieve full self-consciousness and become Spirit in any meaningful way[11]. Reason, for Hegel, is the “certainty which consciousness has of being all reality”[12]. No longer concerned with things, that is, with objects deemed to inhabit a detached, external world, the Kantian realm of noumena, it now understands it is dealing with concepts[13]. Appearance and essence are one, there is no thing-in-itself which is inaccessible to me. The objects that fall upon our consciousness, which in sense-certainty we considered ‘other’, and whose existence in skepticism we doubted altogether, have now been sublated as concepts, entities which we understand as residing firmly inside us, and their sum total has come to constitute a complete internal reality. It is here, in this peculiar moment Hegel calls the ‘ethical world’, that Spirit really takes centre-stage for Hegel. Having thus attained its ethical shape, Spirit now understands that it has further oppositions to sublate, the last arduous steps to take toward its Parnassus, and must gather unto itself the realm of ‘pure consciousness’ it has hitherto alienated from itself[14]. Having found its fulfilment outside the ethical world, in this higher realm, the erstwhile self-alienated Spirit now finds the completion of its worldview by positing immediately oppositional forces, duty and nature, as a single unity, and finally, after its many toils, becomes “spirit immediately certain of its as absolute truth and being”[15].

The Hegelian self as intersubjective, and its relationship to Spirit

Having sketched out a necessarily elliptical account of Spirit’s trajectory through time, we now come to the somewhat pernickety task of distinguishing it from the self, and laying out the nuanced relationship they bear to each other. What is immediately evident when one attempts to evince, from the pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit, any coherent rendering of selfhood, is that the idea of a self never truly leaves Hegel’s thoughts. Even concepts that at first appear completely unrelated – religion, art, the law – are in fact all iterated as phenomena of selfhood to an extent. A radical reading of Hegel could indeed convincingly peg him as a dogmatic idealist, a thinker, in other words, for whom the world is largely a phenomenon of the consciousness, and its gradual unfolding is but a progressive maturing and expanding, in the mind, of the a priori structures which would make such phenomena more internally available to us. In this reading, the Phenomenology of Spirit would much better be seen as a Phenomenology of Mind – which it in any case it is often called, since ‘mind’ is precisely an alternative meaning of the original German, Geist. Our task would in this case be rendered quite simple, since the self would here simply be expandable to the outer limits of the work itself, and be judged co-extensive with it. Much more challenging but also rewarding is to take the rather less radical approach and see Hegel as an idealist of a rather more moderate bent, who regards mind and the world as equivalent but not identical realities, whose overall composition and structure allow each to map onto the other, and whose relationship is one of symbiosis rather than identity. This is the reading of Hegel I also feel is better supported by the text itself, since it allows for the gradual unfolding of Spirit through time as consciousness understands itself to be permeated by it. Here, the self is a rather more nuanced concept to delineate, since it requires an excision from elements extraneous to it, and specifically, it requires a careful prying from a concept with which it also happens to intimately bound up: Spirit.

  Just as Spirit expands over time, so too does the self that moves toward it, and as it passes through its successive shapes, it is marked by them, integrates them into itself, and is forever changed as a result. In sense-certainty, the self, which can make no more sense of the world than as a separate reality, remains by and large unaffected by it. It fancies itself a passive recipient of external input, and therefore can see itself as no more than an empty vessel, since it does not allow in that which would otherwise constitute it. As it becomes aware of itself as fundamentally enmeshed in the world around it, it understands that to know itself is to allow in the object which it once deemed lifeless, but now pulsates within it and, simultaneously, validates him in his own self-knowledge. The self is, here, discovered to be intersubjective. Its self-consciousness is dependent entirely on his recognition of the other within it, as inhabiting its own consciousness and filling it with its contents. There can be no recognition of the self as a self, for Hegel, without a simultaneous acknowledgement of the other as fundamentally constitutive of it. In this sense, Kant is radically disavowed. Where for Kant, the other, like every other noumenon, is a dead thing-in-itself, for Hegel it pulsates within us in a manner fundamentally determinant of who we are. To this extent, it could potentially be argued that the chapter on self-consciousness is one of the most critical to the Hegelian philosophy of the self, for it establishes one of its most fundamental tenets – intersubjectivity – and, for this reason, sets the tone for much of what is to come.

  The idea that the self is intersubjective has far-reaching implications. Until Self Consciousness, the self was unidirectional, a passive subject in a dead world of mere appearances. As it then comes to its own as a self-consciousness – a shape it does not fully take on until it has shaken off its unhappiness and reached ‘reasonhood’ – it makes a monumental discovery that, arguably, represents the pivotal moment in the whole Phenomenology: that it contains all reality in itself. One feels that, had Hegel concluded his masterwork here at this shocking statement, it would have been sufficient to ensure its importance in the history of philosophy. There is much terrain that this orgiastic proposition takes in: that the self is both a self and another; a self and others; a self and society; a self and the world; a self and the realm of pure consciousness; a self and the absolute. As it expands it gathers unto itself all that which it subsumes, until it has reached its ultimate terminus, the station of absolute knowledge. And this, as we have already alluded to, is the point at which the self understands itself to be co-extensive with the Absolute – at least in a figurative, if not literal sense. In Reason, Hegel describes the self that has reached this nirvana-like state in a variety of ways: “an object with the consciousness of the non-being of anything that is other”, “a singular object”, and “all reality and presence”[16]. All of these point toward a self that has annihilated all oppositions to itself, and subsumed within itself all that was once alien to it. It has, in the process, validated its own inner structure as one reflective of all of reality, and is validated by it in turn. Its absolute knowledge is, at once, absolute self-knowledge, for its self-consciousness is precisely the awareness of the Absolute as constitutive of its inner nature. Without this awareness, without, in other words, an understanding of its own complete intersubjectivity, its utter reliance on the other for its own identity, essence and aliveness, it remains a ‘mere’ Kantian apperception, a self-enclosed unity bestowing a solipsistic order on a world that is fundamentally alien to it.

  So much for the Hegelian self. How about the self as it relates to Spirit? Hegel leaves this relationship implicit for much of the first half of the work, and then, as if to compensate for his omissions, provides, in the chapter called Spirit, a series of rich statements whose purpose is to elucidate it. Many of these are suggestive, and require a certain degree of interpretative input: “Spirit is the self of the actual consciousness which spirit confronts” is an example of this. Here, it would appear that Hegel is equating spirit with the self, or at least with the self as it manifests itself a certain stage of its development. Once it has been ‘confronted’ by spirit, that is, once it has internalised the truth of its own complete intersubjectivity, its containment of all of reality, the self becomes spirit. In a sense, this is tautological, for it amounts to saying this: spirit is the encompassment of all reality, and consciousness becomes spirit when it encompasses all reality. But the nuance here is important: Spirit doesn’t simply reside within the consciousness, it comes to constitute its essence and overarching governing principle. In fact, in certain passages of the chapter titled Spirit, Hegel seems to go even further, ascribing an all-encompassing extension to the self which it is hard not to see as dogmatically idealistic: “Giving voice to this assurance sublates the form of its particularity, and it therein recognizes the necessary universality of the self[17].” Be this as it may, at least several points can be gleaned from the picture we have thus far painted of the Hegelian self. First, the self follows a trajectory through time in ever greater and expanding shapes, those mirrored to an extent by Spirit but not exactly parallel to them; second, the self begins in a fashion that is ‘devoid of spirit’, and as it unfolds in the way just mentioned, it is imbued by it to ever greater degrees; third, this process culminates in a point at which Spirit and the self are basically co-extensive. This stage of its evolution corresponds to the absolute self/absolute spirit, the culmination of the self and its attainment of absolute knowledge, or the complete understanding of itself as a self-consciousness that contains all reality and nothing alien to it.

  A number of other propositions could also be extracted from these considerations. Might Spirit, for instance, not be considered the telos toward which the self propels itself, the highest point of its fulfilment? Or might it, rather, be better understood as the motor for its forward propulsion? Is Spirit, in other words, the vehicle or the destination of consciousness’ journey through time? Might the Hegelian self not also be understood as fundamentally transcending all traditionally conceptions, while, at the same time, redefining them? The picture that is formed, once we have sought answers to these critical questions, is, I feel, of a self that emerges tentatively, as a consciousness that has not yet come to its own, and yet, at the same time, contains within it the seed of its irresistible future shape, of its future glory. This is akin to the instinct of a new-born who, though not yet able to crawl, already possesses the genetic encoding that will eventually compel him to kneel, stand, walk and run. So it is an infantile self which, however, already contains all that is required for its self-actualisation. But, much like the new-born, it is programmed to reach it in a pre-established order. The consciousness is a self only partly, since it has not integrated the other into itself, and yet as it moves through its shapes, achieves self-consciousness and reasonhood, it then oddly surpasses itself by becoming a “necessary universality”. So, that which at first was necessarily incomplete, or ‘immediate’ will unexpectedly outgrow its individual completeness; a consciousness in whom a self initially resided which did not know itself, eventually comes to an self-awareness so total that it far outstrips even the widest boundaries it could have fancied capable of delineating it.

Contextualising the Hegelian self

We will begin this last section of the chapter by riffing on the concluding thought of the previous one. As the Hegelian self ‘expands’ to encompass all reality, it surpasses the intermediate unity it would have contented itself with, had it simply replicated its Kantian or even Cartesian iteration. Kant’s unity of apperception finds no further traction, in the Phenomenology, than the concluding sections of Consciousness, those in which the force of understanding has come to be applied to sense-perception, and self has understood that its consciousness can extend itself no further before raising itself up to its next shape: self-consciousness. The unity of apperception it momentarily enjoys, which Kant and Descartes would have already considered a felicitous terminus, is thus discovered to be a self-deception, an opposition which itself must be necessarily sublated. This unity is a unity that must be given up for a disunity that is, at the same time, a greater unity, or a unity of disunities: a “union of union and non-union”. The Kantian transcendental self, since it exists beyond any empirical reach and is therefore not cognisable by the thinking consciousness, is an entirely foreign concept to Hegel. For the author of the Phenomenology, consciousness can have no transcendental element, since its journey consists precisely in pursuing its telos toward absolute knowing, a point at which it finally discovers that it is co-extensive with Spirit, and therefore contains nothing alien to it. The Kantian self is, in fact, alien to itself in a way Hegel would have considered unconscionable: it resides beyond the mind’s own faculty to synthesise it as an empirical cognition, precisely because it constitutes its precondition. The transcendental self, for Kant, functions in the same as any other noumenon: it can be gleaned to exist, but never fully understood. To the Kantian notion of a transcendental impasse Hegel would say that the unknowable thing-in-itself is fatuous piffle, that appearance an essence are one, that there is nothing alien to the mind, and that concept and object are the same. The unity Kant ascribes to consciousness is therefore done away with for an all-encompassing oneness. The self, for Hegel, is not unitary so much as it is universal. The Kantian unity of apperception is, accordingly, an illusion for Hegel, an illusion based on the false premise of an unreconciled diremption.

  A very evident implication of Hegel’s philosophy of selfhood, one which no complete exploration of it should neglect, is its suggestion of a deterministic self. If the self is predestined, from its most immediate moments, to drive on toward a prefigured telos, and this destiny is genetically encoded, so that it can move forward in no other way than by following a predetermined path, then how can it be said to be a self in the purest sense and not a slavish automaton, a hapless puppet to ventriloquistic forces far greater than it? Also – what place is there in such a tight and systemised conception of history for an authentic individual, one endowed with the freedom to pave her own way and fill the essence of her selfhood with contents of her choosing? If one’s ultimate destination is a place of absolute knowing, one in which one’s selfhood has attained a state of ‘necessary universality’ and has amalgamated with absolute Spirit, then how can one be said to have a personality at all as distinct from anyone else’s? Even as early as Descartes, we have seen the importance of authenticity to any conception of the self. Yet, where for Descartes the authentic self was reached by means of universal doubt, of a radical pruning of the consciousness of all its fallacious empirical contents and a rebuilding from transcendental ground zero up, for Hegel authenticity, rather, lies in going forward, single-mindedly, and never looking back; not so much adding – and certainly not subtracting – units of knowledge so much as discovering the metaphysical stuff that was there all along. Hegel’s grand project is, not a Cartesian edifice onto whose foundation bricks are laid that have been manufactured with intentionality, according to an individual’s own design. It is rather the blooming, from a germinal locus, of a flower whose bud already contains all the beauty and complexity of its structure within it. Is a bud able to decide the time and manner of its bloom, its shape, height, or the colour of its petal? The Hegelian self is both pre-established and discovered. Pre-established, since it sits in a consciousness whose destiny, as we have seen, is already mapped out ahead of it; discovered, since it knows not what its destiny is until it begins to unfold. It is initially blind to its own power and extension, and comes to an awareness of itself as it, simultaneously, discovers the truth of the world in which it is immersed, and understands that the two – the world and the self – are in fact an amalgam, two sides of the same cosmic coin, and their final conjoining through Spirit represents the self’s absolute truth.

 Bibliography

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. & ed. by Terry Pinkard.        Cambridge Hegel Translations. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Kindle Edition.

[1] ¶ 7, p. 7

[2] Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Ed. by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kindle Edition, Preface (p. 20)

[3] ¶ 177, p. 108

[4] From an earlier work, Fragment of a System (1800), in the Hegel Reader. Ed. Stephen Houlgate. Trans. Richard Kroner. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998 (p. 36)

[5] ¶ 91, p. 60

[6] ¶ 144, p. 87

[7] ¶ 166, p. 102

[8] ¶ 178, p. 108

[9] ¶¶ 184-193, pp. 109-14

[10]¶¶ 202-10, pp. 120-4

[11] ¶ 210, p. 124

[12] ¶ 233, p. 137

[13] ¶ 240, p. 142

[14] ¶ 596, p. 347

[15] ¶ 596, p. 347

[16] ¶ 233, p. 137

[17] ¶ 654, p. 378