MEPO Forum :: 黑格爾哲學

boris Wrote:
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> This essay, a simple and easy to read 
> introduction, is posted in the web with mp3
> audio.
> http://juanvillage2012.scienceontheweb.net/?p=77
> The following is a portion of it.  It works for me
> to understand Hegel's system.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Hegelian preliminaries
> What, then, is the Phenomenology of Spirit about?
> Hegel says quite clearly in his “Introduction”
> to the Phenomenology that the work is concerned
> with the theory of knowledge . In particular, he
> says that it is concerned with how the kinds of
> knowledge-claims that we make can be said to match
> up with the objects that they purport to be about.
> Thus, one might expect such a work to
> be concerned with problems of the evidence of the
> senses, induction, whether the justifying evidence
> for epistemic claims is “internal” or
> “external” to consciousness, and similar
> issues. However, the topics covered in the
> Phenomenology instead seem to range over items as
> varied as issues concerning the formation of
> character in early modern Europe, Kantian ethics,
> and the history and philosophy of religion, with
> there being only a short introductory chapter on
> what might at least look like epistemology to a
> modern philosophical reader. Understanding the
> general goal of the Phenomenology therefore
> requires us to see how Hegel takes the theory of
> knowledge to be connected with all these other
> issues. The task of the theory of knowledge seems
> to be to offer an account that explains how our
> knowledge-claims (our ideas, our propositions, our
> sentences, whatever) could possibly match up with
> their purported objects. Hegel notes that putting
> the issue in this way seems to place the problem
> of skepticism at center stage in two ways. First,
> the basic issue of such a theory of knowledge
> would be with whether our knowledge-claims do or
> can match up with real things, in which case
> generalized skepticism – the doubt that our
> claims might in general fail to match up to
> “real” objects- becomes the main concern of
> such a theory of knowledge. Answering that kind of
> skeptic comes to be the problem of the theory of
> knowledge. Second, generalized skepticism is also
> the result of adopting such a view, in that once
> one understands the problem of knowledge to be
> that of matching up some “idea” with objects,
> these “ideas” become the intermediaries
> between the thinking subject and the world, and
> the problem thereby naturally arises as to how we
> could know that the intermediary is not giving us
> an illusory representation of its object. Stated
> in those terms, it might seem impossible to answer
> the skeptic unless one therefore finds some kind
> of self-certifying idea (an idea that carries its
> own justification on its face, such as the
> property of being “certain” or being
> “infallibly known” or being “necessary”)
> and a self-certifying procedure to move from that
> self-certifying idea to other non-self-certifying
> ideas. Now, there are many candidates for what
> would count as self-certification (certainty,
> infallibility, indefeasibility, and so on) , and
> the issue therefore seems to come down to which of
> these really would be the self-certifying
> “ground” of all other knowledge. The theory of
> such a “ground” would be a “science” in
> the German sense of Wissenschaft – that is, a
> kind of structured theoretical knowledge of some
> circumscribed domain. Is such a “science”
> possible ? It seems not , for whatever shape this
> “science” may take, it is but itself only one
> more claim to knowledge, and it must therefore
> “ground” itself. There are, moreover, very
> conflicting claims to knowledge among different
> types of communities. Some religious types claim
> to know God with certainty and infallibility in
> their hearts ; other more secular types claim to
> know the individual items of sense-experience with
> certainty or infallibility. The latter may claim
> to reject the former because they do not fit their
> canons of “scientific procedure” or the
> “commonly accepted standards” of rationality.
> The former may reject the latter because they
> substitute procedures of scientific rationality in
> places where only the “heart” can rule.
> Neither side, so it
> seems, produces any real argument to convince the
> other, since both stances amount to simply taking
> certain standards or certain projects to be self
> evident while rejecting the other side’s claims
> simply because they fail to live up to the
> standards of their own point of view. Indeed, what
> each side takes as self-certifying is dependent,
> so it seems, on other assumptions that are
> certainly not so self-evident (such as issues
> concerning secular accounts versus religious
> accounts). At least from the standpoint of a
> theory of knowledge that would be a genuine
> Wissenschaft, we need more than the vague
> assurance that “our side” has really got it
> right simply because the “other side” has
> failed to live up to our standards. The other side
> is, after all, capable of making the same claims .
> Since each side in these disputes already makes a
> variety of assumptions in forming its accounts of
> knowledge-claims, each of these kinds of theories
> is, as Hegel puts it, itself only an appearance, a
> historical phenomenon, alongside other claims to
> knowledge, and, as an “appearance,” it can
> make no intrinsic claim to being true or even
> better than the others. Indeed, if we are to take
> the problem of skepticism seriously, we must see
> all accounts, including the account we are giving
> of the other accounts, as “appearances, ” as
> merely one more set of claims as to what is real
> and true that stands alongside a host of other
> competing claims. An authentic skepticism must
> therefore be skeptical about itself; it must also
> take skepticism itself as only an
> “appearance.” But such a type of skepticism
> will, of course, seem corrosive, since it appears
> to offer no way to resolve such issues. How could,
> for example, the secularist come up with an
> account that is justifiable to the religious in
> terms that the religious can accept on their own
> terms or that give them reasons to change what
> they count as the “grounds” of belief ? Yet ,
> if Hegel is right, only a theory that does exactly
> that could claim to be an authentic Wissenschaft,
> a well-grounded, structured theoretical account of
> knowledge and not just a restatement or a
> refinement of principles that a given community
> (modern, ancient, religious, secular, whatever)
> already takes for granted. The task of a theory of
> knowledge must be to produce some way of
> evaluating what kinds of reasons for belief (or
> for action) can count as authoritative reasons,
> and it must be able to show that the reasons it
> gives for counting those reasons as authoritative
> reasons are themselves authoritative reasons, and
> it must do this while at the same time regarding
> all claims, including the ones it itself makes, as
> being only “appearances. ” The theory of
> knowledge can therefore only adequately define its
> task if it is able to effectively delineate what
> it means to take everything as an “appearance”
> and to understand what it means to be genuinely
> skeptical. To look at all such accounts as
> appearances, Hegel argues, is to look at them (in
> his words) as “formations of consciousness, ”
> as forms of life that have come to take certain
> types of reasons as authoritative for themselves.
> Reasons appear as authoritative when they appear
> as mandatoy, that is, as necessary for the agents
> for whom they are authoritative. In this way,
> Hegel continues the Kantian shift away from
> Cartesian issues about
> certainty (from the kind of hold that we have on
> certain norms) to necessity (the hold that certain
> norms have on us) . A “formation of
> consciousness” in Hegel’s sense is composed
> both of the ways in which a form of life takes
> certain types of reasons (or, to put it more
> generally, norms) as authoritative for itself and
> the ways in which it articulates to itself why it
> is legitimate for those reasons to count for it as
> authoritative, non-optional reasons. (A
> terminological point : In the Phenomenology, Hegel
> quite consistently refers to that set of
> “grounds” that people take as authoritative as
> the “essence,” or the “absolute essence”
> of a formation of consciousness; he says of these
> “essences” that they are the “objects” of
> a consciousness that assumes that such and such is
> authoritative for it. ) The Phenomenology, by and
> large, examines various “formations of
> consciousness” in terms of how they take these
> authoritative standards more or less as “given,
> ” as “objects” of consciousness that the
> participants in that form of life simply
> “find” in their social worlds ready at hand
> for them. To look at accounts as appearances is
> therefore to take them at their own word, to see
> how in their terms they take certain kinds of
> reasons to be authoritative, and how they attempt
> to legitimate that authoritativeness for
> themselves ; it is not to presuppose that any one
> account or “appearance” is superior to
> another. Since there can be a variety of different
> “formations of consciousness, ” it might seem
> that in taking each one as an appearance, the
> theory of knowledge is thereby destined from the
> outset to result in a kind of self-undermining
> relativism or some kind of pointless
> self-contradictory avowal that no statement of
> knowledge can be taken to be true. Taken this way,
> the attempt to produce an adequate theory of
> knowledge can, as Hegel puts it, only be seen
> “as the path of doubt, or, more authentically,
> as the path of despair. ” If an adequate theory
> of knowledge must also therefore give a
> non-question begging account of why it takes its
> own reasons to be the authoritative reasons for
> accepting the account of knowledge that it gives,
> then it seems not merely to have complicated its
> task but perhaps to have made it impossible. Those
> reasons themselves, so it would seem, would also
> have to be underwritten by other reasons, ad
> infinitum. Moreover, in order even to start, the
> theory of knowledge surely has to presuppose some
> kind of standard for counting some kinds of things
> as evidence, but this kind of methodological
> restriction seems to say that it can presuppose no
> such standard at all. Thus, it seems that such
> strictures make it impossible to produce any kind
> of legitimate “science” Wissenschaft of
> knowledge at all. Since we must start somewhere,
> it seems that we must simply take whatever
> standards of evaluation we happen to have and
> subject them to some kind of internal test.
> Indeed, Hegel recommends this solution as
> appropriate, given the general question with which
> modern considerations of the theory of knowledge
> already begin. That issue has to do with how we
> match up our “ideas” with the way things are
> “in themselves.” Now it is trivially clear
> that whenever we attempt to go about doing this,
> we are always using some standard or another in
> terms of which we judge that something counts as
> the way in which things “really are” as
> opposed to the way they only seem to be.
> Those standards, as Hegel says, are internal to
> consciousness in the sense that we are always
> taking things to be such and such in terms of the
> kinds of reasons that we have come to take as
> authoritative for ourselves. The major issue for
> the theory of knowledge must be to examine whether
> those reasons (or, more neutrally put, those
> “grounds”) that we take as authoritative
> really are authoritative. It must show that what
> underwrites the “ground-rules” of our
> reason-giving activities is genuine and
> legitimate. If nothing else, we can look to see
> whether these authoritative reasons themselves are
> within their own terms satisfactory, not whether,
> for example, we find them satisfactory by the
> standards of another set of terms. That is, we can
> examine the reasons that we or anyone else has
> come to take as authoritative, and we can reflect
> on whether those reasons can be shown to be
> adequate at least in terms of the goals that they
> set for themselves. In this way, perhaps, this
> kind of corrosive skepticism can become a
> “self-consummating skepticism . ” There are at
> least two types of doubts we may have about such
> reasons. We may have doubts about whether those
> reasons that we take as authoritative really are
> authoritative reasons and we may have doubts about
> whether the account that we have given of why they
> should (or should not) count as authoritative
> reasons is itself in order. Skepticism arises when
> either of these kinds of doubts occur ; it arises,
> as Hegel likes to put it, out of the negativity of
> self-consciousness. The “negativity” of an
> account is its capacity to generate a
> self-undermining skepticism about itself when it
> is reflected upon within the terms that it sets
> for itself. The negation of an account, in
> Hegel’s language, is always that set of
> self-undermining considerations that arise from
> within an account’s own terms, and, for that
> reason, negation is always determinate negation,
> the specific set of self-undermining objections
> that come out of such accounts. This kind of
> “negativity” – the capacity to generate a
> kind of skepticism about itself from its own terms
> – is a characteristic of those accounts that are
> the object of reflection, or, as Hegel puts it, of
> self-consciousness. The “science”
> (Wissenschaft) of knowledge must therefore also
> develop within itself some conception of the
> relation between authoritative reasons and
> self-conscious reflection. Self-consciousness on
> the Hegelian model is not the awareness of a set
> of internal objects (sensations, mental
> occurrences, representations, whatever) . To use a
> metaphor, self-consciousness is at least minimally
> the assumption of a position in “social
> space.” We locate ourselves in “social
> space” when, for example, we reason in various
> ways ; or when we assume various roles; or when we
> demand a certain type of treatment because of who
> we think we are ; or when we see some forms of
> behavior as appropriate to the type of person we
> think ourselves to be ; or when we recognize
> others as having the right to make certain kinds
> of moves within their speech-community ; or when
> we give a reason to another person to explain or
> to justify what we are doing; or when we give an
> account of what we are doing to others that we
> think affirms what we take to be a good reason for
> doing what we are doing. Within a “social
> space” individuals assert various things to each
> other and give what they take to be reasons for
> these assertions, and people impute certain
> reasons
> to them on the basis of the shared social norms
> that structure their “social space” – that
> is, on the basis of what they take the person to
> be committed to in light of what he does and their
> shared norms. All the various activities of
> reason-giving – for example, of telling someone
> why you take some belief to be justified, of
> giving a good reason to yourself for going ahead
> and doing something, or of narrating some story
> about yourself that you take to explain and
> justify the way you lead your life – are
> themselves forms of social practice in which we in
> turn mutually evaluate each other’s actions, in
> which we each assume certain types of epistemic
> and ethical responsibilities, and in which we
> impute certain moral and epistemic
> responsibilities to others in light of their
> behavior. In the various social practices
> involving reason-giving, we also have principles
> of criticism for evaluating the reasons we give.
> Reason-giving, that is, is itself a social
> practice that goes on within a determinate form of
> “social space” that “licenses” some kinds
> of inferences and fails to “license” others. A
> distinguishing feature of a particular “social
> space” is the set of what counts within that
> “social space” as the basic “ground-rules”
> for agents to justify their beliefs and to guide
> their actions. The structure of authoritative
> reasons within each “social space” thereby
> naturally appears to each agent to constitute not
> just the way that he and others contingently
> happen to reason but the way in which people in
> general should reason. That is, those sets of
> authoritative reasons appear as both certain and
> as structuring what is to count as truth, and as
> necessary, as something that is not optional for
> the kinds of agents they are. When a set of such
> reasons and the accounts given of them undermine
> themselves, they of course lose that appearance of
> necessity and they lose their link to truth for
> those agents. Part of the theory of knowledge,
> therefore, must be to see if there are any set of
> authoritative reasons that can generate their own
> necessity in a way that does not undermine itself.
> This requires the construction of a self-conscious
> reflective account of those authoritative
> standards and norms themselves that can affirm for
> us which of them are genuine and legitimate. Any
> form of life will have certain reasons that it
> takes as authoritative ; to the extent that it
> becomes self conscious about these standards and
> norms, it will develop accounts of why what it
> takes as authoritative for itself really is
> authoritative. Becoming self conscious about such
> norms is to become aware of the apparent
> paradoxes, incoherences, and conflicts within
> them. All these forms of self-consciousness have a
> mediated (that is, inferential) structure .
> Whenever there is mutual recognition among
> self-conscious subjects that is mediated by such a
> shared self-conscious understanding of what for
> them counts in general as an authoritative reason
> for belief and action that is, mediated by whom
> they take themselves to be in light of what they
> count as being generally authoritative for
> themselves and why they take themselves to count
> those things as authoritative – we have a
> relation of what Hegel calls spirit . Spirit –
> Geist – is a self-conscious form of life –
> that is, it is a form of life that has developed
> various social practices for reflecting on what
> it takes to be authoritative for itself in terms
> of whether these practices live up to their own
> claims and achieve the aims that they set for
> themselves. Put more metaphorically, spirit is a
> form of “social space” reflecting on itself as
> to whether it is satisfactory within its own terms
> (with what it takes to be the “essence” of
> things, in Hegel’s terms). “Spirit”
> therefore denotes for Hegel not a metaphysical
> entity but a fundamental relation among persons
> that mediates their self-consciousness, a way in
> which people reflect on what they have come to
> take as authoritative for themselves. Dilemmas
> arise within a given form of spirit when there are
> internal problems within that “social space”
> such that some of these taken-for-granted reasons
> seem to clash with each other, or when some ways
> of reasoning within that “social space” quite
> unexpectedly lead to skepticism about the whole
> system of reasons itself or about significant
> parts of it (for example, when a form of life sets
> certain basic aims for itself that it necessarily
> fails to satisfy, that is, when that form of life
> is unsuccessful in its own terms) . In these
> cases, in order to stabilize their sense of who
> they are, agents seek to affirm for themselves
> that what they have come to take as authoritative
> reasons really are authoritative reasons.
> Moreover, this activity of affirming that things
> are in order and that our reason-giving practices
> are not flawed is aimed at satisfying the desire
> to affirm for ourselves that we are who we think
> we are, or that our self-identity is not terribly
> flawed and irrational , and that the world is
> therefore fundamentally as we take it to be. These
> social practices of affirmation and reassurance
> can take many different shapes – tragic drama,
> religious practice, philosophical reflection,
> acting within certain social roles but they all
> function as practices through which individuals
> and communities reflect on their self-generated
> skeptical reproaches on their form of life and try
> to reassure themselves that their practices are in
> order (or with some revision can be put back in
> order) and that their “social space” is
> therefore internally lucid. Since we cannot assume
> that any one of these “forms of spirit” is
> correct we must treat them all as
> “appearances” – and we cannot assume that we
> can take a vantage point outside any of these
> “social spaces,” we must conduct the theory of
> knowledge “inside” each of these “formations
> of consciousness, ” which of course are also
> “formations of spirit. ” Since any putative
> theory of these reasons ( any putative
> Wissenschaft ) must itself be treated as only an
> “appearance , ” it must be treated as a
> historical phenomenon alongside other historical
> phenomena. Moreover, no such purely historical
> phenomenon can claim to be the correct theory (or
> to be the true Wissenschaft ) simply by stating
> that it “works” within its own terms or
> “fits” better the contemporary scene or
> matches up to its participants’ “intuitions,
> ” for that scene and those intuitions are
> themselves only “appearances” and are the
> result of many contingent factors. But even this
> way of putting matters is itself not sufficiently
> skeptical, since it begs the question as to why it
> is required that philosophy should be such a
> Wissenschaft at all. ( In effect, it makes being a
> Wissenschaft into a hypothetical rather than a
> categorical imperative. ) The usual claims about
> philosophy’s
> need to “ground” things cannot be
> satisfactory, nor can it be enough to simply want
> philosophy to be a Wissenschaft – to have a
> taste for large, architectural edifices rather
> than, say, desert landscapes. After all, why is it
> mandatory for there to be a “grounding” of
> thought and action at all ? And why that type of
> grounding? Why should we not settle for something
> else, perhaps a kind of humanistic reflection in
> an essay oriented form, such as Montaigne offered
> ? Or just aphoristic reflections, such as Pascal
> practiced ? On Hegel’s terms, to be genuinely
> skeptical, we should demand of philosophy that it
> give a non question-begging account of why it must
> be a Wissenschaft at all, and in general how it
> can claim whatever authority it claims for itself.
> Thus, in the terms that Hegel sets for his
> thought, he must be able to show why the kind of
> project that he is attempting – a theory of
> knowledge that treats everything, including
> itself, as an “appearance,” a “formation of
> consciousness” – is itself a necessary
> project, something that “we” (the modern
> community, his readers) supposedly require because
> of some feature of our selves. Moreover, not only
> must “we” be said to require it, this
> requirement itself must be intelligible to
> “us” as being more than something “we”
> just contingently happen to want or desire at this
> point in our history. Even if we do happen to want
> it or need it, that wanting and needing must be
> due to features of ourselves that are not optional
> for us. It is therefore important for Hegel to
> show that alternative accounts of what is to count
> for us as authoritative are not merely deficient
> in respect of some particular aim or another ;
> their deficiencies must somehow themselves lead to
> the kind of account that he thinks is the proper
> one . That is, it would not be enough to gather up
> alternative explanations of what is to count as
> authoritative reasons for belief or action and
> then compare them on some scale of how well they
> all managed to satisfy some presupposed
> fundamental aim (for example, matching up with our
> intuitions in reflective equilibrium, or showing
> the rationality of science to be continuous with
> common-sense rationality) . If nothing else, that
> would always leave it open as to the status of the
> presupposed aim itself, and whether that aim was
> optional for us. Instead, the other accounts must
> be shown to be self-undermining in such a way that
> they themselves require the Hegelian account to
> make sense of themselves. This may mean showing
> that there is indeed some aim that is operative in
> the practices of those alternative accounts that
> the Hegelian theory itself better fulfills. But
> that aim must be shown to emerge as a requirement
> itself, as something that those accounts
> themselves generate out of their own failures to
> make good on the terms that they have set for
> themselves. Hegel’s term for this way of looking
> at reason-giving activities is dialectic.
> Dialectic looks at accounts that forms of life
> give of what they take to be authoritative for
> themselves, and how those accounts are transformed
> in terms of considerations internal to the
> accounts themselves. Forms of life as “spirit”
> are constituted by the kinds of self-conscious
> reflections on what is necessary in that form of
> life to explain and justify what for that form of
> life counts as an authoritative reason for belief
> and action. There is obviously much more in a form
> of life that does not fall under the category of
> reason-giving or
> justification, but the reasons for counting a form
> of life as a distinct form of “spirit” have to
> do with the accounts that the people within that
> form of life give of themselves, what they take to
> affirm for them that their self-conceptions are
> adequate, and what it is that they take to
> reassure themselves about what they as individuals
> and as a collective form of life do and
> accomplish. Thus, a crucial part of the story of
> these kinds of reflective forms of life concerns
> how and why it is that they come to take certain
> kinds of things as justifying what they do, how
> and why they take certain kinds of skeptical
> doubts about this to be more serious than others,
> and how and why we, the readers observing those
> reflective forms of life, can take our accounts as
> necessary to answer their skeptical doubts. When
> confronted with self-generated skepticism, a
> reflective form of life seeks reassurance in the
> accounts that it gives itself of what is
> authoritative for it. One of two things happens :
> either the reassurance is successful , and there
> is a renewal of that form of life ; or it fails,
> and a new conception of what is authoritative –
> and thereby a new form of life – is required.
> Although treating the theory of knowledge
> dialectically brings history into the theory of
> knowledge, doing so is not without its pitfalls.
> This would have been especially clear to Hegel,
> since he lived in a time of both growing
> historicism and of political movements that
> appealed for their legitimacy to alleged facts
> about traditions and to the way that, for example,
> the “Germans” or the “French” did things.
> As Hegel clearly saw, however, if one explains our
> being the agents that we are solely in terms of
> historical forces or movements, then one will not
> be able to answer any questions about whether
> being these types of agents – whether having
> adopted these types of reasons – is itself
> justified. The most one could say is that this is
> what we have become. In that way, a purely
> historical argument taken as legitimating anything
> would only be an example of what Hegel called
> “positivity, ” and what Kant called
> “dogmatism. ” It would tell us that we are the
> agents for whom certain types of things and not
> others count as authoritative reasons, but it
> could not give us any reassurance that taking
> these reasons to be authoritative is not, for
> example, some massive act of self-deception or
> self-degradation, nor could it assist that form of
> life in dealing with its own internally generated
> skepticism about any of these things. If it
> appeals to something like “tradition” or just
> asserts that we have come to take such and such as
> authoritative reasons, it cannot even attempt to
> give an account of itself that can show why in any
> non question-begging way its own accounts are
> “better” than other competing accounts. It
> would only be able to say that we have become
> these agents because of such and such contingent
> events in the past. Therefore, if history is to be
> brought into philosophy (and, in particular, the
> theory of knowledge) without its making philosophy
> into a new form of dogmatism or simply an apology
> for the status quo, then the purely historical
> account of the contingencies that have made us who
> we are must be supplemented by a philosophical –
> that is, a dialectical history of self
> consciousness. A dialectical history tells a
> different story from that of the history of
> historians in that it does not concern itself
> primarily with how
> things came about – what social forces were at
> work, what contingencies were brought into play
> – but with showing how succeeding “social
> spaces” contained resources within themselves
> that were able to explain and justify themselves
> over and against earlier alternative accounts and
> to demonstrate and affirm for themselves that
> their own accounts of themselves were
> satisfactory. This dialectical history of
> self-consciousness is thus also a history of
> rationality itself. All forms of reason-giving
> must also be treated as “appearances, ” and
> the historical nature of rationality consists in
> the way in which forms of life develop not only
> practices for evaluating and criticizing other
> practices but also develop practices for
> reflecting on the practices of evaluation
> themselves. Such a dialectical history does not
> claim that the later “formations of
> consciousness” were “fated” to succeed the
> earlier forms, or that the earlier forms were
> “aiming” at the later forms ; it claims that
> only they (or something very much like them) can
> be seen in retrospect to have completed the
> earlier ones, to have provided a structure that in
> retrospect may be understood as having worked out
> the insufficiencies of the earlier ones in such a
> manner that this later form of life has the
> resources within it to justify its way of taking
> things as making up for the insufficiencies of the
> earlier reflective forms of life. The very general
> form of a dialectical progression in the
> Phenomenology of Spirit therefore looks something
> like this. A reflective form of life takes such
> and such to be authoritative reasons for belief
> and action; those types of reasoning then generate
> within their own terms skeptical objections
> against themselves (as Hegel puts it, they
> generate their own “negation”) ; that form of
> reflective life, however, turns out to be unable
> to reassure itself about what it had taken as
> authoritative for itself ; the new form of
> reflective life that replaces it and claims to
> complete it, however, takes its accounts of what
> for it have come to be authoritative reasons to be
> that which was necessary to successfully resolve
> the issues that were self-undermining for the
> older form of life ; but this new reflective form
> of life in turn generates self-undermining
> skepticism about its own accounts, and the
> progression continues. The necessity to be found
> in the dialectical history of self-consciousness
> therefore is not a causal necessity but something
> more like the necessity to be found in a line of
> argument. Just as only some kinds of things can
> complete a certain line of argument, only some
> types of things can complete a dialectical
> historical progression . The failures of certain
> accounts require that other very specific types of
> accounts be given, if those failures are to be
> avoided, and if the later account is to be said to
> be a resolution of the earlier account. Of course,
> for contingent reasons, the progression may not be
> completed. Just as I may fail to complete a
> certain line of thought for contingent reasons –
> I may die before I finish it, I may be rendered
> incapable of completing it, or I may come to find
> that completing that line of thought is not
> important to me anymore – a historical
> progression may for contingent reasons fail to be
> completed. Contingent failure to complete a line
> of thought does not, however, show that such and
> such was not therefore required to complete that
> line of thought.
> The Phenomenology offers a dialectical-historical
> narrative of how the European community has come
> to take what it does as authoritative and
> definitive for itself. These other accounts are
> not confined to purely philosophical accounts but
> constitute all the ways in which “spirit” can
> appear : as art, as politics, as “high culture ,
> ” as social critique, as religion, as science,
> and so on. In tracing out this dialectical
> history, Hegel also wishes to show how the tension
> between the ways individuals take things from
> their own personal point of view and how they take
> things to be justified from a more impersonal
> point of view lead them to revise their own
> self-conceptions and how they try to fit their
> personal accounts of their lives into the larger
> narrative that they take to be going on in their
> community. Now it is clear that for Hegel, even
> something like this dialectical schema itself
> cannot simply be assumed without further question,
> for it rests on the idea that we need to give
> accounts of what we are doing, that we are
> motivated to alter those accounts when they
> generate self-undermining considerations and so
> on. But, again, for Hegel’s program to remain
> true to the aims it sets for itself, it must pose
> the same kind of question : Why is dialectic not
> something optional for us ? What is insufficient
> with our simply “carrying on in the same way,”
> as it sometimes seems that Wittgenstein
> recommends, or with our not bothering as to
> whether all our reasons are in order, or with
> simply ignoring all the difficulties? For Hegel it
> would just beg the question to say that our
> “nature” demands answers to such questions, or
> that it is the “essence” of humanity to have
> such needs. It is incumbent on Hegel therefore to
> provide an account that shows how such “carrying
> on in the same way,” “giving reasons to
> others,” and similar practices themselves
> necessarily lead to the kind of account-giving
> that dialectic seems to presuppose. This is indeed
> the main task of the first three sections of the
> Phenomenology. The work opens by showing how
> certain post Enlightenment attempts at a
> description of our awareness of things in terms of
> some kind of direct awareness of the objects of
> consciousness undermine themselves, and within
> their own terms turn into quite different types of
> descriptions. It also tries to show how the
> attempt to salvage that idea by an appeal to the
> reflective “understanding’s” description of
> supersensible entities itself becomes
> contradictory and antinomial, with the reflective
> “understanding’s” claim that it consistently
> describes the world thereby also undermining
> itself. Since what “Consciousness” took to be
> a straightforward description of the world turned
> out to be antinomial, it finds that it must
> reflect on the accounts it gives itself.
> “Consciousness” thereby becomes
> self-consciousness in trying to give an account of
> how it could possibly grasp the world as it took
> it to be. In each case, so Hegel tries to show in
> the Phenomenology, there is an element of
> teleology at work in that the schema of
> “skepticism, attempts at reassurance, and the
> ultimate insufficiency of the accounts”
> motivates a move to a different account that
> itself is justified only in terms of its
> overcoming the insufficiencies of the preceding
> ones. But at the beginning of the Phenomenology
> (in the chapters on “Consciousness”) it is
> necessarily stated as an
> epistemological and not a historical point.
> Hegel’s argument for the necessity of a
> historical account arises only out of the
> self-undermining failures of these supposedly
> non-historical accounts. Those offered in terms of
> some kind of direct awareness of objects or
> self-sufficient practical activity turn out to be
> insufficient and require an appeal to
> “impersonal reason” – the “view from
> nowhere, ” to use Thomas Nagel’s term – but
> all the different kinds of appeals to an
> “impersonal reason” that supposedly transcends
> all particular social practices turn out to fail
> on the terms that they set for themselves and to
> imply that they themselves must be understood as
> historically embedded forms of reflective social
> practice – for example, the failure of the
> otherwise successful methods of modern science to
> provide foundational answers to social and
> personal conflicts ; or the failure of those
> claims about individual belief and action that do
> not appeal self-consciously to norms but to some
> fixed “inner quality” of ourselves, such as
> Faustian self-determination, emotionalist
> religion, or the activities involving the
> character ideal of the detached yet sincere
> “gentleman, ” the honnete homme of early
> modern French culture. Each turns out not to be
> the consequence of the application of
> “impersonal reason . ” Instead each turns out
> to be a specific historical “formation of
> consciousness, ” something intelligible only
> when seen in its historical context and in terms
> of the ways it tried to redress the historical
> insufficiencies of its predecessors, to realize
> their aims without falling prey to the ways they
> undermined themselves. In the opening chapters of
> the Phenomenology, therefore, Hegel takes himself
> to have given an account of how spirit comes to
> see itself as necessarily being historical without
> at the outset presupposing that it must be
> historical . Or to put it a different way, we, the
> modern readers whom Hegel takes as his audience,
> come to see that the mandatory nature of some
> norms involves an account of their role in a
> complex set of reflective and non-reflective
> social practices – Geist, “spirit” – and
> that the attempt to explain the normative
> character of these social practices by appeal to
> some kind of direct awareness of objects,
> self-sufficient practice, impersonal reason or
> inner quality fails and must be supplanted by a
> historical account of those reflective social
> practices. In this way, history, as a story of a
> sequence of events that are linked together in
> terms of their being parts of an overall account
> of how such and such came to be authoritative for
> a community, is possible only in terms of the
> development of Geist – that is, of the
> development of such reflective social practices.
> To understand the development of a social practice
> is to understand the development of its norms, and
> while there can certainly be causal accounts of
> how norms develop (in terms of historical
> causation, the diffusion of knowledge, the effects
> of new modes of production, and so on) , an
> account of norms as norms is not causal but is
> itself normative. It is an account of how one set
> of norms fails at achieving its aims, how it
> undermines itself or is undermined by the
> acceptance of other norms – in other words, how
> it fails or succeeds on normative grounds itself.
> Indeed, we, the readers, thereby come to see that
> Geist, self-reflective social practice, makes
> history – as distinct
> from mere succession in time – possible through
> Geist’s (spirit’s) reflections on what in its
> past was insufficient and how those
> insufficiencies point in the direction of what
> could be authoritative about later sets of
> activities and practices. Hegel’s
> characterization of the problem of knowledge as
> that of taking all claims, even its own , as
> “appearances” thus comes full circle. The
> theory of knowledge must be historical, and the
> history of our claim-making activities must have
> developed within itself a series of practices for
> reflecting on the practices themselves, on what it
> means in general to be a legitimate ground of
> knowledge, and what it means to be a rational
> agent. This historicized theory of knowledge ,
> which takes itself as simply an “appearance, ”
> is thus self referential, and it must therefore be
> able to work out how it is that it can come to
> take itself as underwriting its own claims not by
> appeal to any transcendent entities or
> “essences” but only by appeal to its own
> free-standing practices and the way in which
> reason – as the principles for evaluating those
> practices in terms of their own internal normative
> structure – has itself historically developed.
> It is part of Hegel’s thesis that reassurance
> about the intelligibility of those definitive
> norms is an especially difficult task for the late
> modern period. Whereas what was authoritative for
> earlier periods could be presented and justified
> through relatively succinct and compact accounts
> related, for example, to early religious
> practices, what is authoritative for moderns
> cannot be so neatly presented. Modern life’s
> demands are also of sufficient complexity and its
> practices are sufficiently reflective so that its
> “spirit” cannot be fully presented in works of
> art or in religious rituals and symbols. Moreover,
> the complexity of modern practice makes it
> difficult to see how the terms of one practice do
> not simply conflict with and therefore undermine
> the terms of other practices (to see why, for
> example, the “demands” of career do not simply
> conflict with the “demands” of family life,
> and to see why one is not therefore simply forced
> to intuitively balance the claims of one over the
> other or simply to blindly choose one or the
> other). The intelligibility and justifiability of
> modern norms therefore always seem to be in
> question. This is the “negativity” of modern
> life. In Hegel’s own day, this “negativity”
> of modern life had itself been exacerbated by the
> image that had arisen among Hegel’s immediate
> predecessors of an earlier form of life, the
> Athenian Greeks, as offering a clear, if
> unattainable, alternative to modern life.
> Competing alongside that idealized image of the
> Athenian Greeks was an idealized image of the
> Middle Ages as a time of tranquility,
> reconciliatory religious faith, and a common
> purpose to life. For those who believed that
> neither a return to Athens nor to medieval Europe
> was in order, there was also a cacophony of other
> alternatives, many claiming to be distinctively
> “modern”: post-Enlightenment social and
> religious thought, pietist religious revival ,
> doctrines of revolutionary freedom, and romantic
> enthusiasms about the personal exploration of the
> “self.” Coming to terms with modern life
> therefore requires a dialectical history of
> European reflective social practice, of European
> Geist itself. This tracking of
> the history of the development of reflective
> social practice leads us, the readers, from the
> way that the form of life of the ancient Athenian
> Greeks undermined itself to the denouement of the
> classical world in Roman life. That denouement set
> the stage for the way in which medieval
> conceptions of faith and chivalry led to the
> self-undermining nature of the early modern
> aristocratic ethos and the ensuing experience of
> “groundlessness” in early modern European
> life. The movements of religious renewal in the
> seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the
> eighteenth century intellectual movement known as
> the Enlightenment attempted to respond to the
> problems brought on by that early modern
> experience of “groundlessness, ” but the
> insufficiencies of both religious renewal and
> Enlightenment practice to re solve those problems
> necessitated the transformation of the early
> modern experience of “groundlessness” into the
> fully modern project of self-grounding, which
> itself then assumed several different forms : the
> French Revolution, modern subjectivistic accounts
> of autonomy and morality, and modern romantic
> inquiries into first-person experiences of the
> self. In constructing the path that those various
> reflective forms of life have retrospectively been
> seen to have taken, we find not only that each
> such “formation of consciousness” is
> intelligible only in terms of the historical
> insufficiencies of the preceding “formations of
> consciousness, ” but that these “formations of
> consciousness” have left remnants of themselves
> in all the succeeding “formations of
> consciousness” such that the intelligibility of
> each – and of our own – is possible only in
> terms of the intelligibility of all of its
> predecessors . Strikingly, Hegel argues that the
> modern European “spirit” can come to terms
> with the path it has taken and the place it has
> ended up only by understanding the sense of
> religiosity it has also developed along the way,
> and by finally understanding this sense of
> religiosity itself in terms of what he calls
> “absolute knowing” : that culmination of the
> Phenomenology of Spirit in which a full
> reconciliation of modern humanity with itself is
> seen to be possible. Having come down the “path
> of despair, ” the modern community thus turns
> out to be the “self-consummating skepticism”
> that has within it the reflective resources to be
> able to continually renew itself against its own
> self generated forms of skepticism. The
> Phenomenology thus serves the task of forming and
> educating the modern European community into
> comprehending that its form of life is “spirit ,
> ” that the European “spirit” has the shape
> it does only by virtue of the accounts that it has
> historically given to itself of what it has taken
> to be authoritative for itself, and that the kind
> of historicized account it must now give of itself
> is possible only because the historical
> insufficiencies of its previous accounts have
> themselves exhibited a kind of retrospectively
> understood teleology within its entire history.
> Accordingly, the Phenomenology is supposed. to
> take its readers, the participants in the modern
> European community’s form of life, through the
> past “formations of consciousness” of the
> European “spirit” – the ways in which that
> “spirit” has both taken the “essence” of
> things to be and the ways in which it has taken
> agents to be cognitively related to that
> “essence” – and demonstrate to them that
> they
> require the kind of account which the
> Phenomenology as a whole provides, that the
> Phenomenology’s project is therefore not
> optional for them but intrinsic to their sense of
> who they are. Thus, the Phenomenology serves as
> the Bildung (the education, formation, and
> cultivation) of its intended readership into
> coming to terms with what is entailed in their
> form of life and what kinds of alternatives are
> available to them. The conclusion of the
> Phenomenology thus originates for Hegel the
> project of showing how this is concretely to be
> carried out, and the “Berlin system” of
> Hegel’s later days shows us how he attempted to
> fulfill this task. The reconstruction of this
> ambitious Hegelian project is the goal of this
> book.
> --------------------------------------------------
> ---------------------