ENG
470 - Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit & Its Readers
Reading
Syllabus • Subject to change; check back frequently • click
here for current week
week one
17 January
— Tuesday
Log
— Course introduction and overview. • Why choose Hegel's Phenomenology
out of all the things this course might have covered? A few answers:
Consequences for all subsequent "critical theory." Repays
collective labor of reading and discussion. A genre-defying masterpiece
of modernist writing. • Introducing ourselves; motives for taking
the class. • A note on the title: the phenomenological method,
the concept of Geist (spirit, mind).
19 January
— Thursday — a soundfile of this class meeting is available
Reading
— Phenomenology of Spirit (henceforth PhG), paragraphs 1-30 (henceforth
¶1-30 and so on).
Log
I
Russian Iwan Kirejewski on Hegel's late lecture style: He "speaks
in an unbearable way, coughs with every word, does not pronounce half
of what he says and he says the other half in a shaky, wailing tone"
(4 March 1830). K's gradual warming to Hegel. • Adorno on Hegel's
apparent contempt for the linguistic expression of his thought. •
Hegel's composition of the "preface" to the PhG in 1807: "If
ever in the course of Hegel's whole life there was an instant where
he was in a position to be at once rounded out and still constantly
looking forward in complete possession of his philosophical thrust and
thus to express himself, it was in the weeks when he was writing the
Preface" (Herman Glockner, Hegel, Stuttgart: Frommann, 1929,
v2:p419). • Compare Inwood's description of Hegel's lecture style,
Hegel Dictionary 22.
II
Discussion of passages provided by various members of the class. Terminological
groundwork, remarks on composition and context. • The working title
of the PhG had been "Science [Wissenschaft] of the Experience
[Erfahrung] of Consciousness [Bewußtseyn]."
• To move from the love of wisdom to its actual attainment. •
The imperative of totalization and system ("The True is the whole"
[¶20]). • Immanent critique and the defect of "one-sidedness."
• Hegel as child and critic of the Enlightenment. •
Bad abstractions and mere universals: stereotypical cognition.
Reduction to a single trait. "Thin" and "thick"
accounts of a subject-matter. • The imperative of concrete working
through to the universal. • Formative education (culture,
Bildung) of the individual recapitulates stages of world-spirit.
• Progressivism and the end of knowledge: nothing qualitatively
new to know? But what about the restlessness of the spirit (¶11
et passim)? Struggle and reconciliation. • Taking seriously the
idea that truth moves in time: a truth that becomes, without
relinquishing its status as truth. • To think the truth as a whole
in motion. • Is the movement toward a predetermined end? •
Aim and result. • Tension within Hegel's thought, push and pull
(Roy Bhaskar). • The bud "refutes" the bloom, and the
bloom the fruit. • Metaphorical thought in the PhG. • The
truth must actualize itself in the world. • A truth that cannot
make itself known in the real world is not a truth. • The example
of Jesus. • Manifestation as Dasein (existence) and as Erscheinung
("appearance"). • "Edification" (Erbauung)
as bait and beginning. • On mathematical cognition (¶43):
held for further discussion on Tuesday. • The concept of the "Absolute"
and the possibility of "reconciliation." • If the species
came to be at peace with itself? • The ethical drive in Hegel:
thinking freedom. • Peace at the end of a gun? That would be the
master/slave dialectic (PhG IV).
III
On the board (several basic, related oppositions the PhG intends to
overcome)
|
Intuition
(Anschauung) |
~ |
Concept
(Begriff; Miller's "Notion") |
|
Immediacy |
~ |
Mediation |
|
Faith |
~ |
Knowledge |
|
Subject
¶17 |
~ |
Substance
¶17 |
week two
24 January
— Tuesday — a soundfile of this class meeting is available
Primary
reading — PhG ¶31-60; "Who
Thinks Abstractly?" (click fourth title down in left column).
• Recommended background reading — Harris, "Hegel's Intellectual
Development to 1807" (Cambridge Companion 25-51). •
Inwood, "Hegel and his language" and "Introducing Hegel"
(Hegel Dictionary 5-26).
Log
I Hegel's idiom and its relationship to German Idealism as a group
formation. Analogy to Frank O'Hara and the New York School in poetry.
• Preview of activities to come: presenting the primary reading
in class, keeping the class log, annotating secondary sources, writing
position papers. • Evanescence of the dream as paradigm for intellectual
experience more generally. • Review of where we'd gotten to on
Thursday. The peculiarity of the preface. Wittgenstein's ladder. PhG
as ladder toward the Science of Logic. • Making and testing
claims about truth. Inhabiting a standpoint in order to effect its immanent
critique and self-overcoming. At what point does our practice come to
contradict our claims and force us to recognize that our definition
of truth was partial, one-sided, inconclusive, or inherently contradictory.
• Truth is the whole (systematic), in historical motion (human
time). Human history as the medium for the emergence of truth. •
Running the film (Adorno on reading Hegel). • Resources for today:
Harris, Inwood, and "Who Thinks Abstractly?" Groups in-themselves
and groups for-themselves. Getting to know one another. And you are
called?
II
Working through the ¶43 and the difference between philosophical
and mathematical cognition (Erkenntnis). • Adorno's reminder: think
with Hegel's words, but also think through the subject-matter (Sache)
his words aim at. What is the matter with mathematical reasoning? •
Distinction between Understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft).
The quantitative, descriptive sciences of the Enlightenment we'll think
more about in PhG V. Blake's "weights and measures." •
The indifference of the geometrical to our cognition of it: neither
it nor I change. • The dance of subject and object in the PhG.
• The ethical critique of science: can limits be set upon what
we should know? Not for signatories to the Faustian pact. • Understanding
as vivisection. Hey, but I wanted to know my cat as alive. • Natural
vs. human sciences. Producing knowledge that transforms the object of
knowledge (ourselves).
III
Definition of Aufheben, -ung (sublate, sublation): characteristic movement
of dialectical reason. Three moments: negation, preservation, and elevation
(cancel, keep, lift). Example: Reason must negate what is one-sided
about Understanding, hold firm to its content, and transpose it to a
different level of the system. • Again: the true is the whole.
A system of differences in which there are no positive terms. Emergence
of structuralism in linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson). By being positioned
relative to a new totality, the "truth" of the part is altered
by its insertion into the whole. • How preserve what you've negated?
The struck-through text (in Derrida). The inclusion of the weaker argument
in the stronger one. Changing one's mind. • Kierkegaard's concern
that what is negated is not preserved (e.g. the individual within
the social totality). • Dialectic between moment (arrest) and movement
(development). Nancy on the restless of the negative. Hyppolite on moment/movement.
IV
¶24 on true and false. What is the status of the false in Hegel's
system? No radical falsity, as no radical evil. More or less developed
truth is all there is. Comforting, since it means you can't be
all that wrong about Hegel. • Another recurrent movement: Immediate
unity (something takes itself for whole), diremption (splitting in two),
and reconciliation. • Aside on Lacan and the splitting of the subject.
Lacan's dependency on Hegelian categories. Buddy movie version of this
class: Hegel and.... For Lacan, the split is irremediable, so
enjoy you symptom. Not so for Hegel. • Example: Teenage narcissist
takes job at Wal-Mart. Totally unique wage slave? Rationalization (lying
to oneself) as distinct from reconciliation. • The cartoon Hegel:
"thesis, antithesis, synthesis." • Can the dialectic
be observed in natural processes? Marx and Engels thought so. But we'll
no much pursue the problem, preferring to situate it in the realm of
human agency and interrelation.
V
Pure subjectivity: the "I think this." Descartes' Cogito.
Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Transcendental unity of apperception. •
The kindergarten version of truth: Berkeley vs. Dr. Johnson. The kickable
thing. How not get stuck at the wrong level?
VI
Negation of the negation. Example of Notebook of a Return to
the Native Land by Aimé Césaire. Necessity of negating
the category "nigger." Monique Wittig on necessity of negating
category "woman." • How's this look within the horizon
of freedom? From the standpoint of fully realized human emancipation?
The counterfactual in Hegel's thought. Thinking otherwise. • What
would persuade a human to be free? • The richly individuated subject
that was Oscar Wilde, before he was killed by a category. • Development
of institutions of freedom. Contemporary USA compared to Prussia in
the early 19th-century. • Tolerating difference (the liberal paradigm).
Hegel would find mere tolerance as a symptom of undeveloped identity.
• The thinkers of alterity (Adorno, Bataille, Levinas, Derrida
) critique Hegel for always reinstating the identical in the last
instance. •
VII
¶16 on absolute, identity, "all is one." Hölderlin's
motto: hen kai pan (Grk., "all in one"). • "A
= A" is fine as an assertion, but empty. It is non-identity that
generates content (Inhalt). A table of contents without a book
attached. • God is infinite, God is love, etc. • The standpoint
of absolute knowledge. Who occupies it? If an isolated individual attained
the standpoint, it wouldn't count as a full realization of the concept,
because he or she would appear to be insane. • Attainment of absolute
knowledge depends upon mutual recognition (Anerkennung), which depends
upon letting go of domination (master-slave relationships). Absolute
knowledge not a content (Mr. Memory, the encyclopedia, Jeopardy), but
a socially-realized set of institutions and relationships.
26 January
— Thursday — a soundfile of this class meeting is available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶61-90.
week
three
31 January
— Tuesday — see Class Log on FC — soundfile available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶91-120. • Recommended reading — Nancy,
"Sense" (Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative 46-54).
• Hyppolite, "Introduction" and "Sensuous Certainty"
(Genesis & Structure 79-99).
2 February
— Thursday — see Class Log on FC — soundfile available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶121-150. • Recommended reading —
Hyppolite, "Perception" (Genesis & Structure 100-117).
week
four
7 February
— Tuesday — see Class Log on FC — soundfile available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶151-180. • Recommended reading —
Hyppolite, "Understanding" (Genesis & Structure 118-139).
9 February
— Thursday — see Class Log on FC — soundfile available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶181-210. • Recommended reading —
Kojeve, "In Place of an Introduction" (Introduction to
the Reading of Hegel 3-30).
week
five
14 February
— Tuesday — see Class Log on FC — soundfile available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶211-240. • Recommended reading —
Pippin, "You Can't Get There from Here" (Cambridge Companion
52-85)
16 February
— Thursday — soundfile available
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶241-270.
Log We spent this class session, for which no activities were assigned beyond the preparation of our primary paragraphs, discussing the experience of "thinking with" Hegel. Problems establishing an apt "tempo" of reading were mentioned, as were concerns about the opacity of Hegel's prose style, the relative absence of concrete exempla, the hostility Hegel manifests toward "pictorial thinking" (Vorstellung; re-presentation) and his preference for Darstellung (direct presentation). We also discussed the dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis (which then becomes a fresh "thesis" in the next round), a process we likened at one point to fractal geometry due to its "scalability."
week
six
21 February
— Tuesday
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶271-300. • Recommended reading — Kojève, "Summary of the First Six Chapters of the PhG" (Introduction 31-70).
23 February
— Thursday
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶301-330. • Recommended reading — Solomon, "Hegel's PhG" (handout, 181-215).
week
seven
28 February
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶331-360.
2 March
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶361-390.
SPRING
BREAK
(catch up on reading)
week
eight
21 March
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶391-420.
23 March
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶421-450.
week
nine
28 March
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶451-480.
30 March
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶481-510.
week
ten
4 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶511-540.
6 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶541-570.
week
eleven
11 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶571-600.
13 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶601-630.
week
twelve
18 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶631-660.
20 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶661-690.
week
thirteen
25 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶691-720.
27 April
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶721-750.
week
fourteen
2 May
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶751-780.
4 May
Primary
Reading — PhG ¶781-808.
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