Hegel: Texts and Commentary

The Preface to the Phenomenology: Translation with Commentary

… it is not saying too much when I claim that anyone understands Hegel’s philosophy if he completely masters the meaning of this preface.

RUDOLF HAYM, Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), 215.

… the most important of all Hegel texts … Whoever has understood the preface to the Phenomenology has understood Hegel.

HERMANN GLOCKNER, Hegel, vol. II (1940), XX, 419.

The Preface to the Phenomenology is one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times…. HERBERT MARCUSE, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), 97.

The Phenomenology is preceded by a remarkable Preface, which is a literary as well as a philosophical masterpiece.

J. N. FINDLAY, Hegel (1958), 83.

The preface roars like a romantic symphony … I compare it to a world-historical festival….

GUSTAV EMIL MÜLLER, Hegel (1959), 203.

The original text of Hegel’s long preface is far from easy to understand. This fact poses problems for the translator which are alleviated but not solved by the addition of a commentary on facing pages. In all of my other translations, including those in the present volume, I have aimed at the greatest possible faithfulness, to the point of giving the reader some feeling for the author’s style. The following translation takes greater liberties than I am wont to take, but is still faithful.

Where the meaning is in doubt, or two interpretations are possible, I have not considered it my task to make up Hegel’s mind. Where he is ambiguous, I have tried to be. I have not knowingly changed his meaning.

As far as possible, his tone is preserved, too. The alternation between cumbersome sentences that go on much too long and powerful epigrams that spell temporary relief is one of the most striking characteristics of this preface. But for the most part Hegel’s excessively long sentences had to be broken up a little. He relies heavily on pronouns, both personal and relative, and in German the gender usually makes clear to what they refer, even if the referent is found many lines back. In English, lacking the guide of gender, one often has to repeat the referent—and one frequently has to begin a new sentence. Moreover, Hegel begins many sentences with such locutions as For how and what it would be suitable to say…. Or: Also because…. Or: As firm as….; At the same time, when….; Just as much….

That all this is exceedingly awkward, there is no denying; but in German it is not as unusual as it would be in English. It may be one of the lesser values of the many quotations from other writers in this volume that they remind us how awkwardly ever so many Germans wrote during this period—or at least during this period.

In sum: the translation is, I believe, easier to follow than the original. Occasionally, splendid lines have been liberated from the coils of incredibly long sentences. Moreover, Hegel’s long paragraphs have been broken up; and this device, too, allows one to call a little more attention to some sentences by letting them conclude a paragraph.

In this connection, Hegel’s letter to Hinrichs, April 7, 1821, is relevant: Even this would make things easier if you made more notches in your paragraphs and broke them up into more sections: the five first pages are one paragraph; the six following ones, ditto; etc. Hegel’s paragraphs had never been as long as those of his young disciple; and by 1821 Hegel had developed a manner of writing very short paragraphs, in compendium style. I have aimed at striking a reasonable medium.

Hegel’s all too abundant italics are more confusing than helpful. In the Phenomenology, German editors do not reproduce them, nor do I.

In the commentary I have inserted relatively few references to my reinterpretation. Naturally, I believe that a reading of the complete reinterpretation would be a great help in understanding the text. Chapter III, which deals with The Phenomenology of the Spirit, is obviously most relevant, and even a glance at the table of contents will give some idea of the topics it treats. I should like to call special attention to section 34, on Hegel’s terminology.

Hegel’s characteristic terms are by no means always his coinages. Weltgeist (world spirit), for example, had been used by Kant, Herder, and Mendelssohn before him, and is also encountered in Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s works. Some other terms now widely associated with Hegel were introduced by Schiller in his essay On the Aesthetic Education of Man (H 7). An und für sich (in and for itself), an sich (in itself), and für uns (for us) occur together on page 37 of Fichte’s Sun-clear Report (1801), and in the same book Fichte contrasts, in passing, räsonnieren (argumentative thinking) and philosophizing. It would be as silly to say that Hegel stole these terms from others as it would be to suppose that he made them up as he went along, in a deliberate effort to be quaint: the point is rather that much that may seem strange today was not so far-fetched at the time. Hegel used expressions that were then current and, as often as not, gave them a new twist.

In an aphorism of the Berlin period, Hegel said: a great man condemns men to explicate him (Ros. 555). For a commentator this is an appropriate motto, but Hegel was almost certainly not thinking of himself, and the motto is as apt for his preface as it is for my commentary: we are all condemned, as Hegel sees it, to try to comprehend what man has thought up to our time and to relive, in condensed form, the experiences of the world spirit. The preface that follows is of a piece with the conclusion of Hegel’s introductory lectures on the philosophy of history: The moments which the spirit seems to have left behind, it also possesses in its present depth. As it has run through its moments in history, it has to run through them in the present—in the Concept of itself (VG 183 L).

The parallel to Freud should not be missed. Indeed, the first of these two sentences might well have been written by Freud, except that he would probably have said soul, not spirit. But the second sentence, too, is reminiscent of psychoanalysis: recapitulating our past is the price of freedom.

* * *

Hegel’s own description of the Phenomenology appeared in the Jena cultural supplement not before publication, as was then customary for Selbstanzeigen,¹ but on October 28, 1807.

"Announcements of new books:

"Jos. Ant. Goebhardt’s Bookstore, Bamberg and Würzburg, has published and sent to all good bookstores: G. W. F. Hegel’s System of Science. Volume One, containing The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Large Octavo. 1807. Price: 6 fl.

"This volume deals with the becoming of knowledge. The phenomenology of the spirit is to replace psychological explanations as well as the more abstract discussions of the foundation of knowledge. It considers the preparation for science from a point of view, which makes it a new, an interesting, and the first science of philosophy. It includes the various forms of the spirit as stations on the way on which it becomes pure knowledge or absolute spirit. In the main parts of this science, which in turn are subdivided further, consideration is given to consciousness, self-consciousness, observing and acting reason, the spirit itself as ethical, educated, and moral spirit, and finally as religious in its different forms. The wealth of the appearances of the spirit, which at first glance seems chaotic, is brought into a scientific order which presents them according to their necessity in which the imperfect ones dissolve and pass over into higher ones which constitute their next truth. Their final truth they find at first in religion, then in science as the result of the whole.

"In the preface the author explains himself about what seems to him the need of philosophy in its present state; also about the presumption and mischief of the philosophic formulas that are currently degrading philosophy, and about what is altogether crucial in it and its study.

"A second volume will contain the system of Logic as speculative philosophy, and of the other two parts of philosophy, the sciences of nature and the spirit."

Hegel’s own Table of Contents (1807)²

1  Of scientific knowledge

2  The element of truth is the Concept, and its true form the scientific system

3  Present position of the spirit

4  The principle is not the completion; against formalism

5  The absolute is subject—

6  —and what this is

7  The element of knowledge

8  The ascent into this is the Phenomenology of the Spirit

9  The transmutation of the notion and the familiar into thought—

10  —and this into the Concept

11  In what way the Phenomenology of the Spirit is negative or contains what is false

12  Historical and mathematical truth

13  The nature of philosophical truth and its method

14  Against schematizing formalism

15  The demands of the study of philosophy

16  Argumentative thinking in its negative attitude—

17  —in its positive attitude; its subject

18  Natural philosophizing as healthy common sense and as genius

19  Conclusion: the author’s relation to the public

¹ The author’s description of his book.

² Only the part covering the preface has been translated here. In the original the headings are run on and not numbered.

TRANSLATION

1.   Of scientific knowledge¹

[I.1]

In the preface of a book it is customary to explain the author’s aim, the reasons why he wrote the book, and what he takes to be its relationship to other treatments, earlier or contemporary, of the same subject. In the case of a philosophical work, however, such an explanation seems not only superfluous but, owing to the nature of the subject matter,² altogether improper and unsuited to the end in view. For what contents and tone would be appropriate for a preface to a philosophical work? Perhaps a historical statement concerning the tendency and point of view, the general contents and results of the work, an attempt to connect sundry claims and assertions about the truth? Philosophical truth cannot be presented in this manner.

Philosophy deals essentially with the general in which the particular is subsumed. Therefore it seems, more than in the case of other sciences, as if the aim or the final results gave expression to the subject matter itself, even as if they did entire justice to its very essence, while the way in which things are worked out in detail may seem to be unessential. Yet people do not suppose that the general idea of, say, the nature of anatomy—perhaps as the knowledge of the parts of the body, considered qua their lifeless existence—automatically furnishes us with the subject matter itself. Everybody realizes that, if we want possession of the contents of this science, we must also exert ourselves to master the particulars, the detail.

Moreover, such an aggregate of information really has no right to the name of science; and any discussion of its aim and other such generalities is usually no different from the manner in which the content—i.e., the nerves, the muscles, etc.—is discussed, too: in both cases, the manner is equally historical and void of Concepts.³ In the case of philosophy, however, such an introductory discussion would be an oddity: for it would employ this same manner while demonstrating that this manner is incapable of grasping the truth.⁴

The very attempt to determine the relationship of a philosophical work to other efforts concerning the same subject, introduces an alien and irrelevant interest which obscures precisely that which matters for the recognition of the truth. Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other. It does not comprehend the difference of the philosophical systems in terms of the progressive development of the truth, but sees only the contradiction in this difference. The bud disappears as the blossom bursts forth, and one could say that the former is refuted by the latter. In the same way, the fruit declares the blossom to be a false existence of the plant, and the fruit supplants the blossom as the truth of the plant. These forms do not only differ, they also displace each other because they are incompatible. Their fluid⁵ nature, however, makes them, at the same time, elements of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which