Hegel's Idea of a "Phenomenology of Spirit" (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. Forster
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are also several commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.
The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.
Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.
The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.
Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).
In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal...
