Session 1: Foreword

Written By Cadell Last

Last night we started our journey with G.W.F Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We may consider this start to be the “calm before the storm”. What is deceptive in confronting the Foreword (and perhaps also the Introduction written by Hegel himself), is that we get a “general overview” or a “big picture”. While such a big picture is indeed important, what is monstrously universal in Hegel’s thought can be found in the immense density and depth of the particular details. In other words, the big picture may pull us in, but the wild ride ahead will be involved in diving head first into the cracks and crevices of Hegel’s thought, as he takes us on a logical adventure through the shapes of the coming-to-be of knowing (from Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Knowing).

Personal Intro

There is something miraculous in Hegel, at least from my perspective, in the bringing together of the universal and the particular. In my history, I was always pulled by an attempt to understand universality. I still remember when I started my intellectual journey, my mind immediately attempted to synthesize all of the knowledge accessible to my cognition. I was lucky enough to fail high school, and take an extended two year detour at a community college, in a program titled “General Arts and Science” (which is still active and with the same basic function). This program exposed me to everything, from chemistry, biology, statistics, political science, critical theory, and everything in-between. It was in this wild exploratory spirit, totally unconnected from any practical demand in myself, that I realized my passion was for a knowledge connected to humanity. Whether I was studying cell biology or political science, I would always view the knowledge from a human perspective, i.e. that there were humans engaged in a certain knowledge practice. I was always skeptical of the view that we were investigating something “in-itself”, let’s say, without a connection to something that was “for-us”. In that sense, you might say, I was a “spontaneous Hegelian”.

In any case, this self-understanding led me to a combined double major in university in anthropology and history. My historical ambition here was always what we might call “big historical”, which was perceived as unconventional to standard historical education. Standard historical education did not extend beyond what we might call civilization proper, thus it did not consider anthropological time scales, or cosmic time scales, from a human perspective. I remember the book Maps of Time by David Christian had an enormous impact on my thinking. I was interested in the universal, how processes of matter, life and mind originated, and how they were all connected to each other. My anthropological ambition was always situated within this framework, and I gravitated towards the evolutionary point of view, specifically the way fields of primatology and paleoanthropology could help me to understand the origin of the human mind, language, culture, technology and society. I remember In The Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall had an enormous impact on my thinking. I was fascinated by the idea that chimpanzees and the other great apes were our closest relatives, evolutionarily speaking, and that we could learn a lot about our contemporary behaviour and nature, as well as our specific differences, by paying attention to their behaviour and nature. At least that was a starting point.

This immersion in natural history, always from a human standpoint, led me to the consequences of this difference. In other words, no matter how enigmatic the origins of matter, life and mind proved to be, no matter how mysterious the connections between these processes were, and how difficult it proved to describe these origins and connections, what I could not escape was the fact of the human difference that stood before me. This difference was not only in the gaze and voice of others, but in my very own gaze and voice, which in any case confronted me everyday. My focused shifted from the past to what this past meant for the future. This was in large part because of the book The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil not only connected the big history picture directly to human evolution and questions of anthropological interest, but he also started to break from conventional scientific thinking, and projected into the future with wild speculations about the consequences of this historical understanding for the 21st century. According to Kurzweil, my experience of adulthood was not only destined to be unrecognizable in comparison to past human generations, but it was going to be so totally and utterly different from anything contemporary humans can think: a confrontation with real otherness.

I suppose from that point onwards the real work on my own philosophical career started to form. I started to write papers connecting evolutionary anthropology and big history to futurist speculations. That would end up becoming the foundation for not only my entry into a doctoral program at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA), which specialized in questions of evolution, cognition and complexity at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), but also the foundation for my PhD thesis, Global Brain Singularity. For about 5-6 years straight I worked on the papers that would become the chapters of Global Brain Singularity, all of which are also published as separate academic journal articles. The basic structure of the book reflects four different temporal phases:

  • Part 1 focuses on the history of the universe from a human perspective,

  • Part 2 focuses on the present of the human system as in a major transition between worlds,

  • Part 3 focuses on the potential future of the human system given what we know of historical and evolutionary mechanisms, and

  • Part 4 brings us back to a type of meta-analysis of the present moment.

It is Part 4, which emerged in encountering the radical limitations and contradictions of my personal being, as involved in this whole quest, perhaps even ultimately recognizing the impossibility in my own desire. In any case these limitations and contradictions are what forced me to consider more deeply both phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This consideration involved questioning more deeply the way evolutionary theory was disconnected from my day-to-day being, however useful it may have been to get a better understanding of the past and the future from the standpoint of the present.

Ultimately it was exposure to the work of the Slovenian school, in the works of Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar, that helped me to make the bridge between my interests in big history, evolutionary anthropology, futurist speculation, and the modern interpretations of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The works that had the greatest impact on me include Žižek’s Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil, as well as Zupančič’s What Is Sex?, and Dolar’s “The Atom and the Void”. This tradition helped me to understand the way some contemporary philosophers were working at the intersection of phenomenology, with a focus on the nature of idealism, and psychoanalysis, with a focus on the nature of dreams. Both the nature of the ideal, and the nature of the dream, as it related to my embodied and embedded historical existence, was something of which I needed a deeper understanding. What was driving my pursuit in this intellectual journey if not a self-referential ideal and a dream?

This, in turn, forced me to consider the very foundations or roots of this thought tradition, and led me to confronting the monster of G.W.F Hegel (see: Phenomenology of Spirit) and Sigmund Freud (see: Return to Freud), as well as other great thinkers, like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, etc. What was salient to my mind in the work of Hegel and Freud, was an emphasis on the way in which universal history, as an ideal or a dream, was recapitulated developmentally in the individual or the particular. This forced me, to not only consider universal history from a mode of externalized cognition for human beings (as I had done throughout most of my intellectual journey), but also to consider universal history from a mode of internalized cognition embodied in the particular, which in turn would change the way I could think about the external. For both Hegel and Freud, what was at stake was not an understanding of the origin of the universe, life or mind from an external point of view, but rather understanding of the origin of the self, in the history of the spirit, and in the history of the body, that really helped a deeper situation of my intellect, personally. This was not the all-too-common rejection of the universal in a post-modern mode of thinking, but a new thinking about the universal, that must pass through an individual subject in order to come-to-be what it truly is, both in-itself and for-itself.

It is at this point, where my personal introduction can largely be concluded, since it brings us to where we are together, in a course focused on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. What is this work trying to say?

HEGEL AS UNIVERSAL

Hegel is indeed aiming for a universality. But this universality starts first and foremost with an interest in, not only a “love of wisdom or knowing”, but rather a desire for “actual wisdom or knowing”. In other words, Hegel breaks from classical or traditional thinking about philosophy by having a more engaged or actual understanding of wisdom and knowing, as opposed to a more reflective or distanced understanding of wisdom and knowing (running off into the caves, or off into a monastery). We can hear think of Hegel as being far more interested in actual cognition, its operations and functions, before ever taking seriously the reflections or propositions of that same cognition. What is the quality of the actual cognition which is reflecting and proposing? Is it a cognition capable of actual wisdom or knowing? Here I might speculate that, for example, Hegel may see the early thought phases of my own intellectual development, as being constituted by reflections and propositions, of an intellect that was still maturing, still cultivating a stance of actual wisdom and knowing, but not yet actual wisdom and knowing. One can quickly here see how, in bringing Hegel into a personal engagement, it can be a little disturbing, since one may lose all of one’s deeply held thoughts and beliefs about the truth. Hegel is here a shattering experience.

Hegel ultimately thinks on the level of the ideal. There are here paradoxes, as there are in all of Hegel’s thinking, as it relates to material. For example, for Hegel, what is today considered the philosophy of materialism, is for Hegel, the pinnacle of idealism. In other words, or said differently, what we might classify variously as natural science, or the epistemological distinctions “physics”, “chemistry”, “biology”, and so forth, are for Hegel, not to be understood as material, somehow unmediated by subjectivity, but rather radical ideals of subjectivity, which have a unique historicity, within the thought-phase of scientific spirit’s own becoming. What is ultimate here for Hegel, is not a scientific society that places the “natural sciences” as the pinnacle of thought, but rather, a scientific society that places the very capacity for “ecstatic dreaming”, or the “pure notion itself”, as the pinnacle of thought. Thus, a Hegelian society, is not a society that undervalues science, but rather brings science to the level of spirit, and cultivates a true spirit science, a science of capable of understanding the nature of the dream in-itself. After all, is not the whole of natural science, something which is given birth in the ecstatic dream? How else are we to understand the historical subjectivity of a Rene Descartes? Isaac Newton? Galileo Galilei? (i.e. the universally recognized fathers of modern natural science).

This brings us to Hegel as a dialectician, a tool which he uses to bring himself to knowing or wisdom, and a tool which he uses and applied on the level of the ideal. Dialectics may not be Hegel’s “ultimate method” (this is something which we can question in understanding his later works, e.g. Science of Logic), however, and nonetheless, the dialectic is something which features prominently in Hegel’s capacity to derive the becoming of knowing itself, in the Phenomenology of Spirit. As a dialectician, Hegel is opposed to the way in which subjectivity often confuses the truth with static propositions, that is in the activity of “giving reasons”, or “stating conditions” in a form of “external cognition” identifying with “proofs” of this or that, derived from this or that axiomatic foundation. Hegel would claim that such modes of thinking are the very opposite of the truth, and a way for subjectivity to avoid its own temporal self-mediation. Hegel’s dialectic is rather a tool to think the very movement of the notion in-itself, which is subjectivity itself “through and through” (as opposed to subjectivities “reasons”, “conditions”, “proofs” and so forth).

The two most important books published by Hegel, include the aforementioned works, Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. There are of course other important works, but for our purposes, we can focus on what these two works aim to achieve. The Phenomenology of Spirit — of course the focus of our whole course — is a book that aims to explicate the logical movement of historical consciousness (its notion) for knowing of truth in-itself to be for-itself, through the stages or shapes defined as:

  • Consciousness

  • Self-Consciousness

  • Reason

  • Spirit

  • Religion

  • Absolute Knowing

Here one can understand his major interlocutor to be Immanuel Kant, who claimed that the truth in-itself is an impossible and unknowable “noumenal” beyond of the phenomenal realm. For Hegel, this very proposition must be understood as a part of the Absolute’s own self-revelation internal to phenomena, i.e. the way the in-itself of noumena appears to phenomenal consciousness for-itself as impossible/unknowable is a positive, and not a negative revelation. In other words, what Hegel suggests, is not that the noumenal in-itself becomes completely transparent and known to phenomena, but rather that the very nature of the noumenal in-itself as impossible to fully know, is a positive condition for the phenomenal state of absolute knowing. Consequently, in the state of absolute knowing, the very desire for everything to be completely known and transparent, is itself transcended and replaced with the recognition that reality is in-itself incomplete, which is in turn the very condition for subjectivities own processual becoming, and the opening of a new quality of thinking, capable of an openness in emptiness. To put it in yet another perspective, what underlies the desire for completed knowing, is a form of cognition which desires to end its own process (a form of cognition that ultimately desires death). Thus, in absolute knowing, there is a type of confrontation with death before death, or a type of dissolution of all the logical categories which spirit had built up, in the very journey explicated in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The Science of Logic, on the other hand, is a work that focuses and works from, one might say, the state of absolute knowing. Consequently, like the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel again has his focus on a difference with Kant, this time, not as it relates to the truth in-itself, but rather in relation to the dimension of universal categorization. For Kant, his idealist philosophy is based on a certain understanding of a priori categories. This conceptual system of the understanding includes the idea that categories like space and time are not reflections of the physical in-itself (or noumena), but rather properties of the mind, within which we can find 12 other categories, that human subjectivity uses to describe reality. These categories include:

  • Unity

  • Reality

  • Substance and Accident

  • Possibility and Impossibility

  • Plurality

  • Negation

  • Causality and Dependence

  • Existence and Non-Existence

  • Totality

  • Limitation

  • Community (reciprocity)

  • Necessity and Contingency

For Hegel, his relation to Kant is once more a subtractive effort. In the state of absolute knowing, a radically empty state devoid of presuppositions, Hegel seeks to inquire as to how the categories of the understanding are derived by simple thought (which itself becomes being, i.e. thought = being). In other words, Hegel may be impressed with Kant’s system of categories, but he is not convinced that Kant’s system is a transcendent a priori. He rather suspects Kant’s system of categories to have a genesis, and must be derived from simple empty knowing. From this investigation, not only are Kant’s categories historicized, but also the very process by which simple thinking develops categories of the understanding, is explicated.

What all of this amounts to is a Hegelian idealism that seems to my mind to be radically historical and immanentist. In other words, Hegel’s idea is not a naturalist idea, it is not a deconstructive idea, and it is not a transcendental idea. A naturalist idea would reduce the signifier, or our own conceptualization, to the way in which it can reflect natural being in-itself. One may think this is the spontaneous intuition of the natural sciences. A deconstructive idea would suggest that all categories, as historically mediated, ultimately only find truth in their undermining or in being usurped. One may think this is the spontaneous intuition of the postmodern condition. A transcendental idea would suggest that all categories reflect some perfect ideality independent of historical mediation, in some eternal reality beyond the way things appear to historical subjectivity. One may think this is the spontaneous intuition of the religious condition. However, a Hegelian idealism, as a historical immanentist idea, is not really accurately described by any of these positions, even if an aspect of these positions is contained within the very historical movement of the idea as such. For Hegel, the idea is something that only has existence in a historical process, and the categories of the understanding, while having a truth in-themselves, must be derived by thought in that historical process. Furthermore, while all categories of the understanding may find truth in the way they fall apart, this does not negate the fact that, the truth was also their becoming, and the powers that they revealed and actualized, in the very self-appearance of that process.

This brings us up to where we must confront the post-Hegelian ecology of philosophical mind.

HEGEL’S AND ANTI-HEGEL’S EVERYWHERE!

When we think about the conceptual field of post-Hegelian philosophy, what confronts us is something very complex and sophisticated, and yet something that is also massively under-theorized. What is lost in this under-theorization, is a risk of failure in lifting the very notion of philosophy itself to a higher order in the 21st century. Are we still, following Hegel, concerned with and committed to actual knowing or wisdom in our philosophical pursuits and journeys?

What is very clear when we look at the conceptual field of post-Hegelian philosophy, is that we can find many, many affirmations and negations of Hegel’s work. If we look internal to the affirmations or the self-identified “Hegelians”, we can see many different forms and styles of Hegelianism. From the “French Hegelianism” of a figure like Alexandre Kojève, who influenced many French intellectuals, existentialists, and psychoanalysts in the early-to-mid 20th century, to the “American Hegelianism” of a figure like Robert Brandom, who has taken a decidedly practical interpretation of Hegel, influenced by the traditions of American pragmatism, which is now in vogue in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world, to the “Slovenian Hegel” of a figure like Slavoj Žižek, who has developed a type of subversive Hegelian thought through engaging his work with retroactive readings of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and contemporary cultural theory.

All in all some notable figures and works to investigate internal to the field of Hegelianism include:

On the other hand, we can see many of the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy, as essentially building their entire paradigms for thinking, out of a movement that we could characterize as anti-Hegelian, or as a negation of Hegel. This is interesting in and of itself. The fact that so many thinkers have attempted to build a philosophy out of an anti-Hegelian impulse suggests that there is something inherent to Hegel’s thought that allows one to, at the very least, develop potentially new thought for a new time. Hegel from this vantage point can be seen as a philosophical training for the development of the next generation of philosophers. Once one has engaged in battle with Hegel, then one has won the capacity to differentiate from him. However, from a different perspective, or opposite perspective, it could be that this tendency to anti-Hegelianism represents an attempt to overcome a great mind without properly understanding that mind (i.e. to differentiate simply for differentiations sake). This interpretation could lend itself to the idea that many anti-Hegelian motions are simply the demonstration of an immature or even infantile mind, a mind that does not want to put in the work necessary to really understand Hegel. How are we to understand the difference between a genuine anti-Hegelian motion, and an anti-Hegelian gesture that is essentially the result of a straw-man?

This is a genuine problem. However, from a strange third perspective, we can offer another possibility for interpretation. We could say that, whether a thinker has offered to us a genuinely anti-Hegelian motion, or whether an anti-Hegelian gesture is essentially an infantile proposition, perhaps Hegelianism in its broadest and most mature form has the capacity to reinvent itself through fully accepting and encountering this very negativity head on. For example, if Marx’s fundamental critique of Hegel is that Hegel does not engage the political-economic dimension of history, then perhaps we do need to re-think political-economy from a Hegelian standpoint, after the practical failure of Marxism as its own stand-alone paradigm? Or, for example, if Deleuze’s fundamental critique of Hegel is that Hegel does not allow for essential difference, sublating everything back into self-relational identity, then perhaps we do need to re-think the nature of difference from a Hegelian standpoint, after the practical failure of Deleuzianism as its own stand-alone paradigm? In other words, what if Hegelianism is robust and flexible enough to withstand totally reinventing itself through all such criticisms and attempts at overcoming? After all, if the foundation of Hegelianism is not only a search for true knowing or wisdom, but actually thinking from such a standpoint, grounded and yet immersed in the ecstatic dreaming of the ideal, and constantly re-constituting itself through a dialectical process that is subjective through and through, what is the whole of post-Hegelianism, in either its affirmative or negative dimension, but the challenge of really confronting the immanence of such phenomena?

But how?

Let’s first think about what type of thinkers and ideas we are being forced to encounter as anti-Hegelian gestures. Here you can find some notable anti-Hegelians — classified based on whether or not, at some point in the development of their thought, Hegel became a significant opponent or point of reference for negation — coupled with their major works:

What this clearly signals is that the greatest minds in the past 200 years, have openly “gone to war” with Hegel. How can Hegel withstand such a concrete intellectual onslaught? Well, the first thing to recognize is that the crazy dimension built into Hegel’s thought is the dimension of absolute knowing, which has a very unique relation to death, that is, the subject of absolute knowing is basically already dead. One can think about this as a subject that has found death before death has (inevitably) found it, by truthfully testing itself (its own spirit) at every point along its own phenomenological pathway. In this way, the subject of absolute knowing, is not only a subject that can withstand deadly attacks, but also a subject that can rethink its entire network of logical presuppositions from that same empty point of self-reference.

Here I will offer a personal example that I have found methodologically instructive in my own work, inspired from the work of Slavoj Žižek. The philosophical method upon which the totality of Žižek’s career rests, is a type of weird or paradoxical combination of a total identification with Hegel, and a total identification with an anti-Hegelian, the french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In putting together Hegel with an example of someone who attempts to develop in the opposite direction, Žižek is capable of carefully giving birth to something totally different, that is what we could call the phenomenon of Žižekianism (which demands its own interpretation, and indeed there are already many books written on the topic). Here is Žižek’s own description of how this method basically functions, from one of his masterworks, Less Than Nothing:

“The aim of Less Than Nothing is — to repeat Hegel (in a radical Kierkegaardian sense) with the Party Troika Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič along the axis Hegel-Lacan as its “undeconstructible” point of reference: whatever we are doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon.”

The point of pointing out this philosophical method is not to suggest that one also follows this path, but to demonstrate how Hegelianism can be combined with its opposite (in this case, Lacanianism), to potentially generate a creative and open-ended third element that is neither of the two (i.e. Žižekianism). One could here imagine performing such a gesture with Hegel and Nietzsche, Hegel and Deleuze, or Hegel and Girard, for example. Such thinking could radically alter the way in which both affirmative and negative post-Hegelian philosophy, basically functions.

THE FOREWORD IN-ITSELF AND FOR-US

The edition of the Phenomenology of Spirit we will be reading includes a Foreword from Hegelian scholar J.N. Findlay. In this blog I will not only give an overview of this Foreword, but also offer a contemporary engagement with this Foreword, with the help of Hegelian scholar Slavoj Žižek. Findlay starts the Foreword by stating:

“Phenomenology of Spirit […] is meant to be a forepiece that can be dropped and discarded once the student, through deep immersion in its contents, has advanced through confusions and misunderstanding to the properly philosophical point of view.” (p. v)

What this captures is the idea that, one should not expect to find in the Phenomenology something that one can simply identify with for all time. The point of the Phenomenology is not for you as reader to engage in an absolute identification with it, i.e. the book. The point of the Phenomenology is for you as reader to understand the coming to be of knowing itself (explicated in the stages consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowing), so that you can actually operate in history from a true standpoint of knowing, with or without Hegel by your side or in your mind. In this sense, Hegel’s Phenomenology functions as a Master as a type of “vanishing mediator”. To quote Žižek on the function of a vanishing mediator from Absolute Recoil (2014):

“A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom.”

This delivery into the abyss is precisely what Hegel offers and nothing more. Hegel does not offer you a positive project to cling onto. Hegel does not offer you a final resolution or reconciliation that will make everything alright. Hegel offers you the chance for actual knowing in the abyss of your own freedom. Such an offer is merely to be able to be the type of entity that knows that you can endure and withstand absolute dissolution and destruction.

In the Foreword, Findlay structures his analysis of the book as a whole with three basic propositions that may help you as a reader to confront the book itself:

  1. World Spiritual Stages of Mental Progress

  2. Sensuous Immediacy to Science of Knowing

  3. Spiritual Necessity of Absolute Knowing

Let us first start with the idea that the Phenomenology offers us the “World Spiritual Stages of Mental Progress”. From Findlay:

“Phenomenology of Spirit […] task is to run through, in a scientifically purged order, the stages in the mind’s necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy, showing thereby that this position is the only one the mind can take, when it comes to the end of the intellectual and spiritual adventures described in the book.” (p. v)

This points us towards the nature of the “Absolute Idea”. The Absolute Idea is not some transcendent notion disconnected from the world, but rather historically immanentist (as suggested above). The Absolute Idea is a historical process that unfolds itself in the development of spirit, and is structured by a certain logic, that of the logic that Hegel seeks to bring to our attention in this dramatic work. From following this logic one is taken on an adventure, and an adventure that brings one to a certain standpoint of knowing. When we are at this standpoint of knowing, it forces us into a different way of thinking about the absolute. It is not clear if this standpoint of knowing was properly articulated in pre-Hegelian thinking. Moreover, if we do think it, it makes us reflect on the situation for 21st century thought, which must abandon pre-Hegelian metaphysical ideas of the absolute (i.e. non-historical interpretations of the absolute).

Here from Slavoj Žižek in Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020):

“The safest indication of this rupture [with the traditional metaphysical universe] is our gut feeling that overwhelms us when we read some classical metaphysical text — something tells us that today, we simply cannot any longer think like that… And does such a gut feeling also not overwhelm us when we read Hegel’s speculations about the absolute idea, etc.?”

What the hell is Žižek going on about here? Žižek is suggesting that, from the standpoint of absolute knowing proper, the absolute idea in its own real is much different than the way it was described by pre-Hegelian logicians or spiritualists. To be devastatingly concrete, when we think about spiritual or religious gurus with long beards as the pinnacle of knowing, talking about the eternal or the absolute being as something which precedes our existence and something which we may return to when we die, we are missing the point of the Hegelian rupture. The Hegelian rupture is much more abyssal than that, and forces us to think what is actually happening in 21st century ideational process. Thus, the subject of absolute knowing, and its position within the absolute idea today, may be totally different then the subject of absolute knowing, and its position within the absolute idea in the past.

Nevertheless, Hegel offers us, contemporary spirit, a vantage point from which to view the history of phenomenological development. He was able to give this to us by studying history, and deriving from the actual history of spirit, a logical matrix of world spirit’s existential possibilities. To say this in plain language, Hegel was able to see that the history of the absolute idea manifested itself in the same logic of development, whether in China, India, Africa, Middle East, Europe or the Americas. Another way of saying this is that the Absolute Idea does not so much care for space and time, what is primary is its own internal and necessary logic.

This logic, as has been repeated, is the logical series running from consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion and absolute knowing. Irrespective of whether the Absolute Idea develops 5,000 years ago, or 2,500 years ago, or whether the Absolute Idea develops in China or in Africa, it manifests itself with this logical form, at least it has historically.

However, what is different about our time, and what even makes a thinker like Hegel possible, is that this absolute idea is itself becoming self-reflexive and directive. In other words, there are subject’s of absolute knowing, who are not content to sit with their knowing in an isolation from historical process (i.e. running to the caves or the monasteries), but who are getting involved in history itself. This involves not only moving through the logical stages of the absolute idea in their own being, but also taking responsibility for the ideational process as such, and that all subjects must move through this idea into the unknown, into the engagement with self-limit and self-contradiction.

This new qualitative level of the absolute idea seems to involve the true globality of its concrete expression. If Hegel were with us today, capable of seeing the photos that NASA captured of the Earth from the point of view of external cognition, he would not see this as an expression of our unity in the Absolute Idea (as many natural scientists do, i.e. expressing the necessity of political unity after taking in the vision of the Earth as totality). Rather, from a Hegelian point of view, the concrete expression of the Absolute Idea is the fact that the idea as such is now global. In other words, the logical developmental necessity of spirit from consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowing, is no longer unfolding itself in relative isolation (e.g. China, Middle East, Europe, Africa, Americas), but rather unfolding itself in a global form. Much of our 20th century struggles is about the immanence of this globality (here think about the World Wars I and II, and the Cold War, which was really a third World War). Today our World War is a war mediated by the emergence of the internet, and the fight for a form of political-economy which makes sense for the pragmatic interrelation of all global powers, and the cultivation of deeper self-insight among all peoples.

Now let us move to the idea that the Phenomenology of Spirit offers us the logical explication of development from “Sensuous Immediacy to Science of Spirit”. From Findlay:

“Phenomenology of Spirit […] related to the time at which it was written, a time at which an abstract Absolute dominated philosophy. […] While Hegel undoubtedly thought that the sequence of thought-phases described in the Phenomenology […] was a necessary sequence, he still did not think it the only possible necessary sequence or pathway to Science. […] The sequence of phases to be studied in the Phenomenology therefore involves a fine blend of the contingently historical and the logically necessary.” (p. v-vii).

What this means is that, while the Phenomenology attempts to explicate the development of the often repeated sequence of stages, as derived from actual study of the history of world spirit; as already alluded to, this very logical development could itself change in the future of spirit (i.e. as it may be changing in the global unfoldment of the idea here and now). However, what for Hegel would not change is the starting point (sensuous immediacy); and the end point (absolute knowing). Thus, what would remain constant in the nature of the absolute idea independent of historicity of the idea, is the way it begins and the way it “ends”. This “end” has to be thought differently then some static end-point, but rather as a way in which the absolute idea comes to know itself so that it can really begin thinking anew. In this way, the end is a new beginning, and in no way an actual end of process.

However, it is worth our time to really think the way in which contingency and necessity are worked together in Hegel’s thinking. Here from Žižek in Sex and the Failed Absolute (2018):

“Hegel [on] historical movement: a historical movement is, in its first form of appearance, a contingent occurrence, and it is only through its repetition that the inner notional necessity is asserted.”

What does this mean for the development of the logical process of the absolute idea? What it means is that the stages that have run in the sequence consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, absolute knowing in the past of actual human history, not only developed in that sequence due completely to a unique mixture of contingent appearing of those stages and their notional necessity, repetitively asserted by real human subjects in that past; but that in the future of the absolute idea, these contingent unfoldings may be notionally necessitated in an other pattern by real human subjects in the future. Indeed, in the 20th century, we can already detect that spirit’s of absolute knowing attempted to assert an other developmental possibility, by replacing the level of religion with the level of either communism or fascism or capitalism.

There are a few important things to say about the potential otherness of the absolute idea. The first thing to say about it is that the deeper or more engrained the developmental level (for example the level of self-consciousness or reason), the more difficult it would be to imagine the level developing in another way. The second thing to say is that, even the higher levels, like spirit and religion, are difficult to affirm in another way, without the risk of great catastrophe and failure (as discovered in the 20th century when reason tried to become independent of spirit). At the same time, due to the radical contingency of the idea, and the fact that the idea only gains a reality through becoming posited as a notional necessity, if the very moment in which the idea finds itself, does not authentically call forth the levels of spirit or religion in the ways in which they were called forth in the past, then such a path is also doomed. The authentic self-positing of necessity by real subjectivity is what it needed.

This is where we need real depth of thought, connected to both the unconscious of thinking, and the real possibilities of historical action.

In order to really think the depth of the contingency of Hegel’s Absolute Idea we need also to be able to think a situation in which the starting point for the idea, sensuous immediacy, could itself mediate a totally different logical necessity, even at the lower levels of the idea, i.e. on the level of self-consciousness or reason, and still reach the level of absolute knowing. Is that really possible? This is incredibly difficult to think, and it certainly strains the imagination, and even pushes us to the idea that perhaps there is a deeper necessity internal to this free contingent release or play of the idea. In any case, if one is to imagine this depth of contingency, we would be asked to think, if the whole human drama separating us from the rest of nature, in the emergence of the “I” or the “Self” of pure desire, were to happen otherwise in the manifestation of the Absolute Idea in another organism, would it unfold in the same way it has as our being? Is there a different way in which the Absolute Idea can appear to itself then in the revelation of the “I” or the “Self”, structured as it is by the desire of or for the other?

The easiest thing to imagine is the necessity of the mediation of self-consciousness, and the necessity of the mediation of reason. In other words, and to repeat in another way, if humans were to disappear, and another higher order organism were to develop advanced levels of cognition (e.g. the descendants of modern chimpanzees, gorillas, bears, dogs, dolphins, etc.), would their logical process repeat the same basic forms or shapes of humanity’s logical process? Or the same question could be asked about the development of the idea on another planet, in a totally different region of space and time (recall that Hegel’s Absolute Idea places the primacy of logical process and its necessity for absolute knowing, over and above categories of space and time). Would higher order organisms with advanced cognition develop in the sequences consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, absolute knowing?

What Hegel affirms is, irrespective of the potential contingency of the pathway, which is derived by the logic of dialectical processes, what is necessary is absolute knowing, of the Absolute Idea’s return to itself in a self similar form or shape, which has no more problems with difference or otherness. This is true being knowingly reflecting itself, and crucially, also capable of losing itself in otherness or difference. One way to think about this is to think about the actual historical relation between the “mega-paradigms” of the “West” and the “East” versions of the Absolute Idea during the processes of globalization spanning the past few centuries. In the collision between these two “mega-paradigms”, there was the discovery of a totally other religious layer in the Absolute Idea. If you are from the “West” this included realizing that the “East” mediated its own journey to Absolute Knowing via the religious scaffolding of totally other systems, i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and so forth. If you are from the “East” this included realizing that the “West” mediated its own journey to Absolute Knowing via the religious scaffolding of totally other systems, i.e. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so forth. What is at stake in the Absolute Idea on the qualitative level of the global whole, is the mediation of a religious layer that is other to both Western and Eastern history. That is why it is important to think as deeply as possible about the contingency and the necessity of the Absolute Idea. What will become of the religious layer of the idea?

No matter what becomes of this religious layer, how it becomes represented in the 21st century on the global level, what is immanent and necessary is the state of absolute knowing. What distinguishes the level of absolute knowing from the other levels of the phenomenological drama is the perspectival shift that occurs between the inside of the drama and the outside of the drama. Inside of the drama, from consciousness to self-consciousness, or self-consciousness to reason, or reason to spirit, or spirit to religion, there is a feeling of being subjected to an illogical rupture. In other words, one experiences the transition between these shapes or forms of the Absolute Idea as being torn apart into an abyss before being put back together again in a new shape or form that could not have been felt from the inside of the shape or form until one was that very shape or form itself. However, in the state of absolute knowing, one can see the phenomenological drama as if from the outside of the drama, and see the logical process as a continuity with a deeper necessity (pointing towards its own actual state of knowing as totally abyssal). This, consequently, gives the subject of absolute knowing, the capacity to help mediate the logical process of the others in the phenomenological drama. The subject of absolute knowing does not achieve this by forcing or controlling the other, but by merely observing, listening, potentially saying a word here or there, which could help the other come to terms with the illogic of their own inner development, in and by their own self-mediated logical necessity.

What is interesting about the Phenomenology of Spirit as a work is that this book functions as if it were written by a subject of absolute knowing communicating to the realm of ordinary consciousness, i.e. it is as if Hegel is writing from “the position of nowhere (and everywhere)”, outside of the phenomenological drama itself. In this, he is capable of articulating the interior of the phenomenological drama as it is in and for itself, guiding the subject of ordinary consciousness to perhaps get an idea of where it is, and what it might be like, to occupy “the position of nowhere (and everywhere)” itself.

Finally, let us move to the idea that the Phenomenology of Spirit offers us the “Spiritual Necessity of Absolute Knowing”. From Findlay:

“Phenomenology of Spirit […] is, however, for all that, a path involving necessary implications and developments which will be preserved in all paths taken in the future and in the terminus to which these lead. For, on Hegel’s view, all dialectical thought-paths lead to the Absolute Idea and to the knowledge of it which is itself. […] Though Hegel may mention much that is contingent and historical, and may refuse to break wholly loose from this, his concern is always with […] universal notional shapes […] [which] can in fact ultimately be regarded as […] a single all-inclusive universal or concept.” (p. vii)

This reading of Hegel’s notion of the Absolute Idea, one where contingent dialectical thought-paths inevitably lead to the formation of the idea that is a universal all-inclusive concept, however, is one that must be read in line with its opposite: that of the fact that this state of the Absolute Idea is not the end, but a new beginning. For this Žižek forces us to think the “non-All” in Less Than Nothing:

“Can Hegel think the notion […] of the non-All? If we take Hegel as the ridiculous textbook figure as an absolute idealist who, under the headline the Whole is the True, claims to integrate the entire wealth of the universe into the totality of rational self-mediation, then the answer is, of course, a resounding no. If, however, we take into account the true nature of the Hegelian totality — that it designates a Whole plus all its “symptoms”, the excesses which do not fit into its frame, antagonisms which ruin its consistency, and so on — then the answer becomes more blurred.”

What is essential in combining thought of the Absolute Idea as an all-inclusive concept, with the Absolute Idea as a totality plus its symptoms, excesses, antagonisms and so forth, is that we realize that what is really at stake for the subject as a subject of absolute knowing vis-a-vis the Absolute Idea, is a perspectival shift on the very irreducibility of symptoms, excesses, and antagonisms. In other words, there will never be a state in which everything is reconciled once and for all in some simplistic understanding of a totality which is completed and perfected in-itself. What there will be is the opportunity for more and more subjects to help and be helped to a state of absolute knowing, where the very fact of the irreducibility of otherness, is embraced and enjoyed. What was once a symptom causing suffering, is now a sinthome (to use the Lacanian jargon). What was once an antagonism to be banished, is now an intriguing difference and opportunity for new thinking.

What is essential is that, in the state of absolute knowing as a spiritual necessity, while there are still external problems and difficulties, because the spirit is already reconciled with itself, these external problems and difficulties are not perceived as negative. Another way to say this is that problems and difficulties are enjoyed because the spirit is in a state of being in-itself that is for-itself, already in a state of self-referential joy, already enjoying its own self-symmetrical repetition (with a difference). In this state, external problems and difficulties are viewed quite differently then they are from within the phenomenological drama, where the spirit wants a symmetry between itself and otherness as such, a symmetry which banishes otherness and difficulty. It is almost as if Sisyphus and his endless pushing of a rock upon a mountain reach a level on the mountain where the mountain vanishes into an abyss and Sisyphus joyfully spins around his rock in a zero-gravity environment.

What we are dealing with here, in thinking Absolute Knowing itself, is a very weird psychological topography (no longer a endlessly linear going from the bottom of the mountain to the top of mountain). We are dealing with a topography of a weird twisted circle that closes in on itself and endlessly enjoys repeating itself in difference. Thus, this is not a self-similarity that banishes difference, but that sees itself in difference. One could think about this from within the phenomenological drama, as the spirit wanting an external object that would bring it an ultimate joy (like getting to the top of the god damn mountain); but in the state of absolute knowing, this external object is always-already inside the subject itself, no longer externalized (the mountain itself disappears). Moreover, this very inner state is the necessity of spirit, what is pointed towards in all of the stages of the phenomenological drama, but never actual, always an unknown and difficult to think potentiality.

All of this has overwhelming importance for the future of, perhaps especially, political-economy. Why? First, let us consider again another passage from Findlay:

“It is necessary to stress here that the dialectical development which Hegel sees as connecting his phenomenological phases is a logical growth of notions out of notions, given to us who consider the cultural past of humanity as resumed in ourselves. [However], the mind of humanity in the past did not, for example, see the necessary logical step from the kingdom of laws behind nature to the kingdom of subjects who consider nature [i.e. American, French, Haitian Revolutions], nor did they in fact historically pass from the one to the other [i.e. Modern Spirit]. It is we, the phenomenological students of the shapes of Spirit, who see the logical connections between them, and therefore also for the phenomenological purposes the order in which they must be arranged.” (p. viii)

What Findlay is stressing here is, first, that the growth of the idea is a growth of notions out of notions, and must be recapitulated in every individual who appears as historical spirit; and second, that what is different in our time is that we are becoming aware of (students of) this very fact. It is this second point, the reflective awareness of the nature of the growth of the idea, which has consequences for political economy, for spirit is now seeking to direct the very process of political-economic determination. And here, in order to fully comprehend what is at stake, inclusive of all the terror and danger, consider the following from Žižek’s Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020):

“Hegel is not a critical thinker: his basic stance is that of reconciliation — not reconciliation as a long-term goal but reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized Ideal. If there is a Hegelian motto, it is something like: find a truth in how things go wrong! The message of Hegel is not “the spirit of trust” (the title of Brandom’s latest book on Hegel’s Phenomenology), but rather “the spirit of distrust” his premise is that every large human project goes wrong and only in this way attests to its truth. The French Revolution wanted universal freedom and climaxed in terror, Communism wanted global emancipation and gave birth to Stalinist terror… Hegel’s lesson is thus a new version of Big Brother’s famous slogan from Orwell’s 1984 “freedom is slavery”: when we try to enforce freedom directly, the result is slavery.”

Now we can fully comprehend what is at stake for Hegel’s notion of absolute knowing as it relates to the future of political-economy. For the subject of absolute knowing, who can fully enjoy its own self-symmetry in difference, and can perceive problems and obstacles as learning opportunities, thus there is no need to enforce freedom directly. We can now learn the mistakes from the revolutions which sought to enforce freedom directly, as creating new forms of slavery. These revolutions were not really interested in understanding the truth of the Absolute Idea. This is essential to reflect on today. In the context of Žižek’s own Hegelian meditation on freedom/tyranny, Hegel in a Wired Brain, we are asked to think about this very dynamic in the desire for a “wired brain”. Could it be that those cognitive sciences or neurosciences, looking to directly enforce freedom via the manipulation of our brain with technology, are actually setting up the conditions of possibility for a totally new and radical form of tyranny?

SIX HEGELIAN PRINCIPLES

I will end this opening article with six Hegelian principles which should be fresh in your mind when reading the Phenomenology of Spirit. These six principles will help you to get through all of the weird twists and turns of the book, and also help you to apply the basic methods of the book, to analysis in everyday life. These principles include:

  1. Universality and Particularity

  2. Dialectical Process

  3. Dialectical Function

  4. Nature of Polarity/Opposites

  5. Absolute Knowledge

  6. Absolute In-Itself

The first principle: universality and particularity; offers us a perspectival shift on the typical relationship between how the natural sciences conceive of these two categories. For first order scientific analysis, universality is an externality independent of the subject. Here think about laws of the universe physics, or evolution by natural selection in biology. Whereas, and in contrast for first order scientific analysis, particularity is conceived as an inner historical subject that is capable of thinking universality, but is not directly involved in the becoming of this universality. Here think about subjects like Isaac Newton, who developed the foundations for classical mechanics, or Charles Darwin, who developed the foundations for the modern life sciences.

Hegel inverts classical science, by suggesting that universality is in fact the becoming of the Absolute Idea in and as history itself. This inversion means that the universal moves through, and only has existence as, the particular historical subject that embodies (embeds, extends, enacts) this universality in conflict. For example, not only is Newton’s universal a notion that became embodied, embedded, extended and enacted by many subjects across historical time, but this same universal has come into and under intense conflict, leading to its replacement in the forms of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Moreover, the same interpretation of the universal notion can be found in the history of Darwinism. While Darwinism is still a dominant paradigm, embodied, embedded, extended and enacted by many subjects, over the past 150 years, it has been dramatically revolutionized and transformed by many thinkers, including in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and in many other movements related to self-organization and complexity sciences. In a Hegelian “science of the notion”, we would be thinking about the very becoming of the universal notion as such.

This science of notion operates via a dialectical process that is open-ended and, we may suspect, never-ending. The dialectical process can be analyzed by observing the objective thought phases of spirit in an ideational becoming. While the first order understanding identifies with a particular universal, the dialectical understanding identifies with working a polarized contradiction. This polarized contradiction can be formalized as A=B, i.e. two contradictory identities are “both right” from a first order point of view, but which points towards an otherness of identity, from a dialectical point of view. Such a logic applies to the aforementioned meta-battle of universalities between Newton’s laws of physics and absolute spacetime as the universal being, and Darwin’s natural selection and evolution of life as the universal being. Both points of view actually have something right about them, but both cannot be absolutely true because they exhibit contradictions between them, and fully thinking these contradictions through, leads to a transformation of both. Today we may think that the resolution of these contradictions is forming the picture of the cosmic evolutionary worldview, for example (a view thought by neither Newton, nor Darwin), and which may birth totally new contradictions.

We can explore another example, this time in reference to different levels of the logical process of the Absolute Idea, which may be instructive for our thinking future political-economy. In the example of Newton’s and Darwin’s universalities as in conflict, we are essentially dealing with two universalities which both function on the “level of Reason” of the Absolute Idea (as opposed to Spirit or Religion). However, if we look at the conflict of universality between the Darwinian worldview, and the Christian or general Religious worldview, we get a conflict of universality that is operating on different levels of the logical process of the Absolute Idea. One universality, Darwin’s, is operating on the level of Reason, whereas the other universality, say Christianity, is operating on the level of Religion. What the dialectician achieves in thinking this conflict in universality, is first recognizing that, in operating on different levels of the Absolute Idea, that we potentially threaten to destroy the very logical structure of society by placing them on the same level, and thinking that one can usurp or replace the other (i.e. either Christianity replacing Darwinism, or Darwinism replacing Christianity). And indeed, this is in fact how the debates between these worldviews are typically framed. In order to go into how a dialectician handles such conflicts, we need to get a better understanding of dialectical function.

The dialectical function lies in the position of absolute knowing. From the position of absolute knowing the subject can observe the conflict of universality from within the phenomenological drama as operating on the logic of A=B. Here we could formalize the position of absolute knowing with the symbol “C”. Here the symbol “C” is not a complete and perfect idea which reconciles “A=B” into a final third or synthesis, but is rather a place from which subjectivity can work with contradictions and tensions, attempting to mediate a new understanding of universality in a becoming. From the position of “C” there may be a productively transformed mediation of contradictory tension. For example, if we take the contradictory tension between Christianity and Darwinism, we can see that Religion is in contradiction with Reason; and we can see that Reason is in contradiction with Religion. However, instead of claiming that Religion must replace Reason, or Reason must replace Religion, we can say something like:

  • What is the Reason for Religion? or

  • What is the Religion of Reason?

From this logic, we can furthermore propose a hypothesis, something like:

  • The Reason for Religion is a contradiction of individuality, and

  • The Religion of Reason is a contradiction of community

In other words, if we look for the underlying reasons why religion emerges as a necessary layer of the Absolute Idea in the first place, we can say that it is because of conflicts and tensions inherent to the layer of reason. Thus, if we remove the layer of religion, and replace it with the layer of reason, we are going to be unable to properly mediate the conflicts and tensions inherent to the becoming of individuals (or at least we will need an alternative solution, which is no trivial matter, as discovered by 20th century humanity). On the other hand, this also reflects the opposite, that the religion of reason runs into the contradictions of embodied (extended, enacted, embedded) community. One cannot build a community on reason alone, instead you get a frozen, static and ultimately toxic dynamic.

This brings us to the nature of polarity and opposites within the phenomenological drama of the Absolute Idea. The logical contradictions that appear as polar opposites (A=B), are never symmetrically balanced or equal to each other. This is true in the example given from the same level of the Absolute Idea (e.g. Newton and Darwin), and true in the example given from different levels of the Absolute Idea (e.g. Darwin and Christianity). In order to understand how they appear in history, we must first think how logical position A emerges and attempts to establish a unity. Here we can think about this in relation to Newtonianism, which covered the entire field of science in a reductionist frame, before being challenged by alternative positions, which emerged in reaction, as a type of contradiction disturbing the Newtonian unity before eventually dissolving it from within. In this way, logical position B can always be thought of as a reaction formation to logical position A, with the role, not of establishing its own unity, but with the role of disturbing and making impossible the unity of position A.

If we take the contradictory tension between Darwinism and Christianity, we can say that Darwinism emerged as a logical position A in an attempt to establish a new unity in the realm of scientific reason that could even extend beyond scientific reason beyond itself into other realms (like the levels of spirit and religion). And religion in the modern world is a type of reaction formation to this logical position, attempting to disturb it from within, capturing what logical position A necessarily and actually misses (i.e. the level of religion within the Absolute Idea). To put it in the formulas of our previous thought experiment:

  • Evolution appears a new level of rational mechanism; (logical position A aiming for unity)

  • Religion reacts as old on level of spiritual community (logical position B disturbing rational unity)

Now it is interesting to think about such dynamics, in relation to, for example, Man and Woman (in the field of sexuality); or Left and Right (in the field of politics), or Capitalism and Communism (in the field of economics): the striving for logical unity and its inherent disturbance from within.

This brings us to our two final Hegelian principles: first absolute knowing, followed by the Absolute in-itself. For absolute knowing we have its necessity in the way that the Absolute Idea develops through contradiction, from universality (as described above) to singularity (the function of the dialectician). One can think about this as the development from division (illogical ruptures) to the indivisible (what cannot be anymore divided, like the atom and the void). Here the subject of absolute knowing is like an indivisible element that can withstand all pressures and disturbance, since it has already been divided down to its elementary core, capable of an explosively abyssal free-floating.

How this very process is mediated is in and through universal contradiction of multiple competing universalities (e.g. Newton vs. Darwin; Darwin vs. Christianity) on different levels of the Absolute Idea. By actually thinking these contradictions, the very particularity of the individual is forced to think the historical truth of its own self-singularity (since it cannot remain identifying with one universality as its consistent other). Here the singularized self, as has been suggested above, is not an end of becoming, but an opening of other forms of becoming vis-a-vis difference and otherness. What is most essential about this dimension of thought, already described above, is that within the phenomenological drama (consciousness to religion), the one (self-singularity), perceives the other as a false difference in form, lacking ideal becoming (i.e. how the Darwinist perceives the Christian, or how the Christian perceives the Darwinist, etc.). However, in the state of absolute knowing, the one (self-singularity) perceives the other as a truth in a different form of ideal becoming. From this standpoint, one is capable of being within the phenomenological drama, as if from without of it. From this standpoint, one is capable of helping others, by simply mirroring back to them, the position of absolute knowing.

Finally, we have the Absolute in-itself, which is, admittedly, the most difficult to describe and think. All we will say about the Absolute in-itself here is the following: it is the becoming of spirit itself, that it is the way the universal spirit only exists as a particular subjectivity, and in this, is everything in the form of the self-active idea.

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Session 2: Introduction