As I enter into my first immersion into Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (mind), I’m starting to see the value of going back to the old-schoolers. Up until recently, I had found it hard to read anything written before the 60’s. But my immersions in my personal holy triad: Deleuze, Rorty, and Zizek (as well as the principle of diffe̕rrance: the deferred meaning involved in any philosophical text which is always referring to previous philosophers: have elicited my curiosity.
I have found this value in the fact that, while I have managed, at best, shallow scratches on the titanium surface of the book, I’m finding hope (enticements perhaps (in the overlaps: the common terms that Hegel is using such as “being-in-itself” and “being-for-itself” (thank you, Sartre! (his occupation with the notion of nothingness (once again: thank you, Sartre! (as well as the concept of edification. Hegel wags his finger at Rorty and Deleuze. At the same time, he seems to be on the same page in his understanding of what it is philosophy actually does:
“The Absolute on this view is not to be grasped in conceptual form, but felt, intuited; it is not its conception, but the feeling of it and intuition of it that are to have the say and find expression.” -Hegel, Georg W. F. (2010-06-24). The Phenomenology of Spirit (The Phenomenology of Mind) (Kindle Locations 427-428). Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.
And he does go on later in the preface to address complaints about the obscurity of philosophical exposition which sound a lot like the explanations given complaints about Deleuze’s use of free indirect discourse: that a true understanding of philosophical concepts require a kind of oblique approach to meaning. (I’m thinking Claire Colebrook’s explanation here.)
At the same time, there seems to be a contradiction in that Hegel seems to want philosophy to have the same status as a science which, as far as I know, tends to take a more direct approach to meaning. Perhaps my German jam-mate, Harald, can help me with this. That said, I can see a kind of common sense of it (w/departure (in paragraph 1.:
“In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries. For whatever it might be suitable to state about philosophy in a preface—say, an historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about the truth—this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth.” -Hegel, Georg W. F. (2010-06-24). The Phenomenology of Spirit (The Phenomenology of Mind) (Kindle Locations 360-365). Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.
He then goes on to say:
“Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of that universality which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature; contrasted with that the mere process of bringing it to light would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance.”
It just seems to me that philosophy is a matter of moving from the general to the particular. At the same time I would agree with him to the extent that understanding the general (that which resides in the overlaps (and stopping there does not constitute a philosophical process. Still (and excuse my opportunistic attempt to toss my own thoughts into the mix: it seems to me that any relationship (including that with philosophy (is a matter of turning content into form. For instance, the process by which we come to know a good friend, or even a lover, starts with their physical appearance and what they do the very first time we see them. Beyond that, it is a process of unfolding in which everything we come to understand about them participates in (conditions even (how we come to see them. And the same goes for philosophy or any philosophical text we might choose to engage.
Therefore, while I would agree with Hegel that such general understandings are not a true indication of what philosophy can actually do, I would disagree that the wide swashes of a typical preface are “superfluous” in that they are the perfectly natural steppingstone by which one penetrates the individual process.