“While the embryo is certainly, in itself, implicitly a human being, it is not so explicitly, it is not by itself a human being (für sich); man is explicitly man only in the form of developed and cultivated reason, which has made itself to be what it is implicitly. Its actual reality is first found here. But this result arrived at is itself simple immediacy; for it is self conscious freedom, which is at one with itself, and has not set aside the opposition it involves and left it there, but has made its account with it and become reconciled to it.” -Hegel, Georg W. F. (2010-06-24). The Phenomenology of Spirit (The Phenomenology of Mind) (Kindle Locations 602-606). Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.
It happens every time. Every time I start to break into unexplored philosophical text, I get so caught up in decoding the exposition itself that I completely forget to look at the title of the book and extract the wealth of understanding contained in it. It happened with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. (It took me a while before I finally figured it was about the relationship between Being and Nothingness. How clueless is that?) It took a little less time with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. But then I went back to the same cluelessness until I zeroed in on the above quote.
I would first note that the title has been translated as both phenomenology of spirit and phenomenology of mind. (And this gives me a little insight into Merleau -Ponty’s choice for a title: The Phenomenology of Perception.) But what can be seen in Hegel’s title is the kind of dualism typical of his time which can best be understood by his fusion of mind and spirit via the German word “Geist”. This, of course, is just an instinctive projection into the complex expositional twists and turns that Hegel uses to make his point, but I can’t help but feel that what he is describing is a dialectic that will lead us to the Absolute via the evolutionary process via the Mind and Spirit’s break from the body.
And we have to give him credit for doing so before Darwin came along.
At the same time, we can see the whole movement that resulted in postmodernism as a reaction to Hegel. We can see both Deleuze’s and Rorty’s descriptions of the folly that can result from dualism (that which gives us a position of privilege over the objects that occupy our space (in that Hegel used the dynamic to give himself the status of having discovered “The Truth”: the Absolute. Hegel talks about becoming. But it is as if he wants to fix it within his scientific system. So we can see why Deleuze would give privilege to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche “who created becoming in the reader” as compared to Hegel who just described it to us.
And once again, it is hard to see Rorty’s giving privilege to edifying philosophy over the systematic as anything else but a reaction to Hegel.
That said, this seems as good a way as any to end my immersion in Hegel’s book. Tomorrow, I look forward to applying my 15 hour immersion/experiment to Professor/Doctor (?) Buchanan’s reader’s guide to the Anti-Oedipus.