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The following comments pertain to the Miller translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit published by Oxford University Press. Arguably the Phenomenology is one of the most significant works in modern philosophy, certainly in German idealism. While clearly an important work, even by the arcane standards of German idealism it is a difficult read for the non-Hegelian. And, can be nearly impenetrable if approached without the assistance of a skilled guide (or two). The following comments are limited to the respective quality of the Oxford University Press edition, and, to offer some potential resources that may be helpful for readers new to Hegel.
First. In addition to the text of the Phenomenology a foreword and para by para commentary by Findlay is also included. Though he is a capable thinker, Findlay's commentary is rather terse and may be of limited help to very first time readers. From a physical stand point, while the font is of an adequate size, the margins are relatively small and not conducive to copious note making.
Second. With regard to additional resources, Robert Stern's commentary in the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook series is quite good as a starting. It is readable, short, and clear - not overly laden with technical jargon and its citations are referenced to the Miller translation. A modest drawback to Stern is the lack of a glossary. Hegelian terminology can be difficult and some assistance in this regard would be useful. More advanced students may wish to augment Stern with a more detailed commentary from the likes of Harris, Hyppolite or Lauer.
Third. J. Bernstein has a wonderful yearlong graduate-level course discussing the Phenomenology available on-line for no cost at BernsteinTapes.com. Kudos to the folks who have made this available it is an outstanding resource.
Overall, this is a solid version of the Phenomenology that offers good value to the purchaser.
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What is the Phen. of Spirit about? Essentially it is Hegel's answer to Kant and his strong disagreement with Kant's unwillingness or inability to close the gap between the subject and the so called "thing in itself" (the "truth" of any external object). Kant developed an epistemology that argued for certain conditions in order for any object to be experienced. These included the "pure" forms of intuition (space and time), which are, by Kant's account, inside of us and imposed by the mind on sensation (they may or may not be also real, we don't and can't know), the pure categories of the understanding- logical constructs such as cause and effect we impose on experience in order to have any coherent experience at all and the transcendental unity of apperception (understanding that my manifold of experience is "mine"- a non-reflective sense of subjective ego- not who I am or anything about "me" but simply an innate "sense" of continuity of experience, of personal subjectivity). We create our experience through judgments of the understanding by marrying the categories of understanding with our sensations, both altered by the pure forms of intuition and we understand this as our own unique experience through apperception. This then is our reality. These transcendental elements of experience are beyond and prior to (constitutive of) direct experience and understood by us only indirectly through logic.
Hegel objected to Kant's dualism of the subject who "creates" the world of experience and the unknowable "object" of experience (that is, the objective truth of that object). Since Kant left it there without any hope of grasping "reality" (the reality we know is intersubjectively true because we all think the same way but we have no idea if that is the reality of God who can see things intuitively as they really are) he was widely felt by the subsequent generation of German philosophers (who had grown up in reverence to his philosophy) to have only come half way.
Hegel approached the goal by emphasizing the subject as the determinant of any truth statement. The self conscious subject (a form of "Spirit" when combined with like thinking self-conscious subjects in a community of belief) does have the Kantian experience conditions of categories (notions to Hegel) that he/she applies to external objects of sensation (although not the pure forms of intuition) and the element of "self-consciousness", the transcendental unity of apperception of Kant, emphasized by Hegel to the point of being the pivot to forming truth statements. Hegel also apporopriates Kant's "pure reason", a feature that for Kant is only "regulative" and not constitutive of experience (reason, for Kant, is at play in the fields of the Lord so to speak and engaged in manipulation of the pure categories of the understanding to create ideas of theory that, disconnected from the input of the senses, do not apply to actual experience and so do not directly further our knowledge of reality ). In Hegel's view reason is the key element of self-consciousness that moves our evolving understanding of truth.
The book examines various immediate epistemic positions such as "sense certainty" etc. and, using the Hegelian dialectic, that is, examining how the idea matches up with itself in a test of internal consistency to determine if it has done what it sets out to do or explain what it sets out to explain, finds each of these logically inadequate to provide us with an account of the "truth" of external reality. Finding these empiric or realist positions to be untenable he proceeds to "self consciousness" or Spirit and examines how, through history, forms of consciousness, and the grounds they have used to support their beliefs, have matched up with this test of internal consistency. Hegel begins anew with his dialectic in an examination of self consciousness and we seem to see a pattern of forms of consciousness developing grounds for belief that are more and more effective. The "self", in its desire and grasping for purchase in the world defines the external world (and importantly other consciousness) in terms of its own making (notions). Like a form of epistemic evolution, those definitions that work best are selected and others discarded over time. The conditions of experience, immutable for Kant, are subject to change according to Hegel as the successive forms of spirit work through something like his dialectic and finally come to the Absolute, the final Notion that provides us with reality. Not a divine metaphysical reality but the achievement of human self-consciousness in finally reaching a point where its transcendental notions define the truth of the objective world in a way that best satisfies the needs of (social)consciousness. This then provides a closing of the subjective-objective divide that Kant was never able to bridge. Hegel, a firm idealist, never argues that we have the means to go beyond the conditional limitations Kant described but rather that what objective truth is for us is defined by the best set of beliefs about it that serves to satisfy our innate desires and requirements. A very speculative philosophy but certainly not outside the realm of reasonable possibility.
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Today, an entire market has been created for the manufacture of literature designed to make philosophy intelligible to your average moron, all in the spirit of the assumption that "anyone can do philosophy" provided of course that everything is put into fart-jokes and countless other idiotic colloquialisms. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the genuinely incomprehensible and pretentious works which truly deserve the bashings that the simple-minded laymen of the world give to them. In many ways, these types of books are in fact more damaging than the "moron-friendly" ones, precisely because they create an image of philosophy that is nothing but empty verbosity. That is, they are parodies of genuine thinking.
Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" can be said to be a canonical example (even perhaps the prototype) of this latter category. On the whole, this book is less of a systematic philosophical treatise (despite what Hegel claims in the preface) and more of an exercise in using literary hand-waving to mystify a naive audience into accepting a series of absurd, premeditated conclusions. This book is filled to the brim with dizzying tautologies, circular thinking, and completely arbitrary conclusions and jumps of logic. Either Hegel seems to have honestly confused the accidental (the infamous "philosophical prose") with the essential (a search for truth) and was therefore genuinely stupid/insane, or he was a very calculating and precise intellectual charlatan. While the Phenomenology itself is probably a mixture of both, the latter case seems to apply more fully to Hegel as a person.
In spite of all this, what makes this book at least worth delving into, and also what makes Hegel appear to be something slightly more than a complete fool/psychopath, is his ability to not only point out the modernist point of view, but also to exemplify it in himself.
Firstly, the very crux of his entire "dialectic," is his fundamental belief in progress. Riding the same intellectual current as Darwin and others, Hegel posits that mankind is gradually raising itself up from a "primitive" and "ignorant" state into a more "complex" and "knowledgeable" one. As such, Hegel considers his Phenomenology of Spirit to be the final stage of this "development," after which humanity will arrive at an "end of history" and live in a state of perpetual utopia. Obviously, this was quite influential to Marx's own eschatological vision, as well as people like Francis Fukuyama. What's more, this is the essence of the entire contemporary "conservative" viewpoint: one in which humanity, through centuries of "progress," has arrived at a more or less perfected state of existence.
Additionally, Hegel remarkably points out the fact that it is impossible for the modern worldview to truly criticize itself "from within." Nearly two centuries later, Ted Kaczynski had noticed the exact same thing. In this sense, Hegel can be seen as where both the "liberal" and "conservative" points of view meld into one: modernism. Hegel also explicitly states that the Protestant Reformation in effect killed the presence of the sacred and transcendent in Western civilization.
In conclusion, my recommendation to readers would be to study the Phenomenology of Spirit in a very detached way, as intellectual history only--That is, if they can cut through the jungles of verbiage and horrible writing. In terms of providing any sort of absolute truth about how reality really functions, this book is absolutely worthless. What you will find instead is a lengthy apologetic for a collectivist, secular, "feel-good" society in which God has become nothing but a dead function of the capricious mass-mind. However, in terms of providing a more or less clear window into the zeitgeist of the modern age, this book is truly like no other.
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I am very please with this text. As dense as it is, Phenomenology is truly a philosphical and theological work of genius.
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In this book, Hegel's work in on a new creation theorry. But, all of Hegel's work should be linked to the work of Nicholas of Cusa. Hegel does not link his work to Cusa, probably because he feared being burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church. Cusa's very different 15th century creation theory was not propagated into the USA by the Vatican until 1979. (See American Cusanus Society) This book by Hegel is very important to the future of the USA and all future sciences.
Both Cusa and Hegel used Plato's negative (Sophist at 257b)to develop a new and different creation theory based only on things-in-themselves. This new creation theory cannot be aligned to the Bible or any other scripture. I discuss this new creation theory in my book, "The First Scientific Proof of God."
When using Plato's negative, the negation of a finite thing will reveal a not-finite thing (that is, an infinite thing). The double negative reveals God as the unity of all opposites. The negation of a known thing can open the mind of a scientist and reveal other positive things in the universe. Negation can also avoid the production of dirty negatives, such as the radiation waste products of fission energy.
Today's scientists do not use Plato's negative. I believe that this is why our young scientists are becoming lost.
Both Cusa's work and Hegel's work should be taught is every college and university. Karl Marx was a follower of Hegel. But, Marx's atheism led to the failure of the Soviet union in the late 1980s.