GWF Hegel has not been properly understood by most of those who have tried to have struggled with

"The
System." He is criticized as irrelevant, or partially relevant, at best. We need to study him only to the
extend that he has influenced various trends of philosophical thought, trying hard not to mock the
monolithic pretensions of another system, another attempt to impose order on chaos1...

Parts of the whole are taken out of context and scrutinized, distorted and defiled by those who work within
their own framework of “what constitutes an authoritative reason for belief or action2.” The ground they
stand on is formless and fleeting. Hegel is taken as having given his account of the interplay between
Kant's transcendental ego and the world "out there", or of radicalizing Christianity to the point of heresy3.
Unparalleled is his pomp, they say. Who is HE to give US the ladder to ABSOLUTE KNOWING?
Thanks, but no thanks. WE don't speak German. WE are not impressed by the lure of ABSTRACTION.
WE prefer CAMUS...

But these unthinking, unreflective critics are only Specimens to the Scientist who sees by the Spirit of
Truth. In TAKING something AS, they betray the contingency of their position. Why THAT ONE and not
ANOTHER? Be careful, my friends. One often takes Oneself where One is not welcome...

We must be skeptical of our own skepticism. Why one and not the other?

Does it matter to us if we made the right choice? Do we know by what criteria we evaluate our choice as
right? How certain are those criteria for us? What we need is TO BE TAKEN. Truth must force itself
upon us in such a way that WE are consumed BY IT.

We cannot, therefore, begin by criticizing Hegel. In doing so, we bring certain criterion of evaluation to
him which have not yet demonstrated their necessity for-us. It is imperative that each one of us adapts a
radical skepticism with respect to the claims we take as true, as authoritative reasons for our being and
living. Imperative by whose command, you ask? Stung by the Scorpion’s tale once more…

My knowledge of the world is mediated by my awareness of my taking objects as such and such, as, for
example, expressions of an unconditioned, universal metaphysical force. The essence of things is my own
conceptualizing activity, or abstracting, which contrasts itself with a world of independently existing
objects. I am not a self-contained consciousness that somehow represents the world of objects “out there”.
The “out there” still is, to be sure, but what it is I cannot know or represent as other than an aspect of my
abstracting activity.

The [mere] being of what is merely ‘meant’, the singleness and the universality opposed to it of
perception, as also the empty inner being of the Understanding, these are no longer essences [or
things-in-themselves of which we can have knowledge], but are moments of self-consciousness,
i.e. abstractions or distinctions which at the same time have no reality for consciousness itself, and
are purely vanishing essences.4

I am reflected into myself from the world out there and what I know in knowing this reflection is what I
am5. I am both other than who I am and the unity of myself in this otherness. Insofar as the otherness is a
being and not being as such, I am stuck in a “moment” and not properly speaking self-conscious. I am
conscious of “the whole expanse of the sensuous world” but only as the mirror in which I see myself. As a
mirror, this world is a mirage, “…a difference [or infinite otherness] which, in itself, is no difference.”
1
As someone has said, we often take the limits of our own thought as the limits of thought as such.
2
Terminology from Pinkard, Terry; Hegel’s Phenomenology: Sociality of Reason; Cambridge 1994; NY.
3
The authors under attack here are better left unnamed, though their identities may easily be surmised.
4
Phenomenology of Spirit 167. All references are to the Miller translation. Reference is to the paragraph
number and not the page. All further references will be abbreviated PS.
5
PS, 167. “But in point of fact self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the world of sense
and perception, and is essentially the return from otherness.”
What I need is to overcome this dizzying phantasmagoria and realize, i.e. have as my essence, the unity of
myself-as-subject with myself [as opposed to the aforementioned “antithesis of…appearance…and truth.”]
There exist for me two possible states of being in this antithetical existence: animal being and human being.
As animal being, I am the desire for the immediate object, for the appropriation of the world out there, of
determinate nothingness. As human, I desire to appropriate myself.6

“Desire makes being where there is none…according to the property of the desire.”7 I am, then, Desire8.
And the being I make will be either animal or human, depending on me. So what is this determinate
nothingness, this “insubstantial pageant fading” that confirms for me my being and without which I could
never know myself, foaming forth from myself, never to return?9 In feeling the force of my presence, the
force which confirms for me that I am who I am, that which was for me nothingness becomes, in its
reflection back into itself, Life:

…infinity as the supercession of all distinctions, the pure movement of axial rotation……the absolutely
restless infinity of independent self-repose…Life as a living thing.10

But this thing is only for-me. In desiring the thing, I negate it.

In negating it, I affirm myself. As Desire, I am an “empty craving,11” and receive for my being that which I
negate, “[f]or Desire is an absence of Being…it is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, and not a Being
that is.12” There is, however, a problem. If I AM independent and certain of myself as self-determining
and self-conscious, as the true essence in-and-for-myself, then it should not be the case that I depend on the
negating of otherness, of thingness, to confirm for me this certainty. I know that I am only as reflected
back from this otherness, which IS NOT, and yet, somehow, IT IS, and without it, I am not what I am!

In negating (i.e. Desiring, Craving, Appropriating…) the objective otherness of Life, I affirm myself. But I
see now that I can not become certain of myself as human by the negating of this living being, since in
requiring Life for this negation I show my dependency on Life and undermine the certainty that this
negation was supposed to affirm, namely that I am the essence of my self [and not mediated through
another]. But only an other can affirm for me whether or not this conception of myself is “true” or whether
it undermines itself. I cannot negate the living object and preserve a sense of my own independence since
the negating of this object depends on me. If I only know my own independence in the act of negating an
other, I am dependent on the other. To confer recognition on me, to let me know that I am what I think I
am, the other must be independent of me and yet dependent on me.

This independent other must negate within itself the aspect of independence and present itself as fully
determined by me. In other words, I need You to tell me Who I am. When You and I meet, You must
negate Your independence and affirm Your dependence on my truth. Only in this way can I be in-and-for-
myself. A non self-conscious Object cannot certify for me that my self-conception, that my certainty,
corresponds to the truth. (Let us remember that the whole of the Phenomenology deals with this

6
PG, 167. “Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is the immediate
object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a
negative; and the second, viz. itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only as
opposed to the fist object.”
7
Boehme, Jacob. A Short Explanation of Six Mystical Points. Holmes 1988; Edmonds, USA.
8
PG 167. “…self-consciousness is Desire in general.”
9
Boehme, Jacob. Of the Divine Intuition. “Nothing without contradiction can become manifest to itself;
for it has nothing to resist it, goes continually out of itself outwards, and returns not again into itself.” Qtd.
In Koennker, Ernst; Great Dialecticians in Modern Christian Thought; Augsburg 1971; Minneanopolis.
Pg58.
10
PS 169-171
11
Boehme, Jacob. A Short Explanation of Six Mystical Points; Holmes 1988; Edmonds.
12
Kojeve, Alexander; Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; Ed. Allan Bloom; Cornell UP 1947; London.
Pg41.
epistemological question of how we can ever know that our conceptions of what is actually correspond to
”the way things are.”) Only another Myself can do so.

As a conceptual necessity, I require an another self-consciousness to confirm for ME that what I take as
true (i.e. that I am self-determining and independent) really is so.

But You, as another self-consciousness, also desire recognition of Yourself as self-determining and we
each view the other as an object, as dependent on self-consciousness. Self-Consciousness says: I
determine what to take as true relative to My desires. That is, My independence is found in My
subjectivity. Recognize Me as an independent subjectivity so that I may affirm for Myself the truth of My
self-conception as an independent agent. I need to know that things really are the way I take them to be.
In demanding recognition, each understands the other as another self-consciousness (for otherwise
recognition could not be bestowed) but also as object (for to acknowledge the other as truly independent
would be to defeat the purpose). Each sees the Other as a thing to be integrated into his own “projects” and
each demands recognition from the other as subject of his own independence and the truth of his subjective
viewpoint on the world. This viewpoint implies that the viewpoint of the other is false, conflicting as it
does with the subject’s own.

One and the Other are:

for each other, shapes of consciousness which have not yet accomplished the movement of
absolute abstraction, of rooting-out all immediate being, and of being merely the purely negating
being of self-identical consciousness….Each is indeed certain of his own self, but not of the other,
and therefore his own self-certainty still has no truth.

Logically, one party must choose to be determined. We cannot at this stage in the dialectical development
of the Real have recourse to a third person objective viewpoint. No such possibility exists for us. At this
point in the argument, You and I are abstracted “being-for-self.” Neither of us has come to know ourselves
as essentially social. An act of mutual recognition would shatter our self-conception as immediately
individual.

In his Encyclopedia, Hegel writes:

At this present standpoint we have to completely forget the relationships we are used to thinking about. If
we speak of right, ethicality, love, we know that in that we recognize the others, I recognize their complete
personal independence. We know too that I do not suffer on this account, but have validity as a free being,
that in that the others have rights I have them too, or that my right is also essentially that of the other i.e.
that I am a free personal, and that this is essentiality the same as the others also being persons with rights.
Benevolence or love does not involve the submergence of my personality. Here, however, there is as yet
no such relationship, for one aspect of the determination is that of my still being, as a free self-
consciousness, an immediate and single one. In so far as the immediate singularity of my self-
consciousness and my freedom are not yet separated, I am unable to surrender anything of my particularity
without surrendering my freedom.13

I have MY view on the world which does not require anything outside of Myself for verification. Each
side of the equation takes its truth to be independent of social relation and thus an objective viewpoint
cannot logically be reached. The self-certainty of independence self-consciousness has not yet proceeded,
as Hegel notes, into a mediated self-relation. You must negate Yourself and thus affirm the truth of my
self-consciousness for me. But I must do the same for You, since we are both making our claims to self-
consciousness, or “recognizing ourselves as mutually recognizing one another.” We first meet, therefore, as
a fight to the death, each demanding recognition and refusing to give it. But the death of one does not
affirm the truth of the other. It affirms that one valued independence over life [i.e. the properly human over
the properly animal] but the “project” of ascertaining what counts as true cannot be satisfied with one

13
Qtd. In Pinkard, Terr; Hegel’s Phenomenology: Sociality of Reason; Cambridge 1994; NY. Pg363. Italics
mine.
member dead, since “… death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence,
which thus remains without the required significance of independence.”

The only conceptual possibility for recognition, i.e. the only conceivable way that self-dependant self-
consciousness can come to know that its self-conception or the reasons it takes as “authoritative” (as truth)
really correspond to what is in truth, is for one of the two self-consciousnesses, for You or I, to freely chose
to be determined by Life.14 “In this experience,” writes Hegel, “self-consciousness learns that life is as
essential to it as pure [abstracted] self-consciousness.” When one of us chooses Life over Recognition, he
becomes Slave and in doing so, confirms the other’s conception of himself as Master, as independent self-
determined self-consciousness for whom everything is.15

The Slave is able to assume the standpoint of the Master’s subjective point of view as an impersonal,
objective point of view for judging whether his own point of view is correct. Whatever desires the Slave
may have are valid only insofar as they coincide with the “projects and desires” of the Master. Any
problems between Master and Slave are therefore mediated from the “objective” point of view of the
Master. As Terry Pinkard notes, “[t]he movement of self-consciousness is the movement of what is
involved in constructing an objective viewpoint that would integrate within itself the conflicting subjective
points of view.”16

The Slave “maps” his independence onto the Masters and his “projects and desires” are “authoritative” only
insofar as they are determined as such by the Master. But the Master’s independence is thus mediated by
recognition from another. The Slave more closely reached an objective viewpoint. In recognizing the
Master’s dependence on his work, he recognized his own independence. The Slave says: the Objects that I
form for You only have value to the extent that I work on them. Otherwise they are, to you, a nothingness
and cannot affirm your conception of Yourself as independent: “You are nothing without my work.”
Inasmuch as the Master recognizes this dependence on the Slave, he must now learn to “map” his
viewpoint onto the independent viewpoint of the Slave.17 As long as the Master considers himself
inherently superior to the Slave, or the Slave as inherently inferior to the Master, the appearance will not
see itself as a negative moment and the contradictions of this Master-Slave dialectic will not be resolved.18

Remember, the project was to establish one’s subjective point of view as truth. To the extent that he
realizes the necessity of the Slaves having come to take his projects as authoritative, the Master has failed
on his own terms. His truth is a contingent, social fact determined and mediated by the Slaves having
chosen Life over recognition; a contingent fact stemming from fear of the master. The Slave also
recognizes the contingency of the Master’s authority. The Slave took himself as dependent on the Master.
This dependency, he comes to realize, does not reflect any metaphysical necessity but only his decision to
accept to the position of Slave, out of fear of his life.19

Through Work, the Slave achieves independence. His “essence”, as Marx would write20, had been
“reduced to…absolute poverty” so that “it might bring forth out of itself its own inner riches”. But “…in
his realization of himself as the essential moment of self-determinate self-consciousness, he lets go of

14
“The dominance of the master’s point of view is thus dependent on the slave’s having come to accept it
as dominant – that is, the dominance of the master’s point of view is fully dependent on the slaves
contingently [i.e. freely] coming to accept it and on his continuing to accept it.” Ibid. pg60
15
“Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into
unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent
consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependant consciousness whose
essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is [Master], the other is [Slave]. PS 189
16
Pinkard, 58.
17
Ibid., 62.
18
Ibid., 62.
19
“The slave…understands his own subjective life completely in terms of the master’s projects; as we
might put it, he maps his own point of view completely on to that of the master’s” ibid. 60
20
Marx, Karl. Early Texts: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Ed. David McLellan; Oxford, 1971.
pg152.
natural existence with indifference… [He] reflects into himself as “a being which thinks or is a free self-
consciousness.”21 And from this reflection-into-self, we, the phenomenologists, may continue to watch the
movement of self-consciousness through its one-sided moments, delighting in sublation after sublation
until, before we know it, we have become that which we sought.

REFLECTIONS ON DIALECTICAL LOGIC.

As Kojeve notes, the Hegelian method is not properly speaking dialectical, but “purely contemplative and
descriptive22”. Reality as such is dialectical. “Truth is its own self-movement,” we are told. Of course,
that this is reall the case emerges in the phenomenological experience itself. We watch the dialectical
movement, describing what we experience, speaking the “magical words which evoke [God’s] shape..”23
“It is by following this dialectical movement of the Real,” writes Kojeve, “that Knowledge is present at its
own birth and contemplates its own evolution.” In what sense is the Real dialectical? Every immediate
given is, upon reflection, found to imply its negation. The two opposing moments then generate a “higher-
order synthesis,” which itself becomes a “thesis”, naturally implying its own “antithesis” and so on,
through ever higher determinations of Truth until the final and absolute synthesis. The three moments of
dialectical logic, commonly termed thesis-antithesis-synthesis, though Hegel himself never uses this
phraseology, are not simply parts of another logical system but “constituent elements [or what we have
called “moments”] of every logical-real-entity”. It is important to note that the “higher-order synthesis” do
not themselves negate the moments of their constitution but preserve them while overcoming them. The
reader may wish to consult Wholeness and the Implicate Order by physicist David Bohm for another keen
perspective of this infinitely enfolded order.

The absolute synthesis or infinitely enfolded order is a self-mediation referring not to some determinate
negation but to the moments in which it has been constituted. It is the explicit union-in-distinction of itself
with itself in-and-for-itself (i.e. as subject and substance.) That every partial view leads necessarily and of
itself to this position of Absolute Knowing is the demonstrated and impassioned cry of the Phenomenology.
“Every provisional definition of the Absolute within the system, that is, every category, must fall short
because no one category can express all of what the Absolute is. [I]t is through speculation that the Idea
becomes for-itself, that “God” achieves self-awareness and thus completion.24” In other words, “the ideal
which is latent in the nature of all experience, and of the mind itself, forbids us to rest content with the
inadequate category.25” Only the absolute synthesis, the Idea, God, does not undermine itself through a
moment of negativity with an other but is mediated in and through itself.

…Just as it [the absolute Idea] is in its extension [i.e. for-itself, other-than-itself-in-itself], so it is equality
in its depth, in the Self [in-itself.]26

Essentially, speculation seeks, by way of observing the dialectical movement of the Real and losing (only
to find!) oneself therein, to make explicit the necessary interplay between Subjectivity and Objectivity, or
Subject and Substance, as an infinitely singular self-identical difference, or Spirit. Schematically, Spirit 
[SubjectSubstance]. In this brief analysis we can therefore see why one recent author has called Hegel
“the World-Historical Alchemist” whose final product is the Philosopher’s Stone.27

21
PS 197
22
Kojeve, Alexander; Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; Ed. Allan Bloom; Cornell UP 1947; London.
23
“Every individual is a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity along which the world develops.
Every individual can raise himself to domination over a great length of this chain only if he realizes the
goal of this great necessity and, by virtue of this knowledge, learns to speak the magic words which evoke
its shape…this knowledge can be gathered from philosophy alone.” (from Hegel’s Philosophy of Science)
24
Magee, Glenn; Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition; Cornell UP 2001; New York.
25
Mctaggart, John Ellis; Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic; Cambridge 1896; London. Pg4.
26
PS 808
27
Magee Glenn; Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition; Cornell UP 2001; New York.