One of my Facebook followers sent a photo of a hilarious Amazon review of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit my way. There have been so many mentions of that work as a sort of Bildungsroman for human consciousness that, quite frankly, I avoid that cliche. (Spirit isn't really some juvenile coming of age - since there's no other big-S Spirits around to provide it a culture to come of age within - that's just to start).
There definitely is a narrative running through this work - after all, it's about this complex, ongoing, dialectical development of human consciousness through its own history, right? And it arrives at a final point, the "end of history". But that's all very big-picture, universal.
What if you misread the work as about a particular individual? Then you'd get something like this perhaps:
We've now entered a new - and final - section of the Spirit part of the work - Morality. This is the culmination of the previous three big sections of Spirit. The first one introduced and explored ethical life, leading eventually into a form a self-alienated Spirit - Culture.
The complexities of culture then led us into a new section, one that Hegel takes as unique - at that point in time - to the West, that of the Enlightenment. That in turn took us into the Absolute Freedom and Terror section, and that. . . finally into Morality.
This entire section will grapple with the conception of duty or obligation, and how its demands intersect with those of nature, happiness, and actuality.
There is actually a very short introductory set of paragraphs, the commentary on which is here:
Each month, thanks to the underwriting of my Patreon supporters of the Half Hour Hegel project, I hold a online Q&A and discussion session, completely open to the general public (we also host another just for Patreon supporters as well).
We use this FreeConferenceCall link - clicking it takes you right to the ReasonIO "meeting wall", and then it's just another click (and perhaps downloading the app), and you're in!
We'll be meeting later on today, Tuesday, July 10, from 5-6 PM Central Time - so make sure to check the time difference if you're in another time zone.
You needn't know anything about Hegel in order to participate. We do a good bit of Q&A in these sessions - and I give priority in the discussion to any Hegel-related questions participants ask. So if you've been reading Hegel, or following along with the videos, or even just want to know what all this Hegel talk is about, feel free to join us.
Hopefully I'll see some of you readers of this blog, and followers of the Half Hour Hegel project there. Again, here's the link you can use to join.
With these four videos, covering seven paragraphs, we finish up with a very long part of the even more massive Spirit portion of the Phenomenology of Spirit. As noted earlier, this section is really a culmination of the long dialectic of rational self-discovery, effectively producing and unfolding modernity in the West, that has its trunk in the Enlightenment (though the roots may be said to go further back).
Enlightenment involves a transformation of human consciousness, in Hegel's view. It changes the world - and to address Marx's complaint - it definitely does not change it only in the realm of ideas or understanding. Enlightenment's transformation of human existence does not merely have practical consequences. It takes place through the medium of the practical, within the realm of politics, culture, institutions, and government.
It also leads, as the very name of this section indicates, both to Absolute Freedom and to a Terror that is inextricably linked to it at this stage of dialectical development of consciousness. And, as we shall see in the last paragraphs, it opens up a new path before us, one Hegel will call the Moral Consciousness - which we shall soon start exploring.
The Victory Farm Center for the Humanities selected Hegel's Phenomenology as their text to study together this summer, and the director reached out to me to ask if I would be willing to provide an online workshop session, an "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" for them to kick off their collective study.
That's a rather daunting task - I find it's difficult to discuss Hegel well to begin with - and a major (though admittedly idiosyncratic) Hegel commentator, Alexander Kojeve, long ago authored his own Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. It was also rather short notice - I had about two weeks to get ready, at a rather busy time in work (I don't take summers off, or even reduce my workload, since I'm not your usual academic). But I imagined I ought to be able to muddle through well enough to help some motivated readers better make sense of Hegel's thought in general and the Phenomenology in particular, so I agreed.
For their platform, they used a Google Hangout on Air, streaming over YouTube Live. The advantage of that, of course, is that it automatically generates a YouTube video, allowing participants and other interested students to easily go back over the presentation and discussion, as often and as many times as they would like. Here's that video of the session:
It runs about 1 hour 45 minutes in length. The first part of it is really some chitchat and introductions, so I'd start it around the 13:30 mark, if you want to dive right in to the presentation.
