Ten extracts from Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit
Introduction
Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit is one of the most famous texts in the
history of Western philosophy, and perhaps one of the most difficult. The Phenomenology
itself was completed in the city of Jena on the night of 12-13 October 1806, as Napoleon’s
army finished off the Holy Roman Empire just outside the city. In January 1807, Hegel added
a preface, amounting to ninety-one pages in the original edition.
The book was intended as a “science of the experience of consciousness”—that is, an
account of the journey undertaken by human consciousness from the starting point of the
first experience of external objects to the achievement of absolute knowledge. It sought to
show, in effect, that Hegel’s philosophy was not just one point of view among others, but
the logical culmination of the whole historical process that had given rise to all other points
of view as well. It’s hard to think of a more ambitious task.
The preface is partly a justification of this task, partly an explanation of what it involves and
partly a critical comparison of his own project with those of his immediate philosophical
predecessors and contemporaries. At the time, it seemed crucial for Hegel, as a relative
newcomer, to distinguish his project from those of the better-known Kant, Fichte and
Schelling. Two centuries later, it is a difficult task to reconstruct Hegel’s views through
comparison with the debates of his time.
In this context, there is some value in extracting from Hegel’s preface some of his more
programmatic statements concerning dialectic. Each of these statements is embedded in a
more complex argument, which is not fully apparent from the extracts below. If these
extracts can be viewed as the results of Hegel’s often frenzied endeavours, we should heed
his warning (below) that “the bare result is the corpse that has left the guiding tendency
behind it”. We can console ourselves that these results have been given new life by a wide
range of philosophers and political thinkers since Hegel gave this warning!
Benedetto Croce’s What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (1906)
recommends that Hegel should be read “like a poet”, seeking “the true philosopher, the
hater of all that is abstract and motionless” beneath the philosophical formulations. In his
Hegel: A Reinterpretation (1965), Walter Kaufman proposes a similar approach to Hegel’s
Phenomenology, comparing its journey to those depicted in Dante’s Divine Comedy and
Goethe’s Faust. This is an unfamiliar way to read philosophy, but Hegel’s preface makes
unusual demands.
All extracts are taken from G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). The whole of the preface (pp. 1-45 of the same work) is
available in the Resources section of the course website.
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First extract: Conventional images of truth and falsity
The more conventional society gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it
tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and
hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of
philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees it as simple
disagreement. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say
that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is
shown up as the false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the fruit of it
instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one
another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them
moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as
necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole (p.
2).
Second extract: Against judging an idea from outside
The real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result
the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came
about. The aim by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the guiding tendency is a mere drive
that as yet lacks an actual existence; and the bare result is the corpse that has left the
guiding tendency behind it. . . .This concern with aim or results, with differentiating and
passing judgment on various thinkers is an easier task than it might seem. For instead of
getting involved in the real issue, this kind of activity is always away beyond it; instead of
tarrying in it, and losing itself in it, this kind of knowing is forever grasping at something
new; it remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the
real issue and surrendering to it. To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite
easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a
definitive description is the hardest thing of all (pp. 2–3).
Third extract: Ours is the birth-time and period of transition to a new era
It is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit
has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to
submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at
rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first breath drawn by a child
after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth—
there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born—so likewise the Spirit in its formation
matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its
previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms. The frivolity
and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something
unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left
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unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the
features of the new world (pp. 6–7).
Fourth extract: Any principle of philosophy is in itself defective
A so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is
only a principle. It is, therefore, easy to refute it. The refutation consists in pointing out its
defect; and it is defective because it is only the universal or principle, is only the beginning.
If the refutation is thorough, it is derived and developed from the principle itself, not
accomplished by counter-assertions and random thoughts from outside. The refutation
would, therefore, properly consist in the further development of the principle, and in thus
remedying the defectiveness (p. 13).
Fifth extract: Holding fast to what is dead is essential to the life of Spirit
Death . . . is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the
greatest strength. . . But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps
itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it.
It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as
something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we see of something it is
nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else;
on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying
with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being (p.
19).
Sixth extract: The True is the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk
The evanescent itself must . . . be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from
the True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be
regarded as something on the other side, positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and
passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is ‘in itself’ and constitutes the
actuality and the movement of the life of truth. The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in
which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out,
the reval is just as much transparent and simple repose (p. 27).
Seventh extract: Instead of the freedom of argumentation, we should let the content of
argument move according to its own nature
Argumentation is freedom from all content, and a sense of vanity towards it. What is looked
for here is the effort to give up this freedom, and, instead of being the arbitrarily moving
principle of the content, to sink this freedom in this content, letting it move spontaneously
of its own nature, by the self of its own self, and then to contemplate this movement (p. 36).
Eighth extract: Determinate negation and the power of the negative
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Argumentative reasoning adopts a negative attitude towards the content it apprehends; it
knows how to refute it and destroy it. That something is not the case, is a merely negative
insight, a dead end which does not lead to a new content beyond itself. In order to have a
content once again, something new must be taken over from elsewhere. . . . [But] this
insight is the negative which fails to see the positive within itself. . . . As we have already
shown, the negative belongs to the content itself, and is the positive, both as the immanent
movement and determination of the content, and as the whole of this process. Looked at as
a result, what emerges from this process is the determinate negative which is consequently
a positive content as well (p. 36).
Ninth extract: We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to
mean
The philosophical proposition, since it is a proposition, leads one to believe that the usual
subject—predicate relation obtains, as well as the usual attitude towards knowing. But then
philosophical content destroys this attitude and this opinion. We learn by experience that
we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning
compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way (p.
39).
Tenth extract: Truth prevails when its time has come
We must hold to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has
come, and that when this time has come, and that it appears only when this time has come,
and therefore never appears prematurely, nor finds a public not ripe to receive it. . . . The
share in the total work of Spirit which falls to the individual can only be very small. Because
of this, the individual must all the more forget himself. . . . Of course, he must make of
himself what he can; but less must be demanded of him, just as he in turn can expect less of
himself, and may demand less for himself (p. 45).
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