Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 28
Parallels to Logic — and How Far They Carry
It is tempting to correlate the three parts of subjective spirit with the three parts of logic, and the correlation seems plausible at first glance:
| Logic | Subjective Spirit | What Both Share |
|---|---|---|
| Being | Anthropology | the immediate, found |
| Essence | Phenomenology | reflection, the relation to an other |
| Concept | Psychology | self-determination |
The parallel carries best in the middle. What the logic of essence investigates — the relation of inner and outer, of essence and appearance — is exactly what preoccupies consciousness: it has an object opposite it and takes for a property of that object what is really its own constitution (§ 415).
The first correlation holds too: the natural soul has its determinatenesses the way being has its qualities — immediate, found, without relation to itself.
A second parallel, reaching further, runs through the Idea. At the end of logic stands the Idea of Life, then cognition — theoretical and practical — then the absolute Idea. And the same series is found in spirit: the Anthropology begins with life (§ 388: “Spirit has become as the truth of nature”), psychology develops theoretical and practical spirit, and absolute spirit corresponds to the absolute Idea.
Where both parallels fail. The Phenomenology has no place in this second series — between the Idea of Life and cognition, logic contains nothing corresponding to recognition. And conversely, in the first series, what stands between essence and concept in logic is missing: actuality, substance, reciprocal action.
How to handle this. Hegel himself never asserts a one-to-one correspondence, and he has good reasons not to. Logic develops forms in which one can stand toward an object at all — and such forms surface at various points in the system, wherever they fit. Several perspectives can fit at once.
The parallels are, then, heuristic. They help place a passage, and they mislead as soon as one derives from them what must stand at a given point. Whoever concludes from the logic of essence that the Phenomenology must contain a doctrine of actuality has taken a tool for a proof.
A parallel that passes the test runs from theoretical spirit to absolute spirit — and Hegel himself draws it, with paragraph numbers:
| Theoretical Spirit | Absolute Spirit |
|---|---|
| Intuition (§§ 446–450) | Art — “the concrete intuition and representation of the in-itself absolute spirit” (§ 556) |
| Representation (§§ 451–464) | Religion — absolute spirit “at first for the subjective knowledge of representation” (§ 565) |
| Thinking (§§ 465–468) | Philosophy — science as “the unity of art and religion” (§ 572) |
This is no correlation from outside: Hegel uses the same words, in the same sequence. The three forms in which theoretical spirit stands toward a content recur as the three ways in which absolute spirit knows itself.
And this shows what the parallels are good for. This one explains what stands in the text — why art, religion, and philosophy follow in precisely this order. It adds nothing. A parallel that tried instead to derive from the essence of logic what must stand in the Phenomenology would do the opposite.
There is, however, one exception, and it is instructive. The 1830 Encyclopedia maintains the sequence art — religion — philosophy throughout, as do the other presentations. At one place, however, Hegel counts differently, in the foreword to the Philosophy of World History:
“Among the forms of this known unification, religion stands at the summit […] The second form of the unification of the objective and subjective in spirit is art: it enters more into actuality and sensuousness than religion […] But the true reaches not only to representation and feeling, as in religion, and to intuition, as in art, but also to thinking spirit; through this we obtain the third form of unification — philosophy” (TWA 12, 67f.).
Religion — art — philosophy. And with this the corresponding series of theoretical spirit changes too: not intuition — representation — thinking, but representation — intuition — thinking. Hegel says it outright: representation belongs to religion, intuition to art.
What follows from this for the parallel. It holds — the three forms of theoretical spirit recur in the absolute, and Hegel uses the same words. But the correlation is not as fixed as the Encyclopedia makes it appear: at one place Hegel correlates differently, without thematizing the difference.
Why he does not do so cannot be decided. It is possible that the Encyclopedia version was retained out of regard for the earlier editions; it is also possible that so late and so visible a reworking of the system would have been uncomfortable for him. All that is documented is that both sequences occur in his work.
This is more instructive for assessing the parallels than a clean finding would be. Where Hegel himself wavers, a correlation cannot be derived from the system — it is a decision for which there are reasons, and the reasons can be examined.
Hösle has an objection here that holds independently: he considers the sequence intuition — representation — thinking “linear and non-dialectical” — and the correlation of art with mere intuition fits poorly anyway, if one thinks of drama. Hegel seems to be thinking there from the standpoint of reception, not of production.[1]
The test for this is the same as elsewhere: does the parallel explain what stands in the text — or does it add what is supposed to be missing there? In the first case it is useful, in the second not. [KF]
Hösle, Hegels System, p. 387 and chap. 6.4.2, note 107. The consequences of this rearrangement for the whole system are laid out at hegel-system.de (Absoluter Geist, section 6.3). ↩︎