The Phenomenology of Spirit

The Phenomenology of Spirit was written in 1807 by Hegel. These notes are limited to the book’s preface.

Universality is the property of being common to all. To understand a universal is to understand its content. Content is knowledge required for true understanding. To truly understand, it is not enough to know all truths from a single perspective. Science is the rigorous process of uncovering all true content. A snapshot of all true content in time is a form of science. However, each form does not refute its previous one, but rather decorates it when it just has something to add or supplants/replaces it when it contradicts. Content is the sum of all forms. The representation of content inside our minds is concept. Concepts are divided into actual and non-actual thoughts. Actual thoughts are representations. The absence of concepts is intuition, which is associated with simply being or religion and the state of being absolute or self-reliant. New forms tear apart the existing form’s concepts and unifies them again. Deconstruction is vicious and unnatural and construction is natural and intuitive. What felt natural was once different. Early humans believed heaven was a reality. They dreamed too much. Now, we are satisfied with any discovery resembling the concept of heaven.

Science’s aim is to be absolute and to attain the ultimate knowledge or whole. The whole itself is simple and has simple beginnings. Reaching there is not. One starts with exoteric knowledge which is fully determinate and is immediate in that it’s immediately understood. As knowledge moves, its snapshots are moments. Monochrome formalism applies the exoteric moment to a panoply of ideas. However, the resulting moment is not a true moment, but rather another panoply of differences. External insight also generates moments, but then the moments are not connected. The Idea, that science is absolute, is an example of a universal. Speculation vis-a-vis science equates objects that shouldn’t be equated. The Idea’s principle is that everything is one. Speculation’s principle is that everything is the same. And therefore, it results in untruths. The Idea, however, requires truthful objects or substances. It also requires true subjects or connections between objects. Moments are forms that in itself contains objects and subjects. The connections between moments are also subjects, since subjects can be connections between the same object that self-moves. Purposes are particular subjects which suppose their ends at their beginnings. Therefore, an object’s purpose is a subject between it and its idealized version of itself, or its coming-to-be, which points to its beginning.

An object can be in-itself, which is an abstract universality, static to others. It can also be for-itself, which outlines all of its possibilities. The summation of all its possibilities is its form. An object’s transition to its next form is its becoming-other. The relation between its becoming-other and its absolute, final form is continuously sublated, the relation to be returned to at its finality. It must be sublated or mediated to continue moving. If the object reaches the same point as the beginning, this process is called self-equality. Reason and nature are self-equalities. Reason is a self-equality for the reason that its beginning supposes its end. It is a form of doing that does not require thinking. Nature is a self-equality for the reason that it is immediate and when it’s immediate it’s motionless, but it self-moves, and its final form must also be motionless.

Because concepts are represented in our brains, they self-move, self-improve, and self-prove. The way they move is in the form of a proposition, from subject to predicate. The absolute cannot be subject because it is at rest, though it can be the subject of propositions. Subjects have a many-to-many relationship with predicates. If a proposition is a refutation of the subject by the predicate, in a self-moving system, the refutation requires the subject, otherwise, the refutation’s inspiration comes externally. A self-moving system composed of actual subjects, also known as substances, connected with other substances through predicates exists-in-itself, determines itself, and is in and for itself. Transfigured essentialities are concepts simple at their conceptions and simple by the end of all their movements. Science is a transfigured essentiality, as its goal is to return to actuality. An individual embarking on the journey of science will encounter violent resistance to movement. But over time, their forms form an outline.

That doing comes before understanding is well known. That we are conscious without us knowing what consciousness exactly is also well known. In our forms, we observe lost decisions from our histories and repressions that unravel our past developments. The human history of coming to knowing is comparable to the length of the path to absolutely know, so Science moves bidirectionally. Existence is sublated, but its forms and representations are not. Existence is familiar but not understood. To understand existence is to sublate it and study its forms and representations, also known as analysis. Unfortunately, while existence is actual, its forms and representations are non-actual. In analysis, existence is divided into non-divisible chunks that no longer move. And in the midst of analysis, immediacy in understanding is sublated. Analysis negatively thinks with false content.

Early humans converted sensory input into universal concepts. Now that there are too many of those, we strive to return the unintuitive universal concepts into fluid senses. As someone collects sensory input, they forget they’re fixed momentarily. In their process of experiencing, they become unfamiliar with their surroundings before becoming familiar again. They also think negatively by relating to the objects they notice and observing their inequalities with themselves. Beings are substantial content. They understand for themselves by relating to other objects using logic. Logic involves thinking about negatives, false, or non-actuals, and strives to differentiate the truth from the false. Simplicity is determinate and has a definitive true or false value. What’s true has substance and what’s false is negative of substance. But while the content of knowing is indeterminate, it is also not false. It’s why it’s subject. The false is also indeterminate when it mixes what is true indiscriminately. But what is true is not always determinate. The view that truth is determinate is dogmatism.

Truth has different values according to different disciplines. In history, it is expressed as intuitions backed by reasonings, as if the reasonings were the last word. In math, they’re theorems backed by proofs, which need to sublate the truth before their conclusions. Math truths are coming-to-be existences, which are also taking-itself-back essences. Philosophy has that form as well, its other form forms truths as coming-to-be substances as essential inner natures which come into existence in being for others. In other words, math is non-substantial, non-actual in the way it arbitrarily proves and inessentially divides space, and is clever argumentation and defective cognition necessary for philosophy but not complete. Math is analytic in that experiences are presupposed, then proven. Its truths are expressed in lifeless units and conceptless magnitudes. Despite the argued superiority of philosophy over math, all truths rely on outdated representations. In addition, not all truths are equal. Some truths satisfy surface-level curiosities but do not truly help one understand, like superficial curiosities about the latest scientific discoveries which make you feel like you understand a subject that you don’t. In the quest for finding truths, we rely on attention, which is external in what we can concentrate on, and memory, which is also external in what can be brought back. In the process of learning the unfamiliar, we use logic and reasoning to bring us back to the familiar.

Philosophy is not the lifeless nature of math, the inflexibility of science, the randomness of external inspirations, or the speculation of prophetic visions. It is also not the Kantian triplicity, or Understanding, Judgment, and Reason. Understanding creates concepts, Judgment creates principles, and Reason creates the dialectic. But like the inflexibility of monochrome formalism, the predicates in triplicity just mesh with each other and do not create anything new of value. Analogies are also not philosophy. While the semblance of the concept is explained in them, the concept itself is not. Analogies are lifeless, non-living, and motionless. They do not convey inequalities, the essence of the concept, and are instantiations of living universal concepts at best. They make the universal easier to grasp and simplify themselves into determinateness. Other lifeless concepts are those that were accidentally conceived so that they are not reproducible.

If thinking is self-reflection, then the mind moves from self to self, from concept to concept. When stable, the mind abstracts itself from itself, or self-inequality. The goal of science is to achieve final stability, for moments of the self to become whole. Simplicity is self-equal, fixed, substance, and a concept belonging to the brain or nous. Existence is not self-equal, nous, and is the culmination of simple thoughts. Because existence is nous, it is contained in itself, not letting other beings understand its own. The speculative shuns self-inequality, the unfamiliar, and the moving. And materialized thinking, which contains no indeterminate concepts, fails to move from itself to itself. To properly judge, one observes self-movements. In clever argumentation, one breaks down the problem so all its contents are false and so it is entirely negative. To think comprehensively, one must think negatively as well as the totality of the positive and the negative leading to the positive.

In propositions, like “he is a man”, the subject is “he” and the predicate is “is a man”. The subject is a concept and the predicate is accidental. Because “is a man” is presented second, it has the last word. When the predicate has just as much importance as the subject, like “God is being”, the predicate is also the subject, and the proposition is not simple. “God” is a universal and “being” is a substance. The subject vanishes into the predicate, and the reader is forced to read about the subject again to figure out why. Propositions are contents in the nous which actually are concepts. Contents are conceptions of substances or objects, which self-move in actuality. When there is no difference between the subject and the predicate, the proposition is speculative. While speculation returns the inner essence of the subject, however, its lack of rigor does not prove that the subject-predicate relations are consistent externally, a requirement of truth. The dialectic is such rigorous proof in philosophy. It contains complex propositions each consisting of more propositions. What proves the speculative as speculative is itself not speculative. The dialectic is also used on the fundamental exoteric moments of philosophy. Those moments are not the same thing as common sense, trivial truths, and poor philosophy. Poor philosophy seeks to silence critics by saying things are self-evident. In proper philosophy, there is never the last word. As more and more people figure out parts of science, the next generations can get away with doing less as the universal spirit develops more.