The Phenomenology of Spirit

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ryan Smallwood The Logic of Hegel by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Translated by William Wallace Bibliographical Notice on the Three Editions and Prefaces of the Encyclopedia The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline is the third in time of the four works which Hegel published.

It was preceded by The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 and The Science of Logic in two volumes in 1812 and 1816, and was followed by The Outlines of the Philosophy of Law in 1820.

The only other works which came directly from his hand are a few essays, addresses, and reviews.

The earliest of these appeared in the Critical Journal of Philosophy issued by his friend Schelling and himself in 1802, when Hegel was one in thirty which, as Bacon thought, is a great deal of sand in the hourglass, and the latest were his contributions to the Jahrbücher für Wissenschaftliche Kritik in the year of his death, 1831.

Paragraphs, concise in form and saturated with meaning, postulate and presuppose the presiding spirit of the lecturer to fuse them into continuity and raise them to higher lucidity.

Yet in two directions the works of Hegel furnish a supplement to the defects of the encyclopedia.

One of these aids to comprehension is the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in his thirty-seventh year.

It may be going too far to say with David Strauss that it is the alpha and omega of Hegel, and his later writings only extracts from it.

For five hard years, he worked toward a book that would be wholly and unmistakably his own, and in the autumn of eighteen hundred and six, as the armies gathered in the fields around the town, he finished it.

It was called The Phenomenology of Spirit, and it is the book he carried through the smoke of the ruined streets.

Its making had cost him more than labor.

In the disorder of those same months, a son was born to him out of wedlock by the woman in whose house he lodged, a private difficulty and grief that he would carry, awkwardly and not always kindly, for decades to come.

The long road back toward reconciliation, toward a self at home with itself, opens here at the very bottom in the tears of a consciousness that has not yet understood that it has been mourning itself.

Chapter Eight: The Thoughts of God.

The long climb of the Phenomenology was, in the end, only a ladder.

It carried the ordinary mind up to the high standpoint of pure thinking, the place where the split between the knower and the known has finally closed.

I was not aware that by 1860 Europe had long passed his works by, in favor of more modern thinking.

With a passionate desire to reach a comprehension of the truth I grappled with the system; began with the Encyclopaedia, read the three volumes of Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Law, the Philosophy of History, the Phenomenology of the Mind; then the Philosophy of Law again, and finally the Logic, the Natural Philosophy, and the Philosophy of the Mind, in a veritable intoxication of comprehension and delight.

One day when a young girl towards whom I felt attracted had asked me to go and say good-by to her before her departure, I forgot the time, her journey, and my promise to her over my Hegel.

As I walked up and down my room I chanced to pull my watch out of my pocket and realized that I had missed my appointment, and that the girl must have started long ago.

If you listened to my previous episode, you know I've been studying Hegel as part of my master's, and it's been interesting to ponder what Hegel might make of ghosting.

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel details the path consciousness must travel to become absolute knowing.

When we arrive at the chapter on self-consciousness, we learn that consciousness understands itself through how it understands the world.

For Hegel, our first instinct is simply desire.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Rev Left Radio.

All right, on today's episode, we have a three-plus-hour episode walking through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit with philosophy professor, friend, and comrade Colin Bodale, who is a philosophy professor from Villanova, just recently got his Ph.D. in philosophy.

specializes in hegel german idealism etc wanted to have him on to walk people through this crucial text not only for philosophy in general but for marxist right because marxism is a development upon hegelianism and we talk about those connections and those nuances especially towards the end we get into a fascinating conversation of what exactly Marx leaves and takes from Hegel and how we should think about Hegelian philosophy as Marxists it gets much much more nuanced and complex than Marx turned Hegel on his head it turned idealism into materialism that's a part of it but that's just a first glance and we get deep into the actual details of what that looks like what can be kept from him and I think ultimately the People will walk away realizing that we take on board and we should take on board a lot more Hegelianism than we sometimes flatter ourselves to think.

So this is a really fun conversation.

Those are all genuine ways that you can also help support the show.

All right.

Without further ado, here's my conversation with Colin Bodale on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Enjoy.

I'll try to explain it real quickly.

No, I, I've read the Phenomenology of Spirit, and I, I know Hegel.

Okay.

But no, but, but t- but tell me, uh, so but why not denounce Marxism? I mean, what-- So Mao Zed-- Mao Zedong, Marxist, Lenin, Marxist, Joseph Stalin, Marxist.