— A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions Book 49
Select Quotes
2 History With A Purpose
The idea of rule based on an intellectual or spiritual principle signifies the beginning of the growth of the consciousness of freedom that Hegel intends to trace. – Page 18
Whatever is the result of the habits and customs in which one was brought up is not the result of the use of one’s reason. – Page 20
My actions, it might be said, are still governed by forces external to my will–the social forces that gave me my habits–even though there is no despot telling me what to do, and the motivation for the action appears to come from within. – Page 20
Once the objective world is rationally organized, on the other hand, individuals following their consciences will freely choose to act in accordance with the law and morality of the objective world. – Page 30
3 Freedom And Community
Hegel’s objection to this notion of freedom is that it takes the choices of the individual as the basis from which freedom must begin–how and why these choices are made is a question that those who hold this conception of freedom do not ask. Hegel does ask it, and his answer is that the individual choice, considered in isolation from everything else, is the outcome of arbitrary circumstances. Hence it is not genuinely free. – Page 35
Others can reveal to you that what you take to be comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries never come to an – Page 38
Since we did not choose our desires, we are not free when we act from desire. – Page 39
This universal form is, Hegel says, simply a principle of consistency or non-contradiction. If we have no point to start from, it cannot get us anywhere. – Page 42
Hegel’s concern is with freedom in the sense in which we are free when we are able to choose without being coerced either by other human beings or by our natural desires, or by social circumstances. – Page 53
4 The Odyssey Of Mind
‘phenomenon’ means, in its philosophical use, ‘that of which the senses or the mind directly takes note; an immediate object of perception (as distinguished from substance, or a thing in itself)’. – Page 63
Phenomenology, then, is the study of the way in which things appear to us. – Page 63
Thus a phenomenology of mind is really a study of how mind appears to itself. – Page 64
Hegel himself describes his project as ‘the exposition of knowledge as a phenomenon’ because he sees the development of consciousness as a development toward forms of consciousness that more fully grasp reality, culminating in ‘absolute knowledge’. – Page 64
For in the case of knowing, what is one to subtract? It would be like subtracting not the difference the water makes to the ray of light, but the ray of light itself. – Page 65
If we are to doubt everything, why not doubt the claim that we can know nothing? – Page 65
Kant argued that we can never see reality as it is; for we can only comprehend our experiences within the frameworks of space, time, and causation. Space, time, and causation are not part of reality, but the necessary forms in which we grasp it; therefore we can never know things as they are independently of our knowledge. – Page 66
To learn to swim we must plunge boldly into the stream; and to obtain knowledge of reality, we must plunge boldly into the stream of consciousness that is the starting point of all we know. – Page 68
We shall not start with sophisticated doubts, but with a simple form of consciousness that takes itself to be genuine knowledge. This simple form of consciousness will, however, prove itself to be something less than genuine knowledge, and so will develop into another form of consciousness; and this in turn will also prove inadequate and develop into something else, and so the process will continue until we reach true knowledge. – Page 68
The ‘something’ that is the result of the discovery that a form of consciousness is inadequate is itself a new form of consciousness, namely consciousness aware of the inadequacies of the previous form and forced to adopt a different approach in order to surmount them. – Page 69
Sense-certainty is aware only of what is now present to it; as Hegel puts it, it is the certainty of the ‘this’, or of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. – Page 70
I may well think that I know what I mean, even if I cannot put it into words, but in fact this is not knowledge, it is purely subjective, a personal opinion. Opinion is not knowledge. – Page 72
At the level of perception, consciousness classifies objects according to their universal properties; this proves inadequate, and so at the level of understanding, consciousness imposes its own laws on reality. – Page 74
The concepts employed in this process–notions like ‘gravity’ and ‘force’–are not things we see existing in reality, but constructs made by our understanding to help us grasp reality. – Page 74
To be aware of oneself as a self-conscious being, one needs to be able to observe another self-conscious being, to see what self-consciousness is like. – Page 77
A child growing up in total isolation from all other self-conscious beings would never develop mentally beyond the level of mere consciousness, for self-consciousness grows out of a social life. – Page 77
In fact self-consciousness is doubly attached to material objects: it is attached to its own living body, and to the living body of the other person from whom it requires acknowledgement. – Page 78
Hegel gives our natural and socially conditioned desires their place, as he gives traditional political institutions their place; but it is always a place within a hierarchy ordered and controlled by mind. – Page 89
So-called ‘material objects’ turned out to be not things existing quite independently of consciousness, but constructs of consciousness, involving concepts like ‘property’ and ‘substance’. – Page 91
Kant, with his notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ as for ever beyond knowledge, was obviously one of the targets of this criticism. In contrast, Hegel promised that the Phenomenology would reach a point ‘where knowledge is no longer compelled to go beyond itself’, where reality will no longer be an unknowable ‘beyond’, but instead mind will know reality directly and be at one with it. – Page 92
absolute knowledge is reached when mind realizes that what it seeks to know is itself. – Page 92
Reality is constituted by mind. – Page 92
Only when mind awakens to the fact that reality is its own creation can it give up this reaching after the ‘beyond’. Then it understands that there is nothing beyond itself. Then it knows reality as directly and immediately as it knows itself. – Page 92
We may admit that there can be no knowledge without an intellect that structures the raw information received by the senses. – Page 93
This essential nature–this ‘universal mind’–is neither an individual mind, nor a collective mind, but simply rational consciousness. – Page 96
5 Logic And Dialectics
it follows from his absolute idealism that ultimate reality is to be found in what is mental or intellectual, not in what is material. It is to be found, to be specific, in rational thought. – Page 99
Hegel starts with the most indeterminate, contentless concept of all: being, or bare existence. Pure being, he says, is pure indeterminateness and vacuity. Pure being has in it no object for thought to grasp. It is entirely empty. In fact, it is nothing. – Page 103
6 Aftermath
Now Feuerbach inverted Hegel. Being is not to be derived from thought, but thought from being. Man does not have his true basis in mind: mind has its true basis in man. – Page 111