Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit (page 11)

What is the method that underpins the science Hegel proposes? Just as logic underlies many other disciplines, what will be the logic of the Phenomenology of Spirit?

In fact, there is no method or logic that can be regarded as a necessary prerequisite for the constitution and comprehension of this science—of the Hegelian system. A method or logic is only required when one separates the form from the content of a science, the discipline itself from its object—truth—and seeks to organise the former in order to attain the latter.

But here, the point is not to construct a new discipline; it is to present truth itself, allowing it to unfold on its own through its various figures: Truth is the movement of itself within itself, whereas method is knowledge external to it. This is why it is characteristic of mathematics. ¹

There is therefore no need for a Logic as a prior foundation to the system—or, which comes to the same thing: Method […] is nothing other than the construction of the whole erected in its pure essentiality—that is, the exposition of the system itself: Its proper exposition […] is Logic itself.

This is why the system is the most appropriate form for presenting truth—not the apparatus of mathematics: The scientific state that mathematics has bequeathed to us—the whole apparatus of explanation, subdivision, axioms, chains of theorems with their demonstrations, their principles and the deductions and conclusions drawn from them—has, even in popular opinion, already grown somewhat outdated.

The same reproach can be levelled in philosophy against scholasticism, and even against the reasoned conversation of the Socratic or Peripatetic schools: these are not adequate forms for expressing truth:

The manner which consists in proposing a proposition, offering justifications for it, and likewise offering others to refute the opposing proposition—is not the form in which truth can appear.

And yet, when we think of a system or a science, we often imagine charts or diagrams that reduce the richness of the Whole to a few elements. The table of categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, for instance, leaves a lasting impression on the reader and lends the work an air of scientific rigour.

But this is not what Hegel intends to offer: he does not seek to summarise the becoming of Spirit in a few schemata. For in such abstraction and formalism, we lose the life of the Concept:

To be sure, the true form has been established in its true content, and the concept of science has emerged, but: We can no more regard as scientific the use of this form when it is degraded to a lifeless schema, to a ghost-like pattern in the strict sense of the term, and when scientific organisation is reduced to a table.

It is often said that science is opposed to life—that the richness of the Whole cannot be captured by a system. This is precisely the opposition that Hegel seeks to dismantle. He aims to clarify the conditions under which it may be overcome, and to describe a system capable of accounting for the richness of life.

To do so, he proceeds in two stages.

He begins by siding with the critics of this kind of science or system—one built on schemata, the product of a merely thinking understanding:

The tabular understanding keeps to itself [not in the sense of safeguarding, but of confiscating] the necessity and the concept of the content—that which makes for the concrete, the actual, and the living movement of the thing it arranges in its chart; or, more precisely, one should not say it retains these for itself, but that it does not know them. For if it had an understanding of the matter, it would surely show it. It is not even aware of the need for such understanding—otherwise it would temper its schematisation, or at least recognise that it can deliver no more than a table of contents. And this understanding offers only the table of contents—a summary of the content—but does not provide the content itself.

These critics have rightly understood that what escapes such constructions is life:

Formal understanding leaves to others the task of adding that crucial element [namely, life]. Instead of entering into the immanent content of the thing, it always views the whole from above, remaining detached from the singular existence it speaks of—in other words, it does not see it at all. But genuine understanding of the particular demands that we immerse ourselves in the life of the object—or, what amounts to the same thing, that we confront and articulate its inner necessity.

Hegel offers a striking example of the kind of science that denies life while simultaneously impoverishing the Whole by reducing it to a few elements within a system: physics, or what he calls the 'philosophy of nature'. This formalism of nature […] teaches us, for instance, that understanding is electricity.

We do indeed know that the brain's nerve impulses—or brain waves—are electrical in nature. One might then believe that in discovering this, we have grasped the truth of the mind. But such formalism, by reducing Spirit through abstraction to a single element, has in fact made its very essence disappear: life itself.

Against this dead understanding and external knowledge, this lifeless knowledge, Hegel, in a second step, sets out to defend an entirely different model. Which one?

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Hegel: A Close Reading