Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit (page 12)

In truth, science can only be organised through the living movement of the concept itself; in it, this determinacy […] is the soul of the accomplished content, which moves of its own accord ¹.

Hegel defends the possibility of presenting a system that preserves this very life. In order to do so, science must reproduce the very movement of the Concept, that dialectical movement we have already examined, which Hegel here describes as follows:

The movement of what is consists, on the one hand, in becoming an other to itself [the negative moment of differentiation], and in so doing, becoming its own immanent content [the moment of self-reflection]; and on the other hand, in taking back into itself this unfolding or this existence that is its own [the moment of return to self].

We are therefore no longer operating at the level of understanding (Verstand), but rising to the level of Reason (Vernunft), and of philosophy in its highest form – speculative philosophy:

This nature of the scientific method, namely, that it is not separated from the content, and also that it determines of itself its own rhythm, finds its proper exposition, as we have already indicated, in speculative philosophy.

The system Hegel envisages – the science of the Whole – must therefore preserve this inner movement found in all things, which he defines first as ‘logical necessity’, and then as ‘the speculative’:

By the mere fact that substance […] is in itself subject, all content is its own reflection into itself. Thus, in this very nature of what is – which is to be in its being its own concept – lies logical necessity; it alone is the rational and the rhythm of the organic whole; it is just as much the knowledge of the content as the content is concept or essence – in other words, it alone is the speculative.

This dialectical movement must be thought, and reproduced within ourselves in order to be truly grasped: What matters in the study carried out by science is to take on the effort, the labour of the concept.

But it is difficult to break free from the thinking of the understanding, which is grounded in a straightforward notion of identity, and to ascend to the speculative – a thinking of movement, of contradiction and synthesis:

But if one is willing to consider that this kind of thought has a content […], it also has another side, which makes the act of grasping it difficult.

Hegel describes the difficulty of thinking dialectically – that is, of thinking the movement inscribed at the heart of logic – in several paragraphs, including the following:

Once the concept is the selfhood proper to the object, appearing as the becoming of that object, it is no longer a motionless and resting subject that carries its predicates without flinching, but the concept itself that moves and reappropriates its determinations. In this movement, the so-called motionless subject is itself lost […] So that the firm ground that reasoning thought finds in the resting subject wavers, and only this movement itself becomes the object.

Hegel shows that language itself – the medium in which thought unfolds – already gestures towards the speculative level. In other words, there is a dialectic at work at the very heart of language.

What do we see, for instance, in a simple judgement such as ‘the cat is black’? A predicate (‘black’) is attributed to a subject (‘the cat’). The two terms are separate, clearly distinct, in accordance with the principle of identity and the requirements of the understanding.

However, consider this other judgement: ‘God is being’. It might appear at first that we are again dealing with two distinct terms. But in fact, in a certain sense, the subject (‘God’) seems to dissolve entirely into the predicate (‘being’). It seems as though we are saying: God is nothing other than being – and therefore, there is no God:

God seems to cease being what he is according to the structure of the proposition, namely, the firm and consistent subject. Thought, rather than advancing towards the predicate, is instead halted and pushed back towards the subject, lamenting its disappearance […] Thought loses the firm ground and objectivity it had in the subject, and finds itself cast back into the predicate, only to return, not into itself, but back into the subject of the content.

Here we see the dialectical movement at work – within language itself – between subject and predicate. Hegel generalises this as follows:

The nature of the judgement – or simply the proposition, which contains within itself the difference between subject and predicate – is undone by the speculative proposition, and […] the proposition of identity that it becomes contains the backlash which reacts to this first relation.

Hence a conflict between the form of a proposition in general and the unity of the concept, which destroys that form.

A synthesis serves as the dialectical resolution of this conflict: In the philosophical proposition, the identity of subject and predicate must not annihilate their difference, which is expressed by the form of the proposition; their unity must instead emerge as a harmony.

We see here that the very structure of language reveals that the principle of identity – despite its apparent clarity and simplicity – must ultimately be surpassed.

Thus, one must learn to think differently, dialectically, ‘beyond the principle of identity or contradiction’ – and this is no easy task. Yet this is precisely what we must strive to do if we are to rise above mere ‘representational thinking’, or the ‘common sense’ of popular opinion.

Hegel concludes with an ironic remark aimed at common sense, and expresses the hope that his work will be favourably received:

What is excellent in the philosophy of our time places its very value in scientific rigour, and it is only by this that it gains recognition and merit. I may therefore also hope that this attempt to claim science for the concept, and to present it in the element that properly belongs to it, will find its way through the inner truth of the matter. We must be convinced that the true has the nature to break forth only when its time has come, and that it appears only when that time has arrived.

After this preparatory work – this study of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit – we are now better equipped to enter the main body of the work, and to discover the different stages of the self-unfolding of Spirit.

This is what we now propose to undertake.

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