Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit (page 3)

This temporalisation of truth has several fundamental consequences.

First of all, History does not unfold at random; it is the arena for the progressive unfolding of truth. History, then, has an end—a telos, a purpose, a goal:

The true is the becoming of itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its aim, and which begins with its end, and is actual only through its realisation and its end. ¹

Or again: The true is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence completing itself through its development. The Absolute must be said to be essentially a result—it is only at the end that it is, in truth, what it is.

This naturally raises a question: what is the end of History, towards which everything is progressively moving?

This is not the place to answer that question. It would not be fitting to reveal 'the end of History'—if we may allow ourselves the pun—in a preface. It would serve no purpose. Does one reveal the identity of the murderer at the beginning of a detective novel?

Since a thing is not exhausted in the end it aims at, but rather in the progressive development of its realisation, this end can only be fully appreciated once one has passed through the successive stages of the forms truth assumes in its unfolding.

Thus, the end is the universal that is not yet living, just as the tendency is only a pure impulse that lacks actualisation, and the bare result is the corpse that has left this tendency behind.

At this stage—that of a preface—we must focus on the principle of truth's development itself, rather than attempt to identify its concrete stages (which will be the task of the body of the work) or its ultimate destination (which we shall discover at the book's conclusion).

In any case, a preface is ill-suited to the very kind of work Hegel is writing. The Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the only book whose preface begins with a critique of the very idea of a preface in philosophy: The explanations usually given in a preface, to clarify the aims the author has set for himself, the motivations behind his work […] seem not only superfluous in the case of a philosophical work, but even, given the nature of the matter, inappropriate and contrary to the purpose intended.

If the true is indeed the whole—encompassing the wide variety of forms it successively assumes—it cannot be adequately conveyed in a preface, whose very nature imposes limits on its length. At most, a preface can offer a few inessential and contingent remarks, since anything essential belongs to a system whose exposition will require several hundred pages:

Whatever may be said in a philosophical preface, and however it may be said—for example, in offering a historical overview of the intention, or the general standpoint adopted, or the main content and conclusions—all of it remains a string of affirmations and assertions about the true, thrown together at random, and this cannot serve as the method in which philosophical truth ought to be presented.

In fact, if the true is a whole, it can only be presented within a system:

The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of its expression.

It is not a matter of laying out a few truths in a piecemeal or fragmentary way, but of providing a complete, totalising, and systematic exposition—because the successive forms that truth assumes are deduced from one another. They are interconnected by a necessary process that must be brought to light.

Only in this way does philosophy become science. It ceases to be merely the love (philo) of wisdom or knowledge (logos), as its etymology suggests, and becomes knowledge itself. This scientific ideal—a break from the original humility implicit in its name—is something Hegel explicitly embraces:

To contribute to the transformation of philosophy into the form of science—to the goal of enabling it to renounce its name as love of knowledge and become actual knowledge—this is what I have set out to do.

Philosophy is scientific because it can be presented as a system, and it is systematic because it is a science. This ideal of scientificity—no longer ours in the twenty-first century—was already present in Descartes and would later be taken up by Husserl, as the title of his work Philosophy as a Rigorous Science attests.

Today such an ideal is discredited, and no one seeks to make philosophy into a science—still less into the absolute science. But for Hegel, quite the opposite is true. As he resolutely affirms: Knowledge is actual and can only be presented as science or system. And again: The inner necessity for knowledge to be science lies in its very nature.

And this is possible, once again, because the true is a whole. This definition of truth gives rise to this conception of science—and no other. A different definition would have led to a different model of knowledge—the fragmentary style of the pre-Socratics, for example.

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