Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit (page 4)

If the true is a whole whose forms unfold one after the other in history, then we are far removed from any form of mysticism that would claim to grasp absolute truth through a kind of immediate intuition. What is not given all at once, but develops progressively, cannot be apprehended by such an immediate grasp of truth.

In its place, one must prefer the concept—the true medium through which truth can appear, and the only one capable of securing the scientific character of the knowledge derived from it:

Truth […] has its only element of existence in the concept. ¹

Hegel devotes several paragraphs to denouncing this illusion—mystical intuition—which he describes as immediate knowledge of the Absolute, [of] religion, [of] being. He summarises the doctrine in these terms: One is not supposed to conceive the Absolute, but to feel and contemplate it. It is not the concept, but the feeling of it and the contemplation of it that are meant both to guide the inquiry and to provide its content.

Hegel targets the doctrine of intuition because it was fashionable at the time he was writing. He traces the origin of this fascination to the Enlightenment, with the advent of reason and its critical approach to religion—a development that caused humanity to lose its natural bond with the world.

The critical spirit of the Enlightenment dissolved the links that bound the human being to their environment—to being itself. The following period, Hegel's own era, the time of triumphant German Romanticism, constituted a kind of reaction: people sought to recover their natural—and thus immediate—connection with being or with God, by rejecting the concept (associated with the Enlightenment) and favouring intuition as this immediate relation.

Through reason, Enlightenment critique, and reflection on the world and on himself, man no longer lives in a natural state—he no longer coincides with himself in a naïve way. He is painfully aware of this rupture and seeks a remedy, trying to re-establish his original bond with being through intuition:

Not only has his essential life been lost to him, but he is also conscious of this loss and of the finitude that is its content. Cursing the wretched state in which he finds himself, spirit now demands of philosophy not so much the knowledge of what it is, but rather, through philosophy—and only through it—a return to the establishment of that pure and solid substantiality and consistency of being.

Intuition would be the means of repressing the differentiating concept and establishing the feeling of essence.

Even within philosophy itself, a current emerged in this direction: 'enthusiasm', whose most prominent representative is Jacobi. Against Kant, Jacobi maintained that one could have a direct and absolute knowledge of the thing-in-itself by means of intuition. Hegel targets this doctrine explicitly:

It is not the concept but ecstasy; not the cold progression of the necessity of the thing, but the fermentation of enthusiasm that is supposed to provide the substance's cohesion, its expansion, and the continual advance of its richness.

From a Hegelian standpoint, this doctrine makes little sense. It consists in seeing immediacy—the natural—as the deepest form of truth. But if truth is, as Hegel argues, a progressive development, then immediacy is only the first stage of that development, and therefore the stage at which truth is weakest—or rather, poorest. It is truth in its embryonic form, not yet developed. The beginning, the origin, is not what is most profound; on the contrary, it is what is most superficial.

Thus, poverty and superficiality are the two terms that characterise this conception. Nowadays, spirit shows such poverty that it seems […] to seek comfort merely in the meagre feeling of the divine; and just as there is empty breadth, so there is empty depth […] and this kind of discourse is an intensity without content, which behaves like a sheer force without expansion, and is therefore the same as superficiality.

Nevertheless, this does not suffice to definitively invalidate the doctrine. If truth is a progressive development, then the intuition of being or of God is not the ultimate truth, but merely its first stage. Conversely, if truth does not unfold but is given in its entirety from the outset—as the advocates of intuition claim—then it is Hegel's doctrine that leads us astray, causing us to lose this original truth and become lost in a labyrinth of successive, illusory forms.

How are we to decide between these two conceptions? Which of these theories should we turn to?

It is here that Hegel offers a decisive argument in support of his position and against the proponents of the doctrine of intuition.

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