Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit (page 5)

Hegel's redefinition of truth gives him a decisive advantage: he need not refute any particular doctrine, but can simply reduce it to a moment within the progressive unfolding of truth.

In doing so, he both grants it legitimacy—it is a necessary stage in this development and must be respected as such—and refutes it, since it is merely a stage that has been, or soon will be, surpassed. In other words, he affords himself the luxury of not having to refute this or that philosophical doctrine: History takes care of that.

Thus, for example, there is no need to produce a refutation of Stoicism—a task that would be difficult, to say the least. It suffices to show that this philosophical current corresponded to a certain historical period (Ancient Greece and Rome), and that it eventually gave way to a new form in the development of truth—a new doctrine.

By redefining truth, Hegel also changes the very meaning of what it is to refute a theory. It is no longer a matter of identifying factual errors, contradictions, or a lack of evidence—an approach that, in any case, often makes little sense. What errors could one possibly point to in a Stoic masterpiece like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations? The task is instead to show how a given doctrine represented, at the time, a decisive form in which truth was embodied, how it subsequently lost that legitimacy, and what form took its place—and why.

Just as there is no need to refute the bud or the blossom, so too is there no need to refute this or that philosophical theory. One must simply place it in perspective—acknowledging its truth as a moment within the Whole, or within truth itself, which amounts to the same thing, since the true is the whole. ¹

This is how Hegel deals the fatal blow to the doctrine of intuition. He observes that while it may have had its moment of glory—German Romanticism, the post-Kantian doctrine of enthusiasm—it already belongs to the past. Today, we are witnessing a change of era: It is not difficult to see, moreover, that our epoch is one of birth and transition into a new era. Spirit has broken with the world in which it formerly lived and represented itself; it is on the verge of plunging this world into the depths of the past, and is engaged in the work of its transformation.

Time itself, then, brings the doctrines of intuition and immediacy to an end—formidable opponents indeed. Here one sees the power of Hegel's argumentative method: he benefits from the panoramic, totalising vision of pantheistic doctrines—those that grasp reality as a Whole.

In a beautiful passage—remarkable for its literary quality—Hegel describes this shift of epoch through the evocative image of the birth of a child. The warning signs of a coming crisis accumulate, and then the era tips into something new, still unknown, through a kind of qualitative leap:

It is true that spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in a continual process of advancement. Yet just as in the case of the child, after a long period of silent nourishment, the first breath of air interrupts the mere continuity of that growth—just as this marks a qualitative leap, and the child is born—so too does spirit, forming inwardly, slowly and silently mature into its new shape. It gradually breaks apart the structure of its former world, piece by piece, and only scattered symptoms reveal that this world is beginning to totter: the frivolity and boredom that settle upon what exists, the vague and indeterminate presentiment of something unknown, are the prodromes that something else is on the way. This slow crumbling, which does not yet alter the overall appearance, is suddenly broken off by the rising flash—the lightning bolt that in one stroke brings forth the form of the new world.

Still, one might ask: what are the signs that the doctrines of intuition have now been surpassed, and that we have entered a new era?

Hegel points to the growing popularity of Schelling's philosophy. Hegel had worked as Schelling's assistant at the University of Jena and had even written a treatise in his defence: The Difference Between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and Schelling. But he soon distanced himself in order to develop his own thought. That dual movement—admiration followed by critique—reappears here, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Schelling did not fall prey to the temptations of the doctrines of enthusiasm, which claimed that one could intuit the thing-in-itself. But he felt the urgency of a redemptive synthesis that might reconcile Nature and Spirit, and he recognised the need to present this synthesis in the form of a system. He also adopted the standpoint of the Whole, of the Absolute. All of this sparked Hegel's enthusiasm and nourished his own thinking. For Hegel, this opens the path towards a new era—a new spiritual age in which knowledge and spirit become something fundamentally different.

But the limitations of Schelling's doctrine soon became clear to Hegel. It is precisely in the next passage of the Preface that he sets out the reasons for his eventual departure from Schelling's thought.

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