Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Martin Heidegger

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СКАЧАТЬ aside the title love of knowing and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do,”³ and when Hegel states similar things elsewhere, then the word science has a different ring altogether, and its concept an entirely different meaning. And in fact, this meaning of the concept of science arises from and is the final development of that approach which Western philosophy already adopted in antiquity as its guiding question. In contrast to this very intrinsic intention of bringing the guiding problem of ancient Western philosophy to its completion, the propensity toward laying the foundation of the sciences and toward the thus oriented formation of philosophy as rigorous science is of lesser significance.

      But the guiding problem of Western philosophy is the question, “What is a being?” The shaping of this question stands in an inner, de facto relation to λόγος, νοῦς, ratio, thinking, reason, and knowledge. This does not mean primarily and simply that the question, “What is a being?” is dealt with by an intellectual procedure and is known theoretically. Rather, the thesis according to which the inquiry into beings is related to λόγος says something about the factual content of this question, namely, that a being as a being, i.e., regarding its being [Sein], is grasped from the λόγος and as λόγος. It maintains that fixing an interconnection between a being, ὄν, and λόγος already represents a decisive (not a random) answer to the guiding question of philosophy.

      This answer, which was of necessity prepared at the start of ancient philosophy, was brought to completion in a radical way by Hegel. That is, by really carrying through the answer, he brought to real completion the task which was implied in ancient philosophy. (Accordingly, a being as such, the actual in its genuine and whole reality, is the idea, or the concept. The concept, however, is the power of time, i.e., the pure concept annuls time.⁴ In other words, the problem of being is properly conceived only when time is made to disappear.) The Hegelian philosophy expresses this disappearance of time by conceiving philosophy as the science or as absolute knowledge.

      Now, in claiming that philosophy is not science, I am saying that, considering the actual content of philosophy, its guiding question cannot be left in the form that it had for the ancients, nor, consequently, can it be left to stand on the foundation provided by Hegel’s problematic. Thus, I am suggesting parenthetically that philosophy can find its way back into its fundamental problems less than ever as long as it is primarily conceived on the model of the idea of a rigorous scientificality and in terms of the founding of knowledge and of the sciences.

      By seeing the task of philosophy as lying in the thesis that “philosophy is not a science” (a thesis which sounds negative but whose positive character comes clearly to the fore in the title of my book Being and Time), I am not suggesting that philosophy should be delivered over to fanaticism and to the proclamation of any opinions about the world whatsoever (in other words, what currently carries the eminent title of “existential philosophy”). In this view, all strict conceptuality and every genuine problem are reduced to the level of mere technique and schematic. It was never my idea to preach an “existential philosophy.” Rather, I have been concerned with renewing the question of ontology—the most central problem of Western philosophy—the question of being, which relates to λόγος not only in terms of method [Mittel] but also in terms of content. One cannot decide whether or not philosophy is the science by considering some epistemological criterion or other. This decision can be made only from out of the actual content and the inner necessities of the first and last problem of philosophy—the question of being. If we suggest that philosophy cannot and should not be the science, then we are also not saying that philosophy should be made a matter of whim. Instead we are saying that philosophy is to be freed for the task which always confronts it whenever philosophy decides to turn into work and become actuality: It has become free to be what it is: philosophy.

      Philosophy should strike an alliance neither with the scientific nor with the unscientific, but rather simply with the matter itself, which remains one and the same from Parmenides to Hegel. And what about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? We should not say offhand that they are not philosophers; much less should we hurriedly say that they are philosophers and thus are part of the genuine history of philosophy. Perhaps in both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—and we cannot take them seriously enough—something has been realized which in fact is not philosophy, something for which we as yet have no concept. Therefore, in order to understand them and their influence, it is crucial that we search for that concept instead of pitting them against philosophy. We must keep the possibility open that the time to come, as well as our own time, remains with no real philosophy. Such a lack would not be at all bad.

      In these preliminary observations, it had to be said that the goings-on of contemporary philosophy are confused and vacuous in terms of genuine relations to the philosophical tradition and to the actual presence of its spirit. This must be mentioned only to suggest that, no matter how much this activity interferes with us at every step, we must push it aside if we wish to understand anything at all regarding the problematic of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

b) Absolute and relative knowledge. Philosophy as the system of science

      The preceding clarifies, at least in a negative way, the overall sense of the System of Science, which is the main title of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In a positive way the title means: system of absolute knowledge. But what does “absolute knowledge” mean? We shall find that answer only by interpreting the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, even at this stage we can—and must—illustrate the expression “absolute knowledge” by offering a preliminary concept of it.

      The term absolute means initially “not relative.” And what does the expression relative mean when it is applied to knowledge? Knowledge is first of all obviously relative if it is a knowledge of this or that thing while not being the knowledge of something else. This knowledge is relative because it is related to something and not related to something else. Knowledge is said to be merely relative (without being aware of its own relativity) when there is still something else about which that knowledge knows nothing. Relative knowledge is that which does not know everything there is to know. However, such a concept of relative knowledge would be only quantitatively relative, since it means not knowing everything that there is to know. Correspondingly, the idea of an absolute knowledge would also be quantitatively absolute, since it would mean knowing everything that there is to know. But for Hegel the concepts of relative and absolute, as characters of knowledge, are to be understood not quantitatively but qualitatively. It is possible that a quantitatively absolute knowledge, which knows everything so far as range is concerned, could nevertheless be relative in accordance with the character (quale, qualitas) of knowing involved. In what way? What then does the term relative mean when it designates the how, the character and manner of knowing? Is not every kind of knowing, in its own way, a relative knowing, in the sense of being in itself a relation to that which is known? Is not knowledge as such a knowledge of something? This is precisely what Hegel denies and must deny when he claims that there is a knowledge which is qualitatively not relative, but absolute. To be sure, we fail to grasp the Hegelian notion of the relativity of knowledge if we understand it to be in itself a relation to something. I shall attempt to clarify, if only provisionally, exactly what Hegel always means by the terms absolute and relative as qualitative characters of knowledge; and I shall do so by drawing upon the lexical meaning of these designations.

      A scientia is relativa as scientia relata. It is relative not simply as related to something but as a knowledge which in its knowing attitude is a relatum, in the sense of being carried over to that which it knows. Carried over and across, this knowledge remains knowingly in what is known. It knows it precisely so as to be held fast by what is known. Thus, as a knowing of that which is known, this knowledge is consumed by it, surrenders to it, and is knowingly СКАЧАТЬ