Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Martin Heidegger

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СКАЧАТЬ first title used for distinguishing the first part of the system of science reads: “Science of the Experience of Consciousness.” The words which make up the title are familiar to us as long as we take the title in its outward appearance, and particularly if we know the philosophical terminology. And yet this familiarity does not help us; on the contrary, it misleads us. If we do not keep in mind, both from the outset and subsequently, that “science” here means “absolute knowledge,” then we are already hopelessly led astray. Only by keeping that meaning in mind can we grasp what is meant by “experience,” “consciousness,” “experience of consciousness,” and finally by “Science of the Experience of Consciousness.”

      To be sure, a real title, which does not stem from out of perplexity or with a view to appeal and the like, can be understood only on the basis of a thoroughgoing appropriation of the work so entitled. Such an appropriation is also necessary for understanding the introduction of that work. Therefore, even if in discussing the titles we now refer above all to the introduction² to the Phenomenology, and to its important preface,³ then we gain a limited and provisional understanding of the titles. But above all we must do without a complete interpretation of the pieces just mentioned.

      Insofar as we have provisionally explained what the concepts of “science” and “consciousness” mean in Hegel’s sense, we can now inquire what the expression “experience” in “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” means. We are familiar with this expression as a technical term in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. One of the formulations of the problem of the first Critique is the question concerning the possibility of experience. Here experience means the totality of the theoretical knowledge of existing beings (nature). In this sense even today the natural sciences are called experimental sciences.* It is this kind of experience which, in terms of its essence, is the object and theme of philosophical knowledge. That is why the Critique of Pure Reason could be taken as a science or theory of experience, a theory about what experience is.

      But if Hegel characterizes the Phenomenology of Spirit as the science of the experience of consciousness, then (1) experience is not taken in the Kantian sense, and (2) phenomenology as the science as such does not mean a knowledge of or about experience. This holds particularly true when we grasp experience as Hegel does. What does experience mean for Hegel? Is there any connection at all between Hegel’s concept of experience and that of Kant and his problem? If the answer is in the negative, from where does Hegel get what is then obviously his own concept of experience?

      We must ponder what the word experience means generally, prior to its terminological use in philosophy, in order to see that it is not arbitrarily and without reason that Hegel uses the word in this central place.

      For example, we say: I have learned or experienced [erfahren] that such and such has happened, for example, that lightning has struck a house. “I have learned or experienced” means that I have not merely heard something about it, but rather that I heard it from someone who knows it and was there, or who heard it from those who were there. I have heard, I have learned. Again, someone is sent out to inquire about something—e.g., the condition of a patient—and returns with the response that “there was just nothing to find out [erfahren].” Here the term erfahren means to find out, to establish how certain things are. In this and in similar cases, erfahren means to learn and to establish how things are, what is happening and what has happened. Experiencing [in Erfahrung bringen] means to pursue the matter itself in a certain way and to see whether what has been said or believed can be confirmed. Experiencing means to let an opinion be confirmed by the matter itself. Accordingly, experiencing is a knowledge which is confirmed by someone who goes directly to things and sees them. Such knowledge makes a person who lets himself be guided by it an experienced human being. Because he is experienced, he can be regarded as one who has been proved to be, for example, an experienced physician. To say that someone is experienced is to say that he knows what he is doing, observes how things must be going if they are to take the right and not the wrong course.

      The issue for us is not to list and explain all of the differences, nuances, gradations, and interrelations of meaning in the term experience. Rather, we would like only to find out in which direction Hegel’s use of the word goes. And in this respect it should be pointed out that the use of this term by Hegel is not in line with the meanings we have mentioned so far. If we bring these meanings into a first group, then experience means the immediate demonstration of an opinion or a knowledge by way of returning to things in the broad sense of the term, i.e., by seeking recourse in the intuition of some thing as the means of its confirmation. There is a second group of meanings which does not focus exclusively on the element of seeing for oneself or on taking a view of one’s own in order to confirm an opinion and to be guided by it. Rather, in this group of meanings experience connotes the process of undergoing experiences in the course of which the experienced matter itself will be confirmed and its comportment verified by determining whether or not the matter is what it is, or how the matter is joined to something else. Experiencing here means testing the matter itself in and for the context to which it belongs. Expressions such as “to undergo experiences with something,” “to have to undergo experiences with something,” “to have become richer by certain experiences,” always convey two senses: First, they indicate a certain sense of having been disappointed and surprised because things turned out other than expected. Second, they suggest an additional learning of something new that is increasingly verified.

      Let us briefly distinguish both groups or concepts of experience. 1. Experimenting in the sense of demonstrating and proving an opinion about something with recourse to sense perception of that thing itself. 2. Undergoing an experience in the sense of letting the matter itself demonstrate itself and so be verified as it is in truth.*

      According to the first group of meanings, we speak of the sciences of experience as “experimental sciences.” Depending on whether we conceive the notion of a demonstrating-intuition in a narrow or a broad sense, we change the concept of experience. If we do not limit demonstrating-intuition to what is sensible—and is obtained primarily through the sense organs—but conceive of this intuition simply as the manner of confirming an opinion on the matter at hand, then the concept of an intuition of essences may emerge. For example, such an intuition is required in determining the structural relation of a subject and a predicate in a proposition, a relation which can neither be seen by the eyes nor heard by the ears. Even less will we invent something arbitrary about it. Instead, we must demonstrate the structural relation in a living proposition as such. We must render this relation evident for what it is, we must render its essence “evident” as it emerges out of the relationship itself. The intuition which delivers the essence in this first sense, is the phenomenological intuition. Because such an intuiting can be confirmed in terms of the things themselves, as they are in themselves, the phenomenological intuition can also be called experience. It was in this fundamentally extended sense that Scheler used the expression “phenomenological experience” in his early important works over twenty years ago. Recently Husserl too seems to have taken up this extended concept of experience whenever he uses that word—a practice which is in keeping with his conviction, held by him for a long time now and mentioned often, that phenomenology represents empiricism and positivism, properly understood.⁴

      The Hegelian concept of experience as it appears in the title of his Phenomenology, “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” does not go in the same direction as the aforementioned contemporary phenomenological concept of experience. In Hegel the emphasis is not on the moment of significance in confirmation by intuition. Saying this, I am saying at the same time something whose mention is really superfluous from the first, namely, that “science of experience” has nothing at all to do with the “experimental sciences” in the current sense, e.g., biology or history. СКАЧАТЬ