Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Martin Heidegger

Чтение книги онлайн.

       TRANSLATORS’ FOREWORD

      The work presented here is an English translation of Martin Heidegger, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes—Volume 32 of the Gesamtausgabe (Complete Edition)—which constitutes the lecture course given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1930/31. The German edition, edited by Ingtraud Görland, was published in 1980 by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag.

      The text of this lecture course occupies an important place among Heidegger’s writings on Hegel. There are several crucial discussions of Hegel—in Section 82 of Being and Time and in the essays “Hegel’s Concept of Experience”¹ and “Hegel and the Greeks”²—as well as brief analyses of Hegel spread throughout Heidegger’s writings. However, the present text represents Heidegger’s most substantial treatment of Hegel published so far. Bypassing the preface and the introduction to Hegel’s work, this lecture course explicates Sections A (“Consciousness”) and B (“Self-Consciousness”) of the Phenomenology of Spirit.³

      The Character of the Text: A Reading. What distinguishes the following text, setting it apart from a commentary in the usual sense, is the fact that in this lecture course Heidegger offers a simple reading of Sections A and B of the Phenomenology of Spirit. If one looks at Heidegger’s reading of Hegel from the outside, without taking into account what actually transpires in it, then the reading might be characterized as an interpretation of the chapters “Sense Certainty,” “Perception,” “Force and Understanding,” and “Self-consciousness.” But what actually transpires in this interpretive reading is a careful and meticulous unfolding of the movement of thinking that is called “the phenomenology of spirit.” This reading reveals the phenomenology of spirit as a thinking which gathers itself up in a gradual, always conscious and always self-assured manner. The emergent unfolding of this gathering of “the phenomenology of spirit” marks the simplicity of Heidegger’s reading.

      What we read in the text presented here in translation is not the establishment of a position or the expression of an intellectual superiority that is out to score points for or against Hegel. The interpreter of those sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit finds here a reading in which the process of the phenomenology of spirit becomes alive again. That Heidegger intended this—rather than a survey of various interpretations of Hegel’s thought—is shown by the fact that he assigns a limited space to the discussion of works about Hegel. The process of the phenomenology of spirit can come to live again independently of an extensive and thorough treatment of the Hegel literature. As the work of thinking progresses, and as we are drawn into the movement of thinking, it becomes increasingly clear how little this movement depends on the vast and growing literature on Hegel.

      This does not mean that Hegel scholarship should be forfeited. Rather, in its powerful stroke, Heidegger’s reading reveals from within how necessary it is to inaugurate one’s reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit prior to and independent of the debate created by the secondary literature on that work. What we learn from the example that Heidegger provides is that the movement of thinking that occurs as the conditio sine qua non of coming to terms with the Phenomenology of Spirit needs to be initiated each time anew. Instead of being on the lookout for what this or that one has said about this work, the reader should initiate his or her own reading. What safeguards this reading from deteriorating into a subjective rendition of the Phenomenology of Spirit is not the authority of the secondary literature, but the essential character of this work as a work of thinking.

      The simplicity of the reading which is at stake here and the movement which this reading is to bring about can be reached only when the Phenomenology of Spirit is taken as a work of thinking. The phrase “work of thinking” should not be mis-taken as a platitude on the basis of which the Phenomenology of Spirit might be seen as the product of Hegel’s intellectual efforts. The phrase “work of thinking” refers to the work-character of the work Phenomenology of Spirit, to its ἔϱγον, which is never experienced in a mere reading of the text.⁴ It is important to bear in mind that this ἔϱγον (in which the attentive reader participates) is not something added to the work as a supplement. A philosophical work such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit exists as the ἔϱγον which it brings to light from within itself.

      The priority which Heidegger ascribes to the work as a work of thinking helps us to understand why the familiar characterization of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a product of Hegel’s intellectual efforts is far from adequate. When we take the work to be the product of Hegel’s intellectual effort, then we are immediately confronted with the question: Who is Hegel? Is he the focal point of any number of biographical studies? What is fundamentally objectionable in this characterization is that it immediately opens the door for an assessment of the work in terms of biography—in terms of a correlation between work and life. By considering the work as a by-product of life, we reduce the work to an outgrowth of subjectivity, thus blocking access to the ἔϱγον (to what is going on), which is summed up in the word work.

      We might, then, distinguish the several meanings of the word work—and along with that the concomitant root issues involved: (1) the work that we have as a product of Hegel’s efforts, (2) the work as the book that we have (the Phenomenology of Spirit as a text-work), and (3) the work of thinking that is going on in the text-work, a work of thinking that our attentive reading can participate in. The first meaning of work—as product—Heidegger dismisses as peripheral, nongermane, and utterly external to the movement of thinking that his reading is intended to stimulate. The second meaning of work—as text-work—comes up whenever Heidegger makes reference to the work as text. The third meaning of work as process, as the movement of thinking, is the root issue and is central to Heidegger’s concern in this lecture course. Because of a certain style used in German—of not necessarily italicizing titles of books—these last two meanings (the ones that actually bear on Heidegger’s reading) are not distinguished in the German edition: The words “die Phänomenologie des Geistes” (not italicized in German) can refer to the book Phenomenology of Spirit or to the process or movement of “the phenomenology of spirit.” In order to СКАЧАТЬ