Spirit in the Phenomenology

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Spirit in the Phenomenology

[for The Oxford Handbook of Hegel ]

Mark Alznauer

Draft – September 9th, 2014

The task of the Phenomenology of Spirit is so ambitious, and the means it takes so

unprecedented, that it is not surprising that even careful readers have often disagreed

about how a given stretch of text is supposed to contribute to the overall argument. But

going on the evidence of the title alone, one might have expected that there would be a

universal consensus about the importance of the chapter on spirit (the sixth chapter,

according to at least one of the puzzlingly many ways of dividing up the book). But, alas,

there is no such consensus — and when one turns to the book, it is not hard to see why.

Theodor Haering‘s once influential claim that Hegel changed his mind as he wrote the

Phenomenology, and that Spirit in particular makes no contribution to project he set out

to accomplish , is certainly hyperbolic, but it points us to the central interpretive puzzle

facing any attempt to offer a unified reading of the Phenomenology. How could an

argument ostensibly about epistemological issues, about how we can know the world, be

served by what we actually find in this chapter: an extensive and seemingly idiosyncratic

survey of Western history that covers Greek tragedy, Roman law, early modern court

culture, the paradoxes of the enlightenment, the problem of the aftermath of the French

Revolution, and the dilemmas of the ‗beautiful soul‘? It would appear that by the time

we have gotten here, the train has definitely jumped the tracks.



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Of course, that might be for the best. For those less interested in the main

argument of the Phenomenology, the problem of determining how the Spirit chapter

could possibly contribute to that argument has been easy to ignore, for the apparent

detour into history has plenty of interest on its own. Indeed, Hegel‘s treatment of

Sophocles‘ Antigone in the beginning of the chapter, to choose one salient example, has

been profitably analyzed from a staggeringly disparate number of directions: as a

treatment of the social basis of gender roles, as a theory of tragedy, as a politics of

recognition, and so on. For readers like these, the primary value of the Spirit chapter is in

its provocative deployment of the dialectical method to treat various issues in political

and cultural history — and it would have this value even if these discussions added

nothing to the central argument of the book.

It would take a long time and a great deal of interpretive ingenuity to show that all

of the twists and turns we find in the Spirit chapter are necessitated by the overarching

argument of the Phenomenology.1 My ambitions here will be more modest. I hope to

show how and why Hegel‘s general project in Phenomenology leads him to develop the

kind of social theory we find in Spirit. It is the basic structure of this theory, and not the

specific details of its historical application, that I will be focusing on.2 Hegel‘s theory of

spirit has certainly had an enormous influence on subsequent thought on the human

sciences — but its influence was mostly felt in those currents of thought, like Marxism and

German historicism, that emphatically and explicitly rejected central elements of

Hegelianism as mystificatory or speculative in the bad sense. So although Hegel‘s

1 For a recent attempt to do this, see Collins (2013).

2 On the problem of the relation between Hegel‘s narrative framework and the specific

historical episodes that he attempts to interpret with it, see Pippin (1997).



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theory has always been viewed as an important precursor to genuinely scientific,

empirical approaches to human history, the value of that theory has long been thought to

be hopelessly compromised by the philosophic commitments that frame it. I will be

arguing, however, that it is precisely its philosophic underpinnings that give Hegel‘s

theory most of its interest to us today, for what it seems to offer is a social theory that can

simultaneously explain and justify our quintessentially modern commitment to freedom.

My account will focus on two key philosophic claims Hegel makes: first, that guidance

by practical reason is only possible if we belong to a certain kind of social life, one

characteristic of free nations; and, second, that history can be reconstructed as the

progressive resolution of the necessary internal contradictions which afflict free nations.

It will take the rest of this essay to see exactly what all this amounts to, and how the

Spirit chapter argues for it.

I. The Primacy of Spirit

The first thing we need to understand is how Hegel‘s theory of spirit is supposed

to fit into the argument of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a whole. In his later Logic, he

gives a brief characterization of what the Phenomenology attempts to achieve:

In the Phenomenology of Spirit I have presented consciousness as it progresses

from the first immediate opposition of itself and the subject matter to absoluteknowledge. This path traverses all the forms of the relation of consciousness to

the object and its result is the concept of science.3

As this passage indicates, the Phenomenology is supposed to include and examine all

possible oppositions between consciousness and its object. And, as is well known, it is

3 SL, 28; GW 21, 32.



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supposed to lead us to absolute knowledge via negativa: by showing that any assumption

that consciousness is distinct from its object breaks down.

This basic characterization the Phenomenology certainly fits the five chapters

preceding Spirit. In these chapters, Hegel addresses various ―shapes of consciousness,‖

each representing one possible way to oppose consciousness and its object, and tries to

show that they are all internally contradictory: what they take consciousness to be is

incompatible with what they take the object of consciousness to be. The most well-

known example of this is the first one he treats: the shape he calls ―sense-certainty.‖

According to sense-certainty, to be conscious of something is to be in an immediate,

receptive, sensory relationship with it. The corresponding object of consciousness is an

unmediated particular: it is this that before my eyes, prior to any conceptualization.

Hegel‘s argument is that this is an unstable combination: since the only way we could

pick out a bare particular is by placing it under a universal, knowledge cannot be simply a

matter of sense-certainty.

Do we see the same kind of argument in Spirit? To be sure, Hegel claims that in

the Spirit chapter we are no longer dealing with ―shapes of consciousness,‖ and this

might be thought to indicate a real shift in the program. He says:

[The shapes in Spirit] are distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that

they are real Spirits, actualities in the strict meaning of the world, and instead of

being merely shapes of consciousness, are shapes of a world ( PhG ¶441).

But although the target of the argument in changing in certain ways, it is easy to see that

this change does not imply that we are no longer dealing with various possible

oppositions between consciousness and its object. In making the transition to Spirit, we

have only abandoned certain individualistic or psychological forms of this opposition in



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order to examine more social forms that this opposition can take. In Spirit, the opposition

we are interested in is between the social norms that regulate and reproduce social

organisms (the object) and the kind of awareness that a given community has of those

social norms (consciousness).

For example, in Hegel‘s analysis of the kind of social order that characterized the

Greek polis, we have on the one hand, certain social norms that are supposed to guide and

justify the actions of its citizens, thus enabling the reproduction of the polis. These are,

in Hegel‘s terminology, the ―substance‖ or ―essence‖ of Greek society. This is paired

with a certain ―consciousness of substance‖ which is supposed to be characteristic of

individuals in this social order: Antigone, for example, is supposed to immediately

perceive what she should do according to the norms of the polis as these norms pertain to

her case (being a sister she is supposed to bury her brother). Just as in ―sense-certainty,‖

what Hegel wants to argue is that this is an unstable combination of consciousness and its

object; our knowledge of social norms cannot be both determinately authoritative and

simply a matter of immediate, ethical perception.

At the very least, then, we can say that insofar as there are social forms that the

opposition between consciousness and the object takes, Spirit is a necessary part of

Hegel‘s project. But Spirit is not included just for the sake of completeness, it also has a

certain kind of primacy in Hegel‘s account; and this is, if not the central thesis of the

Phenomenology, its most historically influential claim. Although the argument of the

Phenomenology does not start with spirit, but rather retreats back into it, Hegel intends

his notion of spirit to take over the foundational role played by consciousness or

subjectivity in previous modern thinkers. He wants to show that all human cognition is



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somehow rooted in a collective, historical subject. In a key passage at the beginning of

the Spirit chapter, he puts the point this way:

Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of

consciousness are abstract forms of it. They result from Spirit analyzing itself,distinguishing its moments, and dwelling for a while with each. The isolating ofthose moments presupposes Spirit itself and subsists therein; in other words, the

isolation exists only in Spirit which is a concrete existence. In this isolation they

have the appearance of really existing as such; but that they are only moments orvanishing qualities is shown by their advance and retreat into their ground and

essence; and this essence is just this movement and resolution of these moments

( PhG p. 239, ¶440)

What does it means to say that the ―shapes of consciousness‖ analyzed in the previous

chapters of the Phenomenology presuppose spirit? This passage provides three

alternative ways of formulating this dependency relation. Forms of consciousness can be

said to presuppose spirit i) in the way that an abstraction depends on something concrete

from which it abstracts, ii) in the way that something which is merely apparently

independent depends on something else for its existence, and iii) in the way that a claim

about something depends on something else that would ground or justify it.

The failure of the last shape of consciousness treated prior to Spirit, ―Reason as

testing laws,‖ illustrates this dependency very clearly. The shape of consciousness being

examined here is a recognizably Kantian model of practical reasoning. According to it,

we determine what we ought to do by finding out whether whatever we happen to want to

do can survive a universalization test. Hegel argues that such a test is too formal to do

what it is supposed to; insofar as it is a mere consistency test, it cannot really rule

anything out. To figure out whether we should respect the property of others, for

example, Hegel claims that we would need to know and accept some actually existing

institution of property. Insofar as this argument succeeds, it shows i) that the laws of



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practical reason are abstract and insufficient unless they are considered in conjunction

with concrete normative content we derive from our ethical world; ii) that no norms can

exist as binding and valid independently of some existing ethical order; and iii) that the

attempt to provide a justification of the deliverances of pure practical reason will bottom

out in certain social norms.

Although this gives us fairly clear picture of how pure practical reason in

particular might depend on spirit, interpreters have disagreed about the right way to

generalize this to all the other shapes of consciousness that precede Spirit. To get an

overview of the relevant ways of interpreting the primacy of spirit, it is useful to

distinguish between transcendental or developmental approaches to Hegel argument. The

reader should bear in mind, though, that most interpretations make use of both strategies.4

On more transcendental readings, transitions in the Phenomenology are supposed

to move us from one shape of consciousness to a second that has proved to be the

necessary condition for the possibility of the first. When Hegel says that a new shape of

consciousness is ―the truth of‖ the old one, as he frequently does, he means to say that the

former would be impossible if the latter were not already in place. The opening of the

Phenomenology has been given a particularly influential treatment along these lines;

Charles Taylor argued that the ability to use general terms is necessary condition for the

possibility of determinate cognition of sense-particulars.5 This has suggested that the

4 See, for compar ison, Charles Taylor‘s similar discussion of the two forms the dialectic

takes in the Phenomenology (Taylor (1975), 131 ff.).5 Charles Taylor, ―The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology.‖ Michael Forster has

offered two related reasons for thinking that Hegel‘s arguments in the Phenomenology

cannot be transcendental in the strict sense (Forster, pp. 162-63). First, such arguments

presuppose the indubitability of some experience, and yet Hegel insists his approach is

presuppositionless. Second, such arguments are deductive: they move from a true



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entire Phenomenology might be read as a series of transcendental arguments.6 The

Chapter on Spirit, though, presents an obvious problem for this kind of reading because it

seems to consist of some kind of idealized philosophy of Western history — and it

certainly strains credulity to think that the French Revolution, say, is a transcendental

presupposition for our capacity to simply pick out sense-particulars.

There are a variety of ways to address this obvious problem while still insisting on

the fundamentally transcendental nature of Hegel‘s argument. One could argue that

although Spirit as such is a necessary condition for the possibility of consciousness, self-

consciousness, etc. — perhaps because all cognition presupposes language and hence the

induction into some linguistic community — no particular form of spirit is necessary. Or

one could argue that our capacity to make simple empirical claims is differentially

realizeable: although it is only fully present in modern societies, individuals in pre-

modern societies are not utterly incapable of making such claims, they just do it less well.

What is characteristic of the transcendental approach, whatever particular form it takes, is

that it reads spirit as revealing an essential dimension of all cognitive activity. On any

such reading, although in Spirit Hegel appears to be concerned only with one kind of

cognition (knowledge of social norms), this has implications for all concept use, for all

cognitive claims depend on social norms for their determinacy, or validity, or what have

you.

premise to a conclusion (contrary to Hegel‘s stated methodology, which is a ―retreat into

the ground‖). Although both of these points need to be conceded, Rolf -Peter Horstmann

has shown that this can be done without abandoning the idea that Hegel‘s method istranscendental in the sense of aiming at the ―necessary condition(s) for the possibility of

knowledge of objects‖ (Horstmann, 52). In light of these differences, though, Horstmann

designates Hegel‘s method not as ―transcendental‖ but ―transcendentalistic.‖6 Stewart, The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2000).



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The main alternative to a transcendental reading is a developmental reading. On a

developmental reading, the progress of the dialectic does not involve the discovery of

conditions that must ‗always already‘ be in place order for cognition of anything to be

possible, but rather the creation or development of richer cognitive frameworks to solve

the problems that arise in more abstract and simpler frameworks. This kind of approach

is particularly suited to the Spirit chapter, which seems to depict just such a learning

process: one that starts with inadequate Greek conceptions of the authority of social

norms and ends with modern forms of mutual accountability. On such readings, the

primacy of spirit takes on a different cast. Rather than reading Spirit in light of the

supposedly transcendental argument that takes place in the early chapters, we are

encouraged to interpret everything that precedes Spirit in the light of the historical

process depicted in Spirit. When we do this, the Phenomenology thus reveals itself as

something like a Bildungsroman: a narratival account of how the European community

has come understand itself and its relation to the world.7

But although Spirit is well suited to an exclusively historical and developmental

reading, the attempt to read a historical development back into the rest of the

Phenomenology faces certain obstacles. To carry this project out, we need to connect the

shapes of consciousness that we examined in the earlier chapters, shapes which appeared

to be independent of history, to their corresponding shapes of spirit. The first problem

with this is technical: it is not clear at all how to line up the various shapes of

consciousness explored prior to Spirit with the shapes of a world that are treated in Spirit.

According to Georg Lukács, who was a pioneer of this kind of reading, there is supposed

7 Hyppolite (1975).



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to be a one-to-one correspondence between the shapes of consciousness and the shapes of

a world in Spirit.8 To be sure, Hegel himself clearly points to some links between Spirit

and the shapes of consciousness: suggesting, for example, that Stoicism in the Self-

Consciousness chapter corresponds to Legal Personhood in Spirit ( PhG ¶¶479-80). This

one-to-one model, however, seems to fail at some points in the text and seems forced at

many, and this has led to multiple incompatible variations of the developmental

approach, often accompanied with elaborate charts that lay out the subtle lines of filiation

between the various sections of the Phenomenology.

The second problem with a purely developmental approach is more pressing: it is

that any merely narratival account would seem to jeopardize Hegel‘s claims for the

necessity of the progression from one shape of consciousness to the next.9 If the

Phenomenology as a whole is just an account of how our own community happened to

come into being, to tell the kind of the stories we have told ourselves, then its repeated

claims to offered scientific deduction of absolute knowledge will hardly seem credible.

Again, there are a variety of ways to address this problem. One is to just embrace the

Hegel‘s narrative and reject the philosophic pretensions of his argument.10

Another is to

articulate a specifically developmental sense of necessity; one modeled, for example, on

the necessity of a line of argument going in a certain direction.11

8 In fact, Lukács argues that the Phenomenology is composed of three re-tellings of the

whole course of human history, so the problem is even more complicated than I am

indicating. For a recent defense and elaboration of the three-cycle view, see Forster(1998).9 PhG ¶79 & 80.

10 See Butler (1987), 17; and Cutrofello (1995), 34.

11 This comes in stronger (Forster, 1998) and weaker versions (Stern, 2002).



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Most interpretations of the Phenomenology do not restrict themselves to an

exclusively transcendental or developmental approach but incorporate elements of both.

I will be pursing a similarly mixed strategy in addressing Hegel‘s argument in Spirit in

the following. I will assume that Hegel‘s basic claim about the primacy of spirit — his

claim that is the ―essence and ground‖ of all the previous shapes of spirit— indicates

something like a transcendental claim that some shape of spirit is a necessary condition

for the truth of all other forms of human cognition. But I will be treating Spirit itself as

mounting an exclusively developmental argument, one that must display a distinct sort of

necessity. In the following, I hope to show how these two philosophic commitments lead

Hegel develop a unique and unprecedented kind of normative social theory.

II. The Concept of Spirit

In order for spirit to serve as the transcendental ground of the other forms of

cognition, however that is to be understood, the shapes of a world treated in the Spirit

chapter must conceived as independent of the shapes of consciousness explored in the

earlier chapters. To say that spirit must be independent of what comes before it is, of

course, not to say that a shape of the world — some historically actual form of collective

mindedness — could exist apart from consciousness of the world, or of the self, or of

reason. Hegel clearly denies this is possible, insisting to the contrary that ―consciousness,

self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence

in separation from one another‖ ( PhG ¶679). Rather, it is to say that the authority of the

social norms we are under cannot be justified by reference to the world, or the self, or



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abstract reason, since these forms of cognition have shown themselves to presuppose

consciousness of some collectively binding social norms. Their authority needs to be sui

generis. If it were not, if it turned out that spirit did depend on these other forms of

cognition for its justification, then Hegel‘s account would prove viciously circular.

And so it has seemed to many that Hegel‘s thesis of the primacy of spirit leads us

into a blind alley: it traces everything to the social norms we find ourselves with and then

offers us no way of rationally assessing those social norms themselves (since any abstract

standard would itself require contextualization). At one point, Hegel himself seems to

confirm that he thinks the authority of social norms is simply unchallengeable:

They are, and nothing more…If they are supposed to be validated by my insight,

then I have I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being and regard

them as something which, for me, is perhaps true, but also is perhaps not true.Ethical disposition consists just in sticking steadfastly to what is right, and

abstaining from all attempts to move it, or shake it, or derive it ( PhG ¶437).

Here Hegel appears to be saying that the question of what I ought to do simply reaches

bedrock in given social laws and customs — there is no way to go beneath that. This has

been found worrisome for a variety of reasons, but I will be focusing on two of the most

common objections. The first is that it seems to involve a category mistake: the

dissolution of normative questions — questions about what we should think or do — into

sociological ones — questions about what people in fact think and do. A second, related

concern with Hegel‘s ap proach it seems to leave us with a kind of relativism: forms of

cognition are only justified relative to their place and time and never as such.

Although Hegel‘s argument does imply certain kind of ethical historicism, his

account of spirit can, I think, be exonerated from both of these accusations.12

In this

12 On the nature of Hegel‘s ethical historicism, see Beiser (1993) and Alznauer (2012).



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section, I will try to address the first worry — that of sociologism — at the end of the next

section I will be able to say something about the second. In order to meet the first

objection, we will need to better understand the concept of spirit that he is deploying in

this chapter, clearly distinguishing it from the kinds of concepts that are characteristic of

more purely empirical approaches to human society.

Our first glimpse of spirit comes early in the Phenomenology, just prior to the

famous lord-bondsman dialectic. There Hegel says that with self-consciousness we

already have the bare concept of spirit, which is that of a being whose existence is

dependent on its own self-conception, and he points us to the social or objective form of

spirit which is to come later in the book:

What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is — thisabsolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-

consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and

independence: ‗I‘ that is ‗We‘ and ‗We‘ that is ‗I‘ ( PhG ¶177).

That last famous clause suggests that a shape of spirit is one in which individuals (the I)

are united together in some kind of community (the We). But not just any union of

individuals gives rise to the ―experience of what Spirit is‖: in belonging to this social

group I must retain ―perfect freedom and independence.‖ This qualification is obviously

meant to exclude the kind of union that is to be treated next in the text: that between the

lord ( Herr ) and the bondsman ( Knecht ). The bondsman might accept the authority of his

lord in a certain sense, and this does create a kind of community between them, but such

a union does not provide the bondsman with a genuine experience of spirit since his



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freedom and independence are not preserved in this relationship. In obeying the master‘s

will the bondsman experiences his lord‘s will but certainly not his own.13

In the Spirit chapter, we get a further specification of the kind of community we

are concerned with. Hegel says:

Spirit is the ethical life of a nation in so far as it is the immediate truth — the

individual that is a world ( PhG ¶441)

The union between individuals that we are interested in, then, is one that we find

exemplified in nations or peoples. It is a unity that expressed in shared customs and laws.

Hegel is quite explicit, though, that it is not every people that has the right sort of unity to

count as a shape of spirit: in describing the transition from Reason to Spirit, for example,

he insists that Reason is only truly actualized in a ―free nation [ freien Volke]‖ ( PhG

¶352). A free nation provides individuals with a context that resolves the impasses of

struggle for recognition between the lord and the bondsman, for it allows certain

individuals (whomever meets the criteria of citizenship) to understand themselves as

united with other similar individuals in a way that preserves the freedom of all.14

It is

only in obeying the laws of a free nation that citizens experience that ―perfect freedom

and independence‖ that is the sine qua non of spiritual existence.

13 In his later Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel identifies the lord and

bondsman relationship, which he describes as a relationship of authority based on fear, as

definitive of Oriental despotism (see, e.g., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, p. 229).As in the Phenomenology, he treats Greek civilization as marking the ―dawn of spirit‖—

indicating that this is directly connected with the birth of ―free political institutions‖

(Ibid., 91).14

This kind of freedom is entirely compatible with the continued existence of slavery. In

the Greek city-states of the fifth century — which Hegel considers the first free nations in

history — native-born Greek males recognized each other as free while at the same time

treating non-Greeks as property.



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But what exactly does it mean for a nation to be free? It might be thought that I

enjoy this freedom so long as I identify with the customs and laws of my nation. In such

a case, I am free in the sense that the laws I am under are not commands that I obey out

of fear, but rather reflect values or norms that I have internalized or accepted as my own.

If this were enough, then we would have a shape of spirit whenever we have a social

order that is held together by shared values and norms, rather than by fear or by the self-

interest of the members. This understanding of spirit would certainly exclude the

community between the lord and his bondsman, as well as sheerly tyrannical or despotic

regimes, but it would include the full range of cases characterized by what Max Weber

calls legitimate rule (legitimen Herrschaft ). For Weber we have legitimate rule whenever

a social order is taken to be legitimate regardless of whether the source of this legitimacy

is traditional, charismatic, or legal.

But just this reveals the inadequacy of a Weberian interpretation of Hegel‘s

concept of spirit. Unlike Weber‘s notion of legitimate rule, spirit is an intrinsically

normative concept; we have spirit only when we have a truly legitimate social order, not

just whenever we have an order believed to be legitimate.15

Hegel‘s admittedly opaque

way of expressing this point, is to say that s pirit is ―ethical existence that has achieved

actual existence‖ ( PhG ¶440). This implies that spirit both exists in the historical world

15 The difficult question of whether Weber‘s theory of legitimate rule, and particularly his

notion of legal authority, implies that legitimate authority is predicated on claims whichhave a truth value (or not) has been the subject of a great deal of controversy, a

controversy which is recounted in Habermas (1975), Part III. There Habermas points out,

rightly I think, that Weber‘s commitment to value pluralism implies that it impossible torationally resolve any questions about the truth of a claim to legitimacy, and so this

question must be answered in the negative (p. 100). A similar point is made in Rose

(1981), which offers a more complete account of the differences between Hegelian and

Weberian approaches to social science.



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(it is wirklich) and has genuine normative authority (it is sittlich). The best way to see

what this amounts to concretely is to look at the first example of a shape of spirit that we

are given in the Phenomenology. If Hegel were interested in all forms of consensus-

based social order, you would expect him to start with a model of a traditional society,

but instead he starts with a thinly disguised treatment of the Ancient Greek city-states.

In the literature, different answers have been given to the question of why Hegel

starts his account of spirit with the Greeks of the Classical Age. Some have suggested

that there are merely historical reasons for this: Hegel‘s contemporaries had idealized the

Greek polis as an alternative to modern social life and Hegel was concerned to show that

this idealized picture of social life was incoherent in some way. Another suggestion is

that the Greeks represent the best-known example of the simplest and most natural form

that consensus-based social orders take in history: a society where social norms are

simply taken as authoritative just because that is the way things are done.

Neither of these adequately explains Hegel‘s choice. To suggest merely historical

reasons for starting with the Greeks would undermine the rest of the argument Hegel

makes in Spirit. Any demonstration that Greek society was unstable in way that cannot

ultimately be resolved until we arrive at a specifically modern self-understanding of the

authority of social norms only shows the necessity of the latter if there are no real

alternative starting places. But to suggest that Hegel started with the Greeks because they

good example of a traditional social order is highly unlikely; the Greek polis was not a

traditional society at all, much less a typical one, nor did Hegel think it was. A certain

idealization of Greek society is common in the German philosophic tradition, but it



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would be hard to find another thinker who placed a greater emphasis on the world-

historical uniqueness of Greek civilization than Hegel.16

The truth is that Hegel starts with the Greeks precisely because he thinks they

represent a breakthrough case: the first social order which not did not rely on traditional

or charismatic sources of authority, but instead on a very specific kind of legal

authority.17

Hegel fully recognizes that the rule of law existed long before the rise of

classical Greek civilization, but on Hegel‘s account, the Greek polis repr esents the first

form of social order in which the laws are taken as authoritative because they establish

the freedom of the individuals they govern. Hegel thinks the creation of this kind of

social order , what he calls ―true spirit,‖ presupposes individuals who are incapable of

being enslaved precisely because they take freedom to be their essential being, something

of infinite worth.18

These are individuals who, like Hektor in the Iliad , are willing to die

for their city rather than risk enslavement to a foreign people. In such a cases, individuals

can be said to enjoy ―perfect freedom and independence‖ which is characteristic of spirit

precisely because the laws that they obey represent their own will, not the will of another.

16 This feature of Hegel‘s thought is emphasized in Heidegger (1967) and Shklar (1976).

Heidegger, of course, shares a similar preoccupation with the Greeks, though he is

interested less in the uniqueness of the Greek political experience than he is in their more

original experience of Being.17

Hegel‘s insistence that the Greeks were unique in this respect has been put under

significant question by Jaspers‘s ―Axial Age‖ hypothesis (Jaspers, 1953), and the

comparative research project that it has given rise to (see, e.g. Eisenstadt, 1986). This

research has suggested that the Greek attempt to legitimate the mundane, political order by reference to some transcendental standpoint, although certainly indicative of a

historical breakthrough, was something like an ―evolutionary universal‖ in Parsons‘

sense: an adaptively beneficial social innovation that was arrived at by independently avariety of civilizations (Parsons, 1964). This is a clear example of the kind of revision

that might need to be made to Hegel‘s account to make it compatible with post-Hegelian

developments.18

See Lectures on the History of Philosophy, pp. 230-31.



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So although Hegel‘s chapter on Spirit offers us a kind of social theory, we can

now see that it is not a general account of the origins and nature of social order, but an

account that is focused exclusively on a specific kind of normative order: one that whose

authority over individuals rests not on deference to tradition to a charismatic leader, but

on their own consciousness of the infinite value of freedom (in the very literal sense of

non-enslavement). This offers us a clear way to respond to the first of the two worries I

identified at the beginning of this section: the concern that Hegel‘s account makes the

mistake of thinking that normative questions about how we should think or act can be

answered by reference to empirical or sociological accounts of how we in fact do think or

act. We have now seen that Hegel‘s concept of spirit is quite unlike the pure descriptive

notions typically used to analyze society in empirical sociology. A shape of spirit is a

social order which is not only taken to be legitimate by the individuals within it, but one

in that individuals rightly recognize as legitimate because it establishes their own

freedom. To ground other forms of cognition in a shape of spirit is thus to ground them

in genuinely normative considerations, not in a mere social consensus.

III. Spirit in Action

But even if we grant that Hegel is innocent of this kind of sociologism, at least in

principle, it might appear that the social theory we actually get in the Spirit chapter offers

us a strange mélange of normative and non-normative issues. The Spirit chapter certainly

suggests that there is some important connection between the rationality of norms and

their historical viability: Hegel seems to want to say, for example, that the Greek polis



19

dissolved because its norms were insufficiently rational in some sense. But why should

we think that norms must be viable to be valid: that the vicissitudes of the Greek polis

have anything to do with rational justification of Greek laws and customs? Throughout

the Spirit chapter, it looks like Hegel is confusing the normative tasks that are proper to

practical philosophy and the explanatory and interpretive tasks that are rightly addressed

by the social and historical sciences. To paraphrase Rudolf Haym‘s famous criticism of

Hegel, it looks like we have a practical philosophy brought to confusion and disorder by

irrelevant sociological considerations, and a proto-sociological account of history that is

ruined by the inexplicable belief that practical rationality is the engine of all significant

social change.

Behind these worries is a familiar understanding of the proper division of labor

between practical philosophy and the social sciences, one that has led, in our own time, to

the development of two separate and largely unrelated literatures on the nature of human

action. We have, on the one hand, a philosophic literature that is tailored to the problems

of practical reasoning, to the question of what justifies an action. On the other hand, we

have a sociological literature that is oriented to the problem of explaining the relations

between agents and social structures, of determining how agency contributes to the

formation and maintenance of social institutions. Hegel‘s approach is hard to categorize

because he thinks there is a necessary connection between these questions: between the

justification of actions and the development of social institutions. This leads him to

develop the first intrinsically social theory of rational action.

But what does it mean to think action is intrinsically social? As we saw in the

first section, Hegel‘s arguments at the end of Reason are aimed at undermining an



20

alternative view of the relation between action and social context, according to which our

social context provides us with certain potential reasons to act which are then validated

through some kind of reflective endorsement test. On this more individualistic model of

action, we need not be concerned with assessing the substantive rationality of the social

inputs of practical reasoning because it is the subjective process of deliberation alone that

determines whether some possible action is right or wrong. We also do not need to be

concerned with the output or result of action, with the role the action plays in recreating

social institutions, for what matters for the assessment of the action is just the maxim or

intention we had in acting, not how others respond to it or how it reinforces certain social

expectations.

In Spirit, Hegel provides us with the following alternative picture of the relation

between action and its social context (in his word: ―spirit‖):

Spirit, being the substance and the universal, self-identical, and abiding essence,

is the unmoved solid ground and starting-point for the action of all, and it is their

purpose and goal, the in-itself of every self-consciousness expressed in thought.

This substance is equally the work produced by the action of all and each as theirunity and identity, for it is being-for-self, the self, action ( PhG ¶439; also see

¶444)

Hegel‘s characteristically liberal use of italics direct us to the point that spirit or ethical

substance is playing two distinct roles in revised theory of moral agency: it is the ―ground

and starting- point‖ of every action and it is also the ―work ‖ produced by the action of all.

We have already seen what Hegel means by the first of these: for an action to be

grounded or justified, he thinks the agent must be guided by the ethical norms of her

nation, norms which she rightly takes to be legitimate and authoritative because they are

the conditions of her freedom. This is what we are supposed to have learned at the

conclusion of the preceding chapter. The further point being made in the passage is that



21

insofar as these are real, historical social norms they must in a certain sense depend on

human action just as much as they guide it; for social norms only exist insofar as they are

acknowledged, complied with, and enforced. Spirit is thus both the ground of rational

action (the input), and it is the result or product of rational action (the output). These two

aspects of Spirit, the ‗ought‘ and the ‗is‘, are intrinsically connected and mutually

reinforcing: for social norms to be authoritative, they must have social existence; and for

them to perdure, they must continue to attract acknowledgement as authoritative. Hegel

thus conceptualizes spirit as involving a feedback loop, by acting on certain norms I

reproduce them and this reinforces their authority over future action. He tends to

characterize this process in biological terms: ―Just because [Spirit] is a being that is

resolved in the self, it is not a dead essence, but is actual and alive‖ ( PhG ¶439). Hegel is

saying Spirit is ‗alive‘ because, like a biological organism, it can be said to be the result

of itself: a form that determines its own continued existence through characteristic kinds

of activity.19

This is what it means to have an intrinsically social theory of action.

In emphasizing this connection between action and social structure, Hegel‘s

characterization of spirit strikingly anticipates some of the basic theoretical commitments

of the classical sociological tradition. It is particularly illuminating, I think, to compare

Hegel‘s theory of spirit to the approach to social order Talcott Parsons defends in The

Structure of Social Action. In that work, Parsons argues that the founding figures of

sociology all converged on a single insight: the thought that the stability of the social

order could only be explained by the internalization of shared, social values by

19 As we will see, although all forms of spirit are living in the sense of being self-

reproducing, Hegel thinks only certain forms of spirit are living in the sense of being

organic wholes (see the discussion of ―lifeless spirit‖ in PhG ¶477).



22

individuals. The reproduction of normative patterns, Parsons claims, is the most

important functional requirement for a social system to maintain itself in homeostasis —

indeed, the establishment of social order cannot be fully explained any other way.

Hegel‘s theory of spirit clearly shares this commitment of Parson‘s normativist

functionalism.20

We have already noted one difference, though, between this kind of project and

Hegel‘s, which is that Hegel is not interested in the origins and nature of social order as

such, but only in a very specific kind of society, one he thinks the Greeks were the first to

realize. So although he might agree that any social order requires a basis in common

values and norms, what is crucial about the kind of society Hegel is treats in the Spirit

chapter is that that they involve agents who are complying with certain social norms, not

just because they have internalized these norms as valid ultimate ends, but because they

know these norms are conditions for their own freedom. For most purely sociologically

approaches, this would only count as sub-case of social order.21

The differences between Hegel‘s project and standard sociological approaches

become clearest, though, in their respective treatments of social change. It has long been

noted that Hegel, at least in the Phenomenology is more interested in what Comte called

social dynamics than he is in social statics.22

Although Hegel does describe the Greek

polis, which he takes to be the simplest shape of spirit, as a ―whole‖ that is a ―stable

equilibrium of all the parts,‖ his interest in this case does not come from any belief that

20 This has been noted by Knapp (1986), 587. ―Normativist functionalism‖ is a term

drawn from the account of Parsons in Joas & Knöbl (2009).21

It should be noted, though, that Parsons himself agreed that the Greek case represented

a philosophic breakthrough (though one that he thinks ran parallel to similar

breakthroughs in Israel, China and India).21

See Parsons (1982), pp. 294-95.22

See, e.g., Adorno & Kaal (1965).



23

societies that are based on this sort of normative insight were more capable of

maintaining homeostasis than societies based on fear or on merely traditional authority

( PhG ¶462). In fact, Hegel thought the organic unity of the Greek polis was much less

stable over the long term than the unity characteristic of non-Greek traditional and

authoritarian societies. Hegel shared a common belief of his age, which is that one crucial

difference between the East from the West is that the east never changes; real historical

change, for Hegel, takes place exclusively in the West. By forming the first society

whose own reproduction depended on the citizens believing it to be a condition of their

own freedom, he thought the Greeks created novel kind of society that, although it was

able to temporarily generate an unprecedentedly strong form of solidarity (hence the

Greek victory over the Persians), also necessarily included the seeds of its own

destruction (hence the dissolution of the polis into the Roman empire). It is the presence

of internal contradictions in free nations that makes true historical progress possible:

since a more rational society is just one that has resolved the contradictions of previous

societies into some higher unity. Just as Hegel is not interested in social order as such

but only a certain kind of order, he is also not interested in social change as such, but only

these fundamental shifts in the organization of normative authority in Western history,

shifts which correspond to a deepening appreciation of human freedom.

By restricting his evaluation of various shapes of spirit to the diagnosis of internal

contradictions, Hegel inaugurates what has come to be known as immanent critique. This

is perhaps the most well-known and influential aspect of Hegelian social theory,

especially as it has been transformed in the hand of various Marxist and post-Marxist



24

thinkers.23

But there are as many forms of immanent critique as there are kinds of

internal contradiction. It is often taken for granted that Hegel‘s from of immanent

critique involves the attempt to measure a society‘s laws and practices against a norm that

that society officially professes to accept; on this model, a society is internally

contradictory if it doesn‘t live up to its own ideals.24

Opposed to this ‗idealistic‘ form of

immanent critique, is the more ‗materialistic‘ form often associated with Marx. Here

contradictions are not forms of hypocrisy or bad faith, but are understood as functional

instabilities. The canonical example of this is the contradiction between existing social

relations and forces of production that Marx uses to explain historical revolutions. But

Hegel‘s version doesn‘t fit neatly in either of these categories since, as Rahel Jeaggi

rightly notes, it involves an ―entanglement of the functional and normative shortcomings

of a form of life.‖25

In this respect, Hegelian immanent critique might be thought akin to the kind of

criticism we see in Daniel Bell‘s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bell

attempted to identify contradictions between the various spheres of modern society (the

economic structure, the polity, and the culture), like the clash between radical

individualism in economics and modernism in culture, which manifest themselves in

various social conflicts. But even this is an excessively empirical proxy for the kind of

necessary contradiction Hegel is after. For Bell, there is no necessity that links any

particular economic structure (like modern capitalism) with any particular polity (like

23 Herbert Marcuse‘s emphasis on this negative and dialectical aspect of Hegel‘s thought

in Reason and Revolution (1945) was crucial in displacing the then prevalent Popperiancaricature of Hegel an apologist for Prussian authoritarianism.24

This is also the form of immanent critique favored by Michael Walzer (see

Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 87 & 89).25

Jaeggi (2013).



25

democracy), so any contradiction that arises between them is historically contingent.26

But, for Hegel, the central aim of all philosophy, including the philosophy of history, is to

show that things that appear contingent are not. So although it is of course true that we

only know of the decline of the Greek polis through historical evidence, a philosophic

treatment of this must show that such a decline was not due to some peculiarity of the

Greek case, but was inevitable given the kind of social structure that the Greek polis

exemplified.27

For good or ill, Hegel is not guilty of committing a social science.28

As we saw in Section I, the kind of internal contradiction Hegel is interested in

diagnosing in Spirit is supposed to be the strict social analogue of the problems that

afflict the shapes of consciousness examined earlier in the Phenomenology: like the

26 Bell explicitly rejects the idea, which he rightly attributes both to the Hegelian-Marxist

tradition and to Parsonian functionalism, that society must be understood as a ―totality‖

or as a ―structurally unified system,‖ in favor of an approach which views the various

spheres of society as analytically independent (see Bell (1996), pp. 8-10).27

Steinberger (1977) argues that Hegel‘s value to contemporary philosophers of social

and political inquiry, claiming that it comes from his anticipation of the interpretivist

critique of positivistic approaches to social science, suggesting that Hegel‘s commitment

to an interpretive approach is best exemplified by his treatment of Greek civilization (seealso Taylor (1975), p. 217-18, who makes a similar claim). But although Steinberger is

surely right that Hegel‘s approach is incompatible with positivism and behavioralism in

any form, it is a mistake to assimilate Hegel‘s approach to the interpretive paradigm. Notonly does Hegel deny that we can sympathetically understand what it felt like to be a

Greek, likening that to knowing what it would be like to be a dog, his interest in the

Greek case stems from its exemplifying a certain necessary social structure, ―true spirit.‖28

For a contrary view, see Neuhouser (2011). Neuhouser argues that Hegel‘s science of

society is like Adam Smith‘s political economy in its heavy reliance on ―empirical

knowledge of contemporary social reality,‖ only differing from it in being systematic—

and he is quite emphatic that ―it is important not to confuse ‗systematic‘ with ‗a priori.‘‖But Hegel himself shows no reluctance in characterizing his own methodology as a

prioristic. Philosophy, he says, ―owes its development to the empirical science‖ but ―in

return it gives their contents what is so vital to them, the freedom of thought — givesthem, in short, an a priori character. These contents are now warranted necessary, and no

longer depend on the evidence of facts merely, that they were so found and so

experienced. The fact as experienced thus becomes an illustration and a copy of the

original and completely self-supporting activity of thought‖ ( EL §12 my italics).



26

impossibility of saying what you mean in ‗sense-certainty‘. Throughout the

Phenomenology, Hegel has been showing that various shapes of consciousness

necessarily reveal their own self-understanding as inadequate and contradictory in the

process of attempting to express themselves. In Spirit, the relevant contradiction emerges

when individuals attempt to act on their own conception of what is required of them

according to the social norms they are subject to. Speaking of the first shape of spirit, for

example, he says:

[Self-consciousness] learns through its own act the contradiction of those powers

into which the substance divided itself and their mutual downfall, as well as the

contradiction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its action, andwhat is in its own proper nature ethical, and thus finds its own downfall ( PhG

¶445).

Hegel here speaks of two contradictions that are related to each other as the implicit is

related to the explicit. The first is the contradiction that exists in the ―substance‖ latently;

in the Greek case, this is the potential conflict between the human and divine laws. So

long as individuals are not aware that their identification with these laws does not

preclude conflict between them, they can continue to reproduce the social order by

complying with these norms in the manner prescribed. This implicit contradiction

becomes manifest, though, when we come across a second contradiction: a case where an

agent who was guided by these social norms (by ―knowledge of the ethical character of

[her] action‖) finds out that she has nevertheless acted in a way that does not in fact

accord with other norms that can be publicly applied to her action (violating ―what is in

its own proper nature ethical‖). This is the contradiction between what I intended to do

and what I did. Hegel thinks Sophocles Antigone shows us how the Greeks themselves

came to grips with just such a contradiction. In the play, Antigone is not trying to flout





28

have left with you despite my untimely demise, Hegel thinks you should consult the

existing laws and norms concerning property in your nation (see PhG ¶352). These are

authoritative for you because your freedom depends entirely on your being a recognized

member of your state. There is thus no abstractly universal answer to the question ―what

ought I to do?‖ that is not at the same time unhelpfully indeterminate. But Hegel is very

far from thinking that all ways of settling this question are equal. He thinks there are

more and less rational societies, and that the imperfect rationality of a given society, its

latent internal contradictions, will inevitably manifest themselves in an increasing

awareness of the impossibility of acting in accordance with shared norms. Given the

nature of spirit, this necessarily leads to the dissolution of that society — its inability to be

able to reproduce itself through action — and the rise of new forms of social life that are

predicated on a new and improved conception of the nature of social normativity.

IV. The Argument of Spirit

In the previous sections, we have established what spirit is (a free nation) and how

Hegel intends to go about analyzing it (an internal critique of its ability to reproduce itself

by guiding the actions of individuals). In this final section, I will attempt to summarize

the substance of Hegel‘s argument in the Spirit chapter. It is important to recognize at

the outset that Hegel‘s account of spirit in the Phenomenology labors under a double

burden. First, it supposed to offer us a complete normative typology of spiritual worlds:

one that identifies the various possible forms that a normative social order can take and



29

specifies the form that is most rational. Second, it is supposed to offer us an account of

the necessity of the historical genesis of our own, specifically modern world.

Hegel eventually came to think that these two tasks could be, and perhaps needed

to be, disaggregated. In his later Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1823) he would

attempt to provide an analysis of the structure of rational social order that does not follow

the ―temporal sequence‖ in which the various necessary aspects of this social order first

appeared ( PR §32 R & A). The developmental part of the story was relegated to his

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (which were delivered four times between

1821-31 but were never published during his lifetime), and it was expanded to include an

extensive treatment of those civilizations which preceded the Greeks and which are not

properly considered shapes of spirit. But in the Spirit chapter of Phenomenology, Hegel

attempts to do both of these things at once. He tries to show that the historical

development of social order from the Greek polis to the post-Revolutionary modern state

passes through various logically necessary stages in the realization of a fully rational

social order. This has real consequences for the resulting picture of institutional or social

rationality; unlike the account we get in the later Philosophy of Right , in the

Phenomenology the superior rationality of the final shape is depicted as inherently tied to

the developmental story. Modern ethical life is more rational than what went before not

because it satisfies some independent rational standard but simply because it resolves the

internal contradictions of all of the previous shapes of spirit.29

29 It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that Hegel‘s earlier and later approaches to

the issue of institutional rationality are flatly incompatible; in both, such rationality

consists of the unity of objective and subjective freedom. But the difference between

these two ways of justifying Hegel‘s standard for institutional rationality is worth

emphasizing because it has given rise to two very different ideas as to what is of



30

Though it is easy to lose sight of it in the welter of historical details, the basic plot

of Hegel‘s story is uni-directional: it involves increasing collective self-consciousness

about the nature of spiritual activity:

[Spirit] must advance to a consciousness about what it immediately is, mustsublate that beautiful ethical life, and, by passing through a series of shapes, attain

a knowledge of itself ( PhG ¶440)

As we have already seen, a social order only counts as a shape of spirit when the norms

and laws that constitute that order are reproduced because they are taken to be

constitutive of the freedom of individuals in that order. This is what spirit is ―in itself.‖

In Spirit, the various possible shapes of spirit are arranged from the most ―immediate‖

(the one which is least conscious of what it means to be free) to the most ―mediated‖ (the

one which is fully conscious of what it means to be free).30

Hegel identifies three basic

stages in this process: true spirit (which is immediate and unalienated), self-alienated

spirit (which is mediated but alienated), and spirit that is certain of itself (which is

mediated and unalienated).31

continuing value in Hegelian practical philosophy. Neuhouser (2000) and Honneth

(2010) & (2014) hew closely to the structural rationality outlined in Philosophy of Right .Pippin (1991) & (2007), Brandom (1999), and, more recently, Jaeggi (2013b) have relied

more heavily on the intrinsically developmental approach taken in the Phenomenology.30

From the point of view of the overarching argument of the Phenomenology, whichaims at providing a ladder to the absolute standpoint, even this last shape of spirit is not

the end of the line. Spirit is only truly self-conscious of itself as spirit in religion, which

of course is the topic of the chapter following Spirit ( PhG ¶677). The subsequent

chapters, however, add little to Hegel‘s social theory (besides a hint, which he developsin more detail in his later work, that it is transformations in religious consciousness which

are the most important factor in explaining the kind of historical change he is interested

in).31

The fourth conceptual possibility, a social order that is experienced both as immediate

and alien, would not count as a shape of spirit at all. With that possibility removed or

bracketed, it can be seen that Hegel‘s account of the development of spirit is

typologically complete. (In Hegel‘s mature philosophy of history he becomes much





32

The first shape of spirit, ―true spirit‖, represents a kind of baseline case in Hegel‘s

account: it is the least self-conscious form of spirit possible. In ―true spirit,‖ the authority

of social norms is understood to be rooted in the nature of things ( PhG ¶476). What

makes a given law right is a substantive rationality that individuals have immediate

access to. We have already seen above how Hegel‘s reading of Antigone is supposed to

reveal the inherent contradiction in such a social order: its inability to resolve conflicts

between individuals who are opposed to each other, but have the same warrant for their

actions. The upshot of this is the dawning awareness that the authority of social norms

cannot be rooted in the substantive rationality of their content. The alternative is that

what makes given norm right is not its content at all — this is now seen to be a contingent

and changeable —but the ―formal universality of legality or law‖ ( PhG ¶442).

This insight into the contingency of social norms gives rise to second shape of

spirit, ―self-alienated spirit.‖ Self-alienated spirit recognizes that the specific norms and

laws we impose on ourselves are not rooted in nature but are ―the work of self-

consciousness,‖ but it nonetheless experiences this order as alien: ―the world has the

character of being something external, the negative of self-consciousness‖ ( PhG ¶484).

One might wonder how these things are connected: Why does increasing self-

consciousness about the nature of spirit lead to alienation? With the loss of the belief in

the substantive rationality of norms, Hegel claims that the social order comes to be seen

as authoritative simply because it is a universally recognized power above individuals,

who are now considered not as parts of a whole, but as a mere aggregate of atomized

persons ( PhG ¶482). Such an order is experienced as alien because the authority of the

law now has nothing to do with its content: the law is authoritative regardless of what it



33

requires of us. Even clearly horrible laws can thus be fully legitimate. Hegel argues that

this new ―shape of a world‖ gives rise to a flight from the realm world and the creation of

a realm of ― pure consciouness‖ or ―faith [Glaube]‖, where we find a higher, but

politically unactualizable, form of normative authority: a ought-to-be which floats free of

harsh necessities of political reality. Stoicism, feudal honor codes, and Christianity are

all versions of this ideology of flight: they represent privatized normative codes that can

coexist with the authority of merely positive law. An alienated individual is one who is

split between these two, supposedly non-overlapping magisteria.32

Interestingly, although Hegel clearly depicts alienation as a form of individual

suffering, he does not think alienation represents a structural defect in this new form of

social life. Although it is true that the Greek polis could not survive the development of

the reflective, alienated individual, ―self -alienated spirit‖ is a type of normative order in

which alienation, far from being pathological, is in fact a functional necessity. In

describing this new order, Hegel says:

Nothing has a spirit that is grounded within itself and indwells it, but each has its

being in something outside of and alien to it. The equilibrium of the whole is not

the unity which remains with itself, nor the contentment that comes from havingreturned into itself, but rests on the alienation of oppositions ( PhG ¶486).

Since self-reproduction of this shape of spirit ―rests on the alienation of oppositions‖, not

on a harmony between them, it is described as a mechanical rather than an organic or

living unity.

32 Dean Moyar gives a remarkably lucid and helpful explanation of how this argument

works in Moyar 2008. But I think Moyar‘s account does not adequately differentiate the

sort of alienation that is definitive of ―self -alienated spirit‖ from the kind of failure toidentify with your deeds that is a general problem throughout Spirit (from Antigone all

the way to the beautiful soul). Moyar‘s definition of alienation fits the latter problem; but

here, I am mainly focused on alienation in the narrower sense, the sense that only applies

to the second stage of spirit.



34

The structural defect in this new, more mechanical form of social life is thus not

that it gives rise to alienation but that it cannot stay alienated. The reproduction of this

social order rests the continued acceptance of that there is a fundamental opposition

between the real world (the political or legal order) and the spiritual world (the ideologies

of flight). What Hegel tries to show is that when individuals attempt to act on their

alienated, spiritual ideologies, they fail, and in failing realize that they must reformulate

these ideologies (just as with Antigone, this is depicted as a failure to have one‘s deed

express the meaning one intended it to have). The process of working through the

contradictions involved in this fundamental opposition necessarily culminates in the

formulation of an Enlightenment ideology that rejects the very split between the real

world and the spiritual world. And so Hegel says ―[t]he Enlightenment completes the

alienation of spirit in this realm‖ ( PhG ¶486). This completing or overcoming of

alienation leads to an attempt to overthrow of the existing social order: the attempt to

realize the demands of the spirit in the medium of the real world. Indeed, Hegel sees

exactly this dynamic playing itself out in the French Revolution.

The third and final section of spirit, ―spirit that is certain of itself,‖ treats the form

of social normativity which results from this necessary transformation. Like ―self -

alienated spirit,‖ this third shape is characterized by absolute mediation: by a recognition

that what the norms we impose on ourselves are up to us . But unlike ―self -alienated

spirit,‖ this is accompanied with a realization that in order for these norms to be freely

self-imposed, they must accord with the conscience of the individual. This double-

insight is supposed to enable a return to certain features of ―true spirit,‖ a full

identification with the content of the social norms, but now on the grounds that those



35

norms are determined by freedom and not by their accordance with nature or the will of

God.

This is all, of course, terrifically abstract and programmatic; and that abstractness

is precisely the problem Hegel has to work through in this last section. Although in the

previous two sections, Hegel had a clear idea as to what kind of what kind of social order

he was dealing with, since they were historically given, here he is looking to the future.

The very real question he is must answer concerns whether the specifically modern, post-

Revolutionary demand that the social order correspond to the dictates of the individual

conscience can ever find a stable institutional embodiment. Hegel does not deny that

there are forms of this demand that are incompatible with any form of law at all — he even

agrees with Edmund Burke that the notion of freedom which motivated the French

Revolution was among these — but he approaches this problem through an immanent

critique of these positions. He attempts to show that any appeal to subjective certainty

about what is morally required will break down, will be impossible to act upon, until we

come to understand that our subjective convictions only secure their validity by proving

that they can be recognized by others ( PhG ¶670). With this insight into the nature of

social normativity — that it is constituted by reciprocal recognition — spirit achieves full

self-knowledge: it finally realizes what it means to be free.

But although the Phenomenology of Spirit argues that only a society that has

achieved this self-knowledge will be immune to the kinds of immanent problems we have

been concerned with, it does not say anything about what a social order that is built on on

this foundation will actually look like. The significance of this omission can be (and has

been) interpreted in a variety of ways. Marxist and post-Marxist commentators have



36

viewed the lack of any discussion of actual social institutions in this last section as

evidence that Hegel proved unable to resolve the problem bequeathed to him by the

French Revolution. Lukács, for example, claims that:

Once he had provided a profound and central analysis of the movement of history,in terms of contradictions which continuously reproduce themselves, once he had

given an account of the Enlightenment, of the economy of the capitalist society

and of the French Revolution, Hegel was not able to go further and propose adefinite social form in which to clothe his ‗reconciliation‘.

33

For these readers, Hegel‘s concluding section is of primarily symptomatic value: it serves

as an ideological mask for the unresolved contradictions that still afflict modern life.

Others, however, have seen just this indefiniteness as a strength of Hegel‘s account in the

Phenomenology: by refusing to identify any specific institutional form as appropriate to

modern self-consciousness, Hegel enabled us to view modernity as a unending project to

live up to the ideals of modernity rather than as a something we have fully accomplished

and put behind us. On this reading, we should not expect to be done with the

contradictions of modernity and this is exactly the lesson of the Phenomenology. A third

possible response to this lacuna is to insist that the Phenomenology‘s account of the

genesis of the basic modern commitment to reciprocal recognition needs to be

supplemented with the richer and more contentful account of a rational social order that is

provided in his later Philosophy of Right . All of these options have their contemporary

partisans and detractors — and this is a clear sign of the continuing relevance of Hegel‘s

theory of spirit for current philosophic and social thought about the normative

foundations of modernity.

33 Lukács (1975) p. 506.



37

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Diogenes 9 (33): pp. 28-49.

Alznauer, M. (2012). ―Ethics and History in Hegel‘s Practical Philosophy‖ in Review of Metaphysics 65 (3): pp. 581-611.

Bell, D. (1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: Twentieth Anniversary

Edition. New York: Basic Books.

Beiser, F. (1993). ―Hegel‘s historicism‖ in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel . F.

Beiser (Ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Spirit in the Phenomenology