Half Hour Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit (Stoicism, Skepticism, Unhappy Consciousness, sec. 211-212)

In this eighty-eighth video in the new series on G.W.F. Hegel's great early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, we continue our study of the third portion of the section "Self-Consciousness", i.e. "The Freedom of Self-Consciousness". I read and comment on paragraphs 211 and 212 of the text here.

Hegel now focuses on the experience (Erfahrung) which the Unhappy Consciousness passes through as it attempts to move away from an abstract Unchangeable through relating to the Unchangeable that now involves individuality within it.

At first, this new advance and development appears to be something merely contingent, and the individual consciousness does not realize that its own opposedness to the universal Unchangeable both involves a deeper necessity, and is the doing of consciousness itself. The hope of attaining a full unity between individual and universal is raised, but not fulfilled at this point in the dialectic.

In this video series, I will be working through the entire Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph -- for each one, first reading the paragraph, and then commenting on what Hegel is doing, referencing, discussing, etc. in that paragraph.

This series is designed to provide an innovative digital resource that will assist students, lifelong learners, professionals, and even other philosophers in studying this classic work by Hegel for generations to come.

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[MatthewBrown-yjhf]

Thank you so much for these videos! I am enjoying this project very much. If you have watched this far, please consider contributing at Dr. Sadler's Patreon page! He is providing a free resource of incredible value.

[DrewShotwell]

22:30 reminds me of Totality and Infinity

[integralsubjectivity]

What leads the unhappy consciousness to deduce that the individual confronting it is a manifestation of the unchangeable? Would it be, for example, an individual consciousness which has itself already come into contact with the absolute? Or is it a purely deceptive movement in the unhappy consciousness itself as it tries to fulfill hope, attempting to recognize the absolute where it isn't really posited? Or is it just an individual (or a set of words, etc) that leads the unhappy consciousness to think it has begun to realize the absolute in conceptual terms? Thanks for the help, and I love the videos!

[bodywithoutorgans]

Still trying to catch up. Time and time again, these videos help me to see how certain passages anticipate what will occur later in the text. That seems to be what I tend to miss on my own. I hadn't really considered how the Unchangeable is in many ways a forerunner to Spirit, consciousness as a universal, and eventually God. I also had missed how much of this section deals with finding and understanding oneself as a particular individual in the universal, the Unchangeable.

[tehnik]

Is this subsection supposed to correspond to any philosophical school or trend that came after pyrrhonian skepticism?

I have a feeling it’s talking about the general metaphysical and religious trends that existed in the late Roman empire but I don’t want to make a mistake in asserting that.

[QuintessentialQs]

So, at one stage in the dialectical development, one sees another, realizes "they are like me", which means there is a universal "humanness" of which I am only an expression. And the result is violence. A revulsion at being obliterated in the universal that brings about the master and slave dynamic.

But if that's been sublated, and now I see another person who is "like me", I could realize that by understanding them the way I know myself, we can possibly find ourselves one in our "humanness", the universal, unchangeable. "The divine in me recognizes the divine in you." so to speak. But then even the tiniest gap between us which the mind cannot cross may as well be an infinite abyss. A sad moment in the story.

Historically, this feels like the transition from absolute power relations of totalitarian, caste based, slave holding, sorts of societies into some kind of exciting new egalitarian, liberatory philosophy. Like the emergence of Buddhism, Christianity, Liberalism, secular humanism, etc which suddenly declares everyone to be equals, but then it sort of quavers under its own weight and fails to really lift people to that utopian height. The actual differences between people prove immune to the sentiment that we are all beautiful stars.

[hoochi]

i cannot see quite why the unchangeable becomes an actual individual, rather than simply being the play or unfolding of individuality in general. Is Hegel arguing the unchangeable itself has agency which somehow exists above and beyond individual consciousnesses? That doesn't feel consistent with the tenets of idealism Or is Hegel here referencing the incarnation of Christ without quite justifying it in terms of his dialectic (surely not!). or perhaps i'll get the answer i'm looking for in later sections.