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HIST 271
Hegel and the Historicist Chronotope
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
14 July 1789: storming of the Bastille
Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel)
consciousness (Bewusstsein)
Geist (Spirit, Mind): “the I that is a We and the We that is an I”
dialectic
aufheben (to sublate), Aufhebung
determinate negation
alienation (Entfremdung)
telos
Wissenschaft (science—in a broad and lofty sense)
being versus becoming (Sein v. Werden)
recognition (Anerkennung)
immediate, unmediated, immediacy (unmittelbar, Unmittelbarkeit)
mediated, mediation (vermittelt, Vermittlung)
subject/object; necessity/freedom; contingency/determinism; being and thought; is/ought
“Das Wahre ist das Ganze.” (The true is the whole.) –Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
(1807)
“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former
is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be
explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature
in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one
another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own
inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not
merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this
equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.”—Hegel,
Phenomenology of the Spirit
“Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first
breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely
quantitative growth—there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born—so likewise the Spirit
in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the
structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.
The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of
something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling
that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash [ein
Blitz], illuminates the features of the new world.”—Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
“Supersession exhibits its true twofold meaning which we have seen in the negative: it is at
once a negating and a preserving.” —Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
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“The realized purpose, or the existent actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming; but
it is just this unrest that is the self. . .” —Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
¶191: “the lord achieves his recognition through another consciousness” —Hegel,
Phenomenology of the Spirit
¶192: “In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which
constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. . . What now really confronts him is not an
independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-
for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential
consciousness and its unessential action.” —Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
¶193: “But just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to
be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it
immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be
transformed into a truly independent consciousness.” —Hegel, Phenomenology of the
Spirit
¶194: “For this consciousness [servitude] has been fearful, not of this or that particular
thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread [ Angst]; for it
has experienced the fear of death [die Furcht des Todes], the absolute Lord. in that
experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and
everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations.” —Hegel, Phenomenology
of the Spirit
¶196: “the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have
only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.” —Hegel, Phenomenology
of the Spirit
Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation (1969): “the master is thought to be free,
independent, the slave is thought to be unfree, dependent. The freedom and
independence of the master, if we look at it philosophically, is a myth. . . How could the
mater have been independent when it is the very institution of slavery which provided his
wealth, which provided the means of sustenance? The master was dependent on the slave,
dependent for his life on the slave.”
Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation (1969): “The master is always on the verge of
becoming the slave and the slave possesses the real, concrete power to make him always on
the verge of becoming the master.”
“Frei sein ist nichts—frei werden ist der Himmel” (“To be free is nothing—to become free is
heaven”)—Johann Gottlieb Fichte
“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”–Hegel,
Philosophy of Right (1820)
