Hegel, preface to Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel: Texts and Commentary : Hegel's Preface to His System in a New Translation With Commentary on
Hegel: Texts and Commentary : Hegel's Preface to His System in a New Translation With Commentary on
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes). In Hegel: Texts and Commentary, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1966 (1807).

The first subject enters into the determinations and is their soul; thus the second subject, which knows, still finds in the predicate that with which it had wished to be done so it could return into itself; and instead of being in a position to function as the active element in the movement of the predicate - arguing back and forth whether this or that predicate would be suitable - the second subject is still preoccupied with the self of the content and has to stay with that instead of being by itself.

That is Hegel's account of how we comprehend a three-word subject-predicate sentence. I'd like to see his account of how we comprehend his account. It must be like the difference between googol and googolplex.

No, there's something to it, but I didn't get it after one go-round. Anyway that's enough Hegel for now - I just wanted a sampler so I would stop feeling quite so ignorant when he came up in all my other reading. Also today's genteel paperbacks are purty and all, but man do I wish Anchor was still around.
Tags:

Next Posts

Previous Posts

Comments

pseudopodium
That exposition sounds a lot like Robert Benchley. "And so, as we find, or rather the second subject, who has joined us at the club, who we will call 'Joe', finds, well, no, actually he seems to have lost it -- that's odd, I'm sure it was in my pocket this morning -- well, as I, or Joe, was saying, or rather arguing, we don't get along very well, you know how it is with in-laws...."

waggish
It certainly doesn't have anything to do with Logic as we know it. As I was taught, it's just Hegel's argument against the Kantian subject-predicate "thin particular" type thing, claiming that rather than hanging a predicate onto a subject, predicates are in fact something generated out of the subject, because there exists no grounding for a predicate logic that doesn't already presuppose a metaphysics. It's an analogue to the idealists' rejection of Kant stemming from the inability to find a bridge from the phenomenal to the noumenal, such that everything collapses into practical reason.

That's really all I think there is to it. The rest is just willful obfuscation.
stephen
Why would anyone wilfully obfuscate in this context? There are striking similarities between Hegel's thoughts on logic in this Preface and the "logica docens" tradition and "suppositio" doctrine, especially where a "supposition" (a richer notion than "reference") of the predicate coinciding (though

Post a comment

Already a Vox member? Sign in

You will be asked to join Vox to post this comment.