GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL Consciousness and the Dialectical Method Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. The son of a pietistic civil servant, Hegel intended to join the clergy when he began study at the University of Tiibingen in 1788. At Titbingen he became acquainted with an extraordinary group of students, including the preco- cious philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and the writer Friedrich Hélderlin. Influenced by this group, Hegel decided to pursue a career as a philosopher. After initial struggles finding scholarly employ- ment, he took up a post at the University of Jena in 1801. He remained at Jena until 1806, when the French overran the city, It was during this period that he wrote his groundbreaking Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). After a decade of work as a journalist and schoolmaster, he accepted a professorship at Heidelberg in 1816. In 1818 he moved to the University of Berlin, where he became an extraordinarily influential figure in German intellectual life. His thought was of crucial importance in the development of such innova- tive thinkers as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx. Hegel died in Berlin in 1831, but his writings continued t0 influence many of the most significant turns in European and American thought throughout the nineteenth and teventieth centuries. Hegel wanted to construct a comprehensive philosophical system that made sense of all reality. His examination of the Absolute evolved from his youthful collaboration at Jena with Schelling—the two aimed to come up ‘with a more satisfying idealism than Kant or Fichte had offered—into his mature philosophical system, at the heart of which was his concept of dialectical progress. According to Hegel, the Absolute emerged through an ongoing process of conflict between opposites. He believed that such an understanding of reality was revealed through the study of history and nature. Hegel is perhaps best known for his philosophy of history, which can be {found in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, published in the 1830s, His other major works include The Science of Logic (1812-1816), The 103CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE DIALECTICAL METHOD Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (817), and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821). The following selection, the introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit, outlines the dialectical method to be used in Hegel's study of the development of human consciousness. Itis a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it. A certain uneasiness seems jus- tified, partly because there are different types of cognition, and one of them might be more appropriate than another for the attainment of this goal, so that we could make a bad choice of means; and partly because cognition is a faculty of a definite kind and scope, and thus, without a more precise definition of its nature and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. This feeling of uneasiness is surely bound to be transformed into the conviction that the whole project of securing for consciousness through cognition what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates them. For, if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, itis obvious that the use of an instrament ona thing certainly does not let it be what itis for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it. Tf, on the other hand, cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium, Either way we employ a means which immediately brings about the opposite of its own end; or rather, what is really absurd is that we should make use ofa means atall. Ir would seem, to be sure, that this evil could be remedied through an acquaintance with the way in which the instrument works; for this would enable us to eliminate from the representation of the Absolute which we have gained through it whatever is due to the instrument, and thus get the truth in its purity. But this ‘improvement? would in fact only being us back to where we were before. If we remove from a reshaped thing what the instrament has done to it, then the thing—here the Absolute—becomes for us exactly what it was before this [accordingly] superfluous effort. On the other hand, if the Absolute is supposed merely to be brought nearer to us through this instrument, without 104CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE DIALECTICAL METHOD anything in it being altered, like a bird caught by a lime-twig, it would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn, if it were not with us, in and for itself, al along, and of its own volition. For a ruse is just what cognition would be in such a case, since it would, with its manifold exertions, be giving itself the air of doing something quite different from creating a merely immediate and therefore effortless relationship. Or, if by testing cognition, which we conceive of as a medium, we get to know the law of its refraction, itis again useless to subtract this from the end result, For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us, that is cognition; and if this were removed, all that would be indi- cated would be a pure direction or a blank space. Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Sci- ence, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? Indeed, this fear takes something—a great deal in fact—for granted as truth, support- ing its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true. To be specific, it takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presup- poses that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth This conclusion stems from the fact that the Absolute alone is true, or the truth alone is absolute, One may set this aside on the grounds that there is a type of cognition which, though it does not cognize the Absolute as Science aims to, is still true, and that cognition in general, though it be incapable of grasping the Absolute, is still capable of grasp- ing other kinds of truth, But we gradually come to see that this kind of talk which goes back and forth only leads to a hazy distinction between an absolute truth and some other kind of truth, and that words like ‘absolute’, ‘cognition’, etc. presuppose a meaning which has yet to be ascertained. Instead of troubling ourselves with such useless ideas and locutions about cognition as ‘an instrument for getting hold of the Absolute’, or as ‘a medium through which we view the truth’ (relationships which surely, in the end, are what all these ideas of a cognition cut off from the 105