Hegel’s Romance of Reason

The romance of reason lays the groundwork for understanding both Hegel’s critique of Romanticism and his indebtedness to it. It helps us see how his “Phenomenology,” though critical of Romantic heroes and their cult of feeling, is in its own way a romance of reason.

The spirit helps me, suddenly I see counsel
And confidently write: In the beginning was the Deed!
—Goethe, Faust

The Phenomenology of Spirit is the great philosophic novel of modernity. It is Hegel’s Bildungsroman, his novel of formative education modeled after Rousseau’s Emile and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In Hegel’s own words, it is a picture gallery that contains portraits of the human-divine mind and spirit—Geist in its various guises [808].[1] A hybrid of logic and story telling, the Phenomenologychronicles the adventures of spirit in the course of its arduous journey to absolute knowing. This is philosophy in the form of science. In another of Hegel’s many metaphors, the Phenomenology is our ladder to this exalted state.

My topic this evening is one of the subjects portrayed in Hegel’s gallery: Faust, the hero of Goethe’s famous poem. In his lectures on fine art, Hegel calls it “the one absolutely philosophic tragedy.” He elaborates as follows:

Here on the one side, dissatisfaction with learning and, on the other, the freshness of life and enjoyment in the world, in general the tragic quest for harmony between the Absolute in its essence and appearance and the individual’s knowledge and will, all this provides a breadth of subject-matter which no other dramatist has ventured to compass in one and the same work.[2]

Faust comes on the scene in a section within Hegel’s enormous chapter on reason. The section bears the title, “The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through its Own Self.” Its three subsections have the following dramatic titles: “Pleasure and Necessity,” “The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit,” and “Virtue and the Way of the World.” Each subsection deals with a specific claim to know the truth absolutely, that is, simply or without qualification. Each claim is embodied in what Hegel calls a shape or Gestalt of consciousness. The Gestalt for “Pleasure and Necessity” is Faust; for “The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit” it is Karl Moor, from Schiller’s early play, The Robbers; and for the Knight of Virtue, who appears in “Virtue and the Way of the World,” it is the Marquis of Posa, the noble schemer from Schiller’s Don Carlos.[3]

These three figures comprise what I call Hegel’s romance of reason: romance because the figures are Romantic idealists who make their individual hearts the measure of truth; reason because that is the stage at which these shapes appear along the path to science. The romance of reason is one of the most dramatic moments in the entire Phenomenology. It is a good example of how Hegel’s book functions, at one of its many levels, as a dialectical psychology, a study of human types. The romance of reason highlights the role that poets and poetry play in our journey to science. It also lays the groundwork for understanding both Hegel’s critique of Romanticism and his indebtedness to it. It helps us see how the Phenomenology, though critical of Romantic heroes and their cult of feeling, is in its own way a romance of reason.

To understand what Hegel means by reason, and why Faust appears at this level, we must define a term even more fundamental to the Phenomenology: consciousness. The Phenomenology is the journey of consciousness. Consciousness, here, refers to a mode of human existence or Dasein, not just a mode of thinking. It is not only how I internalize the world in reflection and also how I comport myself in it, how I live.

Consciousness is the opposition of subject and object, I and It, the Here-Inside and the There-Outside. This is our natural—that is, uneducated or naïve—mode of being in the world. Perceiving and imagining are prime examples of this mode. The Phenomenology seeks to destroy the opposition of subject and object, to remove the distance between my thinking and all the things I think about. So long as I regard myself, my non-bodily spiritual interior, as separate from the things I think about, I cannot be said to know them: the required intimacy is lacking. Science, for Hegel, is this intimacy. It is the identity of subject and object, thought and being, self and world. This is another way of saying that the mind’s destiny is to find itself as the truth and substance of things.

Neutralizing the subject-object opposition of our natural consciousness may be compared to the following. It is as though Hegel in the Phenomenology seeks to convert us from the mode of onlooker to that of listener. He is shifting the metaphor for our relation to the world away from visual art and toward music. This is a move from looking at, as we do when beholding a painting, to being one with, as we are when listening to music. To think philosophically (that is, genuinely) is not to look at a picture-like truth from afar but to be one with the purely conceptual movement that makes all things what they are and binds them together within a fluid whole. This music-like movement is dialectical logic. Logic, for Hegel, is not a formal method, a cookie-cutter that we apply to various kinds of intellectual dough. It is the life of the whole or, as Hegel calls it, the soul of all things.[4] And to engage in logic, as Hegel understands it, to think dialectically, is the peak of human intimacy with this whole and the end of all desire. This analogy between dialectic and music suggests that the portraits in Hegel’s gallery are more like arias from a Mozart opera or movements from a Beethoven symphony.[5] To understand Faust, or Karl, or the Marquis, we must in a sense become one with the movements of their souls. We must enter their fluid spirit of certitude and move with them, even as we rise above them as phenomenological observer-listeners who grasp the dialectic that goes on, as it were, behind their backs.

Intimacy is the key that unlocks Hegel’s chapter on reason.

As I said at the outset, the Phenomenology chronicles the adventures of the human-divine spirit in its journey to absolute truth. The first three main stages of this journey are consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason. The later stages need not concern us here. As a stage, consciousness has a narrower meaning than the one I noted earlier. It is the stage at which the subject places absolute truth in external physical objects—things. At the stage of self-consciousness, the subject reverses this stance and places the truth in itself. Self-consciousness first appears as radical egotism, the being-for-self that Hegel calls desire (Begierde). This is the violent self-assertion with which the individual self tries to make itself the absolute truth of all things and the lord of other selves.

After self-consciousness comes reason. Reason, as the unity of the previous two stages, combines consciousness and self-consciousness. To use Hegel’s word, it is the Durchführung or interpenetration of thing and self, outer and inner, world and mind [394]. Reason, for Hegel, is not a mental faculty, not reason as we find it in, say, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is the phenomenon, the historical Dasein or being-there, of Man, the being that bends all things to his will. Reason is the unbounded self-confidence and Prometheanism of the modern age. This self-confidence underlies Machiavelli’s effort to articulate the conditions of political mastery, Bacon’s “knowledge is power,” and Descartes’ mastery and possession of nature through technology.[6] At a later stage of the Phenomenology, this will to power, which is also the will to freedom, breaks forth in the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror [582 ff.].

But let us draw back from these large implications and return to reason and its intimacy. Reason, as I have said, is the unity or interpenetration of self and thing, thinker and world. Like everything else in Hegel, it has three stages. In the first, the self seeks intimacy with the world by observing and categorizing the things of nature, especially living nature. In the second, the self acts on the world in order to appropriate it and remake it in the self’s own image. This is the meaning of the title: “The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through its Own Self.” “Through its own self” means through its actions. Faust, Karl, and the Marquis all strive to realize their self-certainty in the realm of deeds. In its third, post-romantic phase, reason, having abandoned its pretensions to reform the world, is civil society. This is the familiar realm in which everybody does his own thing. At this higher stage of intimacy—intimacy through act—I contemplate and enjoy my presumed absoluteness in my publicly acknowledged works, whether in the arts and sciences, or investment banking, or being a philosophy professor.

All these claims to know my inner self as the truth of outer things, these efforts at intimacy, fall to the ground, like almost everything else in the Phenomenology, and negate themselves. Each shape struggles heroically to prove its truth. In the course of that struggle, it destroys itself. It refutes its own claim, spontaneously and without the aid of a cross-questioning Socrates. The result, however, is not blank annihilation. On the contrary, self-destruction is also self-definition, the process by which a shape articulates itself and becomes fully developed. It is also a giving birth. The force that negates and undermines a claim to truth is the same force that generates the next higher claim, the next higher shape of consciousness, which rises Phoenix-like out of the ashes of the previous shape.

This amazing process of self-assertion, -destruction and -reconstitution Hegel calls experience [Erfahrung]. Its three logical moments are summed up in the German verb “aufheben,” often translated as sublate. The verb can mean abolish, hold onto, and lift up. Sublation in Hegel’s logic is the process by which something immediately given is negated, preserved, and lifted up into a higher unity.

Faust is the sublation of reason in its observational, scientific mode. He embodies, at the level of deeds, the modern self-confidence I mentioned earlier. Faust, whose name means fist, is a rebel.[7] He rejects the universals that have so far filled and constituted his life—science, piety, decency, and moderation—in order to live at last as this single self-absolutizing individual who thinks as he likes and does what he wants. He rebels against being observant, in every sense of that term, and turns from scientific to carnal knowledge. He drinks in the spirit of denial and defiance offered to him by Mephistopheles, who at one point in Goethe’s story proclaims: “Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!” (“I am the spirit that persistently negates!”).[8] In the downfall of Faust, a new self-certainty will arise, the sublation of the first. This is Karl Moor. In his downfall, a third arises—the Knight of Virtue. With the downfall of this Knight, the romance of reason reaches its end.

As I noted earlier, reason is individual selfhood seeking truth through embodiment or incarnation. It is my certainty that as a self-conscious individual I am the truth of all things. Hegel calls this position idealism [232]. Reason is individual selfhood in the mode of worldliness. Its spirit is thoroughly secular and irreligious. In the romance of reason, the self incarnates itself or becomes worldly through deeds. These are the self’s efforts to achieve self-actualization or fulfillment. The goal of the rational self is to behold itself, contemplate itself, in some real, outwardly existing concrete thing that the self has done or accomplished. This beholding is the intimacy of self-in-other that is the defining characteristic of reason.

Faust is the first stage of the journey to the incarnation of reason, the interpenetration of pure spirit and living flesh. His story, as it appears in Goethe’s poem, is well known. Some of it I have already recounted. Faust is disenchanted with science and all that is calm and celestial. Tired of being a pious observer, he craves the tumult and excesses of the non-scientific life. He yields to the Earth Spirit, who tempts him with the delicious prospect of forbidden fruit, the fruit of experience and voluptuous immersion in a life of sheer flux. He makes a bet with the devil, Mephistopheles, to the effect that if he should ever seek repose—say to the passing moment “Abide!”—he forfeits his life.[9] Faust falls in love with Gretchen, whom he seduces, abandons, and unintentionally ruins. In order to be with her lover, Gretchen betrays her family and her religion, and even accidentally kills her mother with a sleeping potion. She becomes pregnant, suffers public disgrace, and eventually goes mad and kills her baby, for which she is condemned to death. At a crucial moment, Faust witnesses the horror he has inflicted on his beloved.[10]

This is the story as it appears in Goethe’s completed version (short of the happy ending in which Faust and Gretchen are taken to heaven). In the version that Hegel knew when he was writing the Phenomenology—the so-called Faust-Fragment of 1790—the story ends with Gretchen in the Cathedral, tormented by an evil spirit, surrounded by the ominous tones of the Dies irae, and painfully aware that she has killed her mother, that she is pregnant, and that Faust has abandoned her.

The plot of the Faust-Fragment reveals the point of Hegel’s title: “Pleasure and Necessity.” Faust pursues pleasure (Lust) as the means of gratifying his desire for self-actualization. His desire for sexual intimacy is from Hegel’s perspective reason’s desire for the interpenetration of self and thing, inner and outer, mind and world. But the pursuit of pleasure only incites the crushing force of necessity that destroys Gretchen, who is the intended truth and vessel of Faust’s self-certainty. Faustian consciousness thus undergoes experience in Hegel’s sense. In seeking one thing, it brings about its exact opposite.

Faust comes first in reason’s effort to incarnate itself because his self-certainty is the simplest and most immediate. He craves the immediate gratification of sexual union: he strives to make himself real and genuinely alive at the level of mere feeling. Hegel never makes this sexual aspect of Faust explicit. Indeed, his highly abstract language makes it very hard to see that the account is even about sex. But it is. This is the meaning of the self’s desire to find fulfillment, as Hegel says, “in” another individual [362]. In any case, to quote Faust, “Gefühl ist alles,” “Feeling is all.”[11] That is why Hegel calls Faust “the poorest shape of self-actualizing spirit” [363]. The Phenomenology began with the most immediate form of knowing: sense-certainty. This is the certainty that absolute truth lies in the sensuous this or here-and-now, what we call sense data [90 ff.]. Faust recapitulates sense-certainty at the erotic level: he makes sense-certainty into sensual certainty. A true Romantic, he craves infinite satisfaction in the here-and-now, the isolated passing moment, of sexual pleasure. By renouncing all universals, he hopes to fulfill his desire to be this singular human self in every here and now, a self that is free of context and consequence.

Irony is at work here. Faust steeps himself in the life of unreason, and yet this very denial is for Hegel a stage of reason. This is perhaps the best example in the whole Phenomenology of how spirit accomplishes its universal rational ends through the passions of forceful, self-affirming individuals—through their desires, folly, and fanaticism. Hegel sometimes calls this dialectical irony the cunning of reason.[12] Faust’s irrational desire, his unreason, is reason at a primitive, not-yet-educated stage. It is the necessary violence or rush with which active reason bursts on the scene or appears and which, when developed in subsequent stages, eventually gives rise to absolute knowing. Faust, as a stage of consciousness, is the impulse for this higher spiritual development. He may be the poorest shape of active reason, but his poverty is also a potential: it is the raw energy of active reason. Faust’s feeling-centered narcissism shows us that the Romantic temperament, in its striving for the infinite, is a necessary condition for the emergence of philosophy in the form of science.

Were we to rest content with a moral condemnation of Faust, we would miss this point. We would fail to see that Faust’s leap into carnality, immoral and destructive though it is, embodies a necessary stage in the education of the human spirit. For Hegel, this is what makes Goethe’s poem a tragedy rather than a cautionary tale. Faust dares, and it is a great and heroic daring. He actualizes what all of us perhaps dream of doing, though we may not admit this to ourselves. If the whole truth of the human spirit is to be revealed and grasped, then subjectivity must have its day, make itself known and suffer the consequences of its actions. Only in this way, according to Hegel, does spirit rise to self-knowledge—not by avoiding tensions and contradictions but by generating and enduring them. In the upper regions of thePhenomenology, there will be reconciliation between the individual self and all the universals Faust rejects. The dissonances of spirit will be resolved. But the path to that reconciliation is one of excess, tension, defeat, suffering, and even death. Spirit reaches truth by purging itself of all its errors, but it cannot purge what it does not experience to the fullest.

As we read Hegel’s version of Faustian experience, we must remember that Hegel and Goethe shared, each in his own way, a devotion to science and reason. Hegel deeply admired his poet-scientist friend and no doubt regarded the Faust discussion in the Phenomenology as a tribute to their commonality. Hegel likes to quote (or rather misquote) the lines in which Mephistopheles says that the man who despises reason and science must perish—whether or not he’s handed himself over to the devil.[13] Goethe and Hegel agree on this point. Nevertheless, Hegel is claiming to be at a higher, indeed the highest, stage of thought. At this stage, the truth contained in poetic archetypes is made thoroughly rational and scientific. This is the stage at which great poems like Goethe’s Faust are rendered purely conceptual by the higher energy of philosophic thought.

Faust seeks union with Gretchen. This lowly but presumably charming girl is the means to his coveted self-actualization as a singular unbounded self-consciousness, a liberated human this. To quote Hegel, Faust wants “the intuition [Anschauung] of the unity of the two independent self-consciousnesses” [362]. This intuition, this claim to absolute knowing, is the feeling and rush of sexual gratification, the sinking of spirit into the flesh, although, as I mentioned earlier, Hegel never makes this explicit. Strictly speaking, it is not Gretchen that Faust desires. What he desires, from Hegel’s perspective, is the union of his selfhood and hers, so that his may be fulfilled. It is not even quite right to say that he desires sex. In his rejection of all stifling universals, he desires the worldly knowledge he has never before experienced. He desires the sexual act as the realization of his self-certainty as a god-like individual.

For Hegel, desire (Begierde) has a negative meaning. It is the negativity of the self, the violence by which the self affirms its being-for-self or independence at the expense of the rest of the world [174]. The most blatant expression of this negativity is eating. Eating is the gratification of my desire to destroy external things in order to reduce them to my self-identity. It is a primordial mode of self-certainty. Eating reveals a deep truth. It reveals, symbolically, that the seemingly independent things around me are not solidly real after all but are only passing moments in a larger whole. In his discussion of sense-certainty, Hegel observes that animals know this deep truth, these mysteries, as he calls them, of bread and wine. They do not passively observe sensuous things but gobble them up [109].

At the level of self-consciousness, the stage that comes just before reason, the object of the individual’s desire was ultimately not food but rather the recognition or esteem of another individual [178]. The self-conscious individual wanted the certainty of his own absoluteness realized, validated, by another objectively existing self-conscious individual. This drove him to meet that other self in combat. The goal was to subdue the other’s estimation of himself as absolute and make that other subservient. As we know, this leads to the famous master-slave relation.

Faust is the return of self-consciousness as desire [362]. But desire now no longer seeks the death or simple subjugation of another self. It is not polemical but amorous or erotic. As Hegel emphasizes, Faust wants to destroy not Gretchen herself (although he will succeed in doing precisely that), but only her independence, her being for herself, someone apart from him. He wants an intimacy that destroys distance. Eating too destroys, and aims at annihilation: I eat the apple and so consume it, that is, reduce it to nothingness. In the sexual act, by contrast, the other is preserved. To be sure, Faust wants to take something away from Gretchen, namely, her innocence. But Gretchen must remain a concrete, real, self-conscious being if she is to function as the embodiment and living mirror of Faust’s narcissism—his certainty of his own absoluteness as this individual self. Rape is not an option, since Faust seeks intimacy in a melting of selves, a free flow. Gretchen must give herself to Faust, freely yield her independence and her innocence. She must be tempted to a reciprocal desire. That is to say, she must be seduced.

So far, we have looked at Faust’s certainty and desire. We must now look at the truth of that certainty. This is the experience in which passing pleasure begets brutal necessity.

Hegel stresses the swiftness with which Faustian certitude destroys itself. He calls it “a sheer leap into its antithesis” [365]. The forces that bring about this destruction are Nature and Society. These are the Furies that Faust’s audacity unleashes and that become his nemesis. Faust seeks sexual intimacy as an end in itself. He seeks infinity and freedom in the overpowering rush of self-feeling that is absent in, say, metaphysical speculation. In sexual climax Faust indeed may feel, briefly, that he is a god who has been released at last from the chains of debilitating age, dusty texts, and oppressive piety—that he is Prometheus Unbound. But this climactic rush of selfhood produces an unwanted result: a love child. Sexual pleasure here transcends itself in natural consequence: it goes beyond itself. Faust wanted to use sex as a means to his self-gratification as a singular human this. But sex gets the upper hand and uses him for nature’s universal purpose of procreation. In the realm of organic life, the joy of sex gives rise to the truth of sex, as lovers become parents. Faust, in short, is sublated. He aspired to be an erotic rebel and Übermensch, a singular godlike self who shook his fist at all universals and commonalities like family, law, and religion. Nature, however, has no regard for such delusions of grandeur. It reduces Faust to the status of a generic male, a passing moment in the circle of life. Natural necessity, here, functions a kind of fate. But it does not descend on Faust from above, as in Greek tragedies. Rather it is Faust’s own act that generates the offspring that will be the undoing of Gretchen, the unhappy medium of Faust’s self-certainty. In consummating his certainty of himself, Faust negates that certainty. In the Faust-Fragment, the awareness of this negation is reserved for Gretchen, whose profound anxiety in the Cathedral is the negative truth (or as Hegel also calls it, the Verkehrung or inversion) of what Faust intended. Hegel describes her tragic realization as follows: “Consciousness … has really become a riddle to itself … The abstract necessity … has the character of the merely negative, uncomprehended power of universality, on which individuality is smashed to pieces” [365].

This self-negation, we must note, would be stable, fruitful and happy if its goal were family. In marriage, which aims at concrete shared life as opposed to abstract, purely subjective feeling, lovers are on good terms with the universals Faust rejects and will their own sublation: they sacrifice their singular being-for-self, their independence, for the sake of a publicly recognized permanent bond and for the sake of children, who concretize that bond.[14] But this is precisely the self-sacrifice and universality that Faust rejects. In addition to being undone by nature, Faustian certitude is destroyed by the customs and laws of human society—the very universals that Faust scorned. Faust wanted the experience and Anschauung of luscious union, a fantasy fulfilled. Instead, in the Faust-Fragment, he hears Mephistopheles taunting him with the heartrending picture of the abandoned Gretchen, whose peace and joy Faust knows he has destroyed.[15] In the completed story, Faust will have to endure an even more graphic Anschauung: he will witness Gretchen in prison as a criminal soon to be executed.[16]

Hegel’s account of the logical path that leads from pleasure to necessity is dense and hard to follow. Its central theme is the abstractness of Romantic feeling. Normally, we regard thinking as abstract and feeling as concrete. In this we are like Faust. Hegel shows us repeatedly in the Phenomenology that this view of thinking and feeling is mistaken—in fact, inverted. Faust wanted to escape from the dry bones of science, morality, and religion. He broke with the human community and asserted his this-ness through a quest for intense self-feeling. But this self-feeling, like the sheer this-ness of sense-certainty, is abstract. That is, it lacks solidity, ground, and content—a concrete world. The Romantic ego, by cutting itself off from the genuinely concrete objective relations within the moral realm, is similarly abstract. The pleasure Faust seeks is not pleasure in anything other than pleasure itself; Gretchen is merely a lovely means to that end. And so, the self that makes pleasure its absolute is empty: it is the sheer nothingness of undeveloped immediate singularity.

Pleasure becomes harsh necessity because, as self-feeling, it is abstract or without a fixed content. Faust’s quest in effect drains the objective world of its meaning and transforms it into a brutal implacable force that opposes private desire. That is all that universality can be at this “poorest level of self-actualizing spirit.” But herein lies the central problem, as Hegel presents it. The self, as a thinking self, is universal as well as singular. To put this very simply, I experience myself not as this random bit of self-consciousness, this negligible ego, but rather as a being infinitely worthy by virtue of my inwardness or spirit. Selfhood is that which must be recognized and respected. The necessity that Faustian consciousness unwittingly generates is universality in which no thinking is involved or can be involved. As Hegel says: “It is what is called necessity; for necessity, fate, and the like, is just that about which we cannot say what it does, what its specific laws and positive content are” [363].

What Hegel wants us to see at this extreme point of Faustian experience is that in seeking to make itself real through the sexual act, the self generates a universal that is empty and meaningless and that fails to match the universality and worth that I find within my self-consciousness. We can call this universality Law or Society, but from the perspective of pleasure-seeking consciousness, from the standpoint of Faust and Gretchen, these names can refer only to the external forces that crush desire and destroy inner peace. In short, if the self is to continue its search for universal meaning within the sphere of individual feeling, it must move on to a higher stage. To find its absolute, it must search for the unity of individual and universal in a higher shape of consciousness.

This higher shape is Karl Moor, who embodies the “law of the heart” [370]. He resolves the Faustian contradiction by unifying the extremes of individual feeling and universal order or necessity: Karl wants to reform society in response to the dictates of a well-meaning heart. At this new stage, the heart no longer seeks its absolute in something as immediately self-defeating and frivolous as illicit sex. On the contrary, this new shape is “the earnestness of a high purpose which seeks its pleasure in displaying the excellence of its own nature and promoting the welfare of mankind” [370]. In this move from Faust to Karl, Hegel takes us from private desire to social consciousness.

I wish I had time to complete the romance of reason. Faust, to be sure, is interesting. But the two shapes that come after him are even more interesting, and psychologically more complex. I wish I had time to tell you about how Hegel unmasks social reformers like Karl, who arrogantly claim to be the bleeding-heart liberators of oppressed humanity, and meddlesome idealists like the Marquis, who claim, even more arrogantly, to be above self-interest, to know the hearts of other people, and to be the stage manager of world history.

I also wish I had time to tell you about the amazing things that happen once we are past the romance of reason. In these upper regions of the Phenomenology, where reason becomes spirit, the individual self is fulfilled in and through the communities to which it belongs: ethical and religious communities. Self-consciousness here becomes, in Hegel’s phrase, “an I that is We and a We that is I” [177]. This is the intimacy of inner and outer, the concrete embodiment of selfhood, that reason sought but could not achieve. It is the resolution of the tension within Faustian consciousness. The key to this resolution, for Hegel, is none other than the Christianity that Faust rejects. The Incarnation—in German, the Menschenwerdung or “human-becoming” [748]—is the ultimate interpenetration of the human and the divine natures, flesh and spirit. As the union of mortal life and immortal truth, it is dialectical logic in the form of a sacred image.

But I must content myself with a simple close. Hegel is notoriously hard. His abstract language, dizzying logic, grand claims, and obscure allusions dazzle and befuddle. But there is another side to him that all too often goes without mention. This is Hegel’s imagination, which we have seen at work in Hegel’s account of Faust. The Phenomenology of Spirit is one of the greatest works of the philosophic imagination. It compels us not merely to read about the various shapes of consciousness but to enter imaginatively into the spirit of their certitude. Hegel invites us to see the world through the eyes of his characters—or rather to “hear” the dialectical music of their souls—and to grasp those characters as necessary moments and stages of our own self-knowledge, history, and self-identity. I can think of no better way to leave you than to quote one commentator’s praise of the imaginative Hegel: “It was his peculiar gift to be able to project himself into the minds of other people and of other periods, penetrating into the core of alien souls and strange lives, and still remain the man he was.”[17]

Republished with gracious permission from Kronos (vol. IX). 

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[1] Numbers in square brackets refer to the paragraph numbers in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

[2] Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, Vol. 2, p. 1224.

[3] In his Aesthetics, Hegel refers to all three characters in the same paragraph (ibid. pp. 1124-5).

[4] See, for example, the following sentence from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “This dialectic, then, is not an external activity of subjective thought, but the very soul of the content which puts forth its branches and fruit organically” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B Nisbet, 1991, p. 60).

[5] In his essay “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Theodor Adorno elaborates on the link between Hegel’s dialectic and music (Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993, p.136-137).

[6] The defiant spirit of Prometheanism is powerfully captured in Goethe’s early poem “Prometheus,” in which the Titan proclaims: “I know of nothing poorer under the sun, than you, you Gods!”

[7] In the final version of Faust, the Chorus of Spirits plays on this meaning. They tell Faust, who has just cursed the illusions of the world: “You have destroyed the beautiful world, with powerful fist” (I, 1608-1610).

[8] Faust I, 1338.

[9] Faust I, 1699-1706.

[10] “Dungeon,” Faust I, 4405 ff.

[11] Faust I, 3456.

[12] See Hegel’s Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York: Dover, 1956, p. 33.

[13] Hegel, no doubt quoting from memory, makes several changes in Mephistopheles’ soliloquy at Faust I, 1851-1867. The most obvious is that he quotes only the opening and closing couplets. For another variation on this passage from Faust, see Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Preface.

[14] See Hegel’s discussion of family and marriage in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 199 ff.

[15] In the section entitled Wald und Höhle, “Wood and Cave.”

[16] Faust I, 4405 ff.

[17] Richard Kroner, from his Introduction to Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, p. 9.

The featured image is “Hegel” by Franz Kugler. It is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.