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11 Cards in this Set
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Phenomenology of Spirit Analysis of the Text by: J. N. Findlay |
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1. It is impossible to begin a philosophical work with a clear statement of the kind of view it hopes to establish, or of its relation to what others have written. For philosophy aims at a universality which will embrace and sum up particulars, and cannot be expressed till those particulars have been gone through, and have yielded up the universality in question. It cannot be anatomised in advance, without seeing how its parts function in the whole. |
2. To state the relation of a philosophical work to others is also misleading, in that it suggests that previous works were false, and have now been cancelled out in truth. But philosophical systems do not replace falsehood by truth: they represent the ever clearer development of truth, which is as much present in earlier forms as in later, and which is only complete in a total development which includes all earlier stages |
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3. A statement of philosophical aims and results is only legitimate if it is seen as being initial and superficial, and is not regarded as revealing the essence of the matter in hand. For this essence is not exhausted by aims, but by the way in which they are carried out. It is not concerned with mere results, but with the manner in which they emerge. To state results without saving how one arrives at them is to present the corpse of a system, whereas merely to differentiate a system from others is to remain resolutely on its fringes. |
4. General principles and points of view belong only to the beginnings of the life of thought. Once one’s mind has become deeply immersed in its subject-matter, they will be relegated to surface-talk. |
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5. Philosophical truth can only exist in the form of a fully-worked-out scientific system. Philosophy must show up the inner necessity that drives knowledge towards Science, and it must itself embody this drive when the appropriate moment arrives. |
6. The true shape of truth is conceptual and notional. This can at present only be asserted as a counter to views like those of Jacobi (Studies in Spinoza, 1779), Novalls, Schlegel, etc., which make direct, unreasoning intuition (Anschauung) and feeling and central in philosophy, and the very being of the Absolute itself. |
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7. These latter views arise from the disillusioned desire to return to the peace and security of unquestioning faith which philosophical thinking has rudely shattered. They demand a suppression of thought-distinctions, not their further clarification. They aim at edification and enthusiasm rather than cool insight. |
8. Such views are an attempt to return to the heaven-directed gaze of earlier eras of thought, which has been succeeded by a gaze directed only to empirical detail, which now stultifies and starves the Spirit. |
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9. True Science cannot, however, be satisfied to see all detail vanish in an insubstantial, edifying mist. |
10. The complacency which spurns as finite the exactly defined concepts and necessary connections of Science, is not above but below the level of Science. Its would-be profundities are empty, its sweeping assertions superficial, its prophetic pronouncements arbitrary and superficial. |
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11. Our own time is obviously ripe for a major intellectual and spiritual advance. This has been in the womb’ for a long time, and is now about to achieve birth. Its birth-pangs are belt in a widespread sense of disillusion and frivolity, and in the vague foreboding of something unknown at hand. |
12. A new scientific spirit is at first only present in general, notional germ. It is the product of an extensive, laborious transformation of previous cultural forms, and their resumption into a new simplicity. It must, to be fully actual, redevelop these forms out of this simple unity. |
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13. Science, in its new, notional form, as yet ill worked out and ill connected with the rich detail of past thinking, seems to be the obscure possession of an esoteric sect. To be generally intelligible and exoteric, it must connect all this past detail with its new position. To understand is to make familiar material one’s own by incorporating it in a new scientific structure. |
14. When Science first emerges, it has on the one hand a tendency to stress simple intuitive rationality and a relation to what is divine, but also on the other hand to develop this insight into an organised wealth of detail. The second tendency may be held in check by the first, but continues with justification to demand satisfaction. |
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15. The tendency towards detail may try to satisfy itself by merely running through familiarly organised material, adding to this much that is extraordinary and curious, and then mechanically applying the same ‘absolute idea’ to all such detail without the least modification to suit special cases. This is a monotonous formalism, applicable only to ready-made differences. |
16. The false absolutism just sketched falls to develop difference and detail out of itself, but thinks it has done its task when it has said of anything specific that it is not to be found in the Absolute, since there we have only the Absolute’s identity with self. Such an Absolute is the night in which every cow is black. As opposed to such a absolutism, it will be helpful to give a sketch of a true one. (Aimed at Schelling, but obviously applying to others as well.) |
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17. In my view, which the full exposition of my system alone can justify, the true Absolute must not merely be thought of as a Substance, i.e. something immediately there, whether this be a knower or something known. It must be thought of as a Subject. We think in terms of Substance if we think in terms of undifferentiated universality, whether this be that of what merely is, or of what merely thinks, or of what (à la Schelling) combines both in a single intellectual intuition. |
18. True Substance is a being that truly is Subject, i.e. which only is itself in so far as it alienates itself from itself, and is then able to posit itself in and through what is thus alien. It cannot exist as a simple, positive starting-point, but only as part of a self-departing, self-returning movement, which both negates itself in indifferent, external otherness, and then reasserts itself as the negation of all such otherness. |
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19. The life and self-knowledge of the Absolute may well be described as that of the divine love disporting itself with itself, but such an image readily becomes insipid, or sinks into edification, since it fails to emphasise the seriousness, the anguish, and the patient effort involved in thus negating the negation. The essence of the Absolute cannot be separated from its execution, nor its form from the full content of its carrying-out. |
20. The true Absolute can only be seen as the whole of a self-realising act or process, and is also the result or outcome of such an act or process. What is present at its beginning can only be emptily universal, and can only achieve specific content through connection with what appears to be other than itself, but what can then be seen to be not really other. |
