Preface: On Scientific Knowledge

It is customary to begin a book with a preface explaining the author's aim, his reasons, and his relation to other works on the same subject. In a philosophical work such an explanation seems not only superfluous but, by the nature of the matter, even unsuitable and misleading. For whatever might be said about philosophy in a preface — a historical statement of tendency and standpoint, of general content and results — cannot count as the way in which philosophical truth is to be set forth.

Philosophy is not a collection of opinions, of which one is true and another false. The more ordinary thinking takes the opposition of true and false as fixed, the more it expects every philosophical system to be either agreed with or contradicted. It does not grasp the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but sees in it only contradiction.

The bud disappears when the blossom bursts forth, and one could say that the bud is refuted by the blossom; in the same way, when the fruit appears, the blossom is declared to be a false form of the plant's existence, and the fruit takes its place as the plant's truth. These forms do not merely differ; they displace one another as incompatible. But their fluid nature makes them, at the same time, moments of an organic unity, in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.

This image of bud, blossom and fruit is Hegel's picture of what he calls "dialectic": a development in which each stage is both overcome and preserved in the next.

The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence completing itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result — that only at the end is it what it truly is. And precisely in this consists its nature: to be actual, subject, the becoming-of-itself.

Everything depends on grasping and expressing the true not only as substance, but equally as subject.

This is perhaps the central sentence of the Preface. "Substance" means what simply is, fixed and given; "subject" means what knows itself, moves, and makes itself. Hegel is setting his philosophy against both Spinoza, for whom God is one substance, and the philosophy of feeling or intuition of his contemporaries.

Ours is a time of birth and of transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the world of its existence and representation up to now, and is about to submerge it in the past, and is in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest, but always engaged in moving forward. But just as, with a child, after long quiet nourishment, the first breath breaks off the gradualness of merely quantitative growth — a qualitative leap — and now the child is born: so the spirit that forms itself ripens slowly and quietly towards the new shape, dissolving one particle after another of the edifice of its previous world. The frivolity and boredom that tear at what still exists, the vague foreboding of something unknown, are the signs that something else is approaching. This gradual crumbling is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in one flash, sets up the form of the new world.

But this new world is at first, like the newborn child, not yet complete. Its first appearance is its immediacy, its concept. A building is not finished when its foundation has been laid; and the concept of the whole, when reached, is not the whole itself.

Hegel criticises those who would grasp the Absolute in an immediate intuition, without the labour of thought.

There are those who seek in philosophy not knowledge but edification — who want feeling rather than concept, ecstasy rather than the cold march of necessity in the thing itself. They believe that the more they renounce determinate thought, the deeper they are. But just as there is an empty breadth, so there is an empty depth. To set this one knowledge — that in the Absolute all is one — against determinate and fulfilled knowledge, or knowledge that at least seeks and demands fulfilment; to give out one's Absolute as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black — that is the naivety of emptiness in knowledge.

"The night in which all cows are black" is usually taken as aimed at the philosophy of Hegel's former friend Schelling, or at least at his followers; Schelling took it so, and their friendship did not survive it.

The life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea sinks into edification, and even insipidity, if the seriousness, the pain, the patience and the labour of the negative are lacking from it.

The power of spirit is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its unfolding.

Death — if that is what we want to call this unreality — is the most fearful of things, and to hold fast what is dead demands the greatest strength. Lifeless beauty hates the understanding, because the understanding asks of it what it cannot do. But the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself pure of devastation; it is the life that endures death and maintains itself in it. Spirit gains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. It is this power not as the positive that looks away from the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing, or false, and then, having done with it, turn away from it to something else; no, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying is the magic power that converts it into being.

This passage — "looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it" — is among the most quoted in Hegel.

The individual has the right to demand that philosophy provide him at least with the ladder to this standpoint. And this is what the present work sets out to do: to present the becoming of knowledge, from the most immediate shape of consciousness up to science. The individual must pass through the stages of education of the universal spirit — as shapes already laid aside, as stages of a path that has been worked out and smoothed. In the same way, we see, in matters of knowledge, that what in former ages occupied the mature minds of men has sunk to the level of exercises, even games, for boys; and in the progress of a child's learning we can recognise the history of the world's culture traced as in a silhouette.

The familiar, just because it is familiar, is not known.

A famous line. What we take for granted — "subject," "object," "God," "nature" — is not yet understood, merely because we are used to it.

Philosophical truth cannot be stated in the form of a mathematical proof. Mathematics proceeds by an external construction: the triangle is broken up, its parts are put into other figures, and the result appears at the end — but the movement of the proof belongs to the knower, not to the triangle. In philosophy, the movement belongs to the matter itself. Nor can philosophy be presented as a mere history of opinions. The true is the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; and because each, as it separates itself, just as immediately dissolves, the revel is equally transparent and simple repose.

The Bacchanalian image: the whole is in perpetual motion, yet as a whole it is at rest.

Philosophical propositions are difficult to read, because in them the subject of a sentence passes into its predicate and loses its fixity. When we say "God is being," we expect the predicate to be one more property of a fixed subject; but here the subject vanishes into the predicate, and thought is thrown back on itself. This is what Hegel calls the "speculative proposition"; it is why his sentences must be read more than once.

Science, at last, can only exist as system. Whoever is impatient for the result without the path is like one who wants the oak without the growth of trunk, branches and leaves. The present work is the first part of such a system: the science of the experience of consciousness, or the phenomenology of spirit.

The last paragraph above is partly summarised in the third person, since Hegel's own pages on "the speculative proposition" are very technical.