Beginning Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Pre-Read)

For the first session, we will be reading the “Introduction” (sections 73-89).

I will be using the Michael Inwood translation (pdf here) from Oxford University Press, which is generally considered to be the best currently available. If you already own the Terry Pinkard or A.V. Miller translations, or just prefer them, I think they should work perfectly fine for our group. All three editions have numbered paragraphs so we should be able to move between the different translations without too many problems.

The text is very challenging, especially for those new to Hegel, but I encourage you to try your best to work through each week’s selection. I highly recommend at least one secondary source to accompany your reading (I’ll discuss my favorites below), but I want to make sure that Hegel’s actual text will be the focus of our group. (NB - Since the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” do not appear in the selections we will be reading, we will strictly avoid using them as a way to understand the text.)

We will have to figure out the best format for our meetings. The text is so unruly and dense that I think it would be impossible to have a purely discussion-based reading group. So to start off, at least, I propose a seminar format where, for each session, I will break the text up into blocks and offer an extended interpretation of the relevant section, and in between these blocks, we can take time for discussion, clarifications, challenges, etc. If this format doesn’t work, we can change it as we go.

Please have the reading for each session done before we meet. The tentative reading schedule will be as follows:

• 1. Introduction (Mar. 10)
• 2. Self-Certainty
• 3. Perception
• 4. Force and Understanding
• 5. Truth of Self-Certainty
• 6. Master/Slave (Lordship/Bondage)
• 7. Stoicism/Skepticism/Unhappy Consciousness
• 8. Preface I
• 9. Preface II

Secondary sources: The best short book for our purposes is Robert Stern’s The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (pdf here). It is very readable, well-argued, and if you are only reading one secondary text, this is the essential one. Peter Kalkavage’s The Logic of Desire has been well-received so I’ll include it here. It, too, is very readable, but there are in my opinion certain simplifications of Hegel’s argument that I think are misleading. The best interpretation of the Phenomenology is still Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. But it is a big boy, and some passages are just as difficult as the original text.

For those who would like a listening option and want to achieve Absolute Spirit while driving or doing housework, I have a soft spot for Jay Bernstein’s year-long lecture course from the New School at https://bernsteintapes.com/hegellist.html. If you are not put off by his idiosyncratic speaking style, he provides a rigorous, well-contextualized reading of the Phenomenology. Robert Brandom, a very thoughtful and serious contemporary philosopher, has a series of lectures on YouTube that follows his magnum opus, In the Spirit of Trust, which brings Hegel’s arguments into a more angloamerican analytic style. There are also a few episodes of the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast that cover some of the sections we’ll read in our group, and I thought they were pretty decent. Feel free to share at our meetings any secondary sources that you have found helpful.

Please e-mail me if you need help tracking down pdfs of any of these texts.