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Climbing Harris' Ladder
- Joseph C. Flay
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- Journal:
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain / Volume 22 / Issue 1-2 / January 2001
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 June 2015, pp. 1-14
- Print publication:
- January 2001
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In his two volume work, Hegel's Ladder, spanning over 1500 pages, Henry Harris describes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 as “an epic story about God” (I. 31). Harris' work is itself a work of epic proportions. It is the fullest commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology I have ever seen. We are brought, paragraph by paragraph, from the beginning to the end of Hegel's Phenomenology, without break. And although Harris describes it as an epic about God, there is nothing of the usual mystification that surfaces when “theological” interpretations are offered.
There is, of course, no possibility of commenting on this work in any adequate way, short of perhaps writing a 3,000 page commentary on his commentary of some 1500 pages. After briefly, and inadequately, offering a summary of some of the important characteristics and positions of Harris' work, I want to pose some questions to Professor Harris concerning his interpretation.
As already mentioned, the format Harris chooses is to comment in detail on each of the paragraphs of the Phenomenology. This commentary follows two previous volumes, Hegel's Development I: Toward the Sunlight, and Hegel's Development II: Night Thoughts, in which we are given an erudite and thorough account of Hegel's studies and of his writings prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. These previous volumes are integral to the present two volumes, as indicated by Harris' challenge to his readers and his critics.
My own view — after studying and laying out Hegel's intellectual development as completely and coherently as I could — is that no thesis about Hegel's project should be preferred to the one that I am about to advance unless it coheres with and provides answers to all of the exigencies that I have pointed to in the “genesis” of the book at least as well as mine does. (But many other theses may be valid complements to the one maintained here.) (I. 9)
And, indeed, one of the characteristics of Hegel's Ladder is that we are constantly reminded of how and why the problematic at issue derives from the way that Hegel's thought had developed. Thus, Hegel's Ladder has significance not only as a commentary on the Phenomenology, but also as a link between the Phenomenology and Hegel's earlier development.
Rupture, Closure, and Dialectic
- Joseph C Flay
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- Journal:
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain / Volume 15 / Issue 1 / Spring/Summer 1994
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 June 2015, pp. 23-37
- Print publication:
- Spring/Summer 1994
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The general intent of this paper is to examine Hegel's preoccupation with the question of beginnings. To anticipate, in Hegel's view every account in respect to its beginning – indeed, everything in respect to its beginning – is both immediate and mediated. All things therefore begin having already begun; all things begin in medias res. But if all things begin having already begun, all things begin as a rupture of one sort or another.
This necessity of rupture puts the problematic of beginnings for Hegel into clear focus: system, in order to be system, must involve closure; but because of the nature of beginnings, system must also involve rupture. A judicious view of the texts show, I think, that Hegel is not willing to give up either thesis. Consequently, if the system is to be viable, the rupture cannot efface the closure; but if the system is to begin, the closure must not efface the rupture. Rupture and closure must coexist. Hegel's concern with beginning, then, is a concern with how legitimately to initiate the system without either ignoring or effacing rupture, and without preempting the possibility of closure.
In Parts One and Two I will establish Hegel's clear awareness of rupture and of the part it plays in the system. If we examine the Preface and Introduction to the Science of Logic and to the Phenomenology of 1807 we find Hegel discussing a series of ruptures – indeed a circle of ruptures – which begin with a rupture at the beginning of the Science of Logic. There is first this rupture in the system as system, instantiated in the necessary reference by the Logic back to the Phenomenology. Behind this, there is a rupture in the Phenomenology itself in its own mediated beginnings, a rupture rooted in the immediate experience of natural consciousness. Behind this second rupture there is a third, a rupture in the contemporary Zeitgeist as it is instantiated in the natural attitude of natural consciousness. This rupture takes the form of the loss in natural consciousness of traditional certitude, a loss brought about by the incursion of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy on this natural, everyday consciousness. If we reflect back to the first rupture noted – that at the beginning of the Logic and put it into the context of this causal chain of ruptures, we see that philosophy in fact experiences a self-caused rupture. This self-caused rupture is due to philosophy's own effects on the Zeitgeist as internalized by natural consciousness at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries.