Hegel's Spirit

 

Lord Byron romantically said that there are only four questions of value in life- what is sacred? What is the human spirit made up of?  What is worth living for ? and what is worth dying for? Hegel effectively answered all four questions but his answer was 1,50,000 words long complied in a book called “Phenomenology Of The Spirit”. Again I am declaring this at the very beginning of this blog that I read this book two times cover to cover and understood merely 2 percent of the text and I am proud of it, so kindly keep on open mind while reading.

GEIST

The core premise of this book revolves around this weird German word, which roughly translates to mind or spirit. Hegel starts with what is the nature of the human spirit- does it remain static forever? Can it be devoured by consciousness? Can it exist even when consciousness and existence do not exist? According to Hegel, GEIST evolves with human consciousness and this evolution is masterfully linked with the evolution of human history, and  without answering these questions any further, he moves on  to explain  what is the human spirit made up of: IT is made up of desperation and a vital need for recognization.  

In his chapter on “self consciousness” – he introduces a very interesting dialectic of Lordship and Bondage to explain his conclusion. Hegel posits that a conscious mind cannot recognize its own existence in isolation; it requires another conscious mind to validate it. When two independent consciousnesses first meet, a struggle for dominance ensues—a literal fight to the death.

The paradox Hegel exposes is brilliant: the winner (the Master) forces the loser (the Slave) into submission. But the Master’s victory is inherently hollow. He desires recognition from an equal, yet he has reduced the Slave to an object. Furthermore, the Master becomes entirely dependent on the Slave's labor to survive. Conversely, the Slave, through the trial of forced labor, alters the physical world. By transforming raw materials into tools and culture, the Slave sees his own mind reflected in reality and achieves a      genuine, self-wrought freedom.

                                                       The Engine of History: 'Aufhebung' and Suffering

Now after using 250 words long sentences to explain the above paradox, Hegel once again turns to the Nature of GEIST. To make this section easier we can connect this to lord Byron’s other questions, what is sacred and what is worth living or dying for, to answer these questions Hegel turns his gaze to the historical arena. He famously referred to history as a "slaughterbench" of immense human suffering. However, he argues that this chaos is not meaningless. History is the messy, necessary process through which Spirit stumbles toward absolute freedom( I do not understand what does absolute freedom mean here but it probably refers to the last stage in the evolution of GEIST)

This evolution moves through a tripartite engine often simplified as a triad, powered by the concept of Aufhebung (frequently translated as "sublation"). Aufhebung is a dual-action mechanism: it means to simultaneously destroy, preserve, and elevate. This is the concept which later evolved into what is called as “Hegelian dialectic” much later in formal academia.  

Hegel asserted that every historical era contains internal contradictions. Society must experience the collapse of its current paradigm, suffer through the crisis, and then sublate the conflict into a higher, more sophisticated level of understanding. For Hegel, the "sacred" is this very development—the painful, upward march of human freedom.

Ultimately, The Phenomenology of Spirit concludes at the summit of Absolute Knowing (Absolutes Wissen), the point at which human consciousness looks back at the entire bloody, chaotic trajectory of human history and recognizes it as a necessary journey of self-discovery.

It is a book that cannot be fully mastered in a single lifetime, let alone a few readings. But it rewards the persistent reader. Even grasping a fraction of its scope alters your worldview permanently. 

My Critique

It will probably take me a lifetime to prepare a formal critique of Hegel but let me give you a gist of what I just wrote and probably you will also be able to see the problem with Hegelian GEIST (spirit).

Hegel basically equates core human essence to an evolving entity that requires validation for its existence, now that much seems logical, but how this spirit only takes a linear path along with history is what I cannot comprehend- the assertion that the spirit will continuously evolve on the bloody ruins of civilizations and then it will go on to the summit of absolute knowing relays on too many assumptions like – progression is the ultimate rule of humanity ( both ideological and civilization), Human nature in its totality strives for absolute knowledge etc – now all these things can be said to critique the humanists also, but Hegel wrote extensively on metaphysical concepts due to his theological training and hence his abstract notions regarding the nature of human essence far exceeds that of humanists, hence  these arguments are better suited for Hegel than humanists.

Also Byron’s answer to the initial four questions was only one word- Love.