Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 3
Know Thyself — the Task (§ 377)
Before everything else stands a sentence that determines the task — and a warning that fends off two widespread readings:
“The cognition of spirit is the most concrete, hence the highest and most difficult. Know thyself — this absolute command has, neither in itself nor where it occurs historically as pronounced, the meaning of a mere self-knowledge according to the particular capacities, character, inclinations, and weaknesses of the individual, but the meaning of the cognition of the true nature of the human being as such as of the true in and for itself — of essence itself as spirit.”
The first rejection is aimed at introspection. Whoever wants to know themselves is not supposed to inventory their peculiarities — that leads to a collection of contingencies.
The second concerns knowledge of human character, and it is sharper:
“Just as little does the philosophy of spirit have the meaning of the so-called knowledge of human nature, which likewise strives to investigate in other people the particularities, passions, weaknesses — these so-called folds of the human heart.”
And the reason why it does not suffice: Such knowledge has “in part sense only on the presupposition of cognition of the universal […] and in part” it occupies itself “with the contingent, insignificant, untrue existences of the spiritual,” yet does not “penetrate to the substantial, to spirit itself.”
What is sought instead is knowledge of the general structural laws of spirit — not how this particular human being is constituted, but what it means to be a spirit at all.
This is also the answer to a praise that does not please this volume. Whoever praises Hegel as a subtle connoisseur of human nature while rejecting his systematic framework is praising him for exactly what he explicitly excluded.
And the addition names the reason for the difficulty: One is no longer dealing “with the comparatively abstract, simple logical idea, but with the most concrete, most developed form.” What is difficult is not abstraction but fullness. [KF]