Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 5
The Transition Out of Nature (§ 381)
The opening sentence determines the relation:
“Spirit has nature as its presupposition, of which it is the truth and hence its absolute first.”
Two things stand in this sentence that seem to contradict each other. Nature comes first — without it, no spirit. And spirit is its “absolute first” — that toward which it tends.
The “for us” resolves the contradiction. For the mode of consideration that traces the movement, nature comes first. As a matter of fact, it is the incomplete, whose completion is spirit. There are two orderings — that of cognition and that of the matter itself.
And what the transition means, Hegel says immediately: in this truth, “nature has vanished.” Not abolished — sublated: what fell apart as externality in the philosophy of nature is now at home with itself. What ends there is developed in Hegels Naturphilosophie, 37a.
This also explains why there are three starting points and not one. Die Idee des Lebens distinguishes three circles, all of which are true: Performatively we begin with spirit — we are thinking right now. Chronologically nature was there first. Systematically logic is the ground of both.
And the lecture course makes the doubling explicit. Hegel there distinguishes two modes of consideration and names both:
“This determinateness against nature is not only in our reflection, but it is spirit itself that comes from nature, sublates it, and thereby is the truth of nature. Insofar as we have given the determination of spirit, it is we who determine spirit, and that is the subjective mode of consideration; the objective is that spirit itself determines itself against nature.”[1]
We determine spirit — that is one side. Spirit determines itself against nature — that is the other. Both are in play, and the printed paragraph says it with the single word “for us.”
The “for us” in § 381 names the performative circle, the “absolute first” the systematic one. Whoever pits the two against each other has mistaken a perspective on the matter for the matter itself — and that is exactly the error the talk of “idealism” regularly makes. [KF]
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, Introduction, lecture course 1822: GW 25.1, on § 299 f. of the then-current numbering. ↩︎