Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 6
Which Version Is the Better One?
The question cannot be decided by counting but only by testing: which version stands better with the logic and the architecture of the whole?
In favor of the printed paragraph is its position. § 382 stands in the entryway, where the concept of spirit as such is determined — before the division, before the Anthropology. At this point nothing may yet be presupposed that is only developed later. And Hegel says so explicitly: freedom is determined “formally”; the possibility is “its abstract universality, being-for-itself, within itself.”
Abstract and formal — for Hegel these are not excuses but indications of place. What stands at this point must be poor.
In favor of Erdmann’s version is that it names the movement. “Freeing itself” is a process; “being able to abstract from everything” is a capacity. And the philosophy of spirit is a history, not a catalogue of capacities — Hegel himself objected to this against empirical psychology (§ 378).
The touchstone is logic. There the concept first appears as subjective — in itself, formal — then as objective, then as Idea. The abstract determination is not false, it is undeveloped; and it is followed by development, not correction.
With this the matter is decided, in a way that lets both be right: § 382 gives the determination at the place where it must stand — formal, because prior to all development. Erdmann’s version gives the same determination as a program, and does so in the introduction, where Hegel says what the lectures will do.
This is not a contradiction but the difference between a doctrinal statement and an announcement.
And the addition to § 382 shows that Hegel saw both. For there stands what the paragraph itself does not say: the freedom of spirit is “not merely an independence achieved outside the other, but one achieved within the other from the other, which comes to actuality not by fleeing the other but by overcoming it.”
Achieved, not simply present. With this the movement is present in the printed text too — only in the addition, which comes from the editors and probably from precisely these lectures. [KF]
What I draw from this for this volume: Where versions diverge, one must first ask at what point they stand. A sentence from the introduction and one from the systematic entryway have different tasks, and the stronger formulation is not always the better one. It is better when it accomplishes more at its own place. [KF]
The second determination is manifestation, and it is the more consequential one:
“The determinateness of spirit is therefore manifestation. It is not any determinateness or content whose expression or externality would only be a form distinct from it, such that it would not reveal something, but rather its determinateness and content is this revealing itself” (§ 383).
Here stands the sentence on which the entire volume turns. Spirit does not have a content that it then expresses. Its content is the revealing.
Whoever overlooks this searches behind the expressions for something inner — for a soul that shows itself, for a self behind the actions. There is nothing to find there. This is the same objection Hegel raises in the logic of essence against an essence “behind” appearance — here with particular sharpness.
And from this follows what Stekeler says about § 387: “Spirit, of course, does nothing at all in the literal sense.” Where the content is the revealing, there is no agency conducting it — it is we who carry it out. [KF]