Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 25
The Advantage of Alphabetic Script — an Argument One Can Test
The lecture courses treat extensively what the printed text dispatches briefly: the relation of spoken language to written language, with the Chinese and the hieroglyphs as counterexamples.
Hegel’s objection is not aesthetic but structural:
“For the sake of hieroglyphic script, the Chinese spoken language lacks the objective determinateness that is gained through articulation by alphabetic script.”[1]
The script shapes the spoken language. Whoever writes sounds must distinguish them; whoever writes meanings need not — and the language remains poorer in articulation.
And from this the conclusion for education: “learning to read and write an alphabetic script is to be regarded as an underappreciated, infinite means of education, insofar as it leads spirit from the sensuously-concrete to attention toward the formal.”
The systematic argument holds. Alphabetic writing is, as Stederoth calls it, a sign of the sign: it does not designate the thing but the linguistic sign for the thing. It is thereby more adequate to the sign- character of language — and more practically flexible, since it accommodates shifts in meaning without requiring new signs.
Two qualifications must be made, however.
The first concerns language. Hegel’s conclusion that hieroglyphic script contradicts “the basic need of language as such” holds only if one reduces language to its sign-character — thereby excluding that it can also be organized pictorially or symbolically. Pictorial moments are found in every language; Hegel himself had conceded them for onomatopoeia and then devalued them.
The second concerns the empirical finding. Chinese script is not what Hegel assumes. About 95 percent of its characters are determinative phonetics — combinations of a meaning-bearing element and a sound-indicating element.[2] It thus represents both at once, and in the same unit.
With this the example falls, not the argument. That a script designating sounds achieves something different from one designating meanings remains correct. That Chinese belongs to the second sort is false — and Hegel could not have known this, since the typology of scripts was only established in Europe in the twentieth century.
What remains is the thought that script acts back upon language and that learning an alphabetic script educates toward abstraction.
Hegel against Leibniz: in passing he rejects the idea of a universal conceptual script for scholarly communication — “Leibniz allowed himself to be seduced by his own understanding.” Remarkable here is that Hegel knows the idea and considers it not useful but regressive: a script tied to meanings remains behind one tied to sounds. [KF]
Mechanical memory is likewise determined precisely — and Hegel defends it against the suspicion that it is mere drill: “In mechanical memory I make myself into a mere being, make myself into an externally intuiting thing […] It is a series of signs without representation.”
What happens here is the utmost externalization: spirit makes itself into a thing, of which nothing more can be represented. And precisely from there the path leads to thinking — the lecture course says so explicitly: “memory is a point in the progression of spirit, and its importance is that it constitutes the point from which spirit passes over into thinking.” [KF]
With that the third of the three stages announced far above is reached — intuition, representation, thinking — and the long road through sign, language, and memory was the road to it.
Thinking (§§ 465–468) then means: intelligence recognizes that the universal it finds in the object is its own.
What drives the transition: in intuition the content is found; in representation it has become inner, but still as a this; in thinking it is universal — and thereby the shine of finding is extinguished.
And Erdmann’s transcript names the counter-movement the printed text lacks. Theoretical spirit is not merely appropriation:
“Intelligence as reason approaches the world […] The course of intelligence so far has been to posit the immediate, external as its own, but it is likewise the opposite direction.”[3]
And the transition to thinking is determined accordingly: “In order for this unity — reason — to come about perfectly, the other side is needed, that intelligence posit itself as objective […] that within this inwardness it be, in itself, straightforwardly the opposed, the objective.”
Two directions, not one. Intelligence makes the external into its own — and posits itself as objective. Only both together yield reason.
With this, the role of the sign is also clarified: it is the place where intelligence posits itself as objective — it brings forth something that stands opposed to it and yet is its own. What in print appears as a stage of representation is the point at which the second direction sets in. [KF]
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, transcript by Stolzenberg, on § 459 (= § 454 of the second edition): GW 25.2. ↩︎
On the classification of Chinese character types, Joseph Needham, following Stederoth, op. cit., p. 363, note. The six types range from pictograms to determinative-phonetic compounds, which make up by far the largest portion. ↩︎
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/1828, transcript by Erdmann (221,84–99). ↩︎