Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 36

Kai Froeb

An Editorial Finding That Belongs Here

For 1827/28, the edition has not taken Erdmann’s transcript as its base text, although in an earlier edition (Hamburg 1994) it formed the main text. The editors’ reasoning is instructive for this volume:

The Stolzenberg transcript “can be regarded as the source that comes closest to Hegel’s lecture. The Erdmann transcript, by contrast, is distinguished by the fact that it was heavily reworked, with Erdmann quite evidently following his own personal philosophical interests.”[1]

In other words: Erdmann’s transcript is already reception. It does not stand at the beginning of this part of the tradition but belongs to what follows it — alongside his own books. Whoever reads it reads Hegel through Erdmann.

The ordering of this part thus has a rationale that is not merely chronological: between what Hegel lectured and what his students made of it runs a boundary — and it runs right through the transcripts themselves.

The edition records Erdmann’s version in the apparatus of variants (siglum Er), so that the two can be compared: what Hegel said, and what Erdmann made of it.

How Hegel Structured the Philosophy of Spirit in 1812

There is a second lecture edition that likewise was not included in the Collected Works: the Philosophical Encyclopedia, Nuremberg 1812/13, based on the transcripts of Meinel and Abegg.[2]

It is instructive for the architecture, because there everything stands differently. The third part — “The Doctrine of Spirit” — is structured as follows:

Nuremberg 1812/13 Encyclopedia 1830
I) Phenomenology — consciousness, self-consciousness, reason III. Psychology
II) Psychology — feeling, representation, thinking I. Anthropology
III) Spirit in the Realization of Its Rationality II. Phenomenology
IV) The Completion of Spirit — art, religion, philosophy (objective, absolute spirit)

Three findings that are not minor.

First: there is no anthropology. The entire part that in 1830 stands first — soul, natural determinatenesses, habit, insanity — is completely absent in 1812. The philosophy of spirit begins with consciousness.

Second: phenomenology precedes psychology and is the starting point. What is the middle in 1830 was the entry point in 1812.

Third, and decisive for the question of sequence: within psychology, the series feeling — representation — thinking appears — and under representation appear “recollection [Erinnerung] in general” with the three subpoints intuition, representation, recollection, followed by imagination, then memory.

Intuition thus stands under representation, not before it.

33.2.1 What the Nuremberg Version Reveals About the Genesis

It is instructive not only regarding spirit. Because it originated five years before the first Encyclopedia, it shows at several points what had not yet found its place.

In the Logic, what is later treated as the Preliminary Concept stands as a separate first part. The “Formal Logic” is divided into “1) understanding-based or abstract, 2) dialectical, 3) [the] positive or speculative [aspect] of reason” — these are the three sides that in 1830 appear in §§ 79–82, where they explicitly do not form three parts but rather “moments of every logically real thing.”

In 1812 they are still the structure itself. The 1830 statement that they do not constitute three parts thus corrects an earlier arrangement of Hegel’s own.

Likewise, “Former Metaphysics” and “Critical or Kantian Philosophy” stand as separate sections — from these the later “attitudes of thought toward objectivity” in the Preliminary Concept develop.

And natural science begins with mathematics. A separate first part with geometry, arithmetic, “analysis of the infinite,” and applied mathematics — only after that comes “Physics in General” with mechanics.

In the 1830 Encyclopedia this no longer exists. There, space and time stand as the first division of mechanics; mathematics is not a stage of the philosophy of nature but appears as a mode of consideration.

What these three observations have in common: in 1812 Hegel still organized by sciences — mathematics, physics, formal logic — and later orders by forms of relation. The restructuring concerns not the material but the principle.

For the history of the work’s genesis, this means: what appears self-evident in the mature version — that the structure follows the concept rather than the disciplines — was not yet decided in 1812. Cf. Der Begriff als lebendige Selbstbestimmung and Pflanze und Tier.

33.2.2 The Transitions, as Grounded in 1812

The transcripts present the two systemic transitions in a form the printed text does not have — and both are clearer.

From logic to nature (§ 17): “The system of the particular sciences presents the Idea not in the element of knowledge, but as it appears in the more concrete form of nature and spirit.”

And the division itself: “It splits apart and sets itself over against the other: nature and spirit. Nature is this other itself, spirit is that for which this other is.”

This is the most concise determination of the relation to be found in Hegel — two half-sentences, and the distinction is established.

From nature to spirit (§ 53) — and here stands the ground that § 381 only hints at: the animal is the complete unity of the concept, “but it is not entirely complete, because the living unity is posited in it externally, and it does not know itself as a whole, it has not yet made itself its own object.”

What the animal lacks is not unity, but knowledge of it. And that is exactly what is added: “The final reflection of externality into the abstract element of simplicity, in which the subject relates to itself and appears as universal, is the elevation into spirit.”

A determination that later disappears. At the end of the Logic it says: “The pure idea of life is beauty, the second is the true and the good, the third is knowledge.” The idea of life is thus equated with beauty — with the justification: “The living is beautiful insofar as it has the addition of externality.”

In the mature version this is no longer found. There, beauty belongs to absolute spirit, and the idea of life is the first shape of the Idea, not an aesthetic determination. What is lost in this is a connection between logic and aesthetics that Hegel still drew in 1812.

What Follows From This for the Question of Sequence

We thus have four arrangements, none of them thematized by Hegel himself:

  • Nuremberg 1812/13: feeling — representation (under which intuition) — thinking
  • Erdmann’s transcript, 1827/28: intuition — representation — memory, with thinking placed under it
  • Encyclopedia 1830 and most other passages: intuition — representation — thinking
  • Preface to the Philosophy of World History: representation — intuition — thinking (implicitly, via religion — art — philosophy)

Before drawing any conclusion from this, the cases must be distinguished.

The Nuremberg version is above all early. It arose in 1812/13 — five years before the first Encyclopedia (Heidelberg 1817), and in the very year the first volume of the Science of Logic had just appeared. Hegel did not yet have his system fully assembled at that time.

It was accessible to students: Rosenkranz published the dictations in the Friends’ Edition as Philosophical Propaedeutic. New with Rameil’s 2002 edition is the transcript of the oral explanations — that is, what Hegel said in addition to the dictated text.

And it is secondary-school instruction. What stands there is intended for the upper class of a Nuremberg gymnasium — didactically tailored, simplified, cut down to what could be covered in one school year. Anyone who infers Hegel’s systematic convictions from this confuses a teaching version with an exposition. The dictations and manuscripts of these years are documented in GW 10 and show this tailoring at every point.

The later editions are explained differently. The second and third editions (1827 and 1830) are substantially expanded relative to 1817 — what lies between them is elaboration, not restructuring. And the additions in any case come only from the Friends’ Edition after Hegel’s death.

So what remains. The deviation of 1812 carries little weight for the question of how Hegel himself saw the matter — it is too early, too didactic. Erdmann’s deviation of 1827/28 weighs more heavily, because it dates from the same period as the second edition. And the one in the preface to the philosophy of world history weighs the most, because there Hegel writes for a philosophical audience and states the correspondence explicitly.

What is decisive, however, is not the tally but the reasons. Each arrangement has a principle — in Erdmann, each stage’s being directed toward the previous one; in the preface, proximity to sensibility — and these principles can be examined individually. That is the work that remains to be done, and it is not accomplished by counting versions.

One finding remains, however, and it is independent of the tailoring: anthropology is entirely absent in 1812. Even a teaching version would have had to mention it, had it belonged to the plan at that time — and free spirit is still missing in 1827/28, in a lecture course for students.

Both edges of subjective spirit were thus added later. What stood there from the start was the core: phenomenology and psychology.

A Reservation Regarding the Editorial Justification

It is only half convincing, and the reason can be named: every transcript filters. Whoever takes notes understands along the way, leaves things out, arranges. The difference between Stolzenberg and Erdmann is not the difference between a filter and no filter, but between two filters — and Erdmann was the more knowledgeable listener. He later wrote on logic, the history of philosophy, and subjective spirit itself, the last in three books.

Closeness to the wording is not the same as closeness to the matter. A transcript that faithfully reproduces the lecture can, at a difficult point, miss exactly what was meant; a reworked one can hit it, because the writer understood it.

And a finding from Erdmann’s own version shows what is at stake. The editors of the earlier edition note that his structuring of theoretical spirit deviates from the Encyclopedia: in his version, memory occupies the third place after intuition and representation, while thinking is subordinated beneath it.[3]

And Erdmann’s text makes the reason visible. The series is there ordered by directedness: “First we speak of intuition, then of representation, insofar as it is directed toward intuition; [then] of imagination, where it is directed toward the representing activity […]; then of memory, where this is directed toward the representation of images […] Memory is a reshaping of representing.”

Each stage is directed toward the preceding one and reshapes it. This is an ordering principle, and it is not the same as the one in the Encyclopedia.

And the deviation is not carelessness on the transcriber’s part. The editors demonstrate that Erdmann’s version contains a third form of memory not found elsewhere:

  1. name-retaining memory
  2. reproducing memory
  3. “the third is memory as such”

And its rationale can be stated: this new form “replaces the mechanical memory that until then alone mediated the transition from representation to thinking, because this transition is supposed to be an organic one, which mechanism is not suited to mediate.”[4]

This is a substantive argument, not an oversight: if the transition to thinking is to arise from the matter itself, it cannot be mediated by something explicitly called mechanical. Memory as such sublates the mechanical within itself.

The editors draw from this a further-reaching conclusion, one that concerns the value of the transcript as a whole: the lecture course offers “insight into systematic reformulations and further developments of the concept of spirit that are still completely absent from the second edition of the Encyclopedia, and are found in the third edition only ‘in outline,’ but not in concrete elaboration.”

This puts the editorial question in a different light. Erdmann’s reworking is not merely a filter — it preserves thoughts that were never carried out in print.

And this is not an isolated case. The same division — with memory in third place — already appears in the 1825 transcript, and there the elaboration follows it as well:

“The third is that in intelligence, inwardness and externality are posited as identical […] this is memory. It effects the transition to thinking; it is pure inwardness, subjectivity made into being.”[5]

The same structure twice, once with a matching elaboration. This rules out that it was a transcriber’s oversight — it was Hegel’s own division, in at least two lecture courses.

And the thought behind it can be stated: in memory “the subject makes itself, in itself, into a matter, into an object of itself. Thus the subject is, in itself, objective, a matter. This is the transition to thinking.”

Memory therefore stands in third place because there subjectivity makes itself into something existing — and precisely that is the condition of thinking. Whoever lets the series end with representation and places thinking alongside it loses this rationale.

What Walter did with this is telling: he otherwise takes over Erdmann’s text verbatim, but has aligned this particular section of the structure with the Encyclopedia — a new paragraph, a structural letter for thinking, memory as a third stage within representation.

Whoever asks, then, whether Hegel varied the sequence finds the clue in Erdmann and Griesheim — and its erasure in Walter. An edition that follows the wording thereby also decides which question can still be asked.

II.2 The Students

  1. GW 25.3, Editorial Report. The earlier edition — Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, vol. 13, ed. by Franz Hespe and Burkhard Tuschling, Hamburg 1994 — had drawn on Erdmann and Walter. ↩︎

  2. Philosophische Enzyklopädie. Nürnberg 1812/13, following the lecture courses for the upper class at the Gymnasium, transcribed by Christian Samuel Meinel and Julius Friedrich Heinrich Abegg, ed. by Udo Rameil, Hamburg 2002 (Vorlesungen, vol. 15). ↩︎

  3. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/1828, ed. by Franz Hespe and Burkhard Tuschling, Hamburg 1994, note on 185,883–186,914. ↩︎

  4. Burkhard Tuschling, Introduction to Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/1828, Hamburg 1994, p. XX. ↩︎

  5. Transcript by Griesheim, lecture course 1825 (Gr 336); the classification of 1827/28 follows Erdmann (Erd 175 f.). The comparison is in Stederoth, op. cit., pp. 372 f. ↩︎