Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 43
What the Edition Achieves
The same as with nature: Petry demonstrates where Hegel’s material comes from. His list of contemporary German anthropologies comprises dozens of titles — from Loder’s Anfangsgründen der physiologischen Anthropologie (1800) through Pölitz’s Populäre Anthropologie to Bartels’s Anthropologischen Bemerkungen über das Gehirn und den Schädel des Menschen (1806), the latter “with constant reference to Gall’s discoveries.”
This makes demonstrable what would otherwise remain conjecture: Hegel read the specialist literature of his time, and the anthropology processes it.
His Thesis on the Relationship of Empirical Research and System
This is his most important contribution, and it strikes at the root of Exner’s charge of illegitimate borrowing:
Hegel could pass judgment in this way “on the transition of body into spirit and the emptiness of the traditional philosophical approach to this transition” because he philosophically systematizes its empirical structure. “If one removes the empirical basis, one disputes the value of the careful attention he devotes to the relevant empirical research of his time,” then his critique loses its ground.[1]
This is the counter-position to Exner in a single sentence. Where Exner regards the incorporation of external material as an illegitimate borrowing, Petry sees in it the very condition under which Hegel’s judgment carries any weight at all.
And both have the same finding before their eyes — that the anthropology lives on foreign material. They evaluate it in opposite ways, and the decision hinges on whether one expects logic to generate material or to order it.
What Volumes 2 and 3 Contain
The commentary follows the text paragraph by paragraph, German and English side by side, with the references at the foot of the page. For this volume it proved useful wherever Hegel takes a position not found in the base text — for instance the rejection of play-pedagogy in the addition to § 396 (see Part I).
A procedural note: The volumes exist only as scans without a text layer. They can be read page by page, but not searched — which means that working through them follows what one is looking for, not what is actually there.
A Finding on Lordship and Bondage
Petry situates the passage the way this volume has done — and confirms it from the redaction history: Hegel evidently illustrates the stages of recognitive self-consciousness with the dialectic of lordship and bondage “in order to help his students follow a particularly abstract and difficult section of the Phenomenology.”
And the conclusion: “It is, however, not a systematic treatment of such situations, but the illustration of a stage of consciousness.”
This supports what Stekeler shows by other means: lordship and bondage is an image, not a program — and whoever turns it into a philosophy of history has misjudged the function of the passage.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. and translated by Michael John Petry, 3 vols., Dordrecht 1978, vol. 1, Introductions, pp. liii and lxxxviii. The list of contemporary anthropologies ibid., Appendix. ↩︎