Kommentar zum subjektiven Geist, Chapter 26
Hösle’s Objection to the Ordering
He goes further than the observation that psychology does not thematize intersubjectivity — he considers the sequence itself questionable, and the argument deserves to be taken seriously:
“It can only strike any unbiased reader as surprising that universal self-consciousness is not immediately followed by objective spirit. In the further development, no category approaches Hegel’s concept of ethical life as closely as universal self-consciousness: so why are these two categories separated from one another?”[1]
And the question he attaches to this: “In what sense are intuition, representation, and practical feeling something more complex than universal self-consciousness?”
His proposal: what Hegel treats in the chapter on self-consciousness belongs at the end of the philosophy of subjective spirit — because it is closest to what today is called social psychology and because it leads directly to objective spirit.
The objection carries weight, and it cannot be dismissed by pointing out that the order simply is what it is. For recognition is indeed richer in content than intuition — measured by what occurs within it.
What can be said against this: Hegel orders not by content but by the form of self-relation. Universal self-consciousness is rich in content and poor in self-determination — spirit knows itself in the other, but it does not yet determine the content of its knowing and willing. Psychology accomplishes exactly this, and that is why it stands afterward.
The question, then, is which ordering principle applies — and here Hösle indeed hits upon a real indecision. Hegel himself reworked the sequence several times (see the sequence of theoretical spirit), which shows that he was aware of the question and had not found a final answer. [KF]
Hösle, Hegels System, chap. 6.3.4 (“Die Abfolge der Bestimmungen in der enzyklopädischen Phänomenologie: einige Probleme”). He names four aspects there; the first is the one dealt with here. ↩︎