Hegel, Heidegger, and "Experience" --- A Study in Translation

Abstract

Notes and Discussions HEGEL, HEIDEGGER, AND "EXPERIENCE"---A STUDY IN TRANSLATION In 1790 Kant wrote what is now in print as his First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment. Apparently, because this essay raised issues far beyond those appropriate for his critique of judgment, Kant discarded it in favor of an Introduction which he wrote after he had finished his Critique. Though the substance of it can be found scattered in the Critique, and though it was published among Kant's minor works under another title, this first Introduction has to wait until 1927 for a recognition of its importance. 1 Hegel may not have known of Kant's experience in writing an introduction, but it is difficult not to imagine that he had an introduction to the Critique of Judgment before him when he wrote his First Introduction (1807) to the Phenomenology of the Spirit. He, too, discarded this as an Introduction and wrote the familiar Preface after he had written the Phenomenology of the Spirit. In 1942-1943 Heidegger recognized the kinship between Hegel's rejection of empirical science as a basis for philosophy and his own rebellion against the Kantian elements in Husserl's conception of phenomenology, and he devoted a seminar to a commentary on Hegel's First Introduction. This commentary was first published as a chapter in Holzwege in 1950. It is now (1970) excellently translated into real English under the editorship of J. Glenn Gray. 2 Meanwhile the Phenomenology of the Spirit has been translated into quasi-English (which is all one can reasonably expect from Hegel) by Kenley Royce Dove (1970), and this Introduction appears there not as an introduction but in the body of the text, under Hegel's title, "Science of the Experience of Consciousness." The first edition of the Phenomenology (1807) bears the title: System of Science, Part One: The Phenomenology of Spirit. Part Two was supposed to be an "authentic" (as opposed to "first") science, and was to appear under the title, Science of Logic.3 Heidegger points out that this essay was really written not merely as an introduction but as a general formulation of the scope and aim of scientific philosophy. Hegel's enthusiasm for this subject began to wane as he wrote the Phenomenology of the Spirit. 1 Now (1970) a second edition, with a critical Introduction by Gerhard Lehmann, has been published (Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Pp. xxi+81). Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Concept of Experience, with a section from Hegel'sPhenomenology of Spirit in the Kenley Royce Dove translation (New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Pp. 155). a It is interesting to note that this is the reverse order of the parts of Kant's Critique of Judgment, in which "formal" or logical science (a priori principles of the "techniques of nature") comes first, and empirical judgment comes second. [347] 348 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Hegel begins by stating emphatically and then developing polemically his reasons for not beginning, in the "critical" fashion, with the problem of the knowledge of knowledge, but rather with the way objects become known. A few sentences from his first paragraphs will illustrate the spirit and aim of the essay: It is a natural assumption that, in philosophy, one must first come to an understanding concerning the nature of knowledge before taking up the real subject matter, namely the actual knowledge of what truly is.... But science, in making its appearance is an appearance itself; it is not yet science in its fully realized and propagated truth simply by virtue of making its appearance .... This presentation can be regarded, from this point of view, as the pathway of the natural consciousness which is striving toward true knowledge, or as the path of the soul which is making its way through the sequence of its own transformations as through waystations prescribed to it by its very nature, that it may, by purifying itself, rift itself to the level of Spirit and attain cognizance of what it is in itself through the completed experience of its own self.... We consequently do not need to bring along standards or to apply our preconceptions . . . and through leaving them out, we will reach the point of...