Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason

Abstract

TERRY PINKARD: Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994, 458 pp., $59.95. One of my favorite questions I ask in course that includes Kohut's thinking is this: What thinker (1) placed the developing self at the center of his theories, (2) insisted that the self can only develop when it receives intense recognition from another self, and (3) tried to show that self development is ruled by forces out of our conscious awareness, like the unfolding of seed into plant, an unfolding that makes rational sense only by looking backward after development has gone far it can? The answer of course is Hegel, and one needs to remember that Kohut was trained in the German philosophical tradition before he came to the United States and studied neurology and ultimately psychoanalysis. Hegel is, in addition, the originator of the notion of phenomenology, although that notion has been transformed by each thinker who has subsequently made use of it. His youthful masterpiece, the Phenomenology of is dauntingly difficult and at times impossible to clarify, and yet number of clever writers such Kojeve or Hyppolite have managed to present plausible although tendentious versions of it. Pinkard offers us an up-to-date and more scholarly and dedicated attempt to elucidate this great masterpiece of human thought. His book requires careful concentration, but repays the reader interested in those contributions of Hegel that are especially of contemporary relevance. Pinkard points out that his goal is not commentary or paraphrase but rather reconstruction of the central theses and central lines of thought in the Phenomenology. Pinkard tells us that Hegel examines various formations of consciousness, describing how each takes certain authoritative standards more or less given, as objects of consciousness that the participants in that form of life simply 'find' in their social worlds ready at hand for them (p. 6). The application of this to our clinical work is obvious. Readers should not be put off by Hegel's use of Spirit, which does not here denote metaphysical entity, says Pinkard, but rather a fundamental relation among persons that mediates their self-consciousness, way in which people reflect on what they have come to take authoritative for themselves (p. 9). Pinkard's main area of concentration is on modern life, its project of selfjustification, its alternatives and possibilities, and the ultimate self-reflection of the human community. In examining the essential structure of modern life, he argues that one can only understand what we are at the present time through historical account of how we have developed. That development has been what Hegel calls dialectical, dialectical progression in which form of consciousness recognizes that it cannot reassure itself against skeptical objections that arise within it (its own 'negativity'), and therefore new form of reflective life arises and claims to replace and complete it. In turn the same process repeats itself until we come to where we are now. Kuhn's description of scientific paradigms is similar to this, and we are seeing the competition of forms of consciousness in an acute form today in the field of psychiatry between the psychodynamic and the neuropsychiatrie orientations. …