Tine in HegeI's FIenonenoIog oJ Spivil

AulIov|s) MicIaeI Muvva

Souvce TIe Beviev oJ MelapIsics, VoI. 34, No. 4 |Jun., 1981), pp. 682-705
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TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
MICHAEL MURRAY
In
one of the last seminars of his
life, Heidegger
remarks that
just
as
Hegel
was
trying
to
lay
the definitive foundation of the modern
age,
so was his friend H?lderlin
trying
to break
through
the
ground
of
the
age
in order to
inaugurate
a
step beyond modernity.
For this
reason,
Heidegger clearly regards
the
poet
as more radical than the
philosopher.1
Without
trying myself
to assess the
validity
of this
contrast,
I shall take it as a clue and
argue
that each was
attempting
to
discover,
and to build a
time-design
that could do
justice
to his
epoch
and
respond
to the
experience
of its historical
destiny.
The
question
that concerns this
essay
is
just
how
Hegel
construed and
constructed such a
philosophical designing
of the
time,
and while im
portant
texts for this
topic
are
thematized in his earlier
writings
and
in his
subsequent lectures,
the central text must be the Phenomenol
ogy of Spirit.2
The aim of this discussion therefore is to determine
the time-sense of the
Phenomenology of Spirit
and its
phenomenol
ogy
of
Time,
and to draw in other texts insofar as
they
illumine its
matrix.
1
See Vier Seminare
(Frankfurt
am Main:
Klostermann, 1977), p.
25.
2
I use the
expressions "time-tense," "time-design,"
and
"time-sense,"
as follows: Time-tense refers to the differentiation of time into
past, pres
ent,
and future
tenses; Time-design
refers to the distinctive
structuring
and
relative
weighting
of the different
tenses,
and Time-sense refers to the uni
tary
sense of time afforded
by
the
temporal designing
of the
temporal
dif
ferentia. The relation
among
them thus is
approximately
that of
elements,
arrangement
of
elements,
and
meaning
of the
arrangement.
For an
essay
on the
poetic time-design,
see
my "Heideggers
Hermeneutic
Reading
of
H?lderlin: The
Signs
of
Time,"
in The
Eighteenth Century
21
(1980):
41
66.
I shall make no
survey
of the literature
discussing Hegel's
treatment
of Time in the
Phenomenology;
most of the standard commentaries do not
discuss it
very expressly
or
very fully (e.g., Hyppolite, Findlay,
Facken
heim).
An
exception
is the
brilliant, though
eccentric
reading by Koj?ve
whose Introduction ? la lecture de
Hegel
(Paris:
Gallimard,
1947)
prompted
my
Modern
Philosophy of History
(The
Hague:
Martinus
Nijhoff, 1970),
a
monograph
devoted to
Hegel
and
Heidegger.
Materials from that mono
graph
are used and further
developed
in the
present essay.
In a critical
review of Werner Marx's
Heidegger
and the Tradition
(Evanston,
111.:
Northwestern
University Press, 1971)
I
pointed
out the
inadequacy
of the
Review
of Metaphysics
33
(June 1981):
682-705.
Copyright ?
1981
by
the Review
of
Meta
physics
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 683
In
pursuit
of this aim I will
argue
several theses about
Hegel's
rendering
of
Time, specifically
three:
first,
that
Hegel only gradually
came to conceive Time as the
very
constitution of
Spirit
and of world
as historical
process
because it is a notion at
odds,
in different
ways,
with both Greek
philosophy
and with modern
thought,
which
explains
the
contrary
indications that the texts seem to
give
and sometime do
give; second,
that the coalescence of Time and
reality
was nonethe
less the
singular
achievement of modern
ontology,
in a sense the end
of
philosophy
and
preeminently
of
Hegel's
own work. And
finally
that a
key
to it
lay
in the
development
of the Western time-sense in
the orbit of Christian
metaphysics
and
philosophy
of
history
with re
spect
to time-tense differentiation.
The thrust of
Hegel's thinking,
which makes of it a
deeply
con
serving philosophy,
is directed toward
showing
how the Christian re
ligion,
as
revealed
religion
in an
enlightened
Protestant
version,
is
the
culminating highpoint
in the
history
of
religion;
of how Romantic
art is the
self-transcending
of art
by
art and so its
highpoint despite
the
perfection
of the
Classical;
and of how German Idealism is the cul
mination of modern
European philosophy,
modern
philosophy
of the
entire
philosophical tradition,
and
Hegel's
own work the
apex
of the
German
phase.
And
finally
that the
post-revolutionary
form of the
modern
European
state is the
culminating
moment in the
sphere
of
objective spirit
or the
history
of law and
political
order. An account
of time-tense and time-sense in
Hegel's thought
should somehow illu
minate the eschaton of
modernity
in these different arenas which ac
cording
to
him,
Time itself had
brought
about
(?29:
H.
p. 29,;
M.
p.
17).3
view of
Hegel
that results from
arranging everything
around the
logic
(Phil
osophical
Review
[April 1973]),
which Marx has since claimed to
rectify
in
his Introduction to the
Preface of Hegel's Phenomenology
(New
York:
Harper
&
Row, 1975).
I also noted a
paper complementary
to
my
mono
graph
in Klaus
Hedwig's
"Time and
Eternity
in
Hegel," Dialogue
9
(1970).
Despite
the antithesis
Stanley
Rosen wants to draw between
Hegel qua
lo
gician
and
Hegel qua philosopher
of
history
(which
Hegel's thought
wants to
overcome)
in some basic
ways
his
interpretation
of the time
question
is in
agreement
with
my
own. See G. W. F.
Hegel:
The Science
of
Wisdom
(New
Haven: Yale
University Press,
1974).
The massive work
by
Charles
Tay
lor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
does not ad
vance the
understanding
of the time
problem
in
any
new
way
I can detect.
3
".
. .
the
World-Spirit itself,
has had the
patience
to
pass through
these
shapes
over the
long passage
of
time,
and to take
upon
itself the enor
mous labor of
world-history
. .
."
(M., p. 17).
See also the close of the
684
MICHAEL MURRAY
A hermeneutic
guide
to
reading
the texts of
Hegel
on Time is to
recognize
the
ambiguousness
of all the
texts; indeed,
almost
every
sentence evinces this
ambiguity,
and
perhaps
allows them to be read
in different and
opposing ways.
Characteristic instances are
found in
assertions like these: "That which is of
a real nature is
certainly
dis
tinguished
from
time,
but is
just
as
essentially
identical with time"
(Enz. ?257;
vol.
1, p. 230)
or in the famed
passage
of the Phenomenol
ogy:
"Time is the
Concept
itself that is there
. . .
[thus] Spirit
neces
sarily appears
in Time
. . .
just
so
long
as it has not
. . .
annulled
Time"
(?801, M., p. 487).
For
philosophers
who insist on a semanti
cally
narrow,
steno-conception
of
philosophical discourse,
of the sort
demanded
by
the mathematical
"understanding,"
such a condition of
text is a
grievous
fault. For other
philosophers,
as for
Hegel,
a
denser,
richer
systematicity
is essential to the demand of
speculative
philosophy,
and a
necessity
of
thought proper
to the
conceptual gait.
The
convincingness
of this
approach
for them rests on
whether the
speculative
sublation of
oppositions
can do
justice
to their differences
and their
unity.
In the course of his work in the Jena
period, Hegel
was
thinking
through
the relations between the
philosophy
of nature
during
1803
04,4
and the
philosophy
of
spirit during 1805-06,5 culminating
in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
of 1807.6 Our examination must accord
ingly
turn to the chief
places
in the text of the
Phenomenology
where
the nature of Time
explicitly
surfaces.
Locating
them is the least dif
ficult
part
of the task because there are
surprisingly few;
in
fact,
aside
from two references in the Vorrede
(??28,
46)
and two later
implicit
places
of note
(?? 212, 670),
there are no more than seven
explicit
Lectures on the
History of Philosophy
(New
York: Humanities
Press, 1962),
vol. 2: "To this
point
the
World-Spirit
has
come,
and each
stage
has its own
form in the true
system
of
Philosophy; nothing
is
lost;
all
principles
are
pre
served,
since
Philosophy
in its final
aspect
is the
totality
of forms. This con
crete idea is the result of the
strivings
of
Spirit during
almost
twenty-five
centuries of earnest work to become
objective
to
itself,
to know itself"
(p.
546).
4
Jeneneser
Realphilosophie
1
[1803/4] (Leipzig: Meiner, 1932).
5
Jeneneser
Realphilosophie
2
[1805/6] (Leipzig: Meiner,
1931).
6
Hereafter citations are from A. V. Miller's
translation,
Phenome
nology of Spirit
(Oxford:
Oxford
University Press, 1977),
with
paragraph
numbers
following Miller,
and Hofmeister's fifth
edition, Ph?nomenologie
des Geistes
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1952),
abbreviated M and H. In the cita
tions from
Miller,
I have substituted
Concept
for Notion to translate Be
griff
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 685
places
in the
Phenomenology (??96, 153, 169, 679, 785-89, 801-803,
807-808).
Yet the last three
passages
contain
arguably
some of the
richest and
deepest
texts in
Hegel
and
pose
a
difficult task for inter
pretation.
Our
study
of Time in the
Phenomenology begins
with the Vor
rede which
provides
a fundamental
clue,
and then
procedes
to follow
the
development
of the sense of Time
through
an
ascending complex
ity
that exhibits a
qualitative
dialectic
leading
from an a-historical ex
perience
of Time to a
fully
and
specifically
historical
experience
of
Time. In the
passage already
mentioned
(?28), Hegel
alludes to the
Time of
Spirit
as "the enormous labor of world
history" (M., p. 17).
Now in the
key passage
of
?46, Hegel
adduces a formula for the na
ture of Time which breaks
through
the traditional
conception
and
lays
out in a condensed
way
the double
meaning
of Time
upon
which he
elaborates elsewhere in the
Phenomenology,
as
well
as in the
Ency
clopedia
and
Philosophy of History.
The formula?to which he
recurs in the last
chapters
of the
Phenomenology
or
rather,
from
which he borrowed in
drafting
his Preface?runs: "As for
Time
. . .
it is the existent
Concept
itself"
(M., p.
27).
Now within
the
ellipsis
and the
surrounding
text
Hegel
is at
pains
to differentiate
two
contrasting approaches
to
space
and
especially time, namely
mathematical
space
and time and
spiritual space
and time. And
though
the
argument
he uses to
separate
them has a
general
method
ological import
(or
strictly,
an
anti-methodological import),
it more
specifically
aims at the
presumption
that the mathematical
space-time
so fundamental to the modern
physics
of
Descartes, Newton, Galileo,
is of
a
limited
power
and of a
complete impotence
where
spiritual
ac
tuality
is at issue.
Hegel argues
that a
mathematical construction of
Time,
because informed
by
the
principle
of
magnitude
and
equality
(or
identity)
must fail to
grasp
the
spiritual-historical
Time of
Spirit
in
five related basic
ways. First,
the nature of
quantity
and
magnitude
is
incapable
of
rendering
the
essentially qualitative
and
worldly
sphere
of
Spirit. Second,
mathematical time must be definable
by
some calculable unit of
measurement;
but in the
actuality
of
spiritual
development,
there is no such
repeatable, reiterable,
identical
unit,
nor is one needed for a
proper
science of
Spirit.
For while the science
of
Spirit
deals with
forms,
these forms
are not mathematical but his
torico-conceptual shapes. Third,
mathematical time is
purely
formal
and
only externally
related to its contents and
applications,
and
therefore cannot
express
the inner
unity
of
Spirit,
the
inseparable
de
686 MICHAEL MURRAY
velopmental togetherness
of its form and content.
Fourth,
the
rigid
determinateness of mathematical time can't
express
the self-directed
ness,
the
purposiveness
of the
spiritual process,
because it fails to
capture
either the
process
or the
goal
of the
process
and least the
unity
between them.
And, lastly,
mathematical time
projects
a
view
of
things
or realities which
presupposes
or
describes these
things
as
in
time,
as if time
were an
objective continuum,
countable and mea
surable
by
a
particular
unit of measurement. This is to
say
that it
enforces a
spatialization
of
time, though
this statement won't
entirely
suffice because
Hegel
wants as well to
distinguish
a
living spiritual
space
from a
homogeneous geometrical
space.
Though
the
meaning
of Time
occupies
the whole of the Phenom
enology,
as its
metalingual
and metahistorical
dimension,
it also
ap
pears
as a feature of and within certain
stages
of
phenomenal
knowl
edge. By metalingual
and metahistorical I mean that the
meaning
of
Time
pertains
not
uniquely
to
any
one
particular shape
in the se
quence
and order of the
phenomenal shapes
of
consciousness,
but to
what it means to be a
shape
and to the
ordering
of the
shapes
as
spir
itual formation
process.
The
spiritual
formation
process
is the meta
language
that rules over and
through
the
particular object languages
of the different
shapes.
The
metahistorical,
not to be confused with
the
suprahistorical,
dimension is the dimension of historical
reality
grasping
itself
as historical
reality,
and thus also
pertains
to
every
shape.
Now the
metalingual
and metahistorical has its own moment
of self-conscious arrival and
thorough comprehension,
which is the
form and content of
chapter 7, Religion,
and
chapter
8 as the Science
of the
phenomenal development
of
knowledge.
But
our
review must
turn first to the
appearances
of Time within the earlier
phenomenal
stages.
In the first
chapter
Time occurs not
by
name but in the form of
the minimalist atomic
sense awareness of the hic et nunc
(?96, H., pp.
81-82; M., p. 60).
By fixing
its
particular
content
monstratively,
sense-certainty
wants to
keep
Time
away
from its
truth,
as
entirely
external to its matter. I won't
repeat
the familiar
gambit
of this
chapter except
to note that what
keeps
on
happening
to this mode of
consciousness, keeps
on
showing
up,
is the internal and essential ef
fect of
temporalization.
The fate of the
impoverished
and abstract
time-sense of
sense-certainty
is to
get
inundated and
dialectically
pressured
into
a more
complex
sense of Time as the
enduring
and
fluctuating.
The first
quite explicit
reference to Time is
?153
(H., p.
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 687
118; M., p. 93)
in
chapter
3 on Force and
Understanding,
in which
Hegel portrays
the law of motion in
physics
wherein consciousness
tries to
grasp
the essence of bodies
relationally, yet exhibiting
a cer
tain
conceptual
indifference. This is true
because,
while motion
gets
defined
relationally
as a function of
space
and
time,
distance and ve
locity,
the relata are
thought
to exist without essential
dependence
on
each
other,
each as a
separate difference,
so
that their
unity might
be
typed
"indifference." This
passage (?153)
is
manifestly
linked with
the discussion in the
Vorrede,
in its treatment of motion in modern
physics
and Cartesian and Galilean
metaphysics
of science. The
quantitative, inorganic,
kinetic
sense of time that mathematical sci
ence
projects
to describe bodies in motion
represents
a
viable mode in
its field. At the same
time,
when measured
against
new demands of
consciousness and
adequacy,
it
gets
criticized for its loose and divi
sive manner of
grasping.
That manner the Vorrede
expressly
con
trasts with the
temporality
of the
Concept itself,
where the
Concept
is
properly regarded
as the medium of
Spirit's life-history.
The context of time
representation
shifts as we move
beyond
the
exhausted forms of mere Consciousness into the
dawning
of Self-Con
sciousness. The
reality
field that
engenders
self-consciousness is
that of
Leben,
of
organic living-being
with its own kind and level of
organization
and character.
Hence,
we
read in the
introductory
sec
tion to
chapter 4,
about "The determination of Life as it
issue[s]
from
the
Concept":
"Its
sphere
is
completely
determined in the
following
moments. Essence is
infinity
as the
supercession
of all
distinctions,
the
pure
movement of axial
rotation,
its
self-repose being
an abso
lutely
restless
infinity; independence itself,
in which the differences of
the movement are
resolved,
the
simple
essence of Time
which,
in this
equality
with
itself,
has the stable
shape
of
Space" (M., p. 106).
Life,
as the
ongoing
whole of
living beings,
is
quietly, infinitely
the same
amid its ceaseless fluctuation. All differences in
organisms
are eva
nescent;
the essence of Leben is to be
momentarily,
to
continuously
pass away
in an
endless flux. Without
history,
without essential irre
versible
having-been
and without
unique qualitative advance,
its du
rableness is found not in Time but in
Space,
which
provides
"the sta
ble
shape,"
that is a
Time
logically compacted
into
Space
or a
Space
not
yet temporalized
into its differentia.
Now of course
Hegel goes
on to describe for us the
erupting
of
desire into and out of this
field,
in the
appearance
of animal desire
which
opens up
a
negativity
in this
organic plenitude.
Out of this ni
688 MICHAEL MURRAY
hilative desire
develops
desire for
desire,
or for
living-desiring-being
satisfying
itself
through
another
living-desiring-being.
This condi
tion
engenders
the Master/Slave
dialectic,
a
dialectic of
deepening
negativity
advanced
through
the
power
of
service, work,
and fear.
Precisely
here a new sense of time
gets
insinuated into the
world,
an
historical time that
prescribes
not the motion of
physical objects
in
space,
but the movement of
Spirit
"in"
time,
as we are
tempted
to
say
and
Hegel
himself does. In this
simple preposition
is contained the
kernel of a
problem
of
major significance
for
seeing
the
point
of the
Hegelian analysis.
It is
only
at a new
level of consideration that we
can
begin
to
grasp
the
necessary
connection between
Concept
and
Time. If we were to
triangulate Hegel's approach
we
might
distin
guish
the aim of
a Platonic realist
position
that takes the
Concept
as
eternal form
or
species,
on the one
side,
and
a nominalistic conven
tionalism
on the other that takes the
Concept
as a
temporal
name.
Then
we
might say
that
Hegel's conception
of the
Concept
is both on
tological
and
temporal,
so that the
Concept
is not a mere name but a
mode of existence
(viz.,
that of
Spirit's
life)
and not an eternal eidos
but
a
temporal process
of
self-shapings.
In the section
on
the
Unhappy
Consciousness
(4,
B)
the dialectic
stasis between the individual and the
Unchangeable
is cast in dis
tinctly temporal
terms. When the individual
experiences
the Un
changeable
other as
something
definite and
actual,
he
might
seem to
have
purged
its absolute
otherness,
but in fact he
merely gains
a new
alien otherness. Thus the divine
appears obstinately imperturbable
when it becomes
a sensible actual
particular,
so
that far from
having
come within the reach of the individual
seeking
union with
it,
"the
hope
of
becoming
one
with it must remain a
hope, i.e.,
without fulfil
ment
...
By
the nature of the
immediately present
unit
...
it
necessarily
follows that in the world of time it has
vanished,
and that
in
space
it had a remote existence and remains
utterly
remote"
(M.,
p. 129).
Further discussion of this moment will be
postponed
until
we take
up
the variants on the
Unhappy
Consciousness motif in the
Phenomenology.
Here we
only
need to note the
operation
of a time
structure that is both static and
dynamic,
which is what
virtually
de
fines this stance of consciousness. But this stance should not be mis
taken for a
typicalization
of
religious experience,
as some commenta
tors
suggest,
for the
phenomenology
of
religion
is rendered
only
in
chapter 7, against
which the
religious representativeness
of this
stance must be measured. One
way
to state this connection is to at
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 689
tend to the transformations of the dialectical stasis or
impasse
of the
Unhappy
Consciousness.
Expressed
as the
temporalizing
of the Un
changeable
and of the
individual,
we could
say
the first must be trans
muted into the doctrine of the divine
Trinity
and the second into the
spiritual community
of true believers.
In terms of its
essential,
concrete
topic matter, Hegel's
Phe
nomenology begins properly
in its sixth
chapter,
which is
Spirit,
and
which treats historical world-constitution from the Greek world
through Bildungs-culture,
modern
Enlightenment,
and Moraltit?t.
It follows the
sequence
from Greek and Roman
antiquity,
to the mod
ern
European
or Germanic world in its
revolutionary
and
post
French-revolutionary
forms. The
chapter
concludes in the
apparent
answer to the
question
raised first
by
the combative dilemma of the
master and slave in
chapter 4, A,
about the
possibility
of a
genuinely
mutual
recognition.
The dialectic between the evil actor in the world
and the beautiful soul withdrawn into its own
sphere
climaxes in the
remarkable
phenomenon
of mutual
forgiveness?"a reciprocal recog
nition which is absolute
Spirit"
(?670: M., p. 408;
cf.
8, ?793).
In this
setting,
we are
told,
God becomes
present
and
manifest,
so that the
solution
suggests
a
religious
attainment rather than a
political
one.
The text does not make
clear, yet
there is an
implicit
link with our
temporal problematic
since
forgiveness
is a
phenomenon
that can
only
be determined as an act of the
present
that cancels out but nonethe
less
acknowledges
a
past
and a new and
mutually
shared futural hori
zon. As such this
anticipates
the
highest meaning
of Revealed Reli
gion,
where the
forgiveness phenomenon occupies
a
central
place,
at
the close of
chapter 7,
which
only
then remains to be elevated and
conceptually
articulated to the ultimate
philosophical
level of
chapter
8.
Religion
in the
Phenomenology
constitutes a new statement of
conceptual
and historical
sequence,
but it is neither an
entirely
differ
ent nor an
independent topology
from that
presented
in
chapter
6.
Chapter 6,
we
saw, portrays Spirit
in the actual
history
of
Spirit,
whereas the
preceding chapters
1-5 instead trace out the
conceptual
ordering
and
layering
of
consciousness, self-consciousness,
and rea
son,
in order to
comprehend
these abstract forms and to
provide
the
phenomenological categories
needed to
portray
the mundane
history
of
Spirit.
These
categorial patterns
are first in the order of
analysis,
but
they
are second in the order of
reality, being
themselves abstrac
tions derived from the
ground
of
Spirit.
In the
introductory
to
6,
we
690
MICHAEL MURRAY
read:
"Spirit
is thus
self-supporting, absolute,
real
being.
All
previ
ous
shapes
of consciousness are abstract forms of it.
. . .
This iso
lating
of those moments
presupposes Spirit
itself.
. . .
In this isola
tion
they
have the
appearance
of
really existing
as
such;
but that
they
are
only
moments
...
is shown
by
their advance and retreat into
their
ground
and essence.
. .
."
(M., p. 264)
In this
passage
and
again
in the
following
one from the
introductory
to
7, Hegel
claims
that these three moments
(consciousness, self-consciousness,
reason)
are not
temporally
successive
phases,
but "taken
together,
constitute
Spirit
in its mundane existence
generally" (M., p. 413).7
Interpret
ers who tend to mute the
emergence
of
history
in
Hegel
will incline to
assimilate the last three
chapters
to the same model as the first
five,
though
such assimilation cannot be reconciled with what
Hegel
ex
pressly
says. Interpreters
of
Hegel
from
McTaggert
to Werner
Marx,
who tend to treat the
Encyclopedia
or Science
of Logic
as the
center of
Hegel's interest,
must also
deny
or
ignore
the
centrality
of
history.
For
Hegel,
in the
Phenomenology
in
any case,
there exists
a
worldly history
of
Spirit
in which these abstract momenta
provide
the
syntax
of that
history,
which is
presupposed
as established once
one reaches
chapter 7,
a
chapter
that further
represents
a new de
ployment
of the dialectic
pattern
or
syntax.
Moreover,
the historical field
displayed
in
chapter
7 can be su
perimposed
upon
that in
chapter 6,
and
may
be said to extend it back
ward into the
proto-spiritual beginnings
and forward
up through
the
modernist realization of
Christianity.
The sketch in
chapter
6 covers
the
Greek, Roman,
and Germanic worlds that are also basic to the
outline at the end of the
Philosophy of Right
and to the structure of
the lectures on the
Philosophy of
World
History.
Yet we don't find a
classification
corresponding
to the Oriental
world,
which is the first of
the four fundamental worlds that
Hegel distinguishes
in the
lectures,
until we enter
chapter
7. The Oriental world there
appears
as the
earliest form of
religion,
Natural
Religion,
that
commences in the
"morning-land"
where
Spirit
first
begins
to disinter itself from Na
ture and
begins
to see itself in Nature. Such
a disinternment or
awakening points
ahead to the condition of
Spirit awake, finding
itself
at home
as
the wahre Geist of the Greek world in the noontime of
presence.
The
chapter
on
Religion
therefore reveals formations
an
7
We need not enter into the
controversy,
abetted
by Hegel's
own con
tention in the
Encyclopedia
(?25)
that materials from the rich
ground
of
Spirit
are
needlessly dragged
into the
analyses
of
chapters
1-5.
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
691
tecedent to the Greeks?in other
terms,
to Natural
Religion (7, A)
in
its
Persian, Indian,
and
Egyptian kinds,
as well as ones
coinciding
with the Greek ethical
world,
in the
Religion
of Art
(7, B),
and with
the Christian world from the Roman
Empire up
to the German Euro
pean period,
in Revealed
Religion (7, C).
The
propriety
of the
placement
of
religion
as the
penultimate
stage
of the
Phenomenology
is that it has
always,
wherever it
ap
pears
and of its
essence, put
itself forward as
ministering
between
man and Absolute
Being,
and as
communing
not with
Spirit
"immedi
ately
at home with
itself,"
but
self-consciously
with Absolute
Spirit.
With these
orienting
remarks in
view,
I want to examine
an im
portant general passage
on
Time that
Hegel presents
in the introduc
tory
section to
Religion,
and then focus on
certain transformations of
time-sense that occur in the case of Revealed
Religion
and constitute
a
key
to both its
accomplishment
and its
limitation,
as well as its
jux
taposition
with
chapter
8. As for the
general passage:
Only
the
totality
of
Spirit
is in Time
(in
der
Zeit)
and the
"shapes,"
which are
"shapes"
of the
totality
of
Spirit, display
themselves in a
temporal succession;
for
only
the whole has true
actuality
and there
fore the form of
pure
freedom in the face of an
"other,"
a form which
expresses
itself as Time.
(M., p. 413; H., p. 476)
The
"shapes"
are the
differentiating moments, though
not identical or
substitutable units in a
calculus,
of a
formation-process,
of
temporal
successiveness. No moment can be considered either actual or intel
ligible
as an isolated
moment,
but
only
in the course of the movement
revealed
by
a
phenomenological
narrative in which each moment
gets
aufgehoben.
These different
shapes
define the
individuality
of
Spirit.
"These
['shapes'], therefore,
exhibit
Spirit
in its
individuality
or
actuality,
and are
distinguished
from one another in
Time, though
in such a
way
the later moment retains within it the
preceding
one"
(M., p. 413).
This
process
which is
Spirit's coming
to know and to be
itself as
Spirit,
is a
process
of
self-differentiating
and
self-othering,
of
encountering, negating,
and
transcending
new
dimensions of other
ness.
What will
distinguish
all other
stages,
both abstract and his
torical
ones,
from
Religion
and from Absolute
Knowing
is that within
the latter common
domain an
absolute
identity
and absolute other
ness are
absolutely
combined. Time is the name for this
process
which is not so much a form but
a
formative
process
of
engendering
forms,
a
temporal kingdom
of forms interiorized
by conceptual
memory.
But there is
something radically unsatisfactory
about the in der
692 MICHAEL MURRAY
Zeit formulation. One
might
say
of a world-moment that it is in
time,
meaning
that it can be
distinguished
from some
past
moments and fu
ture moments that
belong
to it
as it does to them. But the text
(here
at the
f?r
uns
level)
expressly
declares the whole of
Spirit
is in
time,
which
strictly
makes no sense if
nothing
in
principle
could ever
pre
cede or
succeed that whole.
Indeed,
to make the latter
point
about
the whole is
traditionally
to state the
standpoint
of
eternity
or nunc
stans of absolute
presence,
as
though
outside of time
altogether.
Yet
this
way, too,
would make no sense to the extent that
Hegel
(also)
wants to
say
that both the
stages
and the
totality
of the
stages
are
temporal.
The
only
way
this can be
successfully
said is to
approxi
mate what is asserted in the final
phrase
of the
passage,
which is to
claim that the whole must be
expressed
as Time.8
Turning
to the
specific
way
that Revealed
Religion
advances this
insight
into the
temporality
of
Spirit,
we can start with a reminder of
each of the two
religious shapes
that it sublates. The
first,
Natural
Religion, represents
God
as sheer
being-in-itself,
whether the sub
stantiality
of Divine
being
be
imagistically thought
as
light,
as
plant
and
animal,
or as artificer
supreme. Against
this
background,
the
decisive advance of Greek Art
Religion
is its
picturing
of God
as an
individual
self-consciousness,
as
being-for-itself
that
appears
in the
myriad
forms of the
temple
cult of the
god
in human
shape,
in the reli
gious mysteries
and athletic
festivals,
and in
epic,
and
tragic
and
comic drama. In this
range
we witness the artistic embodiment of
self-consciousness that is at once finite
subjectivity
and
yet divinity.
The fundamental contribution of Revealed
Religion,
in
contrast,
is
the effort to
unify being-in-itself
with
being-for-itself,
or
divine sub
stance with human
subjectivity,
into the
concept
of Absolute
Spirit.
The
peak
of this
development
is reached in the
pictorial
notion of God
as
Trinity,
that
gives
to divine
reality
the structure of
being-in-itself,
being-for-itself,
and
being-in-and-for-itself,
as the three essential mo
ments of God's nature.
Hegel
construes the nature of the
Trinity according
to the Joa
chimite
tradition,
mediated for him
through Lessing,
that conceives
the God of revelation
as an historical
process.9
That
is,
he does not
8
In a 1797
sketch,
Schiller
speaks
of the German mission "to make a
conquest
of the
great process
of time. Each
people
has its
day
in
history,
but the
day
of the German is the harvest of time as a whole
(der ganzen
Zeit)."
Cited
in
George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics,
and
History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp.
82-83.
9
See
my
Modern
Philosophy of History, chapter
4.
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 693
regard
the three moments of God's nature as eternalistic Plotinian
emanations,
but rather as an idea
unfolding itself, actualizing
itself in
the
history
of
religion.
The non-controversial contact
points
in the
Judeo-Christian tradition for this are the
special
historical relation es
tablished between Yah weh and Israel in the Old
Testament,
and the
universal historical relation established
by
Christ's Incarnation
ac
cording
to the New
Testament,
in which God becomes
a man in his
torical time and
space.
The first
relationship necessarily generates
a
sharp
bifurcation between the historia sacra et historia
profana.
Yet the
sacred/profane
distinction must become
increasingly prob
lematic in the Christian
era,
in as much as the Incarnation attests not
merely
an
epiphany
or atavistic
mediation,
but the divine nature
emptying
itself into the human
nature, whereby
the divine is human
ized and the human divinized. The
problematic
character of this dis
tinction is revealed in the
later, ever-expanding
claims of seculariza
tion or
enlightenment against
those of sacralization
(though
each
misunderstands the
other).
Essential to the
development
of secular
ization is the
significance
attributed to the third moment of the
Holy
Spirit,
which raises a feature in
Hegel's
account that some
regard
as
gnostic
rather than Christian. It
appears
when
Hegel
is
elucidating
the counter-claim to
Enlightenment's misapprehension
of the
object
of Faith. For Faith does not view its
object
as an abstract
being
lying utterly beyond
the
believing consciousness,
but rather
experi
ences itself as the
Holy Spirit dwelling
in
community
and
combining
within its nature the abstract essence
represented by
God the Father
and the self-consciousness
represented by
God the Son. "Thus Abso
lute
Being [Spirit]
is at the
same
time in itself
[Father]
and for itself
[Son]" (H., p. 391; M., p. 335).
Hegel
is
underscoring
the thrust of
the Trinitarian notion. Even
though
the Christian
era,
or at least the
medieval articulation of
it,
understands
history
from the
perspective
of God the Son
against
the
background
of God the Father in the Old
Testament,
the
Trinity
must
finally
be understood in the
light
of the
coming
of the
Spirit
destined to follow
upon
the mortal
departure
of
the Son and
according
to the
special
role which the
Spirit
is to
play
in
the life of the
community.
This relation to
community, Hegel goes
on
to
show,
is not a relation based
upon
an
historiographical thesis,
ei
ther
epistemologically
well
grounded
or
groundless,
but rather more
directly
itself an
historical
happening:
"It is
Spirit
itself which bears
witness to
itself,
both in the inwardness of the individual conscious
ness and
through
the universal
presence
in
everyone
of faith in it"
(H., p. 395; M., p. 338).
The relation between the Father and Son is
694 MICHAEL MURRAY
described in
chapter
7 "as
a
loving recognition
in which the two
sides,
as
regards
their
essence,
do not stand in an antithetical relation"
(H.,
p. 536; M., pp. 466-67).
The
Holy Spirit?as
this Anerkennen der
liebe?is the Absolute
coming
to
self-presence
in the life of the
Christian
community.
The
key
to this turn from the second to the
third
moment,
and to our own
temporal problematic
is the
meaning
of
the death of
God,
as the definitive form as well as the mediation of the
Unhappy
Consciousness
predicament.
The
Unhappy
Consciousness first
appears
in the order of anal
ysis
as the truth of the dialectical
sequence
from Stoical
independence
through Skepticism (chapter 4, B),
and our remarks earlier called at
tention to the latent
temporal design
of this structure of self-con
sciousness. But in the order of actual
history,
as
Hegel
notes
(M., p.
293),
the first
appearance
of the
Unhappy
Consciousness
occurs in the
Roman
legal
world. In this world late Roman consciousness under
goes
the
painful experience
of the death of the
gods, expressed
in the
hard
saying
"God is dead"
(introduction
to
7, C; H., p. 523; M., p.
455).
The essence of Roman
despair
is the
experience
of loss and be
latedness?of its sense of itself built on the ruins of the Greek ethical
order,
which even
though
it has
unique principles
of its
own,
sur
rounds itself with the
trappings
but not the vital substance of the Re
ligion
of Art. For the
Unhappiness
of Roman consciousness
recog
nizes that the oracles are
"dumb,"
that the "divine" statues are
"corpses
in
stone,"
that
epic
and dramatic
poetry
are
powerless
to
avert "the
crushing
ruin of
gods
and men"
(H., p. 523; M., p. 455).
Nothing
within the Roman world of
legal personality, empire,
or
spir
itual
pantheon
can
regenerate
or transcend itself.
Christianity emerges
within such a
despondent
scene
by creating
a new sense of
expectation,
for the advent of a new
god,
while the
audience "of
shapes
. . .
stands
impatiently expectant
round the
birthplace
of
Spirit
as it becomes self-consciousness. The
grief
and
longing
of the
Unhappy
Self-Consciousness which
permeates
them all
is their center and the common
birth-pang
of its
emergence?the
simplicity
of the
pure Concept,
which contains those forms as its mo
ments"
(M., pp. 456-67).
This
expectancy
calls for
a new
immediacy
and
presence
of the divine in the world.
Yet the
distinguishing
mark of the Christian
dispensation
is
not,
in the
Hegelian presentation,
so much the birth of a
present, actual,
sensuously
real
mediator,
but is more
fully displayed
in its
peculiar
theology
of death. The mediator must die in order to be
human,
to be
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 695
incarnate,
and the
pain
that the Christian
experiences
in the cruel
words "God is dead"
(H., p. 546; M., p. 476)
is of a
privileged
kind.
Otherwise
formulated,
the
pain
of the late Roman consciousness and
of the Christian
consciousness,
even
though
uttered in the same
words,
is not the same
pain.
The reason is that
properly
understood
the death of Christ
on the cross is the death of all
gods?and
the end
of the
gods
of
presence,
an
important
common bond between H?lder
lin's Patmos
hymn
and
Hegel's Phenomenology.
Revealed Reli
gion grasps
the
meaning
of this
death,
and the connection between it
and the
coming reign
of the
Holy Spirit,
in
pictorial representations.
The limitations inherent in
religious expression mask,
from the view
point
of
conceptual demand,
the absolute content contained within its
expressive
form. That
expressive
content and that limitation in form
can be exhibited
by seeing
how the
unfolding
of the trinitarian divin
ity
is the
working
out of the horizon and essence of Time. This inter
pretation
discloses the
religious meaning
of the
identity
of Time and
Concept,
and
supplies
a
crucial link with
chapter
8.
God the Father or
being-in-itself represents
the
primordial past,
the time of
origin
and
creation,
to which
things
and men are indebted
for their
existence,
in which the
legendary
events of the fall and the
promise
call for reverent
preservation. Being-in-itself
or
substanti
ality signifies
the hallowed time of
long ago,
in which a bond was es
tablished between God and His
people,
but
only dimly
intimates
pre
sent or
future time since reconciliation is
interminably
deferred. In
this dimension we could
say
that the eternal manifests itself
as
the
past,
and the same
may
be said for the Greek mind
generally.
The
ethical substance of the
polis
is founded
upon
an
entirely customary
world and the Platonic anamnesis of the
primordial
condition of
things
is a
remembrance of
things past. Along
these lines van
Gron
ingen,
in an
analysis
of the Greek tenses of
description, argues
that
the Greek
imagination
was
profoundly
"in the
grip
of the
past."10
In the second
age
of the
Son,
God manifests himself as
being-for
itself,
as a
particular
sensuous
individual,
who is
immediately present
to those around
him,
seen, heard,
and touched
by
his
disciples.
A
sensibly present
God
(H., p. 527; M., p. 458)
is not the timeless
pr?s
10
B. A. van
Groningen,
In the
Grip of
the Past:
Essay
on An
Aspect of
Greek
Thought
(Leiden:
Philosophia Antiqua,
1953).
Compare
Kierke
gaard,
The
Concept of
Dread
(Princeton:
Princeton
University Press, 1967),
pp.
80-82.
696 MICHAEL MURRAY
ence of
eternity
but rather the
kairologic presence
of the eternal in a
finitely present being.
As in the
previous
moment the eternal
ap
peared
as the
past,
so in this moment the eternal
appears
as a
physi
cal and
personal present,
"that the
supreme Being
is
seen, heard,
etc.
as an
immediately present self-consciousness,
this therefore is indeed
the consummation of its
Concept;
and
through
this consummation
that
Being
is
immediately present qua supreme Being" (H., p. 529;
M., p. 460).
This is not
experienced by religious
consciousness as
merely
the
way
in which God
"appears"
for
it,
for as it
interprets
the
divine,
"Here
. . .
God is revealed
as
He
is;
He is
immediately pres
ent as He is in
Himself, i.e.,
He is
immediately present
as
Spirit" (H.,
p. 530; M., p. 461).
In this
respect,
this
presence represents
the ful
fillment and
overcoming
of the
painful abyss
that
separates
a tran
scendental Father
figure
from his
creatures,
and so this
coming-to
presence
answers to the
"hopes
and
expectations
of the world till
now"(H.,p. 530; M., p. 461).
A
coimplication
of this
temporalizing
in terms of the
present,
however,
is that finite
presence
is
always presence
for some and not
others,
and above all not for the successors of later times. Yet
equally
as a
consequence
of that
very
limitedness of its
time-span,
a
time-passage
takes effect:
His
'being'
passes
over into his
'having
been.'
Consciousness,
for
which God is thus
sensuously present,
ceases to see and to hear
Him;
it
has seen and heard
Him;
and it is because it
only
has seen and heard
Him that it first becomes itself
spiritual
consciousness. Or
. . .
just
as
formerly
He rose
up
for consciousness as a sensuous
existence,
now
He has arisen in the
Spirit.
For a
consciousness that
sensuously
sees
and hears Him is itself
a
merely
immediate
consciousness,
which has
not overcome the
disparity
of
objectivity,
has not taken it back into
pure thought;
it knows this
individual,
but not
itself,
as
Spirit (M., p.
467).
Of
course it is death that
eclipses
his
presence,
and which is from
the
perspective
of
immediacy,
his loss and absence. Here
religious
consciousness
undergoes estrangement
from this
present,
suffers its
sense of the loss of its God
as the death of God. Yet this
pain,
viewed
from a
later reflective
phase,
reveals
a
negativity propaedeutic
to the
universalization and
spiritualization
of this
presence.
This is the
presence
that comes to
presence
in the
community itself,
in the com
munity
of the faithful
mutually recognizing
one another in
love,
ac
cepting
its existence in time as well as in
space.
The full
experience
of the death of God
requires,
for the
positive
conversion of the
nega
tive
moment,
a time to unfold and make evident the future as the
age
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 697
of the
Holy Spirit. Recognizing
itself as
belonging
to the
age
of the
Spirit,
the Christian
community
or
Church, temporalizes
its mission
in terms of a future that involves
a
devious dialectic with
worldly
and
secular forces. The
meaning
of the Eternal or Absolute thus
appears
in the mode of the future of
modernity.
H?lderlin
poeticizes
the moment of transition between
being
and
having-been
in Patmos:
Doch trauerten
sie,
da nun
Es Abend
worden, erstaunt,
Denn Grossentschiedenes hatten in der Seele
Die
M?nner,
aber sie liebten under der Sonne
Das Leben und lassen wollten sie nicht
Vom
Angesichte
des Herrn
Und der Heimat.
Yet saddened were
they,
now that
Evening
had
come, amazed,
For
things greatly
decisive harbored in the souls
Of these
men,
but
they
loved life under the sun
And wanted not to
part
from
The face of the Lord
And the homeland.
Hegel interprets
the
pain
and reluctance of
letting-go
and of
accept
ing
the
reality
of
absence,
not
merely
as an individual
psychological
event in the
apostles.
He
interprets
it
on a
larger
scale as a
process
that the entire
community
and its institutions must
undergo,
in order
to transform its sense of
abandonment, through
a
negation
of
nega
tion,
that
gives
itself over?to where it has
always
been?to
a
posi
tive relation to
history. Spirit
in
history,
not
only
in the
separate
or
parallel
stream of
Heilsgeschichte,
means that the
community
must
temporalize
its
understanding
from out of the future in such a
way
that the
past, present,
and future tenses become
integral
to one an
other and
compose
a self-formative
totality.
The realization of this
radical
temporalization
must
grapple
with
many
detours and barriers
in the
history
of Revealed
Religion.
Some of these obstacles can be
briefly
indicated for the
way
in which
they
show the
process
of de
tachment from
immediacy
to be a
process
and also of how
enlightened
Protestant
religion
surmounts them.
The first of these detours is constructed in the medieval doctrine
of "real
presence" (H., p. 545; M., p. 476),
that is of Christ's
becoming
bodily present again
in the consecrated bread.
Hegel
is caustic in his
lectures about the
attempt
to re-introduce
a
physical
sensible
pres
ence into
religion,
for
confusing
the external sensible with the inward
698
MICHAEL MURRAY
spiritual.
For the
genuine
faith of Lutheran
inwardness,
God is
pres
ent in men
only
"in
spirit
and in faith" and that means in
religious
community.11
The second detour
appears
in the denouement of the
Crusades,
which
Hegel
sees as the
culminating meaning
of the medie
val world as the
"Age
of the Son."12 The Crusades are the
quest
to
recover the
Holy
Land and the
grave
of
God,
in order to
approximate,
to come near to the former
presence
of the dead
God,
an effort that is
doomed to failure: "Consciousness
. . .
can
only
find as a
present
reality
the
grave
of its life"
(H., p. 164; M., p. 132).
The
sought-for
prize, just
because it is an actual
place,
cannot remain forever self
same.
Medieval
religious phenomena appear
as so
many
variations
on
"presentifying"
the Absolute that ends in a
desolation,
from which
a
properly spiritual
condition
might begin.
As
Hegel
remarks else
where,
"These
holy spots
. . .
as sensuous
presence
of
place
without
presence
of
time,
are
things
of the
past,
a mere
memory,
no
percep
tion of the immediate
present.13
But there are also constraints that derive not from within the
moments of
religious history,
that are overcome
by
the Protestant
principle
of faith and
conscience,
but from the form of
religion
itself.
Although
in truth the
religious community
is Absolute
Spirit,
God is
trinitarian, Spirit
is coextensive with Time?these facets of the truth
are
only
understood in
pictorial
and
figurative
terms. The Christian
community
will then tend to
interpret
itself
as in
time,
to
counterpose
the sacred to the
secular,
the eternal to the
temporal.
This con
straint is
epitomized
on the last
page
of the
religion chapter
where
Hegel points
out
that, despite
its
deep implicit overcoming
of these
antitheses,
the
religious community
will
portray
to itself the divine
reconciliation
as an
event in the remote
past?als
eine Ferne der Ver
gangenheit?and
the
coming
of the
Spirit
as
something
that will
hap
pen
in a distant future?als ein Femes der
Zukunft (H., p. 548; M.,
p. 47?).
The continuation of the earlier cited
paragraphs
(??763-64)
provides
the
conceptual commentary
on
this state of affairs: "Remote
ness in time and
space
is
. . .
only
the
imperfect
form in which
(im
mediate
existence)
is
given
a
mediated or universal
character;
it is
11
Philosophy of Religion
(New
York: Humanities
Press, 1962), 3:133;
History of Philosophy,
3: 54-55.
12
History of Philosophy
(London:
Routledge
&
Kegan Paul, 1892),
3:
57; Philosophy of Religion,
3:
103; Philosophy of History
(New
York:
Dover, 1956), p.
345.
13
History of Philosophy,
3: 104.
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
699
merely dipped superficially
in the element of
Thought,
is
preserved
in
it as a sensuous
mode,
and not made one with the nature of
Thought
itself. It is
merely
raised into the realm of
picture-thinking
. .
."
(M., pp. 462-63).
What remains to be
accomplished
is the transla
tion of the
religious time-design
into the
conceptual time-design.
In other
words,
our task is to show the fundamental relation be
tween the
religious time-design
of
chapter 7,
traced
above,
and the
philosophical time-design
of
chapter
8. The
concept
of Absolute
Spirit
and its
historicity,
which
Religion
is
historically
the first to
elaborate,
must be
appropriated
at the level of Science.
"(T)he
con
tent of
religion proclaims
earlier in time than does
Science,
what
Spirit is,
but
only
Science is its true
knowledge
of itself"
(M., p. 488;
cf.
p. 486).
The content that
religion
exhibits is
Spirit
as the tem
poralization
of
Time,
and the
translatability
of this contnet into
a con
ceptual
form is based on the fact that the trinitarian
notion,
which
captures
the essence of
religion,
is as
well "the
principle
of all
specula
tive
philosophy."14
Absolute
Knowledge,
that is Absolute
Spirit knowing
itself as
Absolute,
is the
culminating stage
of the dialectic. As such it has its
own distinctive
shape
and its own moment of
emergence,
while its es
sential
particularity
is that it
brings together
in a self-conscious sur
vey
all the
analytical
and historical
forms,
even the form of forms it
self,
within its
purview.
In a certain sense as a
consequence,
Absolute
Knowledge
is vacuous and
empty,
for all of its contents are
only
the forms of
already transpired history, culture,
and
thought.
Absolute
Knowledge
is rather more a new
way
of
seeing
and a new
context for
phenomenological seeing,
wherein the forms are seen in a
patterned
and relational
way
in the course of a movement whole sole
telos is to reveal these moments as moments of the
process
of
Spirit's
coming
to know itself. In this
regard nothing
new,
no new content
gets
introduced but
only
the
presentation
of the forms in a
systematic
and eidetic manner is new. If it doesn't offend
against
"earnestness"
too
much,
one
might
find an excellent
analogy
to this
point
in The
Wizard
of Oz,
which is a kind of American
phenomenology
of mind.
What
Dorothy
and her three
companions
find when
they get
to the
end of the Yellow Brick Road is
very
beautiful but
really nothing
at
14
History of Philosophy,
3:
20;
see
Hegel's
reiteration of the
impor
tance of the trinitarian
idea, e.g.:
1:
222-23;
2:
76-77; Philosophy of
Reli
gion,
3:
11,
99.
700 MICHAEL MURRAY
all. For what each of
them?Dorothy
and the friends who
represent
different
aspects
of her self
(brain
or
mind, heart, courage
or
spirit)?
sought
each had become in the course of the
search, lacking only
the
self-conscious
grasp
of this truth.15
We can't examine here the
phenomenological recapitulation
of
the
preceding stages
of consciousness and historical-cultural
shapes
of
Spirit, epitomized
in
??790-96,
and followed
by
the
history
of mod
ern
philosophy.
Of the latter whose
underlying
idea is that of abso
lute
subject, Hegel
sketches in
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant,
post-Kantian
Romanticism and Idealism in Fichte and
Sehelling,
and
lastly,
in
Hegel
himself who sublates the antitheses of the
subjective
idealism of Fichte and the
objective
idealism
represented by Sehelling
into his own Absolute Idealism. We need to
say only enough
to focus
on the decisive contribution
on the
meaning
of Time
provided by
mod
ern
ontology.
The thrust of modern
Enlightenment
and of
philoso
phy
since the Renaissance is to make the self
or
ego
central and to
conceive
reality
as
ultimately
translucent to its
theory
and transform
able
by
its
practice.
This is the famed
rationality
of the real and real
izability
of the rational. This is what is meant
by
the "I
=
I"
symbol
ism,
and further because this self and
reality
are in
process,
the
identity
must be
temporal
and so countenance difference as well. "So
that, just
as
previously
essence was declared to be the
unity
of
Thought
and
Extension,
it would now have to be
grasped
as
unity
of
Thought
and Time"
(M., p. 489).
This
approximates
the shift from
Descartes to
Kant,
while Fichte's
subjective
idealism accentuates the
temporal Subject
and
Spinoza
and
Sehelling
advance
a modern ver
sion of the claims of Substance.
Philosophical
and
spiritual history generally,
from ancients to
moderns,
is the movement from Substance to
Subject.
While Sub
ject
from Kant to Fichte and the
Enlightenment progressivists
has an
advancing, futurizing character,
Substance since the Greeks exhibits
the character of
preservation, maintenance,
and
sameness,
so that its
Wesen is Gewesen or
pastwardness.
Absolute
Spirit,
"the most sub
lime
Concept
and the
one which
belongs
to the modern
age
and its
religion" (?25, M., p. 14),
must
grasp
itself as
Substance become Sub
15
This is
equally
true of L. Frank Baum's 1900 Wizard
ofOz
and of the
1939 MGM film version. In The Annotated Wizard
ofOz
(New
York: Clark
son
Potter, 1973)
Michael Patrick Hearn
verges
on the
point,
without under
standing
it and without reference to
Hegel (p.
270).
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 701
ject,
and as
Subject
become
Substance,
the
unity
of the in-itself and
for-itself,
of
having-been
and
advancing-toward, expressed
as "abso
lute
presence."
The first
(?801)
of the two
great passages
on Time in
chapter
8
runs:
Time is the
Concept
itself that is there and which
presents
itself to con
sciousness as
empty intuition;
for this
reason,
Spirit necessarily ap
pears
in
Time,
and it
appears
in Time
just
so
long
as it has not
grasped
its
pure Concept, i.e.,
has not annulled Time. It is the
outer,
intuited
pure
Self which is not
grasped by
the
Self,
the
merely
intuited Con
cept;
when this latter
grasps
itself it sets aside its
Time-form, compre
hends this
intuiting,
and is a
comprehended
and
comprehending
intuit
ing. Time, therefore, appears
as the
destiny
and
necessity
of
Spirit
that is not
yet complete
within
itself,
the
necessity
to enrich the share
which self-consciousness has in consciousness
. . .
(M., p. 487)16
This
passage
is
surely among
those
hermeneutically
ambivalent
ones that seem to assert both the
identity
of Time with the
Concept
and the abolition of Time. The transaction of the
argument might
be
construed in the
following
terms. When the self is
posed
as some
thing
outer and
external, merely
available to be intuited or
passively
received,
and when Time is
posed
as some order of sucession in which
the self moves
along,
then we are still
caught
in an
inadequate
realiza
tion
against
which
Spirit
is
progressing throughout
the Phenomenol
ogy.
Not even Revealed
Religion,
as we
noted,
could
escape
from
this manner
of
representing
the self in terms of an
external,
serialized
Time. On this account the
temporal
self is not
strictly grasped
at
all,
because it has not been
conceptualized
and
recognized
as of the same
nature as that which does the
grasping.
When
genuine grasping
occurs, however,
the
particular way
of
regarding
Time as routed
through passive
intuition must
yield
to an active
process
approach.
Moreover,
the Kantian formalist
interpretation
of
Time,
which treats
it as a
subjective
form
only
and never as matter and historical actual
ity,
must be reconceived. What is
annulled, then,
is
merely
the defi
16
Hints at
Hegel's
formulations are
present
in Schiller's Letters
on the
Aesthetic Education
of Man,
trans.
Reginald
Snell
(New
York: Frederick
Ungar,
1965).
In the Eleventh:
"[Man]
realizes form when he creates
time
...
he
gives
form to matter when he
proceeds
to annul time ..."
(p. 63);
and in the Twelfth:
"[The
formal
impulse]
embraces the whole time
series,
which is as much to
say
it annuls time and
change
. .
."
(p.
66).
Interesting
to
note,
in this
regard,
is that Schiller is the first to use
aufgeho
ben in what we have to think of as the
Hegelian
sense,
in the
Eighteenth
Letter
(pp.
88-90).
702
MICHAEL MURRAY
cient
being-in-time
view of Time. The
change
entailed
by
the event
of
comprehension
is that
Spirit
is no
longer thought
as intuited out
there "in"
Time,
but rather
gets conceptually grasped
as
identical
with Time "as" Time.
By
the notion of
"Spirit
in Time" is meant
that Time relative to
Spirit
is viewed an alien cloak worn
by Spirit,
as
a mere form that it
contingently happens
to
assume,
that is
merely
subjective
and
apparent,
and that defines a
pre-established pathway
along
which
Spirit
wends its
way.
Conversely, by
the notion of
"Spirit
as Time" is meant the
recognition
of Time
as the native and
sole
shape
of
Spirit's life,
as the substance and content of its
reality,
and as
absolute,
whose historical course is determined
by
the
self-movement of
Spirit.
The
overcoming
and
supercession
of the no
tion of
Spirit
in Time in favor of
Spirit
as
Time,
is
expressed
in the
formulation "a
comprehended
and
comprehending intuiting."
From
one
perspective, namely
from the relative
viewpoint
of the
particular
spiritual shape,
the
"destiny
and
necessity"
of Time can
appear
as ex
ternal and onerous servitude. From the absolute
perspective
of the
whole
process
reaching fulfillment,
this
destiny
can be celebrated as
the actualization of
freedom,
as
the
homecoming
and self-reconnais
sance of
Spirit.
The final
paragraphs
of the
Phenomenology
set out the relations
between the
happening
of
History
and the
happening
of
Science,
and
the
meaning
of
History comprehended. Hegel's Phenomenology
portrays
the arrival of an
eschaton,
one that is enabled
by history
and
culminates in this
work,
and which moreover
displays
a
two-sided
ness.
On the one
hand,
it
represents
the attainment of
Spirit's
knowing
itself as
nothing
but
Time,
which
completely
understood
would be
begriffne
Geschichte, history conceptualized (H., p. 564; M.,
p. 493).
It knows itself as Time because
Spirit recognizes
that the
Concept,
which is the medium of its
life,
is Time.
"[T]his
revelation
is
. . .
the
Concept's Time,
in that that externalization is in its
own
self externalized
[and] equally
in its
[internal] depth"
(H. p. 564; M.,
p. 493).
A
complementary
way
to elucidate this is to
say
Time
gets
temporalized
into the differences and
unity
of its
triple
tenses. This
temporalization
is
already approximated
in
pictorial
fashion
by
reli
gious
consciousness in the trinitarian
experience
of
God,
which shows
an
affinity
between the
religious time-design
and the
philosophical
time-design.
We could state the latter
conception by saying
that
Spirit
combines the movements of
projecting
itself into the future and
of
recollecting
its
past,
a
combining together
that constitutes its "ab
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 703
solute
presence."
"Absolute
presence"
is not an
eternity
abstracted
from Time but the
fully developed
essence of Time.
In the
Encyclopedia
discussion of Time
(?257 f.)
Hegel
mentions
a
traditional
way
of
thinking
about
Time, namely
the view that
"everything
arises and
passes away
in time."
Hegel rejects
this
view
as
he
rejects
the
formal, abstractible,
or
containerizing
notion of
Time in favor of an Anaximandarian and Hesiodic notion: "But
every
thing
does not
appear
and
pass
in
time;
time itself is this
becoming,
arising,
and
passing
away
. . .
[time is]
the Cronos which
engenders
all and
destroys
that to which it
gives
birth."17 Thus he continues:
"Time does not resemble a container
. . .
[things]
do not
pass away
because
they
are in
time,
but are themselves that which is
temporal.
Temporality
is their
objective
determination"
(p. 231),
and conse
quently,
"It is the
process
of actual
things
which constitutes time"
(p.
231).
When
Hegel
makes the
assertion,
a
paradoxical enough
claim for
traditional
philosophy,
that "time itself is eternal"
(p.
231)
and that in
regard
to "time as such" it "constitutes the absolute
present" (pp.
231-32),
he does this for the reason that Time is not reducible to ei
ther
past
or future or
present
time. In
?259, Hegel
writes that the
"present, future,
and
past"
are "the dimensions of time."
Hegel's
or
dering
of the tenses is itself
noteworthy,
for it
suggests
a
projective
teleologic structuring
rather than an efficient causal
structuring,
which follows the
pattern: past
??
present
?>
future. He further
points
out that these dimensions of Time do not
open up
or
appear
in
Nature,
whose foundation is
Space (?254, p. 225)
and whose distinc
tive time-tense is the Now
(p.
233).
Where these dimensions are
hinted
at,
it is
only
at best a
low-grade subjective
manner as
memory
or
fear in animal life.
Temporalization
here differs
radically
from the
developed, objective,
and absolute formation it finds in
Spirit,
for the
17
Hegel's Philosophy of Nature,
trans. William
Petry
(London:
Allen
&
Unwin, 1970),
1: 230. Other
pages
cited in the text are to this transla
tion. In the
Philosophy of
World
History,
trans. H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), Hegel expands
on the
mythical
com
parison by noting
how Zeus
begins
to
conquer
and
shape
time
by giving
rise
to the demands of
ethical-spiritual development (p.
145).
This
figure
was
important
to Schiller
(Aesthetic Education, Twenty-fifth Letter, p. 120),
and to H?lderlin. See Emil
Staiger,
"H?lderlin's 'Nature and Art or Saturn
and
Jupiter'," European Literary Theory
and
Practice,
ed. Vernon Gras
(New
York:
Delta, 1973), pp. 167-81,
and
my "Heidegger's
Hermeneutic
Reading
of
H?lderlin," pp.
45-53.
704 MICHAEL MURRAY
presence
of
Spirit
is "absolute
presence"
or the full dilation of
Time,
not the constricted
present
of the natural Now.
This
argument
adds
complementary support
to our
interpreta
tion of Time in the
Phenomenology,
which we must conclude
by
not
ing
the close
proximity
between the
religious
and
philosophical
time
design
as
signaled
on the last
page
of the
Phenomenology.
This
page
speaks
in the
language
of the
"speculative
Good
Friday"
about the
"Golgotha
of Absolute
Spirit" (H., p. 564; M., p. 493).18
In
religious
terms,
this
Calvary
and Death is
prelude
to the advent of the
Holy
Spirit, experienced
first as a
darkening
of the world and then as a new
day.
What the
temporalization
means with
respect
to the dimension
of the
past
is
apparent
in the allusions to the
recollecting
and inward
izing
of the
"slow-moving
sucession" of
spiritual shapes
that lead
up
to the
phenomenological
science of these
shapes.
The futural dimen
sion of this
passage may
seem less
apparent,
and a
totalization of
Time
might
well seem to be
necessarily
futureless. To be sure each
shape, along
the
way,
finds its truth in a
future
shape
that
supplants
it,
and for which
Aufheben provides
the
syntax
of
temporal
progression.
But the future reference becomes evident as soon as we
note that the total
temporalization
of
Spirit
is first described as reach
ing
a state "sunk in the
night
of its self-consciousness"
(H., p. 563; M.,
p. 492),
and second followed in the
pentecostal
terms of the Patmos
hymn,
as
the
breakthrough
to a new order. This
unprecedented
nov
elty
is "the new
existence,
a new world and a new
shape
of
Spirit"
(H., p. 564; M., p. 492).
These words
get directly
reiterated in the
Vorrede in the those memorable remarks "that our
epoch
is a birth
time,"
and which
speaks
of a
"qualitative"
not
merely "quantitative"
change
or
leap occurring,
and which refers to the
laying
of a
"founda
tion" of a
building,
a "new
shape"
and "new world"
(??11-12; H., pp.
15-16; M., pp. 6-7).
This is the indeterminate future of
Spirit
knowing
itself
as
temporal. Consequently,
we must conclude that
the second side of the
Hegelian
eschaton is the end that constitutes a
new
beginning,
built on the
newly
established foundation of
temporal
ized
Spirit.
Can the foundation that structures and animates moder
nity
be
surpassed?
If we are to remain
modern, evidently
not. An
affirmative would
require
somehow a
breakdown of
modernity
that
was a
breakthrough
into a
post-modern
condition and a new sense of
18
Glauben und Wissen
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1962), p.
124.
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 705
Time. Such
a direction is
suggested by
the fact that the actual future
that followed the
Phenomenology
was a far
longer night
than
Hegel
ever
imagined.
Vassar
College.