Phenomenology of Spirit

Vivemos aliás numa época em que a universalidade do espírito está fortemente consolidada, e a singularidade, como convém, tornou-se tanto mais insignificante; época em que a universalidade se aferra a toda a sua extensão e riqueza acumulada e as reivindica para si. A parte que cabe à atividade do indivíduo na obra total do espírito só pode ser mínima. Assim, ele deve esquecer-se, como já o implica a natureza da ciência. Na verdade, o indivíduo deve vir-a-ser, e também deve fazer o que lhe for possível; mas não se deve exigir muito dele, já que tampouco pode esperar de si e reclamar para si mesmo" 1 .

The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me-ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness. The sense of me-ness reflects the being in mind alone, and the sense of whoness reflects being deeply within the awareness field. Whoness manifests most directly as pause and within the pause. The pause is unbound in betweeness…the space in between..transitional spaciousness. When the spaciousness of the breathless breath opens whoness can be felt as uncontained and unbound. Whoness is experiential openness….openess without a name or prior to name. We may say openness prior to mind. Dasein to use Heideggarian language. When the breathless breath manifests the experience is always mysterious. What does breathless breath mean? Breathless means no breath, there is no breath. The word breath here, in this context signifies that there is no breath but there is respiration. There is this inner most experience of no breath, no inhaling or exhaling of air and yet there is respiration. There is a respiration without breath and beyond breath. For instance, in the Kechari mudra this breathless breath experience takes place. The breath stops and yet there is an inner sense of breathless respiration. This experience of respiration without breath is described in various traditions of eastern philosophy. In the Dzogchen tradition Longchenpa describes the experience in his great text Words and Meaning. This

In "I that is We, We that is I", an international group of philosophers explore the many facets of Hegel’s formula which expresses the recognitive and social structures of human life. The book offers a guiding thread for the reconstruction of crucial motifs of contemporary thought such as the socio-ontological paradigm; the action-theoretical model in moral and social philosophy; the question of naturalism; and the reassessment of the relevance of work and power for our understanding of human life. This collection addresses the shortcomings of Kantian and constructivist normative approaches to social practices and practical rationality it involves. It sheds new light on Hegel’s take on metaphysics and puts into question some presuppositions of the post-metaphysical interpretative paradigm.
With essays by: Fred Neuhouser, Heikki Ikäheimo, Jean-François Kervégan, Luigi Ruggiu, Robert Stern, Arto Laitinen, Francesca Menegoni, Axel Honneth, Lucio Cortella, Luca Illetterati, Emmanuel Renault, Paolo Vinci, Italo Testa, Alfredo Ferrarin,  Franco Chiereghin, Leonardo Samonà, Geminello Preterossi

Examines why and how Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit develops Kant's unwritten final chapter, 'The History of Pure Reason', to develop a properly Critical epistemology, without transcendental idealism, and to reply to two opposed meta-critical forms of scepticism.

The analogy of being was introduced by Aristotle, and later thematised by Thomas Aquinas, as a special mode of grammar in which one term may signify two or more meanings, but in which each of the signified meanings derives its primary meaning by participating in one common meaning. The analogy of being thus decisively presupposes this metaphysic of participation. But this very pillar of participation is also the principal source of the aporia of analogy. In the Science of Logic, Hegel outlined how the quantitative ratio and the syllogism of analogy may be successively sublated into the Idea in what I call a ‘speculative analogy’. When Erich Przywara later re-formulated the analogy of being at the apogee of phenomenology, he implicitly opposed Schelling’s rhythmically oscillating opposition of contraries to Hegel’s sublation of contradictions. This conflict over contradiction has produced two competing models of analogy: Hegel’s analogical dialectics in which contradictory differences are meant to be sublated into the ‘absolute middle’ of the Idea; and Przywara’s dialectical analogy in which contrary opposites are meant to participate in the mysterious ‘suspended middle’ of God. Przywara criticizes Hegel for evacuating the mystery into concepts, but Hegel might respond by criticizing Przywara for withholding these mysteries beyond the concept. This comparison illustrates how Hegel’s Science of Logic cannot adequately resolve all contrary opposites in a speculative analogy unless the middle terms the syllogisms are re-read against the letter of Hegel’s text as the absolute middle of Christ in the Trinity.

"This treatise makes an outstandingly important contribution to the interpretation of the Phenomenology."  --H.S. Harris, The Owl of Minerva

A major criticism of Hegel's philosophy is that it fails to comprehend the experience of the body. In this book, John Russon shows that there is in fact a philosophy of embodiment implicit in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Russon argues that Hegel has not only taken account of the body, but has done so in a way that integrates both modern work on embodiment and the approach to the body found in ancient Greek philosophy.

Although Russon approaches Hegel's Phenomenology from a contemporary standpoint, he places both this standpoint and Hegel's work within a classical tradition. Using the Aristotelian terms of 'nature' and 'habit,' Russon refers to the classical distinction between biological nature and a cultural 'second nature.' It is this second nature that constitutes, in Russon's reading of Hegel, the true embodiment of human intersubjectivity. The development of spirit, as mapped out by Hegel, is interpreted here as a process by which the self establishes for itself an embodiment in a set of social and political institutions in which it can recognize and satisfy its rational needs. Russon concludes by arguing that self-expression and self-interpretation are the ultimate needs of the human spirit, and that it is the degree to which these needs are satisfied that is the ultimate measure of the adequacy of the institutions that embody human life.

This link with classicism - in itself a serious contribution to the history of philosophy -provides an excellent point of access into the Hegelian system. Russon's work, which will prove interesting reading for any Hegel scholar, provides a solid and reliable introduction to the study of Hegel.

Language is not simply about signs and signification. There is a tension between wording and word signs. Language is not simply the issue of signs and signification, but the emergence and manifestation of Being within human beings. The field of Being is unceasingly manifesting within human beings. The field of Being's manifestation of being within human beings may eventually become articulated as signs and symbols. The energetic manifestation of Being unfolds into signs and symbols of signification. Being manifests experientially as the felt sense of sublime vibrations and pulsations of energy becoming sound, sound becoming letters and letters becoming words and signifiers. In mind alone there is only the emphasis on the play of signification and the unfixed relations between signified and signifier. This is language as representation. This is also the language of reification. The language of awareness begins as the language of sublime vibrations, pulsations within the direct felt sense of inner experience. Mind alone is language as information. On the contrary the languaging of awareness within the awareness field is informing us and bringing us into the experience of beingness within the field of Being. Language within the field as the field expresses and manifests the energy of the word. The word, both written and spoken, is the energy of the field of Being embodied within us and expanding within us. The energetic field dimension of words and letters gives us and invokes within us the felt sense of Being. Language is the manifestation of Being within beings. Language is the medium of the field, just as the body is a medium of the field. Language and embodiment are co-emergent mediums of the field. Language arising within the body is a medium of the field within human embodiment. Language invokes the field, communicates the field and rides within and through the field. Sound is the vibration of field. Articulated sound is the field becoming words. As sounds are spoken, sound becomes syllables and letters arising from within our embodiment of the field. Our embodiment manifests configurations of the field. We are configurations of the field of awareness embodied in time and space. Sound and articulated syllables manifest the field within beings as Being. By giving Being to beings there is an opening for the symbolic signification and signifier. There is a felt difference in the relation and character of signifiers to significant within mind alone. Within the continuum of the awareness field, there is the self-manifestation of non-discursive experience becoming discursive experience. In mind alone signifiers are the representation of mind's ideation. Words arising within the embodiment of the field of awareness symbolize awareness. The symbolization of awareness experientially brings forth the sense of awareness in depth and breath and expresses the vast range of psyche. Language symbolizes awareness and language manifests awareness. Words symbolize the experiencing of the field within the field of Being as beingness. Words and beingness are in fluid intermingling oneness.

"John Russon offers a second volume on Hegel’s Phenomenology that emphasizes not the historical text but the pedagogy one might draw from serious consideration of Hegel’s description of the individual, social, and institutional structures of self-consciousness. It is particularly welcome, in this time where circumstances seem to exacerbate differences among cultures, classes, ethnicities, political arrangements and religions  Its logical lessons on the differences between the infinite and the finite, and the particular and the universal point to solutions that involve not totalitarian flight to abstract (or imposed) universals, religious or political, but a patient abiding with difference and exploration of the particularity of human social organization — “ethicality” or Sittllichkeit. The book’s language is fluid and jargon-free; the Hegelian experiential lessons it expounds would be useful in both higher-level undergraduate and graduate courses. They are supported by an exoskeleton of textual scholarship, including German citations and a brief history of 20th century Francophone Hegel interpretation. I find the book engaging, deep, and useful." Michael Vater, NDPR

"The 15 chapters each focus on a section of Hegel's book, making this an excellent resource in a course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers." —Choice

In Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, John Russon uses the theme of reading to clarify the methods, premises, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions developed in Hegel’s seminal text. Russon’s approach facilitates comparing major sections and movements of the text, and demonstrates that each section of Phenomenology of Spirit stands independently in its focus on the themes of human experience. Along the way, Russon considers the rich relevance of Hegel’s philosophy to understanding other key Western philosophers, such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. Major themes include language, embodiment, desire, conscience, forgiveness, skepticism, law, ritual, multiculturalism, existentialism, deconstruction, and absolute knowing. An important companion to contemporary Hegel studies, this book will be of interest to all students of Hegel’s philosophy.

This paper aims to elaborate on some of the possible connections between Hegel and Lacan. Subjectivity, negativity and desire will be the guiding notions of this endeavor, as they are fundamentally intertwined in both thinkers. A comparative analysis of their respective articulations will enrich our understanding thereof, while warding off misunderstandings of their respective positions.
The paper will start with an interpretation of the mirror stage, the master-slave dialectic and the distinctiveness of human desire, which will prepare the subsequent Lacanian reading of three basic Hegelian concepts: determinate negation, mediation and experience. Here the main point of reference will be Slavoj Žižek’s defence of “Hegel’s madness” against Robert Brandom’s “renormalizing” interpretation. The paper ends with an outline of what Hegel could mean by “grasping substance equally as subject”.

This paper explores some uncertainties arising from the question of what theology might contribute to social anthropology. It offers reflections on the proposal by Joel Robbins in ‘Theology and Anthropology: An Awkward Relationship’ (2006) and contrasts its approach with some recent work by Timothy Jenkins. I read both anthropologists as bearers of the legacy of GWF Hegel (1770-1831). Robbins and Jenkins are described here as reprising Hegel’s account of the struggle of Enlightenment against superstition, but in different ways.

This paper shows how the concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (total or universal work of art), which originated as 'Artwork of the Future' in Richard Wagner's 'Zurich Writings', is rooted in Wagner's reading of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit', particularly of the section on 'Das geistige Kunstwerk' (The Spiritual Work of Art). Wagner's conceptions of a 'Kunstwerk der Zukunft' and a universal 'Kunstgenossenschaft' must be interpreted as a failed attempt to provide a solution for the negative deadlock of modernity and thus an alternative to today's total work of art: capitalism.

In "Sense-Certainty" Hegel establishes "the now that is many nows" as the form of experience.  This has implications for the interpretation of later figures within the Phenomenology of Spirit: specifically, the thing (from Chapter 2), the living body (from Chapter 4), and the ethical community (from Chapter 6) are each significantly different forms of such a "now" in which the way that past and future are held within the present differs.  Comparing these changing "temporalities" allows us to defend Hegel's distinction between nature and spirit, and his claim that only spirit has a history.  This comparison also allows us to see how it is that phenomenological philosophy, and the "end of history" that it announces, is a stance of openness to the future.

An inclusive diagnosis of the pathologies of recognition needs to regard the critique of ideology as one of its necessary components. In contrast to many other living creatures and species, humans and their communities relate to their reproductive ends interpretively. Thus, it might well be that a pathological condition, that is, a systematic deviation from reproductive ends making social life ‘dead’ or ‘ill,’ is being maintained precisely by these creatures’ interpreting the ‘false’ situation ‘falsely.’ Yet I will argue that a crucial point of both ideology and its critique, as “moments” of a recognition theoretical diagnosis of social pathologies, must be that ideology is never fully false. In the broader context of a critical theory of society this demands a reinvestigation of Adorno’s claim that, in ideology, the true and the false are deeply interwoven (Adorno 2003, 465). In the following, I will draw upon Hegel’s phenomenological analysis of Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness as intellectual reactions to social pathology. I will argue that, in Hegel’s view, the true and the false are held together in ideology by its being recognitively educational: ideology presents both a moment of social pathology and a moment of its overcoming. It gives, so to speak, artificial respiration to a social life fallen ill.

I discuss the critique of Kant in *Anti-Oedipus*, but also consider how Deleuze and Guattari have written the book to parallel the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason.  I then consider how their analysis of desire in this work compares to Hegel's analysis of desire in the Phenomenology of Spirit.  I conclude that Hegel's notion of the "desire for recognition" is insufficiently accounted for by Deleuze and Guattari.

This paper examines how and why Hegel's own positive thesis regarding equal mutual recognition and its constitutive role in individual rational judgment is explicated and justified, not in 'Lord & Bondsman', but requires scrutinizing a host of individualist views right up to the end of 'Spirit', in 'Evil and its Forgiveness'.

In the history of interpretations of Hegel, how one reads the chapter on ‘Absolute Knowing’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit deter­mines one’s whole perspective. In fact, Marx’s only comments on the Phenomenology concern this final chapter, taking it as the very “secret” of Hegel’s philosophy. But what is the secret hidden within the thicket of this impenetrable prose? My suggestion is that it turns on a very specific meaning of the “abolition of time” that Hegel describes in the very last paragraphs. But the meaning of this idea is not what Marx criticized in his last Manuscript of 1844, that is, it is not simply a form of idealism which abolishes the finitude of man. Rather this relationship to time accepts such finitude, making it the central axis upon which the possibility of freedom turns. In this paper, I will present a reading of Absolute Knowing that focuses on the meaning of overcoming time, and connect it to some thoughts on “disposable time” that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse.

Brandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. pp. xiv + 836. In the last thirty years, there has been a remarkable renaissance of interest in Hegelian philosophy in the Anglophone world, and Robert Brandom has been one of the main reasons for it. His new book, the culmination of his long engagement with Hegel's Phenomenology, is supposed not only to show us the way forward in philosophy but also, he says, to cure many of our social ills. His reconstruction of Hegel's idealism is, as he says early on, 'a semantics with an edifying intent' that will make us 'better people' (p. 32). It will usher in a 'spirit of trust'. This is a tall order for a book on anybody, including one on Hegel. Brandom's book is an instance of a genre-'Here's what I in particular make of large parts of Hegel's book'-and, although scholarly, it ignores almost entirely all the other secondary literature on the topic. The real interlocutors of the book are Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, a smor-gasbord of some of the major analytical philosophers of the twentieth century, but not other Hegel interpreters. Nonetheless, given the fact that Brandom's own account of the Phenomenology is much longer than the already fabulously long original book itself, this neglect of the secondary literature is probably overall a good thing. This is a big book in all the senses of the term. Brandom simply eschews the traditional neo-Platonist, neo-Aristotelian and neo-Spinozistic interpretations to argue instead that the emphasis on Geist is really about a kind of inferentialist semantics grounded in a norma-tive pragmatics, an expanded and refined version of the same position he has defended eloquently over the last few decades. This encompasses the Sellarsian idea that concepts are the kind of things that normatively mediate inferences (and are thus primarily not to be understood in representationalist terms) and that the semantics of these concepts themselves cannot be adequately comprehended unless we understand those inferences in pragmatic terms, that is, in terms of what we are doing when we do things like, to take a paradigmatic example, make judgments.  Mind, Vol. 0. 0. September 2019 ß Mind Association

Determining the character of the relationship between universals and particulars, or between general claims and determinate examples thereof is a central concern for epistemology. Hegel examines the theme of examples in relation to knowledge in the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit. He argues that “sense-certainty” – the epistemological stance that takes immediacy to be the criterion for knowledge – fails to recognize the role played by examples in knowledge and experience. Although the theme of example is not explicitly dealt with elsewhere in the text, the question of the relation between universal and particular in knowledge is a crucial one for the Phenomenology of Spirit as a whole. The present study aims to develop the conception of example that is implied within Hegel’s text as a whole.

In addition to attempting a resolution of a number of the criticisms raised against Hegel’s account of “sense-certainty,” the first chapter develops the implications of Hegel’s claim that sense-certainty fails to appreciate the fact that it relies upon a determinate conception of the nature of examples, which undercuts its claims to immediate knowledge. The second chapter focuses upon experimental knowledge, and shows that the turn to experiment in epistemology can be interpreted as an attempt to rethink the nature of examples as they relate to knowledge. Hegel’s basic criticism of the “experimental conception of knowledge” is contrasted with a number of the criticisms that have been raised by recent investigations of experimental practices. Chapters three and four examine Hegel’s conception of self-knowledge, and show that a number of the problems raised within the previous forms of knowing are resolved within the sphere of self-consciousness and “Spirit.” In particular, the final chapter shows that the kind of self-knowing that takes place in the phenomenon of “conscientious forgiveness” has a universality that is attentive to the particularity of the situation wherein it arises. It is argued that to this form of knowledge there corresponds a conception of example – that of “exemplary selfhood” – that can successfully resolve the problem of the relation between universal and particular in knowledge with which the study begins.

In this paper, I develop the notion of the inner plurality of the rational form of life as it is at play in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The guiding idea is that our ›spiritual‹ form of life is essentially plural and diverse. Hegel offers us way of seeing why this is the case.

This thesis examines the Master-Slave Dialectic, gives an exegesis of and interprets the Dialectic and relevant sections therein. I first argue that what occurs in the Master-Slave Dialectic is a paradigmatic example of Hegel's view of the dialectical shifts, and that these dialectical shifts can be read as changes in identity. I then examine critiques of Hegel's views on identity and respond through the lenses of terror of death, anxiety, and work.

Hegel's specifi c interpretation of burial rituals in the Phenomenology is an important part of his general understanding of the development of human freedom and of spirit. For Hegel, freedom is not something immediately given, but something that must be realized by way of the self's ongoing practical engagement with the world, and in particular by way of the self's transformation of the otherwise meaningless realm of nature into a vehicle for realizing a specifi cally human meaning. The practice of burial rites is construed as accomplishing such a transformation, and thereby as a crucial manner in which this dialectic between freedom and nature is played out. Attention is paid to Hegel's conception of the earth as the material condition for freedom's self-realization, and the symbolic dimension of burial rites is shown to have implications for Hegel's overall theory of human agency.

It is the argument of this paper that Robert Pippin is wrong. What he is wrong about is, depending on one's point of view, either very interesting or exceedingly dull. I argue that he is wrong about the plausibility of his own non-metaphysical idealism. For such non- or anti-metaphysical idealism is, whatever else it is, very likely quite false to the facts of Hegel's idealism and for that reason inadequate to address the philosophical issues which Hegel's idealism raises. But this is to say that Pippin's position is a very implausible position to take concerning the truth about Hegel. I have endeavored to show, at least schematically, that and how all this is so. (This paper was written for a graduate seminar at Villanova University)

The idea that physical and organic structures reoccur on the level of social life is central to the social-critical use of the concept of an “outer second nature” (Testa 2007, 488). In what follows, I will suggest that Hegel’s dialectic of “Lordship and Bondage” offers valuable insights for a critical social ontology of second nature and, in particular, for developing the idea of social philosophy as a diagnosis and therapy of social pathologies (Laitinen & Särkelä 2018). In this famous passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit, death and disease namely reappear on a spiritual level of life in novel, distinctively social shapes, namely, death as “Lordship” and disease as “Bondage.” A peculiar feature of Hegel’s diagnosis of “Lordship and Bondage” is that instead of taking social pathology as a dysfunction of a social organism, he expands the diagnosis by critically describing precisely the healthy organic reproduction as the death of a genuinely spiritual life-form. What on the level of organic life still was healthy in the sense of a frictionless self-maintenance, cannot mean anything else than death and disease to spiritual life.  “Lordship,” I will argue, presents the basic form of spiritual or social death (2). Moreover, similarly to diseases in organic life, which Hegel in his philosophy of nature interprets as both tendencies towards and struggles against death, “Bondage” can serve both to reproduce and to transcend the relationship of domination; therefore, so goes the second claim, “Bondage” can be represented as the basic spiritual or social form of disease (3). First, however, the experiential story must be caught up with by briefly looking at the transition from the “Struggle onto Life and Death” to “Lordship and Bondage” (1).

Hegel acknowledged that states are compelled to colonial expansion in order to accommodate the structural effects of a capitalist system that sets modern property right in motion. Hegel did not, however, acknowledge the origins of modern right in European colonial practices themselves, for the expansionary activities of European states pass without comment in his narrative of modern right’s emergence in his Philosophy of Right, Phenomenology of Spirit, and Lectures on the Philosophy of History. In this article, I situate European colonial practices within the development of modern right, freedom, and jurisdiction in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; argue that the need to justify jurisdictional expansion was pivotal in the development of modern subjective right and thus should have been included in the Phenomenology; and support this conclusion with two developments in natural rights theory—in the works of Francisco de Vitoria and John Locke—that emerge from European colonial activity. The result is an emendation to Hegel’s philosophy of European (colonialist) history.

While Hegel’s discussion of the “speculative sentence” occurs in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, commentators rarely link it to the larger program of this text. Instead, this discussion has typically been received as a guide to the Science of Logic’s presentation, as an independent theory of judgment, or as a reflection on the constraints and capacities of language generally. In this paper I argue that the speculative sentence can and should be linked to the Phenomenology itself. Specifically, I show that Hegel’s discussion both mirrors and supplements the “Introduction’s” explication of immanent phenomenological method. Establishing this parallel in turn allows us to identify a class of sentences throughout the Phenomenology as properly speculative and methodologically substantive. At the same time, this interpretation helps clarify several characteristics that Hegel ascribes to the speculative sentence, but which have gone unaddressed by commentators.

An Analysis of “Unhappy Consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
In this paper, I analyze the “Unhappy Consciousness” (“das unglückliches Bewußtsein”, ¶ 206- 230) according to German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s account in his Phenomenology of Spirit. I argue that the Hegelian account of the “Unhappy Consciousness” (¶ 206- 230) undergoes “three different ways” (¶ 210), or experiences, which result in the emergence of a new “object” (¶ 230), namely “Reason” (¶ 231- 437). Further, I argue that the philosophical significance of the Hegelian account of the “Unhappy Consciousness” lies, ultimately, in that it provides the transition between self-consciousness and “the idea of "Reason"” (¶ 230).

Lars von Trier's film, Nymphomaniac, explores a female protagonist's, Joe's, bodily suffering and pleasure from the age of two to fifty. We are first introduced to Joe by her beaten body. Joe is found by Seligman who wants to hear her story. This story, which concerns her sexual journeys, has a strong metaphysical component and involves a type of spiritual self-laceration through the body. While one may expect a film about sex to concern the orgasmic, the film instead shows a failed attempt at union. Using Hegel's account of the Geist's (Spirit/Mind's) enervation in Phänomenologie des Geistes/The Phenomenology of Spirit, I will contend that Lars von Trier's film is about starvation as much as it is about excess, both bodily and psychical. Hegel describes Geist as defeated in its triumph and always looking for a fulfillment that cannot occur. While Hegel does provide a teleological narrative of the human spirit's movement, spiritual perfection – Geist's union with its surroundings – is always in some sense beyond the Geist. Likewise, Nymphomaniac's narrative moves through time, but is empty of any sense of place. This article argues that Joe is forever a purgatorial identity, a physical manifestation of tortured Hegelian Geist.

In contrast to those interpretations that understand Hegel's notorious notion of Aufhebung (supersession) as the unchanged activity of the philosophical subject (spirit) as determined from the standpoint of the consummation of the system of science, this essay will show that, within the Phenomenology of Spirit, supersession is dialectically produced in and across the "course" of experience. By attending to the transformation of supersession as it unfolds in the "Introduction," first three chapters and the first section of the fourth chapter, I will expose the manner in which supersession is procedurally reflected in the context of the experience of a particular mode of consciousness. In other words, this essay offers a detailed commentary on the development of supersession as the structure of dialectical development.

In this paper I analyze recognition as a kind of power. I analyze the notion of power in the general sense as some sort of causal capacity, and introduce the distinction between the active power of doing something and the passive power of undergoing something. Such a distinction is needed in order to capture some central features of the phenomenon of recognition, and in particular the way that ‘being recognized’ and ‘recognizing’ are intertwined. I then argue in favor of both the conceptual and genetic priority of the passive power of being recognized over the active power of recognizing. Furthermore, I introduce the notion of ‘attractor’ of recognition as a way to analyze some relevant features of the phenomenon of ‘being-recognized’. My approach to recognition as some kind of power, should here offer some tools not only to bridge the gap between the theory of recognition and the theory of power, but also to get the passive side of both power and recognition right. This could provide a more plausible and phenomenologically adequate understanding of both, and be useful to help capture and read anew within a recognitive grounding of critical theory some aspects of the contemporary debate on biopolitics.

This articles examines the relation between time and concept in Hegel, with a particular attention to the final pages of Phenomenology of Spirit where the cancellation of time is discussed. The main objective of my analysis is to delineate two possible identifications of time and concept in the context of Italian translation of the sentence: " Time is the concept itself that exists there " (Zeit ist der Begriff, der da ist). The problematization begins with the question whether omission of the comma in Italian translation leads to the ontological radicalization of Hegel's thought. Having firstly taken into consideration Kojève's reading of the identity between time and concept, and secondly Vattimo's translation of Gadamer's sentence "Das Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache " , the paper points out that " translating without a comma " introduces a hermeneutical dimension of Hegel's absolute knowing through which there is no conceptuality beyond temporality. On the other side, this conclusion will shed new light on the theme of cancellation or annihilation of time: what is annihilated is not time as such, but a certain modus of time, allowing exactly the passage to the history and its constitution as begriffene Geschichte. In that regard the paper also deals with Heidegger's critique of the vulgar conception of time and with Derrida's readings as well.

Hegel’s conception of Spirit does not subordinate difference to sameness, in a way that would make it unusable for a genuinely intersubjective idealism directed to a comprehensive account of the contemporary world. A close analysis of the logic of recognition and the dialectic of conscience in the Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates that the unity of Spirit emerges in and through conflict, and is forged in the process whereby particular encounters between differently situated individuals reveal and establish the emerging character and significance of the stances they uniquely occupy.

Robert Brandom’s semantic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit culminates in an account of an ideal form of reciprocal recognition that we are always already committed to whenever we apply a concept, but that still awaits its concrete realization in an adequate recognitive practice replacing modernity. This future practice will be a “postmodern” form of ethical life that is based on a commitment to “forgiveness”, a willingness to offer rational reconstructions of past concept applications. On Brandom’s reading, Hegel describes the form of reciprocal recognition that is characteristic of postmodern ethical life in the account of forgiveness that concludes the Spirit chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In this article, I explore practical consequences of Brandom’s account of postmodern ethical life (PEL). I argue that it is possible to derive moral norms from Brandom’s account of PEL, but that this account at the same time has implications regarding the way we should understand each other’s actions which are morally not acceptable by PEL’s own lights. Among other things, PEL leaves no room for moral critique, and it makes us helpless against covert manipulation
and oppression by powerful agents. I therefore conclude that the normative structure of PEL is inconsistent.

Es ist ein aus der Tradition nur zu vertrauter Gedanke, dass sich Mensch und Tier dadurch unterscheiden, dass Menschen im Unterschied zu Tieren wesentlich selbstbewusste Wesen sind. Wenn wir Hegels Naturphilosophie und seine Philosophie des Geistes betrachten, dann ist offensichtlich, dass auch Hegel ganz explizit von einem solchen Kontrast Gebrauch macht: Obwohl tierisches Leben nach Hegels Charakterisierung bereits durch eine basale Form von Subjektivität und Selbstgefühl gekennzeichnet ist, weist es dennoch nicht jene Form von Selbstbezug auf, die Hegel Selbstbewusstsein nennt und dem geistigen Leben vorbehält. Tiere können so zwar als „selbstisch“ , nicht aber im vollen Sinne als selbstbewusst bestimmt werden: sie erscheinen uns als selbsthaft, sind aber nicht für sich selbst ein Selbst. Was Hegel nun aber gegenüber der Tradition auszeichnet, ist die Art und Weise, in der er das fragliche geistige Selbstbewusstsein zugleich so charakterisiert, dass es wesentlich auf das animalische Leben bezogen bleibt. Um die Art dieses Bezugs etwas weiter zu erhellen, werde ich im Folgenden einen berüchtigten Übergang in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes untersuchen, der sich am Anfang des Selbstbewusstseinskapitels befindet. An diesem Übergang zeigt sich, dass sich das Selbstbewusstsein nicht nur wesentlich an einem Bewusstsein des Lebens gewinnt, sondern auch in seiner Verwirklichung auf das Leben verwiesen bleibt.