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4 / GENERALITIES work emerged. It is literally an introduction only to the first three moments of the book, that is, consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason. The content of the last part of the book, which contains the especially important arguments on spirit and on religion, exceeds the Phenomenology as the latter is defined stricto sensu in the introduction. Hegel seems to have inserted something into the framework of the phenomenological development which he had not at first meant to include. For the moment, we shall be content with this observation, without which we could not understand the precise scope of the introduction. But we shall return to this question when we study the structure of the book. We mean to analyze the introduction as closely as possible. Moreso than the preface, it allows us to determine both the meaning of the work that Hegel wished to write and what the technique of phenomenological development was for him. The preface is an hors d'oeuvre; it contains general information on the goal that Hegel set for himself and on the relation between his work and other philosophic treatises on the same subject. The introduction, on the contrary, is an integral part of the book: it poses and locates the problem, and it determines the means to resolve it. First, Hegel defines how the problem of knowledge is posed for him. In some respects he returns to the point of view of Kant and Fichte. The Phenomenology is not a noumenology or an ontology, but it remains, nonetheless, a knowledge of the absolute. For what else is there to be known if "only the absolute is true, or only the true is absolute" (PE, I, 67; PG, 65; PM, 133)?3 .But instead oLpnilsenting knowledge of the absolute in-and-for-itse:I.£, Hegl_ considers knowledge as it is present in consciousness, and it is from considering the self-criticism of this phenomenal knowledge that he rises to absolute knowledge. Second, Hegel defines the Phenomenology as the development and the formation of natural consciousness and its progression to science, that is to say, to philosophic knowledge, to knowledge of the absolute. He indicates the necessity of an evolution of consciousness and, at the same time, the end point of this evolution. Finally, he specifies the technique of phenomenological development, showing how this development is the work of consciousness engaged in experience and how the [internal] necessity of this development can be thought out retrospectively by philosophy. 3. See Translators' Preface, p. xi, for a discussion of editions of the Phenomenology.
Meaning and Method of the Phenomenology / 5 1. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE : IDEA OF A PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE PHILOSOpmC WORKS that Hegel wrote in Jena before the Phenomenology, he criticized all propaedeutics to philosophy. One cannot, he argued, remain like Reinhold, forever in the square before the temple. I>hilosophy is not a lOgiC, an organon, which, before knowledge, deals with the instrument Qtknowledge. Nor is it a love of truth that is not the possession of truth. It is science and, as Schelling claimed, science of the absolute. Beginning with his essays on the philosophy of nature, Schelling had contraposed an ontological conception to the philosophy of reflection of Kant and Fichte. He argued that instead of halting at the point of reflection, at the knowledge of knowledge, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the object to be known, whether it be called nature, the universe, or absolute reason. Such, too, was Hegel's view, in "Differenz," as well as in the article "Glaub en und Wissen oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjectivitat" ["Faith and Knowledge, or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity," hereafter "Glaub en und Wissen"trans.] in the Kritische Journal der Philosophie. In the latter, Hegel reproached Kant's transcendental idealism with having remained a subjectivism despite its deduction of the categories. The basis of Kant's merely critical philosophy had not, according to Hegel, progressed beyond Locke: "Kantian thought is true to its principle of subjectivism and of formal thought in that its essence consists in critical idealism." 4 By intending to be "a critical examination of human understanding," it condemns itself to being unable to move beyond its starting point. The ' final subjectivism is only a consequence of the point of departure. It is necessary to pass beyond the critical point of view and, as with Schelling, to start straight off with the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective in knowledge. The knowledge of this identity is primary and it constitutes the asis of all true philosophic knowledge. In his introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel again takes up his criticism of any philosophy that is only a theory of knowledge. And yet, as all commentators have noted, in some respects the Phenomenology clearly marks a return to the point 4. Hegel, Erste Druckschriften, p. 235; for fuller information on Hegel's works, see "List of Hegel's Works Cited," p. xiii.
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