selection one - Sound and Signifier

History and Phenomenology / 35
own objective Dasein as world history"), and also in the passage
at the end of the book where he contraposes, in a more ambiguous
way, the free temporal development of history to the
conceptual history that the Phenomenology is (PE, II, 313; PG,
564; PM, 808).11 In many other passages, he speaks of a "world
spirit," the development of which is distinct from the phenomenological
development.1.2 Besides, we need but look at the content
of the Phenomenology to rule out the hypothesis that the Phenomenology
is properly speaking the philosophy of world history
in its entirety.
The role of history in the Phenomenology is so great that
Haym could define the book as "a transcendental psychology
vitiated by history and a history vitiated by transcendental psychology."
13 But history does not play the same role throughout
the book. In what we will call the first part of the Phenomenology,
including the major sections, "Consciousness," "Self-consciousness,"
and "Reason," the only one$ which remain in the
Propaedeutic and in the Encyclopaedia, history plays little more
than the role of example. It allows concrete ir.ustration of what,
according to Hegel, is a novel and a necessary development of
consciousness. These historical illustrations occur especially in
the most concrete chapters, on self-consciousness and on reason.
Self-consciousness is fornied in the relations of the struggle
b e tween opposed self-consciousnesses and that between mm::t e r
and slave, struggles which, properly speaking, are not temporal,
clthough they can be found at the origin of all human civilizations
and reproduce themselves in different forms throughout
the history of humanity. The developments that follow evoke
more precisely particular moments of human history : stoicism,
skepticism, and unhappy consciousness. Though generally stingy
with historical detail and proceeding always by allusions, Hegel
does not hesitate to say, after having described in abstract terms
the self-consciousnAss that has raised itself to autonomy, mat
"when this liberty of self-consciousness enters the history of the
II. More precisely, Hegel appears to dtstinguish a temporal
development some of whose manifestations are continent, a science
of phenomena] knowledge (the Phenomenology), and a philosophy
of history which will b part of the system proper and will genuinely
be history conceptualized in-and-for-itself.
12. See especially PE, I, 16g, 198, etc.; PG, 152, 175; PM, 243,
272, as well as the passages from the preface on which we comment
below.
13. R. Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1927), p. 243 (originally
published in 1857)·