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48 / G ENE R A L IT I E S it a pathway that is not only Hegel's but that carries in the particularity of its history a universal significance. Much more ponderously than Descartes, and in a far different spirit (instead of rejecting prior history we must integrate it within ourselves and rethink it in order to supersede it), Hegel sets forth what is universally valid in his particular journey. The road, like Descartes's, is a road of doubt, even of desperate doubt, but that doubt is not the result of a resolution taken once and for all. On the contrary, it is the "detailed history of the formation of consciousness itself to science." Perhaps when Hegel wrote this phrase, which occurs in the: introduction, he was specifically thinking of Descartes and comparing their two journeys. But by what right can this route, which is tied to particular contingencies, be called a science? How can it present a genuine necessity? Of course the necessity is seen only at the end of the voyage, when the philosopher rethinks what appeared to be offered to him as contingency. And, as we know, Hegel later suppressed the subtitle, "First Part of Science." 26 But the introduction, and the preface as well, insist on the scientific nature of the whole development. Subsequently, Hegel preserves under the name "phenomenology" only the first moments, and only in their most abstract and most general form. The problem is no longer posed then, but by the same token the Phenomenology no longer has the character of a concrete philosophical journey, a character which makes it one of the most beautiful works of philosophic literature. Without claiming completely to resolve the problem of the necessity of the phenomenolOgical development, as that development is presented in 1807, we can quote something Hegel wrote several years earlier : "Man can and must connect the imperishable and the sacred to the contingent." In his thought of the eternal, man binds the eternal to the contingency of his thought: The Phenomenology appears as a science because from the route of the formation of individually and historically conditioned consciousness it extracts the moments by means of which that path is simultaneously the path of the formation of consciousness 26. In the new edition of the Phenomenology which he was working on before his death.
History and Phenomenology / 49 to science, that is, the path through which consciousness becomes universal and rises above every conditioned situation.21 Th abstractly individual consciousness is l:!- consciousness only because it opposes itself and is thus simultaneously universal consciousness. But universal consciousness is not merely abstractly universal; it is absolute consciousness only insofar as it opposes itself and is individual. Beginning with his earliest writings, Hegel tried to think through the unity of particular consciousness and universal consciousness. He struggled-as Sophocles had in Antigone and Shakespeare in Hamlet-to bring to life characters who embody a moment of human history. He wrote several "lives of Jesus," but unlike Kant, for instance, for whom Jesus was the sensuous outline of morality, Hegel tried to grasp the irreducible individuality of Christ and at the same time, by deepening his particularity, to discover the universal in him . For: Hegel philosophic doctrines are not abstract doctrines, they are ways of life. Skepticism, stoicism, unhappy consciousness, the moral world view : these are expositions not of philosophic thought but of experiences of life. Their human universality is fulfilled only in the actual experience of a particular consciousness. But, conversely, the meaning of that actual experience lies only in a thought that is universal. Thus the pre-Revolutionary period in France is embodied for Hegel in the lacerated consciousness of culture, and the Terror is interpreted as a certain "metaphysics." 28 This attempt to gather up the universal and the particular into spiritual individuality is what makes Hegelianism, and especially the Phenomenology, interesting. Hegel refuses to choose between an existentialism (like Kierkegaard's ) which, according to him , would be abstract -an existentialism in which individuality is unique and resists transcribing its life situation in the code of universality-and a universalism that would exclude actual experience. The truth lies in their unity : that truth which also is life, as the life of spirit is truth. To understand the meaning of the phenomenological development and its relation to world history it 27. Kroner, Von Kant his Hegel, II, 379. The passage from Hegel is in Early Theological Writings, p. I72. 28. PE, II, 79; PG, 372; PM, 543-44, where Rameau's nephew embodies the laceration of consciousness, and PE, II, I36; PG, 4I9; PM, 605, where the Terror, Robespierre, and the Law of Suspects are interpreted in the light of a certain metaphysics.
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