{259} (cont’d)

Classical logic would say that a judgment has a clear structure. We have the basic scheme of judgment (prescinding from subtleties or complications), which is the one Hegel operates with, S is P. Any judgment has a subject, a predicate, and its unity —regardless of the type of this unity— is affirmed precisely by the copula is, A is B, S is P. Putting it this way, the P of the predicate (for example, the dog is alive) represents a property the subject has and precisely by the subject having it, the understanding —which places itself outside the subject, outside the thing and makes concepts of it— predicates the content of this concept of the subject. Thus, life is a property as profound and radical as it may be of the dog, but a property of his, the dog has it. This, Hegel says, is a logical proposition.

However, this is a truth, which is only penultimate, because the ultimate truth is more profound. The ultimate truth is not that the dog may be living, but exactly the reverse, that the living, hic et nunc, is this dog. This is what Hegel calls a speculative proposition. Here the terms are inverted, it is not the case {260} that the subject may have a predicate, but that the subject is what it is thanks precisely to the fact that the predicate determines it in its internal characteristics. The subject is not something that externally receives some predicates together with the objective contents of the concepts, but something that is duly conformed by the predicate, what classical logic attributes to it from the outside. The speculative proposition, Hegel says, is strictly the reverse of the logical proposition. The logical proposition starts from a subject and attributes a predicate to it. On the other hand, the speculative proposition places itself fully in the predicate and tries to find out, by an internal motion of the predicate —the life of the concept—, how it constitutes the subject, the dog I have right in front of me.

Some may think this is a notable artificiality. True, but those like us who are not philosophers in the Hegel style and have memories of history (the only thing we can have) think, for example, that St. Thomas said the transcendentals do not divide, but contract themselves in each of the things. For Hegel, that would be the case for every concept and not just for the transcendentals. There is contraction by other concepts and by other determinations to be in a particular way the object I have in front of me.

Let us not think that philosophies are monstrosities. Philosophies are not made by individuals who make mistakes with their reasoning. If they make mistakes they happen at the starting point. At any rate, in the logical proposition all the physical and transcendental properties of a subject are gathered in a predicate that is predicated with truth of that subject. On the other hand, the speculative proposition involves the sense of saying that in the speculative what is called “subject” is the constitution of something by virtue of its predicates. These predicates do not have the characteristic of being property of a subject, but of {261} being the “conformed” life of the very reality of the subject. The transcendental order, which in St. Thomas appears as the order of the magis communia, of the most common characteristics of being insofar as created, in Kant it acquires the character of constituting principle of the object for my intellection as such. But in Hegel it is something much more radical, it is the conforming order of things insofar as things; therefore, the subject is the result of the predicate. The subject is not sub-predicated under the predicate, but is constituted by the predicate itself.

From this point on, Hegel will be able to tell us something that has always seemed like an exaggeration; “the truth of the concrete is always the general”. Now we can understand it. The concrete is precisely constituted by the internal life of concepts, by their mutual syntheses, and the truth of what is concrete resides precisely in that which we call general. In the end, Hegel will say that truth is always what is general.

As we can see, reason is nothing but the life of the concept and the concept as begreiffendes Denken is that which involves at one and the same time the reality and the certainty of things. This is precisely reason, towards which Hegel aims the absolute, to constitute in it the transcendental truth. It is not the case of reason as something extrinsic to the very absolute, but on the contrary, as the radical and ultimate way, according to which the absolute is such, that is, absolutely true.

With this we have somewhat expounded the terminus of Phenomenology of Spirit. But we still have to ask how does Hegel reach this concept of reason? That is the third point.

Hegel —the first line of Phenomenology of Spirit affirms it— starts from consciousness. Man is aware of some things: he knows them, faces them, perceives them and {262} is aware (ist bewust); has a conscience (Bewust-sein). Conscience is something each and every one of us has, and is the first thing Hegel is going to use to try to investigate what reason may be. Let us say, then, that conscience means more or less being aware of something, i.e., it is knowing insofar as being aware. Certainly, this is not easy to say, particularly in the case of Hegel because he against all previous philosophy since Descartes not only will not identify conscience with reason, but also will excise them radically. However, we are still going to attempt the way of conscience and try to reach reason.

The difference is going to be that reason, as seat or if you will as expression of the truth of what the thing is, does not appear as such in conscience. It appears simply as a consciousness that I as an individual have “of” the thing. And precisely because it is not absolute knowledge, absolute reason, but is the way it appears to consciousness, Hegel just calls it a phenomenon, the analysis of which is taken up in the Phenomenology¹. It is a phenomenon, a phaínesthai, precisely because it appears in the form of consciousness². In order for this to be such, this consciousness is going to undergo an experience (Erfahrung), of which we have to ask what is its object, what is the form in which this experience is realized, and what is the process of this experience.

{263} In the first place, the object of the experience, as we have just indicated. In my conscience I have knowledge “of” things that are there in a dual form. My knowledge of what they are appears there radically under the form of conscience. But the object Hegel searches for is not the form in which this absolute knowledge appears. Through the form in which it appears, he is trying to arrive to the phaivómenon, the phaínesthai, to what absolute knowledge is itself as true absolute knowledge. It is the case of being and not of the way absolute knowledge appears, of the knowledge of knowledge, the knowledge that not only involves as concept the unity of the thing and certainty, but also knows itself in that unity.

In the second place, the way Hegel is going to undertake to accomplish this consists in submitting conscience to a kind of progressive development of what conscience is insofar as conscience. This submission is what Hegel calls the “dialectic of experience” (Dialetik der Erfahrung) because it is the dialectic of how this absolute knowledge continues to appear in the different forms of conscience until it reaches the point of knowing itself as such absolute knowledge. Needless to say that this dialectic is not the one that is going to appear in the Logic, which is not a dialectic of how knowledge appears, but the internal and constitutive dialectic of reason itself and of knowledge as such. Putting it briefly, what Hegel does here is an experience, to understand through experience the configuration that the whole of conscience, insofar as conscience, is acquiring as form of manifestation of absolute knowledge. This internal dialectic, this dialectic of experience is not a dialectic of different acts of conscience, but is the complete development of conscience as a Gestalt, in its total configuration, with analytic phases, and of how it is conformed in different forms, with some necessarily emerging from others. In {264} each form the entire conscience is always present, but always with different forms³.

In the third place, Hegel describes the process by which some forms of conscience emerge from others in six points.

a) Let us start from the most trivial, from conscience. We have “consciousness-of”, for example, this glass of water. Here is this glass of water, I am aware that this glass of water exists, I have a series of perceived objects endowed with more or less rich properties, duly organized, etc. Here is the object I have in front of my consciousness and my knowledge of it consists, so far, in being aware that it is actually there and has some particular properties.

b) But through an internal process that internal configuration of consciousness can return upon itself, this is reflection (Sebstbewusstsein). Then, consciousness discovers itself {265} as self-consciousness. In self-consciousness things do not appear at all, only my thoughts about them, that which consciousness in the previous phase became aware of. Now I appear with my thoughts, only I. That is the control of self-consciousness, the control of the I in which philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, had centered the entire philosophical knowledge. For Hegel, this is something of the second or fourth order, because actually, in what does this I consist? In having itself as object. I have my thoughts; I am an I that has my thoughts, my certainties, my possible doubts. Then the I appears as an object, fine, but as an object of self-consciousness, in the same way that this glass of water appears as an object of the direct consciousness. This is precisely the “reification” of the I. About this I, constituted as such an “object”, what can we say? We can say everything that the philosophies riding on apperception have said, for example Leibniz and Kant. That it is an I, which accompanies all the representations and remains identical in all of them. If we were to remove from that I all the concretion of the acts that are riding on it, what would we have left? Purely and simply the radical and general form of the identity of the object as such. That is the philosophy of Fichte. Fichte makes his whole philosophy start —as Hegel tells us— from that identity, that A is A, the I is identical to itself. What Fichte wants, by means of a very long process that fills many volumes of his work, is to obtain the whole world from this. But what is really happening is that in each of the divisions Fichte is making, the great partition is becoming wider without ever reconquering the unity postulated at the beginning, simply because that unity is vague and formal. It is a formalist vagueness because we must not forget that from the beginning, I with my thoughts {266} not only have thoughts, which are mine, but with them I know the thing; and inasmuch as I know the thing they belong to it, since I know it as truth. In my self-consciousness I discover that the certainty, that the I, not only consists for things to be themselves and that the I may be one more thing itself, but also that in the measure in which they are known by the I, things are for me.

c) Consciousness showed itself as self-consciousness; now it shows itself as unity of certainty and truth about things. This is the third stage, Vernunft. Reason is the way absolute knowledge appears within the self-consciousness or more properly at the frontier of self-consciousness. Thought, reason, is not consciousness, rather consciousness is only a mode of manifestation of reason. This identity between certainty and truth —Hegel tells us— is the essence of reason.

d) Nevertheless, this identity is not a dead identity. It seems as if on one side we have the object —the thing, which is itself— and on the other the I —which would be itself and for itself. And there will always be minds capable of creating a great abstract concept, which in one way or another would cover both termini. But that is not the case. For Hegel, it is the case of a living unit, of a real life in which the possible duality between certainty and truth emerges from the unitary type of the concept and from what its inner life is. This is precisely what reason is (Vernunft).

e) Reason, insofar as it appears, allows a fifth step to take place because that reason is the inner life of the concept. Inasmuch as it is life, it is truly spirit (Geist). This is the next step. Self-consciousness steps out from consciousness or rather in self-consciousness we are shown knowledge in a fuller way. Out of self-consciousness knowledge has been manifested {267} to us as something that belongs to reason, now reason appears as spirit. Spirit is something whose being is only activity of the self (ist nur Selbsttätigkeit); its being is “actuosity”⁴ (Sp. actuosidad) and because of this its being is an absolute process⁵. Being is actuosity and precisely because of it reason in its ultimate essence is spirit.

f) But, in what does that actuosity of spirit consist? That actuosity consists precisely in not only going through the stages we have just recalled here, but that at the end of these stages the spirit that discovers itself in the form of absolute knowledge, is appearing in the different forms of consciousness. But a moment arrives in which reason and spirit somehow have to transcend these forms of appearance and face what the spirit is in reality, absolute knowledge; they have to cross over from the order of phenomena to the order of being. This is the stage when spirit is the concept of itself (das Begreiffen seiner Selbst). Here it is not the case that absolute knowledge is already appearing in my conscience, but that this is the knowledge, the truth we might call “cognizant” (Sp. “esciente”) (die wissende Wahrheit). For Hegel then, truth is the absolute; the absolute is the {268} concept and the concept is the very living spirit. The absolute, in the end, is spirit.

We will ask, but what kind of spirit and what kind of reason are we talking about? This is what Hegel will have to tell us in the third part; for the moment, let us not bring this problem to Hegel. The absolute is the all (das Wahre ist das Ganze) and this all is in the process of auto-conforming. First, in the form of phenomenon in the different manifestations within consciousness, which afterwards leads precisely for the all to be discovered in something that formally consists in its own and internal conceptivation.

Consequently, for Hegel the transcendental order: first, is formally a system of concepts; and second, is a principled order. Except that the principle of the transcendental order is neither the truth —for example, in the sense of Leibniz— nor the “I think” —in the sense of Kant—, but something different, namely, the very life of the spirit. Such is the principle of the transcendental order. The conceptivizing reason is the very essence, the internal structure of the transcendental order, and the reason that knows itself to be this, is the absolute knowledge. We can now understand that it is not knowledge of the absolute, but that it is the form itself, the absolute form of the absolute.

Thus, Hegel, arriving at the terminus of this way, of the Phenomenology of Spirit, reaching the concept of reason can enunciate a few expressions that taken in isolation may seem tremendous, but should be taken in their context. Hegel tells us, for example, that being is to think, i.e., that being means to be thought of, to be conceived, that nothing is greater than the measure in which it realizes a concept that as such is an act of the conceptivizing thinking. Therefore, Hegel affirms that the concept as such is entity in itself and by itself. There is no difference at all {269} between concept and being, but here we do not refer to an abstract concept, but to that moment or that act of conceptivizing thinking, a thinking that is conceptively determining the subject, which is properly the object the understanding is concerned with⁶. Consequently, Hegel affirms, “really, the forms of the concept are the living spirit of the real”⁷, and the real is only that which is true by the strength of these forms. That is, the real is only that which is conceived this way, because the rest would only be chaos, but not something real. Consequently, insisting on this point, Hegel says that “logical reason is the substantial or the real”⁸. It is the case then, of a vision of being and reality taken simply from the conceptivizing thinking, from that, which conceives being and reality and in which the real is that, which is conceived by reason.

Once we have reached this level, and have attained this concept of reason, we have also discovered that the true problem is not in how it appears in the forms of conscience. The problem is in something more profound, in the structure of this absolute thinking, and Hegel will now have to answer the question, what is the internal structure of this order of reason? It will be the second step in the ongoing stepping march of Hegel.

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¹ Note by Zubiri: I cannot forget that forty five years ago, when I competed as a simple beginner for my ill-fated Chair of History of Philosophy, one of the subjects I would have been required to write for four hours, if I had drawn the subject by lot, simply asked this, “What does Hegel understand by phenomenon?”
² Zubiri note on the margin: Appears, who? This is what has to be investigated. Anticipating, phenomenon is the manifestation of Reason in consciousness.
³ “Diese dialektische Bewegung, welche das Bewusstsein an ihm selbst, sowhol an seinem Wissen, als an reinem Gegenstande ansübt, insofer ihm der neue wahre Gegenstand daraus entspringt, ist eigentlich desjenige, was Erfahrung genaunt wird. Es ist in dieser Beziehung an dem soeben erwähnten, wadurch sich über die wissenschaftliche Seite der folgenden Darstellung ein neues Licht verbeiten wird”, G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, op. cit. p.61.
Zubiri translates now: “The dialectic motion, which consciousness undertakes in itself, inasmuch by what concerns its knowing as by what concerns its object, with respect to conscience shows it is from here that it quickly surges to the new true object, and that is what is properly called experience.”
Translation of Zubiri in 1935: This dialectic motion that conscience operates in itself, inasmuch in its knowledge as in its object, is properly what is called experience, inasmuch as from this motion there springs for conscience the new true object” (Fenomenología del espíritu [Phenomenology of Spirit], tr. X. Zubiri, op. cit., p. 118).
It is experience: first, because in each stage a new Wissen is reached, which now brings a new object, and second, because each step is “die ganze Felde der Gestalten des Bewusstsein”.
⁴ “Sein Sein ist Aktuosität”, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ibid., p. 52. [Tr. note: Zubiri revives this old Spanish term not commonly used today meaning "an activity with diligence and care", and applies it to make this distinction]
⁵ In consciousness the certainty of being the whole of reality has not yet been realized. “Reason is spirit by being elevated to Truth, which is the certainty of being the whole of reality, by being aware in consciousness that Reason itself is the world, and that the world belongs to it.” (“Die Vernunft ist Geist, indem die Gewissheit, alle Realität zu sein, zur Wahrheit erhoben und sie sich ihrer selbst als ihrer Welt und der Welt als ihrer selbst bewusst ist”, G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Ed. cit., p. 284). “The entity in itself and by itself, which at the same time is real as consciousness and represents itself, is the Spirit” (“Das an— und fürsichselende als Bewusstsein wirklich und sich selbst vorstellt, is die Geist”, ibid., p. 285).
⁶ Wissenchaft der Logik, ibid., “Einleitung”, p. 31.
⁷ Enzyklopädie, § 162. (Enzylopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. The edition Zubiri uses is the one published by G. Lasson, Meiner, Leipzig, 1905)
⁸ “Die logische Vernunft selbst ist das Substantielle oder Reelle”, Wissenschaft der Logik, ibid., “Einleitung”, p. 29.