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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
It is tempting for a reader of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to try to determine the logical connections involved in the shifting shapes of spirit as it moves from one mode of consciousness to next. The task of uncovering the many parallels between historical periods and the various stages of consciousness is equally enticing. But what if one brackets both the logical and the phylogenetic-historical approaches and, instead, reads Hegel's dialectic of spirit as an ontogenetic-psychological progression based on the suffering and happiness of an individual? Such an approach takes the reader's attention directly to the stage of unhappy consciousness in anticipation of using it as locus for an interpretation of the Phenomenology in general. What follows is an attempt at just such an interpretation; to this end I ask four questions: (1) What is unhappy consciousness and why is it unhappy? (2) To what extent is consciousness unhappy, not only in the period of unhappy consciousness, but throughout the Phenomenology? (3) If unhappiness is pervasive, what role does it play, if any, in the dialectical progress? (4) If this role is significant, is the drive of spirit toward absolute knowledge a form of eudaemonism, that is, does the Phenomenology present a philosophical process which has a telos of happiness?
I begin by asking, to what does unhappy consciousness refer? The predominant response among Hegel scholars is to interpret the unhappy consciousness as a description of mediaeval Christianity,(1) and though this view is not wrong, it does not fully answer the question. The question, for present purposes, requires a reply based on Hegel's story of the singular mind, and so it would be prudent to begin by recalling the exact place of unhappy consciousness within the larger scope of the Phenomenology. This mind has already superseded the first stage, that of mere consciousness (Section A) with the discovery of the inner world of the thinking subject. This occurs, says Hegel, when the gaze of consciousness, turning from appearances to that which lies behind them, discovers the covert "I" which was present but invisible in the previous moments of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding. In the new mode of self-consciousness (Section B), the mind first grounds its self-awareness by opposing itself to an other consciousness. The first form of such opposition is the trial by death, but when the Self chooses survival over complete self-negation, it becomes a bondsman under the domination of a lord. However, the slave-consciousness, by means of its work, comes to see its independence and learns to view itself as existing on its own account. Rising above the lord-and-bondsmen relationship, it then thinks of itself as a free self-consciousness in relation with any other self-consciousness.
The first type of free consciousness is what Hegel calls Stoicism, a state for which the only principle is the empty thought of freedom. At this juncture the good and the true consist merely in what is thought, and likewise freedom exists as only one such thought. Skepticism, pushing the presumed irrelevancy of the external world to the point of its total negation, follows Stoicism, finding its freedom in a freedom from any conviction. However, in living, it cannot help but confirm the sensory and ethical reality it has nullified in thinking. Thus its negations become trivialities and skeptical consciousness degenerates into an asinine game of contradiction, calling out a not-A to every A.
This comprises the rough outline of the setting in which unhappy consciousness appears; the Phenomenology is about one quarter complete. Unhappy consciousness emerges directly from the skeptical contradictions, distinct in that it brings together the contradictions between which skepticism was divided. Consciousness becomes a dual consciousness, but a duality composed of opposites: an essential and unchangeable being juxtaposed against an empirical self that is unessential and mutable. Consciousness takes itself to be the latter self, and its first attempt at reunification is to become the Unchangeable. But the essential Being, as utterly remote in space and time, cannot be unified with the unessential self. And thus there is a new movement wherein the self aims at a unification with the Unchangeable as embodied. The endeavor moves through three relations that consciousness has with the incarnate: (i) as a "pure consciousness," (ii) as a particular individual with desire and work, and (iii) as a nothingness. All of these relationships fail at unification just as the first attempt did. The pure consciousness can apprehend the Unchangeable only through devotion and feeling, not through thought, and thus the Unchangeable remains alien. The second consciousness renounces itself by viewing its works and deeds as gifts of the essential Being. But in feeling its own satisfaction in its desire and work, even in its thanksgiving, consciousness perceives itself once again as a particular and therein as a self no longer renounced. In the third case, consciousness posits itself as a pitiable nothingness that renounces its property, satisfaction, and will, and relates the Unchangeable only through a third, mediating consciousness. However, the unity is not an object for this consciousness but is so only for the mediator, and thus consciousness remains a consciousness of duality.
I think this digested recapitulation of the unhappy consciousness reveals its essential and definitive characteristic, namely the mind's awareness of its own radical disunity. There is no such disunity in Stoicism, where consciousness is without an other. Its object is thought, and this cannot be distinguished from itself. Hence Hegel says that, for this self-consciousness, "the essence is not an other than itself.... [It] is an `I' which has the otherness within itself, though in the form of thought, so that in its otherness it has directly returned into itself" (200).(2) In this sense, the Stoic's other is itself, and hence it is not a true other...
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