Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
International Phenomenological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
http://www.jstor.org
MAN, GOD, AND DEATH IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY
I
In the most primitive form of self-consciousness that Hegel
isolates, the individual is not yet aware of his own mortality.2 His en-
vironment presents no insurpassable limit to his dynamic activity, but
is rather the object of desire -raw material to be appropriated into
his indeterminate and all-inclusive living reality.
This expansive totality meets its limit in another self who has the
same view of the world.3 Since neither will allow the other to ap-
propriate himself, a struggle results-a struggle whose inherent
motivation will be satisfied only where one or both of the combatants
dies.
In Hegel's analytical reconstruction of experience, this moment
of death marks the first point at which an individual consciousness
becomes aware of its finitude and of its limitations. What was taken
to be limitless is discovered to have inescapable boundaries. For it
matters not what one intends to achieve if one dies. Therefore death
can here be called the first negation that becomes present in the ex-
perience of self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness, however, does not simply come to an end.
Because its basic desire extends beyond what it is already, it can an-
ticipate what is to come. When it knows that death is possible -that a
limitation can in fact be imposed-it can seek to cancel that in-
evitability. Since such a move endeavours to negate finitude, it can be
called the second negation-or the negation of negation. In its most
primitive form this transition takes place when a combatant realizes
his vulnerability, and instead of continuing to the bitter end, sur-
renders and becomes a slave of the other.4
This is not the last word, however, for the consciousness of death
on the part of the slave transforms the second negation into
something positive. For in having his self-certainty shaken to the core,
he becomes aware of himself as living process, not as enduring
essence, and discovers that the products of his labour embody the
dynamic activity that constitutes his life.5 The finitude that was first
2PhG 139f; PhM 225ff; PhS 109ff. [PhG = Phanomenologie des Geistes, ed.
Hoffmeister, Hamburg: Meiner, 1952; PhM = Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind,
tr. Baillie, London: Allen & Unwin and New York: Macmillan, 1955; PhS =
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.]
3PhG 143ff; PhM 231ff; PhS 113ff.
4PhG 145f; PhM 234; PhS 115.
5PhG 148ff; PhM 237ff; PhS 117ff.
MAN, GOD, AND DEATH IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY 185
II
The section of the Phenomenology that discusses the master-
slave relationship and the unhappy consciouness focuses on the in-
dividual self, abstracted from its social context. But men are social
beings, and they come of age, not as individuals in an indifferent
world, but as integrated members of a mature society. The social and
historical dimension of man's maturity is explored by Hegel in his
8"Der Geist ist das sittliche Leben eines Volks. . ." PhG 315. (Compare PhM
460; PhS 265). In the 20th century, Volk is better translated as "people" than as
"nation." Until the 18th century "sittliche" meant the characteristic ethos of a com-
munity or people. It would appear that this sense is in Hegel's mind more than the
now current sense of "ethical" or "moral."
9PhG 318ff; PhM466ff; PhS 267ff.
Ol1tmay be misleading to see this as applying only to the Greek city state. After
citing examples of belief in life after death and of belief in communication between
mankind and the spirits of the dead from Australia, Egypt, China, Rome, and
America, Cassirer concludes: "All this shows in a clear and unmistakable manner
that we have here come to a really universal, an irreducible and essential
characteristic of primitive religion." An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale, 1944),
85.
"PhG 324; PhM 474; PhS 272.
11PhG 337ff; PhM 493ff; PhS 284ff.
MAN, GOD, AND DEATH IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY 187
royal power they agree to take turns. When, at the end of his term,
the elder refuses to transfer authority because of his seniority, the
other, grounding his claim on the original agreement, initiates a
struggle. No longer a personal dispute, it becomes a war, for the rebel
enlists the support of neighbouring states. After both brothers die in
personal combat, the new monarch, as punishment, refuses to grant
the rebel the proper rite of burial. In the person of Antigone, the
divine law of the family unsuccessfully challenges this decree of
human law. But her protest awakens the consciousness that it is the
divine law that sanctions oaths and establishes the positive unity of
the community. At first bloodless and ineffectual, it opens up the
possibility of the civil order dissolving and of justified retribution by
other communities; and the government has to surrender. In this de-
nouement, human law is weakened by its lack of independent
authority; while divine law is shown to be impotent in having its
universal bond adequately translated into the discrete decisions of
civil society.
The two roles that death plays here intersect and interact. The
punishment of the criminal's corpse both defines his finitude and
translates his cause into a bloodless universality. The resulting strug-
gle that threatens to become a war both redefines the authority of the
civil government, and marks its demise. The conflict, thus arche-
typically represented, results in the inexorable dissolution of the
power of both divine and human law, replacing them with the
abstract individualism of legal personality. The fateful movement of
destiny through the medium of death dissolves the contradiction bet-
ween the two laws into an abstract unity -a result that only formally
embodies the third logical moment, in which a second negation is
cancelled so that a positive may emerge.
Hegel's subsequent discussion of spirit estranged from itself takes
place in the abstracted realm of culture. As such it is not concerned
with the immediate reality of death. Hegel signals this loss by noting
that the counsellor, who serves culture's "realm of actuality," would
give sound, or universally valid advice were he prepared to surrender
his particular interests to the point of death.13 When he pulls back,
however, he falls into the attitude of flattery in which he only reaf-
firms his changing, contingent, and finite individuality.
In the unreal world of pure speech that results, the debate be-
tween pure insight and faith, between enlightenment and superstition,
takes place.14 Faith represents in its objective doctrine the death of a
13PhG 361; PhM 528; PhS 307.
"4PhG385ff; PhM 561ff; PhS 329ff.
188 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICALRESEARCH
III
As Kojeve suggests, then, death is a necessary condition for
"6Seethe Preface: PhG 39; PhM 105; PhS 27.
190 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICALRESEARCH
positive form. But in fact it is the third negation. For this dynamic,
which both reaches out to what is independent, incorporating it into
one's life, and surrenders one's own independence, has become iden-
tical in finite man and God. The painful awareness of the death of
God allows the spiritual integration of the human with the divine not
only in dogmatic theory but in actual fact. In other words, in the
revealed religion of Christianity God is negatively defined as dying,
not only in the objective content of its positive doctrine, but in the
subjective, existential consciousness of the believer. And when this
takes place death not only defines the limits of man's finitude, nor
cancels the mediator's particularity, but reveals the fundamental
identity of God and man. Both become actual by negatively dissolv-
ing the negativity through which their negatively determined isola-
tion (whether abstract beyond or self-contained evil) is cancelled.
When one lives in a reconciled relation with God, then, God
ceases to be wholly other and is present in the spiritual community
that incorporates both God and man. Since such a community re-
quires the active participation of both the divine and the human part-
ners, the negative death of God as abstract other has converted into
the positive presence of God as Spirit.
Until this final move is acknowledged and articulated through
the self-conscious comprehension of thought, man has not achieved
absolute knowledge.23 Only when he recognizes that the negative
dynamic that has radically defined man come of age is identical with
the negative dynamic of manifest religion is he able to know that his
secular experience is not a misleading delusion, but the achievement
of maturity.
-But does this mean that once such knowledge is achieved,
modern man can dispense with religion? If this were the case,
Kojeve's thesis would have some plausibility: not that man's negativity
dissolves God's positivity, but that God's negativity dissolves itself.
Thus man come of age embodies in his own humanity the truth of
religion. There are reasons, however, why such a conclusion is not con-
vincing. After all, Hegel consistently states that the result abstracted
from the process that leads to it, is false and misleading. The inte-
gration of God and man can only be maintained if it continually in-
corporates within itself the total dynamic through which God dies
and is yet affirmed to be present in the life of man. Once Feuerbach
and others divorce man's maturity from that which constitutes it,
JOHN BURBIDGE.
TRENT UNIVERSITY.