This post is crossed post from philosophy.com where I'd started re-reading that text. The way I'm going to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of a conversation with J.M Bernstein's 1994 seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit is more appropriate here. It is an attempt to develop the conversational aspect of philosophy now that Trevor and Joanne have sadly dropped away and the comments are few and far between.

In the note to the lecture on the Introduction Bernstein says that Hegel was fighting against the instrumentalization of reason that was resulting from the natural sciences-humanities split. That interpretation accords with my reading here.

I'm listening to the seminar now. It jumps in straight away and we pick it up already going. The lecture is talking about the historical formation of consciousness that downplays individual intention, and highlights us as passionate, desiring creatures in history seeking satisfaction.

How does this happen? Hegel says:

"...because this exposition has for its object only phenomenal knowledge, the exposition itself seems not to be science, free, self-moving in the shape proper to itself, but may, from this point of view, be taken as the pathway of the natural consciousness which is pressing forward to true knowledge. Or it can be regarded as the path of the soul, which is traversing the series of its own forms of embodiment, like stages appointed for it by its own nature, that it may possess the clearness of spiritual life when, through the complete experience of its own self, it arrives at the knowledge of what it is in itself." (para.77)

The authority for this particular form of life is given by us, as subjects. So it can be changed for a new way of doing things with its particular understandings--- or forms of conciousness/embodiment---by us. Thsi is what we do all the time, right?

Hegel then remarks on the way to understand this having a world or form of life.In para 78 he says:

"Natural consciousness will prove itself to be only knowledge in principle or not real knowledge. Since, however, it immediately takes itself to be the real and genuine knowledge, this pathway has a negative significance for it; what is a realization of the notion of knowledge means for it rather the ruin and overthrow of itself; for on this road it loses its own truth. Because of that, the road can be looked on as the path of doubt, or more properly a highway of despair."

The story that is told by Hegel is this:
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em>"For what happens there is not what is usually understood by doubting, a jostling against this or that supposed truth, the outcome of which is again a disappearance in due course of the doubt and a return to the former truth, so that at the end the matter is taken as it was before. On the contrary, that pathway is the conscious insight into the untruth of the phenomenal knowledge, for which that is the most real which is after all only the unrealized notion. On that account, too, this thoroughgoing scepticism is not what doubtless earnest zeal for truth and science fancies it has equipped itself with in order to be ready to deal with them — viz. the resolve, in science, not to deliver itself over to the thoughts of others on their mere authority, but to examine everything for itself, and only follow its own conviction, or, still better, to produce everything itself and hold only its own act for true."

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