Evangelia Sembou's ‘Midwifery’ and Criticism in G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a competent and pedagogical reading of Phenomenology of Spirit that rises from the hypothesis that Hegel's method in this work is akin to Socratic ‘midwifery’. As a reading of Phenomenology of Spirit, Sembou's ‘Midwifery’ and Criticism is trustworthy and clear. It could well be used as a reading guide. Its strength comes from Sembou's capacity of extracting the Phenomenology's narrative and presenting the dramas between consciousnesses from the inside: her point of view is not that of a documentation of Hegel's sources or of a participation in later debates but of a participation in Hegel's thinking experience. I read the book while teaching the Phenomenology of Spirit, and I found the book suitable for students who look for further reading. However, the radius of the book is somewhat diminished by the fact that ‘Midwifery’ and Criticism does not give a complete presentation of Phenomenology of Spirit. Although it is mostly a chapter by chapter commentary of Hegel's book, it omits three parts, two of which without even mentioning them.
Most importantly, Sembou does not comment on the Preface, although Hegel here offers important insights into the task of philosophy in general and into his own proceeding and presentation in particular. The Introduction cannot replace the Preface, for the former only gives a preparatory analysis of the concept of knowledge, while the latter presents Hegel's general view of philosophy and his plan of the future system as a whole. Moreover, to my knowledge Hegel himself never compares his work with midwifery, but in the beginning of the Preface he compares, by a famous rhetorical turn, the emergence of his philosophy to the birth of a child after a long gestation, and although this image is not a concept but a simple representation, it is surely already tuned by his idea of the life of the spirit developed through the Preface. Hence, it would have been interesting to learn how this figure informs the idea of ‘midwifery’ that is put forth in the book.
Sembou also drops the commentary of the chapter on Reason (Vernunft). Although in classrooms it is not unusual to skip this part of the Phenomenology, which analyses early 19th century sciences, for Hegel the sciences of nature and human nature presented in this section were not inessential. The pedagogical use of Sembou's book would have been enhanced had she provided at least a brief explication of the function of Reason for the overall argument – precisely because it is the least accessible for beginners. Finally, the chapter on Religion is touched briefly but not analyzed in any detail. In her reading, Sembou concentrates on passages that have been commented on the most in the 20th century and gives a good explication of debates on them, but she does not highlight any neglected passages that would give a novel view on her theme (for instance, one could imagine that midwifery could have been examined from a scientific or from a religious point of view). In this sense, Sembou's presentation goes to the essential but not beyond.
Sembou's reading hypothesis, according to which Hegel's approach is akin to Socratic ‘midwifery’, deserves closer attention. Sembou starts from the famous image of ‘midwifery’ given by Plato in Theatetus where Socrates elicits from Theatetus his views on the nature of knowledge without imposing his own ideas on him. As is well-known, Socratic midwifery means that knowledge should not be imposed dogmatically from without but drawn out of the mind of the student. Sembou underlines, furthermore, that the Socratic midwife not only attracts ignored knowledge towards consciousness but that she also aborts false ideas, like unfit children. This is why, in her view, the ‘two aspects of Socratic midwifery are pain (even violence) and courage’ (3). Indeed, in the sense that Socratic midwifery unmasks false assumptions, it delivers only ‘abortions’ and its result is essentially a negative one (5).
Sembou then regards Hegel's proceeding in the Phenomenology of Spirit as another case of ‘midwifery’. The idea is justified by the fact that in this book Hegel does not present a positive doctrine, but proceeds by an immanent critique of existing forms of knowledge by making their implicit contradictions explicit and by presenting this development as the history of the experience of consciousness. If Socratic midwifery takes place between two persons (Theatetus and Socrates), Hegel's midwifery takes place between two forms of consciousness, the natural consciousness and ‘our’ phenomenological consciousness: when natural consciousness encounters seemingly contingent problems that it understands only as indeterminate negation, ‘our’ consciousness understands the necessity of the problems that can be specified through determinate negation (20-22). In the Phenomenology of Spirit the situation is actually more complicated, since Hegel's pedagogy actually makes us identify ourselves with both of the consciousnesses, making ‘us’ deliver the delivery by the phenomenological consciousness of the natural consciousness. According to Sembou, ‘Hegel's midwifery consists in: first, eliciting a new shape of consciousness; second, rendering explicit what is implicit therein and thereby unmasking the contradictions or inadequacies thereof (hence an immanent critique); third, explaining to the reader(s) what is going on. This results in the presentation of the experience of consciousness in the form of a book (as Phenomenology of Spirit)’ (24).
The result of Sembou's reading of Phenomenology of Spirit as Socratic midwifery is an interpretation of the work as having just a negative purpose, instead of a positive result (187). Here she agrees with William Maker's Philosophy without foundations and claims, convincingly, that the Phenomenology of Spirit is more about destabilizing consciousness than about constructing a definite concept of science.
Sembou's hypothesis produces a clear and coherent reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, there are reasonable grounds for asking if she examines all the consequences of her hypotheses. Most of the time, she uses ‘midwifery’ and the connected terminology of delivery, childbirth, abortion, etc., simply as metaphors pertaining to the Socratic method without specifying how this approach should be distinguished from competing approaches (such as dialectical examination, analysis, interpretation or, for that matter, internal critique) and whether it should be practised because it reveals something that traditional readings have left aside. This leads me to three questions at least.
Firstly, throughout the book, ‘midwifery’ functions as a synonym for ‘immanent critique’: it means ‘making explicit what was implicit’. But is a new term useful if it does not mean anything else than the traditional ‘immanent critique’? Furthermore, although the title of the book is ‘Midwifery’ and Criticism, philosophical midwifery is never explicitly distinguished from criticism (unless it means the distinction between Kantian critique and Hegelian ‘midwifery’ that is very well explained in the first chapter), and the ‘critical edge’ of Hegel's midwifery is not explained until the second to last page in which it is reduced to aborting weak forms of consciousness: ‘What Hegel can do as midwife is to examine the health or weakness of each newly-born child (“shape”) and then decide for himself, as well as let “us” decide for ourselves, whether it can be brought up or not. The weak or invalid child will die of its own, hence the basis of the Phänomenologie's immanent critique’ (188, cf. 3-5, 81). It could actually be argued that Hegelian midwifery is less harsh than this, for it is not critique in the simple sense of destructing false ideas but rather in the Kantian sense of revealing the reasons of the falsity, which are then ‘sublated’, and therefore also ‘remembered’ by the spirit.
Secondly, the difference between Socratic and Hegelian midwiferies remains vague, although the elements of the distinction are mentioned when it is pointed out that Hegel's midwifery is not only the immanent critique of representations but also the presentation of the dialogue of consciousnesses in which the critique takes place. In this sense, Hegel is more akin to Plato the writer than to Socrates the ‘midwife’ who did not write. If the arrangement of Hegel's book is actually theatrical, so that he acts like the theatre director who puts the dialogue of the consciousnesses on stage (26), how does midwifery relate to this theatrical disposal?
Thirdly, at first sight Sembou's hypothesis seems provocative: one could expect that the theme of ‘midwifery’ has been chosen in order to ‘feminize’ and therefore to ‘romanticize’ Hegel (in the early 19th century sense of the word). This is not the case, however, for Sembou's ‘midwifery’ does not have any feminine undertones but it refers only to the Socratic method. Had the ‘feminine’ aspect of midwifery been taken into account, it would have been possible to develop a much more radical reading, asking if a ‘feminization’ of Hegel could actually bring out new aspects of dialectics. After all, midwifery is a special relation in which the midwife's discrete ‘feminine’ intervention contributes to the constitution of a mother-child-relation in a way that has very little to do with the classical ‘masculine’ theatre director's staging of the dialectics between the two dramatis personae that follow the director's will. Such a question does not necessarily lead to a ‘deconstruction’ (like Derrida's famous question in Glas: ‘Is there a place for the bastard in Hegel's system?’) but maybe to another perspective of the philosopher's role. If philosophy must be delivered by ‘midwifery’, what is reason itself as the ‘womb’ and matrix of reason? What kind of a twist does such a point of view brings to the Logic and to the Philosophy of Spirit?
If Evangelia Sembou's ‘Midwifery’ and Criticism were examined as itself an act of midwifery, it would consist in making Hegel deliver a solid story of the experience of consciousness in which it is easy to recognize its father's traits. It would not make Hegel give birth to anything unexpected, illegitimate, or monstruous, that the midwife would choose to abort. If midwifery is essentially negative, as Socrates’ and Hegel's is according to Sembou, this book is less an act of perilous midwifery than, quite simply, a respectacle reading.
