I. Introduction

This paper offers a limited defence of two seemingly disparate interpretive approaches to Hegel’s account of the freedom of spirit in his Jena Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote ¹ On the one hand, scholars such as Brandom (Reference Brandom2002), McDowell (Reference McDowell1996), Pippin (Reference Pippin1989), Pinkard (Reference Pinkard1996) and Sedgwick (Reference Sedgwick2012) construe that freedom fundamentally in terms of agency, depending largely on a post-Kantian appropriation or ‘completion’ of the spontaneous, apperceptive ‘I’ constituted in intersubjective, rational space. On the other hand, scholars such as Dudley (Reference Dudley2002), Houlgate (Reference Houlgate2006) and Maker (Reference Maker1994) defend what we may call a ‘phenomenological’ view, where the PhG ultimately reveals an ‘open region’—akin, that is, to Heidegger’s notion of das Offene in his Vom Wesen der Wahrheit—allowing thought to proceed unabated by any presuppositions or prejudices.

I argue that the phenomenological view stands to the post-Kantian view as condition for its possibility. I show that, for Hegel, apperception is impossible without the sort of ‘opening’ that the phenomenological view articulates. I also maintain that, even though apperception is central to the project of the PhG, its role is fundamentally different than the one that post-Kantians assign it; and that even though the notion of rational agency is central to Hegel’s thought, he spends more time in the PhG developing the sort of ‘negative’ freedom of the phenomenological tradition. So even though my position combines the other two, it takes rather more from the phenomenologists than the post-Kantians.

Ultimately, my interpretation attributes to Hegel a view developed by Heidegger in his 1930/31 lectures on the PhG: a construal of the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge as one of ab-solution [Ab-Lösung]. I hold that the Hegelian version of das Offene, which is the condition for the possibility of apperceptive activity, itself rests on absolution as a condition for its possibility. Thus, I contend that the culminating position of Hegel’s PhG reveals absolution as a fundamental condition for the possibility of apperception.

My argument proceeds as follows: in II, I introduce Pippin’s view of Hegelian apperception, the predominant post-Kantian view on the matter. I then (III) show that, while formally accurate, this reading misplaces the role of apperception in Hegel: while post-Kantians tend to focus on apperception as Hegel’s account of the transcendental framework underlying cognition of objects, I show that Hegel instead assigns it a fundamental systematic function: it underlies the moment of so-called ‘speculative’ thinking, or the way new forms of thinking develop from out of old ones.

I then turn to the phenomenological reading in IV, developing a basic philosophical account of the notion of absolution. In V, I employ that account to argue that absolution underlies the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge in the PhG, when we interpret that final position as revealing the open region of thinking. Since the development of forms of thinking is just the role assigned to apperception, Absolute Knowledge articulates the ‘space’ where apperception may operate freely. I conclude with some final thoughts about the relationship between Hegel and Heidegger on the matter.

II. Pippin on Kantian formalism, Hegel and apperception

As Pippin argues (1989: 16ff.), the four constitutive features of Kant’s apperceptive subject are its (1) identity, (2) unity, (3) reflexivity and (4) spontaneity. In order for our experience of objects to be what it is, the subject must be (1) identical through time, since otherwise, it would not be able to (2) unify a manifold of intuition in the ways that it does. Moreover, Kant holds that these various forms of unification are rules that the knowing subject follows, as opposed to mere associations that just happen to it; thus, every unification must also contain an act, however implicit, of (3) reflective awareness that I am the one unifying the manifold. These reflective acts of synthetic unity are thus also (4) spontaneous, or the product of a distinctive kind of agency the subject has over the unifying it does: I unify the manifold in such-and-such a way by choosing, or exercising authority over, the rules that guide the unifying activity.

Hegel fundamentally accepts Kant’s notion of apperception, calling it ‘one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Reason’ (WL: 515/12.17–18). On the other hand, he also claims that Kant’s ‘subjective idealism’ ‘stops short’ at the merely formal or ‘empty’ categories of the understanding (EL: §46/89, §45A/88, §43/86). These claims about Kantian apperception and Kantian formality set the boundary conditions of Pippin’s interpretive approach to Hegel’s idealism. He shows how cognition, in Hegel, fundamentally involves a spontaneous and rule-governed synthesis of objects that closely follows the Kantian account. But Pippin also shows how Hegel sees Kantian formalism threatening the intelligibility of the (a) unifying and (b) reflecting activities of apperception (facets (2) and (3), above).

(a) Kantian formalism and apperceptive unification: This concerns the opposition of content and form in Kant: i.e., the separability and distinguishability of intuition and concept. Kant maintains that the spontaneous applications of rules of synthesis—i.e., concepts—are nevertheless subject to, or rationally constrained by, the receptive deliverances of intuition. At the same time, since concepts are purportedly within the bounds of reason, and intuitions purportedly lie outside the bounds of reason, there is no way for that intuition to provide that rational constraint. This is a necessary constraint, since without it, the subject could just carve up the world according to her arbitrary use of rules; it would be, to apply McDowell’s (Reference McDowell1996) phrase, ‘a frictionless spinning in the void’. Thus Pippin argues that Hegel must do away with the Kantian separation between form and content as a separation between concept and intuition: instead, he sees Hegel positing that the deliverances of receptivity are always already ‘shot through’ with spontaneity, or that receptivity and spontaneity are inseparably but distinguishably operative.

(b) Kantian formalism and apperceptive reflexivity: Again, the ‘reflexive’ aspect of apperception involves at least an implicit awareness, in any consciousness of an object, of one’s being thus conscious, i.e., of remembering, imagining, perceiving, etc. Kant also claims about this reflexivity that it is ‘the mere form of any thinking, and not itself a thought’ (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 37). Hegel’s complaint, here, involves a worry about self-knowledge in reflexivity, how apperceptive subjects could possibly justify this reflexive awareness. Now to be sure, Hegel’s is not the Cartesian concern about some subject’s deception about its dream-states and waking-states. It rather concerns the subject’s ability to articulate what sorts of things it must be doing in order to count to itself as being in one state rather than another. Without that capacity, an agentive knower could not then count as having rational authority over her claims to know, for she would not be able to avow such claims as her own.

Kant demonstrates that any knowing experience relies, as a condition for its possibility, upon a number of subjective activities—of, e.g., the productive imagination and the understanding—and that as a condition for the possibility of my knowing, I have to be at least implicitly aware of being, at that moment, in a state of productive imagining or of applying the categories, etc. But as the reflective moment is, again, merely the form of a thought, and not itself a thought, this reflexive awareness lacks an epistemic status; as such, it is vulnerable to sceptical challenge.

In this instance, Pippin’s Hegel solves the problem by situating self-conscious reflexivity within an intersubjective space. On this reading, the ‘I’ counts as an ‘I’ only in so far as it attains that status within a community of mutually recognizing selves. This means that there is no ‘private’ mind lying behind the communal status of the ‘I’, and so no mental activity that has any significance apart from the one it possesses within that intersubjective community. From this standpoint, the scepticism about reflexive capacity falls away: it is not as though, if one takes oneself to be judging, and others assess one as judging, one may yet be doing something else in truth. To have a certain capacity just is to be self-interpretable and intersubjectively interpretable as having that reflective capacity.

Thus, Pippin argues, the argumentative trajectory of the PhG is largely set by Hegel’s solving these problems of Kantian formalism. The solution culminates in ‘Absolute Knowledge’, where spirit attains ‘knowledge of itself’ and ‘the conditions of human knowledge are “absolutized”’ (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 168). That is, Hegel ‘fills out’ the formal knowing self by imbuing it with a justificatory content no longer subject to sceptical challenge in the ways described above.

So on Pippin’s view, Hegelian and Kantian apperception both aim at the same end: the framework of cognition that underlies, as transcendental condition, the constitution of claims to know objects of experience. The dialectical progressions of the PhG and the greater Logik are, then, largely independent of apperception itself, and provide Hegel’s preferred means of justifying that framework. So when Hegel refers to apperception as ‘one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of [Pure] Reason’ (WL: 515/12.17–18), Pippin takes this as an indication that Kant’s ‘profound truth’ only needs completing, and that the dialectical procedure Hegel develops is the preferred mode of deduction of those elements of apperception, merely the systematic means for one’s attaining absolute knowledge of one’s apperception.

III. Apperception and speculative development

That apperception does not play the role that Pippin assigns it follows from a similar, laudatory passage about apperception in the greater Logik. Hegel writes:

The key claim is the one tying apperception to speculative development. For this indicates that Hegel’s progression beyond Kant involves assigning apperception a systematic role; it is not just a framework for the cognition of objects buttressed by a systematic framework, but part of that systematic development itself. Describing speculative development in the lesser Logik, Hegel writes:

The speculative involves not just the construction of knowledge-claims in a Kantian fashion, though Hegel does seem to think of this, for instance, as belonging to speculative development in what we may call its ‘intra-systematic’ function. In the Anmerkung to the above passage, he claims that ‘the mere logic of the understanding’—i.e., intra-systematic thinking that takes a certain form of thinking for granted—‘is contained in the speculative logic and can easily be made out of the latter’. But as the ‘mere’ indicates, this is a relatively minor function of speculative thinking, especially since this kind of thinking comes about, Hegel says, when one omits ‘the dialectical and the rational’ (EL: §82, 131–32) or the capacity for thinking to criticize the system-level categories that one takes for granted in one’s everyday, non-philosophical activity.

This is to say that apperception is present at the foundation of all thinking, not just thinking related to the knowledge of objects. So it is correct that the PhG involves the task of buttressing apperception. But this buttressing must then involve not just the ability to better justify claims to know; it must also involve a greater capacity to know, as each new moment of speculative thinking overcomes the limitations of the previous one. In this sense, when Hegel says that Kant ceases thought ‘at the level of understanding’ he means that Kant ceases speculative development at the intra-systematic level, shying away from the renewal of thought that is the proper function of philosophical thinking.

We find the clearest formulation of the systematic function of apperception in the final chapter of the PhG. There, Hegel describes the thinking of a spirit that is aware of itself as spirit. In thinking about itself, it reflects on its own activity in a process that Hegel calls ‘Erinnerung’ or ‘recollection’. Here is how he describes it:

The process begins with what Hegel mentions last: spirit enters into recollection when it forsakes its own shape, what Hegel calls spirit’s ‘externalization [Entäußerung]’. In ‘going-into-itself’, spirit realizes that what it took to be its own shape is in fact not its own, and so realizes that, whatever else spirit may be, it is not that. So what seemed to constitute the ‘inner’ shape of spirit was not actually the inner. It goes where it belongs, then, in truth: outside spirit.Footnote ²

The forsaken shape then assumes a place in that ‘gallery of pictures’ which Hegel calls spirit’s ‘substance’, meaning that spirit reconstitutes itself out of this collection of shapes. Spirit draws upon these shapes in the process of recollection or re-internalization (according to Hegel’s ‘Er-Innerung’ in PhG: §808). Recollection is therefore the other side of spirit’s externalization of a particular shape, a creative activity in which spirit once again runs through and assimilates the previous shapes. This makes Erinnerung the process by which spirit reconstitutes itself at each phase of transition throughout the systematic progression of shapes in the PhG.

According to Pippin’s own characterization of apperception, Erinnerung is itself an instance of it. This is to say that the process of Erinnerung fits neatly into the four features of apperception that we mention, following Pippin, at the outset:

1. (1) Identity: There must be, in some sense, a spirit that is identical through time. If spirit were somehow dis-unified, there would be some shapes or moments of development that would not belong to it. But spirit would not have been able to arrive at this recollective standpoint in the first place—whichever recollective standpoint it may be—had it not actually worked through those moments.Footnote ³ Thus, spirit must be identical through the various phases of that development.

2. (2) Unity: In Erinnerung, spirit must figure out how all the various shapes could or do hang together within its identical self (Hegel says in PhG: §797 that spirit must ‘gather together the individual moments’ of spirit’s development). This is a matter of spirit’s self-articulation, how it figures out what it is now by thinking through what has come before. It must form a unified, coherent picture of a new shape of spirit from out of the old ones.

3. (3) Reflexivity: In this moment, above all others, the reflexive moment is necessary. For if spirit did not know it was recollecting, then it would not know that it was thinking about itself or articulating itself, as opposed to some other object of knowledge.

4. (4) Spontaneity: Finally, Erinnerung must be a moment of spontaneous activity; for if it were not, then this moment would not be a matter of self-determination, but precisely the opposite: the determination of spirit by something other than spirit. Much of what is shown through the course of the PhG, is that spirit is only determined by its own activity; even when spirit seems to be guided by something external, one merely finds spirit assigning the external thing—e.g., the claim that ‘spirit is a bone’ (PhG: §343, 303)—the significance it has.

It follows that apperception is a matter of systematic import for Hegel, part of the dialectical progression itself. And while Pippin is correct to argue that demonstrating the conditions for the possibility of apperception is a central task of the PhG, there is a further issue with Pippin’s reading as concerns the foil or obstacle that must be overcome in its demonstration. For Pippin, that foil is Kant. But the problem that Hegel takes with Kant is merely one form of Hegel’s broader worry about subjective attitudes and habits of thinking towards or about philosophical matters. Consider, for instance, the following description of apperception from the lesser Logik:

Some familiar themes from Pippin’s interpretation arise here: that what is true arises as a result of my own, self-determining thinking; that the kind of thinking I engage in is inherently reflexive, a product of my self-consciousness; and so the notion that truth is a product of subjective activity. This supports the notion that apperception is fundamentally an agency, a self-avowal of a claim to know, a commitment of oneself in rational space.Footnote ⁴ This tempts us to interpret the notion of freedom Hegel describes as fundamentally involved with agency, for instance, in the following Anmerkung. There, Hegel says that

But that Hegel is speaking about this sort of positive freedom is not borne out by the rest of that passage. Rather, this sort of freedom belongs to ‘an abstract “I”, as freed from all particularity’ (EL: §23, 55); it is a negative freedom that releases one’s thought from its attachment to merely contingent or idiosyncratic desires or beliefs. From that standpoint, the ‘I’ of apperception ‘does only what is universal, in which it is identical with all individuals’.

On the one hand, Hegel confirms that negative freedom is merely a condition for the possibility of rational agency, or that one’s thoughts are not ultimately answerable only to the desires of the individual thinker, but also to a community of thinkers oriented towards the rationality of one’s claimings. But on the other hand, Hegel’s emphasis concerns the attainment of that space, its realization through and by spirit. In the context of apperception: Pippin’s articulation of Hegelian apperception, emphasizing the thinking subject’s self-avowing exercise of authority over or responsibility for rational claimings, takes for granted the capacity for a subject to let go of or surrender those proclivities or habits of thought that impede or corrupt that rational exercise.

Hegel focuses specifically on a kind of surrendering, a vulnerability or openness that one must cultivate within oneself as a condition for the possibility of the constitution of this rational space. In this regard, the closing passage of this Anmerkung is telling and, considering the phenomenological movement that would follow, rather prescient:

It is not as though just anyone, regardless of one’s commitment to it, can just happen upon truth. Rather, it results from a rigorous self-cultivation and even purificationFootnote ⁵ —the pure ‘I’ as thought purified of all particularity—and does not occur as a matter of one’s mere biological maturation. Much of what makes one’s self-cultivation so challenging involves the cultural forces that align against one’s attempts at so maturing. Hegel speaks about two such forces in the Preface, and outlines the capacity for free thinking spirit to overcome them. The first is a tendency for one to cling to what is familiar in thought, merely by virtue of its familiarity:

The second concerns the irrational attitude that ensnares thinking when it is confronted with a so-called ‘non-actuality’, a violation or running aground of what is familiar. He calls one’s encounter with non-actuality ‘death’ because the paradox occasioned by the encounter—it is a moment where one encounters, as actual, some heretofore inconceivable occurrence—can only be resolved by abandoning those familiar thoughts. Here is how he describes it:

Finally, he describes the practice of thought that allows spirit to so confront its “death”:

To pull itself out of its intellectual torpor, spirit must abstract from its certitude about what it is, and recognize that certitude for what it is: a merely subjective attitude towards what it believes, and not an indication about the fixed truth of things. Recognizing this certainty as only a moment, with a finite temporal duration, spirit returns to pure thinking about what it is. In other words, the recognition of the finitude of certainty is the reflexive feature of apperception allowing spirit to confront its own death. And this reflective feature requires a freedom from its own fixed limitations of thinking, its own preconceived notion of itself. On the view I am defending, then, the trajectory of the PhG is set by the need to demonstrate the conditions for the possibility of this moment of apperception: the possibility for spirit to reflect from a pure, unconditioned standpoint upon its own certitude.

IV. Absolution

My claim is that, following Heidegger’s reading in his 1930/31 lectures, the notion of absolution [Ab-Lösung] is the condition for the possibility of the reflective moment of apperception. Here is Heidegger’s initial formulation of the term: ‘to be ab-solved from what is known does not mean “abandoning” it, but “preserving it by elevating it”. This elevation is an absolving which knows; that is, what is known is still known, but in being known it is now changed’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1988: 15).

So Heidegger finds some relationship between the notions of absolution, knowing and ‘Aufhebung’ or ‘sublation’. That these concepts seem so distantly related raises a perhaps justified suspicion of the kind of interpolation for which Heidegger is so well known. It is not at all clear how one, in being absolved from knowing something, may then ‘preserve and elevate’ it. If I know, for instance, that the sun rose at 6 this morning, this seems to imply some fixity about the matter. If someone should correct me and tell me that the sun in fact rose at 6:30, then there is no ‘preserving’ or ‘elevating’ of what is known, and it is no ‘changing’ of the knowledge. It just turns out that I actually did not know in the first instance, and that first claim is just replaced by the second one.

This example belongs to what Heidegger would call a ‘quantitative’ knowing: it is one of a series of facts that one may adduce ad infinitum, which adduction may arise from a singular way of knowing, what we had called a ‘shape of spirit’. These shapes carry with them, at a higher level, claims to know as well; but these are claims to know about how to know things or in what way to grab hold of knowledge. The shapes of spirit are thus forms of what Heidegger calls ‘qualitative’ knowledge.

In the realm of qualitative knowledge, it is relevant to talk about Aufhebung in a way it is not in quantitative forms of knowing. This is because, in the instance of quantitative knowledge, my thought was only directed at something else: the sunrise. But in the instance of qualitative knowledge, its rejection or replacement requires that I think about my way of thinking itself. I think about what is highest within me: who I am and how I relate to the world. If I may reflect freely and openly on my thinking—and again, this is a big condition that cannot be guaranteed as given from the beginning—then I arrive at a realization: that this way of knowing is actually not a way of knowing at all: it only obscures knowledge from view.

However paradoxical it may seem, that realization is itself a knowledge: in this moment, I come to know that this way of thinking is not knowledge-yielding, a knowledge at the ‘second level’ about the way knowledge works. And this is an elevation since, before I arrived at this conclusion, this way of thinking was merely an apparent knowing. However, in its rejection, it is actual knowing; it attains its true form: or, I see the appearance of knowledge as mere appearance.

We may then say that, when I have aufgehoben one way of knowing, I am absolved from having to know that way. But this seems, admittedly, a bit too liberal in its usage: for absolution is related, in its strict usage, to sin, and it is difficult to see just how the rejection of a way of knowing could require it. In this vein, then, let us recall that the way of knowing concerns what I take myself to be and how qI construe my relationship to the world. As long as I avow this way of thinking as my own, I carry myself in accordance with it, live according to its dictates. If I should then find that this way of knowing is a false one, I realize that I was living falsely, acting falsely: I was not being the kind of thing I am supposed to be. I know this even if I have not yet figured out the ‘right’ or ‘true’ way to be. To be wrong or untrue in this grand, systematic sense is just to live a life of sin.

Even at this point, however, it may not yet be clear just why I need to be absolved of my sin. For it may just be that, having recognized my sin, I resolve never to do that again and proceed to reformulate my way of knowing. But this sort of simple progression is not true to our lived experience of this kind of realization. When one discovers the falsehood of one’s way of living, one begins, in Hegel’s words, to despair. And there is much in this moment that, although it is left unsaid in the text, is only slightly hidden, and is a problem spirit must consistently confront in the course of its own self-development. For instance, recall the claim from PhG: §32, quoted above, concerning the need for spirit to ‘find its feet within its absolute disruption’. If Hegel feels the need to demonstrate how spirit so stabilizes itself, this can only be because absolute disruption, the total loss of one’s orientation to oneself and the world, is a real moment of experience for spirit and one that spirit does not yet know how to overcome. Lacking the ability to face that moment, Hegel sees, instead, a desire for spirit to run from the truth, to cling to what has come before, even if it is untrue. On this view, spirit tends to seek the stability or fixity of thought, or just seeks out those moments where it does know how to ‘stand’. It can navigate this familiar way of thinking, or has a habitual way of conforming itself to it whereby spirit attains a feeling of relative ease.Footnote ⁶ In this case, the sins of that way of being are multiplied: not only does one live falsely, but one is aware of one’s falsehood, and continues to live it out anyway.

On the other hand, we may imagine how one might see falsehood as falsehood, and yet still not fully ‘stand’ in the moment of absolute disruption: spirit may be filled with such bitterness or guilt from its sins that it is blinded to any genuinely new possibility of thinking. In this instance, one also gains a sort of stability, but it is still not one in which spirit truly frees itself from what has come before. We may rather call it a kind of stability by repulsion, the automatic, unthinking inversion of whatever came before. Spirit is, in this case, guided by mere ‘reaction’, not rethinking or re-creating, and so there is no way for a genuinely rational reformulation of spirit to come to light.

What spirit needs, for such a rational progression beyond what has come before, is to purify itself of these feelings and to ready itself for the re-creation of ways of knowing. This is something that absolution, in its genuine sense, provides. For what one needs, in order for one’s reformulated self-conception to genuinely follow the dictates of reason, is for one’s thinking to be free from any external or fixed pre-determination of one’s self. In this sense, to be absolved of sin is to be freed from it. One no longer carries that sin with oneself, in the sense that one knows that those who have absolved one will no longer judge one according to it. This corresponds to a removal of limitations constraining one’s rational, autonomous formulation of one’s self-conception: one’s sins keep one tied to the conception of one as sinner, and as one who has enslaved others, one who has alienated oneself from God, one who has objectified others, and so on. Therefore, as long as one counts as one who has enslaved others, or has not been absolved from that sin, one cannot recreate one’s self-conception as one who does not enslave others.Footnote ⁷ One is thereby unfree to perform just the kind of reformulation of the self that one needs in order to overcome what has come before.

To be clear, however: absolution is not forgetting. One does not come to count as never having sinned. Rather, absolution allows one to see the sin as it is in truth—something that one ought not to do—and frees those absolved to form themselves anew, to internalize the experience of the sin in a way that allows that sin to serve as the ground for the further cultivation of the self.

V. The absolute

The point I am working towards is that the ‘absolutizing’ of apperception in the PhG has less to do with a final articulation of the dynamics of human agency, and more to do with demonstrating the ‘openness’ of pure thought that underlies apperception. The condition for the very possibility of that openness, I am arguing, is ‘ab-solution [Ab-Lösung]’, a position that owes much to Heidegger’s reading of the PhG in his 1930/31 lectures. But that this absolution, which I have described in a roughly Hegelian sense, is ultimately as central to the PhG as it is on Heidegger’s view, seems at least questionable. For in spite of the centrality Heidegger accords to the term, it appears only three times—all in the verb form, ablösen—in the whole PhG. So it is not clear, at least immediately, how such a central concept may be used so infrequently.Footnote ⁸

For one, the significance of a term Hegel employs does not always correlate with its frequency. For instance, the central concept of Erinnerung appears, by my count, only seven times; ‘despair’ (Verzweiflung) appears only twice, and ‘mutual recognition’ (gegenseitig Anerkennung) only once. Still, given that Heidegger associates ablösen with aufheben (a term that appears, seemingly, on every page of the work), we would expect some kind of correlation between the frequencies of use of those two terms, some explanation within Hegel himself of how they stand together. There are no such occurrences in the text.

Nevertheless, that the term appears so infrequently means that we can feasibly examine each instance individually. The term first appears at the end of the section on Antigone, where Hegel speaks of one who is abgelöst from the polity. Pinkard renders this ‘banished’ (PhG: §472, 415), which is true to the story being told there. It is thus not clear how one could fairly interpret Hegel, in that context, as meaning ‘absolution’. One is not ‘absolved’ from the kingdom in this case, but ‘banished’.

The second usage comes at the end of the section on self-certain morality. There, the ‘pure’ moral self finds itself turning over, through its contradictions, into the ‘impure’ or acting moral self. What drives this oscillation is, Hegel says, that each side ‘displaces [ablöst]’ the other. This happens to such a great extent, Hegel continues, that eventually the moral consciousness must simply ‘give up’ (aufgeben) its position altogether. Once again, this does not sound much like an absolution at all; for the ablösen of each side arises and continues only as long as a tension remains between their opposition, which is only resolved in the moment of aufgeben. So it seems that ‘displaced’ is a proper rendering, and that the additional sense of ‘absolution’ cannot be ascribed to it.

We find the third appearance of the term in the last paragraph of the text, not long after Hegel describes the practice of Erinnerung. There, Hegel provides one final articulation of the results of the PhG, summarizing the notions of the absolute concept, absolute knowledge, and the science of phenomenal experience. Depicting the ‘scientific’ arrangement of the various shapes of spirit that constitutes the text, Hegel writes:

Pinkard renders ‘ablöste’ as ‘replaced’, which does not quite give the right sense here. For instance, when one replaces the battery in one’s phone, the new battery does not stand in any necessary relation to the previous one as its successor, at least not in the relevant sense here: the new battery does not ‘take over’ from the old battery in the same way that the new shape of spirit takes over from the old one. First, the new battery performs the same function as the old battery, and in the same way; and while the new shape of spirit may need to fulfil the same metaphysical, epistemological or moral self-conceptions, it must do so in a different way than all the other shapes have. Secondly, the new spirit must stand in a necessary and negative relation to the old spirit; indeed, the new spirit can only be what it is because the old spirit was what it was: they stand in that dialectical relationship of determinate negation to one another.

Similarly, it does not seem as though ‘banished’ or ‘displaced’, which Pinkard uses in the two other instances, are proper fits here. As to the former, one spirit’s ‘banishing’ another makes it sound as though it would no longer be preserved for Erinnerung, which, according to the apperceptive criterion of identity, could not be the case. As to the latter, ‘displacement’ carries with it a connotation of force which, while appropriate for the unsettling oscillation between the pure and concrete selves, does not apply in this instance. For there is no conflict between the old and new spirits that drives the transition; rather, Hegel remarks, the progression involves the old spirit’s ‘forsaking’ itself” and ‘giving itself … over to recollection’ (PhG: §808, 719, trans. slightly altered from Pinkard’s).

Why, then, might ‘absolved’ be the better fit in this instance? For one, there is the reference to Golgotha at the very end of the paragraph. For another, the themes of ‘rebirth’ in this last paragraph echo what we said about how absolution permits a freedom from what has come before. Hegel says that, ‘within each new realm of spirit, it [i.e. spirit] needs to begin all over again in its immediacy and from its immediacy to rear itself once again to maturity’; and in a passage just after that, Hegel speaks of the new spirit as ‘newborn’. Again, in order for this starting point to be a ‘new’ one, there must be a break of some sort with what has come before. Otherwise, as we said above, it is not a new beginning, but is still guided by what has come before. So while there is this necessary connection with the negation of what has come before, there is also a moment of self-determination, where spirit decides for itself what kind of significance the negation has for it. The Ablösung of each previous form makes possible that moment of self-determination.

This is what Hegel refers to when he says that the goal of this progressive Ablösung of spiritual forms is ‘the revelation [Offenbarung] of depth’ which Hegel calls ‘the absolute concept’. The point echoes what we said of absolution above: if one remains resentful of or embittered by what has come before, those previous forms hold an influence over one’s thinking, precluding the possibility of free, self-determining thought. Any successive form of thinking would, thereby, still be determined by that old form of thinking, or would be rather superficial relative to the depth that one’s thought might reach when freed from any reflective limitation towards what has come before. Therefore, spirit must absolve its old forms of their failings, so that spirit might determine itself anew in das Offene of thought.

VI. Conclusion

To this point, I have remained largely silent on the question of the relationship between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s versions of das Offene, and so have commented little on central differences that remain unresolved. And while the conclusion to a paper is hardly the appropriate place for that resolution, I would like to gesture towards the general structure that resolution might take.

I have sought, however subtly, a connection between the attitude of absolution and the notion of ek-sistent Dasein in Heidegger’s Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. In both instances, das Offene opens for one that, in a certain sense, ‘readies’ oneself for it. For Heidegger, the Hegelian version remains, in a fundamental sense, enclosed. Even in the standpoint of Absolute Knowing, Spirit remains not yet ready, or in-sistent upon or within a particular metaphysical interpretation of Dasein as Cartesian Ego from which Heidegger’s Dasein, at least in principle, may free itself. But the ultimate dynamic that Heidegger offers between das Offene, in-sistence, and ek-sistence is presaged in Hegel’s Jena PhG as I interpret it here.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely in the extreme that Heidegger would endorse the Hegelian relationship between absolution and apperception in his own work: the self-conscious ‘I’ belongs to that same, Cartesian interpretation of Being that Heidegger rejects. But I wonder whether such a thorough rejection may succeed in this instance, and it seems apt to speak, at least roughly, of what Pippin calls the ‘persistence of subjectivity’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2005). For in spite of all his protestations, Heidegger’s retrieval of the Greek logos as ‘gathering’ still ties thinking inextricably to a principle of unity akin to the form of apperceptive speculation I have articulated at the core of Hegel’s project. And even though Heidegger does not articulate ‘gathering’ in the transcendental terms of the German Idealists, there is still this similarity: gathering always involves a ‘letting lie before’ thinking, or is always a gathering of what opens itself to thinking.

In this sense, then, it seems as though there is still room to argue, against Heidegger, for a metaphysics of the self-conscious subject-as-willing. This is especially so when that willing appears at the root of thinking; for die Sachen cannot ‘gather themselves’, but require a ‘gatherer’ to carry out the gathering. On the other hand, this gathering requires a moment of Gelassenheit, without which die Sachen are not thinkable in all their depth. Thus, what I have argued here as the properly Hegelian view, combining agency and seinlassen as conditions for the possibility of apperceptive thinking, may turn out to have a philosophical viability defensible against both the Kantian and Heideggerian accounts of agency in thinking. But that is a matter for discussion on another occasion.