Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has long been among his most widely read and discussed works. In the last decades, thanks to a new wave of interest in Hegelian thought in the Anglophone world, a series of multi-authored commentaries and companions on the Phenomenology have appeared. But only a few scholars have provided a unitary and global take on the work in single-handed commentaries. Among them, the monographs of scholars like Pippin (Reference Pippin1989), Pinkard (1994) and Siep (Reference Siep2000) can stand alongside the classic commentaries (such as Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure, Reference Hyppolite1946) that illuminate the text as a whole in a new way. Richard Dien Winfield’s new volume adds one more strong voice to this discordant chorus, and powerfully enriches the available resources for addressing Hegel’s text.

Winfield is one of the most prominent advocates of what has been called a ‘non-foundationalist’ reading of Hegel. As the title of the book suggests, the work is based on lectures Winfield gave in a 2011 graduate seminar at the University of Georgia—the audio recordings of which have been circulating online for a while now and have become an important resource for students and scholars. The book is preceded by Winfield’s Hegel’s Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures, which has a similar structure and was published by the same publisher in 2012. In a crucial sense, however, Hegel’s Phenomenology is not so much a sequel as a prequel. The Phenomenology tends to be a key work for Hegel scholars: what you find there will determine what you look for in the Science of Logic. This applies in particular to Winfield, whose take on the Phenomenology is key not only to his understanding of the Science of Logic, but also to his overall philosophical project.

Following Hegel’s original text, each of the seventeen chapters contains careful reconstructions of Hegel’s argumentative moves and countermoves, focusing on the content as well as the structure and philosophical import of Hegel’s analyses. Winfield does this by staying quite close to Hegel’s text and terminology. He largely disregards current scholarly debates on the text—as well as more historically oriented secondary literature—and refrains from contextualizing Hegel’s views and those of his contemporaries within their time. As in the previous book on the Science of Logic, Winfield quotes almost no secondary literature. This brings full attention to the argument, but also creates problems, as has been pointed to by reviewers of the previous volume.

One of the reasons why Winfield does not dwell on secondary literature is that he considers most current scholarship on Hegel’s Phenomenology to be wrong. In this book he does not specify who he has in mind. However, in one of his previous articles he lists Marx, Kierkegaard, Bloch, Lukács and Habermas as ‘examples of this misinterpretation’ (Winfield Reference Winfield1989: 296 n. 8), and one can imagine that he would include much of the contemporary scholarship relying on the Phenomenology for developing theories of action, sociality or mindedness. As he puts it,

The first distinctive element of Winfield’s reading is his claim that the Phenomenology does not put forth any systematic philosophical view, but rather demolishes a range of conceptions of knowing. According to Winfield, one should first of all grasp this radically negative nature of the text. To support his claim, Winfield often stresses that Hegel’s Phenomenology is taking into account only phenomenal knowing: ‘rather than undertaking ontology or foundational epistemology, we are merely considering knowing as a given that is stipulated as a phenomenon’ (5).

His second core claim is that all those phenomenal forms of knowing belong to the same paradigm, namely a foundationalist one. Attacking foundationalism is the hallmark of Winfield’s philosophical project. In his previous works—including Hegel’s Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures—Winfield points to foundationalism as a ghost haunting the entire Western philosophical tradition. Hegel’s Phenomenology appears as a key ally—if not the main inspiration—for his project. According to Winfield, Hegel here dealt a mortal blow to the foundationalist tradition, to the extent that he shows that all attempts at constructing foundational shapes of knowing are self-undermining and doomed to fail.

The series of failures presented in Hegel’s text lead Winfield to defend a particular claim about the end of the Phenomenology, namely Absolute Knowledge. As he puts it in his previous book, Hegel’s work has ‘a purely negative outcome’ (Winfield 2012: 38).This outcome consists in the overcoming of any difference between subject and object and the rejection of any knowledge that is representational. This rejection is the result of the self-undermining of all forms of knowledge presented in the Phenomenology. This collapse of representationalism, Winfield argues, paves the way for the ‘positive’ philosophical project that starts with the Science of Logic. He considers the latter a non-foundationalist enterprise, in the sense that it starts from pure indeterminacy and does not rely on any kind of presupposition as to what knowledge is. All presuppositions have been proven to be inconsistent in the Phenomenology.

Winfield’s engaging almost 400 pages contain detailed and interesting discussion of various aspects of Hegel’s thought, such as his treatment of communitarianism in the chapter on ‘Reason as Self-Actualisation of Self-Consciousness’ (177) or his reference to Rawls and James Fishkin in his discussion of Antigone (235). Yet we can ask whether Winfield eventually succeeds in reading the Phenomenology as a text that does not advance any substantial claim about cognition, but rather makes a purely negative point.

On the one hand, Winfield appears to put much weight on the phenomenal character of knowing. We not should commit Hegel to any positive view, he states, because we ‘are considering knowing…as a phenomenon’ (5). Provided that this ‘phenomenal’ character of knowing is undoubtedly a key aspect of Hegel’s argument, one could ask: does it necessarily entail that Hegel should not be committed to any of the views he presents? Moreover, does it entail the negative outcome of the entire work? It is true that the Phenomenology rules out some purely ‘phenomenal’ forms of knowing, but it might well be that by doing this one can discover elements, in determinate shapes, that are coherent and therefore need not be dismissed but can rather be carried along as the demolition proceeds. In this respect, Winfield does not seem to provide enough evidence to support the claim that the Phenomenology has a uniquely ‘negative’ conclusion.

Winfield’s claim that, for Hegel, all forms of knowledge are doomed to fail is not necessarily convincing either. A great deal depends, in this case, on the sense that we give to the concept of failure. Winfield agrees with the standard view that Hegel considers each form of knowing presented in the text to integrate the previous ones rather than simply to discard them. He states that this happens in ‘self-consciousness’, which integrates structures belonging to consciousness, in ‘spirit’, which according to Winfield himself ‘carries along with it these prior modes of consciousness’ (362), in ‘religion’ etc. Why should this integration not happen in absolute knowledge? It seems strange that this is the only shape that disregards all the previous ones instead of incorporating their key elements.

In the Introduction to his work, Hegel himself appears to suggest a more positive reading, presenting the Phenomenology as a path leading natural consciousness to ‘true knowledge’ (PhG 49). At some points Winfield himself seems to acknowledge that there is a minimal conception of Geist that is coherent and not entirely refuted by Hegel—otherwise the argument would risk undermining itself—but that is rather re-conceived in the course of the work. Failure, as such, does exclude the possibility of reconceptualization.

Winfield’s ambivalent approach is perhaps most evident when he compares Hegel’s phenomenological procedure to a sceptical one. As with the sceptic, the phenomenological observer does not commit to the views she criticizes but shows only that they are deficient. Winfield then claims that Hegel’s method is ‘fundamentally different’ from scepticism (16) because, as stated above, it appears to be in the very nature of Hegel’s argument to preserve and transform the various positions that are analyzed, and not just to dismiss them. What the ‘preservation’ and ‘transformation’ of previous shapes of spirit concretely means obviously needs to be specified. But, as some critics of the ‘negative’ reading have argued, this general feature of Hegel’s phenomenological method seems to leave room for reading the Phenomenology as a ‘logical constructive’ process (Harris Reference Harris1982) that contains ‘positive’ claims as well.

With regard to textual evidence, although I do not have the space to dwell on this issue, many of the passages Winfield relies on to defend his claim appear to be consistent with a more constructive interpretation. In addition, passages such as the one mentioned above seem to explicitly support such a reading. One might have wished that Winfield pay more attention to them. Nevertheless, Winfield’s book should by no means be dismissed; its seventeen lectures cut a clear path through a book that many find to be impenetrable and, in the course of the argument, Winfield provides even seasoned readers with numerous useful tools for making sense of Hegel’s attempt at ‘challenging us to think without foundations’ (382).