Richard Kroner aptly observes that, ‘[a]lthough the Phenomenology is supposed to clarify Hegel’s philosophy, no book is less suited to a beginner’ (1970: 45). When Hegel wrote it, he had not yet published much of a philosophy for it to clarify: neither the later system that it announces nor the crucial ferment of his thinking over the decade or so preceding its publication were available to his first readers. Fortunately, we are not ‘beginners’ in that sense; we can take up the book alongside Hegel’s other writings, published and unpublished, for help. One way to use such material is to unearth the tangled network of allusions and other traces of Hegel’s intellectual development that lie just underneath the work’s surface; another is to focus on the conceptual content to which it is supposed to introduce us. Ludwig Siep takes the former approach in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Ardis Collins takes the latter in Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles. Both richly reward the reader by treating the Phenomenology as a text essentially in need of context rather than as something with which one simply begins.

Siep’s book is ‘a corrected, but not substantially revised, version of the German edition’ (xiii) listed in the bibliography below; the English edition differs from the original primarily by its exclusion of the original’s Stellenkommentar and an enlarged bibliography incorporating work appearing since the publication of the German edition. It is a substantial bibliography (42 pages) and a valuable bridge into the territory of German Hegel literature for the Anglophone reader.

The book should be both helpful to students and learned enough for specialists. It is clearly written and organized, for the most part following the structure of the Phenomenology, but frequently referring the reader to other texts when some earlier or later expression of Hegel’s view serves to clarify his meaning. Chapters one through four offer an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophical development up to the Phenomenology, with a particular focus on the 1801 Differenzschrift. Chapters five and six cover the Phenomenology itself, with the former devoted to the preface and introduction, and the latter, which comprises about two-thirds of the book, to the main text. A brief closing chapter then addresses the influence of the Phenomenology on later philosophy.

Siep does not organize the book around any overarching interpretive thesis—it ‘maintains an introductory character and is addressed not only to scholars and students of Hegel but also to a broader academic public’ (xv)—but all readers will gain from his impressive command of the Phenomenology’s literary and historical context. The book distinguishes itself from other guidebooks by its attention to Hegel’s early development, and the chapters devoted to this development are an excellent introduction to this period in their own right. Siep approaches the Phenomenology primarily from the direction of Hegel’s other Jena writings; for him, ‘Hegel’s philosophical program, beginning with the Differenzschrift, strives to overcome the dualisms and dichotomies that afflict not only philosophy, but also the culture of his time’ (71). As he sees it, the Phenomenology seeks to carry out the task laid out for philosophy in the opening chapter of the Differenzschrift, healing the divisions of late Enlightenment culture by means of a distinctive appropriation of the Kantian conception of reason as a faculty that spurs human cognition toward systematic unity.

The book is bursting with references to the thinkers and traditions in relation to which Hegel situates himself (or a given form of consciousness) at every step. These go well beyond the contexts of Kantian and Romantic philosophy and include Platonism (80), Neoplatonism (16), Aristotelianism (117), ancient and modern scepticism (25) and negative theology (64); theories of appearances (53), economics (135), the highest being (24) and slavery (93); and the now-obscure debates in medicine, psychology and the physical sciences to which Hegel responds in ‘Observing Reason’. Students and specialists will also appreciate the many excursuses into Hegel’s philosophical development that appear throughout the book, often dealing with his Jena manuscripts. One example is a discussion of how the distinction between logic and metaphysics disappeared from Hegel’s manuscripts and lectures between 1801 and 1805, especially between the system-drafts of 1804–5 and 1805–6 (42–44). Another concerns Hegel’s substitution of the theoretical attitude of stoicism in the ‘Self-consciousness’ chapter of the Phenomenology for what had been a transition to ‘a legal relation of right’ in his 1805–6 Realphilosophie (94). Still another is a helpful assessment of the differences between the structure of the ‘Religion’ chapter and that of the 1821 lectures on the philosophy of religion (203–5).

If Siep’s primary interest is in the origins of the Phenomenology, Collins’s is in its systematic purpose and the way it fulfils it. Her book seeks to address ‘as wide an audience as possible’ (8), but its length and goals will probably limit this to those with at least some antecedent interest in Hegel. Her approach ‘keeps Hegel’s own agenda dominant in the investigation’ and, unlike Siep’s, ‘restricts its concern with background influences’ (7). Its nineteen chapters are distributed amongst eight parts; other than the introductory first part, these compose two main studies, the second of which builds upon the first: a study of the introductory essays of the Philosophy of Right, Encyclopaedia, Science of Logic, and the Phenomenology, in that order, and a study of the progress of the Phenomenology itself.

In the study of Hegel’s introductory essays, Collins advances a set of theses about his view of the status and ‘proof procedure’ of the Phenomenology, and, in particular, about its role as a justification of the philosophical standpoint. For Collins, Hegel is committed to two positions that may seem difficult to square: that philosophy begins with a presupposition that must be justified (lest it begin in a mere thought exercise) and that this presupposition must not be mediated by anything else (on pain of resting upon some further presupposition and so failing to justify anything). The Phenomenology provides the needed justification, issuing in a concept of science that is both scientifically derived and immediate. This will strike many readers as an impossible task, but Collins’s reconstruction of the presuppositions and dialectical apparatus that are supposed to accomplish it is attractively elegant. I will try to give some sense of it by outlining (first) what she takes the Phenomenology’s starting and ending points to be, (second) how she takes the one to lead to the other, and (third) how she takes the resulting demonstration to constitute the justification of the beginning of logic for which the introductory essays that she examines call. In focusing on these methodological issues I omit much that is of interest in Collins’s treatment of the Phenomenology itself, such as her fascinating analyses of life, desire and conscience, and her culminating focus on the relationship between conscience, revealed religion and absolute knowing.

The Phenomenology’s starting point is ‘the reality of experience’ (245), which encompasses the entire relation between subject and object. This beginning reflects Hegel’s ‘qualified endorsement’ of Jacobi’s conception of experience in the Encyclopaedia’s discussion of immediate knowing, according to which experience is neither a domain strictly internal to the subject nor the subject’s external confrontation of an object, but the whole relationship between them (100–1). Thus, although consciousness’s object as sense-certainty is an immediately given sensible object, our object, as observers, is the entire relationship between this subject and its object. The Phenomenology’s end-point is either immediate or mediate, depending upon the perspective one takes on it. Insofar as ‘absolute knowing’ encompasses the entire sequence of forms of consciousness, it is a mediated result. But this result is at the same time the immediate concept of science that constitutes the beginning of logic, and the Phenomenology brings the observer—in whom, according to Collins, the real development takes place (196–97)—to this immediate beginning of pure thinking.

The end of the Phenomenology has this dual status—as the mediate result of the development of experience and as the immediate beginning of logic—in virtue of Hegel’s dialectical procedure. Determinate negation, according to Collins, is the outcome of a process of ‘retreat into a ground’. It has two main components: first, the mediated derivation (through a series of steps whose details I omit here) of an ‘infinite’ ground for any given ‘finite’ determination, and, second, the positing of the derived ground as a simple self-identity that is prior to the grounded determinations from which it was derived. Collins characterizes the shift from the first part of the process (derivation of ground) to the second (immediate positing of ground) as a ‘reversal’ (146, 151, 219) of the order of demonstration, inasmuch as it consists in changing one’s view of the ground in question from that of a mediated result to that of an immediate beginning of further development.

The second principal study seeks to show how this dialectical procedure connects the starting point of the Phenomenology to its end point so as to constitute the kind of justification of the beginning concept of logic for which the introductory essays call. Hegel demonstrates that a form of consciousness specified only by ‘the minimal conditions required for knowing to appear’ (181) ‘retreats’ into a series of intermediate grounds according to the process outlined above, and ultimately into the final ground of absolute knowing. And, because this minimally specified starting point is just the immediate ‘reality of experience’, it is—unlike Fichte’s pure I, which is not ‘immediately at hand’ to consciousness (133)—not in need of further justification. Therefore, the demonstration serves, according to Hegel, as a genuine justification of absolute knowing. But the very same procedure requires that the ground it deduces, precisely because it deduces it as ground, be posited immediately as a simple, self-same form of knowing, and this ‘reversal’ satisfies the other, seemingly incompatible demand that philosophy (i.e., ‘pure thought’ or logic) should have an immediate beginning. Thus,

Both books raise interesting questions. Siep maintains that Hegel’s is a holist system constituted by a network of interrelated concepts, and he associates this holism with Hegel’s systematic organicism: ‘A philosophical system must not be understood as an analytic deduction starting from supreme first principles,’ he writes, ‘but rather as an organic development from simpler to more complex theoretical structures which reciprocally explicate one another’ (57). But his account of what such holistic reciprocal explication involves leaves me unsatisfied. For Siep, the system’s results depend upon its ability to incorporate certain concepts into a network and gradually rule out those that cannot be so incorporated. Systematic unity is defined in terms of the network of relationships between concepts, and its contents, which are ‘semantic’ in nature (e.g., 59, 240), are true or actual to the extent that they can be incorporated into this network (e.g., 57, 80, 252). While I agree that Hegel’s system must involve something like a network of reciprocal conceptual relations, this does not seem sufficient to capture his organicist ambitions. If we take Hegel’s organic characterizations and metaphors seriously—including his heavy emphasis upon inward unity in contrast to the outwardness of the relations between forms of consciousness or concepts, which not only relate reciprocally to one another but also express, or are grounded in, that simple inwardness—we might expect that the system develops not only by the gradual incorporation of concepts into a network of relations, but also, more fundamentally than this, by actualizing an inner potential in which the entire series of forms is implicit. If this is right, then holism will fall short of Hegel’s organicism in more or less the same way in which a contemporary systems-theoretic account of life as a chaotic but self-regulating physical system would be too weak to capture Aristotle’s view that the generation and unity of organisms is due to their natures (even if such a comparison cannot be taken too far).

This point may also be made by way of a contrast with Collins’s approach to Hegel’s philosophical procedure. She interprets absolute knowing as an identity between the oppositional character of the entire system of finite determinations, on the one hand, and the unity of their ground on the other:

These claims distinguish Collins’s position from the one I have just attributed to Siep. In first distinguishing the relational system of opposites as a whole from a unitary ground and then identifying system with ground, rather than identifying the unity of the system straightaway in terms of the relational system, Collins’s reconstruction is in my view more faithful to Hegel than Siep’s. Because this scheme preserves a distinction between a unitary inward principle (what Collins calls ‘ground’) and its manifold outward expression (what she calls the ‘relational system’), it is more amenable to Hegel’s teleological and organicist ambitions.

Collins also claims, however, that in a determinate negation ‘the new concept asserts nothing more than the preceding concept together with the negation of this concept’ (149). Something close to this is true for Hegel: his dialectical procedure requires indeed that determinate negations be determined entirely by that out of which they arise. But does this mean that they contain nothing more than these related opposites? The passage she cites in support of this claim, as well as her own approach elsewhere in the book, suggest that she might well abandon this restriction. The passage in question is from the second preface to the Science of Logic (SL: 21: 37–38), where Hegel describes a determinate negation as ‘a new concept but one higher and richer than the preceding—richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite’ (SL: 21: 38). This ‘unity’ seems to be the kind of ‘ground’ that Collins elsewhere distinguishes from the system of reciprocal oppositions that ‘retreats’ into it. For Hegel says here that the unity of a given pair of opposites is something ‘even more than’ their reciprocal relation to one another, just as Collins urges in the passage above and in her account of the dialectical process. A concept is already ‘richer’ than another if it has a reciprocal negative relation to it; but to be ‘the unity of itself and its opposite’ is something ‘even more than’ the already-augmented richness of relation. In a number of discussions of determinate negation (e.g., 156, 194, 208, 230), perhaps in an attempt to keep to her principle that determinate negation involves ‘nothing more than’ the relation between a predecessor concept and its opposite, Collins seems to elide this distinction between mere relation and unity. But her account of ‘retreat into a ground’ seems to require that we keep them distinct and so allow that a determinate negation does include more than the opposites and reciprocal relations out of which it arises—namely, the ‘ground’ into which they retreat. This will be unpalatable to some, but, if I have understood her proposal correctly, it involves no additional cost because it amounts to a restatement of one of her central commitments.

More than anything else, my engagement here, even where critical, is a response to the richness and quality of these books. Siep’s deserves a place on course syllabi and in specialists’ libraries, and Collins’s is due a careful hearing in the ongoing debate over Hegel’s presuppositions and methodology. I hope that both books will be read and discussed widely.