Here’s an attempt to give some prefatory remarks about this preface that Hegel was squeamish about writing.
Jay Bernstein says (paraphrasing) the preface assumes knowledge of the whole [and there is a hugely important emphasis on whole/part for H]. The preface expresses anxiety b/c we cannot begin. There is no beginning. We are already in the middle.
So while it would be nice to write an adequate meta-preface here, for Mr Hegel, an adequate preface is not possible to write.
For H, it is impossible to present the “whole,” which can only be inferred – via the story of the unfolding of the self-moving-thing-IN-itself — towards becoming the self-moving-thing-FOR-itself. (29: “being in itself needs to be converted to being for itself”). In vs For here I think goes to ‘purposiveness’ – or that which gets actualized – sort of the drive for self-actualization via the labor of the negative.
It’s almost like the subject-predicate grammar is inadequate to his grand schema. And i say grand b/c H is ushering in a new era of Philosophy (literally love of knowledge). It is no longer love of K but a "science of knowledge" that H is trying to push forth. The original title (in English) was something like System of Science: 1st Part, The P of S.
I think most teachers don’t want to start with the preface b/c it infers the whole philosophy, which isn’t intuitive at all.
So, I’m already out of sequence. It is very hard to maintain the continuity of this becoming of Geist. I’ve read that Hyppolite says that PS is like a Bildungsroman - or coming of age story for the heroic protagonist Geist (who should be smoking unfiltered Spirits etc). Actually this is a brilliant metaphor - i do think it works.
(J Bernstein presents a one line distillation that sounds a bit like a Hollywood elevator pitch without a punchline: God becomes man; man becomes Holy Spirit; and Holy Spirit is Geist)
H is “completing” (or maybe better, abolishing) Kant in this book. In other words, he is rectifying the history of philosophy (which is one of the problems for me - i distrust rectification - it feels like the endless succession of avant-gardisms).
H wants to invert much of Kant. Instead of Universal/Particulars (or the debate between Rationalists and Empiricists), H emphasizes Whole/Part relations.
He wants to abolish singularities ("if you start with universals they swallow particulars; if you start with particulars you get nominalism/skepticism/relativism").
H wants to overcome empiricism. Anti-epistemological. Interested not so much in knowledge (subj k in itself) as in recognition or self-consciousness. That self-moving-subjectivity.
Kant’s transcendental unit of apperception is replaced with Spirit (which unfolds in time or that which includes history). Hegel is arguing for Absolute/Infinite Idealism (unity of thought & being) over Kant’s formal/subjective/finite idealism.
You could say modern Philosophy starts with Descartes, and H corrects Descartes too - not “I think” but “we think.” Subjectivity discovers self-relation. And this mediation is negation – or maybe the process/labor of the negative. This movement of the negative, aka opposition, is the driving force of the self moving subject.
For Hegel — one might be the loneliest number — but also two is a lonely number. You need at least two to have self consciousness. But H wants an I that is a we and a We that is an I. [There’s a joke about three dog night here but it’s not a good one.]
Everything is mediated. H is against unmediated intuition dominant in Kant and other philosophy. He is also against Realism precisely b/c it is unmediated and suggests things (sic?) exist independent of conceptual schemes.
Of course for H, the “we that is an I” is conditioned by history - again the continuity of becoming (or of historical movement) is important.
Ps/on this “continuity of becoming” - as a theory of temporality i think it is wrong. It is in line with Bergson - and maybe just an inadequate way of thinking about history. The Whiteheadian inversion makes a lot more sense to me: humans construct continuity and presume that there is a continuity. So i think it might be more usefully thought of as a “becoming of continuity.” The real is more discontinuous...which probably makes it more difficult to propose revolutionary theorems, but more optimistic about inevitability coming discontinuities.
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