The Phenomenology of Spirit

This new American translation of the Phenomenology rephrases as much as it translates Hegel’s signature 19th century German into remarkably clear and fluent English prose.

The Miller translation is still the best. This translation simplifies the text to an academically unacceptable extent. Does the translator understand German? English? The made up words are laughable. And so expensive!!! A waste.

It’s hard to judge a translation of The Phenomenology. Did I understand better? Well, it’s almost as if every time I read the book, it’s the first time. So much strikes me as new and impenetrable. Every time I read it the scope of my not-understanding shifts. Maybe it decreases, but maybe I just come to understand that there’s more that I don’t understand.Since this is the latest translation of the book, I read it from the standpoint of translation, although it’s impossible, for me at least, not to be drawn into re-thinking my understanding of Hegel’s project here. I’ll talk about that first, and then I’ll get to some comments about the translation.What is Hegel’s core insight in The Phenomenology? I think his insight comes in response to the same question that motivated Kant’s thought — how is it that we (subjects) understand a world (objects) that, at least at first pass, appears utterly different from us? Why is the way in which we understand and “know” reality successful, given the world’s apparently utter otherness?And, famously, for Kant the answer was that we supply the conditions of the world’s knowability — the structures, if we can accept that unKantian word — that tie perceptions into coherent, intelligible experience.Hegel’s insight takes Kant’s answer much farther. The world is knowable because it is not alien to us, because what it is, its intelligible structure, is exactly the structure of human reason. But not, as for Kant, as something contributed by a knowing subject to the world, rather as something constitutive of the world itself. The world simply IS rational, whereas for Kant it was (merely) experienced as rational.For Kant, that implied a leftover that wasn’t knowable — the world as “thing-in-itself,” independently of the conditions of knowledge provided by knowing subjects becomes something outside the knowable, in fact entirely unintelligible.For Hegel, there is no leftover, no world as “thing-in-itself” to be contrasted with the knowable world, since the conditions of knowledge inhere in the world itself.This line of argument certainly makes Hegel an “idealist” in some sense, in that the stuff of mind and the stuff of the world are one and the same — the world is “ideal” in that it is made of the same stuff as the knower.But Hegel’s idealism isn’t so simple. This is where one of Hegel’s unique contributions comes into play — his historicism. The knower must become a knower — knowing isn’t simply given to us. And hence in the early chapters of The Phenomenology, we see an evolving conception of knowledge in action. Knowing fails, and it evolves itself in its failures.In the succeeding chapters, this evolving conception of knowledge becomes truly historical, in that it must test itself against the world of its own making — the human world of communities, cultures, religions, sciences, and polities. In that evolution, both sides evolve, as the knower evolves both what knowing is and the (human) reality that it knows.“Absolute Knowing” then at the end of the process presents us with both an evolved sense of what knowing is and an evolved world that is known.That known world is, despite our classifying Hegel as an “idealist,” fully real, solid, and tangible. This is not Berkeley’s idealism, or even Fichte’s (as Hegel often implicitly points out). What has happened is that each side of knowledge, the knower and the known, has evolved to become fully conformable with the other. As Hegel is commonly quoted, “The real is the rational, and the rational is the real” (see the Preface to Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right for the quote).A very interesting and provocative takeaway from Hegel’s treatment of knowledge in The Phenomenology (particularly in the Preface) is, to put it in catchy Hegel-ish style, all knowledge is also theory of knowledge — in the sense that knowing something requires knowing what the activity of knowing that something is. This is in fact the task he puts before himself in The Phenomenology — to in Hegelian terms, make knowledge adequate to its object.Hegel contrasts knowing as “external” to its object with what he calls “science.” Knowing as external to its object is an application of something (a measuring device, a categorization scheme, or even rules of inference or calculation) to the object. Knowing a thing as “science” begins with the discovery of what it is to know such a thing as it comes to be itself and builds knowledge in accordance with what it is to know such a thing.For example, world history might be “known” any number of ways. You can count centuries, list populations, categorize events, etc. Or, more preferably, you could begin with an investigation of what historical knowledge is, how someone in the present apprehends something in the past at all, and then build a knowledge of the past on that basis.Knowing world history as “science” (for Hegel) means discerning the conceptual movement that world history actually is. This is what he attempts in his own Lectures on the Philosophy of History. There is no accounting there of dates and even little of events as such, but rather an account of the rational, conceptual flow that history follows, in Hegel’s understanding at least.Okay, that’s enough on the content of Hegel’s thought. I had to do that. But now, the translation.One problem with translations of Hegel is to decide who you are translating for. Translating for a “Hegel scholar” is one thing, and translating for someone reading the book for the first time is another. The latter is a special problem for Hegel’s work, given its inherent complexity and its uncomfortable style. Reading Hegel for the first time is a climb up a very steep ramp. The question is whether this translation helps.I think it might. Have a look below at one sentence I chose from the concluding chapter on “Absolute Knowing”. It’s just one sentence, and I’m not a German scholar, but we can use it to illustrate some points.Here is the German: “Die Bewegung, die Form seines Wissens von sich hervorzutreiben, is die Arbeit, die er als wirkliche Geschichte vollbringt.”Here is the Fuss and Dobbins translation that I’m reviewing: “The process of advancing the form of its self-knowledge is the work that spirit accomplishes as actual history.”And here are the three previous translations that I have read (I haven't yet read Inwood's translation):Pinkard — “The movement of propelling forward the form of its self-knowing is the work which spirit accomplishes as actual history.”Miller — “The movement of carrying forward the form of its self-knowledge is the labour which it accomplishes as actual History.”Baillie — “The process of carrying forward this form of knowledge of itself is the task which spirit accomplishes as actual History.”Notice a couple of things. While German word order just doesn’t transfer to English, Fuss and Dobbins did their best to transform Hegel’s chunky style into a relatively simple English sentence. For example, they translate “hervorzutreiben” simply as “advancing.” The other three attempt to render the word in a way that retains some of the nuance of the term’s components but that becomes awkward — “carrying forward” or “propelling forward.” From a scholarly perspective, Fuss and Dobbins may be letting something drop from the term, but they do, I think, make the overall sentence more readable.Notice also that Fuss and Dobbins don’t mess with the typically Hegelian construction, “die Form seines Wissens von sich.” That would be sacrilege, as well as probably misleading to a student of Hegel. In fact, all four translations follow a pretty literal read.It’s interesting that Pinkard here and elsewhere indulges a more dynamic way of speaking, using the present participle “knowing” for “Wissens” while the others all translate it as a straightforward noun, “knowledge.” He also chooses a more forceful word, “propelling” in translating “hervorzutreiben” than Miller or Baillie.Okay enough wonkiness. The point is that Fuss and Dobbins do attempt to smooth Hegel out a bit for the reader. It doesn’t make The Phenomenology readable. Nothing could do that and still be The Phenomenology.Like I said in a review of the Pinkard translation, I think if you are a student of Hegel, it’s worth reading more than one, even all, of the translations, to get various grips on the content.I’m glad Fuss and Dobbins had their go at it.

The book is a highly valued work of scholarly translation yet printed cheaply for a price of the original book. Paper is different and I can't leave the feedback for the printing as that is impossible.In recent years, I have bought on Amazon U.K. books of the same quality that are supposed to be directly from the publisher, however they are POD (Print On Demand). I think that it would be fair that Amazon let customers know that certain books are POD's and not printed originally by the publisher. I would never pay the same price for the copy, and from now on will check carefully what I am buying. All the POD's will be promptly returned.