The Phenomenology of Spirit by GWF Hegel is one of the most profound books in all western philosophy. One could spend a lifetime studying it and still not have within one’s grasp the sum of the insights it contains. Hegel is renowned for being the formidable philosopher of the grand sweep of history, of the intellectual embodiment of what he termed “Geist”, or consciousness in its broadest conception.
Indeed, Hegel’s writing is intellectually exhilarating, a great spiritual journey across the enormous canvas of human life. But I find that the writing of Hegel is more suggestive when he draws back from his grand dialectical fireworks to something more modest.
Hegel was a Christian thinker, but his overall understanding of God is more profound and sophisticated than that of anyone else I have read. Although Hegel writes in a highly abstract way about this process, and where we pick up the story we are still at an early stage of the dialectic, in this he is of a piece with the Christian doctrine, where it is in the most day-to-day and humble actions that God reveals Himself.
I have written elsewhere about Hegel’s famous dialectic of master and slave (or “master-servant”, or “lordship and bondage”). It occupies a celebrated place in Hegel’s overall system and has been highly influential. Hegel reveals at the end of that episode in the Phenomenology that, in spite of the struggle to the death with the master for recognition, it is in the slave where truth resides.
As Stephen Houlgate writes in his guide to the Phenomenology: “The relation between the master and the slave is asymmetrical. The master, in contrast to the slave, is unable to give positive, objective expression to his freedom through labour and so enjoys nothing but his own mastery.” The slave, on the other hand, through activity and work, and later on desire and enjoyment, comes to realise that he himself is an independent human being.
After that episode, Hegel moves on to relations between individuals. We join the story in paragraph 222, at an important juncture now well beyond that famous “fight-to-the-death” scenario. Hegel will now discuss gratitude.1
In giving thanks, an individual seems to nullify his own existence as an independent being: in the moment he appears to be dependent on the other person in the relation. However, at the same time, giving thanks leads to a higher awareness of his own existence as an independent or concrete individual, and of individuality in general.
Hegel terms this “reciprocal self-surrender.” In giving something to someone else you demonstrate your own independence as a person. In expressing gratitude, you show your dependence. The other has bestowed the gift to an individual, they have given not just a gift but also something of their own self as well, and in doing so have now made themselves dependent upon the first consciousness for validation.
The recipient then “gives thanks” to the bearer of the gift, and in so doing, through acknowledging the gift, enables its validation and he thereby becomes more than just a passive acceptant of an object.
For though consciousness renounces the show of satisfying its feelings of self, it obtains the actual satisfaction of it; for it has been desire, work and enjoyment; as consciousness it has willed, acted and enjoyed. Similarly, even its giving of thanks, in which it acknowledges the other extreme as the essential Being and counts itself nothing, is its own act which counterbalances the action of the most extreme, and meets the self-sacrificing beneficence with a like action. If the other extreme consciousness also gives thanks; and in surrendering its own action, ie its essential being, it really does more than the other which only sheds a superficial element of itself.
In receiving, the recipient gives back more than he received. He validates not only himself in the relationship, but the other too. They both move to a higher concept of mutual recognition:
Thus, the entire movement is reflected not only in the actual desiring, working and enjoyment, but even in the very giving of thanks where the reverse seems to take place, in the extreme of individuality. Consciousness feels itself therein as this particular individual and does not let it itself be deceived by its own seeming renunciation, for the truth of the matter is that it has not renounced itself.
The elegance of Hegel’s science of the experience of consciousness come fully into play hereon in. Through work and desire, consciousness tries, through self-othering, to grasp the essence of the “unchangeable” - ie God - as an aspect of the holy or the sacred.
What has been brought about is only the double reflection into the two extremes; and the result is the renewed division into the opposed consciousness of the Unchangeable [God], and the consciousness of willing, performing and enjoying, and self-renunciation itself which confronts it; in other words the consciousness of independent individuality in general.
This passage is a complex dialectic of reciprocity. Remember that the dialectic of master and slave is also a dialectic of reciprocity, but this is resolved but preserved [aufgehoben] at a higher level.
But let us now look at this in more everyday terms.
In giving we give something of our own being to another person. We are not simply giving an object. A book may be a gift, but in giving a gift we are also making an offering to someone else, showing how much we may love or appreciate them. We therefore also give something of our soul, and this can also make us vulnerable, for what if the recipient rejects it?
In giving thanks, a person forgets they are an independent individual with their own desires, activity and enjoyment, and in that moment becomes dependent on the other. Gratitude demonstrates our dependence on each other. To put it another way, our very independence as individuals involves a mutual back and forth, the “reciprocal self-surrender” that Hegel termed. For in receiving, we give thanks: we give and receive in the same movement. And in receiving a thank you, the original giver gets a part of the other person’s inner self back too.
This paragraph is a deeply beautiful statement by Hegel. It shows that human life is marked out as social life, as relations between individuals. Giving and thanking are as basic and essential to human being as desiring, working and enjoying. The giving of thanks is part of the fundamental, metaphysical essence of our spirit. As in the prayer of St Francis, “it is in giving that we receive.”
Accordingly, in Hegel’s narrative, the complete realization of ourselves as individuals in general comes through this reciprocity: kindness, generosity, gratitude.
I must express here my gratitude for Dr Greg Sadler’s video series on Hegel, which has been very helpful here.