“The world”, said Wittgenstein, “is the totality of facts, not of things”. According to the “correspondence theory”, therefore, “the truth” will be the totality of assertions that state “the facts”. In Hegel's mature theory of “truth”, this is not “philosophical truth” at all, but the ideal limit of “correct statement”.

“Philosophical truth” however – like Wittgenstein's Tractatus – is a rather special subset of “the truly assertible facts”. It is the set that contains all of the true assertions about the logical structure of human cognitive experience. Thus, it is a set of “logical facts”; and if we are to know scientifically, what “human knowledge” is, we must be able to state these “facts” correctly. Hence Hegel's theory of “truth” is not independent of his theory of “correctness”. He has a “correspondence theory” of “truth”; but “Truth” is a property of assertions about “knowledge”, not of assertions about “the world”. For this reason, the theory of “truth” becomes a complex and interesting topic in Hegel's view, and not the boringly simple matter already disposed of in the formal definition of “correctness”. What is called “the correspondence theory” does not deserve the honorific name of “theory” at all. It is a formal logical truth that can be stated in a single sentence. Only in Hegel's theory of “experience” does “correspondence” become, for the first time, interesting.

The general ground for comedy is therefore a world in which man as subject or person has made himself completely master of everything that counts to him otherwise than the essential content of what he wills and accomplishes, a world whose purposes are therefore destroyed because of their unsubstantiality. Nothing can be done, for example, to help a democratic nation where the citizens are self-seeking, quarrelsome, frivolous, bumptious, without faith or knowledge, garrulous, boastful and ineffectual: such a nation destroys itself by its own folly.

Hegel is keen to distinguish the merely laughable from the comical in the sequel to this passage from page one thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine of the English translation of his Aesthetics. We may laugh at any contrast between subjective caprice and insubstantial action, while vice and evil are not in themselves comic: “There is also the laughter of derision, scorn, despair, etc. On the other hand, the comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.” (Is this condition of serenity, I wonder, attained by effort or by grace?) In comedy, “the ruling principle is the contingency and caprice of subjective life” whose nullity and self-destructive folly displays the abused actuality of substantial life. The aberration of the passions that rage in the human heart are drawn from “the aberrations of the democracy out of which the old faith and morals have vanished” (as Hegel describes Aristophanes's comedies). While in tragedy the powers which oppose each other as pathos in individuals are hostile, in comedy, “they are revealed directly as inwardly self-dissolving.” Comedy, as much as tragedy, is always divine comedy, “the Divine here in its community, as the substance and aim of human individuality, brought into existence as something concrete, summoned into action and put in movement.”

The general intent of this paper is to examine Hegel's preoccupation with the question of beginnings. To anticipate, in Hegel's view every account in respect to its beginning – indeed, everything in respect to its beginning – is both immediate and mediated. All things therefore begin having already begun; all things begin in medias res. But if all things begin having already begun, all things begin as a rupture of one sort or another.

This necessity of rupture puts the problematic of beginnings for Hegel into clear focus: system, in order to be system, must involve closure; but because of the nature of beginnings, system must also involve rupture. A judicious view of the texts show, I think, that Hegel is not willing to give up either thesis. Consequently, if the system is to be viable, the rupture cannot efface the closure; but if the system is to begin, the closure must not efface the rupture. Rupture and closure must coexist. Hegel's concern with beginning, then, is a concern with how legitimately to initiate the system without either ignoring or effacing rupture, and without preempting the possibility of closure.

In Parts One and Two I will establish Hegel's clear awareness of rupture and of the part it plays in the system. If we examine the Preface and Introduction to the Science of Logic and to the Phenomenology of 1807 we find Hegel discussing a series of ruptures – indeed a circle of ruptures – which begin with a rupture at the beginning of the Science of Logic. There is first this rupture in the system as system, instantiated in the necessary reference by the Logic back to the Phenomenology. Behind this, there is a rupture in the Phenomenology itself in its own mediated beginnings, a rupture rooted in the immediate experience of natural consciousness. Behind this second rupture there is a third, a rupture in the contemporary Zeitgeist as it is instantiated in the natural attitude of natural consciousness. This rupture takes the form of the loss in natural consciousness of traditional certitude, a loss brought about by the incursion of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy on this natural, everyday consciousness. If we reflect back to the first rupture noted – that at the beginning of the Logic and put it into the context of this causal chain of ruptures, we see that philosophy in fact experiences a self-caused rupture. This self-caused rupture is due to philosophy's own effects on the Zeitgeist as internalized by natural consciousness at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries.

There has been much debate regarding interpretation of the concept of recognition (Anerkennung) in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Among the issues discussed in various commentaries, two that I find particularly interesting and important are: a) the question of the social and historical vs psychological significance of the concept of recognition which appears in Chapter 4 of Hegel's Phenomenology and b) the status of the dialectic of lordship and bondage for understanding the nature of the reconciliation of self-consciousness in the realm of objective spirit. Both of these topics have been widely discussed and I could not pretend to do justice to them in the space of this paper. My particular interest here is to discuss the political significance of Hegel's concept of recognition, specifically by exploring its connection to Hegel's overtly political works, especially the Philosophy of Right with its articulation of the Idea of the state. However, before proceeding directly to that task, I would like to begin with some comments on the two issues I just mentioned, as they are relevant to my topic.

In an essay entitled “Notes on Hegel's ‘Lordship and Bondage’” George Amstrong Kelly cautions the reader of the Phenomenology against oversimplifying Hegel's concept of recognition. There are two oversimplifications in particular that he worries about: (1) reducing the significance of Anerkennung to a social and political reading, and (2) (in Kelly's words) “the master- slave relationship is made an unqualified device for clarifying the progress of human history”, (p 191) The first mistake is avoided by seeing, in addition to the social “angle”, the “pattern of psychological domination and servitude within the individual ego”, (p 195) According to Kelly, “The problem of lordship and bondage is essentially Platonic in foundation, because the primal cleavage in both the history of society and the history of the ego is at stake. The two primordial egos in the struggle that will lead to mastery and slavery are also locked within themselves”, (p 199) The internal aspects of lordship and bondage are found in the struggle for self-awareness between self and other within the Ego, eg., in terms of appetition vs spiritual self-regard, opposed faculties in the ego that once awakened must be brought into harmony. As Kelly puts it in his book Idealism, Politics and History, “man remits the tensions of his being upon the world of fellow beings and is himself changed in the process. This relationship furnishes the bridge between psychology and history”, (p 334)

The aim of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to provide its reader with a “ladder” to the standpoint of science, showing him “this standpoint within himself (§26). By the standpoint of science, the standpoint of absolute knowing, I understand a perspective in which human cognition has no absolute limits or barriers, in which no items and types of items, most notably Kant's things in themselves, are intrinsically or a priori external to human cognition. Hegel is only attempting to provide a ladder to this standpoint because he believes that no demonstration or deduction of it is possible. Hegel's denial of the possibility of demonstration is premised on a simple logical insight: if what is presupposed as external to reason and cognition – material objects, other persons, language, social practices, history – are in fact constitutive conditions of them, then a position whose premises are weaker than what it seeks to demonstrate, as for example one might attempt to explicate the possibility of linguistic meaning only through reference to elaborate structures of intention, must necessarily fail. Hence, Hegel's initially puzzling formula that states that the “aether” of knowing is “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness” (§26), is designedly anti-Kantian: we only come to apperceptive self-awareness, what for Kant is pure or transcendental self-consciousness, through cogntion of things in themselves, the very things access to which Kant denies as a condition apperception.

In the early sections of The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, Hegel offered some advice on how not to write the history of philosophy. In the hands of the collector of philosophical opinions “philosophy is transposed to the plane of information. Information is concerned with alien objects”. But for Hegel a scarcely less inert relation to previous work in philosophy is implied when this work is taken as a series of faltering steps towards the invention of a perfected thought-technique which would spare truth the labour of error. In these circumstances “The preceding philosophical systems would at all times be nothing but practice studies for the big brains”. Research on the Phenomenology of Spirit has occasionally resembled both an aggregation of inert philological objects and a series of intellectual work-outs. But either fate may be preferable to its relegation to the honourable oblivion of Gedankendichtung, “conceptual poetry”. The phrase “Hegel-specialist” has an oxymoronic ring to it; but the separation of faculties which governs this need for experts cannot be wished away. A stuffed replica of the Phenomenology of Spirit, or even a requirement that all philosophers should speak Hegelian, can hardly today provide more than philosophical kitsch. Hegel's philosophical compositions continue mutely to reproach the graceless cerebration sometimes conducted in their name, but they are still worse served by what Hegel referred to as “the conceit that will not argue”. These considerations also apply to the content of interpretations of the Phenomenology itself and of Hegel's thought in general. Some recent readings have emphasized Hegel's Kantian and Fichtean inheritance to the point where it might almost be thought that what is distinctively interesting about Hegel has vanished altogether. But such readings represent a fair response not merely to any idea that Hegel kindly allows us to have back intact the dogmatic metaphysics harshly prohibited by Kant, but also to interpretations which forget that Hegel's critique of epistemology proceeds immanently and epistemologically rather than being shot from a pistol. Discussion of the “unhappy consciousness” might stand as an epitome for these oppositions in Hegel-reception. At one extreme lies Walter Kaufmann's suggestion that “Hegel evidently wanted to get some ideas about medieval Christianity off his chest…”; but deeper and more nuanced readings of the presence of a phenomenology of religious consciousness in this passage are not lacking, above all the monograph by Wahl and Hyppolite's discussion in his commentary.