In his two volume work, Hegel's Ladder, spanning over 1500 pages, Henry Harris describes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 as “an epic story about God” (I. 31). Harris' work is itself a work of epic proportions. It is the fullest commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology I have ever seen. We are brought, paragraph by paragraph, from the beginning to the end of Hegel's Phenomenology, without break. And although Harris describes it as an epic about God, there is nothing of the usual mystification that surfaces when “theological” interpretations are offered.

There is, of course, no possibility of commenting on this work in any adequate way, short of perhaps writing a 3,000 page commentary on his commentary of some 1500 pages. After briefly, and inadequately, offering a summary of some of the important characteristics and positions of Harris' work, I want to pose some questions to Professor Harris concerning his interpretation.

As already mentioned, the format Harris chooses is to comment in detail on each of the paragraphs of the Phenomenology. This commentary follows two previous volumes, Hegel's Development I: Toward the Sunlight, and Hegel's Development II: Night Thoughts, in which we are given an erudite and thorough account of Hegel's studies and of his writings prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. These previous volumes are integral to the present two volumes, as indicated by Harris' challenge to his readers and his critics.

My own view — after studying and laying out Hegel's intellectual development as completely and coherently as I could — is that no thesis about Hegel's project should be preferred to the one that I am about to advance unless it coheres with and provides answers to all of the exigencies that I have pointed to in the “genesis” of the book at least as well as mine does. (But many other theses may be valid complements to the one maintained here.) (I. 9)

And, indeed, one of the characteristics of Hegel's Ladder is that we are constantly reminded of how and why the problematic at issue derives from the way that Hegel's thought had developed. Thus, Hegel's Ladder has significance not only as a commentary on the Phenomenology, but also as a link between the Phenomenology and Hegel's earlier development.

H. S. Harris, in his two-volume study of Hegel's Phenomenology, endorses both the titles that Hegel gave to this work. As a science of experience, Harris says, the Phenomenology situates us within the psychology of the singular self, the self's sense of its own consciousness, and exhibits therein “the conceptual structure of pure science.” As the phenomenology of spirit, the Phenomenology shows how an individual situated within his or her own experience and history belongs to the universal life of a spirit that encompasses all history and all selfhood. Thus, the Phenomenology demonstrates that the temporality of the singular self holds within itself eternity; and it conceives this eternity as the pure logic of philosophical science which is “the interpretation of its world by a rationally scientific community.” Harris intends to show that the Phenomenology is a continuous science in its own right, and that the logic developed in Hegel's philosophical system simply detaches this scientific, logical dimension from its embeddedness in the concreteness of human experience.

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive to work through Jean Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary.

I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and (in Spanish) Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here” (I, 312), “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators” (I, 315), “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him” (I, 613), and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams (to name just a few!) — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty.

Students of the Hegelian school must acknowledge an abiding debt to Ernst Barnikol. Upon his death in 1968, he left uncompleted a voluminous manuscript on Bruno Bauer, representing over forty years of research. Of this manuscript, conserved at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, only a fraction has been published, but even this fraction, in its almost six hundred pages, continues to set standards in the field for meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism. Barnikol's interests were primarily theological, though he recognised clearly that Bauer's religious critique was politically motivated. Barnikol also discovered, but did not publish, Bauer's 1829 Latin manuscript on Kant's aesthetics. This text, adjudicated by Hegel and awarded the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, had been deposited among Hegel's correspondence in the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. It was first published in 1996, in the original Latin, with German translation and commentary. In referring to his discovery, Barnikol made a substantive claim which must be disputed here, that Bauer's early text remained without influence on his subsequent work. Focusing on Bauer's depiction of art, and on the relation of art and religion as manifestations of spirit, we can trace lines of continuity and development in his thought, from his 1829 manuscript to his writings of 1841-42. The central idea of the early manuscript, a Hegelian conception of the unity of thought and being, is the key to deciphering the complex and elusive meaning of Bauer's critical theory in the Vormdrz.