Time in Hegels PH

Time in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit"
Author(s): Michael Murray

Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Jun., 1981), pp. 682-705
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
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TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
MICHAEL MURRAY
In one of the last seminars of his life, Heidegger remarks that just
as Hegel was trying to lay the definitive foundation of the modern
age, so was his friend H?lderlin trying to break through the ground of
the age in order to inaugurate a step beyond modernity. For this
reason, Heidegger clearly regards the poet as more radical than the
philosopher.1 Without trying myself to assess the validity of this
contrast, I shall take it as a clue and argue that each was attempting
to discover, and to build a time-design that could do justice to his
epoch and respond to the experience of its historical destiny. The
question that concerns this essay is just how Hegel construed and
constructed such a philosophical designing of the time, and while im
portant texts for this topic are thematized in his earlier writings and
in his subsequent lectures, the central text must be the Phenomenol
ogy of Spirit.2 The aim of this discussion therefore is to determine
the time-sense of the Phenomenology of Spirit and its phenomenol
ogy of Time, and to draw in other texts insofar as they illumine its
matrix.
1 See Vier Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), p. 25.

2 I use the expressions "time-tense," "time-design," and "time-sense,"
as follows: Time-tense refers to the differentiation of time into past, pres
ent, and future tenses; Time-design refers to the distinctive structuring and
relative weighting of the different tenses, and Time-sense refers to the uni
tary sense of time afforded by the temporal designing of the temporal dif
ferentia. The relation among them thus is approximately that of elements,
arrangement of elements, and meaning of the arrangement. For an essay
on the poetic time-design, see my "Heideggers Hermeneutic Reading of
H?lderlin: The Signs of Time," in The Eighteenth Century 21 (1980): 41
66.
I shall make no survey of the literature discussing Hegel's treatment
of Time in the Phenomenology; most of the standard commentaries do not
discuss it very expressly or very fully (e.g., Hyppolite, Findlay, Facken
heim). An exception is the brilliant, though eccentric reading by Koj?ve
whose Introduction ? la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) prompted
my Modern Philosophy of History (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), a
monograph devoted to Hegel and Heidegger. Materials from that mono
graph are used and further developed in the present essay. In a critical
review of Werner Marx's Heidegger and the Tradition (Evanston, 111.:
Northwestern University Press, 1971) I pointed out the inadequacy of the
Review of Metaphysics 33 (June 1981): 682-705. Copyright ? 1981 by the Review of Meta
physics
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 683
In pursuit of this aim I will argue several theses about Hegel's

rendering of Time, specifically three: first, that Hegel only gradually
came to conceive Time as the very constitution of Spirit and of world
as historical process because it is a notion at odds, in different ways,
with both Greek philosophy and with modern thought, which explains
the contrary indications that the texts seem to give and sometime do
give; second, that the coalescence of Time and reality was nonethe
less the singular achievement of modern ontology, in a sense the end
of philosophy and preeminently of Hegel's own work. And finally
that a key to it lay in the development of the Western time-sense in
the orbit of Christian metaphysics and philosophy of history with re
spect to time-tense differentiation.
The thrust of Hegel's thinking, which makes of it a deeply con
serving philosophy, is directed toward showing how the Christian re
ligion, as revealed religion in an enlightened Protestant version, is
the culminating highpoint in the history of religion; of how Romantic
art is the self-transcending of art by art and so its highpoint despite
the perfection of the Classical; and of how German Idealism is the cul
mination of modern European philosophy, modern philosophy of the
entire philosophical tradition, and Hegel's own work the apex of the
German phase. And finally that the post-revolutionary form of the
modern European state is the culminating moment in the sphere of
objective spirit or the history of law and political order. An account
of time-tense and time-sense in Hegel's thought should somehow illu
minate the eschaton of modernity in these different arenas which ac
cording to him, Time itself had brought about (?29: H. p. 29,; M. p.
17).3
view of Hegel that results from arranging everything around the logic (Phil
osophical Review [April 1973]), which Marx has since claimed to rectify in
his Introduction to the Preface of Hegel's Phenomenology (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975). I also noted a paper complementary to my mono
graph in Klaus Hedwig's "Time and Eternity in Hegel," Dialogue 9 (1970).
Despite the antithesis Stanley Rosen wants to draw between Hegel qua lo
gician and Hegel qua philosopher of history (which Hegel's thought wants to
overcome) in some basic ways his interpretation of the time question is in
agreement with my own. See G. W. F. Hegel: The Science of Wisdom (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). The massive work by Charles Tay
lor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) does not ad
vance the understanding of the time problem in any new way I can detect.
3 ". . . the World-Spirit itself, has had the patience to pass through
these shapes over the long passage of time, and to take upon itself the enor
mous labor of world-history . . ." (M., p. 17). See also the close of the
684 MICHAEL MURRAY
A hermeneutic guide to reading the texts of Hegel on Time is to

recognize the ambiguousness of all the texts; indeed, almost every
sentence evinces this ambiguity, and perhaps allows them to be read
in different and opposing ways. Characteristic instances are found in
assertions like these: "That which is of a real nature is certainly dis
tinguished from time, but is just as essentially identical with time"
(Enz. ?257; vol. 1, p. 230) or in the famed passage of the Phenomenol
ogy: "Time is the Concept itself that is there . . . [thus] Spirit neces
sarily appears in Time . . . just so long as it has not . . . annulled
Time" (?801, M., p. 487). For philosophers who insist on a semanti
cally narrow, steno-conception of philosophical discourse, of the sort
demanded by the mathematical "understanding," such a condition of
text is a grievous fault. For other philosophers, as for Hegel, a
denser, richer systematicity is essential to the demand of speculative
philosophy, and a necessity of thought proper to the conceptual gait.
The convincingness of this approach for them rests on whether the
speculative sublation of oppositions can do justice to their differences
and their unity.
In the course of his work in the Jena period, Hegel was thinking
through the relations between the philosophy of nature during 1803
04,4 and the philosophy of spirit during 1805-06,5 culminating in the
Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807.6 Our examination must accord
ingly turn to the chief places in the text of the Phenomenology where
the nature of Time explicitly surfaces. Locating them is the least dif
ficult part of the task because there are surprisingly few; in fact, aside
from two references in the Vorrede (??28, 46) and two later implicit
places of note (?? 212, 670), there are no more than seven explicit
Lectures on the History of Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1962),

vol. 2: "To this point the World-Spirit has come, and each stage has its own
form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost; all principles are pre
served, since Philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms. This con
crete idea is the result of the strivings of Spirit during almost twenty-five
centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to know itself" (p.
546).
4 Jeneneser Realphilosophie 1 [1803/4] (Leipzig: Meiner, 1932).
5 Jeneneser Realphilosophie 2 [1805/6] (Leipzig: Meiner, 1931).
6 Hereafter citations are from A. V. Miller's translation, Phenome
nology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), with paragraph
numbers following Miller, and Hofmeister's fifth edition, Ph?nomenologie
des Geistes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), abbreviated M and H. In the cita
tions from Miller, I have substituted Concept for Notion to translate Be
griff
places in the Phenomenology (??96, 153, 169, 679, 785-89, 801-803,

807-808). Yet the last three passages contain arguably some of the
richest and deepest texts in Hegel and pose a difficult task for inter
pretation.
Our study of Time in the Phenomenology begins with the Vor
rede which provides a fundamental clue, and then procedes to follow
the development of the sense of Time through an ascending complex
ity that exhibits a qualitative dialectic leading from an a-historical ex
perience of Time to a fully and specifically historical experience of
Time. In the passage already mentioned (?28), Hegel alludes to the
Time of Spirit as "the enormous labor of world history" (M., p. 17).
Now in the key passage of ?46, Hegel adduces a formula for the na
ture of Time which breaks through the traditional conception and lays
out in a condensed way the double meaning of Time upon which he
elaborates elsewhere in the Phenomenology, as well as in the Ency
clopedia and Philosophy of History. The formula?to which he
recurs in the last chapters of the Phenomenology or rather, from
which he borrowed in drafting his Preface?runs: "As for
Time . . . it is the existent Concept itself" (M., p. 27). Now within
the ellipsis and the surrounding text Hegel is at pains to differentiate
two contrasting approaches to space and especially time, namely
mathematical space and time and spiritual space and time. And
though the argument he uses to separate them has a general method
ological import (or strictly, an anti-methodological import), it more
specifically aims at the presumption that the mathematical space-time
so fundamental to the modern physics of Descartes, Newton, Galileo,
is of a limited power and of a complete impotence where spiritual ac
tuality is at issue. Hegel argues that a mathematical construction of
Time, because informed by the principle of magnitude and equality
(or identity) must fail to grasp the spiritual-historical Time of Spirit in
five related basic ways. First, the nature of quantity and magnitude
is incapable of rendering the essentially qualitative and worldly
sphere of Spirit. Second, mathematical time must be definable by
some calculable unit of measurement; but in the actuality of spiritual
development, there is no such repeatable, reiterable, identical unit,
nor is one needed for a proper science of Spirit. For while the science
of Spirit deals with forms, these forms are not mathematical but his
torico-conceptual shapes. Third, mathematical time is purely formal
and only externally related to its contents and applications, and
therefore cannot express the inner unity of Spirit, the inseparable de
686 MICHAEL MURRAY
velopmental togetherness of its form and content. Fourth, the rigid

determinateness of mathematical time can't express the self-directed
ness, the purposiveness of the spiritual process, because it fails to
capture either the process or the goal of the process and least the
unity between them. And, lastly, mathematical time projects a view
of things or realities which presupposes or describes these things as
in time, as if time were an objective continuum, countable and mea
surable by a particular unit of measurement. This is to say that it
enforces a spatialization of time, though this statement won't entirely
suffice because Hegel wants as well to distinguish a living spiritual
space from a homogeneous geometrical space.
Though the meaning of Time occupies the whole of the Phenom
enology, as its metalingual and metahistorical dimension, it also ap
pears as a feature of and within certain stages of phenomenal knowl
edge. By metalingual and metahistorical I mean that the meaning of
Time pertains not uniquely to any one particular shape in the se
quence and order of the phenomenal shapes of consciousness, but to
what it means to be a shape and to the ordering of the shapes as spir
itual formation process. The spiritual formation process is the meta
language that rules over and through the particular object languages
of the different shapes. The metahistorical, not to be confused with
the suprahistorical, dimension is the dimension of historical reality
grasping itself as historical reality, and thus also pertains to every
shape. Now the metalingual and metahistorical has its own moment
of self-conscious arrival and thorough comprehension, which is the
form and content of chapter 7, Religion, and chapter 8 as the Science
of the phenomenal development of knowledge. But our review must
turn first to the appearances of Time within the earlier phenomenal
stages.
In the first chapter Time occurs not by name but in the form of
the minimalist atomic sense awareness of the hic et nunc (?96, H., pp.
81-82; M., p. 60). By fixing its particular content monstratively,
sense-certainty wants to keep Time away from its truth, as entirely
external to its matter. I won't repeat the familiar gambit of this
chapter except to note that what keeps on happening to this mode of
consciousness, keeps on showing up, is the internal and essential ef
fect of temporalization. The fate of the impoverished and abstract
time-sense of sense-certainty is to get inundated and dialectically
pressured into a more complex sense of Time as the enduring and
fluctuating. The first quite explicit reference to Time is ?153 (H., p.
118; M., p. 93) in chapter 3 on Force and Understanding, in which

Hegel portrays the law of motion in physics wherein consciousness
tries to grasp the essence of bodies relationally, yet exhibiting a cer
tain conceptual indifference. This is true because, while motion gets
defined relationally as a function of space and time, distance and ve
locity, the relata are thought to exist without essential dependence on
each other, each as a separate difference, so that their unity might be
typed "indifference." This passage (?153) is manifestly linked with
the discussion in the Vorrede, in its treatment of motion in modern
physics and Cartesian and Galilean metaphysics of science. The
quantitative, inorganic, kinetic sense of time that mathematical sci
ence projects to describe bodies in motion represents a viable mode in
its field. At the same time, when measured against new demands of
consciousness and adequacy, it gets criticized for its loose and divi
sive manner of grasping. That manner the Vorrede expressly con
trasts with the temporality of the Concept itself, where the Concept
is properly regarded as the medium of Spirit's life-history.
The context of time representation shifts as we move beyond the
exhausted forms of mere Consciousness into the dawning of Self-Con
sciousness. The reality field that engenders self-consciousness is
that of Leben, of organic living-being with its own kind and level of
organization and character. Hence, we read in the introductory sec
tion to chapter 4, about "The determination of Life as it issue[s] from
the Concept": "Its sphere is completely determined in the following
moments. Essence is infinity as the supercession of all distinctions,
the pure movement of axial rotation, its self-repose being an abso
lutely restless infinity; independence itself, in which the differences of
the movement are resolved, the simple essence of Time which, in this
equality with itself, has the stable shape of Space" (M., p. 106). Life,
as the ongoing whole of living beings, is quietly, infinitely the same
amid its ceaseless fluctuation. All differences in organisms are eva
nescent; the essence of Leben is to be momentarily, to continuously
pass away in an endless flux. Without history, without essential irre
versible having-been and without unique qualitative advance, its du
rableness is found not in Time but in Space, which provides "the sta
ble shape," that is a Time logically compacted into Space or a Space
not yet temporalized into its differentia.
Now of course Hegel goes on to describe for us the erupting of
desire into and out of this field, in the appearance of animal desire
which opens up a negativity in this organic plenitude. Out of this ni
688 MICHAEL MURRAY
hilative desire develops desire for desire, or for living-desiring-being

satisfying itself through another living-desiring-being. This condi
tion engenders the Master/Slave dialectic, a dialectic of deepening
negativity advanced through the power of service, work, and fear.
Precisely here a new sense of time gets insinuated into the world, an
historical time that prescribes not the motion of physical objects in
space, but the movement of Spirit "in" time, as we are tempted to say
and Hegel himself does. In this simple preposition is contained the
kernel of a problem of major significance for seeing the point of the
Hegelian analysis. It is only at a new level of consideration that we
can begin to grasp the necessary connection between Concept and
Time. If we were to triangulate Hegel's approach we might distin
guish the aim of a Platonic realist position that takes the Concept as
eternal form or species, on the one side, and a nominalistic conven
tionalism on the other that takes the Concept as a temporal name.
Then we might say that Hegel's conception of the Concept is both on
tological and temporal, so that the Concept is not a mere name but a
mode of existence (viz., that of Spirit's life) and not an eternal eidos
but a temporal process of self-shapings.
In the section on the Unhappy Consciousness (4, B) the dialectic
stasis between the individual and the Unchangeable is cast in dis
tinctly temporal terms. When the individual experiences the Un
changeable other as something definite and actual, he might seem to
have purged its absolute otherness, but in fact he merely gains a new
alien otherness. Thus the divine appears obstinately imperturbable
when it becomes a sensible actual particular, so that far from having
come within the reach of the individual seeking union with it, "the
hope of becoming one with it must remain a hope, i.e., without fulfil
ment ... By the nature of the immediately present unit ... it
necessarily follows that in the world of time it has vanished, and that
in space it had a remote existence and remains utterly remote" (M.,
p. 129). Further discussion of this moment will be postponed until
we take up the variants on the Unhappy Consciousness motif in the
Phenomenology. Here we only need to note the operation of a time
structure that is both static and dynamic, which is what virtually de
fines this stance of consciousness. But this stance should not be mis
taken for a typicalization of religious experience, as some commenta
tors suggest, for the phenomenology of religion is rendered only in
chapter 7, against which the religious representativeness of this
stance must be measured. One way to state this connection is to at
tend to the transformations of the dialectical stasis or impasse of the

Unhappy Consciousness. Expressed as the temporalizing of the Un
changeable and of the individual, we could say the first must be trans
muted into the doctrine of the divine Trinity and the second into the
spiritual community of true believers.
In terms of its essential, concrete topic matter, Hegel's Phe
nomenology begins properly in its sixth chapter, which is Spirit, and
which treats historical world-constitution from the Greek world
through Bildungs-culture, modern Enlightenment, and Moraltit?t.
It follows the sequence from Greek and Roman antiquity, to the mod
ern European or Germanic world in its revolutionary and post
French-revolutionary forms. The chapter concludes in the apparent
answer to the question raised first by the combative dilemma of the
master and slave in chapter 4, A, about the possibility of a genuinely
mutual recognition. The dialectic between the evil actor in the world
and the beautiful soul withdrawn into its own sphere climaxes in the
remarkable phenomenon of mutual forgiveness?"a reciprocal recog
nition which is absolute Spirit" (?670: M., p. 408; cf. 8, ?793). In this
setting, we are told, God becomes present and manifest, so that the
solution suggests a religious attainment rather than a political one.
The text does not make clear, yet there is an implicit link with our
temporal problematic since forgiveness is a phenomenon that can only
be determined as an act of the present that cancels out but nonethe
less acknowledges a past and a new and mutually shared futural hori
zon. As such this anticipates the highest meaning of Revealed Reli
gion, where the forgiveness phenomenon occupies a central place, at
the close of chapter 7, which only then remains to be elevated and
conceptually articulated to the ultimate philosophical level of chapter
8.
Religion in the Phenomenology constitutes a new statement of
conceptual and historical sequence, but it is neither an entirely differ
ent nor an independent topology from that presented in chapter 6.
Chapter 6, we saw, portrays Spirit in the actual history of Spirit,
whereas the preceding chapters 1-5 instead trace out the conceptual
ordering and layering of consciousness, self-consciousness, and rea
son, in order to comprehend these abstract forms and to provide the
phenomenological categories needed to portray the mundane history
of Spirit. These categorial patterns are first in the order of analysis,
but they are second in the order of reality, being themselves abstrac
tions derived from the ground of Spirit. In the introductory to 6, we
690 MICHAEL MURRAY
read: "Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previ

ous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it. . . . This iso
lating of those moments presupposes Spirit itself. . . . In this isola
tion they have the appearance of really existing as such; but that they
are only moments ... is shown by their advance and retreat into
their ground and essence. . . ." (M., p. 264) In this passage and
again in the following one from the introductory to 7, Hegel claims
that these three moments (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason)
are not temporally successive phases, but "taken together, constitute
Spirit in its mundane existence generally" (M., p. 413).7 Interpret
ers who tend to mute the emergence of history in Hegel will incline to
assimilate the last three chapters to the same model as the first five,
though such assimilation cannot be reconciled with what Hegel ex
pressly says. Interpreters of Hegel from McTaggert to Werner
Marx, who tend to treat the Encyclopedia or Science of Logic as the
center of Hegel's interest, must also deny or ignore the centrality of
history. For Hegel, in the Phenomenology in any case, there exists
a worldly history of Spirit in which these abstract momenta provide
the syntax of that history, which is presupposed as established once
one reaches chapter 7, a chapter that further represents a new de
ployment of the dialectic pattern or syntax.
Moreover, the historical field displayed in chapter 7 can be su
perimposed upon that in chapter 6, and may be said to extend it back
ward into the proto-spiritual beginnings and forward up through the
modernist realization of Christianity. The sketch in chapter 6 covers
the Greek, Roman, and Germanic worlds that are also basic to the
outline at the end of the Philosophy of Right and to the structure of
the lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Yet we don't find a
classification corresponding to the Oriental world, which is the first of
the four fundamental worlds that Hegel distinguishes in the lectures,
until we enter chapter 7. The Oriental world there appears as the
earliest form of religion, Natural Religion, that commences in the
"morning-land" where Spirit first begins to disinter itself from Na
ture and begins to see itself in Nature. Such a disinternment or
awakening points ahead to the condition of Spirit awake, finding itself
at home as the wahre Geist of the Greek world in the noontime of
presence. The chapter on Religion therefore reveals formations an
7 We need not enter into the controversy, abetted by Hegel's own con
tention in the Encyclopedia (?25) that materials from the rich ground of
Spirit are needlessly dragged into the analyses of chapters 1-5.
TIME IN HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
691
tecedent to the Greeks?in other terms, to Natural Religion (7, A) in

its Persian, Indian, and Egyptian kinds, as well as ones coinciding
with the Greek ethical world, in the Religion of Art (7, B), and with
the Christian world from the Roman Empire up to the German Euro
pean period, in Revealed Religion (7, C).
The propriety of the placement of religion as the penultimate
stage of the Phenomenology is that it has always, wherever it ap
pears and of its essence, put itself forward as ministering between
man and Absolute Being, and as communing not with Spirit "immedi
ately at home with itself," but self-consciously with Absolute Spirit.
With these orienting remarks in view, I want to examine an im
portant general passage on Time that Hegel presents in the introduc
tory section to Religion, and then focus on certain transformations of
time-sense that occur in the case of Revealed Religion and constitute
a key to both its accomplishment and its limitation, as well as its jux
taposition with chapter 8. As for the general passage:
Only the totality of Spirit is in Time (in der Zeit) and the "shapes,"
which are "shapes" of the totality of Spirit, display themselves in a
temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and there
fore the form of pure freedom in the face of an "other," a form which
expresses itself as Time. (M., p. 413; H., p. 476)
The "shapes" are the differentiating moments, though not identical or

substitutable units in a calculus, of a formation-process, of temporal
successiveness. No moment can be considered either actual or intel
ligible as an isolated moment, but only in the course of the movement
revealed by a phenomenological narrative in which each moment gets
aufgehoben. These different shapes define the individuality of
Spirit. "These ['shapes'], therefore, exhibit Spirit in its individuality
or actuality, and are distinguished from one another in Time, though
in such a way the later moment retains within it the preceding one"
(M., p. 413). This process which is Spirit's coming to know and to be
itself as Spirit, is a process of self-differentiating and self-othering, of
encountering, negating, and transcending new dimensions of other
ness. What will distinguish all other stages, both abstract and his
torical ones, from Religion and from Absolute Knowing is that within
the latter common domain an absolute identity and absolute other
ness are absolutely combined. Time is the name for this process
which is not so much a form but a formative process of engendering
forms, a temporal kingdom of forms interiorized by conceptual
memory.
But there is something radically unsatisfactory about the in der
692 MICHAEL MURRAY
Zeit formulation. One might say of a world-moment that it is in time,

meaning that it can be distinguished from some past moments and fu
ture moments that belong to it as it does to them. But the text (here
at the f?r uns level) expressly declares the whole of Spirit is in time,
which strictly makes no sense if nothing in principle could ever pre
cede or succeed that whole. Indeed, to make the latter point about
the whole is traditionally to state the standpoint of eternity or nunc
stans of absolute presence, as though outside of time altogether. Yet
this way, too, would make no sense to the extent that Hegel (also)
wants to say that both the stages and the totality of the stages are
temporal. The only way this can be successfully said is to approxi
mate what is asserted in the final phrase of the passage, which is to
claim that the whole must be expressed as Time.8
Turning to the specific way that Revealed Religion advances this
insight into the temporality of Spirit, we can start with a reminder of
each of the two religious shapes that it sublates. The first, Natural
Religion, represents God as sheer being-in-itself, whether the sub
stantiality of Divine being be imagistically thought as light, as plant
and animal, or as artificer supreme. Against this background, the
decisive advance of Greek Art Religion is its picturing of God as an
individual self-consciousness, as being-for-itself that appears in the
myriad forms of the temple cult of the god in human shape, in the reli
gious mysteries and athletic festivals, and in epic, and tragic and
comic drama. In this range we witness the artistic embodiment of
self-consciousness that is at once finite subjectivity and yet divinity.
The fundamental contribution of Revealed Religion, in contrast, is
the effort to unify being-in-itself with being-for-itself, or divine sub
stance with human subjectivity, into the concept of Absolute Spirit.
The peak of this development is reached in the pictorial notion of God
as Trinity, that gives to divine reality the structure of being-in-itself,
being-for-itself, and being-in-and-for-itself, as the three essential mo
ments of God's nature.
Hegel construes the nature of the Trinity according to the Joa
chimite tradition, mediated for him through Lessing, that conceives
the God of revelation as an historical process.9 That is, he does not
8 In a 1797 sketch, Schiller speaks of the German mission "to make a

conquest of the great process of time. Each people has its day in history,
but the day of the German is the harvest of time as a whole (der ganzen
Zeit)." Cited in George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 82-83.
9 See my Modern Philosophy of History, chapter 4.
regard the three moments of God's nature as eternalistic Plotinian

emanations, but rather as an idea unfolding itself, actualizing itself in
the history of religion. The non-controversial contact points in the
Judeo-Christian tradition for this are the special historical relation es
tablished between Yah weh and Israel in the Old Testament, and the
universal historical relation established by Christ's Incarnation ac
cording to the New Testament, in which God becomes a man in his
torical time and space. The first relationship necessarily generates a
sharp bifurcation between the historia sacra et historia profana.
Yet the sacred/profane distinction must become increasingly prob
lematic in the Christian era, in as much as the Incarnation attests not
merely an epiphany or atavistic mediation, but the divine nature
emptying itself into the human nature, whereby the divine is human
ized and the human divinized. The problematic character of this dis
tinction is revealed in the later, ever-expanding claims of seculariza
tion or enlightenment against those of sacralization (though each
misunderstands the other). Essential to the development of secular
ization is the significance attributed to the third moment of the Holy
Spirit, which raises a feature in Hegel's account that some regard as
gnostic rather than Christian. It appears when Hegel is elucidating
the counter-claim to Enlightenment's misapprehension of the object
of Faith. For Faith does not view its object as an abstract being
lying utterly beyond the believing consciousness, but rather experi
ences itself as the Holy Spirit dwelling in community and combining
within its nature the abstract essence represented by God the Father
and the self-consciousness represented by God the Son. "Thus Abso
lute Being [Spirit] is at the same time in itself [Father] and for itself
[Son]" (H., p. 391; M., p. 335). Hegel is underscoring the thrust of
the Trinitarian notion. Even though the Christian era, or at least the
medieval articulation of it, understands history from the perspective
of God the Son against the background of God the Father in the Old
Testament, the Trinity must finally be understood in the light of the
coming of the Spirit destined to follow upon the mortal departure of
the Son and according to the special role which the Spirit is to play in
the life of the community. This relation to community, Hegel goes on
to show, is not a relation based upon an historiographical thesis, ei
ther epistemologically well grounded or groundless, but rather more
directly itself an historical happening: "It is Spirit itself which bears
witness to itself, both in the inwardness of the individual conscious
ness and through the universal presence in everyone of faith in it"
(H., p. 395; M., p. 338). The relation between the Father and Son is
694 MICHAEL MURRAY
described in chapter 7 "as a loving recognition in which the two sides,

as regards their essence, do not stand in an antithetical relation" (H.,
p. 536; M., pp. 466-67). The Holy Spirit?as this Anerkennen der
liebe?is the Absolute coming to self-presence in the life of the
Christian community. The key to this turn from the second to the
third moment, and to our own temporal problematic is the meaning of
the death of God, as the definitive form as well as the mediation of the
Unhappy Consciousness predicament.
The Unhappy Consciousness first appears in the order of anal
ysis as the truth of the dialectical sequence from Stoical independence
through Skepticism (chapter 4, B), and our remarks earlier called at
tention to the latent temporal design of this structure of self-con
sciousness. But in the order of actual history, as Hegel notes (M., p.
293), the first appearance of the Unhappy Consciousness occurs in the
Roman legal world. In this world late Roman consciousness under
goes the painful experience of the death of the gods, expressed in the
hard saying "God is dead" (introduction to 7, C; H., p. 523; M., p.
455). The essence of Roman despair is the experience of loss and be
latedness?of its sense of itself built on the ruins of the Greek ethical
order, which even though it has unique principles of its own, sur
rounds itself with the trappings but not the vital substance of the Re
ligion of Art. For the Unhappiness of Roman consciousness recog
nizes that the oracles are "dumb," that the "divine" statues are
"corpses in stone," that epic and dramatic poetry are powerless to
avert "the crushing ruin of gods and men" (H., p. 523; M., p. 455).
Nothing within the Roman world of legal personality, empire, or spir
itual pantheon can regenerate or transcend itself.
Christianity emerges within such a despondent scene by creating
a new sense of expectation, for the advent of a new god, while the
audience "of shapes . . . stands impatiently expectant round the
birthplace of Spirit as it becomes self-consciousness. The grief and
longing of the Unhappy Self-Consciousness which permeates them all
is their center and the common birth-pang of its emergence?the
simplicity of the pure Concept, which contains those forms as its mo
ments" (M., pp. 456-67). This expectancy calls for a new immediacy
and presence of the divine in the world.
Yet the distinguishing mark of the Christian dispensation is not,
in the Hegelian presentation, so much the birth of a present, actual,
sensuously real mediator, but is more fully displayed in its peculiar
theology of death. The mediator must die in order to be human, to be
incarnate, and the pain that the Christian experiences in the cruel
words "God is dead" (H., p. 546; M., p. 476) is of a privileged kind.
Otherwise formulated, the pain of the late Roman consciousness and
of the Christian consciousness, even though uttered in the same
words, is not the same pain. The reason is that properly understood
the death of Christ on the cross is the death of all gods?and the end
of the gods of presence, an important common bond between H?lder
lin's Patmos hymn and Hegel's Phenomenology. Revealed Reli
gion grasps the meaning of this death, and the connection between it
and the coming reign of the Holy Spirit, in pictorial representations.
The limitations inherent in religious expression mask, from the view
point of conceptual demand, the absolute content contained within its
expressive form. That expressive content and that limitation in form
can be exhibited by seeing how the unfolding of the trinitarian divin
ity is the working out of the horizon and essence of Time. This inter
pretation discloses the religious meaning of the identity of Time and
Concept, and supplies a crucial link with chapter 8.
God the Father or being-in-itself represents the primordial past,
the time of origin and creation, to which things and men are indebted
for their existence, in which the legendary events of the fall and the
promise call for reverent preservation. Being-in-itself or substanti
ality signifies the hallowed time of long ago, in which a bond was es
tablished between God and His people, but only dimly intimates pre
sent or future time since reconciliation is interminably deferred. In
this dimension we could say that the eternal manifests itself as the
past, and the same may be said for the Greek mind generally. The
ethical substance of the polis is founded upon an entirely customary
world and the Platonic anamnesis of the primordial condition of
things is a remembrance of things past. Along these lines van Gron
ingen, in an analysis of the Greek tenses of description, argues that
the Greek imagination was profoundly "in the grip of the past."10
In the second age of the Son, God manifests himself as being-for
itself, as a particular sensuous individual, who is immediately present
to those around him, seen, heard, and touched by his disciples. A
sensibly present God (H., p. 527; M., p. 458) is not the timeless pr?s
10 B. A. van Groningen, In the Grip of the Past: Essay on An Aspect of

Greek Thought (Leiden: Philosophia Antiqua, 1953). Compare Kierke
gaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967),
pp. 80-82.
696 MICHAEL MURRAY
ence of eternity but rather the kairologic presence of the eternal in a

finitely present being. As in the previous moment the eternal ap
peared as the past, so in this moment the eternal appears as a physi
cal and personal present, "that the supreme Being is seen, heard, etc.
as an immediately present self-consciousness, this therefore is indeed
the consummation of its Concept; and through this consummation
that Being is immediately present qua supreme Being" (H., p. 529;
M., p. 460). This is not experienced by religious consciousness as
merely the way in which God "appears" for it, for as it interprets the
divine, "Here . . . God is revealed as He is; He is immediately pres
ent as He is in Himself, i.e., He is immediately present as Spirit" (H.,
p. 530; M., p. 461). In this respect, this presence represents the ful
fillment and overcoming of the painful abyss that separates a tran
scendental Father figure from his creatures, and so this coming-to
presence answers to the "hopes and expectations of the world till
now"(H.,p. 530; M., p. 461).
A coimplication of this temporalizing in terms of the present,
however, is that finite presence is always presence for some and not
others, and above all not for the successors of later times. Yet
equally as a consequence of that very limitedness of its time-span, a
time-passage takes effect:
His 'being' passes over into his 'having been.' Consciousness, for
which God is thus sensuously present, ceases to see and to hear Him; it
has seen and heard Him; and it is because it only has seen and heard
Him that it first becomes itself spiritual consciousness. Or . . . just
as formerly He rose up for consciousness as a sensuous existence, now
He has arisen in the Spirit. For a consciousness that sensuously sees
and hears Him is itself a merely immediate consciousness, which has
not overcome the disparity of objectivity, has not taken it back into
pure thought; it knows this individual, but not itself, as Spirit (M., p.
467).
Of course it is death that eclipses his presence, and which is from
the perspective of immediacy, his loss and absence. Here religious
consciousness undergoes estrangement from this present, suffers its
sense of the loss of its God as the death of God. Yet this pain, viewed
from a later reflective phase, reveals a negativity propaedeutic to the
universalization and spiritualization of this presence. This is the
presence that comes to presence in the community itself, in the com
munity of the faithful mutually recognizing one another in love, ac
cepting its existence in time as well as in space. The full experience
of the death of God requires, for the positive conversion of the nega
tive moment, a time to unfold and make evident the future as the age
of the Holy Spirit. Recognizing itself as belonging to the age of the

Spirit, the Christian community or Church, temporalizes its mission
in terms of a future that involves a devious dialectic with worldly and
secular forces. The meaning of the Eternal or Absolute thus appears
in the mode of the future of modernity.
H?lderlin poeticizes the moment of transition between being and
having-been in Patmos:
Doch trauerten sie, da nun
Es Abend worden, erstaunt,
Denn Grossentschiedenes hatten in der Seele
Die M?nner, aber sie liebten under der Sonne
Das Leben und lassen wollten sie nicht
Vom Angesichte des Herrn
Und der Heimat.
Yet saddened were they, now that
Evening had come, amazed,
For things greatly decisive harbored in the souls
Of these men, but they loved life under the sun
And wanted not to part from
The face of the Lord
And the homeland.
Hegel interprets the pain and reluctance of letting-go and of accept

ing the reality of absence, not merely as an individual psychological
event in the apostles. He interprets it on a larger scale as a process
that the entire community and its institutions must undergo, in order
to transform its sense of abandonment, through a negation of nega
tion, that gives itself over?to where it has always been?to a posi
tive relation to history. Spirit in history, not only in the separate or
parallel stream of Heilsgeschichte, means that the community must
temporalize its understanding from out of the future in such a way
that the past, present, and future tenses become integral to one an
other and compose a self-formative totality. The realization of this
radical temporalization must grapple with many detours and barriers
in the history of Revealed Religion. Some of these obstacles can be
briefly indicated for the way in which they show the process of de
tachment from immediacy to be a process and also of how enlightened
Protestant religion surmounts them.
The first of these detours is constructed in the medieval doctrine
of "real presence" (H., p. 545; M., p. 476), that is of Christ's becoming
bodily present again in the consecrated bread. Hegel is caustic in his
lectures about the attempt to re-introduce a physical sensible pres
ence into religion, for confusing the external sensible with the inward
698 MICHAEL MURRAY
spiritual. For the genuine faith of Lutheran inwardness, God is pres

ent in men only "in spirit and in faith" and that means in religious
community.11 The second detour appears in the denouement of the
Crusades, which Hegel sees as the culminating meaning of the medie
val world as the "Age of the Son."12 The Crusades are the quest to
recover the Holy Land and the grave of God, in order to approximate,
to come near to the former presence of the dead God, an effort that is
doomed to failure: "Consciousness . . . can only find as a present
reality the grave of its life" (H., p. 164; M., p. 132). The sought-for
prize, just because it is an actual place, cannot remain forever self
same. Medieval religious phenomena appear as so many variations
on "presentifying" the Absolute that ends in a desolation, from which
a properly spiritual condition might begin. As Hegel remarks else
where, "These holy spots . . . as sensuous presence of place without
presence of time, are things of the past, a mere memory, no percep
tion of the immediate present.13
But there are also constraints that derive not from within the
moments of religious history, that are overcome by the Protestant
principle of faith and conscience, but from the form of religion itself.
Although in truth the religious community is Absolute Spirit, God is
trinitarian, Spirit is coextensive with Time?these facets of the truth
are only understood in pictorial and figurative terms. The Christian
community will then tend to interpret itself as in time, to counterpose
the sacred to the secular, the eternal to the temporal. This con
straint is epitomized on the last page of the religion chapter where
Hegel points out that, despite its deep implicit overcoming of these
antitheses, the religious community will portray to itself the divine
reconciliation as an event in the remote past?als eine Ferne der Ver
gangenheit?and the coming of the Spirit as something that will hap
pen in a distant future?als ein Femes der Zukunft (H., p. 548; M.,
p. 47?). The continuation of the earlier cited paragraphs (??763-64)
provides the conceptual commentary on this state of affairs: "Remote
ness in time and space is . . . only the imperfect form in which (im
mediate existence) is given a mediated or universal character; it is
11 Philosophy of Religion (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 3:133;

History of Philosophy, 3: 54-55.
12 History of Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1892), 3:
57; Philosophy of Religion, 3: 103; Philosophy of History (New York:
Dover, 1956), p. 345.
13 History of Philosophy, 3: 104.
merely dipped superficially in the element of Thought, is preserved in

it as a sensuous mode, and not made one with the nature of Thought
itself. It is merely raised into the realm of picture-thinking . . ."
(M., pp. 462-63). What remains to be accomplished is the transla
tion of the religious time-design into the conceptual time-design.
In other words, our task is to show the fundamental relation be
tween the religious time-design of chapter 7, traced above, and the
philosophical time-design of chapter 8. The concept of Absolute
Spirit and its historicity, which Religion is historically the first to
elaborate, must be appropriated at the level of Science. "(T)he con
tent of religion proclaims earlier in time than does Science, what
Spirit is, but only Science is its true knowledge of itself" (M., p. 488;
cf. p. 486). The content that religion exhibits is Spirit as the tem
poralization of Time, and the translatability of this contnet into a con
ceptual form is based on the fact that the trinitarian notion, which
captures the essence of religion, is as well "the principle of all specula
tive philosophy."14
Absolute Knowledge, that is Absolute Spirit knowing itself as
Absolute, is the culminating stage of the dialectic. As such it has its
own distinctive shape and its own moment of emergence, while its es
sential particularity is that it brings together in a self-conscious sur
vey all the analytical and historical forms, even the form of forms it
self, within its purview. In a certain sense as a consequence,
Absolute Knowledge is vacuous and empty, for all of its contents are
only the forms of already transpired history, culture, and thought.
Absolute Knowledge is rather more a new way of seeing and a new
context for phenomenological seeing, wherein the forms are seen in a
patterned and relational way in the course of a movement whole sole
telos is to reveal these moments as moments of the process of Spirit's
coming to know itself. In this regard nothing new, no new content
gets introduced but only the presentation of the forms in a systematic
and eidetic manner is new. If it doesn't offend against "earnestness"
too much, one might find an excellent analogy to this point in The
Wizard of Oz, which is a kind of American phenomenology of mind.
What Dorothy and her three companions find when they get to the
end of the Yellow Brick Road is very beautiful but really nothing at
14 History of Philosophy, 3: 20; see Hegel's reiteration of the impor

tance of the trinitarian idea, e.g.: 1: 222-23; 2: 76-77; Philosophy of Reli
gion, 3: 11, 99.
700 MICHAEL MURRAY
all. For what each of them?Dorothy and the friends who represent
different aspects of her self (brain or mind, heart, courage or spirit)?
sought each had become in the course of the search, lacking only the
self-conscious grasp of this truth.15
We can't examine here the phenomenological recapitulation of
the preceding stages of consciousness and historical-cultural shapes
of Spirit, epitomized in ??790-96, and followed by the history of mod
ern philosophy. Of the latter whose underlying idea is that of abso
lute subject, Hegel sketches in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant,
post-Kantian Romanticism and Idealism in Fichte and Sehelling, and
lastly, in Hegel himself who sublates the antitheses of the subjective
idealism of Fichte and the objective idealism represented by Sehelling
into his own Absolute Idealism. We need to say only enough to focus
on the decisive contribution on the meaning of Time provided by mod
ern ontology. The thrust of modern Enlightenment and of philoso
phy since the Renaissance is to make the self or ego central and to
conceive reality as ultimately translucent to its theory and transform
able by its practice. This is the famed rationality of the real and real
izability of the rational. This is what is meant by the "I = I" symbol
ism, and further because this self and reality are in process, the
identity must be temporal and so countenance difference as well. "So
that, just as previously essence was declared to be the unity of
Thought and Extension, it would now have to be grasped as unity of
Thought and Time" (M., p. 489). This approximates the shift from
Descartes to Kant, while Fichte's subjective idealism accentuates the
temporal Subject and Spinoza and Sehelling advance a modern ver
sion of the claims of Substance.
Philosophical and spiritual history generally, from ancients to
moderns, is the movement from Substance to Subject. While Sub
ject from Kant to Fichte and the Enlightenment progressivists has an
advancing, futurizing character, Substance since the Greeks exhibits
the character of preservation, maintenance, and sameness, so that its
Wesen is Gewesen or pastwardness. Absolute Spirit, "the most sub
lime Concept and the one which belongs to the modern age and its
religion" (?25, M., p. 14), must grasp itself as Substance become Sub
15 This is equally true of L. Frank Baum's 1900 Wizard ofOz and of the
1939 MGM film version. In The Annotated Wizard ofOz (New York: Clark
son Potter, 1973) Michael Patrick Hearn verges on the point, without under
standing it and without reference to Hegel (p. 270).
ject, and as Subject become Substance, the unity of the in-itself and
for-itself, of having-been and advancing-toward, expressed as "abso
lute presence."
The first (?801) of the two great passages on Time in chapter 8
runs:
Time is the Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to con
sciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily ap
pears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped
its pure Concept, i.e., has not annulled Time. It is the outer, intuited
pure Self which is not grasped by the Self, the merely intuited Con
cept; when this latter grasps itself it sets aside its Time-form, compre
hends this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuit
ing. Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit
that is not yet complete within itself, the necessity to enrich the share
which self-consciousness has in consciousness . . . (M., p. 487)16
This passage is surely among those hermeneutically ambivalent
ones that seem to assert both the identity of Time with the Concept
and the abolition of Time. The transaction of the argument might be
construed in the following terms. When the self is posed as some
thing outer and external, merely available to be intuited or passively
received, and when Time is posed as some order of sucession in which
the self moves along, then we are still caught in an inadequate realiza
tion against which Spirit is progressing throughout the Phenomenol
ogy. Not even Revealed Religion, as we noted, could escape from
this manner of representing the self in terms of an external, serialized
Time. On this account the temporal self is not strictly grasped at all,
because it has not been conceptualized and recognized as of the same
nature as that which does the grasping. When genuine grasping
occurs, however, the particular way of regarding Time as routed
through passive intuition must yield to an active process approach.
Moreover, the Kantian formalist interpretation of Time, which treats
it as a subjective form only and never as matter and historical actual
ity, must be reconceived. What is annulled, then, is merely the defi
16 Hints at Hegel's formulations are present in Schiller's Letters on the

Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1965). In the Eleventh: "[Man] realizes form when he creates
time ... he gives form to matter when he proceeds to annul time ..."
(p. 63); and in the Twelfth: "[The formal impulse] embraces the whole time
series, which is as much to say it annuls time and change . . ." (p. 66).
Interesting to note, in this regard, is that Schiller is the first to use aufgeho
ben in what we have to think of as the Hegelian sense, in the Eighteenth
Letter (pp. 88-90).
702 MICHAEL MURRAY
cient being-in-time view of Time. The change entailed by the event

of comprehension is that Spirit is no longer thought as intuited out
there "in" Time, but rather gets conceptually grasped as identical
with Time "as" Time. By the notion of "Spirit in Time" is meant
that Time relative to Spirit is viewed an alien cloak worn by Spirit, as
a mere form that it contingently happens to assume, that is merely
subjective and apparent, and that defines a pre-established pathway
along which Spirit wends its way. Conversely, by the notion of
"Spirit as Time" is meant the recognition of Time as the native and
sole shape of Spirit's life, as the substance and content of its reality,
and as absolute, whose historical course is determined by the
self-movement of Spirit. The overcoming and supercession of the no
tion of Spirit in Time in favor of Spirit as Time, is expressed in the
formulation "a comprehended and comprehending intuiting." From
one perspective, namely from the relative viewpoint of the particular
spiritual shape, the "destiny and necessity" of Time can appear as ex
ternal and onerous servitude. From the absolute perspective of the
whole process reaching fulfillment, this destiny can be celebrated as
the actualization of freedom, as the homecoming and self-reconnais
sance of Spirit.
The final paragraphs of the Phenomenology set out the relations
between the happening of History and the happening of Science, and
the meaning of History comprehended. Hegel's Phenomenology
portrays the arrival of an eschaton, one that is enabled by history and
culminates in this work, and which moreover displays a two-sided
ness. On the one hand, it represents the attainment of Spirit's
knowing itself as nothing but Time, which completely understood
would be begriffne Geschichte, history conceptualized (H., p. 564; M.,
p. 493). It knows itself as Time because Spirit recognizes that the
Concept, which is the medium of its life, is Time. "[T]his revelation
is . . . the Concept's Time, in that that externalization is in its own
self externalized [and] equally in its [internal] depth" (H. p. 564; M.,
p. 493). A complementary way to elucidate this is to say Time gets
temporalized into the differences and unity of its triple tenses. This
temporalization is already approximated in pictorial fashion by reli
gious consciousness in the trinitarian experience of God, which shows
an affinity between the religious time-design and the philosophical
time-design. We could state the latter conception by saying that
Spirit combines the movements of projecting itself into the future and
of recollecting its past, a combining together that constitutes its "ab
solute presence." "Absolute presence" is not an eternity abstracted

from Time but the fully developed essence of Time.
In the Encyclopedia discussion of Time (?257 f.) Hegel mentions
a traditional way of thinking about Time, namely the view that
"everything arises and passes away in time." Hegel rejects this
view as he rejects the formal, abstractible, or containerizing notion of
Time in favor of an Anaximandarian and Hesiodic notion: "But every
thing does not appear and pass in time; time itself is this becoming,
arising, and passing away . . . [time is] the Cronos which engenders
all and destroys that to which it gives birth."17 Thus he continues:
"Time does not resemble a container . . . [things] do not pass away
because they are in time, but are themselves that which is temporal.
Temporality is their objective determination" (p. 231), and conse
quently, "It is the process of actual things which constitutes time" (p.
231).
When Hegel makes the assertion, a paradoxical enough claim for
traditional philosophy, that "time itself is eternal" (p. 231) and that in
regard to "time as such" it "constitutes the absolute present" (pp.
231-32), he does this for the reason that Time is not reducible to ei
ther past or future or present time. In ?259, Hegel writes that the
"present, future, and past" are "the dimensions of time." Hegel's or
dering of the tenses is itself noteworthy, for it suggests a projective
teleologic structuring rather than an efficient causal structuring,
which follows the pattern: past ?? present ?> future. He further
points out that these dimensions of Time do not open up or appear in
Nature, whose foundation is Space (?254, p. 225) and whose distinc
tive time-tense is the Now (p. 233). Where these dimensions are
hinted at, it is only at best a low-grade subjective manner as memory
or fear in animal life. Temporalization here differs radically from the
developed, objective, and absolute formation it finds in Spirit, for the
17 Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. William Petry (London: Allen

& Unwin, 1970), 1: 230. Other pages cited in the text are to this transla
tion. In the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), Hegel expands on the mythical com
parison by noting how Zeus begins to conquer and shape time by giving rise
to the demands of ethical-spiritual development (p. 145). This figure was
important to Schiller (Aesthetic Education, Twenty-fifth Letter, p. 120),
and to H?lderlin. See Emil Staiger, "H?lderlin's 'Nature and Art or Saturn
and Jupiter'," European Literary Theory and Practice, ed. Vernon Gras
(New York: Delta, 1973), pp. 167-81, and my "Heidegger's Hermeneutic
Reading of H?lderlin," pp. 45-53.
704 MICHAEL MURRAY
presence of Spirit is "absolute presence" or the full dilation of Time,

not the constricted present of the natural Now.
This argument adds complementary support to our interpreta
tion of Time in the Phenomenology, which we must conclude by not
ing the close proximity between the religious and philosophical time
design as signaled on the last page of the Phenomenology. This page
speaks in the language of the "speculative Good Friday" about the
"Golgotha of Absolute Spirit" (H., p. 564; M., p. 493).18 In religious
terms, this Calvary and Death is prelude to the advent of the Holy
Spirit, experienced first as a darkening of the world and then as a new
day. What the temporalization means with respect to the dimension
of the past is apparent in the allusions to the recollecting and inward
izing of the "slow-moving sucession" of spiritual shapes that lead up
to the phenomenological science of these shapes. The futural dimen
sion of this passage may seem less apparent, and a totalization of
Time might well seem to be necessarily futureless. To be sure each
shape, along the way, finds its truth in a future shape that supplants
it, and for which Aufheben provides the syntax of temporal
progression. But the future reference becomes evident as soon as we
note that the total temporalization of Spirit is first described as reach
ing a state "sunk in the night of its self-consciousness" (H., p. 563; M.,
p. 492), and second followed in the pentecostal terms of the Patmos
hymn, as the breakthrough to a new order. This unprecedented nov
elty is "the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit"
(H., p. 564; M., p. 492). These words get directly reiterated in the
Vorrede in the those memorable remarks "that our epoch is a birth
time," and which speaks of a "qualitative" not merely "quantitative"
change or leap occurring, and which refers to the laying of a "founda
tion" of a building, a "new shape" and "new world" (??11-12; H., pp.
15-16; M., pp. 6-7). This is the indeterminate future of Spirit
knowing itself as temporal. Consequently, we must conclude that
the second side of the Hegelian eschaton is the end that constitutes a
new beginning, built on the newly established foundation of temporal
ized Spirit. Can the foundation that structures and animates moder
nity be surpassed? If we are to remain modern, evidently not. An
affirmative would require somehow a breakdown of modernity that
was a breakthrough into a post-modern condition and a new sense of
18 Glauben und Wissen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1962), p. 124.
Time. Such a direction is suggested by the fact that the actual future
that followed the Phenomenology was a far longer night than Hegel
ever imagined.
Vassar College.

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Time in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit"

Author(s): Michael Murray

1 See Vier Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), p. 25.

In pursuit of this aim I will argue several theses about Hegel's

A hermeneutic guide to reading the texts of Hegel on Time is to

Lectures on the History of Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1962),

places in the Phenomenology (??96, 153, 169, 679, 785-89, 801-803,

velopmental togetherness of its form and content. Fourth, the rigid

118; M., p. 93) in chapter 3 on Force and Understanding, in which

hilative desire develops desire for desire, or for living-desiring-being

tend to the transformations of the dialectical stasis or impasse of the

read: "Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previ

tecedent to the Greeks?in other terms, to Natural Religion (7, A) in

The "shapes" are the differentiating moments, though not identical or

Zeit formulation. One might say of a world-moment that it is in time,

8 In a 1797 sketch, Schiller speaks of the German mission "to make a

regard the three moments of God's nature as eternalistic Plotinian

described in chapter 7 "as a loving recognition in which the two sides,

10 B. A. van Groningen, In the Grip of the Past: Essay on An Aspect of

ence of eternity but rather the kairologic presence of the eternal in a

of the Holy Spirit. Recognizing itself as belonging to the age of the

Hegel interprets the pain and reluctance of letting-go and of accept

spiritual. For the genuine faith of Lutheran inwardness, God is pres

11 Philosophy of Religion (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 3:133;

merely dipped superficially in the element of Thought, is preserved in

14 History of Philosophy, 3: 20; see Hegel's reiteration of the impor

16 Hints at Hegel's formulations are present in Schiller's Letters on the

cient being-in-time view of Time. The change entailed by the event

solute presence." "Absolute presence" is not an eternity abstracted

17 Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. William Petry (London: Allen

presence of Spirit is "absolute presence" or the full dilation of Time,

18 Glauben und Wissen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1962), p. 124.

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