Recently, I’ve felt compelled to visit Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (TPoS). This came out of nowhere and I must say I had some initial resistance to it because of the book’s reputation of being impenetrable. I also dislike spending time on studying abstract philosophical concepts, as most of this form of thinking is detached from normal life. If I cannot find a practical or actionable way to approach philosophical ideas, I feel like I am wasting time.

To breach this resistance, I decided to do my best to approach TPoS as a psychological text. Would I find any parallel between that book and Jung’s collected works?

Before I can get into a discussion of the similarities, I have the difficult task of summarizing TPoS to the reader who will not be familiar with it. For the purpose of this article, I am going to reduce the complexity of the book to the following: TPoS concerns itself with the evolution of spirit through different stages. Spirit (Geist in German, sometimes translated as ‘mind’) is to be understood as the underlying, pre-existing substructure that makes different forms of consciousness possible and is expressed historically in culture (the word Zeitgeist makes use of Geist in a similar manner). Hegel starts by a description of spirit as consciousness⁠—specifically sense-certainty, perception, and understanding⁠—and shows how it has to evolve by negation, by collapsing on itself into self-consciousness. The process keeps going as self-consciousness evolves and collapses into reason which evolves and collapses into absolute knowing. (Note: all words in italics are terms from the book.)

Reading TPoS is a journey through all these nuances of spirit, all of them having defined identities and transcendental faults. Every time it reaches new heights, the next few sentences will undermine the previous achievement as a limitation to be overcome. Every progress is negated and every negation opens the next opportunity.

The best analogy would be that reading TPoS is like walking a tightrope where one risks falling off at each sentence. The exercise is a perilous undertaking, always unstable but it can be done if one sticks close enough to the text.

While reading a book that challenges the reader at every sentence sounds off-putting, it is precisely this quality that makes TPoS such a remarkable achievement. In this book, Hegel talks the talk and walks the walk: not only does he introduce the dialectic on a formal level, he also uses it as an aesthetic throughout the whole book. A definition of dialectic is “to study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories”. (G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline: Part 1: Science of Logic). This means that, for every concept that is split into distinct categories, Hegel works through their intimate connection and shows how each of them can be reversed on each other. This collapse onto the other transforms the thing from within, opening it up to becoming something else.

A good example of this process is the passage Lordship and Bondage (known as the master-slave dialectic). A naïve approach would conclude that a master is always a master of his slave, the slave always a slave to his master, and that relationship is unchanging. But by working out the dialectic between these two partial categories, Hegel shows that the master experiences slavery because his experience is always mediated through his slaves while the slave has the opportunity to achieve mastery in the constrained environment provided by the master.

Now that we have some context on the contents, I would like to focus on the aesthetic of the book, which cannot be fully explained without an example. Here is a somewhat randomly picked paragraph out of the master-slave dialectic.

“194. We only saw what servitude is in relation to mastery. However, servitude is self-consciousness, and thus what it is in and for itself is now up for examination. For servitude, the master is initially the essence. Therefore, to servitude, the truth is the self-sufficient consciousness existing for itself, a truth which for servitude is nonetheless not yet in servitude. Yet servitude has this truth of pure negativity and of being-for-itself in fact in servitude in its own self, for servitude has experienced this essence in servitude. This consciousness was not driven with anxiety about just this or that matter, nor did it have anxiety about just this or that moment; rather, it had anxiety about its entire essence. It felt the fear of death, the absolute master. In that feeling, it had inwardly fallen into dissolution, trembled in its depths, and all that was fixed within it had been shaken loose. However, this pure universal movement, this way in which all stable existence becomes absolutely fluid, is the simple essence of self-consciousness; it is absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which thereby is in this consciousness. This moment of pure being-for-itself is also for this consciousness, for, to itself, its object lies within the master. Furthermore, not only is there this universal dissolution as such, but, in his service, the servant also achieves this dissolution in actuality. In his service, he sublates all of the singular moments of his attachment to natural existence, and he works off his natural existence.”

G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

Because much of the specific vocabulary has not been provided, this passage is likely to induce a headache for most readers. The reason I am quoting it is not to be scrutinized intellectually, but rather to get a sense of the aesthetics behind the writings. In fact, the whole book continuously flows and meanders in this manner, up to its very last sentence.

As mentioned above, this should be seen as a conscious aesthetic choice from Hegel. His style is a reflection of the dialectic: it mirrors the process of evolution, the movement of transformation of spirit.

Let’s start back at the beginning: The Phenomenology of Spirit is a terribly confusing title, at least compared to one of its alternative titles “Science of the Experience of Consciousness“. If we consider the latter name, it has the clarifying effect of pointing out that the transformation of consciousness can only happen through experiences. In other words, it is necessary to have things to be conscious of otherwise there can be no growth of consciousness—and maybe even no consciousness at all. The project of the book is to discuss this evolution as a science (Wissenschaft), meaning in an articulated and systematic manner.

From this point, we can look at the book in two manners: 1) as a description of the progressive stages that spirit takes (from sense-certainty to absolute knowing). Or, 2) as the continual process underlying these transformations. For the rest of the article, I will leave out the first part and focus on the second part.

“But isn’t absolute knowing the goal of spirit?”, will ask the careful reader. “Isn’t this the reason why consciousness journeys through experiences? To achieve this final state?”. It is true that the book ends on absolute knowing, but it is wrong to conclude that it is the end of the journey in light of Hegel’s project.

Throughout his book, Hegel rejects any kind of closed loops, closed systems, or final state to achieve. Everything is always in tension with others and with itself. On the contrary, if we were to posit a finality, this would ultimately lead to arrested development. Instead, Hegel argues for a process of becoming that never ends, that can never be completed. Therefore, what consciousness strives for is not a finality but it is striving for the movement itself.

The following video from Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar will guide the discussion of looking at TPoS from the standpoint of the movement of becoming.

Quoting from 9:35 to 11:15, “The path to truth is truth itself. So, this is a very strange structure and this speaks about the structure of absolute knowledge. Because what does it say about absolute knowledge? It doesn’t say, “You need a long path in order to arrive at absolute knowledge, and then you’ll be there.” What it says is the opposite: “The path to truth is everything“. When you arrive to the absolute knowledge, you only realize that everything happened on the path. You don’t arrive to a certain position where you would be on top of everything. It’s only the path which actually made this position. And the whole thing is on the path. . . . [C]onsciousness has some sort illusion that it will reach this final goal which will be the absolute whatever and what you reach in the end is an indication, a vector, which points backwards and which actually just says “Well, all these failures [that you did] during the way – this is the path to truth. This is all there is to it. There is no truth outside of this. Only this is absolute knowledge.” So in this sense you can have the rhetoric of Golgotha and finality and whatever, but in some sense it is an absolutely empty point. You don’t learn anything new in the absolute knowledge. You only learn that everything happened on the way.”

And at 14:57, he repeats “So the system itself is an introduction. You are being introduced all the time to this final point. But then you get to this final point and what you learn is, hell, there is no final point, everything you learned was on the way.”

These quotations are key to understanding the difference between striving for a finality and striving as such. The path, the movement, the process of consciousness journeying through experience is what makes everything possible. Everything is generated from this. “There is no truth outside this.”

From 24:16 to 26:17, “So, I think that one of the keywords of the Preface is das Sich-anders-werden [§18], which actually, in the English translation, is translated rather well by self-othering. So you presuppose [that] the subject is a certain self. That it is posed, it is placed in the position of the subject of a proposition. But what happens in the proposition itself is the self-othering; it has to become its other in order to be itself.

And this is the basic idea in all his accounts. In Hegel, everything that seems eternal has to pass into time and this is why you have this radical equation, “Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst” [§801], that the concept is the same as time precisely because everything has to be entrusted to the passage of time. And everything that is underneath has to come to the surface. And there’s another important sentence in the Preface, that “the strength of the spirit is only as strong as it entrusts itself to the surface.” So something that remains hidden and underneath is just not real, it has no truth. It’s only by it coming to the surface that it gains its content.

And on the question of necessity, he uses the form of becoming accidental of the essence. It’s only if the essence entrusts itself to accidentality, to the process of contingency, that it can be an essence at all; otherwise it’s absolutely an empty point. The substance was an empty point unless it took upon itself the risk of becoming its other.”

We can read here a psychological description of the process of becoming, which requires becoming vulnerable to time and to accidentality. Paradoxically, we become real only when we make ourselves vulnerable in this manner. On a similar point, Jung writes, “The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious.” (Carl Jung, Answer to Job, CW 11, par 740).

Self-othering: to entrust oneself to the process of time and accidentality, becoming other constantly. A visual representation of the chaotic nature of the process of becoming.

One last point that should be emphasized is that, according to Hegel, not only is the path moving eternally forward, it is doing so by bringing the past with it. The wealth of previous existence, previous knowledge, and previous being must be brought forward continuously. To move forward, the future must be pregnant with the past.

We can find an analogous position in Robert Johnson’s Inner Work, “Jung believed that every mortal has an individual role to play in this evolution. For just as our collective human capacity for consciousness evolved out of the unconscious psyche, so it does in each individual. Each of us must, in an individual lifetime, recapitulate the evolution of the human race, and each of us must be an individual container in which the evolution of consciousness is carried forward.”

In conclusion, individual consciousness is the container that must continuously transform to bring the past into the future anew. Learning this as a process (and not as a finality) is the goal of Hegel’s science and Jung’s individuation.

To learn more about Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I recommend this video as an introduction for curious people Diagram of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and this four-part series for going through the book G.W.F. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Part 1/4)

The dialectic as a ‘path’ symbolically calls forth the idea of individuation. This is not surprising because both concepts are concerned about the ego having to navigate the opposites and to adapt to a complex and changing world. Having acknowledged the similarities, we can now look at the differences.

Hegel presents its dialectical theory as a macroprocess whose unfoldment comes from its own tension. This tension is continuously generated from the fact that opposites are always connected by a similarity, an underlying connecting unity. This tension promotes a “pure recognition in absolute otherness” which is “the very ground and soil of science” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, par 26). There is not much to disagree with formulating the evolution of consciousness, the quest for self-knowledge in these terms. The problem is that, practically speaking, this tension does not solve by itself: if the ego has reached a dead-end and is not able (or willing) to get itself out of a corner, it will have to pay a great price. Jung is very clear about this:

If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative attitude may end in real death. The demand would not have come to this person had he still been able to strike out on some promising by-path. But he is caught in a blind alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him. If he refuses this then no other way is open to him. Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get out of the way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can just negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he suddenly loses the courage to live. The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness. The connection of the unio mentalis with the death-motif is therefore obvious, even when death consists only in the cessation of spiritual progress.

Carl Jung, Mysterium Conunctionis, CW 14, par 675

In this regard, individuation is very different from the dialectic. Depth psychology posits that the unconscious is the place where the tension between opposites is worked on first. Typically, dreams attempt to restore psychic equilibrium when the attitude of the ego is too one-sided. Then, it is up to the ego to acknowledge that it received a meaningful message and work with it to the best of its ability.

What happens if the dreams are ignored? Many would like to believe that problems of the unconscious will solve by themselves, that the ego can keep living its life by letting the unconscious do its own thing. This naïve optimism is inappropriate: the demand for inner work never stops accumulating and, if not addressed, one is always at risk of being overwhelmed by suppressed contents. The ego has to take responsibility for what happens in the unconscious. Without the ego’s attention and cooperation, the unconscious is helpless to be effective and might have to resort to becoming tricksterish or adversarial.

Here is a dream of mine that reinforces the necessity of the cooperation of the ego:

At university, I am taking a course about Electromagnetism. I am struggling with the class because I can’t understand the way the prof teaches, though he is not a bad prof. So I leave the class and go through the uni trying to find an alternative. After a while, I haven’t found a solution and go back to the class. I say this sentence aloud: “Success is never guaranteed, only failure is.“

This dream was a response to a complex inner situation I was in. Because everything looked like a mistake, I resorted to passivity. The conclusion is clear: inaction is no solution.

Individuation described in its simplest terms, Jungian Dream Interpretation: Archetypical vs Reaction Based with Dr. Michael Conforti from 12:27 to 16:10

Another important distinction is that individuation cannot be reduced to the idea of becoming. Not all paths are approved by the unconscious.

From what I’ve been able to understand and observe personally, the unconscious is able to anticipate future developments and evaluate them as positive or negative before they happen. This means that, while the ego can be enthusiastic about certain developments, the unconscious might reject these same opportunities. The opposite is also true: the ego might find no value in doing something whereas the unconscious is rooting for it.

This leaves the individual with the difficult task of having to walk a path without any clear direction. Yet this is exactly the task that is required:

But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee — not for a single moment — that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer — at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Joseph Campbell puts it in lapidary terms: “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

My experience of individuation is that it leaves me continuously uncertain, hesitant, feeling like I am walking blindfolded. I am always moving and waiting at the same time. I frequently feel of out of balance, overwhelmed by how alone I am, wanting to come back into a life that is more normal, that I can communicate to others, and yet the next dream will ask me to keep exploring the other way.

Sometimes it gets easier. There is great enjoyment to see life flowing organically instead of rushing from peak to peak. Life becomes less of a quest for achievement and more of being observant on how each moment expresses itself meaningfully. If you can catch it, you can observe that reality responds to the way you conduct yourself and the way you use your will.

At the end of the day, one has to give up on forcing the future to go the way we want. Instead, one has to trust this mysterious process of natural unfoldment, finding balance between action and inaction, having a foot inside and a foot outside at all times.

Life is so complicated that we are better off not knowing what the future holds. When I look backwards in time, I can easily see that I would have been paralyzed by having a glance at my future. The intellect wants to know the future but Wisdom knows that one is better off not knowing too much about what the future holds.

“To see ahead and to know in advance would be murderous for the beginning. May beginnings be protected in the darkness of not-knowing.” (Carl Jung, The Black Books, Book 6, 9. X. 16)

If dreams provide a compass against the complexity of life, how is one supposed to live if the dreams aren’t helpful? Sometimes we can’t understand them, sometimes there is just no dreams to analyze. So what should one do?

I would like to suggest an answer to that question, which I got from Jordan Peterson. It goes like this

If you want to know something about yourself, sit on your bed one night and say, “What’s one thing I’m doing wrong, that I know I’m doing wrong? That I could fix. That I would fix”. You meditate on that, and you’ll get an answer. It won’t be one you want. But it’ll be necessary. (source)

The idea behind this form of prayer (for a lack of a better word) is that one should do things that call for you. It is not about doing things that you want to do, but rather doing things that call to be done, that need to be done, that require you to do them. This shift of perspective works but it is very difficult to stomach. What needs to be done is often diametrically opposed to what one wants to do.

As a daily practice, I am fond of writing down the recurring thoughts that I have. I write them down as much as possible. It makes my head lighter and reduces anxiety. It also allows me to structure my days and weeks: if I have nothing to do for the day, I address what’s already written on the paper.

Some of the items on that list come from the prayer above, the version I use being something like “What needs to be done that I should do but that I don’t want to do?” I write down everything that comes to mind and leave them on the list. It has to be said, sometimes just looking at these items is demoralizing. It might take me a week or more before I can gather the strength of addressing them.

“And that’s that.“

Individuation is a great and mysterious necessity and the demands it makes on the ego are threatening. Jung understood fully that one of the main neuroses of modern man is found in the avoidance of his own being and becoming. While the solution to this problem appears to be straightforward, one has to take into account the unbelievable resistances and manifold difficulties that one will encounter on that way. According to Meister Eckhart, there is no greater torment than returning to one’s true self, it is an “abyss deeper than hell itself “. (Carl Jung, Aion, CW 9ii, par 209)

“The way to yourself is the longest way and the hardest way. Everybody would pay anything, his whole fortune, to avoid going to himself. Most people hate themselves, and for nothing in the world would they go where they are, where their native town is, because it is just hell.” (Carl Jung, The Vision Seminars, Vol 1, p. 30)

Here is a dream of mine that confirms this.

Michael Jackson was nearly killed by Bill Gates but he had a special astrological sign thus was kept alive. That’s how he got obsessed with astrology and how to apply it to people close to him. Something in the dream points out that “Home is where it hurts the most.”

In the context of the dream, Michael Jackson is a man that rejected his blackness and tried to become white. Bill Gates is an adversarial figure. The study of astrology and the special sign are both symbols of the archetypal task that one has to carry through life.

Why would Michael Jackson reject his own blackness (i.e., the shadow, his inferior side)? Because “Home is where it hurts the most“, because anything is preferable than to return to oneself.

In Jung’s The Red Book, we find another exploration of this same theme. Many times throughout the book, Jung addresses the readers directly and calls us to not live by way of examples but rather “live yourselves“. (ibid., Prologue) Here are a few other quotes that are near and dear to me.

“There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

Oh, that all men and all their ways become strange to you! Thus might you find them again within yourself and recognize their ways. But what weakness! What doubt! What fear! You will not bear going your way. You always want to have at least one foot on paths not your own to avoid the great solitude! So that maternal comfort is always with you! So that someone acknowledges you, recognizes you, bestows trust in you, comforts you, encourages you. So that someone pulls you over onto their path, where you stray from yourself and where it is easier for you to set yourself aside. As if you were not yourself! Who should accomplish your deeds? Who should carry your virtues and your vices? You do not come to an end with your life, and the dead will besiege you terribly to live your unlived life. Everything must be fulfilled. Time is of the essence, so why do you want to pile up the lived and let the unlived rot?” (ibid., The Gift of Magic)

“Truly; the way leads through the crucified, that means through him to whom it was no small thing to live his own life, and who was therefore raised to magnificence. He did not simply teach what was knowable and worth knowing, he lived it. It is unclear how great one’s humility must be to take it upon oneself to live one’s own life. The disgust of whoever wants to enter into his own life can hardly be measured. Aversion will sicken him. He makes himself vomit. His bowels pain him and his brain sinks into lassitude. He would rather devise any trick to help him escape, since nothing matches the torment of one’s own way. It seems impossibly difficult, so difficult that nearly anything seems preferable to this torment. Not a few choose even to love people for fear of themselves. I believe, too, that some commit a crime to pick a quarrel with themselves. Therefore I cling to everything that obstructs my way to myself.” (ibid., The Way of the Cross)

This article has outlined the paradox that individuation entails: to walk one’s path is where the gold resides—if we are able to cultivate the wisdom of our own experiences. But it’s also the most despised and difficult endeavor conceivable so one will be tempted to reject this responsibility as quickly as possible.

Having talked to older people who have been living their own lives ruthlessly, they usually share that this is how it is. The path that you walk has everything you need, and nothing else is needed. If it is not there, it will either come at a more appropriate time or never come at all. There is no point seeking what isn’t there. What’s already there is yours to work with, why would you abandon it? This should not be seen as arguing for passivity, rather it is a call to put aside infantile grandiosity and to finally address the things that have been waiting for you for who knows how long.

Individuation is a natural unfoldment of the whole personality. It has its own logic, its own compass, its own needs and its own milestones to achieve. It requires being in tune with the movement of life, the life impulse in all things. For this purpose, the ego is too limited to do it alone and needs to work with the guidance of the unconscious.

Learning this movement is not about being perfect either, it’s about wholeness. Perfection is an intermediary stage on the way to wholeness: “The alchemists say very aptly: “Perfectum non perficitur” (that which is perfect is not perfected).” (Carl Jung, Aion, CW 9ii, par 333, note 108)

Talking about enlightenment, von Franz comments, “[After the highest illumination, you stop seeking it] because you have the humility to know that even the highest realization is not the last. It is an even greater realization to know that the highest realization is not the last. . . . That is, so to speak, the ultimate stage, wherein you realize the very limitation of your own enlightenment.” (Barbara Hannah, Marie-Louis von Franz, Lectures On Jung’s Aion, p. 193)

This also means that mistakes and accidentality are unavoidable. One must take our chances facing the unknown within and without or suffer the accumulation of an unlived life.

We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. […]

Carry through your life as well as you can, even if it is based on error, because life has to be undone, and one often gets to truth through error. Then, like Christ, you will have accomplished your experiment. So, be human, seek understanding, seek insight, and make your hypothesis, your philosophy of life. Then we may recognize the Spirit alive in the unconscious of every individual. Then we become brothers of Christ.
Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, p. 98

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