The Image of Recollection-inwardizing in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the Problem of Substantiating the Conceptual Form of Philosophical Knowledge

Abstract

The article considers the role of the image “recollection” in the genesis of Hegel’s doctrine of concept as a form of philosophical knowledge. The author assumes that “recollection” plays this role due to the place it occupies in the composition of the work. In Phenomenology of Spirit, the content of self-consciousness is revealed in the process of reconstructing socio-historical being, and “recollection” as the last step on this path brings it together into “concrete self-consciousness” (chapters VII–VIII); because of this, Hegel argues, concept is born. The author tries to demonstrate that taking into account the role of “re­collection” in substantiating the conceptual form of philosophy is able to explain the self-movement of categories of Logic; the general view of this movement is presented in the fragments of Preface devoted to “speculative proposition”. The difficulty of analyzing “recollection” is related to the fact that it is not a con­cept, but an element of the figurative structure of Phenomenology of Spirit. At the same time, Hegel points with the help of this image to the synthesis of the connections of socio-historical life that takes place in the process of hu­man comprehension world of history and culture. It is this point that turns out to be the key to substantiating the possibility of presenting the content of philo­sophy in rational-discursive form. As a result, “recollection” appears in Phe­nomenology of Spirit as a metaphor for culture, which forms the subject of philo­sophical cognition; and this subject is able, regardless of the historical existence of Spirit, to generate Absolute knowledge, which will be developed in Logic in the form of the system of categories.