Abstract

My project focuses on the role of images in the philosophical education of human consciousness described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , and in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic. Traditionally, Hegel's famous use of images in his masterwork has been viewed either with amusement or suspicion. The former view assumes that the images are mere illustrations of abstract positions, while the latter casts images in a far dimmer light, seeing them as a superfluous, merely rhetorical obfuscation of the truth. I contend that, in fact, while the illustrative function of images is undeniable, they play a substantive, rather than a merely metaphoric, role in Hegel's system. Hegel's education at the Gymnasium Illustre in Stuttgart, like that of virtually every other German schoolboy of the time, was based on the rhetorical education prescribed by the Christian humanist Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon, in turn, readily acknowledges his debt to ancient sources on the education of children via rhetoric, especially Quintilian and Cicero. In the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel describes the process followed by human consciousness as embodied in the education of a child. Hegel describes the education of human consciousness as reflected in the grammar school education of a child, and that child's education was grounded in the rhetorical regimen of the ancient world. Hegel describes the entire Phenomenology as a "Gallery of images." If rhetoric clothes itself in images , as Melanchthon and his ancient sources claimed, and rhetoric is a central part of education , including the education of human consciousness, then images, as the tools of rhetoric, also play a central role in education, including the education of consciousness. Where the Phenomenology presents this education in the rhetorical terms appropriate to an account of human social and moral consciousness, the Science of Logic gives the same account in the dialectical, nonimagistic terms appropriate to purely philosophical discourse. Thus, the rhetorical account of human consciousness which occupies the entire Phenomenology stands revealed as the sole presupposition of the dialectical account provided in the Science of Logic