The place of Vorstellung in the philosophy of spirit

pp. 40-67

in: Malcolm Clark, Logic and system, Berlin, Springer, 1971

Abstract

The previous chapter has given some general indications of Hegel's use of the term "Vorstellung". It is, on the one hand, a functional "picture-thinking" which, immersed in the particularity of space and time, is inadequate to the self-possession of thought. Yet it is not simply "below" thought as a level which can be passed and forgotten. The first efforts to rise beyond it produce a merely formal thinking which, in its abstract universality, must pass through a reincarnation in the particularity of Vorstellung before claim can be made to a higher level in the true experience of thought. That is, the Hegelian dialectic of particularity, universality, and individuality is here represented as a complementary movement of passage from Vorstellung and return to Vorstellung, in the search for philosophical meaning. Vorstellung is the "other" of thought, and yet is "interior" to it.