Hegel’s natural assumption The frst sentence of the Phenomenology of Spirit Hammam Aldouri The ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit has en- joyed a long and rich critical reception in the history of Hegel scholarship. 1 Distinguished from the famous ‘Preface’ in that it introduces the particular ambitions of the Phenomenology as opposed to Hegel’s philosophical enterprise as a whole, the opening section of the 1807 work has been understood as the exposition of a para- doxical structure of philosophical science (Wissenschaft): the path of philosophical science emerges from out of the analysis of the immanent dialectical unfolding of an introduction to this same philosophical science. Hegel acknowledges this paradoxical relation between the path to and the path of philosophical science at the end of the introductory section to the Phenomenology: ‘the way to philosophical science is itself already philosophical science.’ 2 A crucial element of this internally paradoxical con- ception of philosophical science within the Phenomeno- logy – that it is simultaneously the introduction to philo- sophical science and always already a part of that science – is a preliminary dialectical critique of the limits of mod- ern theories of cognition. As the memorable opening passage of the Introduction makes clear, the problem with modern epistemology is that it tries to know the mode of knowing most appropriate for comprehending the truth of the absolute – the truth of what is – before any step is taken into the philosophical knowledge of truth as such: It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what in truth is, one must frst of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to possess the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it. 3 [Es ist eine natürliche Vorstellung, daß, ehe in der Philo- sophie an die Sache selbst, nämlich an das wirkliche Erkennen dessen, was in Wahrheit ist, gegangen wird, es notwendig sei, vorher über das Erkennen sich zu verständi- gen, das als das Werkzeug, wodurch man des Absoluten sich bemächtige, oder als das Mittel, durch welches hindurch man es erblicke, betrachtet wird.] Before one gets into the work of philosophy, one must frst learn to philosophise. 4 Much ink has been spilt in explicating why it is that Hegel starts his Introduction to his 1807 book with this ‘natural assumption’. Above all else, Hegel is said to be positioning his phenomen- ological study in relation to the distinctive problems of modern epistemology, principal among which is the presumed separation of the subject of knowing and the object known via the instrumentalisation of cognition. But how did the ‘natural assumption’ appear? How did it become a predominant form of philosophical procedural- ism? What are the processes that allowed it to manifest in such a manner that Hegel was able to deploy it as the starting point of his Phenomenology? Are those processes intra-epistemological or broader socio-historical ones? Without answering these questions, any exposition of the ‘natural assumption’ is in danger of being itself naturally assumed as a simple manifestation of the limits of the- ories of cognition when, in fact, something signifcantly more complicated is taking place. This essay aims to protect against such an ironic fate by offering an alternative account of the frst sentence of the Introduction. It will provide an exposition of the presupposed processes that render the ‘natural assump- tion’ possible as a hypostatised cultural form that could be immediately mobilised by Hegel as the starting point of the Phenomenology. I will show that, more than simply RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.07 / Spring 2020 53