Phenomenology of Spirit

Introduction

Hegel completed the Phenomenology in Jena in 1806, during the days of Napoleon’s victory there, and published it in 1807 as the first part of a planned “System of Science”. The preface, written last, contains the claims that “the true is the whole” and that truth must be grasped as subject, not only as substance. The chapters lead from sense-certainty through perception and understanding to self-consciousness, with the figures of master and servant, the Stoic and the “unhappy consciousness”, then to reason, spirit, religion and absolute knowing. The chapter on spirit discusses Sophocles’ Antigone and the French Revolution. Alexandre Kojève’s Paris lectures (1933–1939) made the book central to twentieth-century French thought.

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Connections

Builds on

• Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge1794 · Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Criticizes

• Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant
• System of Transcendental Idealism1800 · Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Taken up in

• History and Class Consciousness1923 · Georg Lukács
• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Second Sex1949 · Simone de Beauvoir
• Black Skin, White Masks1952 · Frantz Fanon
• Écrits1966 · Jacques Lacan
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed1968 · Paulo Freire
• Life, Existence and the Horizons of Mind1977 · Tang Junyi
• Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition1992 · Charles Taylor
• The Struggle for Recognition1992 · Axel Honneth
• Less Than Nothing2012 · Slavoj Žižek

Criticized in

• Either/Or1843 · Søren Kierkegaard
• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 18441844 · Karl Marx
• The Rebel1951 · Albert Camus
• Let’s Spit on Hegel1970 · Carla Lonzi
• The Postmodern Condition1979 · Jean-François Lyotard

More works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

• 1812Science of Logic
• 1820Elements of the Philosophy of Right