Phenomenology of Spirit

Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel’s grandest experiment, that changes our vision of the world and the very nature of the philosophical enterprise. In his own words, “This book demonstrates how knowledge arises… It includes the various shapes through which spirit becomes pure knowledge or absolute spirit.” Seen by Hegel as a necessary forepiece to his philosophical system, its task was to run through, in a scientifically purged order, the stages in the mind’s necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy. Little wonder Hegel originally wanted this work titled as Science of the Experience of Consciousness. The sequence of phases to be studied in the Phenomenology therefore involves a fine blend of the contingently historical and the logically necessary. Its successive phases bring out what is logically implicit in its earlier phases. They also bring out a series of implications actually embodied in past history and in Hegel’s own thought history.