Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. Later that same day, Hegel wrote a letter to his friend, the theologian Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer: On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel was putting the finishing touches to this book as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on October 14, 1806, in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city. 'Hegel and Napoleon in Jena' (illustration from Harper's Magazine, 1895) It had a profound effect in Western philosophy, and 'has been praised and blamed for the development of existentialism, communism, fascism, death of God theology, and historicist nihilism'.

Focusing on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, ethics, history, religion, perception, consciousness, existence, logic, and political philosophy, it is where Hegel develops his concepts of dialectic (including the lord-bondsman dialectic), absolute idealism, ethical life, and Aufhebung. The book marked a significant development in German idealism after Immanuel Kant. This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of 'the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge'.

Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an 'exposition of the coming to be of knowledge'. The Phenomenology of Spirit ( German: Phänomenologie des Geistes) is the most widely-discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind.

Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel