The Phenomenology of Spirit
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- J. B. Baillie
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~300,000 words · 1,444 passages
Cite this work
- APAHegel. (n.d.). The Phenomenology of Spirit. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-phenomenology-of-mind-baillie
- MLAHegel. "The Phenomenology of Spirit." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-phenomenology-of-mind-baillie.
- ChicagoHegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-phenomenology-of-mind-baillie.
What it is about
Consciousness on its way from sense-certainty to absolute knowing, by way of master and servant, the unhappy consciousness, and spirit coming to recognise itself.
Context and history
Hegel finished it at Jena in 1807, by his own account with the battle close at hand. This is J. B. Baillie's translation, the first complete English one: it renders Geist as 'Mind', and that is already an interpretation — later translators say 'Spirit', which opens the word toward the historical and collective rather than confining it to the individual mind.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
IN the case of a philosophical work it seems not onlysuperfluous, but, in view of the nature of the subject, even inappropriate and inexpedient to begin, as writers usually do, with a preface explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries. For whatever it might be smtable to state about philosophy in a preface — say, an historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about truth — this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth. Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of universality, which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature, for which the mere process of bringing it to light would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance. On the other hand, in the general idea of e.g. anatomy — the knowledge of the VOL. I. — B I 2 Phenomenology of Mind VOL. I. — B I 2 Phenomenology of Mind parts of the body regarded as lifeless — we are quite sure we do not possess the objective concrete fact, the actual content of the science, but must, over and above, be concerned with particulars. Further, in the case of such a collection of items of knowledge, which has no real right to the name of science, any talk about purpose and such-like generalities is not commonly very different in manner from the descriptive and superficial way in which the contents of the science — these nerves and muscles, etc. — are themselves spoken of. In philosophy, on the other hand, it would at once be felt incongruous were such a method made use of and
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