The Phenomenology of Spirit
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- J. B. Baillie
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~300,000 words · 1,444 passages
Cite this work
- APAHegel. (n.d.). The Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie) [The Phenomenology of Spirit] (J. B. Baillie, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-phenomenology-of-mind-baillie
- MLAHegel. The Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie) [The Phenomenology of Spirit]. Translated by J. B. Baillie. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-phenomenology-of-mind-baillie.
- ChicagoHegel. The Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie) [The Phenomenology of Spirit]. Translated by J. B. Baillie. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-phenomenology-of-mind-baillie.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
' Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds sfcience in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths ; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness {opo<;) of meaning ; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude. But just as there is a breadth which is emptiness, there is a depth which is empty too : as we may have an extension of substance which overflows into finite multiplicity without the power of keeping the manifold together, in the same way we may have an insubstantial intensity which, keeping itself in as mere force without actual expression, is no better than superficiality. The force of mind is only as great as its expression ; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself when spending and giving out its substance. Moreover, when this unreflective emotional knowledge makes a pretext of having immersed its own very self in the depths of the absolute Being, and of philosophising in all hohness and truth, it hides from itself the fact that instead of devotion to God, it rather, by this contempt for aU measurable precision and definiteness, simply confirms in its own case the fortuitous character of its content, and on the other endows God with its own caprice. When such minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion, they think that, by putting ■oil over self-consciousness, and surrendering all