Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit

We should recognise our good fortune: it is only in the past few decades that The Phenomenology of Spirit has become accessible in English. More than a century passed before the first translation appeared – J. B. Baillie’s, in 1910 – a bold undertaking that took on this monumental work. Until then, Hegel was known in England primarily through the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and through a more accessible, more ‘popular’ text: the Aesthetics.

Baillie’s translation, which was rather free, also bore a distinct theological imprint. In truth, it was not until A. V. Miller’s work in 1977 that a truly satisfactory translation became available.

Hegel himself did little to ensure the lasting prominence of this work. The book’s original title, System of Science, subtitled First Part: The Phenomenology of Spirit, gave it a place of honour within the structure of Hegel’s system: it was the book one was meant to begin with, in order to discover the whole.

But no second part was ever published. Instead, Hegel went on to write (after a Logic and the Elements of the Philosophy of Right) the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which restructured the architecture of his system. In this new work, phenomenology is no longer considered the first part, but merely a subsection within one part of the third and final division of the system – the section entitled philosophy of spirit. It is thus relegated to a minor role in the reconfigured Hegelian framework. This, along with the late appearance of its translation, might suggest that The Phenomenology of Spirit is a secondary work.

Of course, it is nothing of the sort: this masterpiece – hailed by Levinas as one of the five most beautiful books in the history of philosophy – shook its era to the core, and left a deep mark on subsequent thinkers. Beyond its conceptual depth, many passages are remarkable for their literary quality, far removed from the abstract dryness so often associated with Hegel’s name.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the first book one should delve into when seeking to understand Hegelian philosophy. For this reason, it deserves to retain its original status in our eyes: that of a foundational work, the gateway to Hegel’s system.

The circumstances in which the book was written are well known. Hegel was working at the University of Jena, in Prussia (present-day Germany), as a Privatdozent – an unrewarding academic position, since it was unpaid and denoted lecturers without a chair. He served as assistant to Schelling and defended him in a short treatise entitled The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy. But he eventually distanced himself from Schelling, in order to develop his own thought, his own doctrine, and began writing The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Yet the turmoil of the time caught up with him. Europe was being ravaged by the Napoleonic wars, and the Emperor himself came to lead – and win – the Battle of Jena. According to legend, Hegel was forced to flee the city, hiding the just-completed manuscript of the Phenomenology beneath his coat. Spotting the Emperor in the distance, astride his white horse, he wrote of the event:

I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – ride out of the city on reconnaissance; it is indeed a marvellous feeling to see such an individual, who, concentrated in a single point of space, seated on his horse, stretches out over the world and dominates it. ¹

This fleeting encounter between two brilliant minds – two giants who each exerted profound influence in their respective spheres, one in politics, the other in philosophy – cannot fail to stir the imagination.

In 1807, the book was published. Hegel was then 37 years old, and had entered into History. He would never revise the text, apart from the preface. In 1831, he began correcting the first half of that preface, but died shortly afterwards during a cholera epidemic that swept across Europe.

Now that we know more about the context in which the work was written, let us turn to its actual content. What theory does Hegel develop in this book, and how does it constitute a revolution in the history of philosophy?

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Hegel: A Close Reading