“The Phenomenology of Spirit’ written by an outstanding German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is an important work which reflects the complex system of Hegel’s views concerning the structure and the main peculiarities of conscience from the point of view of philosophy. In this work the philosopher develops his unique perspective of dialectic as a basic pattern of thought, and suggests his own vision of spirit that is different from those presented by his predecessors.
Hegel`s dialectic, though based on that developed by the ancient philosophers, was developed into a complete theory of conscience. According to Verene, it “refers to the actual and necessary form of consciousness as it develops in relation to its object and to the form that speculative knowing takes when it makes this development explicit” (Verene 105). Hegel views experience as dialectical movement that is “what consciousness practices on itself as well as on its knowledge and its object, and, insofar as, to consciousness, the new, true object arises out of this movement, this dialectical movement is what is genuinely called experience” (Hegel, 55). The conscience is not stable, it cannot exist as it is, because the very essence of it is in the realization through itself and seeing and analyzing things beyond itself, revealing a number of controversies which, in their turn, show the imperfection of every individual truth and construct the vision of the general one.
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"Dialectic as the Fundamental Pattern of Thought in “Phenomenology of Spirit”".
In other words, the conscience endlessly compares the changes which take place within it and out of it and leads an endless inner dialogue constructing its own truth. The dialectic movement results in the appearance of a new object of conscience because the primary object is viewed from the point of knowledge about it and the changes which occur within it.
In the historic context, Hegel represents his dialectic as the “dialectic of Master and Slave”. A master and a slave stand for embodiments of two consciousnesses which under the influence of fear and conflict have occupied different positions – the dominating and the secondary one. Though from the first sight it may seem that they interact within a strict hierarchy, these two elements are interdependent (Houlgate 21). The master dominates only as long as the slave is ready to perceive him as a master, and the slave remains subordinate only as long as his believes the master to be higher and stronger.
One more concept that is widely discussed by Hegel in his work is spirit which is defined as “the substance and the universal persisting essence in-parity-with-itself – it is the unshakable and undissolved ground and point of origin for the activity of each and all – it is their purpose and goal as the in-itself of all self-consciousnesses, an in-itself which has been rendered into thought” (Hegel 264). Spirit is considered to be the real essence while all the others forms of conscience existence are just mere abstractions of this essence. The spirit analyzes and defines itself in any moment of is existence. It is the ethical immediate being of nation which, though lives in every individual, is universal for everyone. The spirit can be subjective and belong to an individual, objective that is characteristic of families and groups of people, and absolute that is the synthesis of both objective and subjective spirits: on this level the spirit is the embodiment of universal knowledge in-itself. The notion of spirit is also closely related to notions of morality and realizing of one`s duty.
In comparison to the philosophy of Locke and Kant, who suggest that people have no innate knowledge and the experience they get is mostly of the external character (Kant 2-4) and a result of the cognition processes, Hegel states that the knowledge and the truth can be the things in-themselves and they do not simply reflect the impacts of the outer world.
Generally, the philosophy presented by Hegel in his work “The Phenomenology of Spirit” does not simply develop the ideas of conscience and reason, it reconsiders all the preceding theories and creates a new kind of dialectic: not as a way to perceive the outer world and to transform knowledge about it but as a matter of conscience itself, as an absolute pattern of how thought functions within itself. Moreover, Hegel`s perspective of morality and spirit analysis suggest that people have the innate knowledge that, in Hegel`s opinion, can become a key to the absolute truth.
- Hegel, Georg. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1998.
- Houlgate, Stephen. “GWF Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, edited by Robert C. Solomon & David Sherman, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 8-29.
- Verene, Donald Phillip. Hegel`s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. Suny Press, 2012.
- Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
