Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel was a central figure in the philosophical movement of German Idealism. To understand Phenomenology of Spirit, it is important to understand how his ideals fit within the context of his contemporaries. The movement dominated European philosophy from the 1780s to 1840s. German idealism is known for its complexity and obscurity. Although philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte are criticized for projecting irrationalism—a reputation driven by the difficulty of their writing and ideas—German idealists helped form the foundation of modern logic and scientific thought. Hegel, along with thinkers like Kant, Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, developed radical ideas about reality and the nature of consciousness.

The movement began with Kant’s transcendental idealism, a philosophy which argues that space and time are merely appearances. This means that human understanding of the external world and reality is limited and intuitive. Humans only perceive the external world through the filter of their own consciousness. Hegel and his contemporaries built upon Kant’s ideas by suggesting that all things are made up of contradictions and that for something to exist, it must be a figure of human consciousness.

Kant’s views differed from dogmatic idealism which asserted that space and time did not exist. Also called immaterialism or subjective idealism, philosophers like George Berkeley insisted that reality existed only within the minds of humans and of God. Kant rejected the immaterialism of dogmatic idealism, validating human experience by securing the relationship between reality and consciousness. German idealism was predicated upon the idea that there is a material world and that there is no distinction between being and thinking. Kant suggested that space and time were priori forms of knowledge. Rather than building his philosophy on the idea that space and time did not exist, he argued that the innate intuition of space and time created the foundation for sensory experience.

Some philosophers, such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, supported Kant’s ideas for steering away from the moral nihilism that was at the center of the pantheism controversy, a major debate that dominated German intellectual life in the 1780s. However, Reinhold and others later criticized Kant for his failure to develop a singular principle that would define his work and lay the foundation for forms of intuition. Reinhold called this the “principle of consciousness.”

German idealists like Hegel believed they could construct a comprehensive scientific system that would merge multiple areas of study, including metaphysics, epistemology, morality, politics, and aesthetics. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel radicalized Kant’s ideas by introducing a principle called the absolute. Fichte argued that the principle of consciousness is not a concrete fact; instead, it is an action. Consciousness applies a distinction between the self and the object. Fichte radicalized Kant’s work in his critique of the contradiction between being-for-itself and being-in-itself. He suggested that an external object could not be a being-in-itself. Instead, external objects are only real as they are conveyed through human consciousness and experience.

Schelling was a fan of Fichte’s work and defended it in On the I as Principle of Philosophy, in which Schelling proposed that both being and thinking were dependent upon the “I,” or the self. He and his classmate at Tübingen from 1790 to 1793 built upon Fichte’s ideas but soon began to deviate from them. This classmate was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Schelling later asserted that being and thinking emerged from the unity of the spirit and nature. Hegel documented the increasing divide between Fichte and Schelling in The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801). Hegel’s impact on logic is often argued to be greater than any other German idealist. In Phenomenology of Spirit, he criticized Schelling’s work for failing to recognize the different forms of consciousness. He suggested that logic was formal and material and could be discovered through dialectics, a method for examining opposing sides of logic and consciousness.