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Hegel's classic Phenomenology of Spirit is considered by many to be the most difficult text in all of philosophical literature. In interpreting the work, scholars have often used the Phenomenology to justify the ideology that has tempered their approach to it, whether existential, ontological, or, particularly, Marxist. Werner Marx deftly avoids this trap of misinterpretation by rendering lucid the objectives that Hegel delineates in the Preface and Introduction and using these to examine the whole of the Phenomenology . Marx considers selected materials from Hegel's text in order both to clarify Hegel's own view of it and to set the stage for an examination of post-Hegelian philosophy. The primary focus of Marx's book is on the account. Hegel gives of the phenomenological journey from natural consciousness to philosophical wisdom (or absolute knowledge, as Hegel calls it). In showing that Hegel's many statements concerning consciousness 'finding itself' or 'knowing itself' in its world can be understood as discovering the rationality of the conditioning world, Marx offers a solution to several sets of interrelated problems that have troubled students of Hegel. His book contains valuable analyses of the relation between Hegel's thought and that of Descartes and Kant as well as that of Karl Marx, and it also sheds considerable light on the question of the internal unity or coherence of the Phenomenology.

It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form. To be sure, the spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressing motion.... the spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward the new form, dissolving one particle of the edifice of its previous world after the other,.... This gradual crumbling... is interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807..

The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel's grandest experiement, changing our vision of the world and the very nature of philosophical enterprise. In this book, Solomon captures the bold and exhilarating spirit, presenting the Phenomenology as a thoroughly personal as well as philosophical work. He begins with a historical introduction, which lays the groundwork for a section-by-section analysis of the Phenomenology. Both the initiated as well as readers unacquainted with the intricacies of German idealism will find this to be an accessible and exciting introduction to this great philosopher's monumental work.

Hegel, in a chapter called “Absolute Knowing,” end his most exciting and original work, the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit, with a quotation, or rather a significant misquotation, of a poet? The poet is Schiller and the poem is his 1782 “Freundschaft” (Friendship). This immediately turns into two questions: Why are the last words not Hegel’s own, and why are they rather a poet’s? I will turn to the details in a moment but, as noted, such an inquiry may not be worth the trouble. Authors, even philosophers (who, with only a few exceptions, are not known for their literary style) like to cite poets..

Preparing the journey -- Consciousness -- Self-consciousness -- Reason -- Spirit -- Religion -- Absolute knowing.

Why these lectures? -- Hegel between the ancients and the moderns -- Divisions and topics in philosophy of subjective spirit -- Anthropology : slumbering spirit -- Animal magnetism and clairvoyance -- Dementia -- Phenomenology of spirit -- Reciprocal recognition, spirit, and the concept of right -- Recognition and self-actualization -- Psychology : theoretical spirit -- Spirit for itself : from the found to the posited -- Imagination, sign, memory -- Mechanical memory and transcendental deduction -- Psychology : practical spirit : the synthesis of Kant and Aristotle -- The formalism of the psychology -- Unresolved issues : the unity of the philosophy of spirit -- Notes on the text and translation -- Introduction -- Anthropology -- Natural soul -- The dreaming soul -- Sentience -- Self-feeling -- Habit -- Actual soul -- Phenomenology of spirit -- Consciousness as such -- Self-consciousness -- Reason -- Psychology -- Theoretical spirit -- Intuition -- Representation -- Thought -- Practical spirit.

Hegel's discussion of the concept of “habit” appears at a crucial point in his Encyclopedia system, namely, in the transition from the topic of “nature” to the topic of “spirit” (Geist): it is through habit that the subject both distinguishes itself from its various sensory states as an absolute unity (the I) and, at the same time, preserves those sensory states as the content of sensory consciousness. By calling habit a “second nature,” Hegel highlights the fact that incipient spirit retains a “moment” of the natural that marks a limitation compared to “pure thought” but that also makes perceptual consciousness possible. This makes Hegel's account analogous in important respects to John McDowell's “naturalism of second nature.” But Hegel's account of habit can be seen as a version of a Kantian synthesis of the productive imagination—and hence presupposes a given material that can become one's own by means of habit. This does not mean that Hegel falls into the Myth of the Given, but it does suggest that an appropriate account of second nature might be committed to something McDowell wants to deny: that nonconceptual states of consciousness play a role (even if not a justificatory role) in perception.

While Hegel argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s chapter on “Absolute Knowing” that we must see the necessity of each of spirit’s transitions ifphenomenology is to be a science, he argues in its last three paragraphs that such a science must “sacrifice itself ” in order for spirit to express its freedom. Here Itrace out the implications of this self-sacrifice for readings of the transitions in the Phenomenology, playing particular attention to the roles that space and timeplay in absolute spirit’s externalization.