Phenornerwlogy o{8pirit
TRANSLATED BY A.V. MILLER WITH ANALYSIS OF THE TEXT AND FOREWORD BY J. N. FINDLAY
HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
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PHENOME'NOLOGY OF SPIRIT BY
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F. HEGEL
Translated by A. V. Miller with Analysis of the Text and Foreword by J. N. Findlay, F.B.A., F.A.A.A.S.
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[email protected] Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1952
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Phenomenology of spirit. Index. ISBN -13 978-0-19-8!.l4597-rPbk I. Title 2. Miller, Arnold Vincent 3. Findlay, John Niemeyer liD
MetaphYSiCS
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FOREWORD J. N. FINDLAY THE Phenomenology of Spirit, firs t pu blished in 1807, is a work seen by Hegel as a necessary forepiece to his philosophical system (as later set forth in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline of 1817, 1827, and 1830), but it is meant to be a forepiece that can be dropped and discarded once the student, through deep immersion in its contents, has advanced through confus~ons and misunderstanding to the properly philosophical point of view. It~ task is to run through, in a scientifically purged order, the stages in the mind's necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy, showing thereby that this position is the only one that the .mind c;;t.n take, when it comes to the end of the intellectual and spiritqaJ adventures described in the book. But this sort of history, he tells us in Encyclopaedia §2S, necessarily had to drag in, more or less out of place and inadequately cQaracterized, much that wOl,lld afterwards be adequately sC':t forth in the system, and it ~lso had to bringjn many motivating connections of w~ich the adventuring mind was unaware, which explained why it passed from one phase of experience Of action to another, and yet could not be set forth in the full manner whicp. alone would render them intelligible. Heg~l also, in preparing for repubJication of the work before his death in 1831) wrote a note which throws great light on his ultimate conception ofit. It was, he writes, a peculiar earlier work (eigentumlichefr#bere Arbeit) which ought not to be revised, since it related to the time at which it was written, a time at which an abstractAbsolute dominated philosophy, (See the final pOlragraphof the first section of Hoffmeister's Appendix Zur Feststellung des Textes in the 1952 edition.) This note indicates that, while Hegel undoubtedly thought that the sequence of thollght-phases described in the Phenom~nolQgy-phases experi