Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is easily one of the West’s, and possibly the world’s most debated and disagreed over philosophers of all time. Respected and admired by some, and criticized and mocked by others, Hegel is a thinker whose conclusions are very often dismissed and yet whose influence is near impossible to escape. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel humbly attempted to explain the world through reason. Contrary to reason however, the philosopher’s writing is a puzzling fusion of the technical and the mystical, creating a magnificent set of metaphysical abstractions. A truly impressive coup of linguistic engineering. There is hardly anything one can say about Hegel’s ideas that cannot be contested by another person, as such, many have built their philosophical career around this philosopher’s work. The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel’s first published book, and it is widely considered to be his masterpiece, even though it’s final parts were written in a hurry in order to escape the civil turmoil of his time. The Phenomenology of Spirit is a history of consciousness, and more specifically, the development of consciousness. In the text, Hegel seeks to uncover all of the steps that consciousness must go through, such as Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, and Religion, before it can arrive at the point of fully sufficient knowledge, which he famously called: Absolute Knowledge. No philosopher has ever attempted anything similar to Hegel’s philosophical masterpiece, and even today with the latest science, technology, and knowledge, this project seems nothing less than extremely ambitious. The subject matter Hegel deals with is not only original, Hegel also uncovers his steps towards Absolute Knowledge with a fresh new method of philosophy and inquiry: the dialectical method.
The dialectical method is a novel kind of logic which Hegel invented. This method contrasts itself with the method of logic known as deductive reasoning which Aristotle put in place numerous years before the existence of Hegel. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have primarily relied on deductive arguments, such as the most famous example, the syllogism: “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal.” Hegel thought that the problem with syllogisms and the method of proofs that follow, is that they separate the actual content of a form from the pure form. Deductive frameworks are produced in accordance with a mechanically followed set of rules, they are formula and work like so, consequently, they do not encompass the reality that an individual knows, but only a formulated fraction of it. In the preface of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes his thought in this way: “When we wish to see an oak with its massive trunk and spreading branches and foliage, we are not content to be shown an acorn instead. So too, Science, the crown ora world of Spirit, is not complete in its beginnings” (12). One cannot go directly to the full oak tree in order to describe the oak tree, the acorn must be taken into account to understand the development of the tree into it’s current full form, is never final. The arrangement of an argument is independent of the order of the world. Different propositions can be inserted into the framework indifferently, and will produce a consistent argument. Unlike other philosophers before him, Hegel did not believe that a person’s perception and logic fundamentally shaped reality as it appeared to the individual, because this meant that pure reason could never tell a individual anything about reality in-itself. “Since I hold that Science exists solely in the self-movement of the Notion, and since my view differs from, and is in fact wholly opposed to, current ideas regarding the nature and form of truth…” (71). Hegel, being drawn by the mystical from a young age, did not find the current understanding of truth satisfactory as he believed the content of a form, and the form itself, could not be separated. Every concept takes a form in sense-certainty experience, but every formula for knowledge changes the actual content of the original form by imposing a different form upon the original form. Therefore, for Hegel, all efforts to separate content from form are wrong and does an injustice to the matter. To put it simply, both content, and form, are inseparable. More importantly however, deductive reasoning which uses formula that splits content from form, is not agreeable with the fact of a continually changing essence of reality in-itself which Hegel identified. Reality is moving and evolving, coming into being and fleeting away. Then accordingly to Hegel, there cannot be static formulas that describe reality adequately.
For Hegel, all reality is spiritual (or mental). The historical unfolding of spirit (or mind) consists in its gradual realization of this most important fact: that spirit (or mind) is reality. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel sets out tries to trace the process, using his dialectic method, in which the mind passes from ignorance of its true essence to the realization that it comprises everything it knows. This understanding is the basis of all of Hegel’s philosophy, so The Phenomenology of Spirit could be considered as a sort of prolegomena or an “educational novel” (Stanford Encyclopedia), for his entire philosophical system. The Phenomenology of Spirit involves a highly thorough and intricate developmental description of how thought comes to discover a particular kind of knowing, which Hegel calls Absolute Knowledge. With the dialectic method, Hegel continues moves through Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, and Religion, to the final point where it recognizes Absolute Knowledge as the condition and fulfilment of knowledge. Hegel believed the mind evolved through stages, or “moments”. At each of these stages, the mind takes a particular form in which it must wrestle with actual reality in order to realize how it is wrong. When the mind has an inaccurate conceptualization of itself as reality, but in another appearance, not in-itself, it reaches a dead-end where it must confront and resolve a contradiction as not being reality in-itself. This contradiction is overcome through a union of the old conceptualization and its contradiction where both are accommodated in a wider conceptualization, which will in turn reach its own dead-end. The mind gradually realizes itself in reality and understands to recognize reality in-itself, as itself. Hegel demonstrates throughout his text how this progression continues until the final stage is reached.
Hegel begins this journey of knowledge and understanding with Consciousness, and more specifically, with sense-certainty. In Consciousness, Hegel begins by explaining that sense-certainty makes objects out to be given and primary and the subject that perceives the objects to be mediated and secondary: “One of the terms is posited in sense-certainty in the form of a simple, immediate being, or as the essence, the object; the other, however, is posited as what is unessential and mediated, something which in sense-certainty is not in-itself but through [the mediation of] an other, the 'I', a knowing which knows the object only because the object is, while the knowing may either be or not be. But the object is: it is what is true, or it is the essence” (93). A human being is first aware of sensations, such as soft, cold, smooth, and so on. These sensations, or sense-certainties are immediately present to the human being, seeming as truth in it’s pure form. However, when the mind attempts to articulate this truth, the mind discovers that it can only articulate, and therefore grasp them, in universals. Universals fail to apprehend the particularity and the immediacy of its sensations, so the mind strives to overcome this problem by using terms like “This”, “Now” or “Here”. To make proof of this issue, Hegel devises a thought experiment by writing down “Now is Night” on a piece of paper, so now being night seems like an immediate, primary, and truthful concept according to sense-certainty: “We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and more than it can lose anything through our preserving it” (95). He then asks to look at that piece of paper later, at noon: “If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale” (95). The “Now is Night” on the paper is still existing, but in a different now than when it was written, it is not and cannot be the same now as when it was first written. Hegel argues that this shows the idea of "now" is not immediate at all — that it exists only though being mediated by what it is not. Sense-certainty takes what it has as the truth, to be certain. However, the truth is actually different than what sense-certainty believes it to be, so even these immediate and direct terms (Here, Now, This) will not do, since what is “this” one moment becomes “that” the next, and what is “here” one moment is “there” the next. In other words, the apparent truth of sense-certainty always falls away when one attempts to articulate it.