The structural principles of hegel’s the phenomenology of spirit narrative

Abstract

The paper dwells on the making of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit narrative. The author aims to substantiate the idea that the creative process was determined by a combination of two principles, both introducing a conceptual structure that was not related to the specific historical and cultural content. Firstly, the structure of the expanding text corresponds to the structure of The Phenomenology’s object that encompasses the observing consciousness, the observed consciousness and its object; secondly, the movement of experience on each of the three specified levels ends with reaching the same logical form of relating consciousness to the infinity. The object is highly specific as it implies the need for revealing semantic structures covertly present in the Hegelian text. This predetermines the need to use special methodological approaches (that would allow separating the formal aspect of the “experience of consciousness” from its content and present it in as an independent complexly organized conceptual construction) along with traditional methods of historical and philosophical research. Such approaches include identifying of three types of consciousness, acting as subjects of “experience”; revealing the structural isomorphism of “experience of consciousness”, hidden behind The Phenomenology of Spirit’s external variety of topics. Finally, the author comes to the conclusion that the method of constructing the narrative chosen by Hegel leads to the liberation of the subject of consciousness, which is characterized at each of the stages of the movement by meaningful diversity. It leads from the connection with “sustainable existence” and tracing it to the structure of “infinity” toward self-consciousness. This analysis of The Phenomenology of Spirit narrative is novel in that the conceptual integrity of the work is based on identifying the structure of the narrative, and not by trying to establish a single epistemological, psychological and historical line of content development. In addition, since one of the main difficulties in justifying The Phenomenology’s integrity has always been associated with the heterogeneity of its content and the seeming unexpectedness of passages and shifts in the process of describing the experience of consciousness, the author considers the result as an important argument in defending the vision of Hegel’s opus as an integral and coherent one.