The post-phenomenological project

After the Phenomenology, Hegel began to work out what was later to become known as “the system,” articulated in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (originally published in his Heidelberg years in 1817) and expanded in his lectures in Berlin from his arrival there in 1818 to his death there in 1831. During this period after the writing of the Phenomenology and the construction of the “system,” Hegel apparently came to think that it was possible to say more about the structure of this modern community within the dialectical terms he had set for himself. The Phenomenology ends with the statement of the modern project: the creation of a reconciled community that would unite the intellectual project of modern life – the attempt to create a self-founding form of life – with the practical project of modern life, the attempt to create a form of life of self-determining individuals. However, in the Phenomenology, this remains as a project, for there is no theory offered there of which practices or institutions could accomplish it.

Among the kinds of watershed events in the European community's history that the Phenomenology had located, the most consequential for the post-phenomenological project was the sense of “groundlessness” in the European community after the decline of the aristocratic ethos.