WHAT IS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT?

Beginning around the summer of 1802, Hegel began to prepare his friends and students for the immanent publication of his own “system” or at least a part of it. For a young professor out to make his mark, this was apparently the thing to do in those heady days in the university city of Jena, which had already seen several of Fichte's “Doctrines of Knowledge” and Schelling's influential “System of Transcendental Idealism.” But no such work appeared, since Hegel began to change his mind rapidly about a number of important elements in such a system, especially, after the lectures given in the 1803-4 academic year, about the relation between his category theory, or logic, and his metaphysics, and even more deeply, about many of Schelling's ideas. These changes also prompted an interest, sometime around 1805, in a proper “Introduction” to such a system, a work that was to be a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” and that would be published, together with his “Logic,” in a single volume at Eastertime 1806.