Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract The Phenomenology is organized into six theses: (1) All consciousness is self-consciousness. (2) Self-consciousness is social self-consciousness. (3) Spirit (Geist) is self-conscious life, and this is to be conceived generically in terms of social self-consciousness. (4) Self-conscious life has a history of that to which it collectively takes itself to be absolutely committed, a history which is as much ideal as it is material. (5) This history is progressive (and in that sense, somewhat teleological), and it culminates in modern life after the finalization of the French Revolution, with two different but related accounts of that progress (namely, the history of spirit and the history of religion). (6) The thesis about the centrality of self-consciousness is what the Phenomenology as a whole is about and at the end turns out to have both a theoretical and practical significance. The Phenomenology itself and the system to which it gives rise afterward is, we are supposed to realize, the very point of departure for modern life. It culminates with the experience of the Phenomenology being the book you needed in particular and the book that we needed in general, and not just another book of philosophy.