Quotes from book
The Phenomenology of Spirit

Name: The Phenomenology of Spirit
Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelOriginal title Phänomenologie des Geistes (German, 1807)

The Phenomenology of Spirit is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's most widely discussed philosophical work; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work as an "exposition of the coming to be of knowledge". This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of "the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge".The book marked a significant development in German idealism after Immanuel Kant. Focusing on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, physics, ethics, history, religion, perception, consciousness, and political philosophy, it is where Hegel develops his concepts of dialectic , absolute idealism, ethical life, and Aufhebung. It had a profound effect in Western philosophy, and "has been praised and blamed for the development of existentialism, communism, fascism, death of God theology, and historicist nihilism".

“Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

Preface, § 2
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

“Discord which appears at first to be a lamentable breach and dissolution of the unity of a party, is really the crowning proof of its success.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

§ 575
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

“The life of God — the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things — may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

§ 19
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

“History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. … Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)