Summary of Hegel’s Phenomenology of World

Abstract

The author presents key arguments advanced in her book Hegel’s Phenomenology of the World (2018). From the outset, the author accepts the hypothesis that the Phenomenology can be read as a Bildungsroman. Yet, against traditional interpretations, she avers that it is not the consciousness that “builds itself up”; instead, the reader witnesses a gradual crystallization of a specific world-order. The author argues that the consciousness senses, thinks and acts based on an implicit understanding of what the “world” is. For the author, the world designates a “concrete whole,” a “model of reality” that conditions individual acts of consciousness. Consequently, the path of the Phenomenology of Spirit is read as a sequence of world-pictures, most of which are found to be deficient, i.e., they capture reality insufficiently, and thus they disintegrate. This worldly disintegration makes itself manifest in epistemological, moral, or practical failures. Absolute knowledge is a level of knowing that leads to such a conception of a world that captures reality in the most appropriate manner. This world, based on the recognition of finitude and plurality as constitutive principles of reality, can be considered the world of the modern society.