Hegel Phenomenology Of Spirit Quotes

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.

The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level". (1807, § 69).

It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.

The vanity of the contents” of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests “…since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

is—it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it.

On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent’s attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker.

The bourgeois intellectual neither fights nor works.

Das Widermenschliche, das Tierische besteht darin, im Gefühle stehen zu bleiben und nur durch dieses sich mitteilen zu können.

To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.

The spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressive motion, in giving itself a new form.

The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself…Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.

The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work — of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the “What am I?” Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds.

Man who does not manage to satisfy himself through Action in and for the World in which he lives flees from this World and takes refuge in his abstract intelligence...

Puede decirse que el hombre es una enfermedad mortal del animal. You can tell that man is a mortal disease of the animal

por lo poco que el espíritu necesita para contentarse, puede medirse la extensión de lo que ha perdido.

The truth is the whole.

To put the point facetiously, one could say that Hegel began his career a Marxist and later became a Hegelian.

The outcome is the same as the beginning only because the beginning is an end.

Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is 'absorbed,' so to speak, by this contemplation -- i.e., by this thing. He forgets himself, he thinks only about the thing being contemplates; he thinks neither about his contemplation, nor -- and even less -- about himself, his "I," his Selbst. The more he is conscious of the thing, the less he is conscious of himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word 'I' will not occur. For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde....

According to Hegel -- to use the Marxist terminology -- Religion is only an ideological superstructure that is born and exists solely in relation to a real substructure. This substructure, which supports both religion and philosophy, is nothing but the totality of human actions realized during the course of universal history, that history in and by which man has created a series of specifically human worlds, essentially different from the natural world. It is these social worlds that are reflected in the religious and philosophical ideologies, and therefore-- to come to the point at once -- absolute knowledge, which reveals the totality of Being, can be realized only at the end of history, in the last world created by man.

We must hold to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come, and that it appears only when this time has come, and therefore never appears prematurely, nor finds a public not ripe to receive it; also we must accept that the individual needs that this should be so in order to verify what is as yet a matter for himself alone, and to experience the conviction, which in the first place belongs only to a particular individual, as something universally held.

Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of [the divine] substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams.

All the same, while proof is essential in the case of mathematical knowledge, it still does not have the significance and nature of being a moment in the result itself; the proof is over when we get the result, and has disappeared. The process of mathematical proof does not belong to the object; it is a function that takes place outside the matter in hand.

Wahrheit heißt Übereinstimmung des Begriffs mit seiner Wirklichkeit.

Universal liberty can’t produce any work or any positive action, only negative action. Universal liberty is only the rush to erase.

from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth Him his own infinitude.

Kantian philosophical caution is thus not actually as cautious as it pretends to be, for it rests on assumptions that it takes for granted.

In the Logic, Hegel states that this ‘unity’ of thought and being constitutes the ‘element’ or ‘principle’ of logic.7 Logic thus starts from the idea that being is known by pure thought to be intelligible to pure thought.

The individual who pretends to act for such noble ends and who masters such admirable oratory counts in his own eyes as an excellent creature – he gives himself and others a swelled head, although the swelling is only due to self-important puffery.

Self-conscious mind has not merely passed beyond that to the opposite extreme of insubstantial reflection of self into self, but beyond this too. It has not merely lost its essential and concrete life, it is also conscious of this loss and of the transitory finitude characteristic of its content

Nature, withdrawing into its essence, deposes its living, self-particularizing, self-entangling manifold existence to the level of an unessential husk, which is the covering for the inner being; and this inner being is, in the first instance, still simple darkness, the unmoved, the black, formless stone.

La belleza carente de fuerza odia al entendimiento porque éste exige de ella lo que no está en condiciones de dar. Pero la vida del espíritu no es la vida que se asusta ante la muerte y se mantiene pura de la desolación, sino la que sabe afrontarla y mantenerse en ella. El espíritu sólo conquista su verdad cuando es capaz de encontrarse a sí mismo en el absoluto desgarramiento. El espíritu no es esta potencia como lo positivo que se aparta de lo negativo, como cuando decimos de algo que no es nada o que es falso y, hecho esto, pasamos sin más a otra cosa, sino que sólo es esta potencia cuando mira cara a cara a lo negativo y permanece cerca de ello. Esta permanencia [en lo negativo] es la fuerza mágica que hace que lo negativo vuelva al ser.

The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety.

There are two aspects to merely clever argumentation that call for further notice and which are to be contrasted with conceptually comprehending thinking. On the one hand, merely clever argumentation conducts itself negatively towards the content apprehended; it knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothing. It says, “This is not the way it is”; this insight is the merely negative; it is final, and it does not itself go beyond itself to a new content. Rather, if it is again to have any content, something other from somewhere else has to be found. It is reflection into the empty I, the vanity of its own knowing. – What this vanity expresses is not only that this content is vain but also that this insight itself is vain, for it is the negative which catches no glimpse of the positive within itself. Because this reflection does not gain its negativity itself for its content, it is not immersed in the subject matter at all but is always above and beyond it, and thus it imagines that by asserting the void, it is going much further than the insight which was so rich in content. On the other hand, as was formerly pointed out, in comprehensive thinking, the negative belongs to the content itself and is the positive, both as its immanent movement and determination and as the totality of these. Taken as a result, it is the determinate negative which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content.

Hegel was an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Jena, and, as he later told his friend, the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, he ‘actually completed the final draft in the middle of the night before the Battle of Jena’ (which took place on 14 October 1806 and in which Napoleon’s troops comprehensively defeated the Prussians).1 Furthermore, Hegel had to entrust the last sheets of his manuscript to a courier who rode through French lines to take them to the publisher in Bamberg.

Consciousness knows something; this something is the essence or is per se. This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth. Consciousness, as we see, has now two objects: one is the first per se, the second is the existence for consciousness of this per se. The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object. But, as was already indicated, by that very process the first object is altered; it ceases to be what is per se, and becomes consciously something which is per se only for consciousness. Consequently, then, what this real per se is for consciousness is truth: which, however, means that this is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.

I apprehend and see in all of them that they are in their own eyes (für sich selbst) only these independent beings just as I am. I see in their case the free unity with others in such wise that just as this unity exists through me, so it exists through the others too--I see them as myself, myself as them. In a free nation, therefore, reason is in truth realized. It is a present living spirit, where the individual not only finds his destiny (Bestimmung), i.e., his universal and particular nature (Wesen), expressed and given to him in the fashion of a thing, but himself is this essential being, and has also attained his destiny.

On the afternoon of October 13, as Napoleon rode through Jena, he was spotted by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from his study window. Hegel, who was writing the last pages of The Phenomenology of Spirit, told a friend that he had seen ‘the Emperor, this Weltseele [world-soul] ride out of town … Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it.’102 In his Phenomenology Hegel posited the existence of the ‘beautiful soul’, a force that acts autonomously in disregard of convention and others’ interests, which, it has been pointed out, was ‘not a bad characterisation’ of Napoleon himself.

It is not out of (false or sincere) modesty that Lacan says “I learn everything from my analysands,” “I borrow my interventions from them.” Rather, this is a procedure, a method that is carefully thought out, and actually recalls Hegel’s warning, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, against the kind of (philosophical) proceeding which concerns itself only with aims and results, with differentiating and passing judgments on things. This kind of activity, says Hegel, instead of getting involved with the thing, is always-already beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and being preoccupied with it, this kind of knowing remains essentially preoccupied with itself. The proximity of “practicing analyst” Lacan and “speculative philosopher” Hegel on these questions of method should be enough to prevent any hasty conclusions drawn in terms of theory versus practice, philosophy versus antiphilosophy, or singular versus universal.

Este movimiento dialéctico que ejerce la conciencia sobre sí misma, tanto en su saber como en su objeto, en la medida en que de él surge para ella su nuevo y verdadero objeto es propiamente aquello que denominamos experiencia. Desde este punto de vista, en el proceso recién descrito todavía hay que destacar un momento que puede arrojar una nueva luz sobre el aspecto científico de la presentación que haremos a continuación. La conciencia sabe algo, este objeto es la esencia o el en-sí; pero también es el en-sí para la conciencia; con esto surge la ambigüedad de esta verdad. Ya vemos que ahora la conciencia tiene dos objetos, uno el primer en-sí, otro el ser para-ella de este en-sí. El segundo sólo parece a primera vista la reflexión de la conciencia en sí misma, una representación no de un objeto, sino únicamente de su saber del primer objeto. Lo que pasa, como se ha mostrado antes, es que el primer objeto se altera, deja de ser el en-sí y se convierte para la conciencia en un objeto que sólo es el en-sí para ella. Pero con esto el ser para ella de ese en-sí es lo verdadero, lo que significa que es la esencia o su objeto. Este nuevo objeto contiene la anulación del primero, es la experiencia hecha sobre él.

Under 'rational' assumptions, such texts as those of early Islam can be taken as either literal or symbolic (and the notion of "literal" itself, meaning "as written", adds a further problematic dimension to interpreting something written), but those texts were in fact written as neither literal nor symbolic, but as revelatory. The same is true of Christian and Jewish religious texts, and in fact of most religious texts worldwide. Revelatory texts, to be understood, require an experience of the revelatory itself, and in fact many such texts were intended precisely to provoke the experience necessary for understanding them. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind) is in fact a revelatory text, but the content of the revelation is the nature of revelation itself as reflexive understanding, and as such attempts to provoke not only the experience, but the experience of understanding the experience of revelation. There is no guarantee, though, as with any other revelatory text, that it will in fact be understood by any given reader. Other reflexively revelatory texts include Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) . All three are considered among the most "difficult" texts in philosophy precisely because approaching them with the usual, rational, interpretive apparatus of philosophy itself will get the reader nowhere. As a projection, though, the rational on its own cannot give any guidance as to what to record content-wise, since it can only account-for something already given. As a result while history is by definition formally rational, its content is tacitly determined by something else. This something else, in the western world, is factually a priori revelation, for the most part in the west revelatory texts associated with the Christian religion and its immediate antecedents, but also with those of Islam, with which we share antecedent revelatory texts and with whom there has been significant mutual influence over the past millennium, and with specific westernisations of eastern revelatory texts. Thus, the underlying assumptions of the most formally rational thinking are inherently revelatory and religious in nature, while our rational interpretation of revelatory texts themselves as either literal or symbolic completely misses the thrust and intent of the very texts that underlie our basic thought processes.

When Hegel arrives absolute knowing in the Phenomenology of Spirit, he reveals the theoretical radicality inherent in his position. This is not the point at which the subject knows everything that there is to know but rather the point at which the subject recognizes that there are no more conceivable paths out of contradiction. Absolute knowing affirms the necessity of a failure that occurs when the subject collides with the inevitability of contradiction. This is why one might rename absolute knowing the recognition of the inevitability of contradiction.

Understanding or Knowledge of the Past is what, when it is integrated into the Present, transforms this Present into an historical Present, that is, into a Present that realizes a Progress in relation to its Past.

...this is a book about texts as well as their authors, it is not a textbook so much as a context book and a pretext book, concerned with settings and motives as well as the works themselves. Its success will be measured by the readers who pick up Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and find themselves engrossed rather than baffled—and even when they are baffled, are happy to go on reading, interrogating, and arguing with their authors for themselves.

As in Hegel’s “struggle of the enlightenment with superstition,” in his Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, enlightenment was the dominion of “pure insight and its diffusion,” and it seeped into men’s thoughts like a “perfume,” or like an “infection.”47

In mortal terror man becomes aware of his reality, of the value that the simple fact of living has for him; only thus does he take account of the 'seriousness' of existence.

the bourgeois World is but an agglomeration of private Property-owners, isolated from each other, without true community.

The Bourgeois is neither Slave nor Master; he is - being the Slave of Capital - his own Slave. It is from himself, therefore, that he must free himself.

This Slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner.

Hegel calls the truth of his Phenomenology a "bacchanalian revel"; it is, in other words, an orgy of ideas, a conceptual debauch.

Hegel's Phenomenology is not so much about experience as it is about changes in experience, changes in the forms of experience, transformations of the concepts through which we give form to our experience. Total and unified comprehension is the principle behind this series of changes and transformations, but this is not Hegel's principle; it is rather the principle or goal intrinsic to all human experience and, in particular, what defines reason (which Hegel sometimes defines as "the search for unity").

Here is the personal source of "the two Hegels." On the one hand, there is Hegel's sense of particular contexts, communities, and cultures; on the other hand, there is his Enlightenment sense of humanity, this all-embracing conception that had become, in Kant for example, the key to morality, rationality, politics, religion, and simply "being human." There is, again, this extreme tension in Hegel's Spirit, in other words, between his sense of unity and his sense of differences. And I shall argue in the pages that follow that this essential temperamental tension emerges in the writing of the Phenomenology itself, literally splitting the work in two. The incoherence of the Phenomenology, I want to argue, is nothing less than the epic philosophical tension of the age—something far more important than the lack of organization of a single philosopher, and something far more earth-shaking than an academic confusion concerning the proper "systematization" of German Idealism.

Similarly, Hegel's dialectic of "the concept" or "forms of consciousness" is an attempt to "think through" our ideas about the world, and about ourselves, developing these ideas—or letting them develop—to the point where we can see their consequences, their inadequacies, their inconsistencies. And by doing so, our comprehension "grows," it becomes more encompassing, letting us see things we did not see, letting us appreciate ideas we could not accept, forcing us to see connections we had not seen before. And the goal of this process, or "Absolute Knowing," is to gain a single all-encompassing conception, which makes sense of everything at once. But though this may be the goal of the Phenomenology, it is not its result; there is no end to the process of understanding life, while we are still living it. Hegel began looking for the Absolute, but what he discovered was the richness of conceptual history.

Indeed, I want to argue that no single image has been more detrimental to our understanding of Hegel—or our ability to accept him—than the self-congratulatory idea that his philosophy is the spiral staircase upward to the Absolute, not only because there is no Absolute, but because there is no "upward" either, and no staircase. Whatever else their disagreements, the one view of Hegel's philosophy that seems wholly taken for granted by almost all the commentators is the idea that the dialectic is going somewhere; but to move is not necessarily to move in any particular direction, and increasingly to comprehend the complexity and expanse of the world is not always an improvement or progress. One of the more obnoxious features of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to such modern stoics as Spinoza and Schopenhauer, is their unabashed tendency to declare their own profession, thinking, as indubitably the "highest" human activity, and "thinking about thinking" (or, as many of these thinkers think, "thought thinking itself") as the very purpose of the cosmos itself. But once one steps outside of philosophy (and indeed, sometimes inside of it, too), there is no justification whatsoever for this self- congratulatory view. To think with increasing clarity and comprehension is an undeniable desideratum of thought, and increasingly to appreciate both the unity and differences of what we call "humanity" may be an important goal in a world which is quickly shrinking, getting more crowded and more violent. But none of this justifies the arrogant pretentiousness of some philosophers, that philosophy alone is the answer to the world's problems, and that thinking itself is what makes us uniquely "human." Hegel may have believed these things, but the Phenomenology presents us with a very different image; the dialectic is more of a panorama of human experience than a form of cognitive ascension. It has its definite movements, even improvements, but it is the journey, not the final destination, that gives us our appreciation of humanity, its unity and differences. And if, as in Goethe's Faust, there is a sudden but unanticipated divine act of salvation at the very end of the drama, this is more poetic license than the conceptual climax of all that has gone before it.

History here is always a comedy, and not a tragedy: the tragic is before or after, and in any case outside of, temporal life; this life itself realizes a program fixed beforehand and therefore, taken in itself, has neither any meaning nor any value.

Certainly, "dialectic" is a magnificent thing. But one never finds the dialectic, as if it were a mill which exists somewhere and into which one empties whatever one chooses, or whose mechanism one could modify according to taste and need.

In Hegel’s view, Kant is the father of the critical era in philosophy to which we all now belong. He contends, however, that Kant himself did not carry out a sufficiently profound critique of the categories. What Kant did, in Hegel’s view, was – mistakenly – restrict their range of validity: he argued that they should be employed to understand only possible objects of experience, but not things ‘in themselves’.

In Hegel’s view, an uncritical, or inadequately critical, approach to the categories takes a certain understanding of them on authority – be it the authority of past philosophers, tradition, common sense or formal logic.

For Hegel, therefore, all truly critical philosophy in the wake of Kant is governed by the following imperative: all ‘presuppositions or assumptions must equally be given up when we enter into science’. Science – that is to say, philosophy – should thus be ‘preceded by universal doubt, i.e.,

Whereas Spinoza begins with contestable definitions of substance, attribute and mode, Hegel begins with the utterly indeterminate thought of pure ‘being’.

The relationship of the Phenomenology to the rest of the systemis as an entrance exam. It is a test for those who have presuppositions about the world that they are unable to suspend, in order to begin with Hegel’s Logic and follow the development of thought that is unfolded there. The Phenomenology charts alternative perspectives on how we know the world and demonstrates the inadequacy of all of them. For this reason, Hegel calls this discussion ‘the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair’ (PS, p. 49).