Introduction - Hegel's Phenomenology
in october 1806, as Napoleon and his forty-thousand soldiers invaded Jena, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was nearby, finishing his famous book: The Phenomenology of Spirit. The book has the intended purpose of introducing the reader to Hegel’s overall philosophical project, the ‘science of logic’. Though it might seem strange today, when we associate ‘logic’ with symbolic languages or the rules of good argumentation, it makes sense to call Hegel a logician, in a unique sense that we will come to understand. Things are even stranger when we open the Phenomenology and find in it quotations from poetry, allusions to the Haitian revolution, Ancient Greek cults and Martin Luther’s health conditions, prose that randomly alternates between dramatic, profound imagery and opaque, abstract concepts, and philosophical interpretations of practices as basic as sense-perception and as complex as organised religion. Nonetheless, the book has a purpose. It is a phenomenology insofar as it