Hegel’s Phenomenology of Unhappy Consciousness

Andrzej Wiercinski

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Unhappy Consciousness
The Dialectic of the Phenomenology of Spirit as the Education of Consciousness

Article

22/1 - Spring 2017, pages 65-79

Date of online publication: 11 juillet 2018

Date of publication: 11 juillet 2018

Abstract

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a careful description of the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Its dialectic is the education of consciousness. There are three stages of unhappy consciousness: external beyond, changing individual, and achieved reconciliation. Being aware of its own mutability, the self yearns for reconciliation, which can only come from the external beyond, from the unchanging. The quest of unhappy consciousness for reconciliation is characterized by the three stages of devotion, sacramental desire and labour, and self-mortification. The self, constituted by what is other, is never able to achieve lasting satisfaction; it desires the unity of self-consciousness. Through the experience of itself, the self comes to a clearer self-awareness and transgresses its own limits.

Keywords

Cite this article

Wierciński, Andrzej. “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Unhappy Consciousness: The Dialectic of the Phenomenology of Spirit as the Education of Consciousness.” Forum Philosophicum 22, no. 1 (2017): 65–79. doi:10.5840/forphil20172214.

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