Testimonial: I am a poor study of philosophy. Phenomenology of Spirit is a work I read previously, and though I am sure I benefited from reading it, I considered its insights passingly, rather than taking them to heart. With a second reading, enforced by notes, my intention is to better understand the philosophy. These notes will most likely take the form off documentation and small assertions to help cla rify the work to myself.
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Foreword

vi

What is obvious… in Being is not its identity with Nothing, and what is obvious in Sense-certainty is not its total lack of determinateness.

vii

… successive phases bring out what is logically implicit in its earlier phases.

ix
Here is described the logical movement which _Phenomenology _ exhibits.

x
Absolute Knowledge or Absolute Idea is the final integration that they system Hegel is constructing does or must involve.

Spirit exhaustively analysable by universality, specificity, singularity.

xi

Ego is identified with the categories used in the synthetic construction of objects by the understanding.

xiv

Hegel refutes the view of knowledge that says we can have beliefs about things in themselves that we never have direct access to.

xvi

Sense certainty and perception being flawed. Understanding, explanatory unity provided by the conscious mind.

xx

Sachlichkeit’s arbitrary objectivity, the task one does, ostensibly without regard for external approval.

xxiii

Enlightenment being unable to achieve synthesis of abstract universal insight and pious unsophistication.

xxiv

Sansculottism - a violent extremest of France

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Preface: On Scientific Cognition

2. The failure to see philosophy as a progressive unfolding.

3. Concern with aim or result a means of avoiding the work.
4. The need of culture to develop a general conception of the issue, rather than apprehension by differential classification.
5. The goal of this work - being philosophy closer to the form of science, from love of to actual knowing.

6. Philosophy requires what is the opposite form of Notion? Because the Absolute is not to be comprehended directly.

7. Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, and of the finite that is its own content.

A demand is put to philosophy, and seemingly, out so it is to me, Hegel says we cannot have a direct intuition of these substances of things

10. Empty breadth and empty depth - the spirit is only what is articulated.
11. How the spirit grows consist of differences of degree, then of kind, once it has dissolved the structure of its previous world.

12. Science, the crown of the world of spirit

16. Absolute versus the full body of articulated condition

17. One of my favorite examinations of the introduction of God consciousness into our thought is Auerbach’s analysis of Abarham’s staid execution of Isaac in Mimesis.

19. Form is essential to essence, and so pure self-contemplation of the divine is “contaminated” with form. This mingling is required for it to be conceived and expressed as an actuality.

20. The Divine or the Absolute come about in a procession, just as the procession of animals articulates all of zoology, whereas the term ‘all of the animals’ does not.

21. The example of the embryo. It is, in itself, human, but is not human in conception. It is only human when it becomes for itself what it is in itself.

22. The power to move as pure negativity

23. The anticipation that the Absolute is Subject makes the actuality impossible, as actuality is self-movement, not an inert point.

24. “Knowledge is only actually, and can only be expounded as Science, or as a system”

25. The representation of absolute as spirit expresses that the true is actual only as a system.

26. The spirit that is developed such that it knows itself is science.

27. Okay, I am speculating here that the idea that philosophy requires that consciousness should dwell in the element of pure self-recognition in absolute otherness is similar to saying ‘the animals’ as a representation of thee matter described. Hegel goes a step further to say that the element where consciousness dwells goes through becoming, and philosophy must be considered in its intermingling with this becoming, rather than as a concept tacked onto the element.

28. Consciousness knowing objects in anti-thesis to itself seems to be a limited concept.

28. Describes the movement from uneducated to knowledge in the individual and the relationship to the universal individual (self-conscious Spirit).

29. Hegel describes the importance of each moment and the manner in which the world-soul embodied to the full extent each shape in the succession that accounts for world history. * It feels true that our default condition is to constantly contend with “skips” where our end is in mind, even when that end is unproductive, and we neglect the work of embodying to the full extent the shape of the moment.

30. I am not completely comprehending this section, but it seems that Hegel proposes there is an intermediary step in the embodiment of existence (the end of its sublation) that is similar to the example from zoology, where a familiarity (‘all animals’) is present that is not the articulation in itself. > knowing is the activity of the universal self, the concern of thinking.

31. Description of the analysis of an idea, Death, and the power of Spirit of contending with death (looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it).

The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding

33. The difficulty in bringing fixed thoughts into a fluid state as opposed to sensual experience

36. Describes the process of experience in the terms of an object of the self.

The relationship of the false and true and kinds of truth, philosophical and historical.

44. Describes the deficiencies of the cognitive process by way of the relationship of a proof to its manifestation in lines.

45. Describes the mutual independence of mathematical propositions in the sense that they lack necessary connection, which philosophy possesses.

47. Philosophy, on the other hand, has to do , not with unessential determinations, but with a determination in so far as it is essential.