VI - The Formation of Spirit

Summary

In entering now the domain of ‘Geist’, what Hegel will call later ‘objective spirit’, we are dealing for the first time with real historical forms. Previously we were dealing only with abstracted aspects of these forms: we saw Stoicism, for example, in the development of self-consciousness; now we will come back to the full historical form of which it is an aspect. In this chapter we have whole polities, or phases in the life of a whole civilization, as our stages, and not just a given idea, outlook or ideal (which can ultimately only be understood in the light of Geist).

The PhG being a non-historical dialectic thus gives a kind a spiralling effect. We return at a higher (or a deeper, if this metaphor be preferred) level to the same phenomena. If from the dialectic of the master and slave to the end of Reason the implicit references had a rough historical order, we now return to the beginning. And at the end of this chapter, we shall again, in the chapter on Religion.

The chapter on Spirit takes us through some crucial passages of the philosophy of history. We start off with the Greeks, with that society of perfect Beisichselbstsein which Hegel as many of his contemporaries could not remember without nostalgia. This society, as we remember, was characterized by a perfect unity between citizen and society.