Authority and Freedom

Hegel’s Journey

In 1807, at the age of thirty-seven, Hegel published his first major work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit. The book was completed in an atmosphere of turmoil, for the previous year Napoleon seized the city of Jena, where Hegel had been teaching; Hegel fled his lodgings with half the manuscript and little else. The Phenomenology shows the philosopher taking a rather different view toward society than did the younger Hegel in his impassioned reaction to the events of the French Revolution. Negation, so important in his earlier attitudes, as in the writings of Fichte and Schlegel, is still there. But now this idea has been expanded, enriched, and set alongside another term: recognition.