The problem of organizing the narrative space in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”

Abstract

The analysis of the narrative space of “Phenomenology of Spirit” presented in this paper is based on distinguishing within the “experience of consciousness” among (i) the points of view of the observing consciousness (the consciousness of the author and the reader), (ii) the observed consciousness and (iii) its subject. They differ by their place in the struc­ture of the phenomenological subject and their role in the movement of experience, but they consistently achieve the same logical structure, which is “infinity”. The narrative space of the work is therefore a dialogue, whose participants follow down the same path to “infinity”. However, the development of each storyline must be woven into the move­ment of experience as a whole. For this reason, Hegel faces a fundamental problem of organizing the narrative space. This problem is the need for coordinating the descriptions of individual stages of experience in which the role of the actor is assumed by each of the participants in the dialogue. The author tries to answer the question, why in the narrative space of “The Phenomenology of Spirit” the development of the points of view of the par­ticipants of the dialogue is carried out not “in parallel”, in one time of experience, but con­secutively. As a result of this consecutive approach there appear “gaps” in the description of the experiment that call for a return to its starting point and a repetition of the stages of the logical reconstruction of “infinity” that are already familiar to the reader. The paper shows that Hegel chooses that particular method of organizing the narrative space which leads to the liberation of the subject of consciousness from its connection with “sustain­able existence” and to its elevation to “infinity” or to self-consciousness. The author uses these results to argue in defense of a perspective on “The Phenomenology of Spirit” ac­cording to which this work is complete and internally consistent.