Questions on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
1. List the three major characteristics of Reason according to Hegel, and give a brief account of their
relationship to each other.
2. List the three major abstract characteristics of Spirit, and give a brief account of their relationship.
3. How is Spirit like a seed?
4. What are the “means” of Spirit?
5. What is a “world-historical individual”? Give an example and explain why that example counts in
Hegelian terms.
6. What does Hegel mean by "dialectic" with regard to Spirit?
7. Why is Hegel so wary of "mere formalism"?
8. What according to Hegel is the property of self-consciousness? (it exists only in being acknowledged by
another, What is meant by recognition?
9. What does the self-conscious being see in the other? (its own self) What is meant by saying that “it
supersedes this being of itself in the other and thus lets the other again go free”? Why is reciprocity
necessary?
10. What does it mean to say that, “Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself
with itself and unites with itself . . . They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another”?
(exist within a role)
11. In what context is it true that the relationship of two self-conscious individuals “is such that they prove
themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle?
12. Why does Hegel say that “it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won”? That the individual
must seek the death of the other?
13. Why is it a quality of life to split into extremes with opposite characteristics, and if so, what happens to
the middle term?
14. What happens when consciousness is split into the lord/bondsman dialectic? How is the lord related to
the bondsman, and to the “thing”? (he is free to enjoy the latter)
15. What is the different relationship of the bondsman to the “thing”? (labors with it, cannot destroy it)
Which one experiences desire? (“The aspect of independence he leaves to the bondsman, who works on
it,”.
16. How does the lord achieve consciousness? What effect does his existence have on the bondsman’s
action? (“Thus he is the pure, essential action in this relationship while the action of the bondsman is
pure and unessential.”)
17. In what sense is the servile consciousness of the bondsman “the truth of the independent
consciousness?” How will servitude come to reverse itself? What is its present state of consciousness?
18. What does it mean to say that the bondsman experiences the melting away of everything stable, and that
this creates consciousness?
19. What is the effect of work on the bondsman? What are some implications of this idea? Would everyone
share it?
20. What is the relationship between the individual and the object s/he creates? (sees its own independence
in the independent being of the object)
21. What part does fear play in the process, according to Hegel? What seems to be meant by “fear”?
22. Can you see political implications in Hegel’s views? How may he anticipate ideas enunciated by Marx?
23. How may Hegel have influenced the formulation of exisentialism? Modern theology? Are there any
other aspects of 19th or 20th century culture which you see as Hegelian?
24. What is required, according to Hegel, for "self-certainty"? Why is it necessary in this regard that there
should be a "life-and-death struggle" in which "each must seek the other's death"?
25. How does Hegel characterize the immediate aftermath of this "life-and-death struggle"? How does he
describe the two kinds of consciousness that he calls "lord [Herr] and bondsman [Knecht]"?
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26. How do the lord and bondsman, respectively, relate to the "thing"? What does laboring or "work[ing] at"
the thing turn out to be vital to the bondsman's consciousness?
27. After the struggle, what contradiction or problem besets the lord's attempt to achieve self-certainty
through his conquest of the one now called the bondsman?
28. How does the bondsman's "servitude" lead to the surprising development of "a truly independent
consciousness?
29. How is it, further, that "consciousness qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object]
its own independence"? In other words, how, according to Hegel, does work, as "formative activity,"
allow the bondsman to produce his own independent identity?
30. We have read only a few selections by Kant and Hegel, but what similarities and differences can you
find in the two philosophers' way of examining individual consciousness or identity? (general question,
possible paper topic)
31. How did Hegel apply his dialectic concept (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) to history in general and to
German history in particular?
32. Is Hegel's romantic idealism another version of a "natural religion?
33. Why is Hegel's philosophy focused on "reconciliation" of opposites?
34. In reading about Hegel's early attempts to formulate a conception of recognition and of ethical life, what
general philosophical assumptions or claims do you find to be most problematic? For example, are there
dubious metaphysical or epistemological ideas animating his theoretical claims? Do you see anything
about the ideas of recognition he is trying to develop that are essentially tied to such problematic
assumptions or claims?
35. How do you understand the phrase "ethical life" as used by Hegel?
36. According to Hegel/Mead/Honneth, rights evolve (in particular, they "broaden") in the course of
historical change. What sort of thing do they have in mind? What, if any, philosophical problems does
this thesis present for you?
37. What contribution did Hegel make to criticism?
38. In the early Hegel Marx sees: “The appropriation of man's essential powers, which have become
objects ... only an appropriation occurring in consciousness” while “the equally uncritical idealism of
Hegel's later works - that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world”. Can
you explain what is meant by these two criticisms?
39. Explain: “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy”
40. Marx says that for Hegel the subject is not real man. Is it possible to make the same criticism of modern
social and natural science?
41. If the bearer is not God, Asbsolute Spirit who or what is? and what is this about subject and predicate?
42. What is meant by saying “Nature is Nothing”?
43. How does Hegel influence phenomenology and existentialism?
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