Abstract

In the “Introduction” of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel portrays phenomenological knowledge in the tension between immediate self construction and a philosophical understanding of its development to the point of true knowing. This study deals with the question of what exactly must be regarded as the “complement” of philosophic understanding. From analyzing the “Introduction” and returning to the texts about the absolute epistemology from Hegel’s systematic outlines from Jena, it follows that the “complement” must be seen in the abolition of consciousness in its content, as well as in the evidence of the realization of the absolute epistemology in it. Thus, consciousness is on the one hand a “constructive” self-development of its own totality; but it is not simultaneously a consciousness of the self-development of its own identity’s totality – it is the later only as a moment of absolute epistemology, as an existing idea of a philosophy, which can only though itself understand this existence as its own moment