Alienation and the Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

As noted in Chapter 5, Hegel maintains that consciousness does not immediately understand that it is composed of a subjective and an objective aspect and that these are unified by spirit. Because consciousness initially takes its object to be something strictly other than itself, it initially maintains that an aspect of itself is purely other than itself. It is, in other words, alienated from itself. While consciousness can overcome this alienation, it can only do so by passing through a specific developmental process where it experiences a variety of relations with its object that it, in some way, takes to be strictly other than itself.