Abstract

Hegel had being working on themes related to consciousness while teaching at the University of Jena, but these manuscripts remained unpublished during his lifetime. The Encyclopaedia of 1817 contains Hegel’s first published doctrine of consciousness without a teleological exposition of the various shapes of spirit. His theory of consciousness involves the progression from a very basic type of consciousness up to perceptive consciosness, self-consciousness and reason. Hegel’s systematic assessment develops the various kinds of relationships of the subject as being conscious of sensations, of objects of the world, of other living beings and of dominating relations between different consciousness. This progression involves a dialectical movement which transforms the subject-object difference at every stage of the analysis to which consciousness is submitted.