The author interprets Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as a description of the path on which consciousness formulates a particular model of the world at each "stop". In each model, description and normative claim intersect: the models serve to understand the situation in which consciousness currently lives, but they are also expressions of the kind of world consciousness wants to live in. The formulation of models is therefore not just a theoretical exercise, but always also a standpoint that transforms the actual world. The path of Phenomenology, which is a path of conflict, ultimately results in a world in which consciousness can be free. This world is the reality of post-Enlightenment modernity: for it is here that consciousness sees that the world is not alien to man and that, on the contrary, his own thinking enters the world, for example in the form of modern institutions whose point of departure is equality, not hierarchical relations. Against traditional interpretations of Hegel's philosophy, the author presents a reading that does not fall into the sovereignty of an absolute spirit conceived as pure thought elevated to objecthood. Instead, absolute knowledge can be interpreted as a rejection of the notion that individual forms of consciousness can be considered absolute. As we read in the conclusion of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the infinite thrives to meet spirit from the multiplicity that is in the world, not from the sovereign unity of absolute spirit. Second Edition.
Czech edition