Ordinary Consciousness to Absolute Knowing

In the history of philosophy there are a few texts that standout as what we may call “events”. These texts both break from the past, and cast a shadow on the future of thought. When we think of Plato’s Symposium, or Descartes Meditations, we are dealing with texts which both introduce conceptual understandings that appear radically distinct from previous thought of world-spirit (think Platonic forms, or the Cartesian cogito), and also which shape the conceptual understandings of the world-spirit to come (think monotheistic society, or scientific naturalism).

The Phenomenology of Spirit can be thought as such an “evental-text”.