Abstract

Taken together with its companion volume, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801, this book provides definitive evidence that the spirit of thoroughness whose survival Kant once praised has still not perished from the earth. In 1303 pages we are given a magnificently detailed intellectual biography of Hegel up to the writing of the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the very end of the present volume Harris acknowledges what was no secret, that his real aim all along has been to elucidate the Phenomenology. He is no doubt already at work on this his next task. Those who have attempted to interpret that formidable text without the benefit of two decades of preparatory studies like these can only await the result in awe and anticipation. We are all incalculably in his debt.