The Phenomenology
of Spirit is the work in which Hegel first fully realized his most fundamental and original thinking, one
centered in a radically new philosophical method
of pure dialectical negation (Aufhebung), a negation which is negation, preservation, and transcendence simultaneously, and which is the deepest driving power not only
of consciousness and history but
of absolute Spirit itself.
And if the
pure subject
of consciousness is the deepest
center of nineteenth century thinking and vision, now that subject is violently disrupted, as most deeply understood by Nietzsche himself, and in the wake
of that disruption there has occurred the advent
of a truly anonymous
consciousness and society.