Hegel Georg Wilhelm Fredrich - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - the Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel frequently described his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit to his students as his voyage of discovery. It was in that work, Hegel's first published version of his own systematic views, that Hegel, a virtually unknown, barely employed academic figure in Jena, became Hegel, the philosopher celebrated all over Europe. Nonetheless, however much of a voyage the book was for him, it was by no means an easy passage. Published in April of 1807, it was a work written hurriedly while Hegel was in extremely dire circumstances. He was thirty-seven when the Phenomenology appeared, and during its composition he had no tenable job, no real prospects, and an illegitimate child on the way. He did indeed have a teaching position at the university at Jena, but the salary for that position was not merely meager, it was nothing at all (Hegel was a private lecturer at the university). He had been supporting himself in a condition rapidly approximating to a state of penury on the basis of a small inheritance he had obtained when his father died in 1799. In 1806, the minister of the government which ran the university, Johann Wolfgang Goethe himself, managed to procure a 100 Thaler per year salary for the beleaguered Hegel, but that really amounted to a minor honorarium, not a sum that even the poorest student could live on. To survive, Hegel needed some type of employment, and, if it was to be in a university, he was going to have to produce a book of some importance. However, not only were positions at universities few and far between, they were becoming even scarcer because of the Napoleonic wars in Germany at the time. The Phenomenology was a book born out of both despair and a steadfast confidence on Hegel's own part that his audience whom he envisaged to be no less than the people of modern Europe itself needed this book.