Intended as a pedagogical aid for attendees of his lectures, Hegel revised and extended the Encyclopedia over more than a decade, but stressed its role as a "textbook" in need of elucidation through oral commentary.

[2] The 1830 text is widely available in various English translations[3] with copious additions (Zusätze) added posthumously by Hegel's students, deriving from their lecture notes.

These additions expand on the text with examples and illustrations, and while scholars do not take the Zusätze to be verbatim transcription of Hegel's lectures, their more informal and non-technical style make them good stand-ins for the "necessary oral commentary".

Hegel is careful to methodically derive each category of reality ('thought-determination') from its predecessor notion, with the completed system bringing the circle to a close, demonstrating its unity.

He said, “the entire range of the universal determinations of thought… into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible.”[4] In other words, the diamond net of which Hegel speaks are the logical categories according to which we understand our experience, thus making our empirical observations intelligible.