It had a profound effect in Western philosophy, and "has been praised and blamed for the development of existentialism, communism, fascism, death of God theology and historicist nihilism".

[2] Hegel was putting the finishing touches to this book as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on October 14, 1806, in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city.

Later that same day, Hegel wrote a letter to his friend, the theologian Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer: I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance.

It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it ... this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.

The book consists of a Preface (written after the rest was completed), an Introduction, and six major divisions (of greatly varying size).

[a] Due to its obscure nature and the many works by Hegel that followed its publication, even the structure or core theme of the book itself remains contested.

First, Hegel wrote the book under close time constraints with little chance for revision (individual chapters were sent to the publisher before others were written).

Secondly, the book abounds with both highly technical argument in philosophical language, and concrete examples, either imaginary or historical, of developments by people through different states of consciousness.

Jean Hyppolite famously interpreted the work as a Bildungsroman that follows the progression of its protagonist, Spirit, through the history of consciousness,[9] a characterization that remains prevalent among literary theorists.

If consciousness just pays attention to what is actually present in itself and its relation to its objects, it will see that what looks like stable and fixed forms dissolve into a dialectical movement.

Hegel used two different sets of terms for his triads, namely, "abstract–negative–concrete" (especially in his Phenomenology of 1807), as well as "immediate–mediate–concrete" (especially in his Science of Logic of 1812), depending on the scope of his argumentation.

When one looks for these terms in his writings, one finds so many occurrences that it may become clear that Hegel employed the Kantian using a different terminology.

[17][19][20] Walter Kaufmann, on the question of organisation, argued that Hegel's arrangement, "over half a century before Darwin published his Origin of Species and impressed the idea of evolution on almost everybody's mind, was developmental.

[23] Kaufmann also remarks that the very table of contents of the Phenomenology may be said to "mirror confusion" and that "faults are so easy to find in it that it is not worth while to adduce heaps of them.

"[citation needed] However, he excuses Hegel since he understands that the author of the Phenomenology "finished the book under an immense strain".

[24] The work is usually abbreviated as PdG (Phänomenologie des Geistes), followed by the pagination or paragraph number of the German original edition.

Electronic versions of the English translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind are available at: Detailed audio commentary by an academic: