In his two volume work, Hegel's Ladder, spanning over 1500 pages, Henry Harris describes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 as “an epic story about God” (I. 31). Harris' work is itself a work of epic proportions. It is the fullest commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology I have ever seen. We are brought, paragraph by paragraph, from the beginning to the end of Hegel's Phenomenology, without break. And although Harris describes it as an epic about God, there is nothing of the usual mystification that surfaces when “theological” interpretations are offered.

There is, of course, no possibility of commenting on this work in any adequate way, short of perhaps writing a 3,000 page commentary on his commentary of some 1500 pages. After briefly, and inadequately, offering a summary of some of the important characteristics and positions of Harris' work, I want to pose some questions to Professor Harris concerning his interpretation.

As already mentioned, the format Harris chooses is to comment in detail on each of the paragraphs of the Phenomenology. This commentary follows two previous volumes, Hegel's Development I: Toward the Sunlight, and Hegel's Development II: Night Thoughts, in which we are given an erudite and thorough account of Hegel's studies and of his writings prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. These previous volumes are integral to the present two volumes, as indicated by Harris' challenge to his readers and his critics.

My own view — after studying and laying out Hegel's intellectual development as completely and coherently as I could — is that no thesis about Hegel's project should be preferred to the one that I am about to advance unless it coheres with and provides answers to all of the exigencies that I have pointed to in the “genesis” of the book at least as well as mine does. (But many other theses may be valid complements to the one maintained here.) (I. 9)

And, indeed, one of the characteristics of Hegel's Ladder is that we are constantly reminded of how and why the problematic at issue derives from the way that Hegel's thought had developed. Thus, Hegel's Ladder has significance not only as a commentary on the Phenomenology, but also as a link between the Phenomenology and Hegel's earlier development.