The problem with Hegel's characterizations of the new philosophical form that he invented, a Phenomenology of Spirit, is simply that there are far too many descriptions. Some are clearly reformulations or specifications of others; but in many other cases the descriptions seem inconsistent, or to reflect different periods in Hegel's rapidly evolving thought between 1802 and 1806 in Jena. The Phenomenology was originally a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness.” He names it “the Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit” and the “Introduction” to the “System of Science.” It was also the first part of such a system. The Encyclopedia calls the Phenomenology “the scientific history of consciousness.” In the body of the work, Hegel calls the work “the way of the soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself” (55, ¶77). He famously calls the Phenomenology “the pathway of doubt,” indeed “the way of despair” (56, ¶78), and thereby “the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science” (56, ¶78).

And this is only the beginning.