The Phenomenology of Spirit as a Bildungsroman

Abstract

J.W. Goethe concluded in 1795 his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Twelve years later, Hegel would publish his Phenomenology of Spirit. His “science of the experience of consciousness” and this new kind of novel appeared in historical conditions leading both literature and philosophy to pay attention to culture and to cultivation of identity by the hero himself. Goethe and Hegel converge in two masterpieces, close to each other in many aspects. This paper aims to present Hegel’s Phenomenology as an example of a stylized apprenticeship novel. Lukács would point out in Goethe’s novel “the problem of the relation between poet and bourgeois world”, in which a romantic Werther had collapsed, for there is a pedagogical significance for socialists in this narrative. Although in our age philosophies of history are suspicious, such “coming-of-age novels” still survive as an appropriate gender in the writings of, e. g., Günter Grass and J. M. Coetzee.