Andrzej Wiercinski

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a careful description of the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Its dialectic is the education of consciousness. There are three stages of unhappy consciousness: external beyond, changing individual, and achieved reconciliation. Being aware of its own mutability, the self yearns for reconciliation, which can only come from the external beyond, from the unchanging. The quest of unhappy consciousness for reconciliation is characterized by the three stages of devotion, sacramental desire and labour, and self-mortification. The self, constituted by what is other, is never able to achieve lasting satisfaction; it desires the unity of self-consciousness. Through the experience of itself, the self comes to a clearer self-awareness and transgresses its own limits.

Hermeneutics promotes an awareness of the interpretive character of the world. With regard to the difficult and complex relationship between philosophy and theology,hermeneutics calls for critical rethinking of the Heideggerian postulate to exclude theology from philosophy on the grounds of the autonomy of philosophy, and to exclude philosophy from theology on Barthian revelational positivist grounds.Heidegger‟s philosophy has a long history of being interpreted as an invitation to theology to think about God and religion in a new, non metaphysical way. Reexamining the question of the meaning of Being,Heidegger inspired a search for new paths of thinking God outside the established onto-theological tradition.I will argue that both exclusions—philosophy from theology, theology from philosophy—are hermeneutically untenable

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a careful description of the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Its dialectic is the education of consciousness. There are three stages of unhappy consciousness: external beyond, changing individual, and achieved reconciliation. Being aware of its own mutability, the self yearns for reconciliation, which can only come from the external beyond, from the unchanging. The quest of unhappy consciousness for reconciliation is characterized by the three stages of devotion, sacramental desire and labour, and self-mortification. The self, constituted by what is other, is never able to achieve lasting satisfaction; it desires the unity of self-consciousness. Through the experience of itself, the self comes to a clearer self-awareness and transgresses its own limits.