ABSTRACT
The idea that the soul becomes spirit is partially explained by the gloss that it gains "knowledge of what it is in itself," which means knowledge of what it is implicitly but, to begin with, not yet for itself or for its own consciousness. It is only at the end of the development that the soul comprehends what it was all along. Hegel continues: The natural consciousness will show itself as merely the Concept of knowledge or not real knowledge. What Hegal proposed to write really was the Bildungsroman of the human spirit-a grandiose poetic conception that invites comparison with Goethe's Faust. Suffice it to say that philosophers confront Hegel's second conception of the phenomenology of the spirit, which the philosophers call the poetic one. As the scientific conception is derived from Kant, the poetic one was inspired by Goethe.
