Hegel’s Concept of the Spirit against the Background of the Antigone and Rameau’s Nephew

Tereza Matějčková

For Hegel, it is obvious that the part cannot be grasped apart from the whole. The more difficult task is to make manifest that the part encloses the whole – and Hegel attempts to achieve this by means of the concept of the spirit. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, the spirit is explicitly made an object of analysis primarily in passages dedicated to interpretations of literary works. And hence our task: to pursue the paradox of the presence of the whole in the part in view of Hegel’s interpretations of the Antigone and Rameau’s Nephew.