The Phenomenology presents the "pathway of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge." It is the education of consciousness through its own experience. Each shape of consciousness finds that its criterion of truth fails when applied; it passes into a new shape.

We begin with sense-certainty (the "this," the "now") and discover that the immediate cannot be said without mediation. We move through perception and understanding, then self-consciousness and the famous struggle for recognition. Spirit appears as ethical life, culture, enlightenment, and finally religion before reaching absolute knowing—the point at which consciousness no longer has an object over against it but knows itself as the unity of itself and its object.

The book is not a history of philosophy or of culture in the ordinary sense; it is the systematic exhibition of the necessary stages through which spirit must go to attain self-knowledge.