This is the first part of a year-long course. On the reading of Hegel proposed in this course, the Phenomenology seeks to demonstrate that Spirit, Geist, is the necessary social-historical foundation for a non-self-defeating form of life. Demonstrating this to be the case involves overcoming the destructive dualisms of modernity (subject-object, self-consciousness versus nature, freedom-necessity, etc.), overcoming the radical individualism that emerged in late Antiquity and became fundamental with Protestant-inspired Kantian autonomy; and epistemology as first philosophy – we are bound to the world not as knowers but fundamentally as social agents. During the semester we carefully read Hegel's "Introduction," the accounts of "Consciousness" and "Self-Consciousness," and, at least, the first half of the chapter on "Reason." As we proceed, fundamental objections to Hegel are considered: Heidegger's critique of Hegel's phenomenological method; Feuerbach's contention that consciousness need never leave the world of sense-certainty; Derrida/Bataille's argument that the dialectic of master and slave involves an illegitimate transfiguration of the negativity of death into a moment of development and growth. At stake throughout is an interrogation of Hegel's conception of idealism, and its governing premise: subjectivity is grounded in (at least) intersubjectively, his theory that self-consciousness is bound to a structure of mutual recognition; it is that thesis which installs sociality and ethical normativity into the heart of Hegel's project.