system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why isn't Hegel included among the names most associated with phenomenology, such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty among others? Is his Phenomenology of Spirit something completely different from the phenomenology elaborated by those we typically call phenomenologists?
gpt
There are people much more qualified to answer this on here but I'll take shot:

In a sense, both Hegel and the 20th century phenomenologists have the same aim: To develop a philosophy that can ground "science" (*Wissenschaft*). The basic difference is that Hegel is trying to "ascend" from particular sensuous experience ("sense certainty") to abstract conceptual *"absolute knowing"*, whereas 20th century phenomenology is trying to "descend" back to particular sensuous experience (*"back to the things"*). Context is key here, Hegel was writing in a time when Kant had just blown philosophy wide open and possibilities seemed endless, the question was one of building the right *system* on top of Kant. So in a sense he was "building" philosophy from particular experience to the abstract universal to achieve a grounding of philosophy. Husserl was writing in a time when those systems established in the 19th century were crumbling - philosophy not only seemed to have been made obsolete by the natural sciences but the sciences were in a *crisis* as well (*"foundational crisis of Mathematics"*). His play to rescue philosophy was to *reduce* philosophy from the abstract universal to particular experience to achieve a grounding.