of consciousness is “pain” it is at the same time a going through in the sense of an elaboration [Herausarbeiten] of the essential shapes of appearing self-consciousness. To say that experience is the “labor of the concept” means that it is the self-elaboration of consciousness into the unconditioned totality of the truth of its self-comprehension. Experience is the transcendental labor that wears itself out [abarbeiten] in the service of the unconditioned violence of the absolute.[21] Experience is the transcendental labor of consciousness.
As a course, an examination, a going through (a carrying out and a consummation), pain, labor, the experience of consciousness is always also and everywhere a cognizance and a taking notice. But this taking notice is never a mere apprehension but the letting-appear that as course and journeying each time experiences [er-fährt], i.e., attains, an essential shape of consciousness.
Experience as attaining is, however, only the unfolding of consciousness into the truth of its being. The experience of consciousness is not only and not primarily a kind of cognition, but it is a being [ein Sein], namely the being of the appearing absolute whose own essence lies in unconditioned appearing to itself. For Hegel, the absolute is “the concept” in the sense of the unconditioned self-comprehension of reason. This unconditioned concept is the essence of spirit. Spirit is in itself and for itself “the absolute idea.” “Idea” means: the showing of itself, but understood in modern terms: as representation of oneself to the one who represents—unconditioned representation [Repräsentation], manifestation of its own self in the unconditioned truth of its own essence, which in modern terms is certainty and knowledge. Spirit is absolute knowledge. The experience of consciousness is the self-presentation of knowledge in its appearance. “The experience of consciousness” is the essence of “phenomenology.” Phenomenology, in turn, is “the phenomenology of spirit.”
Only if we succeed at thinking the moments of the essence of experience mentioned here from the ground of their unity in a unified manner are we in the position to think the wording of the titles “the Experience of Consciousness” and “the Phenomenology of Spirit,” truthfully, i.e., in a speculative and metaphysical way.
Linguistically both titles contain a genitive. We ask: Is the genitive a genitivus objectivus or a genitivus subjectivus? Does “the experience of consciousness” only mean that consciousness is the object [Objekt] of and what stands against [Gegenstand] experience? This is evidently not the case, because experience itself is in its essence as a course and a coming to itself the being of consciousness. “Experience” fully comprehended expresses for the first time what the word “being” in the word being- conscious [Bewußt-sein] means. Consciousness is the “subject"