The Phenomenology of Spirit (German: Phänomenologie des Geistes) (1807) is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's most widely discussed philosophical work; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work as an “exposition of the coming to be of knowledge”. This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of “the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge”.