This research investigated how German and French phenomenologies inherit German idealism and how the former attempt to critically overcome the latter. Therefore, the research shed light on three reference points: 1) Heidegger’s critical reading of Hegel, 2) Levinas’s confrontation with Hegel and 3) Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger’s reading of Hegel.

For research reference point 1, Heidegger’s idea of ‘Hegel’s concept of experience’ (1942–43) was examined alongside Hegel’s Introduction to Phenomenology of Sprit (1807). Levinas’s texts ‘Substitution’ (1968) and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Being (1974), in which Levinas evokes his interpretation of Hegel’s Introduction to Phenomenology of Sprit, were revisited in point 2. Point 3 analyses Derrida’s comments on Heidegger’s ‘Hegel’s concept of experience’, briefly sketched in his lecture Heidegger: Question of Being and History (1964–65).

Through these steps, the research clarified how Hegel’s concept of the ‘inversion (Umkehrung) of consciousness’ was critically reinvestigated. Heidegger interprets this concept as an inversion from the ontic to the ontological. Levinas opposes Hegel’s notion with his own idea of ‘inversion from the same to the Other’. Derrida situates Levinas’s thoughts in the continuity of Heidegger’s destruction of the philosophy of presence, culminating in Hegel’s concept of absolute knowledge.