Reddit reviews The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

What is it that you don't feel like you understand? It would be helpful if you could ask a more specific question. Hegel uses "consciousness" in the Phenomenology both in the more typical sense (meaning something like "an individual's awareness of the external world and of his/her own thoughts") and as a name for the "protagonist" of the Phenomenology, who progresses from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness to […] to Absolute Knowing. As we read the Phenomenology, we are watching as consciousness (in the second sense) makes a series of attempts to understand itself and its world, and we are watching as each of these attempts fails. Or do you specifically mean the "Consciousness" chapter (i.e., the chapter including the sections on "sense-certainty," "perception," and "force and the understanding")?

I'm not sure what else to add without knowing what, specifically, you're struggling with. As a general rule when you're talking about Hegel's philosophy of mind, it would certainly be helpful to know some Kant--particularly (and kind of unfortunately since it's probably the hardest part of Kant) the "Transcendental Deduction." Kant's ideas regarding the transcendental unity of apperception were hugely important to the post-Kantian idealists, including Hegel.

It would also help to know a little bit about K.L. Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, and his analysis of representation as consisting in three parts: (roughly) 1) the representation, 2) a relating of the representation to a subject, and 3) a relating of the representation to an object. I think you can detect the Reinhold picture when Hegel says things like, "consciousness distinguishes something from itself and at the same time it relates itself to it. Or, as this should be expressed: There is something for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, that is, of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowledge. However, we distinguish being-in-itself from this being for an other; what is related to knowledge is likewise distinguished from it and is also posited as existing external to this relation; the aspect of this in-itself is called truth" (¶82).

Knowing some Fichte would be good too; ditto Schelling. Honestly, though, I'm afraid that I might be making reading the Phenomenology seem like an extraordinarily daunting task for which you need to spend years preparing yourself, but that's because your request for help is so broad that I don't really know where to focus my recommendations. The Phenomenology is definitely super hard, but you don't need to have memorized the whole history of philosophy to make any sense of it or something.

As I always do when people ask about the Phenomenology, I'll also recommend that you check out from your library or buy Michael Forster's Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit and Jean Hyppolite's Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The Forster is a great overview of what the Phenomenology as a whole is trying to do, though it won't help much with specific sections. The Hyppolite is a straight-up chapter-by-chapter commentary which you can read as you read the Phenomenology: read a chapter, then read the Hyppolite, then go back and read the chapter again--it's a bit time consuming, but you'll get a lot out of doing that. If you can't get the Hyppolite for some reason, go for either the Stern or the Kalkavage texts that do roughly the same thing.

If you want to respond or edit the OP with a more specific question, then I can try to address that more directly.

Hello. I am currently going through Hegel by using Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit by Yirmiyahu Yovel as well as The Logic of Desire by Peter Kalkavage. I am using these secondary sources in conjunction with the Miller translation of the Phenomenology. I am quite pleased with how thorough they are, and I strongly recommend them for an in-depth understanding of Hegel's project.