I The term interiority or inwardness (Ger.
Innerlichkeit) was used by F.G. Klopstock and J.W. v. Goethe, but it was only in G.W.F. Hegel that it gained the interpretive configuration that subsequently became definitive: first, and in the widest sense, the term refers to the subjectivity or the immediate being-within-one's self of the spirit (III). Wherever there is spirit, there is interiority, and vice versa, for interiority
is nothing other than the spirit's “returning into itself” (
Philosophie der Geschichte, 340). Second, thus defined the term serves as…