1.

2 German Idealism
1. General characteristics of idealism
Now we must direct ourselves to a complex philosophical system, which
was developed during the high point of Romanticism, and which would
leave its mark on the history of contemporary philosophy: German idealism.
The Kantian system sought to respond to the ultimate skepticism of
empiricism. According to its internal principles, the possibility of the
physical and mathematical sciences and the impossibility of a scientific
metaphysics had been proven. At the same time, it founded a morality based
on the imperatives of practical reason, building a formal ethics of duty. But
the Kantian system, rather than being a final answer to the ultimate questions
of the human soul, dragged along behind it a metaphysical heritage: the
assertion of the unknowable thing-in-itself, which was seen in the eyes of
his followers as something incoherent, as a veritable philosophical scandal.
Leonard Reinhold (1758-1823), Salomon Maimon (1753-1800),
Sigismund Beck (1761-1840), and Gottlob Ernst Schultze (1761-1833),
Kant's early critics, gave different answers to that problem. The first spoke
of the thing-in-itself as something unknowable and unable to be represented:
it was only the logical foundation of a sensation that the subject had not
produced. Maimon, in turn, eliminates the thing-in-itself, because, he says, it
is unintelligible. Beck considers the starting point of transcendental
philosophy to be the action of producing a representation: there is no
receptivity from without, and therefore, this problem of the thing-in-itself is
not even raised. Schultz, in turn, demonstrates the incoherence of the Kantian
system: either we return to the skepticism of Hume, or admit the
knowableness of things other than the subject, thereby reverting to
dogmatism.
Fichte, the first great idealist, believes that the idea of a thing that has, in
itself, an existence independent of any power of representation, goes beyond
thought itself, and is reduced, therefore, to pure fantasy. Instead, philosophy
must start at the root: the action of the self, which posits the self; a self that
must be pure and absolute. With this assertion arose idealism.
The world outside the mind, according to idealism, is the product of
thought. The Copernican revolution initiated by Kant is thus brought to its
culmination. But what does it mean to say that the world is produced by
thought? The thought that we refer to is not, of course, the mind of the
particular individual, an entity too weak to sustain the whole universe.
Idealists propose a super- individual intelligence, or, in other words, an
absolute subject.
The transcendental Kantian self becomes, in Fichte, a metaphysical
principle that simultaneously gives rise to the starting point of
philosophizing: the absolute self. In idealism, all of reality is the process of
self-expression or self-manifestation of infinite reason. Through Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, philosophical thought returns to the metaphysical. This
is metaphysics of a Spinozan sort: that is, from the point of view of the
totality.
At the heart of German idealism we find a great confidence in the power of
reason, until we get to Hegel, who believed it was not only desirable but
possible to have knowledge of the Absolute through philosophy. Along with
this confidence it is important to emphasize the theological element of
idealism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were students of theology, and they
tried to clarify the relationship between the finite and the infinite. Their
answers are different, but each of the three cases demonstrates the influence
of their studies in their youths.
As we have indicated, idealism developed in the heart of Romanticism.
However, we could say that the Romantic writers par excellence were
litterateurs rather than philosophers. It is true that Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel were in agreement with the Romantic artists in many points of view,
but we reiterate that it cannot be said that the idealist philosophy is the
"official" philosophical expression of Romanticism. The importance of the
Infinite, the Absolute, the vision of totality, unity of historical development—
all are certainly characteristics common to the Romantics and the idealists.
In this sense, the philosopher most imbued with the artistic ethos of
Romanticism is Schelling. However, Fichte and Hegel's concepts of nature
do not coincide entirely with Goethe's vitalism. The primacy of privileged
feelings over rational knowledge, and the proposed assimilation of poetry
and philosophy, has little to do with the rationalist attitude that underlies
Fichte's intellectual intuition or Hegel's absolute philosophical knowledge.
Ultimately, we must affirm a spiritual affinity between the Romantic
Movement and German idealism, but at the same time it is necessary to point
out their differences.
 The idealist systems of the nineteenth century have no prior parallel in the
history of philosophy, apart from the Scholastic thought of the thirteenth
century. The aspiration to a universal, totalizing, and final vision of the
universe is truly impressive. However, despite idealism's lofty speculation,
it is not free of arbitrariness, ambiguity, and contradictions. The collapse of
idealism as a system that took place after Hegel's death in 1831 showed the
fragility of a philosophical system built on such Promethean efforts.
Nonetheless, the legacy of Hegelian idealism would become an obligatory
reference point for the philosophers who followed him. Moreover, we could
say with certainty that the philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth
century would be developed in a dialogue—sometimes open, sometimes
hidden, at times calm, and at times combative—with idealism.

2. J. G. Fichte: Subjective idealism

(a) Life and works. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in 1762, in Rammenau,
Saxony. Of modest financial means, he was able to study theology thanks to
the generosity of a local nobleman, Baron von Miltitz, who discovered young
Fichte's intellectual capacities. He did his studies at the School of Pforta,
where years later Nietzsche would study.
His interest in philosophy begins with a reading of Spinoza, although he
rejected his determinism. For economic reasons he moved to Zurich, where
he worked as a private tutor. In this period he would read from Rousseau to
Montesquieu and— most importantly—familiarize himself with the Kantian
system. In 1791, after a brief stay in Warsaw, he returned to Germany. On the
return trip he decided to visit Kant in Königsberg. With Kant's blessing, a
year later he published, anonymously, his Attempt at a Critique of All
Revelation, which for many years was attributed to the elder philosopher
from Königsberg. The mistake would be clarified by Kant himself in a well-
known literary magazine. This circumstance would immediately turn Fichte
into a well-known character in philosophical circles.
In 1793 he married Maria Johanna Rahn, whom he had met in Zurich. In
1794, Fichte was appointed professor at the University of Jena, despite the
somewhat Jacobin reputation he bore due to certain of his writings. In that
year he published his most important work, Foundations of the Entire
Science of Scientific Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), in which he
transformed his Kantian critique into an idealist metaphysics. This book
would be revised, reissued, and clarified in subsequent years.
 In addition to the Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre),
Fichte was interested in man's moral purpose, in continuity with Kant's
ethical concern. In 1796, he published Foundations of Natural Right, and,
in 1798, The System of Ethics. The following year he was forced to
relinquish his chair of Jena, after being accused of atheism on the basis of
some statements in the essay On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine
Governance of the World. Fichte moved to Berlin. In 1800, he published
The Vocation of Man, a work directed to an educated audience, but not to
professional philosophers. In the same year, The Closed Commercial State
appeared, in which he proposes a kind of socialism.
In 1804, he accepted a professorship in Erlangen, where he taught a course
titled On the Nature of the Scholar. During those years, the situation of
Prussia, which had been invaded by Napoleon, evoked in him one of the
most profound characteristics of his personality: his vocation as preacher
and missionary. In 1807, he set forth the exalted and nationalist Addresses to
the German Nation. In 1810, he was named dean of the Faculty of
Philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin. A year later, he
became its rector. He died on January 29, 1814, from a typhus infection
contracted from his wife, who devoted herself to caring for Prussians
wounded in the Napoleonic Wars.
(b) The basic principles of philosophy. Fichte argues that philosophy, like
any other science, has to rely on a foundational principle (Grundsatz).
Furthermore, given that philosophy is the science of foundations, this
principle will be that of science itself—or, put another way, the foundation
of human knowledge. As such, it must be indemonstrable and immediately
true: "The remaining propositions will have a relative certainty, derived
from it; this must be immediately certain." Fichte, as you see, did not depart
much from Cartesian logic, which regards science as a mathematical model,
clearly resulting in the systematic intent of his philosophy.
What is the first principle of philosophy? The philosopher finds himself
faced with one initial choice: either he can explain experience as a product
of intelligence itself, or experience is explained as a product of the thing-in-
itself. The first option is that of idealism, and it shows that the idealist
philosopher has chosen liberty. The second option is that of dogmatism, and
it shows that the dogmatic philosopher does not hold freedom in high regard,
and it depends on the "other," on the outside. Behind the Kantian thing-in-
itself, Fichte glimpses the looming specter of Spinozan determinism, which
must be rejected. It is important to stress that, for Fichte, the acceptance of
philosophical idealism necessarily takes the side of man's free moral
activity.
Having made the choice for freedom, we must look for the foundational
principle of philosophy. Idealism finds itself faced with an obvious fact: the
ordinary consciousness believes that there is a world of objects that
influence it. But if there are no things-in-themselves, idealism will have to
explain what causes this fact. In other words, it will have to give an account
of experience. The idealists do not attempt to deny reality, but rather to
explain it. Not wanting to admit the existence of nomenal substances, it
appears that all things are objects for a subject, which gives them a reason to
be. Fichte tries to respond convincingly to the question of how a person can
explain the world that surrounds him. His answer would be the theoretical
and practical deduction of world based on the pure self.
This pure self is not the consciousness of the unique individual's self-
consciousness, but rather what lies behind it, and which is the condition of
the objectification and unity of consciousness. It is a foundational principle,
and upon this condition knowledge is in no way demonstrable. The
foundational proposition of philosophy is: The originating self posits its
own self absolutely, that is, "the I posits itself as an I." The self-positing of
the self is achieved by an act of the very self, which turns on itself, and is
established as a determination of the consciousness itself. The activity of the
pure self is self-intuition, in the sense of a self-positing. Fichte called this
action "intellectual intuition," using a concept that Kant had applied only to
the divine intellect. It is important to stress that he is not talking about the self
as knowledge, of a self in a certain phenomenological sense— that is,
subject to variations—but rather of a pure self, absolutely free of any limit
and any determination. The Fichtean self is pure subjectivity, it is pure "I-
ness" (Ichkeit), and is based on the distinction that is at the heart of
consciousness, between the subject and object, which precedes any possible
determination, either theoretical or practical.
However, we must distinguish between the spontaneous activity of the pure
self and philosophical reconstruction of this activity. The pure self is not
aware of itself through self-observation, but through the experience of its
own activity. The activity of the pure self, insofar as it is unconscious, only
exists per se in the philosopher's intellectual intuition, through which he
apprehends the spontaneous activity of the self. In apprehending itself as
pure activity, as the pure act of self-apprehension, the pure self manages to
know itself through intellectual intuition as activity that posits itself. That is,
the self itself creates, precisely as an originating, pure activity. It is thus that
Fichte affirms that the pure self, knowable through intellectual intuition,
apprehends itself as activity, and not as substance: "intelligence, for
idealism, is doing, and nothing more than that; it should never be called an
active thing."
If the first principle of knowledge is the self-positing of the self, all the
objects must be deduced from this foundational and originating principle. In
order to deduce the theoretical basis of the self, Fichte posits the dialectical
nature of consciousness. The thesis—the first moment in the dialectical
process—is the position of the self. The self is identical to itself: I = I. The
principle of identity, A = A, only expresses the dynamic identity of the self
that posits itself in a logical fashion: that is, in the abstract. However, the
affirmation of the self as identical to itself implies the negation—the
antithesis, the second moment of the dialectical process—of the self and
not-self. The self- positing of the self is a dynamic act; that is, the self posits
itself as a positor: the affirmation of its own being entails the appearance of
something which is other with respect to the self: that is, of a non-self.
Thus, the second foundational proposition of philosophy is that the self is
absolutely opposed by a non-self. However, both the infinite self, like the
non-self that opposes it, are acts of the self and assume the identity of the self
that is expressed in the self-positing I (first principle). In opposition between
the I and the not-I, it does not make sense to speak of an inside-outside
contrast, because it is not possible to think of anything that is "outside" the
originating self. The abstract expression of this principle is the logical
proposition A ≠ not-A. For our philosopher, the thesis is the moment of
originating freedom of the self, and the antithesis is its negation: the moment
of need.
The limitless activity of the self is opposed to the limited object-ness of
the not-I. But for consciousness to emerge, there needs be some reciprocal
limitation: the I and the not-I must be divisible. Thus Fichte formulates the
third foundational proposition of philosophy: the self, as the I (infinite)
opposes to the divisible self (finite) a divisible not-self (finite). Thus is
born the consciousness of the self: upon opposing itself to the not-self, the
self knows itself as such. The infinite originating self is self-limited to a
finite self, opposed to an equally limited not-self. However, this is an
opposition that occurs within the heart of the pure self: that is, in the realm of
the consciousness. This endless succession of dialectic moments expresses
the infinite activity of the self that continuously creates boundaries within
itself in order to overcome them. Since the continuous evolution of the real is
the result of the infinite activity of the self, the world that results from it is
not an infinite set of things, but of acts. The limited self is the individual
subject, and the limited not-self is the world opposed to it. Insofar as self
and not-self are limited, the opposition between them is not total: there is no
suppression or elimination of the self over the not-self, but rather the limited
nature of the divisible self and the not-self allows for the synthesis through
which all of reality may be deduced.
(c) The practical deduction: Fichte's morality. Copleston defines Fichte's
philosophical system as a dynamic ethical idealism. Indeed, the ethical
problem occupies a central place in the system, and the so-called practical
deduction of the self shines a better light on his metaphysical doctrine.
According to Fichte, the self must oppose itself to the not- self so that it
becomes aware. But the ordinary consciousness believes that the world
outside is something given, something already fact. When the finite
consciousness enters the world, it must find something already finished,
something already done. Fichte believes that the pure self, insofar as it can
produce the not-self, must be understood as the power of the productive
imagination, which makes the self limit its own activity, positing itself as
passive or modified. But what the intimate nature of the self truly reveals is
not the theoretical deduction through the productive imagination, but the
practical deduction. This process is explained as follows. At the practical
level, the pure self will be revealed as pure will, as infinite effort. To be
able to engage in its infinite activity, the self needs an obstacle, something
that it resists. In other words, effort requires a contrary motion, a counter-
effort, an impediment that offers resistance. Thus, the intimate nature of the
self requires the productive imagination, which acts as a barrier to be
overcome, to create the not-self. The collision with these obstacles is what
allows the self to produce an effort. The self "feels" the resistance that
opposes the not-self when it engages in its own activity. This feeling of
resistance is the foundation of the self's faith in the existence of a reality
independent of the self. These obstacles are the external world or nature, as
we like to call it, that the self "creates," opposes to itself, and then
continuously overcomes. This process is aimed at the complete realization of
the self, through a constant and gradual assertion of its own activity.
Man, according to Fichte, is an organized natural product, understood as a
limitation and object of the infinite unconscious effort of the self. But he is
also an intelligence and a conscious subject: it is an effort that desires
complete freedom and independence and, therefore, autonomy. But, in turn,
this dichotomy of man understood as subject and as object, just like nature
and freedom, must be overcome: the natural impulse and the spiritual
impulse form part of a single impulse. Transcendental philosophy seeks
tirelessly to bridge between the natural world and the world of freedom,
which underpins the unity of the human being. That is, we have to find a
synthesis between actions performed under the natural impulse and those
performed under the spiritual impulse.
"My impulse insofar as it is natural and my inclination as pure spirit, can
these be considered as two different principles? No, since from a
transcendental point of view my being consists of a single impulse that
touches both, considered from two different points of view. That is, I am a
subject-object, and my true being lies precisely in the identity and
separability of both. If I think of myself as an object, determined by the laws
of the sensible intuition and discursive thought, then that which is my own
impulse becomes a natural impulse, because I am nature. If, on the contrary, I
consider myself as a subject, the impulse would be purely spiritual, a law of
self-determination. All the phenomena of the self occur simply because of the
reciprocity of these two impulses, which also constitute a reciprocal
relationship of one and the same impulse."
This synthesis is achieved when man performs the actions that impel his
natural instincts not only to satisfy those instincts, but also to integrate them
into the ideal purpose that man possesses as a spiritual subject. Only thus, by
means of a spiritualization of the instincts, can man realize himself as a
moral being, in a free, continual, and progressive affirmation of himself. The
ideal or moral purpose of the self is self-activity, in the action determined
solely through the self.
The self, as a finite manifestation of the pure self, is the act that posits
itself, that conceives itself as its self-activity, that thinks of itself as
necessarily free, and therefore that is subject to the law determining itself in
accordance with the concept of self-determination. This will, as an ability to
perform a causal action, requires a natural world—the not-self—in which it
may perform its particular actions. The production of the not-self is the
instrument through which the self freely engages in its activity and enacts
itself morally. If we use an image from the theater to try to clarify this idea,
the natural world is the stage that the self constructs in order to be able to
enact its own freedom. The not-self is the stage of moral action. As a result,
according to Fichte the first principle of morality—or sine qua non for an
act to be moral—is as follows: "Always act in accordance with the best
conviction that you have concerning your duty, or act according to your
consciousness." Consciousness of duty, which is the unfailing guide of moral
activity, is a manifestation of autonomy and of self-activity.
Thus, the primacy of practical reason that Fichte's idealism posits
supersedes the gap between theory and praxis, subordinating nature to the
moral purpose. Theoretical and practical reason are not two different
spheres; rather, the first is ordered for the purposes of the second. So, the
moral imperative (Sollen) becomes the raison d'etre for the natural world:
that is, of what it therefore can and cannot otherwise be (Müssen).
(d) The philosophy of religion. Beginning in 1801, and more specifically
in the Doctrine of Science of 1804, Fichte begins what some scholars call
his "second philosophy," although the issue of the continuity of Fichte's
philosophy is open to discussion. From a starting position of an atheistic
tendency—Jacobi had already pointed to the exclusionary alternative
between the pure self and God—Fichte passes to the affirmation of God as
the sole absolute, which is the ultimate foundation of knowledge. God is
incomprehensible to conceptual thinking. We could say that it is light and
life, and in this sense consciousness is the image of the divine. God is being:
the only being, since to be infinite, he must be the only one. Instead, God is
not a person, since according to Fichte's categories the personal being
involves limitation.
Starting from these new premises, Fichte elaborated a doctrine concerning
religion, which stipulates that the ultimate goal of man is union with God
through love. God is being and life. This life is manifested outwardly in
human consciousness. Man is a reflection of being, an image of the absolute
being. Fichte boldly asserts that man is God's existence: in our
consciousness we reach the absolute being as the foundation of ourselves
and of the world, and at the same time that we affirm the presence of God in
us and in the world. From this perspective, Fichte believes that Jesus of
Nazareth is the one who has reached the highest degree of unity of
consciousness with God. However, to Fichte, Christianity is not true because
it is a revealed religion, but rather only insofar as it is, according to him, in
agreement with his philosophical system.
This was far removed from the allegations of atheism that our philosopher
had received after publication of On the Basis of Our Belief in the Divine
Governance of the World. However, despite his sincere acknowledgement of
the debt he owed to the Christian cultural heritage, his system of thought was
also far removed from that taught by this faith.
According to Hartmann, given that in this second philosophy, God as
absolute being takes ontological priority over the consciousness, "the
development of the doctrine of science roundly demonstrates that the
systematic consummation of idealism eliminates idealism itself, and takes
back to realism." However, in order to establish whether Fichte actually
abandons the idealism, we should clarify what we mean by that. If idealism
is understood to be the priority of thinking about being, and the status of
consciousness, then Fichte abandons idealism. But if idealism is understood
to be the thesis that the world is only real within the realm of consciousness,
the so-called second philosophy remains faithful to this premise, because
God exists and manifests itself in our consciousness. In this regard, Fichte's
second philosophy is an alternative to Hegel's absolute idealism. To
paraphrase Hartmann, we might say rather that the development of the
doctrine of science resoundingly proves that the systematic consummation
of subjective idealism is absolute idealism.

3. F. W. J. Schelling: Objective idealism

(a) Life and works. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born in
Leonberg, Württemberg, in 1775, the son of a prestigious Lutheran pastor. He
was admitted to the faculty of theology in Tübingen when he was only 15
years old, three years before the established minimum age. There he formed
close ties of friendship with Hegel and the poet Hölderlin. However, at the
end of his philosophical and theological studies, he renounced an
ecclesiastical career and went to work as a private tutor. With the
publication, in 1794, of On the Possibility of an Absolute Form of
Philosophy, and the following year of Of the I as the Principle of
Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge, he appeared to
the academic world as a disciple of Fichte. In 1796, he published
Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. A true precocious
genius, at age 22 he was already a well-known philosopher.
In 1798 we find him in Jena, where he was appointed professor at the
prestigious university thanks to the help of Fichte and Goethe. He remained
there until 1803, when he moved to the University of Würzburg. In that year
he married Carolina Michaelis, who was divorced from A. W. Schlegel.
Carolina died in 1809, and Schelling remarried to Paulina Gotter in 1812.
He had five children with her. Between 1806 and 1820 he was secretary of
the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. However, Hegel's death put Schelling
back in the spotlight: he returned to university teaching, first in Munich and,
beginning in 1842, in Berlin. In the latter city he would teach, between 1842
and 1846, various courses attended by students who over the years would
become well known themselves: von Savigny, Engels, Kierkegaard,
Burckhardt, Bakunin. In 1846, Schelling finally left the university to devote
himself entirely to research and cultural activities organized by the Prussian
Academy. He died in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, in 1854.
Among his more important works we should mention Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature (1797)—a work that was revised, reissued, and
clarified several times during his lifetime; System of Transcendental
Idealism (1800); The Ages of the World (which remained incomplete); and
two works that cover his lectures in Berlin: Philosophy of Mythology and
Philosophy of Religion.
Historians of philosophy refer to different stages of Schelling's thinking.
We, following Copleston, prefer to speak of an ongoing "philosophizing
rather than a finished system or succession of finished systems."
(b) The nature and philosophy of transcendental idealism. The Letters
on Dogmatism and Criticism illuminate Spelling's attitude with regard to
the various philosophical systems. According to him, Spinoza represents
dogmatism, because his philosophy is the realm of determinism, where the
Absolute is object. In contrast, in criticism, represented by Fichte, the
Absolute is subject. From a purely theoretical point of view, neither can be
proved, because philosophy can not move from the finite to infinite. But from
a practical-moral point of view, the vitalistic attitudes of dogmatism and
idealism are very different. Dogmatism requires that one abandon one's own
freedom in the name of a kind of divine pantheism. In contrast, criticism
required that the individual perform the Absolute within himself through
constant acting freedom. Idealism is a moral choice that must triumph over
the object (and here we should not forget that Fichte's self was an activity
understood as moral action, as effort, as the overcoming of obstacles posited
by the not-self).
All we have said so far represents a philosophical position substantially
similar to that of Fichte, who locates the starting point of idealism in an
ethical decision. But while Schelling holds himself out as a disciple of
Fichte, he would distance himself from his teacher in arguing the need to
rethink the notion of nature as a mere not-self, or as obstacle or simple stage
of moral action. As the most Romantic of the idealists, Schelling developed
a theory of nature as a "visible spirit" or "sleeping spirit." Thus one can
move beyond the totalizing juxtaposition between objectivist dogmatism and
subjectivist criticism.
The correlation between spirit and nature allows us to start with nature to
arrive at the spirit—a philosophy of nature itself—or start with the spirit to
arrive at nature—which is what Schelling calls "transcendental idealism,"
where the footprints of Fichte's theoretical deduction are very much in
evidence.
The first question that Schelling raises is how it is that nature is possible,
and consequently, how to overcome the dogmatic assertion which argues that
external things exercise a causal activity on the spirit. Nature, according to
our author, is both natura naturans and natura naturata, using Spinozan
terminology: that is, spirit and matter, subject and object. Nature is the
"visible spirit" and the spirit is "invisible nature." Schelling sees nature as a
dynamic and teleological unity, which tends toward the self-consciousness.
Nature and spirit are, respectively, the positive and negative pole of the
totality, which is a universal organism. In nature there is an ongoing, dynamic
development that leads to awareness of itself through the human spirit. This
entails an evolutionary vision of nature: the natural powers—Schelling
spoke primarily of three powers, material, light and life—culminates in
man, where nature becomes aware of itself.
With its dynamic, organic, and finalized vision of the natural, Schelling's
philosophy of nature moves beyond both the one-sidedness of Fichte's
subjectivism, as well as Spinozan objectivism and the mechanicism of
certain authors of Modernity. Nature is the immediate and objective
manifestation of the Absolute, which becomes aware of itself through the
human spirit. For this reason, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of
the spirit simply show two different perspectives of the same absolute being.
"The philosopher," says Copleston, "must show how objective Nature is
ideal through and through in the sense that it is a unified dynamic and
teleological system which develops upwards, so to speak, to the point at
which it returns upon itself in and through the human spirit. For, given this
picture of Nature, we can see that the life of representation is not something
which is simply set over against and alien to the objective world, so that
there arises the problem of correspondence between the subjective and the
objective, the ideal and the real. The life of representation is Nature's
knowledge of itself; it is the actualization of Nature's potentiality, whereby
slumbering Spirit awakens to consciousness."
Since nature and spirit are just two sides or two different aspects of a
single being, the philosophy of the spirit—philosophy of the self or
philosophy of intelligence—is complemented by the philosophy of nature.
Schelling develops this second point in his book System of Transcendental
Idealism. The system of transcendental idealism explains his philosophy of
mind in terms of absolute activity from the perspective of consciousness.
Taking objectivity as a starting point, the philosophy of nature has shown the
subjective nature of the object. Similarly, starting with subjectivity, the
philosophy of the mind exposes the objective nature of the subject.
The originating source and foundation of all the spirit's activity is
intellectual intuition, that is, the process by which the self intuits itself, and
thus institutes itself—using Fichte's terminology we might say "posits"—as a
subject that at the same time "is" and "knows." The subject unites being and
knowing in a dialectical contraposition, as opposed manifestations of the
dynamism of the self. To the unlimited activity of the self—objective, that is,
real—is opposed the limiting activity—reflexive and subjective, that is,
ideal. For Schelling, philosophical realism stems from the increase in real
activity as a limitation of the self. In contrast, the preferential consideration
of the ideal or creative activity of the self gives rise to idealism. There is,
however, the possibility of overcoming this apparent opposition, uniting both
perspectives in the same reflection. This is the path that Schelling explores
in System of Transcendental Idealism and which he would call ideal-
realism.
Making a clear parallel with the natural powers from his philosophy of
nature, Schelling puts three ideal powers at the foundation of transcendental
idealism: knowledge, action, and art. The philosophy of the spirit is
developed starting with an analysis of each of these ideal powers, structured
into three interdependent parts: theoretical philosophy, practical
philosophy, and the philosophy of art.
The analysis of knowledge—which is at the foundation of theoretical
philosophy—explains the ideal-ness of the limit: that is, it shows how the
limit which the knowing self experiences in its consciousness is a product of
the unconscious activities of its productive intuition, which is based, in turn,
on the reflexive ability of the absolute will. Schelling builds his practical
philosophy on the act of self-determination of the absolute will, which gives
rise to action. In it is expressed the fundamental opposition between freedom
and necessity. On the one hand, freedom is a necessary condition for the self-
determination of the subject, and thus for the morality of human action.
Moreover, Schelling observes that the activity of the singular individual is
conditioned by superior forces that determine its outcome. However, this
opposition is only apparent, resulting from a one-sided perspective. The
course of history resolves this contradiction by seeing how the force of the
Absolute—nature, destiny, or divine Providence, depending on what we call
it— works through the actions of free, unique individuals and is manifested
in them.
However, history fails to eliminate the primary opposition between nature
and mind. To this end, Schelling develops a philosophy of art or an original
aesthetic, in which the Romantic enthusiasm for nature, and its exaltation of
art and literature, are expressed philosophically. For this German
philosopher, aesthetic intuition shows the unity of the unconscious and
conscious, of the real—nature—and the ideal—spirit. The artist, besides
having technical skill, is the vehicle for a power that works through him.
This power is the same one that works through nature. The absolute self,
through productive intuition, is objectified in nature. This objectification is,
however, unconscious. In contrast, in the work of art, the absolute self is
supremely objectified, because it is the result of a conscious, and therefore
free, activity. Thus the philosophy of art becomes the most comprehensive
and complete expression of transcendental idealism. For this reason, some
characterize the idealism that Schelling suggests as an esthetic idealism.
(c) The philosophy of identity. In 1801, with the publication of the
Exposition of My System of Philosophy, Schelling distances himself even
further from the positions of Fichte's idealism. In this book, he calls his
transcendental idealism a philosophy of indifference or philosophy of the
unity-totality.
 Instead of asserting the relativity of the self and not-self, he speaks of the
Absolute as identity. The Absolute is pure identity of subjectivity and
objectivity, reality and idealness. This absolute is not nature or spirit,
subject or object, but the absolute identity of and indifference between both.
Only for the finite consciousness is there difference between subject and
object. According to Schelling, only through the identification between
subjectivity and objectivity can we can finally move beyond the dispute
between idealism and realism.
Schelling identifies Identity with Reason: "That which I call reason is
absolute reason or reason conceived as a total indifference between the
subjective and objective." The philosophy of indifference is knowledge of
the Absolute, which is based on the intuition of it. With respect to originary
knowledge, this philosophy is the Absolute Knowledge of the Absolute: a
condition of possibility for any ulterior knowledge. As G. Reale and D.
Antiseri rightly point out, "It is clear that we are faced with a thinking in
which Fichte and Spinoza have been synthesized in a form of radical
pantheistic spiritualism (or spiritualist pantheism). All is Reason, and the
reason is the All."
If reason is all, outside the uni-totality nothing can exist at all. Therefore,
the world does not exist per se, but rather eternally is within the heart of the
Identity. In the sense that it has been defined above, reason knows, and
outside of reason nothing can be known. Schelling's Absolute has never
existed itself, to produce the not-self through the Fichte's productive
imagination. Hence the necessity for reason itself to split into subject and
object. Consequently, there is a difference between spirit and nature,
between the objective and the subjective, but this is just a qualitative
difference that is produced only for the finite empirical consciousness. This
qualitative difference does not alter the absolute identity. The finite being is
a form of absolute identity, where the subjective (spirit) or objective (nature)
predominates. However, its reality is merely phenomenal: it's a matter only
of the qualitative distinction between the subjective and objective.
(d) The doctrine of the rupture. The obvious speculative difficulties that
arise from the assertion of absolute identity, on the one hand, and qualitative
difference, on the other, lead Schelling to once against raise the question of
the relationship between infinite and finite. The accentuation of identity has
made it almost impossible to explain the transition to an infinite conceived
as an absolute indifference out of a world populated by finite, determined,
and multiple things. The search for a way to get past this problem would turn
Schelling's Romantic-naturalist pantheism into in a kind of Gnostic dualism.
Indeed, as his ideas mature, Schelling stresses ever more strongly the
divine and transcendent nature of the Absolute. However, the Divine is not
an act that is pure, abstract, and impersonal, as Fichte sees it. For Schelling,
the Absolute-God is infinite life and person. God is history taking place.
God is not only Reason or Logos, but also irrational Impulse and selfish
instinct. The dialectical unity of opposites that previously crowned the
activity of the Absolute, now lives in God, with these forces in continual
struggle. God is Good, but also Evil.
Taking certain ideas from Plotinus and above all from Böhme, Schelling
speaks of creation as a rupture or leap: "There is no continuous transition
from the Absolute to the real; the sensible origin of the world is only
thinkable as a complete rupture of the absolute by means of a leap." In the
world there is the finite self, which is formed by a kind of unity with infinite
reason. The distancing of the world from the Absolute, which Schelling
explained as a cosmic collapse, can return to its absolute origin through the
human spirit: "History is an epic in the mind of God. It has two main parts:
the first is the description of humanity's departure from its center until it
reaches the highest level of estrangement from itself. The second part
describes its return. The first part of the story is the Iliad, and the second, the
Odyssey. The movement in the first part is centrifugal, that of the second is
centripetal." With this beautiful image Schelling attempts to describe the
historical trajectory of humanity: man, in his egoism, distances himself from
his divine origin, and by means of his freedom must return to it. The moral
alternative is located in man's orientation toward or distancing from the
Absolute.
(e) The philosophy of religion. The philosophy of religion which
Schelling develops once he has moved past the philosophy of identity, deals
with the study of mythology and revelation. He conceives of the history of
Christianity—the supreme historic religion, in which unconscious mythology
becomes conscious—as an evolution toward God's own revelation, in three
phases, very similar to those of Joaquin de Fiore: the first period is Petrine,
which stresses the importance the concepts of law and authority; the next is
the Pauline, starting with the Protestant Reformation, which highlights the
importance of freedom as an ideal in God; and a third period, the Joanic,
which corresponds to the Holy Spirit, that of God's love, the highest
synthesis of the two preceding periods.
In this last stage of his thought, and as a result of his new conception of the
Absolute, Schelling distinguishes between negative philosophy, where the
Absolute is discovered to be the supreme essence, and which is not able
explain the existing world, and positive philosophy, which conceived of the
absolute as a personal Being, which, as lord of being, can explain the real
world. Schelling, even more clearly than Fichte, moves beyond his initial
objectivist idealism to arrive at a metaphysics founded on the assertion of a
transcendent Being that gives reason to the world. However, Schilling's God
has more to do with the Plotinus' One that with God the Creator and
Redeemer of the Christian revelation.
As a negative philosopher, Schelling is a bridge joining Fichte and Hegel;
as a positive philosopher, Schelling presages certain of Kierkegaard's
critiques of the Hegelian system. But the lack of systematization in his ideas,
his use of poetic imagery, and his Romantic attitude prevented Schelling from
creating a school of thought. At any rate, he nevertheless will exert a vast
influence in the Romantic circles of Central and Eastern Europe.

4. G. W. H. Hegel: Absolute idealism

(a) Life and works. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on
August 27, 1770, the same year as the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. His father
was a civil servant. He received a solid classical training as part of his
secondary education in the city of his birth, studying both in Greek and in
Latin. In particular, the reading of Sophocles' Antigone and other classics of
Greek literature left a deep impression on him that would decisively
influence his thinking.
In 1788 he moved to Tübingen to undertake theological studies. There he
struck up a friendship with Schelling and Hölderlin: the first, who was five
years younger and gifted with a more precocious intelligence, would be one
of his major philosophical confidants during the first years of his thinking,
and the second would strengthen his admiration for classical Greece,
already set into motion in his early studies. During his years of study at the
Lutheran seminar of Tübingen, he would read Rousseau and become deeply
interested in the French Revolution: he even planted a "liberty tree" with his
friends in the outskirts of Tübingen, and every year he would celebrate the
anniversary of the revolution. His coursework certificate carries the
following academic assessment: not very suited for philosophy.
After receiving his doctorate in theology in 1793, he completed his
university studies. From that year until 1796 he worked as a private tutor in
Berne. From there he moved to Frankfurt, where he devoted himself to the
same activity until 1799. During this period he produced some writings that
would be published posthumously in 1907, under the title Early Theological
Writings. In them we can already note the theme of his philosophy: the
Absolute and its relations with finite beings.
In 1799, thanks to the small property he inherited after the death of his
father, he left the profession of private tutor and devoted himself to the study
of philosophy, with the intention of trying his luck at a university career. In
1801, he was a Privatdozent in Jena, where he would write The Difference
Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy. In 1805 he was
appointed as extraordinary professor at the university of Jena, and two years
later he would publish his masterpiece: Phenomenology of Spirit. When
Jena was conquered by Napoleonic troops that year, Hegel lost his inherited
property, and the university was closed. These circumstances forced him to
suspend his academic activities and seek a new job. For one year he ran the
local newspaper in Bamberg (Bavaria). A year later, in 1808, he was
appointed rector of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg. The post gave him some
economic relief, and there he married Maria von Tucher, who belonged to an
influential Bavarian family. She would bear him two sons: Karl and
Emmanuel. It was also there that, in 1812 and 1816, he would publish the
two volumes of his Science of Logic.
With the publication of this book, Hegel—who was already well known in
the German intellectual environment—received offers from the universities
of Erlangen, Heidelberg, and Berlin. He accepted the offer from Heidelberg.
There, in 1817, he published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences. However, the following year he moved to Berlin, where he would
be rector from 1829 to 1830, thereafter occupying the chair of philosophy
until his death on November 14, 1831. Although he taught numerous courses
that would published posthumously—for example, the Lectures on the
philosophy of universal history, Lectures on the philosophy of art,
Lectures on the philosophy of religion and Lectures on the history of
philosophy—during his Berlin years he published only one book, the
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821).
 (b) From theology to philosophy. Hegel, like Fichte and Schelling,
initiated his intellectual meanderings in the field of theology. In a sense,
Hegel never abandoned his original interest in theological issues. Moreover,
these topics never disappeared from the scenery and were a source of
inspiration for his later philosophical research.
The earliest surviving letter from Hegel, written in the years 1793-1794
and published under the title Fragments of the Popular Religion and
Christianity, demonstrates a conception of Greek culture and religion, as
well as of Christianity, that is consistent with an intellectual training
received at the Lutheran seminary in Tübingen. Hegel here presents an
idealized image of the religiosity of the Hellenic world, which he compares
with the Christianity of the European Enlightenment. For our philosopher, the
religion of classical Greece is the paradigm for Volksreligion (popular
religion): a sentimental and subjective religiosity rooted in the heart of the
village. In contrast, Christianity represents an intellectual and objective
concept of religion. Greek religious ceremonies, filled with joy and vitality,
stand in contrast to the ceremonies of the decadent Christianity of his time:
sad rituals far removed from life.
During the years of its activity as a tutor in Bern, he also wrote a Life of
Jesus (1795). Hegel presents a Jesus who is a human preacher of Kantian
morality, stripped of all supernatural content, and he identifies the message
of the gospel of salvation with a pure moral doctrine based on reason. Christ
is presented as divine only to convince the Jews. After the death of Jesus, the
apostles turned Christianity into a positivist religion, and the imposition of
dogmas drowned out the spiritual freedom that the teacher had preached.
However, this earlier vision of Christ would change as his thinking
matured. Beginning in 1799, when he wrote The Spirit of Christianity and
Its Fate/Destiny, he considers Jesus a preacher of love, with a privileged
participation in the divine life, thus moving past the Kantian moral
perspective. In these pages the central problem of Hegelian speculation
reappears: the relationship between finite and infinite. His views on Greek
religiosity had not changed, but now Hegel attributes to the Jewish religion
those defects that he previously had attributed to Christianity: positivism or
objectivity. The Hebrew God is an authoritarian god, distant from human
life. For Hegel, the Jewish concept of divinity involves a mistaken
understanding of the infinite, because Yahweh is found outside the life of
finite beings, in the "afterlife." But the true God is love. Anyone who loves,
is unites with the Love. Love is the divinity. Therefore, the way to move
from the finite to the infinite is through love. In this process, religion plays
the role of the force that achieves the synthesis of the finite and infinite.
Christianity, with its doctrine of the Incarnation, manages to overcome the
split between God and man that impaired the Jewish religion, and that leads
to what Hegel called an "unhappy consciousness." When it is internalized in
man through Christ—the God made man—the Mosaic Law becomes an
ethics of love. In this interpretation of the passage from Greek popular
religion to Christianity through the religious experience of the Jewish
people, we can already glimpse the three moments that will make up the
basic outline of the Hegelian dialectic.
As we shall see in the next paragraph, as Hegel developed his system,
philosophy would carry forward the task that had been entrusted first to
religion: the dissolution of the finite in the Infinite. However, the primacy of
philosophy with respect to religion does not imply that Hegel held contempt
for religious thinking: the German philosopher criticized the attacks that the
Enlightenment, from its rationalist standpoint, directed against the faith, thus
losing the possibility of arriving at the absolute. On the other hand, he
believed that Jacobi, Kant, and Fichte, in an attempt to recover the absolute,
did not have enough confidence in reason, and made the infinite the exclusive
field of feeling and subjective faith. But God is not beyond the reach of
reason, because for Hegel, it is a matter of understanding through the
mundane, of finding the infinite and eternal in the finite and earthly. And to
do this he made recourse to a fundamental theological model: that of the
Incarnation.
In fact, beginning in his years in Frankfurt, Hegel acquired a Christ-centric
vision that he never abandoned in his mature thinking. In Jesus Christ, the
infinite is made finite, the eternal is made temporal. The Absolute emerges
from itself to be made flesh: God demolishes himself, but then comes back to
life and returns to glory. Hegel uses the dogma of the Incarnation as a model
to explain the relationship between the finite and the infinite: setting aside
the specific historical content of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity made
man, for our philosopher God is continually made flesh, and vanquishing
himself and rising again in the history of the world. The passage of the
infinite through the finite constitutes the true incarnation of God.
(c) The purpose of philosophy. In the early years of his teaching in Jena,
Hegel locates the problem of the radical opposition between the finite and
the infinite, of the split between subject and object, between the particular
and universal, at the center of philosophical speculation. The solution of this
fundamental contradiction is the engine that has propelled man to
philosophize. As expressed synthetically in his essay The Difference
between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (1801), "division is
the source of the need for philosophy." But despite more than two thousand
years of philosophical speculation, he finds the answers given to this enigma
by the thinkers that have preceded him all inadequate. Neither Kantian
philosophy, not the powerful systems of Fichte and Schelling, had managed
to adequately bridge the gap that separates the finite and the infinite into two
different worlds.
Kant fails to solve the problems of philosophy because, by denying that
reason has any value as knowledge, he can only go halfway. In contrast,
Hegel believed that philosophical reflection has to use reason (Vernunft) as
its primary instrument and not the intellect (Verstand), since the conceptual
and abstract knowledge of the latter tends to perpetuate the conflict between
the universal and the particular. On the other hand, speculative knowledge of
reason unifies and exceeds all divisions. As we shall see later, this idea will
form the core of the Hegelian dialectic.
Moreover, in open polemic with Fichte, Hegel asserts the radical
insufficiency of the principle of identity A = A as an expression of the
essence of the Absolute, and therefore as a starting point of philosophy,
because this principle affirms the identity, dispensing with all difference.
Nor is it possible to base a system of thought on the principle of
contradiction A ≠ A, or rather A = B, because this principle leads only to the
concept of "difference." In Hegel's interpretation of Fichte's system, the
contrast between self and not-self cannot be resolved. Identity and difference
confront one another with no possibility of reconciliation. For Hegel,
however, the truth about the Absolute is found in the synthesis of these two
principles, in the unity of identity and difference. Therefore, the purpose of
philosophical thought is to find a synthesis between finite and infinite: that is,
to conceive of the Absolute not as something transcendent beyond the finite
world, but as an immanence of the infinite into the finite, and of finiteness in
the infinite. This is not to deny the reality of one thing or the other, but to
locate their integration, since for Hegel the truth is the totality.
Hegel begins by confirming the fact that finite and infinite are relative
concepts: that is, that they are intrinsically interdependent. We understand
what finiteness may mean only in juxtaposition with the idea of infinity; on
the other hand, it is possible to glimpse the infinite only in connection with
the finite. The Absolute is not an impenetrable reality that exists behind its
manifestations: it coincides dialectically with its manifestation, it is its
manifestation. The development of this idea would distance Hegel from the
philosophy of identity that Schelling developed during those years. The finite
is one moment in the life of the infinite: the infinite is a replete Absolute, not
an indifferent one, as is that of Schelling, whose Absolute-Identity resembles
—according to Hegel's well-known expression in the preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit—"the night in which all cows are black."
(d) The absolute and the dialectic. The Hegelian Absolute is both subject
and substance. "Hegel's project," writes Colomer, "is the boldest one in the
history of philosophy: to move beyond the two stages of Western thinking by
reconciling them: the philosophy of being and that of the subject. Hegel
thinks, like Fichte and Schelling, that philosophy has to begin with the
absolute. But unlike his two predecessors, he conceives of the absolute as a
subject, that is, as a subject that includes in its dialectical development all
the richness of the substance." Retaining the modern principle of self-
conscious subjectivity, Hegel has proposed the revival of the metaphysical
dimension of being.
The highest definition of the Absolute is to say that it is spirit. "One can
express how the substance is essentially subject by saying that the absolute is
spirit." Hegel conceives the Absolute as a substantial and reflexive subject.
In saying that it is spirit, one arrives at the synthesis of the in-itself of being
substantial and the for-itself of reflection (self-consciousness), which
together characterize subject-being. The spirit is not Schelling's unity-
totality, within which indistinction and indifference reign. The Absolute is
not substance in the sense of being more or less static; rather, it is activity,
movement, it is an unum atque idem that nevertheless is reflected
consistently in ever-different figures. To capture the life of the Absolute,
speculative philosophy must understand that no things exist that are isolated,
finite, and determinate. All the finites are interrelated, since they form part
of, and are moments in, the process of the Absolute's unfolding. The spirit is
the unity that is constituted in multiplicity. Every moment of the Absolute is
necessary, because the life of the Absolute lies in the succession of each and
every one of these moments.
 To describe this essential characteristic of the mind, in Phenomenology
Hegel uses the images of the lifecycle of a plant: "The bud disappears when
the flower blooms, and it could be said that the flower refutes the bud;
likewise, when the fruit appears, the flower is declared a false existence of
the plant, and the fruit is put forth into place of the flower as its truth. These
forms not only differ, but are also ... mutually incompatible. But at the same
time, their fluid nature makes them moments of organic unity, in which they
not only are not negated, but on the contrary are equally necessary, and this
equal necessity now constitutes the life of the whole." To understand reality
as if it were a set of atomic entities, independent and isolated from each
other, is an abstraction that alienates us from reality. The seed, the flower,
the fruit—these cannot exist isolated from the biological development of the
plant, the earth, the sun. Indeed, the life of the plant is the succession of these
moments.
Hegel posits reality as a dialectic process, in which these isolated
moments are incorporated into a synthesis that integrates the oppositions.
The life of the Absolute has a triadic rhythm. The mind's own movement is a
process of reflecting on itself, consisting of three stages or "sides" that occur
continuously without being repeated. Hegel calls the first moment "being-in-
itself," which is surpassed by a second moment called "outside of itself" or
"being other." The cycle closes with a "return to itself" or "being-in-itself
and for-itself," only to start the cycle once more. The third "side" is the
moment of superceding synthesis, in which the Absolute is the identity-in-
difference of the two previous moments. However, this moment constitutes,
at a higher level, a new "being-in-itself," to which must necessarily be
oppose a new "being other." As we can see, this is a circularity sui generis:
the Absolute does not ever return to the original state, but with each new
synthesis the prior synthesis is maintained, superseded in its negation and
sublimated into a higher level.
Hence the mutability of the spirit is not, for Hegel, just a random or chaotic
succession of contradictory forms, but rather possesses in itself the
rationality of thought. The Absolute is reason (Vernunft) which knows itself.
The life of the mind is an ongoing and necessary process for self-fulfillment,
culminating in the Absolute's full awareness of itself. The knowledge that the
mind has of itself as Absolute is the ultimate expression of rationality; it is
the truth itself. If the Absolute is the totality, and the totality is the mind that
knows itself, then reality and rationality are just two sides of the same coin.
In this regard we must understand the famous phrase from the preface of the
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, "what is rational is real and what is
real is rational." The Absolute and reason are identified with one another in
the dialectic: the unfolding of the life of the Absolute will always follow a
rational pattern. Or, if you look at things from the opposite perspective,
thought necessarily follows the rules of the self-reflexive movement of the
Absolute Spirit. The dialectic succession "being-in-itself," "being other,"
and "being-in-itself and for-itself" that gives rhythm to the life of the
Absolute is also the supreme law of thought.
Although normally we call the three moments of the Hegelian dialectic
triad thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the terminology that Hegel used in his
works to designate the three "sides" of thought is more complex and
descriptive. Hegel called the first moment the "abstract or intellective side,"
the second the "dialectic or negatively rational side," and the third the
"speculative or positively rational side." The first moment is the fruit of the
intellect's activity (Verstand); in contrast, the second and third are
manifestations of reason (Vernunft).
Every cognitive process starts with the work of the intellect. The intellect
is the power of thought that abstracts universal concepts from the experience
of the particular and concrete; it defines universal concepts, distinguishing
among them and opposing certain ones to certain others. The first activity of
thought is essential, because without it any knowledge is impossible.
However, the intellect, as Hegel conceived it, can not overcome the
opposition between the universals that it has abstracted and the unique
objects of sensible experience, because it is unable to grapple with one or
the other from the perspective of the totality. Therefore, the knowledge of
reality provided by the "abstract or intellective side" of the dialectic is
incomplete and therefore unsuitable for philosophical reflection. We need to
go beyond the "being-in-itself" provided by the intellectualization of the
universal.
The second step of reflection is given by reason, whose activity plays out
at a higher level, able to apprehend the live connection of the totality with
the parts that comprise it. Universal and particular, finite and infinite, one
and multiple—as intellectual abstractions these are concepts that are
opposed in an absolute manner. However, this opposition is relativized if
we look at it from the point of view of reason. In fact, reason discovers that
it is impossible to independently define one of the terms in a pair of
opposites, because its meaning properly lies in the indivisible relationship
that joins the one to the other. Thus, for example, the concept of "one" is
indefinable if you do not go immediately to the concept of "multiple," and
vice versa. The same can be said of other pairs of opposites, such as finite
and infinite, equal and unequal, and similar and dissimilar, and so on. A term
necessarily names its opposite, such that Hegel does not hesitate to assert
that it becomes its opposite: the "being-in-itself" becomes "outside of itself,"
and now is "other." For the intellect (Verstand), A and B are opposites; for
reason (Venunft), A becomes B, and B, A.
The "dialectical or negatively rational side" is not a unique feature of
thought, but rather is proper to the life of the Absolute as totality. Hegel uses
several examples to illustrate this fact: the seed must die as such for the plant
to germinate; the bud must disappear so that the flower may come into being.
Likewise, when the child becomes an adult, childhood negates itself by
turning into its opposite: adulthood. According to Hegel, classical
philosophical tradition had ventured up to this point, expressing these ideas
in various ways without arriving at all the consequences that derive from it.
When it comes to knowing the very life of the Absolute, we need to get to the
bottom, topping off the dialectical process with the synthesis that definitively
supersedes the originating opposition. Hegel claims that he himself
discovered this step, the "speculative or positively rational side" of the
dialectic, while the philosophical system of Fichte and Schelling had
managed only to glimpse it.
The third dialectic moment, or negation of the negation, involves
something more than the removal of the original opposition, as it is a
reaffirmation of the thesis through the negation of the antithesis. It is not
simply that it has returned to the primitive state, but rather that the thesis has
been recovered at a higher level: the "being-in-itself and for-itself." We
could say that thesis and antithesis live a new life within the synthesis. Thus,
for example, the various stages of life endure in the living being: the seed
and plant are in some way present in the fruit, or the experiences of
childhood and adulthood "live on" in the man who has already passed
through them. To express this synthesis that supersedes the opposites
preserved within it, Hegel used the German verb aufheben in a technical
manner. Thus, through the succession that pertains to the synthesis
(Aufhebung) we can follow the life of the Absolute, and introduce ourselves
to it in its profundity: being, for Hegel, is becoming, or as Heraclitus said,
war is the father of all; that is, through the opposition of thesis and antithesis
we arrive at the synthetic moment, which will produce another opposition,
which itself will be surpassed later in a necessary and ongoing dialectical
process.
From what has been said about the dialectic structure of reality we can
take away the fact that the truth does not lie in adjusting understanding to fit
reality, since as we have seen, reality and thought are two distinct aspects of
the Absolute. Rather, the truth is identified through the entire process of
affirmation-negation-negation of the negation (superseding synthesis): "it is
this process which creates, in its unfolding, its own moments and passes
through all; and the entirety of this movement constitutes its positive content
and its truth." To the logic of reason (Vernunft), the copula that links the
subject to the predicate of a proposition expresses the dialectical movement
of the parts that comprise it: that which at the beginning was the subject turns
into the predicate and vice versa, superseding the initial difference. We
might better understand this using Hegel's famous phrase: "what is rational is
real and what is real is rational" if we replace the "is" that joins the subject
and predicate with "becomes": "what is rational becomes real and what is
real becomes rational."
Despite the optimism of its creator, the Hegelian synthesis of the
philosophy of being and the philosophy of Modernity's subject entails a
serious loss: the disappearance of the ontological transcendence of the
metaphysical horizon. The Hegelian Absolute is not the transcendent Infinite
Being separated from the finite, but is the becoming-itself of all reality. In
this way, Hegel has canceled, in a single stroke, the ontological distinction
between God and the world that Christian philosophy is founded on. Hegel
seems to affirm a pantheism: everything is in God, but this is a God, to
repeat, that is not distinguished from the everything, and that evolves in the
course of history itself, understood as a system that is perfected dialectically
in a steady progress toward absolute freedom. If we add that absolute self-
consciousness is achieved through the human spirit, as we shall explain
below, pantheism can be transformed into a radical anthropology. These
issues have opened a debate that would last for two centuries, and it would
be unrealistic to give a convincing answer about the ultimate character of
Hegelian theism in these pages. What can be said is that God, the world, and
man are involved in one and the same singular reality, one which is not static
but dynamic, and which inclines toward universal self-consciousness.
 (e) The Hegelian system. Once we have described the fundamental
characteristics of the Absolute and the dialectic, we are set to present the
various parts of the Hegelian system. Hegel employs the dialectic to
describe the three moments of the unfolding of the Absolute: the moment of
immediacy, that is, the Idea in its being-in-itself, which should be studied by
logic, the moment of the negation or estrangement of the idea (its "being
other"), that is, Nature, whose field of study is the philosophy of nature, and
finally the moment of the spirit, in which the intervention performed is seen,
that is, the return to the self in self-consciousness the self ("being-in-itself
and for-itself"). The last moment in the development of the Absolute will be
studied by the philosophy of the mind.
This first three-part division supports further triads: logic is divided into
the logic of being, of essence, and of concept; the philosophy of nature into
mechanics, physics, and biology; the philosophy of the mind into subjective
mind, objective mind, and absolute mind.
(f) Logic. Hegel begins his system with logic, to which he devoted a full
treatise in 1812-16: Science of Logic. He also devoted the first part of the
Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences to this discipline.
Logic is the part of philosophy which is responsible for exposing the
essence of the Absolute in itself. In the classical philosophical tradition, this
task belonged to metaphysics, but given that everything rational is real, and
anything real, rational, Hegel understands metaphysics and logic to be the
same thing. "Logic," writes Hegel, "must be understood as a system of pure
reason, as the realm of pure thought. This kingdom is the truth, such that,
devoid of any veil, it is in itself and for itself. We could say that this content
is the representation of God, as it is in its eternal essence before the creation
of nature and of finite spirit." We should not let the phrase fool us: this is
nothing more than a definition intended for teaching, using representative
religious language. In the Hegelian system, there is no question of a God
"before the creation," because the dualities have been superseded in the
interests of a universal dialectical monism.
Hegel analyzes the categories of human thought before its concrete use.
These categories are, as in Kant, categories of pure thought, but they are
also, as in Aristotle, metaphysical categories: they express both ways of
thinking and ways of being. The structure of logic is triadic. He begins with
the analysis of thought in its immediacy, which is the doctrine of being or the
concept itself. He continues with the analysis of thought in reflection and
mediation, or the doctrine of the essence. He ends with the thought that
returns to itself: the concept-in-itself and for-itself.
The first part—that is, the doctrine of being—starts with the pure being:
the concept of pure being (reines Sein) is indeterminate: it leads to not-
being, to nothingness. The mind moves from being to not-being, and from not-
being to being: its truth is, therefore, this movement; that is, the becoming.
But the same fate must be superseded by the determinations of the being
there, since being and nothingness are empty concepts. Hegel consequently
analyzes some of these determinations: quality, quantity, measure. The
doctrine of the essence, in turn, deals with the study of reflection on being,
which manifests itself as appearance, to arrive at the analysis of the category
of reality, as the immediate unity of the essence and of existence, or of the
interior and the exterior.
In the last part, dedicated to the return of thought to itself or the doctrine of
the concept, after analyzing the notions of subjective and objective, he
arrives at the idea, the concept in-itself and for-itself, which is the category
that belongs to the self-conscious mind. In previous stages, Hegel shows how
the truth of a thing is not found in itself but rather in its dialectic reference to
the other. In the last stage, that of the absolute idea, truth is reached as the
totality of the dialectic process: "The idea itself is the dialectic, which
forever separates and distinguishes that which is identical to itself from that
which is different, the subjective from the objective, the infinite from the
finite, the soul from the body, and only thus is creation eternal, eternal life,
eternal spirit." The idea, says Hegel, using a famous Aristotelian phrase, is
the thought that thinks about itself: that is, God. But not the transcendent
Christian God, since the Hegelian Absolute is the process of its own
becoming. We are faced with a concept of everything as self-consciousness,
arrived at in the universal dialectical process.
(g) The philosophy of nature. We thus arrive at the second part of the
system, the philosophy of nature, to which he devotes the second section of
the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. There Hegel writes that the
idea (the object of conceptual logic) decides, as a demonstration of its
absolute freedom, to abandon its peculiarity and go outside itself as nature. It
seems logical to think that in this paragraph, as in many others, Hegel uses a
pictorial, representative language that pertains to ordinary religious thought:
the idea's free decision to go outside itself is analogous to the decision of the
Judeo-Christian God to create a world.
 As had already happened with Schelling, Hegel has no small trouble in
explaining the material world. For Hegel, the moment of nature is necessary,
since if the absolute idea does not have inside itself its own negation or
otherness, it would be a mere abstraction. Thus, he can assert that "God
manifests himself as nature and as spirit. These two formations are divine
temples of God that he fills with his presence. God as an abstraction is not
the true God: God is subject only as the living process of positing his other,
the world, which, conceived in divine form, is his Son, and above all, in
unity with its other, in the Spirit." Nature, as estrangement from the spirit, is
necessary for the dialectical process that ends, teleologically, in universal
self-consciousness.
The philosophy of nature is divided into mechanics, physics, and organic
physics (or biology). The first conceives of nature as inert matter, purely
foreign and isolated; the second conceives of it as determined natural
individuality; and the third conceives it as organism in the determination of
subjectivity. Hegel shows, in this part of the system, the entire arbitrary and
a priori burden than in other places go by unnoticed. The philosophy of
nature is the most tenuous aspect of his system: the dialectic aims to explain
everything, from volcanic phenomenon to electricity, giving philosophy the
role that should have be left to empirical science.
(h) The philosophy of mind. The last element of the Hegelian triadic
system is the philosophy of mind. The absolute ideal, estranged in nature, it
returns to itself through the mind of man and the historical spirit, to be
reunited in the Absolute Spirit. In this last phase of his thought, Hegel defines
the spirit as "the realized concept that is for itself, which has itself as its own
object." The main feature of mind is now freedom, in the sense of not
depending on another, that is, self-referentiality; and intimately linked to
freedom is the universality of the possibility of the spirit manifested in a
multiplicity of individuals. Mind is realized in man, the only thing that
"raises itself above the individuality, the sensation of the universality of
thought, to the knowledge of its self, of its subjectivity." Through man and his
history the Absolute Spirit manifests itself.
The philosophy of mind is divided, in turn, into three parts: the subjective
spirit, the objective spirit, and the absolute spirit. Hegel devotes a third part
of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences to it. It also addresses
various aspects of the philosophy of mind in his Elements of the Philosophy
of Right and the courses at the University of Berlin, taught in the final years
of his life.
The subjective spirit is the first moment in the philosophy of mind. There
Hegel touches on the study of man as finite subject of a spiritual nature. He
starts with an analysis of the soul, the object of anthropology, and continues
with the consciousness, finishing with psychology. Many of the topics
discussed had already been dealt with in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Of
particular interest is the last part, psychology, whose object is the mind. In
his theoretical work, the mind culminates in thought; in its practical work, he
conceives of the will as the return to itself and the permanence-in-self of
thinking. Psychology culminates in free will, understood as a synthesis of
theoretical and practical moments of the mind: a free desire as a free
intelligence. The essence of the spirit is freedom. The notion of person as a
free spiritual being, according to Hegel, is one contribution of Christianity.
In classical antiquity, there were some glimmers of this notion, but "this idea
arrived in the world through the work of Christianity, for which the
individual has such infinite value; since his object and purpose is the love of
God, he is destined to have an absolute relation with God as spirit and to
make him exist more in him; that is, man is destined for the highest freedom."
The second part of the philosophy of the mind deals with the objective
spirit, that is, the world of culture and of institutions, from "objectivations"
of the human mind. Just as the Absolute is objectivized in nature, the
subjective spirit is objectivized or expressed in culture, leaving its state of
immediacy.
Hegel believes that the first objectification of the subjective spirit is the
law. The individual subject, aware of his freedom (the person) must
outwardly express his character as a free agent, giving himself an area of
freedom. He does this by appropriating material things. Personality confers
the ability to possess both rights and property. A person comes to be an
owner of a thing not only by an act of freedom, but also through the effective
appropriation of the thing. But the law also should establish intersubjective
standards, and prevent any possible violations of these rules. That is why
Hegel completes his doctrine of law with an analysis of contract law and
criminal law.
Hegel moves from the study of law to the study of morality, which is the
gateway to ethics (Sittlichkeit); the trajectory is fully completed in the
ethical order, that is, in the state. The ethical order is the synthesis of
subjectivity and objectivity: the finite spirits supersede themselves through
the various moments of social life. For Hegel, the family constitutes the first
moment of the ethical order, at the same time that it expresses a first
sentiment of totality, whose concrete manifestation is family property. But the
family already has within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, since the
children as they grow, become individuals. Individuals emerge from family
life and assert themselves as individuals, negating the totality.
This negation of the totality in turn negates itself through civil society, the
second developmental stage of the ethical order. Civil society, as a union
organized economically, with its resulting division of labor and social
classes, is the external state: that is, the state that rejects its essential
character. This is the subjective-objective union of the spirit. Therefore,
family and civil society are concepts that are superseded in the state.
The state is the third and most important phase of the ethical order: the
self-aware ethical order. The state is the realization of the rational will
when this will has been elevated to the level of the universal self-
consciousness. It is the highest expression of the objective spirit.
The state is the passage of God through the world, which identifies
individual interests with general, universal interests. The state achieves the
freedom of individuals, since freedom is potentially universal and as such
desires the general good. But this does not necessarily mean a totalitarian
concept of the state: the mature state should ensure the maximum exercise of
personal freedom. This does not prevent us from also affirming that
individuals should make the universal aim of the state into their own aim.
(i) The philosophy of history. Hegel's doctrine of the state is closely
linked to his philosophy of history. According to Hegel, philosophical
history or the philosophy of history is characterized by the fact that reason
rules the world, and consequently world history is a rational process. More
specifically, world history is a process by which the spirit achieves a real
awareness of itself as freedom: "world history is the progress of the
awareness of freedom."
Now we will refer more directly to his Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, which is the best-known version of this aspect of his system.
According to Hegel, the concrete unit of the development of the world spirit
(Weltgeist) is the national spirit or spirit of the people (Volksgeist). The
spirit of the people is the expression of their culture: art, religion,
philosophy, legal organization, etc. The Volksgeiste are historic moments of
Weltgeist, and their succession through time manifests the inexorable
development of the Spirit. Moreover, in every historical period there are one
people who necessarily dominate the rest, guiding the cultural development
of a whole era, such that they lend to it their specific characteristics. In this
regard we must understand the Hegelian notion of history as the court of the
people, because the historical events that mark the destiny of the nations are
nothing other than necessary—and therefore just—moments in the dialectical
development of the Absolute.
The content of the spirit of the people is prior to and above the individual.
The particular accesses the life of the Spirit through its identity with the
social collective of the people to which it belongs. On the other hand, the
state is the highest form of social aggregation. Accordingly, the full
dialectical development of the nation leads toward the state, as a higher
manifestation of the objective mind. From this unique perspective, the
Prussian nation-state represents, for Hegel, the height of the ultimate
dialectical state.
Why does the Prussian state occupy such an important position at the
summit of history? Hegel believes that universal history follows a trajectory
that runs from East to West: from despotic Oriental empires to European
Christian civilization, having passed through ancient Greece and the
emergence of the democratic principle. However, in Christian Europe it is
the German people who hold more interiority, who have been a fertile
ground for germination of the Philosophy of the Spirit. Superceding the
distinction between thought and reality, the German national spirit represents
the full maturity of man, who reaches the supreme freedom through the
awareness of being a moment of the Absolute.
Each state affirms itself as an individual sovereign against other states.
There is no sovereign power higher than the state: to settle an inter-state
dispute, the answer is war. War is necessary: it is necessary to posit the
finite, property, and life as contingent. War is a painful but necessary means
to enable the progress of history. According to Ballesteros, "In Hegel, the
defense of imperialism as the key to progress is linked to the fact that 'only
one people may be the bearer of the universal spirit in each historical era,
and therefore the spirit of other peoples is deprived of rights when
confronting it.' This domination of one nation over the others is closely
related to military valor, because the 'foundation of the modern world has
made military valor its loftiest trait, insofar as it is expressed through one
member of a totality against another totality.' Military valor is therefore the
very foundation of the legal recognition of hegemony: 'War is the instant
whose acknowledgment gives meaning to history.'"
Hegel's nationalist tendency would be a source of inspiration for many
politicians in Central and Eastern Europe. But above all, it would influence
their vision of the state as the ultimate manifestation of the objective spirit,
clearing the way to the visionary and totalitarian politics of the twentieth
century. Hegel also affirms the importance of the great individuals as
"instruments" of the Weltgeist. A prototypical case is Napoleon, whom
Hegel witnessed, triumphant, after the Battle of Jena, at the height of his
splendor.
When interpreting the Hegelian philosophy of history, some have accused
him of cynicism: history as judge would lead to force as legitimate right. But
perhaps underneath this view we can glimpse Hegel's overconfidence in the
rational element of history: the irrational elements, in the end, from the point
of view of the Absolute, are made rational through the astuteness of Reason.
(j) The sphere of the Absolute Spirit. We have briefly looked at the
spheres of the subjective mind and the objective mind. Now we have to
climb to the top of the Hegelian system: absolute knowledge of the Absolute.
The Absolute Spirit exists only through the human spirit, when this spirit
reaches a finite level of knowledge which, in the Phenomenology, Hegel
called absolute knowledge. This is the finite spirit's awareness of being a
moment in the life of the Absolute. This absolute awareness can be reached
through three kinds of knowledge: art (apprehending the beautiful, which
manifests itself in nature, but especially in the work of art), religion, and
philosophy. Art, religion, and philosophy lead to absolute knowledge of the
Absolute.
Beauty is the sensible appearance of the idea, and it is apprehended
through aesthetic intuition. There are two elements in the work of art: the
sensible form and the idea (unity of subjectivity and objectivity). Depending
on the harmonization of these two elements, one can speak of a symbolic art,
in which the sensitive element predominates over the spiritual (Egypt); a
classical art, which achieves perfect harmony between the two elements
(Greek sculpture); and finally, a Romantic art, with the dominance of the
spiritual element, apprehended as movement, action, conflict (poetry, music,
painting). It is the art of Christianity.
 A different way to reach the Absolute is religious knowledge. In
Phenomenology of Spirit our author had discussed religious phenomenon
[phenomena?] at length. For Hegel, religion is "the self-consciousness of the
spirit in the form of representation." Religion is the portent of absolute
knowledge, but it does not yet reach the state of being an absolute
knowledge, precisely because of the representative character of the religious
consciousness, which does not yet have full identification between concept
and content, between knowledge of the spirit and the spirit itself. Hegel
devotes many pages to the analysis of the religious phenomenon in history.
He starts with a study of natural religion: the first representations of the
divine are light, plants, and animals (Persia and India). Egypt developed
what Hegel called the artisan religion, a preparation for the religion of art,
identified with Greek religiosity, where it undergoes a process of humanizing
the divine. But Hegel was interested, above all, in analyzing what he
systematizes as the final historical stage of religious phenomenon, which
belongs to manifest religion. In this, the spirit is known to itself as spirit: that
is, Christianity.
In the religion of the Incarnation, the divisions of the unhappy
consciousness are superceded: the divine essence is incarnated as human,
and self-consciousness is reached. In the Christian representation, self-
consciousness, through the unity of the human with the divine, takes place in
the singular consciousness of Jesus Christ. The essential content of manifest
religion is thus the unity of human nature and divine nature. This religion has
three developmental moments, which Hegel sets forth following the neo-
Platonic model: the affirmation of the spirit as self-consciousness, the exit
from the self through objective alienation, and the return to the objectivity of
self- consciousness. The first moment incorporates the Christian doctrine of
the Trinity; the second, that of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption; the third
that of the spiritual community of the Church. In these pages of
Phenomenology Hegel "translates" the representative language of religious
knowledge into the conceptual language of speculative knowledge.
Regarding the Trinity, he explains that God the Father, essentially equal to
himself, eternal and simple, known himself in his being-other, which is God
the Son. The Son is the Logos, the Word pronounced by the Father, who is the
alterity of the Father, returning to the Father in the unity of his essence and of
his other in the Holy Spirit. Hegel believes that the differentiation between
the Father and the Son, as the essence of divinity and his self-aware word, is
too abstract to be real: the differentiation in the particularity of sensible
existence is greater. The Creation is, therefore, a necessary unfolding of the
differentiation that occurs within the Trinity. So too is evil, which is the fruit
of an epistemological process of human consciousness, which, in order to go
from sensible consciousness to pure thought, must suffer its internal division,
which reflects the difference between good and evil. According to this
representation of religion, the entry of evil into the world demands its
reintegration into it as well. Thus the Incarnation is explained: God is
alienated from himself, takes an alien form, and through this alienation, at the
sacrifice of the Mediator, supercedes the alienation and reconciles himself
with himself. "The divine dead Man, or the human God, is in itself the
universal self-consciousness."
As Colomer notes, "in a few, but dense, pages Hegel finishes outlining his
speculative version of Christianity. The development of Christian dogma
coincides with the development of the Absolute Spirit. Under a seemingly
orthodox language, Christian faith has been emptied of its real content. The
events of the salvation story are worth more for what they mean than for
what they are." In short, for Hegel the Christian religion is a representative,
"popular" version of his philosophical system, which has as its culmination
the absolute knowledge.
In the statement that Hegel makes concerning religion in the Encyclopedia
of Philosophical Sciences, where he takes up the issue already addressed in
Phenomenology, he presents the following classification of religions: a)
Naturreligion, which is the religion of the substance: God is conceived as
an undifferentiated universal; b) the religion of individuality, in which God
is spirit, but in the form of an individual person or personality (Hebrew,
Greek, and Roman religion); and, finally, c) absolute religion, that is,
Christianity. God is the infinite spirit, not only transcendent but also
immanent. God is not undifferentiated, he is a Trinity of Persons, infinite
spiritual life. In addition, the kenosis of the Word—which is verified
historically in the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus
Christ—which is "a scandal for the Jews, foolishness to the pagans" (1 Cor
1: 23), finds its logical position within Hegel's system: it is the central point
of the dialectical evolution of the Spirit. Indeed, in Jesus Christ, man's
awareness of his essential identity with the Absolute Spirit is realized.
Christianity is the absolute truth, but in the form of Vorstellung, of
representation.
 The difference between religion and philosophy rests in their manner of
conceiving God: philosophy posits the passage from the Vorstellung to pure
thought. The object of philosophy is the same as that of absolute religion, but
the medium of knowing is the concept. In the bosom of the absolute
knowledge, Hegel posits that theology is superseded by philosophy. But if
you consider it from the opposite perspective, we could say that the
dissolution of theology in philosophical knowledge, which crowns the
Hegelian system, implies the theologization of Hegelian philosophy.
Hegel will devote some lessons to the history of philosophy. In reality, and
coherent with his system, philosophy coincides with his history: the various
philosophies are the stages that the spirit passes through until arriving at the
truth. A given period of the history of philosophy presupposes the previous
one. Thus, the most recent philosophy is the highest expression of truth. In
this sense, Hegelian philosophy is the most truthful, the one in which the
Absolute Spirit is known as the thought that thinks of itself. That is why
Hegel can say: "The spirit world has gotten to this point; each phase has
found its own form in the true system of philosophy; nothing has been lost, all
the principles have been preserved, since the latest philosophy is the sum of
the forms. This idea is the result of the spirit's efforts across almost two
thousand, five hundred years of the most serious of labors, to objectify
himself, to achieve self-knowledge."
(k) Conclusive balance. The philosophical systems of German idealism,
as we wrote some pages ago, are unique in history. Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel attempt to tackle the totality, trying to bridge the divisions inherited
from the eighteenth century. Philosophy would once again contemplate a
universal subject. However, one wonders if they really succeeded in
overcoming the divisions between theory and life, reason and will, nature
and history. Everything suggests—and in particular if we observe the
subsequent development of philosophy, as we will have opportunity to do in
the next part of this book—that idealism followed in the intellectualizing
footsteps of the Enlightenment. The Hegelian assertion of identity between
the real and the rational demonstrates that the Hegelian project is in
continuity with the earlier rationalism, and that the attempt to understand life
remains a mere rationalization and intellectualization of reality. But reality
itself demonstrates, on infinite occasions, that it has very little of the rational.
Interpreting wars, natural disasters, and the consequences of evil in the
world as mere "connivances" of Reason highlights the substantial failure of
idealism in its attempt to bridge the divisions of the Enlightenment and the
Kantian system.
Referring now specifically to Hegel, together with the admiration that his
effort at global systematization arouses, it is easy to warn also that in his
very logic the coherence concerning the respect for reality prevails. The
dialectical method and triadic structures applied to all levels of reality, from
the Holy Trinity to the theory of volcanic activity, can be perfectly coherent
and consistent with the principles that they start from, but they can also force
reality to fit into these tight structural diagrams. As Kierkegaard will later
say, a logical system is possible, but a system of existence is not possible.
Hegel is a philosopher who was concerned with theological problems.
History occupies the center of his vision of Christianity. The Christological
model is at the heart of his system. From a Christian perspective, how shall
we judge the Hegelian view? Hegel seems sincere in his defense of
Christianity and the thinking that upholds orthodoxy. But in reality, he
subordinates religion to philosophy, since the final interpretation of the
mysteries is entrusted to the philosophical reason and not religion.
Christianity would, in fact, be an exoteric sort of Hegelianism, and vice
versa, Hegelianism would be an esoteric Christianity. In Hegel, the
supernatural truths—the Christian mysteries—are replaced by philosophical
truths, in a vain attempt to rationalize what supercedes reason. In this sense,
we could draw a parallel between Hegelianism and the Gnosticism of the
first centuries of the Christian era.
Did Hegel really think that the history of philosophy was complete with his
system? The philosopher from Stuttgart was too shrewd to believe such a
simple thing. Rather, in Hegel there is an awareness that he was the
culmination of an era, which began 2,500 years ago: that of Christian
philosophy. The "history" of the Absolute Spirit is concluded with the self-
consciousness through the human spirit. What would come after would be
part of a new historic stage. Hegel culminates his system with absolute self-
consciousness, achieved through the history of the mundane world. We find
ourselves thus with an even more radical step in the process of
secularization: the Absolute is identified with historical becoming, and
transcendence disappears from the existential horizon. Soon this
disappearance would produce radical consequences.