Hegel's Apotheosis of Logic (PDF)

This book presents what Hegel calls "e;the vital spirit of the actual world"e;, the truth, namely, of logic's form and content as one concrete whole. Axiomatic here is that thinking is necessarily free and unbounded, if we could escape a performative contradiction in evaluating it. Thinking is absolute, what Hegel calls spirit or mind, Geist. He identifies three forms of "e;absolute spirit"e;, namely art, religion and philosophy, where each form is absorbed into the next one; philosophy subsumes religion and religion subsumes art, in a process seeking and achieving the absolute. Philosophy, therefore, is ultimately theology as fulfilling the latter in mind's constitutive self-transcendence towards "e;the absolute idea"e;, itself the absolute, Hegel asserts. This is "e;absolute idealism"e;, where the Idea is true being and finite things are transitory notions. This book aims to clarify such conceptions, whereby "e;theological"e; transcendent grace is natural or "e;all in all"e;, faith is absolute knowledge in germ, things are the opposite of what they "e;immediately"e; seem, while achieved self-consciousness is "e;the ruin of the individual"e; abstractly parted from its objects. Thus external nature is internal, the whole in or one with the part, necessity absolute freedom, these being stages of Logic.Hegel needs a second, related trio to the above three forms. This is logic, nature and mind, likewise, in ceaseless process, a returning upon self. Thus art's foundational quality mirrors that of "e;the logical art"e;. The individual art-object, art as striving for absolute perfection, founds spirit's trajectory. Hence, consciousness first appears individual only as set towards universal self-consciousness in "e;absolute knowing"e;.