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Zur Transformation des Gegenstandes im „absoluten Wissen“ von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes
In: Hegels Philosophie der RealitätSearch for other papers by Simon Schüz in
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Abstract
This paper presents a new reading of the “absolute knowing” reached in the final stage of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The paper shows that Hegel’s conception of absolute knowing is primarily that of a standpoint or attitude, rather than of a propositionally articulated idealist doctrine. It departs from the observation that Hegel’s Phenomenology is driven by the methodological challenge of educating the standpoint of natural consciousness. This challenge entails giving up a naive realist attitude towards objects in favor of the idealist attitude of “science”. I argue that the task of absolute knowing is to unify both attitudes towards objectivity in order to reach a standpoint to which the philosophical insight of “science” and its transparent connection to the stance of “natural consciousness” are simultaneously available. To this end, I analyze how the final chapter of the Phenomenology tries to achieve this task through comprehending the development of experience in the form of conceptual reflection. Drawing on Hegel’s analogy between an immanent logical development and the self-motion of the soul, I conclude that absolute knowing must be understood as a special kind of thought process: the ‘self-comprehension of the concept’. This interpretation has significant implications for the systematic relationship between the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic, which I outline at the end of the paper.