I’ve been thinking about whether Hegel intended Absolute Knowing in the Phenomenology of Spirit to be a final achievement or a new mode of inquiry.
If every stage of consciousness is overcome through internal contradiction and Aufhebung (sublation), what prevents Absolute Knowing from being subject to the same dialectical movement? Is it truly the completion of Spirit’s phenomenological journey, or does it mark the beginning of an indefinitely self-reflective process in which thought continually revises itself while remaining fully aware of its own conditions?
In other words, is Absolute Knowing best understood as a fixed philosophical standpoint, or as an ongoing activity of rational self-mediation that never ceases to develop?
I’m especially interested in interpretations grounded in Hegel’s text rather than later Hegelian traditions.

He talks about how perception makes it seem that philosophy only talks about these abstract categories of the understanding. Who is he talking about? I thought about Locke and Hume but I'm not sure if I'm right.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I'm to understand that truth arrives from a resolution of contradictions and that every thesis and antithesis may resolve themself into a new, better idea, then what implications would this have on large language models and AI in general? Could the process of comparing a thesis and antithesis be somehow simulated within the math of a machine learning model, and would this allow for artificial general intelligence?

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In the movement of Spirit, the thing is not exhausted by its aim, for that aim remains merely formal and abstract. Rather, it is only in its elaboration. Through the labor of the negative that the concept attains its concrete actuality. Nor is the result the truth in isolation, but only the result as it emerges together with its own becoming, the unity of the in itself and the for itself.

The aim taken by itself is a lifeless universal, a dead abstraction while the tendency, as yet unactualized, drifts without substance, lacking the self movement that would raise it to true Being.

why would modern leftists and even foundational leftists like marx agree with hegel's work when his beliefs are the opposite to theirs

Hello friends. I was in conversation with Prof. Gregory B. Sadler. And this is a clip from the same. Let me know your views on this. Thank you!

In addition, I’ve been reading Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza recently and I’ve been building up to Deleuze. What do you think of the opinion that Deleuze fundamentally misunderstood, even “strawmanned” Hegel.

Hegel frequently describes Spirit as becoming itself through recognition, mediation, and historical self-development. This seems to imply that selfhood is intrinsically relational rather than self-contained.
My question is whether this commits Hegel to the view that individuality is always derivative of a more universal process of Spirit, or whether there remains an irreducible first-person standpoint that cannot be fully aufgehoben into the universal.
Put differently: if every determination of the self is mediated, is there anything about subjectivity that is immediate in principle, or is immediacy itself always retrospectively constituted through mediation?
Would Hegel regard the search for an ontologically fundamental, self-subsisting subject as a category mistake, or is there room within his system for a form of individuality that is not simply a moment of Absolute Spirit’s self-relation?

Incorporealism holds that consciousness, experience, and meaning are more fundamental than material reality. This seems to share some similarities with Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, where reality is understood as the unfolding of Geist (Spirit) through history and self-consciousness.
Would Hegel view an incorporeal ontology as a legitimate extension of his philosophy, or would he reject it for neglecting the role of material and historical mediation in the development of Spirit? How might Hegel’s dialectical method evaluate the claim that consciousness is ontologically primary?

I often see people trying trying to use Hegelian jargon to talk about concrete events in an unbearably pretentious way, but Hegel affirms in multiple places that ”real life” as such is not dialectical, it is subject to the either/or and categories of reflection - in the second zusatz to the body of the shorter logic for example, there is also a discussion of this in the section on being in the greater logic. In the same way, Kant in the introduction to Metaphysics of Morals mocks people for using his technical terms in “popular” settings. If you think the point of Hegel is that things change, and contradiction drives change, then you didn’t understand him - this is a banal commonplace. And if you dress up some social or political commentary in Hegelian dialectic you are pretentious and pseudoscientific. You can “use” dialectic to say anything, true or false, from a certain view on world history to Schellingian mumbojumbo, or really anything you like, that’s why Hegel tells you NOT to schematize. Hegel’s logic is not a “tool” you can use to go think about Israel or agriculture; it’s actually quite useless, any teleological process trivially exhibits “negativity” and can be gussied up in pseudologic. In this way bullshitters (sorry) can make their asinine opinions sound profound and scientific. (I would argue that this is what Hegel does as well but I shouldn’t say that I suppose or I’ll get le downvoted by undergrads and Starbucks Marxists - the horror!) If you want concrete examples of great thinkers playing around with logical language to make points that do not truly rest on Hegelian logic but rather on various presuppositions (empirical or otherwise) just look at Marx and Kierkegaard - or Hegel, for that matter. People who think Hegel gives you a “method” you can go out and “use“ should spend less time huffing their own farts and watching Zizek videos and more time thinking and studying. They should start by rereading Hegel; they’ll find their perspective attacked right from the start, in the preface to the Phenomenology. And if you hurl that quote at me from the greater Logic, to the effect that absolutely everything is dialectical and subject to negativity, I will reach through my screen and buffet you on the nose because you didn’t understand a word I said.

I have been reading POS and so far only have read the preface but now I have started learning German, just passed the A1 level after two weeks to try to understand and dwell upon it perhaps from an advantageous point also to be able to study it further in a German university. I have seen many words so far in the preface that just feel a little off of another meaning of that same word. It is not I think that Hegel is not trying to simplify as much as possible and these translation also get away the feeling of understanding it as it was thought by Hegel.
Like think of the word Sein; it is just an extracted out meaning as we’re translating it, we just add an explanation of few lines and move from that but the very presence of the linguistic terms in the whole of German literature and life is in itself another thing, to feel that emergence out of this nation of the word.
Sein, seid etc seem to me content this spirit. Hegel does not like judging but for our game it can play some part in understanding German culture to somehow make us disbelieve something.
Hegel mixed up a lot of words as it is very common in German and to me it feels a little exciting just to be able to see why the thing is as it is in the topic.
My question rather is… has anyone who who speak an alien language as to German tried that and how has that paid off for you?

Recently, I’ve been learning a bit about Salomon Maimon and I’m looking for other philosophers from the era between Hegel and Kant wherein post-Kantianism was first developing. Which ones specifically influenced Hegel?

I’ve been thinking about whether Hegel’s concept of Geist should primarily be understood as an ontological feature of reality or as the culmination of an epistemological process.
If Absolute Knowing is the point at which subject and object are reconciled, does Hegel mean that reality itself is fundamentally self-developing through Geist, or is he describing the conditions under which consciousness comes to fully comprehend reality?
Put differently, is the dialectic something that belongs to Being itself, or is it a structure of rational cognition that retrospectively appears ontological because thought ultimately grasps its own conditions?
How do you reconcile Hegel’s claims about Absolute Spirit with contemporary philosophy of mind or process metaphysics? Does reading Hegel as an ontological idealist remain the strongest interpretation, or is there a more compelling non-metaphysical reading of Geist?

Hello all, I just started reading Hegel's POS and I wanted some of your perspectives. I've only just started the first 10 pages, so I'm pretty fresh. I promise you I am coming in good faith, though I haven't decided on where I stand with his philosophy quite yet because I haven't finished fully analyzing it (which may take a while, lol. It's quite dense in places and I have ADHD. But I'm committed to understanding it.)

Anyway, I had two questions:

-> What makes Hegel the authority on truth? -> Where does genuine human emotion lie in Hegel's philosophy if we are to prioritize absolute knowledge over "sensuous immediacy?" (quote from the foreword, which I'm assuming is an accurate statement on Hegel's beliefs.)

If I'm off base here I apologize, it's just coming off a bit, let's say, robotic to me. I am wondering where the humanity is in here, but that might be explained later. I just wanted some third-party perspectives on it.

It's like when something becomes another thing but then this other thing also becomes another thing. You know how sometimes something is true and not true at the same time. Well that's what's called a dialectic. It basically means that stuff is like changing into other stuff. Like how people back in the day had different opinions than now? That's called Welt Geist. Like these days we think some things are wrong but in the past they thought it was good so it's like things are becoming better.

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In the grand dialectic of existence, what is a mere Gap in the linear chronology of a résumé but a necessary negation. A moment of becoming? While capital demands continuity, the Phenomenology of Spirit reminds us that true development unfolds through contradiction, alienation, and the labor of the negative.

If you’re an adult enough, you know there are things you radically can’t change throughout the course of life: maybe you were born a social minority, have a physical condition, have gone through a business failure and are financially suffering, gotten incarcerated, etc.

These are what we get to suck up as “necessities” as opposed to contingencies, shaping up our “fate.”

Why is it often said, “all publicity is good publicity?” Because bad publicity can be painful at that time, but it ends up expanding your base. In a Hegelian life, it’s Bildung (formation) that eventually increases your autonomous capacity through the foreign limit. Less by some firm faith and more by knowing the difference of nominal vs. pragmatic.

Hegel’s notion of freedom is unique in this sense that it always goes hand-in-hand with control, which resonates with Begriff (as in “grip”), the German word for “concept”: a kid that throws tantrums might look more free in the immediate sense, but no one would say he’s freer than an adult that knows how to control himself and is capable of doing far more in the world.

So if you did all you could about a bad situation and still became condemned to it, maybe it is meant to shape you further in some way: contradiction turning out to be contribution in its alterity of necessity. I think knowing Hegel entails keeping this in mind in viewing both life and history: as a categorical rule per logic, if it’s necessary, then it is always already good.

Just thought it was a good Hegelian mantra to share for anyone to benefit from.

(Or of course you could refute like “wouldn’t this weaken the desire to revolutionize the status quo” or whatever if you want, all dialectic good dialectic too)

I’ve been thinking about Hegel’s concept of Spirit as the historical process through which reason and self-consciousness come to know themselves. If future AI systems become capable of participating in culture, institutions, and shared rational discourse, would Hegel view them as merely products of Spirit’s development, or could they become participants in that process?
Would this contradict Hegel’s conception of Geist, or is there room within his philosophy for new forms of intelligence to contribute to the unfolding of self-conscious reason?

Is Hegel's system dependent on the universality of Euclidean geometry? That is, that there are certain axioms that define with finality what forms infinite space can take?

This would be consistent with Kantian metaphysics, which used Euclidean geometry as proof of the efficacy of synthetic reasoning. That is, Euclidean geometry is proof of reasoning that applies both to Concepts and Intuitions.

In Hegel's work, this takes on a more Platonic flavor, where "bad" infinity is limited in concrete, definite ways by universally-valid postulates. The infinite is self-limiting, can only be folded up in a finite number of ways.

Now here's where I think I'm in over my head. Wouldn't Fractal and other Non-Euclidean geometries disprove such a position? That is, they make geometry appear to be a localized, relational phenomenon. I don't understand Non-Euclidean geometry (or Chaos Theory) well enough to say for sure, but it would seem that, at minimum, these frameworks interrupt the alleged finality of Euclidean systems.

Am I missing something here? Can someone tell me if I am completely off-base? Admittedly, I have very little knowledge of mathematical theory. But my vague understanding of these concepts suggests that they might upend traditional metaphysics (including those of Hegel). Who wants to help set me straight?

In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel presents self-consciousness as developing through recognition by another self-consciousness. Do you interpret recognition as a necessary condition for consciousness itself, or only for fully developed self-consciousness? How, if at all, might this distinction apply to advanced AI or isolated minds?