Abstract

The goal of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to achieve absolute knowing. Minimally, knowing can be absolute only if it is unconditioned or unlimited; that is, only if it is not essentially contrasted with some other possible knowing—say, God's—or is not restricted such that it necessarily does not pertain to certain items—say, freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, or God. Knowing can be absolute only if these items, appropriately interpreted, are within its scope. However, if it can be shown that human knowing is not limited or restricted in either of these two ways, it would then follow that we cannot contrast our conceptual scheme—human knowing as such—with the world, and, hence, we cannot even notionally contrast human knowledge of appearances with things in themselves. Initially, it is in this quite narrow sense that Hegel's project in the Phenomenology is to transform Kant's subjective or limited idealism into objective or absolute idealism by showing that items Kant took to be necessarily extrinsic to human knowing are intrinsic and constitutive of it. Thus, if we were to translate Hegel's dictum that the ground of science in general is "pure self-recognition in absolute otherness" back into Kant's lexicon, it would state that we achieve full apperceptive self-awareness, full categorial selfawareness of ourselves as knowers, only in the thing in itself. Within Hegel's own system, achieving the standpoint of absolute knowing is a necessary condition for doing logical science, and, by implication, the first part of the system as a whole, because only by demonstrating that the necessary conditions of human knowing cannot, even notionally, be contrasted with the world in itself is it possible to then work out a system of logical categories that are simultaneously categories of thought and categories of being.