Abstract

The aim of this paper is not to enter into a detailed discussion of the nature of the Absolute and the Individual, but to show that on the Hegelian conception of the Absolute the individual self is not saved. Hegel is fond of reiterating that his Absolute is not a bare one, but a one in many, an organic whole, a perfect and harmonious system of an infinite number of individual selves. The individual, as in Spinoza and Schelling, does not lose itself in the Absolute. The latter is not a lion's den into which all animals enter but from which none returns, not a mere darkness in which all cows are black, but a system of different individuals