G. W. F. Hegel · Philosophy
At the summit of Hegel’s system, Spirit grasps the Absolute through three forms: art (the Absolute in sensuous form), religion (in representation and feeling), and philosophy (in pure thought). In philosophy, Spirit at last knows itself as the rational whole - thought thinking itself.
We have followed Spirit out of itself into nature and back to itself through human consciousness, the master-slave struggle, and the long progress of freedom in history. Now we reach the summit of Hegel’s entire system: Absolute Spirit. This is Spirit in its highest activity - no longer merely developing through nature or struggling through history, but grasping the ultimate truth of reality, comprehending the Absolute, knowing itself as the rational whole of all that is. And Hegel makes a remarkable claim: Spirit reaches this highest knowledge through three distinct forms, which deal with one and the same ultimate content - the Absolute, the truth of reality, God - but apprehend it in three different ways, ascending in adequacy. These three forms are art, religion, and philosophy.
The crucial point is that all three have the same supreme object - the divine, the Absolute, the deepest truth of reality - but they grasp it in increasingly adequate forms. Art grasps the Absolute in sensuous form, in beautiful objects we can see and hear. Religion grasps it in the form of representation (Vorstellung) - in images, stories, symbols, and feeling, as in the narratives and rituals of faith. Philosophy grasps it in the form of pure thought - in concepts, comprehended rationally and systematically. The same truth rises through the senses, through the heart and imagination, and finally through reason. This is Hegel’s extraordinary ranking of the highest human activities: art, religion, and philosophy are not separate hobbies but three modes of one supreme endeavour - Spirit coming to know the Absolute, and so to know itself.
Art, the first form of Absolute Spirit, grasps the divine in sensuous form - it makes the Absolute visible and beautiful in material that we perceive with the senses. The highest art, for Hegel, is one in which spiritual content and sensuous form are in perfect balance, and he finds this supremely in classical Greek sculpture, where the gods are given perfect human shape, the spiritual fully expressed in the beautiful body. Greek art, he says, is the perfect embodiment of the divine in sensuous form - the high noon of art. Yet this very perfection points to art’s limit. As Spirit develops and deepens - above all in Christianity, with its sense of an inwardness and an infinity that no sensuous shape can contain - the spiritual content begins to overflow the sensuous form. The inward, infinite, spiritual truth of the modern world can no longer be adequately captured in marble or paint; it strains beyond the sensuous toward representation and thought.
This leads Hegel to one of his most famous and provocative theses: in a certain sense, art is a thing of the past. “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” He does not mean that people will stop making art, or that art is worthless - he means that art is no longer the highest way in which Spirit grasps its deepest truth, as it was for the Greeks, for whom the statue of the god was the very presence of the divine. For us moderns, Hegel argues, the deepest truths of Spirit have outgrown sensuous expression; we no longer worship statues or find ultimate truth in beauty; art has been surpassed by religion and philosophy as the vehicle of Absolute truth. We still love and need art, but we approach it reflectively, as an object of thought and appreciation, no longer as the supreme revelation of the divine. This is the ‘death of art’ thesis - not the end of art-making, but the end of art’s reign as the highest form of Spirit, a reign that has passed to forms more adequate to a Spirit grown more inward and more rational.
Philosophy is the highest form of Absolute Spirit, and in it Hegel’s entire system reaches its goal. For in philosophy, Spirit at last grasps the Absolute in the form fully adequate to it - pure thought - and in doing so, Spirit comes to complete self-knowledge. This is the culmination toward which everything has been moving. Recall that for Hegel reality is ultimately Spirit, and the whole cosmic process is Spirit going out of itself and returning to itself in self-knowledge. In philosophy, that return is completed: Spirit comprehends, in rational thought, that all the reality it has been knowing - nature, history, art, religion, itself - is Spirit; that the knower and the known are one; that reality is the self-knowing rational whole. In the philosopher’s comprehension of the Absolute, it is the Absolute comprehending itself; reality, through human philosophical thought, comes to full consciousness of what it is. This is ‘absolute knowing’: thought that knows itself as the truth of all reality.
Hegel sees this as the fulfilment of an idea as old as Aristotle: the divine as ‘thought thinking itself’, self-contemplating reason, the activity in which knower and known coincide. Philosophy, for Hegel, is reality awakened to itself - the point at which the long journey of Spirit, from the emptiest abstraction of the Logic, through nature and the whole drama of human history, arrives at its destination: Spirit, in and through human philosophical thought, knowing itself as the rational whole of all that is. This is why Hegel could end his vast Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by quoting, in the original Greek, the passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics on the divine self-thinking thought - placing his own philosophy as the completion of Aristotle’s deepest vision. The whole system is a circle: it ends where, in a sense, it began, with thought comprehending thought, but now enriched by the entire development it has traversed. Philosophy is the final form of Spirit because in it, at last, reality fully knows itself - and that self-knowledge is the truth and goal of everything that is.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Hegel’s system culminates in ‘Absolute Spirit’, which grasps the highest truth in three ascending forms: art (in sensuous form), religion (in representation), and philosophy (in pure thought). Explain these three and why philosophy is the highest, where Spirit knows itself fully.
Leads to Aristotle.
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