tianity. The last, which Hegel speaks about in an oblique and guarded way as
the “Unhappy Consciousness,” is critiqued in what amounts to a review of the
main religious confessions and their respective practices of devotionalism,
pietistic moral action, and monastic self-mortification. At the end of the Phe-
nomenology, the Absolute Knowledge which rises above the state, religion, and
art is “Philosophical Science as the self-comprehension of Spirit” (Hegel,
[1807] 1967: xiii; cf. 805–808). At Berlin, Hegel’s most elaborate and fre-
quently repeated lectures were those on the history of philosophy.
For Hegel, metaphysics is historical, and is identical with epistemology.
When he first summarizes his system, the terms he uses comment equally well
on the history of philosophy: “Consciousness first finds in self-consciousness
... its turning-point, where it leaves the parti-coloured show of the sensuous
immediate, passes from the dark void of the transcendent and remote super-
sensuous, and steps into the spiritual daylight of the present” (Hegel, [1807]
1967: 227). This could be a résumé of the world of primitive nature, passing
through medieval religion, emerging into modernity; it expresses equally a
compressed intellectual history from the Enlightenment materialists to the
Idealists (with an oblique reference to Schelling, from under whose wing Hegel
was just breaking), and finally to Hegel’s system itself.
Hegel sets out by demonstrating that dialectic dissolves the sensory world
of commonsense impressions. Any ordinary object is made up of qualities
which distinguish it from other things. But each quality is what it is only in
relation to other qualities that it is not; an apple is what it is by virtue of not
being an orange. In a rather explicitly Fichtean formula, Hegel comments that
the identity of A (A A) depends on the fact that A is opposed to not-A. The
object dissolves in a sea of relations, not unlike Indra’s net in Hua-yen Bud-
dhism. With the characteristic touch of Idealism, Hegel formulates the qualities
of objects not as being-for-itself (Ansichsein) but as being-for-another (An-
dersein).
Hegel’s Cartesian starting point, leaving the self to be developed later, is
the Here and Now of sensory immediacy. Here and Now negate all other
moments and elsewheres of being. Although objects and relationships change,
Here and Now are constant, universal throughout; the radically particular
implies something universal. What is preserved through the flux of time stands
over against every other thing that it has been, as things continuously perish
into something else, as being-for-itself. Being is not univocal, but comes in
modalities: a fundamental distinction is between being something, a determi-
nate being (Seiendes), and being-as-such, the undetermined (Sein). Being is the
predicate of every thing, but being as such is not a thing, it is nothing, “pure
indeterminateness and vacuity” (Hegel, [1812–1816] 1929: 1:149). This is the
position later revised in existentialist form by Sartre. Hegel uses it to generate
658 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths