Editing Absolute idealism (section)

==Schelling and Hegel's concepts of the absolute==
According to the scholar [[Andrew Bowie (philosopher)|Andrew Bowie]], Hegel's system depends upon showing how each view and positing of how the world is really has an internal contradiction: "This necessarily leads thought to more comprehensive ways of grasping the world, until the point where there can be no more comprehensive way because there is no longer any contradiction to give rise to it."<ref name="SEPSchel"/>

For Hegel, the interaction of opposites generates, in a [[dialectic]]al fashion, all concepts necessary to comprehend what is. 

For Kant, reason was only for us, and the categories only emerged within the subject. However, for Hegel, reason is fully immanent. Spirit emerges from nature in history and, in art, religion, and philosophy, knows itself in its truth. 

Hegel shows that the world is not other than self. With the realization that mind and world are, by logical necessity, meaningfully coherent, our access to the world is made secure, a security that was lost in Kant's proclamation that the [[thing-in-itself]] was ultimately inaccessible.

Hegel's position is a critical transformation of the concept of the absolute advanced by [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling]] (1775–1854), who argued for a philosophy of Identity; as articulated by Bowie:

{{blockquote|text=‘Absolute identity’ is, then, the ''link'' of the two aspects of being, which, on the one hand, is the ''uni''verse, and, on the other, is the changing ''multi''plicity which the knowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that “The ''I'' think, ''I'' am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality” (SW I/7, p. 148),<ref>{{Cite book|last=Schelling|first=F.W.J.|title=Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling, I Abtheilung Vols. 1–10, II Abtheilung Vols. 1–4, Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61.|location=Stuttgart}}</ref> so the I is ‘affirmed’ as a predicate of the being by which it is preceded.<ref name="SEPSchel"/>}}

For Schelling, the absolute is a causeless 'ground' upon which relativity (difference and similarity) can be discerned by human judgement (and thus permit 'freedom' itself) and this ground must be simultaneously not of the 'particular' world of finites, but also not wholly different from them (or else there would be no commensurability with empirical reality, objects, sense data, etc. to be compared as 'relative' or otherwise).

In both Schelling and Hegel's systems (especially the latter), the project aims towards a completion of metaphysics. As Redding describes it: "While opinions divide as to how Hegel's approach to logic relates to that of Kant, it is important to grasp that for Hegel logic is not simply a science of the form of our thoughts. It is also a science of actual ''content'' as well, and as such has an ontological dimension."<ref>{{Citation|last=Redding|first=Paul|title=Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|date=2020|url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/hegel/|encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|editor-last=Zalta|editor-first=Edward N.|edition=Spring 2020|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|access-date=2020-04-15}}</ref>

For Schelling, reason was an organic 'striving' in nature, and this striving was one in which the subject and the object approached an identity. Schelling saw reason as the link between spirit and the phenomenal world, as [[Quentin Lauer|Lauer]] explains: "For Schelling [...] nature is not the negative of reason, to be submitted to it as reason makes the world its home, but has since its inception been turning itself into a home for reason."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Lauer|first=Christopher|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WRv3oc6fJzoC&q=Schelling+reason&pg=PT57|title=The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling|date=2011-11-03|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1-4411-1588-1|language=en}}</ref> 

Hegel's doubts about intellectual intuition's ability to prove or legitimate that the particular is in identity with whole led him to progressively formulate a [[Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel#Dialectics,_speculation,_idealism|speculative dialectic]] in which concepts like ''[[Aufheben|Aufhebung]]'' came to be articulated. [[Frederick C. Beiser|Beiser]] summarizes the early formulation as follows:

<blockquote>a) Some finite concept, true of only a limited part of reality, would go beyond its limits in attempting to know all of reality. It would claim to be an adequate concept to describe the absolute because, like the absolute, it has a complete or self-sufficient meaning independent of any other concept. 

b) This claim would come into conflict with the fact that the concept depends for its meaning on some other concept, having meaning only in contrast to its negation. There would then be a contradiction between its claim to independence and its de facto dependence upon another concept. 

c) The only way to resolve the contradiction would be to reinterpret the claim to independence, so that it applies not just to one concept to the exclusion of the other but to the whole of both concepts. Of course, the same stages could be repeated on a higher level, and so on, until we come to the complete system of all concepts, which is alone adequate to describe the absolute.<ref>{{Cite book|date=2008-11-17|editor-last=Beiser|editor-first=Frederick C.|title=The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy|doi=10.1017/ccol9780521831673|isbn=9780521539388}}</ref>{{failed verification|date=July 2023}}</blockquote>

Hegel's innovation in German Idealism was to theorize a historical mode of self-consciousness self-reflection capable of generating a more inclusively holistic understanding of what it ultimately means to be rational in the grand scheme of things.