Parte de libro
The metaphilosophical implications of Hegel’s conception of absolute idealism as the true philosophy
Registro en:
9781350162600
Autor
Ferreiro, Héctor Alberto
Institución
Resumen
In the remark to the final paragraph of the chapter on ‘Existence’ (Dasein) in the Logic
of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Hegel states that the ‘ideality
of the finite is the chief proposition of philosophy’ and that ‘every true philosophy is
for that reason idealism’ (EL,1
§95 R; ENZ, §95 Anm.). At the end of the chapter on
‘Existence’ in the Science of Logic (1832) Hegel claims, further, that ‘every philosophy
is essentially idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then
is only how far this principle is carried out’ (SL, 124; WdL, GW21, 142). Along this
line, Hegel conceives of absolute idealism not only as the result of the entire history
of philosophy but also as the philosophical system that reveals, by developing it and
formulating it adequately, what the precedent philosophies, mostly unknowingly, tried
to develop and formulate, namely a general theory about reality based on the principle
of the unity of being and thought. According to Hegel, every particular philosophy
throughout history expounded in a successive, partial and complementary way the
process of identification of being and thought; inasmuch as the system of absolute
idealism assumes the latently idealist theses present in former philosophies, it makes
those theses explicit and expounds as its own internal development the process of
the identification of being and thought. Thus, absolute idealism is, for Hegel, the
philosophy that shows what philosophy is actually about.
It is not by chance that Hegel explicitly mentions idealism in the context of
his exposition of the category of ‘existence’ (or ‘being-determinate’). If the most
basic ontological category is ‘something’ (Etwas) – as it was arguably the case, for
example, in Kant´s philosophy2
– existence has still to be added to that possible
something so that it actually exists. In this framework, existence is as such the other
of the determinate content that the knowing subject knows, that is, the other of
determinacy (Bestimmtheit). Hegel, on the contrary, claims that being becomes itself being-determinate and, further, the existing determinate thing (Daseiendes) (EL §90;
ENZ §90; SL, 88–90; WdL, GW21, 102–103; see also WdL, GW11, 65–66)...