Hegel's Philosophy of Absolute Spirit – How Spirit Comes to Know Itself

Hegel’s system does not end with the state but with art, religion and philosophy. This book explains why, and examines whether this ending is a withdrawal from the world.

“We may well find the Greek statues of the gods excellent,” says Hegel, “but it is no help; we bow the knee no longer.” Sentences like this are the source of the thesis of the end of art. The book reads them word by word: what according to Hegel is past is not art but its highest vocation, to be the form in which a culture assures itself of its truth – and it says how the thesis could be tested today. In this way it goes through the whole of absolute spirit: art as knowing in intuition, religion as knowing in representation, philosophy as comprehending thought.

In the Encyclopaedia this part takes up barely thirty pages; the lectures fill eight volumes. The book opens up the paragraphs of 1830 from the lectures, primarily on the basis of the students’ transcripts in the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works).

Structure

Part I defines absolute spirit and leads from the state to religion, with Hegel’s statement that the state rests on it. Part II interprets art: the beauty of art, the artist, the symbolic, classical and romantic forms of art, the arts from architecture to poetry, art as something past. Part III deals with religion: its concept, the sequence of stages of the determinate religions, the consummate religion in its three kingdoms, the proofs of God’s existence and the split in the Hegelian school. Part IV leads to philosophy, to the charge of pantheism, which Hegel corrects using the Bhagavad Gita and Rumi, to the history of philosophy and to the three syllogisms at the end of the Encyclopaedia. Three concluding chapters ask whether the sequence art, religion, philosophy is the only one, respond to an objection and look back.

What is special

Each chapter begins with a guiding question and first states Hegel’s thought in plain language; sections “On the text” provide wording, versions and transcripts for specialist readers. The concluding chapters take up Vittorio Hösle’s objection that for Hegel contemplation is the final goal and absolute spirit has no effect back on practice. The book answers with five circles of feedback – between the three forms, on state and society, on the practice of the individual, between the religions and on the body – and in each case separates what is in Hegel, what can be derived from him and what goes beyond him. What philosophy gives to action is, according to this book, a standard: it measures what exists against what it itself claims to be.

Relation to the other books

The absolute idea and Hegel’s talk of God are developed in Hegel’s Logic – Logic of Thinking. The path to absolute spirit is taken in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit – How Nature Becomes Will and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – How Freedom Becomes Real; the shapes of art and religion in the Phenomenology are dealt with in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – How Certainty Becomes Truth. How Feuerbach and Marx inverted Hegel’s philosophy of religion is shown in Hegel and Marx – To Comprehend and to Change.

Bibliography

Year

2026

Edition

Hegel Interpretations Edition · Absolute Spirit

Licence

Copyright

Where to buy

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Price: 14.90 EUR/USD

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