Philosophy, Religion, and the End of Hegel

Abstract

I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy:A new epoch has arisen in the world. It seems as if the world spirit has succeeded in casting off everything in objective reality which is alien to itself, in order to comprehend itself as absolute spirit: to produce its own objective world from itself and to keep that world serenely in its own power. The struggle of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which once appeared as an alien reality, is now coming to an end. The finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and, by the same token, the absolute self-consciousness has achieved the reality which it formerly lacked. The whole of world history and especially the history of philosophy is the representation of this conflict. History now seems to have achieved its goal, when the absolute self-consciousness is no longer something alien; when the spirit is real as spirit. For spirit is this only when it knows itself to be absolute spirit; and this it knows in speculative science (Wissemchaft).