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THE PHILOSOPHICAL STANDPOINT: FROM INTUITION TO NOTION THE RECONCILIATION OF THE TWO FIGURES of conscience in Phenomenology of Spirit constitutes the recognition of a universal principle in the world, realized in and through the willing and judgment of individuals. For Hegel, this movement reflects the mode by which absolute principles are realized more generally. But it is only with the unfolding of conscience that this realization happens in a self-conscious fashion. We have already explored the pathway by which consciousness comes to identify its own convictions as the truth. First, consciousness understood its ultimate truth as an external object to which it devoted itself, in state power and wealth. Then, it came to see that it itself was the real truth of things, in “pure insight” and Enlightenment thought. And yet this ‘I’ turned out to be abstract and empty; it could not realize its absolute status in the world except by destructiveness. It is only with conscience that it finds a truth within itself that it can actually assert in the world. Conscience must assert this inner truth, as we have seen, because there remains an other outside itself that threatens and conditions it. It is impelled to seek the recognition of this other in order to vindicate its inner certainty. And it is in the movement by which its truth is realized—in action, judgment, and forgiveness—that we finally see, according to Hegel in the final chapter of Phenomenology, the Absolute realizing itself in a self-conscious form. Now, the object of truth remains throughout in the mode of knowing, rather than 65 3 Philosophy of Right The Final Reconciliation of Love and Reason as an external thing.1 Thus, on the one hand conscience has overcome the idea of the Absolute as external to itself, since it finds it within, in the form of an inner certainty. On the other hand, this is a certainty that is active, which realizes itself in the world. It is only with conscience, then, that we have the real experience of the Absolute, the self-conscious knowledge of unity with being that we have been seeking all along. In this sense conscience does constitute the “transcendental intuition” of the Difference essay, the direct connection with the Absolute in its own self-positing, upon which Hegel had earlier sought to base his philosophical system. The moral will of conscience is the will of the Absolute realizing itself in human history. But the difference we see here is that Hegel no longer thinks this achievement could be an ultimate transcendence of the reflective standpoint and the basis for an immediate connection with the Absolute in all its forms. For in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “Absolute Knowing,” it becomes apparent that it is not conscience per se that can know itself as absolute (although it might assert itself as such), but the philosophical consciousness that stands beyond it and encapsulates retrospectively both the logical trajectory of experience that has brought consciousness there and the inherent rationality of what it achieves in the world. There are three points to be considered here, in terms of the inadequacy of conscience as a philosophical standpoint.The first is that, without the developmental view of consciousness’ relation to its object, the very idea that conscience contains the truth within it remains merely a subjective assertion. Only we who have been following along with the journey of consciousness can rationally establish what emerges from its experiential movement—the idea that the truth resides within. Second, even when conscience does assert its knowledge and its right, in any one instance the certainty it protests may be subjective and misguided. If it tries to overcome the subjective character of its truth by gaining the recognition of others, it may turn out to be a beautiful soul who actualizes nothing. Or if it acts, it loses the unity of its intuition, as the latter is dichotomized by the other’s views into its universal and particular aspects. Thus, the realization of intuition in the world entails its engagement once again with the reflective thinking that it believed itself to have transcended. Indeed, one of the main revelations of the dialectic of conscience is that the intuition can only realize itself through this confrontation and fragmentation, that it is only in and through the particularizing force of the modern will and reflective thought that the Absolute can be actualized in human history. Yet in the end—and this is...

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