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On the Borderline of Madness Absolute Wisdom The citation with which Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind concludes licenses the reader of that book to read it through the lens of Aristotle’s teaching in Metaphysics 1072b that philosophy is thinking as such and thinking in the fullest sense, where thinking as such deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thinking thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object.1 There is much talk here of the object of thought. In a phrase that owes something to Parmenides, Aristotle tells us that, where thought of the best and of the fullest is concerned, thought and the object of thought are the same, tauton nous kai noēton. If he had left it at that, the thought in question would be noetically -noematically representative. However, he also tells us that this thought is active and that its highest and fullest object is God. But if, at least for this loftiest and deepest thought, thought and the object of thought are the same, ONE 8 | MARGINS OF RELIGION the object of thought must be active, that is to say living. So the objecthood that belongs to what Aristotle refers to as the object of thought, noētos, would be that of what Hegel calls an Objekt, an objective, as contrasted with that of a Gegenstand, something standing over against the thinking. The so-called object, that is to say the objective, could then be noēsis, thinking, as when at 1074b of the Metaphysics Aristotle says that thinking of the most excellent of things is thinking of thinking, noēsis noēseōs, and as when in §237 of the Logic of the Encyclopaedia Hegel explicitly borrows this expression from Aristotle to characterize the Absolute Idea. Saying that the logic that treats of that Idea in the Encyclopaedia and in the Science of Logic is concrete is another way of saying that it is a thinking of itself, not a thinking about itself or about anything else. Hegel observes that if we wish to speak of matter and form in this context we must say that the matter is pure thought and therefore absolute form itself.2 As the realm of pure thought logic is “the realm of truth as it is without veil.” Hegel’s notion of truth here is to be contrasted with Heidegger’s notion of truth as un-concealing accompanied by concealing. After all, what Hegel is talking about is God’s truth. The absolute truth that is the content or matter of absolute thought is “the exposition (Darstellung) of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.”3 So Hegel is able to write that the Logic of the Encyclopaedia, the latter’s first part, is applied in the other two parts under the titles The Philosophy of Nature and The Philosophy of Mind. On the other hand this “lesser” Logic and the “greater” Science of Logic look back to the Phenomenology of Spirit, of which Hegel says that it is “the first part of the System of Philosophy.”4 The Absolute Idea expounded in those systems of logic presupposes the pure science of Absolute Wisdom or Absolute Knowing in which this latter work culminates. But in the Phenomenology this science has already been deduced. It is a result deduced through a series of mediative negations of negations in which competition is converted into cooperation and, starting with the simplest opposition of immediate consciousness of an object, representational consciousness is superseded, aufgehoben. The principle of formal logic that a double negative yields a positive is enough to remind us that in dialectical logic Aufhebung is a transition in which what is lost is at the same time saved. But how saved? Whereas innocent consciousness takes immediate sensory consciousness of an object to be the richest experience we can have, Hegel tells us that the mature human being has learned that “philosophical knowledge is the richest in material and organization, and therefore, as...

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