Frank Kogan

Well, I've got Kaufmann's explication on a facing page - otherwise I'd probably really be at sea - but one thing I take to be going on here (other than Hegel being a corrective to various German guys whose names begin with Sch) is the dismantling of mind vs. matter, dismantling the model that has the mind (Subject) either trying to get matter (Substance) right or trying to get itself right. So for Hegel, Substance isn't just sitting out there in its fullness as an expression of the Absolute, since Substance had a past and has a future, moves from here to there, has directions and purposes, all of these things that one (if one is a German philosopher in Hegel's time) would attribute to Subjects not to Substances, so - possibly - Hegel has moved the Subject inside the Substance. (If that's what he's doing it's a neat trick, reversing Kant, who'd for practical purposes moved Substance inside of Subject [if I've got my Kant right, and I wouldn't bet the farm on that].)

I think I'm reading this the way you do (though since we've read some of the same post-Hegels we might be misled in a similar direction): I think "methodology" is the right word, since if we jettison the concept "Absolute" we haven't lost much; we can just make the Absolute "everything and its opposite and whatever disputes it, grasped as a whole, should it ever be able to grasp itself as a whole, and this whole of course includes the entire process of how we got here, i.e., the history of the universe including necessarily all errors and corrections in our understanding (since our judgments are part of the universe), including future errors, and obviously "here" isn't the mere here and now since the whole has to encompass everything to come as well, which actually takes us into the possibly infinite future." So Hegel is destroying the Absolute in order to save it from mysticism and intuition, that is from the idea that the Absolute is sitting right in front of us, the world being its expression, and we can grasp it straight up through intuition, without getting down among the grubby mundane of events and things and shit, and changes in events and things and shit, or actually understanding them bit by bit, stuff and its changes, or applying our mind in detailed ways, all of which is just what Hegel insists we do have to do. The historical motion of stuff through time (stuff including creatures with minds and purposes, i.e. subjects) proceeds by negation, encompasses not only what something is but what it is not, what it could turn into, what it could have been but isn't, what it forestalls, etc. - later generations would call this "difference." Or maybe I'm projecting a whole bunch of ideas onto Hegel. I'm assuming that later generations would dispense with any kind of ultimate negation of the negation, hence of the Absolute.

None of which I'd have grasped (if indeed I have grasped it) without having read post-Hegels and commentaries and facing pages and such.