For the present, let us observe that Hegel adopts the standpoint of modern political economy. He sees labor as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of man; he sees only the positive and not the negative side of labor. Labor is man's coming to be for himself within alienation or as an alienated man. The only labor Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labor. So that which above all constitutes the essence of philosophy -- the alienation of man who knows himself or alienated science that thinks itself -- Hegel grasps as its essence, and is therefore able to bring together the separate elements of previous philosophies and present his own philosophy as the philosophy. What other philosophers did -- that they conceived separate moments of nature and of man's life as moments of self-consciousness, indeed, of abstract self-consciousness -- this Hegel knows by doing philosophy.
Therefore, his science is absolute.
Let us now proceed to our subject.
"Absolute Knowledge." The last chapter of the Phenomenology .
The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object. (The positing of man = self-consciousness.)
It is, therefore, a question of surmounting the object of consciousness.
Objectivity as such is seen as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to human nature, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as something alien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also objectivity. That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being.
Hegel describes the process of surmounting the object of consciousness in the following way:
The object does not only show itself as returning into the self, (according to Hegel that is a one-sided conception of the movement, a conception which grasps only one side). Man is equated with self. But the self is only abstractly conceived man, man produced by abstraction. Man is self [ selbstisch ]. His eyes, his ears, etc., have the quality of self; each one of his essential powers has this quality of self. But therefore it is quite wrong to say that self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers. Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; human nature is not a quality of self-consciousness.
The self abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist, egoism raised to its pure abstraction in thought. (We shall come back to this later.)
For Hegel, human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness.
All estrangement of human nature is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness not as the expression, reflected in knowledge and in thought, of the real estrangement of human nature. On the contrary, actual estrangement, estrangement which appears real, is in its innermost hidden nature -- which philosophy first brings to light -- nothing more than the appearance of the estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness.
The science which comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All reappropriation of estranged objective being, therefore, appears as an incorporation into self-consciousness; the man who takes hold of his being is only the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective being. The return of the object into the self is therefore the reappropriation of the object.
Expressed comprehensively, the surmounting of the object of consciousness means [the following eight points taken almost verbatim from Phenomenology, chapter "Absolute Knowledge"]:
(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something disappearing.
(2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which establishes thingness [ Dingheit ].
(3) That this alienation has not only a negative but also a positive significance. (4) That this significance is not only for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself.
(5) For self-consciousness the negative of the object, its own supersession of itself, has a positive significance -- or self-consciousness knows the nullity of the object -- in that self-consciousness alienates itself, for in this alienation it establishes itself as object of establishes the object as itself, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself.
(6) On the other hand, this other moment is also present in the process, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken back into itself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its other-being as such.
(7) This is the movement of consciousness, and consciousness is therefore the totality of its moments.
(8) Similarly, consciousness must have related itself to the object in terms of the totality of its determinations, and have grasped it in terms of each of them. This totality of determinations make the object intrinsically [an sich] a spiritual being, and it becomes that in reality for consciousness through the apprehending of each one of these determinations as determinations of self or through what we earlier called the spiritual attitude towards them.
As to (1)
That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something disappearing is the above-mentioned return of the object into self.
As to (2)
