Hegel's Apotheosis of Logic

This book presents what Hegel calls &quote;the vital spirit of the actual world&quote;, the truth, namely, of logic's form and content as one concrete whole. Axiomatic here is that thinking is necessarily free and unbounded, if we could escape a performative contradiction in evaluating it. Thinking is absolute, what Hegel calls spirit or mind, Geist. He identifies three forms of &quote;absolute spirit&quote;, namely art, religion and philosophy, where each form is absorbed into the next one; philosophy subsumes religion and religion subsumes art, in a process seeking and achieving the absolute. Philosophy, therefore, is ultimately theology as fulfilling the latter in mind's constitutive self-transcendence towards &quote;the absolute idea&quote;, itself the absolute, Hegel asserts. This is &quote;absolute idealism&quote;, where the Idea is true being and finite things are transitory notions. This book aims to clarify such conceptions, whereby &quote;theological&quote; transcendent grace is natural or &quote;all in all&quote;, faith is absolute knowledge in germ, things are the opposite of what they &quote;immediately&quote; seem, while achieved self-consciousness is &quote;the ruin of the individual&quote; abstractly parted from its objects. Thus external nature is internal, the whole in or one with the part, necessity absolute freedom, these being stages of Logic.Hegel needs a second, related trio to the above three forms. This is logic, nature and mind, likewise, in ceaseless process, a returning upon self. Thus art's foundational quality mirrors that of &quote;the logical art&quote;. The individual art-object, art as striving for absolute perfection, founds spirit's trajectory. Hence, consciousness first appears individual only as set towards universal self-consciousness in &quote;absolute knowing&quote;.