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In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Absolute Knowing (das absolute Wissen) is the final stage of the Geist’s (Spirit’s) self-development. According to Hegel it is the point at which consciousness has grasped that all of reality, i.e. nature, history, thought etc. is a dialectical process, and that thought itself is part of that process. In Absolute Knowing, Geist recognizes itself in the world: subject and object, thought and being, are reconciled. So it’s “absolute” not because knowledge is finished once and for all, but because knowledge has become fully self-conscious of its method i.e. dialectics.[1]
The materialist conception[edit | edit source]
The materialist conception of Absolute Knowing is recognition that the world is a process of contradictions and transformations, and that human thought must grasp and participate in that process; absolute knowledge doesn’t mean omniscience, but the recognition that truth is concrete, historically conditioned, and verified in practice. While simultaneously rejecting the final metaphysical closure, Lenin writes:
Alias:
Man’s consciousness
not only reflects the ob-
jective world, but cre-
ates it.[2]
Lenin clarifies that "creates" here does not mean creation ex nihilo from pure thought. It means that through human labor and revolutionary practice, we actively reshape the material world according to our purposes (material necessities which themselves are not determinate but create potential tendencies which our material conditioned will tends to but not definitely as an absolute bend to), and in doing so, we test and validate our ideas. This is the materialist conception of practice that collapses Hegel's transcendental Geist back into the activity of material human beings.
Further reading[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ “The experience which consciousness has concerning itself can, by its essential principle, embrace nothing less than the entire system of consciousness, the whole realm of the truth of mind, and in such wise that the moments of truth are set forth in the specific and peculiar character they here possess — i.e. not as abstract pure moments, but as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself appears in its relation to them, and in virtue of which they are moments of the whole, are embodiments or modes of consciousness. In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it, with what is only for it and exists as an other; it will reach a position where appearance becomes identified with essence, where, in consequence, its exposition coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind. And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will connote the nature of absolute knowledge itself.”
G.W.F. Hegel (1807). Phänomenologie des Geistes or The Phenomenology of Spirit: 'Introduction'. - ↑ “Alias:
Man’s consciousness
not only reflects the ob-
jective world, but cre-
ates it.”
V.I. Lenin (1914-09 to 1914-12). [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch03.htm "Conspectus of Hegel’s book, The Science of Logic, Book III (Subjective Logic orthe Doctrine of the Notion)."] Marxists.org.