The Owl of Minerva

Volume 30, Issue 1, Fall 1998

Simon Lumsden
Pages 3-32

Absolute Knowing

In this essay, I focus on the way Hegel reconciles consciousness and self-consciousness in absolute knowing. What I want to suggest is that in absolute knowing the conscious subject comes to understand itself in terms of these conditions, providing it with the content of a new form of consciousness. It is in conceiving of itself in terms of these objective conditions for knowledge, which supersede the singularity of the self and yet are the conditions for consciousness, that the conscious subject is to be understood as self-transcending.