Absolute Knowing and Presentation

Abstract

There is reason to believe that Hegel would consider our concern with presentation a form of contemporary “misology”, — the retreat of thought from the substantial contradictions of its own making to a mere interest in the vagaries of the immediate. But this concern, endemic to much current philosophic thought, represents a mediation of the present with the past in a truly speculative sense, for it is with the self-consciousness of the current standpoint that antecedent configurations progressively reveal their absolute depth. Let it be added that the necessities of presentation are particularly integral to the realization of Hegelian science, and it is our position that the link between absolute knowing, and the system proper, cannot be understood aside from the act of presentation itself.