Hegel's Science of Logic achieves its conclusion with a chapter on the ‘absolute Idea’ that parallels the ending of other works such as the ‘absolute Knowing’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the ‘absolute Spirit’ chapter of the Encyclopedia. However, the ending of the Logic claims special systematic attention due to the fact that Hegel presents here the ‘discourse on method’ of his philosophy. The method of philosophy — of philosophical thinking and philosophical knowing — is the method of speculative logic. This logic “takes the place” of the old metaphysics — of the traditional metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis — going beyond Kant's own critique and proposing a new science that establishes itself as the “eigentliche Metaphysik”. The project of concluding this new speculative metaphysics with a theory of method is complicated by the double systematic placing that Hegel attributes to his logic which, at the same time, figures as the very first and very last science of the whole system of philosophy. In this perspective, the absolute Idea of the Logic gains its double relation to the phenomenological ‘absolute knowing’ and to the highest moment of ‘absolute spirit’.

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.

It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

Philosophers may disagree with unmatched zeal, but no philosophical controversy can free them from their common dependence upon the concept as a privileged vehicle of truth. Even when embracing the most radical empiricism or the most unyielding scepticism, philosophers cannot help but make conceptual arguments. All their efforts may aim at curing themselves of addiction to the concept, but so long as they reason on behalf of experience or the suspension of judgment, thinking remains the element in which their claims live and die.

Philosophers' perennial use of conceptual argument might seem a double curse, subverting all of philosophy's equally perennial aspirations to seize the truth. To begin with, if philosophical investigation constitutively employs concepts, how can it possibly establish the validity of conceptual determination? If philosophy cannot fail to use concepts to legitimate reason as a midwife of truth, will philosophical investigation not fall into the vicious circularity of relying upon an instrument that can never be certified without taking its reliability for granted? Secondly, if philosophy must always utilize concepts to arrive at truth, must philosophers not presuppose that the object of true knowledge is what is conceptually determinate? Besides being beyond philosophical justification, will this assumption not limit objectivity to a mortuary of changeless universals from which all becoming, all particulars, and indeed, all actual existence are excluded as some inconceivable illusions? Will the only objectivity that philosophy can conceive be a phantom realm of ideas that can never correspond to genuine reality?

“Hegel achieved the most miraculous things,” wrote Karl Popper. “A master logician it was child's play for his powerful dialetical method to draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical hats”.

It is a serious charge, supported by Hegel's preference for Kepler over Newton, his ‘deduction of the actual position of the planets’ while ignoring the recent discovery of the planet Ceres, and his claim that ‘magnetizing iron increases its weight’.

Because Popper is so convinced that Hegel is a fraud, he does not deign to investigate the actual pattern of Hegel's argument. The obscure, abstract vocabulary is dismissed as bombast and tautology.

The aim of this essay is to cast light on the puzzling transition from logic to nature that is stated at the end of Hegel's Science of Logic. The passage is summed up by the famous intriguing sentence about the absolute idea freely resolving to let itself go.

Firstly, I shall sketch the, so to speak, “divine” features of the absolute philosophical knowing that is to be developed in the Encyclopaedia system. My point is to account for the relationship between the standpoint reached by the Phenomenology of Spirit and the content of the Logic, regarded as the presentation of God as he is in his eternal essence.

Secondly, I shall focus attention on the way in which the developed idea of philosophical knowing is systematically displayed in the Encyclopaedia. My point is now to account for: i) the mutual relationships among the three parts of philosophical science (science of logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of spirit); and ii) the relationship between these parts and the whole of philosophy.

Thirdly, I shall examine the two main and opposite standard interpretations of the transition from the first to the second part of the Encyclopaedia. My point here is to challenge the conceptual presuppositions of the readings under consideration, by means of a close examination of the revised editions of Hegel's text.

Fourthly, I shall argue for a different view. My last point is to focus on the character of the absolute idea's self-determination. It involves letting the determination of the distinction exist as something independent, so that the “other” obtains the determinacy of “other-being”, of an actual entity. Therefore it must be distanced from the divine way of generating (the Father-Son relationship) that is the form of love. I shall conclude by discussing the implications of Hegel's use of the notion of “creation” and his paradoxical definition of nature as being the Son and not the Son of God.

Given its centrality to the intellectual thought processes through which the great structures of logic, nature, and spirit are unfolded it is clear that mediation is vital to the very possibility of Hegel's encyclopaedic philosophy. Yet Hegel gives little specific explanation of the concept of mediation. Surprisingly, it has been the subject of even less attention by scholars of Hegel. Nevertheless it is casually used in discussions of Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophy as though its meaning were simple and straightforward. In these discussions mediation is the thesis that meanings are not atomic in that the independence of something is inseparable from its relation to something else. Hence being is mediated by nothing, the particular by the universal, the individual by society. But does Hegel ever explain mediation in a way which justifies such use of the concept? The same easy employment of mediation is found in Theodor Adorno whose works are replete with the use of this concept and, indeed, acknowledgements of its Hegelian origin. But the concept of mediation in Adorno's negative dialectic is operative in an entirely different context from that of Hegel. How, it might be asked, can a concept be so adaptable? I want to argue that mediation is, in fact, an equivocal term which in both Hegel and Adomo covers a variety of entirely different conceptual relations. Furthermore, as propounded by both Hegel and Adorno it lacks the rigour which could allow the particular conclusions which the concept allegedly facilitates.