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April 26,2025
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Heideggers reading is symptomatic(and he does not deny this, especially at the end) of his desire to salvage his prioritization of finitude, and hence consequently for him, the constitutive openness of the human being. It is always a bit arrogant for a reviewer to look at these historically situated readings and pass judgment on them for being merely wrong, since even Heidegger makes this explicit by pointing at Hegel's pressuposition of an Absolute standpoint as a product of his time and the state of the western metaphysical tradition and hence shouldn't just be merely discarded.

But even with that out of the way, i think Heidegger misses(and in this missing, this erring, Heidegger's originality as a thinker is constituted) that Hegel is not a thinker of closure, of reducing philosophy to an arrogant completion based on his present, rather. In the phenomenology, Hegel allows us to think how truth is always a retrospective affair, how Truth is both this process of recollection and the subsequent openness to historicity of ones own position, and hence to futurity which it provides. This is the lesson of the Absolute Knowing chapter on which the Phenomenology ends, it is not a completion of thought in a naive sense of absoluteness. but a realization of its own condition in modernity as existentially lost and "groundless". The ability to open ones self up to the future, to the movement of history amidst this stance. The Absolute is internalized when Spirit, in modernity, realizes the Death of God himself as the truth of the Absolute itself, that alienation is irreducible and the minimal condition for the freedom of spirit which becomes an explicit cultural signifier within the discourse of modernity. Nonetheless, Heideggers project may have been a necessary detour which 20th century philosophy needed for us to arrive at Hegels reappropriation within a proper defense of him in the contemporary voices of people like Malabou, and for that we must appreciate this reading.
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