#absolute knowledge

But the goal is not as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way. Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence. but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own. it is something that goes beyond itself. With the positing of a single particular, the beyond is also established for consciousness, even if it is only alongside the limited object as in the case of spatial intuition. Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction. When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.

If nothing more is said of something than that it is 'an actual thing,' an 'external object,' its description is only the most abstract of generalities and in fact expresses it's sameness with everything, rather than it's distinctiveness. When I say: 'a single thing,' I am really saying what it is from a wholly universal point of view, for everything is a single thing; and likewise 'this thing' is anything if you like. If we describe it more exactly as 'this bit of paper,' then each and every bit of paper is 'this bit of paper,' and I have only uttered the universal all the time. But if I wanted to help out the language ---which has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all --- by pointing out this bit of paper, experience teaches me what the truth of sense-certainty in fact is: I point out as a 'Here,' which is a Here of other Heres, or is in its own self a 'simple togetherness of many Heres;' i.e. it is a universal. I take it up then as it is in truth, and instead of knowing something immediate, I take the truth of it, or perceive it.

This simple infinity, or the absolute notion, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed, nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none. This self-identical essence is therefore related only to itself; 'to itself' implies relationship to an 'other,' and the relation-to-self is rather a self-sundering; or, in other words, that very self-identicalness is an inner difference. These sundered moments are thus in and for themselves, each an opposite--of an other; thus in each moment the 'other' is at the same time expressed; or each is not the opposite of an 'other' but only a pure opposite; and so each is therefore in its own self the opposite of itself.

For us, or in itself, the universal as principle is the essence of perception, and, in contrast to this abstraction, both the moments distinguished -- that which perceives and that which is perceived -- are the unessential. But, in fact, because both are themselves the universal or the essence, both are essential. Yet since they are related to each other as opposites, only one can be the essential moment in the relation, and the distinction of essential and unessential moment must be shared between them. One of them, the object, defined as the simple (entity), is the essence regardless of whether it is perceived or not; but the act of perceiving, as a movement, is the unessential moment, the unstable factor which can as well be as not be.

It is known that Hegel asserted that his knowledge is circular, and the circularity is the necessary and sufficient condition of absolute truth--that is, of complete, universal and definitive (or "eternal") truth.

Knowledge is universal when it arrives at the point of giving us the sense of things before whose greatness and eternity all pathos and human tendency disappears: when it introduces in the primordial, in the cosmic, in all that which in the field of the spirit has the same characteristics of purity and of power of oceans, deserts, glaciers. Every true universal tradition has carried in itself this breath of the large, animating with it disinterested forms of activity, awakening the sensibility to values that cannot any longer be measured by any criterion of utility and of passionality, whether individual or collective: introducing through 'living,' a 'more than living.' This is the type of an invisible empire, which history shows us in the examples for instance of Brahmanic India, Christendom and Hellenism itself: a unitary culture which rules every 'politically' and economically conditioned reality from within, in a variety, even an independent variety, of peoples or cities.