Unlike “picture-thinking” – myth, art, etc. — Hegel’s speculation involves the use of concepts, ideas, or universals. Here, however, the dissimilarity ends, for although the matter of Hegel’s philosophy — its employment of concepts rather than images – is substantially different from mytho-poetic thought, its form is strikingly similar.
Hegel’s system is a complete conceptual speech about the whole, but it is not merely a network of abstract concepts. Instead it takes the form of a concrete totality. In the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel defines philosophy as the “actual knowledge of what truly is” […]. In fact, his philosophical aim is the traditional one: to give an account of Substance, the really real. However, it is the totality of the system that itself gives us this reality. Every “provisional definition of the Absolute” within the system, that is, every category, must fall short because no one category can express all of what the Absolute is. Thus, the system does not describe the Absolute, it gives form to the Absolute itself. Hegel’s philosophy does not tell us what Substance or the Absolute is (in the manner, for instance, of Aristotle’s philosophy), it brings the Absolute into being. Why? Because it is through speculation that the Idea becomes for-itself, that “God” achieves self-awareness and thus completion. This completed or actualized divine is the Absolute.
Recall the previously quoted fragment preserved by Rosenkranz [Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben, 141]:
Every individual is a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity, along which the world develops. Every individual can raise himself to domination over a great length of this chain only if he realizes the goal of this great necessity and, by virtue of this knowledge, learns to speak the magic words which evoke its shape. The knowledge of how to simultaneously absorb and elevate oneself beyond the total energy of suffering and antithesis that has dominated the world and all forms of its development for thousands of years – this knowledge can be gathered from philosophy alone.
The magic words are the categories of Hegelian philosophy. The magic power is dialectic guided by recollection. And, as we shall shortly find, our access to this power is through a form of imagination. […]
It is important to see the radical difference between Hegelian thought and all other forms of philosophy. Non-Hegelian philosophy answers such questions as “What is God?” or “What is Being?” by equating its subject matter with some property or universal: “God is water” or “God is the Unmoved Mover” or “God is Nature.” We can call this mode of thought propositional or predicative. It takes some object as given, and precedes to describe it by attaching one or more predicates to it, usually after lengthy argumentation.
The problem with this form of thought, as Hegel points out in the preface to the Phenomenology, is that it draws a rigid distinction between subject and predicate. One may laboriously demonstrate that “God is good” but we know that the two terms are connotatively different. The predicate does not exhaustively present the subject’s nature to us. We may decide to add other predicates: “God is good,” and “just,” and “all-knowing,” etc. But unless we can demonstrate that we have completely captured the essence of God our knowledge is not absolute […]. Thus the predicative or propositional approach is inherently incapable of giving us what we want. The predicate of a proposition always places the subject in a higher, wider, or more inclusive genus, for instance, “Man is mortal,” “Dogs are mammals,” etc. But Hegel conceives the Absolute as the Whole itself, as the ultimate category beyond which there is no higher category. Hegel does not tell us what the Absolute is. Hegel’s thought gives form to the Absolute itself. Yet the dialectic is driven precisely by the supersession of categories — “provisional definitions of the Absolute” – which purport to say what the Absolute is, but only say part. Hegel can say that his system is complete because it achieves closure as a circle of thought; his Encyclopedia is exactly what it sounds like, an encirclement. His philosophical “method” (if it can be described as such) is qualitatively different from the propositional method of philosophy that I have described.
To borrow a term from the Jungian Erich Neumann, Hegel’s speculation is “circumscription.” In his book The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann discusses mytho-poetic thought and its origins in the unconscious.
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), pp. 92-4
See also & also & also on complete speech.
Cf. Renaissance magi’s angle on imagination.