be said that the goings-on of contemporary philosophy are confused and vacuous in terms of genuine relations to the philosophical tradition and to the actual presence of its spirit. This must be mentioned only to suggest that, no matter how much this activity interferes with us at every step, we must push it aside if we wish to understand anything at all regarding the problematic of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
b) Absolute and relative knowledge. Philosophy as the system of science
The preceding clarifies, at least in a negative way, the overall sense of the System of Science, which is the main title of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In a positive way the title means: system of absolute knowledge. But what does “absolute knowledge” mean? We shall find that answer only by interpreting the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, even at this stage we can—and must—illustrate the expression “absolute knowledge” by offering a preliminary concept of it.
The term absolute means initially “not relative.” And what does the expression relative mean when it is applied to knowledge? Knowledge is first of all obviously relative if it is a knowledge of this or that thing while not being the knowledge of something else. This knowledge is relative because it is related to something and not related to something else. Knowledge is said to be merely relative (without being aware of its own relativity) when there is still something else about which that knowledge knows nothing. Relative knowledge is that which does not know everything there is to know. However, such a concept of relative knowledge would be only quantitatively relative, since it means not knowing everything that there is to know. Correspondingly, the idea of an absolute knowledge would also be quantitatively absolute, since it would mean knowing everything that there is to know. But for Hegel the concepts of relative and absolute, as characters of knowledge, are to be understood not quantitatively but qualitatively. It is possible that a quantitatively absolute knowledge, which knows everything so far as range is concerned, could nevertheless be relative in accordance with the character (quale, qualitas) of knowing involved. In what way? What then does the term relative mean when it designates the how, the character and manner of knowing? Is not every kind of knowing, in its own way, a relative knowing, in the sense of being in itself a relation to that which is known? Is not knowledge as such a knowledge of something? This is precisely what Hegel denies and must deny when he claims that there is a knowledge which is qualitatively not relative, but absolute. To be sure, we fail to grasp the Hegelian notion of the relativity of knowledge if we understand it to be in itself a relation to something. I shall attempt to clarify, if only provisionally, exactly what Hegel always means by the terms absolute and relative as qualitative characters of knowledge; and I shall do so by drawing upon the lexical meaning of these designations.
A scientia is relativa as scientia relata. It is relative not simply as related to something but as a knowledge which in its knowing attitude is a relatum, in the sense of being carried over to that which it knows. Carried over and across, this knowledge remains knowingly in what is known. It knows it precisely so as to be held fast by what is known. Thus, as a knowing of that which is known, this knowledge is consumed by it, surrenders to it, and is knowingly lost in it. Even if such a knowledge is a knowledge of everything, lacks nothing quantitatively, and is therefore absolute, it is still relative according to the kind of knowing involved. For example, if we think of all the beings which exist and think of them as created by a God who also exists, then the totality of beings known in this way would still only be relatively known. Such a relative knowledge would be caught up in and imprisoned by what it knows. Hegel calls such knowing “consciousness.”
But we must ask if there is a possibility of knowing which is qualitatively different from this. It is obvious that we can come to a proper decision about this only if we take it up in terms of the quality of knowing. This means that we have to ask whether the quality of relative knowledge as such allows for something qualitatively other than relative knowledge. For knowledge to be qualitatively other than relative knowledge, for it to be other than a knowledge which is carried over to what is known and bound there, it must not remain bound but must liberate and ab-solve itself from what it knows and yet as so ab-solved, as absolute, still be a knowledge. To be ab-solved from what is known does not mean “abandoning” it, but “preserving it by elevating it.”5 This elevation is an absolving which knows; that is, what is known is still known, but in being known it is now changed.
Obviously such an absolving presupposes the attachment of relative knowledge. And absolving as a detaching which is aware of itself must first of all be a knowledge in the sense of relative knowledge. The possibility, as it were, to free the so-called relative knowledge is given in our capacity to know it again, to become conscious of that which is extant in the broadest sense. In the process of its unfolding alongside things, consciousness absolves itself in a certain way from them as soon as it becomes aware of itself as consciousness. Becoming aware of itself, this consciousness turns into what we may accordingly designate self-consciousness. Here in the nature of relative knowledge lies a possibility for detachment; and herein lies the question—and it is one of Hegel’s most decisive questions in his confrontation with the philosophy of his time and with Kant—whether in relative knowledge this detachment actually takes place or whether relative knowledge is still consciousness, albeit self-consciousness.
Is not this knowledge, which knowingly absolves itself from consciousness and knows it (consciousness), in turn also a relative knowledge, bound now, of course, not simply by what is known in consciousness, but by consciousness as the known? Thus, we quite appropriately grasp the knowledge which absolves itself from consciousness as self-consciousness. Yes indeed, but the first consequence of this is that although self-consciousness is absolved, it is still relative, and therefore not absolute knowledge. What is known through such absolving is that that knowledge itself is a way of knowing, is aware of itself, and is a self-consciousness. Thus, in self-consciousness we realize two things: (1) that knowledge can be detached, and (2) that there is a new form of knowledge which can only be consciousness—such that now knowing insists on the I and remains entangled with itself, such that it gets tied to the self and the I. Thus, this knowledge is relative and bound in two ways: (1) This knowledge knows itself as self, and (2) it distinguishes this self from existing things. In this way self-consciousness remains relative in spite of the detachment that has asserted itself.
Nevertheless, it is just this self-consciousness, relative in one respect and not relative in another, that reveals the possibility of a detachment or liberation. This liberation is indeed such that it does not discard that from which it liberates itself; but in knowingly absolving itself—knowing it—it takes and binds to itself, as that which frees itself. This self-conscious knowledge of consciousness is, so to speak, a relative knowledge which is free; but as relative it is still not absolute, still not genuinely free.
Obviously the pure kind of non-relative knowledge will be primarily that which absolves itself even from self-consciousness, which is not fettered to self-consciousness and yet is aware of it—not as existing for itself, next to which there is still simple consciousness, but as self-consciousness of consciousness. The unbounded origin of the unity of both self-consciousness and consciousness, as they belong together, is a knowledge that is aware of itself as the purely unbounded, purely absolved absolute knowledge, which provisionally we call reason. This knowledge, absolute and absolved as it is, is a knowledge which, while not relative, holds onto, possesses, and retains that which it knows relatively.
Hegel designates all three—consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason—as consciousness. Thus, consciousness means three things:
1. Any kind of knowledge
2. A knowledge which is related to things without being aware of itself as knowledge
3. Consciousness in the sense of self-consciousness.
Whatever is known relatively—in the qualitative sense, not merely quantitatively—is known as something limited. But whatever is limited is, in its multiplicity, related to the absolute, as that which has no