Coda

Abstract

Abstract If all our thought is for Hegel temporally conditioned, what are we to make of those passages in which he asserts that it is the business of philosophy to concern itself with the “eternally [ewig]” present? How, too, are we to interpret his claim that, despite its developmental history, Spirit has a certain “immortality [Unsterblichkeit]”? The author offers a few reasons for why Hegel’s treatment of permanence is compatible with his insistence that there is movement or dialectic in everything, even in our most basic thought-forms. There is permanence in the advances of thought and Spirit as least because new forms invariably build upon old ones, upon what came before. In building upon and responding to what came before, new forms not only negate but also preserve what came before. This is the idea behind Hegel’s remark that “[n]othing in the past is lost” to philosophy.