Experience of thinking

At the end of metaphysics, being is given over to absolute cognition. This is the ‘achievement’ of absolute Idealism. In the movement where being phenomenalises itself – the movement that we name ‘dialectic’ – being is given over to the absolute concept that grasps itself, seizes itself, appropriates itself absolutely. This is self-expressed in the very concept of the concept: Begriff, arising from the verb greifen, points toward this act of seizing or getting hold of or grasping: the absolute concept is the concept of the concepts that seizes, grasps and takes hold of itself absolutely. Thus this absolute cognition is not the cognition of ‘this’ or ‘that’ being but of beings in totality where this totality is understood not as an aggregation of all beings but of being as such: in absolute knowledge, it is being as such that is given over, without remainder, to the grasp of the absolute concept, as though being itself must elevate itself in a movement from which an essential act of negativity would not be separable. To lift itself up to presence, to rise to the concept (Aufheben), thinking must undertake the labour of negativity, that is, the work of seizing, grasping, taking hold of itself. At the end of metaphysics, being is absolutely abandoned to its grasp, to this seizure, to its be-holding of itself. At the instance of its closure, metaphysics determines thinking as this absolute act of grasping, seizing, taking possession of being as such and as such, of beings in totality. Thinking uplifts itself to the absolute concept by positing itself (grounding, founding or instituting itself, installing or placing itself) – as the verb setzen implies – in a manner that is self-originary, autochthonic and autarchic (auto-arché: self-ruling; meaning also, by the same gesture, the self that rules, the self as the arché or principle of beginning). From this is derived the ultimate legitimising principle (arché) of the modern hegemonikon: the notion of the Subject is understood by absolute Idealism as absolute self-grasping. As such, the Subject is the ultimate legitimising principle of the modern hegemonikon: it institutes itself, grounds itself, founds itself, installs itself or places itself (setzen) as autarchic (self-ruling), autochthonic (inhabitant in its own place) and mythic (self-saying, the auto-saying, saying that says itself, is mythic).