Speculatively, we only come to comprehend infinitude when we comprehend the ambiguity at the heart of finitude. Infinity is nothing other than the finite properly comprehended. Infinity is nothing other than the exposition of finite ambiguity. Or as Heidegger would say, philosophy proper is a comprehensive questioning that puts the being that questions in question. This is why Heidegger asserts that medieval thought is not philosophy but dogmatics, an inquiry into what is taken as the unquestioned ultimate being.

So man is not a biological category. Man is that unique being that is self-questioning.

The absolute as an idea is merely a logos, a discourse, on method. It is not a thought meant to identify some supposed ultimate being. In this way Hegel completes the modern break with the detour that philosophy took when it was employed by medieval Christian thinkers as a means of grounding a dogma. Hegel means to free the subject, not force the subject to be comprehended in light of some idea however “absolute” this idea might be conceived to be.

To move from Being to Essence with comprehension requires that we cash out Hegel’s movement terms. This cashing out is not done within the text itself. Who or what is “returning to self” or “positing” or “presupposing” or “grounding” is in question. Are we talking about god’s thought? Are we talking about finite thought? Or are we not even speaking about a thinker for this thinking? Each of these alternatives have been proposed. That these alternatives have been proposed means that we who read Hegel recognize that the who or what of thought’s movement remains in question.

Thought as absolute becomes a realm of inquiry when thought that regresses or circles is recognized to be more than a mere impasse leaving us with no way out. So, it is not “why exactly do we not have an infinite regress” as if this is meant to be a thought stopper. It is instead, “yes, it is because we have an infinite regress of finite thought that this regress as infinite is not merely bad but can be speculatively reconceived as true.” The regress is what first has to occur. It is the place of the true infinite as the true infinite is nothing more than a reconception of the bad infinity of the regress. The infinite regress is salutatory in that it blocks the quest of finite thought to think the infinite as some ultimate which it might grasp. The impasse means to block the theological impulse. The infinite as Hegel conceives it is not some ultimate being. It is this reconception of the thought process as it exhibits an impasse, exhibits a dialectic.

The true infinite arises at the very point when finite thought becomes a question to itself when it finds itself caught in an inferential impasse.

God is the whole of philosophy only for the medieval “philosophers”. But as Heidegger notes, a thinking that means to inquire into what is already taken as the truth before such inquiry takes place is not philosophy. So, for Hegel, “god” is not a philosophical term. It has no place within the speculative account unless one attempts as you never cease to do to equate “god” with the absolute idea. There is nothing in the speculative account that is improved or clarified by such a dubious replacement. If we went back and deleted all Hegel’s marginal comments about god in his remarks or introductions – recognizing that these throwaway remarks were nothing more than remnants from a superseded way of thinking employed simply so that he might be able to remain employed in his profession – nothing of substance would be lost.  As I have said before “god” does no work in a speculative account. He just shows up at the margins there given credit for what is not properly “his”.

If Descartes marks the turn to the subject as the topic of philosophy, then Hegel liberates this turn from its obsession with absolute certainty, an obsession that is a shadow of the medieval obsession with absolute being. Thought that thinks truly is not thought that is certain. It is thought that turns upon – reflects upon – itself. It is a process and not some final resting place because man as the being that puts the beings into question remains himself always in question as a result. It is the questioning of this being, not the ultimate status of some supposed divine being that is absolute. With Hegel we are not done thinking. If Hegel is relevant then it is because our encounter with Hegel’s thought opens up an entirely new realm of what is in question that seizes our being.

Over the course of a speculative exposition if one is seized by questions pertaining to god then these are questions for one whose thinking is oriented by theological concerns. So such a one can ask as you do if god falls away over the course of a speculative account. This would be a good question. But one cannot save god by taking Hegel’s absolute – a conception that has a precise speculative sense within the exposition – and equating it with “god”. Hegel’s absolute as it is employed in a speculative exposition has no resemblance to a divine ultimate being. So the proper answer to your question is yes, god does fall away. The how and why of this falling away is something that should focus your thinking.

Over the course of the history of philosophy there has been an unfortunate tendency to vulgarize thought by locating the general categories in a region of being – a supersensible realm – of their own. So when we first encounter pure being in the Logic we are reminded of what pure being has meant in the metaphysical tradition. It has meant a pure being beyond the beings. It has served to indicate a divine being. This notion is immediately deconstructed by Hegel when he equates being with nothing. As we go through the Logic we can see that self-standing categories each in turn are brought back down to earth and out of the virtual realm that metaphysics once reserved for these thoughts. In effect, Hegel improves upon Kant by showing that the tendency of thought to employ reason beyond the bounds of sense is not so much unavoidable as it is the result of a misconception of how the thinking of categories in their truth actually takes place when thought is speculative.

To liberate Hegel’s thought from the accretions of theology we can begin with Eckhart's "If God were not, I would not be and if I were not, God would not be". You call this mystical which I take to mean unintelligible since it appears to portend something we currently do not understand.

Let’s translate this back into Hegel’s thought: “If the absolute were not, then I would not be, and If I were not, then the absolute would not be.” We have two thoughts as one.

Speculatively, “if the absolute were not, then I would not be” needs to be conceived in light of Hegel’s absolute which marks that which is divided against itself. Hegel’s absolute is not that final thought that enables one to form a perfect whole but instead reveals a cut where one might be expecting to find the idea the completes the whole. Paradoxically, it is this failure to complete the whole that completes the whole. Or what completes the whole is what reveals the whole as incomplete. So what Hegel would be saying is that we are the beings that question our own being because what is absolute is a finite self that is able to confront itself as in question or as not settled in its being. We are self-comprehending when we conceive of ourselves as self-divided in this way.

And speculatively, “if I were not, then the absolute would not be” indicates what we see throughout Hegel’s expositions: only what we bring about – the dialectical impasse – enables the absolute to emerge as the form of this impasse. The infinite is nothing more than what appears behind the back of finite thought as its own infinite movement as put on display as a dialectic.

Hegel then replaces a mystery about a divine being with a way of finite thinking, a way that generates that which also encompasses that which does the generating. Only in this way do we have intelligible discourse about a being that both stands within and apart from the absolute, or stands within the beings in question and stands apart as the being that questions.

You still seem to be stuck on what it means for thought and being to be one. This is not some metaphysical claim. As I indicated, it references the precise moment when finite thought finds itself caught in an inferential impasse as it exhibits a dialectic. You say you fail to get this point. Precisely! You are at a loss as to what to make of speculative thought, thought as it elicits a dialectic.

When Hegel arrives at the absolute idea what has he come to? He has come to an account of thought as a dialectic, the very thinking that you are unable to think. This account of the process when thought becomes dialectical is the absolute idea. Since you are unable to understand what Hegel is up to you continue to attempt to make an unwarranted switch with no textual evidence to support this switch.

Why do you do this? It is not just that you do not understand. You do this because you are not touched by philosophy. You do not put yourself in question by which I mean your belief that god is the truth is not something you are interested in examining. Again, you are at peace with your dogma; therefore, you are not touched by philosophy; you are not able to philosophize.

So when Hegel engages in the process of disrupting common conceptions you, like most Hegelians, cannot make heads nor tails of what he is up to so you read Hegel as you would wish him to be read. You turn an account on method into the place where the divine appears. This would be a shameless obfuscation if it were not for the fact that we all do this to some extent. We each in our own way impose our own limitations upon Hegel, misreading him in the process. This is why Socrates had it right when he said wisdom is knowledge of our own ignorance. An encounter with Hegel’s thought is simultaneously an encounter with what should be but as of yet has not been put into question about our own natural habits of thought. To encounter true philosophy authentically is to grasp how philosophy means to alert us to how we are essentially questioning beings.  This is something Heidegger taught us.

Philosophic thinking is quite distinct from common thought. That is why Hegel needs to name his way of thinking, calling it speculative. You are unable or unwilling to, or uninterested in thinking this difference. The difference between questioning the meaning of being and grasping being is profound. The recognition of this difference is what makes Heidegger the philosopher of the Twentieth Century. I wrote a long piece on this several months ago when Paul challenged anyone on this site to make this difference unintelligible. If one does not understand this difference then one cannot understand Heidegger.

I conclude with your comment: “if we should find wondering to be the truth then we would fix it as the object of our wonder.” This is precisely what Heidegger does. He makes our questioning the matter in question. He sees the long history of metaphysic as the wrong turn away from such questioning, what he calls the forgetfulness of being as that which is in question. This being in question turns philosophy back to examining finitude as its proper topic, not some supposed ultimate infinite being.

Writing more than a century after Hegel we can see the progress of man. Unlike Hegel, Heidegger did not need to dissemble about how thought about the divine poisons philosophic thought. Hegel did not have this freedom.

-          Alan