ABSTRACT
This chapter considers an aspect of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s thought which, enables to understand him better than any other, that is the thoroughgoing teleology of his manner of thinking. If one regards Hegel as an Aristotle in whom teleology has been carried to the limit, so that it becomes transformed into something else, one will perhaps have achieved a good way of regarding him. That Hegel’s method is reiteratively metalogical no one who studies him closely can for a moment doubt. Most of the objections to Hegelian dialectic rest on the persistent assumption that it is thought that operates on one level, rather than persistently revisionary thought that is always commenting on and criticizing itself. The most characteristic teleology of all in Hegel, and the one least understood by his students, is the sudden finding of oneself at one’s goal for the very reason that at first seemed to place one far from it.
