ABSTRACT
Western philosophy has sought its authentic unities in the ‘real’ rather than in the ideal realm—they are individuals rather than universals—and there is the same tendency as in the ideal case to restrict authenticity to fairly small rather than to widely spreading units. Philosophy, which for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is Absolute Spirit, is said to be ‘its own time comprehended in thought’, and the warning is added that ‘it is just as silly to suppose that any philosophy goes beyond its contemporary world as that an individual can jump beyond his time’. Hegel expresses one of the most characteristic urges of Western philosophy, the desire for ‘true unities’ which are unities in and for themselves, which represent the genuine and not the fictitious furniture of the world. Western philosophical thought has been overwhelmingly diremptive and in some extreme cases such diremption has been self-destroying, has removed its own disunion through destroying the connections which alone make disunion significant.
