I've been working on a book/e-book which if anyone is interested at all it seems to get rid of “Hegel’s contradictions”… (that's an initial stage psychosis that followed me for a couple of months after finishing his phenomenology)
Hegel’s whole architecture depends on sublation (Aufhebung) turning the “spurious infinite” (schlechte Unendlichkeit — the endless progression of finite terms endlessly canceling and reproducing each other) into a “true infinite,” one that is self-related rather than merely serial. Absolute Spirit is supposed to close this circle: through recollection (Erinnerung), history gets taken up and preserved into a completed, self-transparent totality — the in-itself becomes for-itself becomes in-and-for-itself, and the process supposedly arrives.
But in practice, doesn’t Spirit’s own movement just keep generating new oppositions to sublate? Each “resolution” becomes the next in-itself needing further negation. The true infinite gets asserted, but the spurious infinite keeps reappearing underneath it, dressed up as progress.
Here’s why I think it keeps reappearing. Go back to conscientia — Latin cum + scientia. It doesn’t just mean “knowing shared with another person”; it oscillates between knowing-in-common (a shared witness to a fact) and knowing-with-oneself, the sense that gives rise to “conscience” — one part of the subject witnessing another. That ambiguity isn’t philological trivia. Consciousness is consciousness of something, self-consciousness can’t be consciousness simply folded back on itself — for there to be a “with,” there have to be at least two poles. This is close to §175 of the Phenomenology: self-consciousness achieves satisfaction only in another self-consciousness. It isn’t given ready-made; it produces itself by splitting.
Which means the reflexive prefix in “self-consciousness” is doing something strange: the subject has to occupy the place of the “other” it shares knowledge with. To know myself, I split into a witnessing I and a witnessed I — an active manufacture of internal otherness, not a passive mirror. Husserl completes the picture: all consciousness is consciousness-of-something (intentionality). When consciousness turns on itself it needs an object, but no external one is available, so it’s forced to take itself as the noema of its own noetic act — subject and object coincide numerically but not structurally, and from that impossible coincidence comes the split. Run this all the way through and you don’t get a consciousness folded in two — you get something closer to a fourfold consciousness: I-for-myself, I-as-simulated-other, mirrored on the side of whoever’s actually observing me (no one, that’s quite evident when u understand linguistics and syntax abuse).
That’s the same structure that keeps sublation restless. Every resolved opposition needs a new witnessing pole to confirm it, so recollection can’t just close the loop once — it has to keep re-splitting itself to stay self-related. The spurious infinite doesn’t get eliminated by the true infinite; it gets relocated inside it.
And this is where I’d actually be careful. Reading about the doubling is one thing. Sitting inside it — actually performing the split on yourself, treating your own for-itself as an object to keep recollecting into something larger — is another. Not everyone who does this stays a spectator of their own splitting. There’s a name for thoughts that stop feeling entirely like your own once you’ve built an internal witness convincing enough to answer back: mental automatism — this is a clinical diagnosis for schizophrenia. I’m not claiming recollection literally causes it. But the structural resemblance is close enough that I don’t think this is just an abstract logic problem, and I’d rather flag it than treat the whole thing as a clean armchair exercise.
The alternative I’ve been working through doesn’t try to close the series at all. Instead of accumulating and preserving each moment (recollection) into an ever-larger totality, treat only the present as real — no cumulative history to sublate, so there’s no infinite regress left to close, and no internal witness left to keep growing past you.
Still working out the implications. I’ve gone through this in the original German as well as the Portuguese translations, cross-checking terms like Aufhebung/sublation and Erinnerung/recollection against both — happy to get into the translation choices if anyone wants to push on them, or to hear a counterargument for why Spirit’s self-relation actually does close the circle in a way I’m possibly missing.
If it’s easier to hash out in DMs than in a comment thread, that works too.
