What we are being offered here is not an argument so much as a metaphysical soufflé: impressive in height, fragile in substance, and liable to collapse the moment one inserts a fork of plain language. The prose is saturated with capital letters—Absolute, Spirit, Radical Subject, Center, Periphery—as though typography itself could substitute for demonstration. It is philosophy by incantation, not by argument.
Let us begin with the opening maneuver, which is as slippery as it is self-congratulatory: Hegel is not an idealist but a phenomenologist. This is the sort of sentence that announces profundity while quietly sawing off the branch on which it sits. Hegel, we are told, is a “phenomenologist of the Radical Subject,” which is rather like saying that Napoleon was not a general but a phenomenologist of artillery. It is a rebranding exercise, not an analysis. Calling Hegel a phenomenologist does not remove his idealism; it merely smuggles it in under a fashionable label and hopes no one checks the luggage.
The fetishization of Hegel’s remark that the Absolute is “essentially a result” is a case in point. Yes, Hegel says this. No, it does not mean what is being claimed here. To wrench that sentence out of the Phenomenology and inflate it into a doctrine of “absolutely radical immanence” is to confuse a dialectical claim about conceptual mediation with a cosmic soap opera about Spirit wandering off into time, getting lost, and heroically returning home with a better personality. Hegel’s “result” is not a metaphysical finish line waiting patiently at the end of history like a trophy on a podium. It is the logical articulation of what was implicit all along. That is precisely the point. Nothing “lies ahead” in the naïve teleological sense this passage insists on resurrecting.
From there we plunge into the now-familiar geography of philosophical mysticism: center and periphery, eternity and time, empty universal and catastrophic concrete. These are not arguments; they are stage directions. We are invited to picture a movement, not to understand one. The language gestures constantly toward rigor—“transversal,” “predetermines,” “structures of consciousness”—but never once pauses to show how any of this could be false, tested, or even meaningfully disputed. This is philosophy rendered unfalsifiable by design.
The treatment of time is especially revealing. Time, we are told, has “no orientation, meaning, or content” and carries no events. All events originate “from within consciousness.” This is not a daring insight; it is solipsism dressed up as profundity. On this view, the French Revolution, the Black Death, and the invention of antibiotics are not events in time but decorative flourishes applied retroactively by consciousness to an otherwise inert temporal void. One wonders why anyone bothered building clocks, archives, or hospitals, since history is apparently just an internal rearrangement of mental furniture.
Even worse is the smug declaration that linear time is “fundamentally alien” to Platonic, Hegelian, and phenomenological thought. Alien to whom, exactly? Plato managed to write dialogues set in sequence. Hegel filled thousands of pages with historical development. Phenomenology begins with lived experience, which stubbornly insists on before and after. To declare linear time verboten is not fidelity to these traditions; it is a refusal to engage with what they actually say.
The pièce de résistance is the claim that history is “perpendicular” to time. This is the sort of sentence that sounds profound only because it is geometrically absurd. Perpendicular to time? Time is not a plane on graph paper. This is metaphor run amok, metaphor promoted to ontology, metaphor crowned king. It explains nothing while congratulating itself for sounding as though it has.
Then come the obligatory invocations of esoteric authority: Homo Intimus, νοῦς ποιητικός, Radical Subject. These are talismans, not concepts. They are introduced, not argued for; named, not justified. Each one functions as an intellectual escape hatch: when clarity threatens, another Greek term is released into the room to distract the audience.
By the end, we are assured that none of this is linear, cyclical, temporal, or even properly historical—yet it is somehow still “history,” still a “result,” still an “end.” The entire structure is immune to criticism because it refuses to inhabit any framework where criticism could land. It is not in time, not outside time, not cyclical, not linear, not empirical, not conceptual in any ordinary sense. It is, in short, a philosophical non-stick surface.
This is precisely the kind of writing that gives metaphysics a bad name: dense where it should be precise, grand where it should be modest, and obscure where it should be honest. It does not clarify Hegel; it mythologizes him. It does not rescue philosophy from idealism; it baptizes idealism in ever more elaborate ritual language. And it does not deepen our understanding of history or consciousness; it merely replaces explanation with exaltation.
Hegel does not need this sort of help. He is difficult enough without being transformed into a prophet of cosmic interiority whose ideas can only be grasped by abandoning time, history, and common sense altogether. When philosophy stops arguing and starts chanting, the Absolute has not revealed itself—it has been quietly replaced by rhetoric.
See A. Dugin’s lecture course “Doxas and Paradoxes of Time” (2021–2022). Link does not work.
When the spiraling diatectic reaches the Absolute, it starts anew. See Philosophy & Revolution by Raya Dunyevskaya.
What we are being offered here is not an argument so much as a metaphysical soufflé: impressive in height, fragile in substance, and liable to collapse the moment one inserts a fork of plain language. The prose is saturated with capital letters—Absolute, Spirit, Radical Subject, Center, Periphery—as though typography itself could substitute for demonstration. It is philosophy by incantation, not by argument.
Let us begin with the opening maneuver, which is as slippery as it is self-congratulatory: Hegel is not an idealist but a phenomenologist. This is the sort of sentence that announces profundity while quietly sawing off the branch on which it sits. Hegel, we are told, is a “phenomenologist of the Radical Subject,” which is rather like saying that Napoleon was not a general but a phenomenologist of artillery. It is a rebranding exercise, not an analysis. Calling Hegel a phenomenologist does not remove his idealism; it merely smuggles it in under a fashionable label and hopes no one checks the luggage.
The fetishization of Hegel’s remark that the Absolute is “essentially a result” is a case in point. Yes, Hegel says this. No, it does not mean what is being claimed here. To wrench that sentence out of the Phenomenology and inflate it into a doctrine of “absolutely radical immanence” is to confuse a dialectical claim about conceptual mediation with a cosmic soap opera about Spirit wandering off into time, getting lost, and heroically returning home with a better personality. Hegel’s “result” is not a metaphysical finish line waiting patiently at the end of history like a trophy on a podium. It is the logical articulation of what was implicit all along. That is precisely the point. Nothing “lies ahead” in the naïve teleological sense this passage insists on resurrecting.
From there we plunge into the now-familiar geography of philosophical mysticism: center and periphery, eternity and time, empty universal and catastrophic concrete. These are not arguments; they are stage directions. We are invited to picture a movement, not to understand one. The language gestures constantly toward rigor—“transversal,” “predetermines,” “structures of consciousness”—but never once pauses to show how any of this could be false, tested, or even meaningfully disputed. This is philosophy rendered unfalsifiable by design.
The treatment of time is especially revealing. Time, we are told, has “no orientation, meaning, or content” and carries no events. All events originate “from within consciousness.” This is not a daring insight; it is solipsism dressed up as profundity. On this view, the French Revolution, the Black Death, and the invention of antibiotics are not events in time but decorative flourishes applied retroactively by consciousness to an otherwise inert temporal void. One wonders why anyone bothered building clocks, archives, or hospitals, since history is apparently just an internal rearrangement of mental furniture.
Even worse is the smug declaration that linear time is “fundamentally alien” to Platonic, Hegelian, and phenomenological thought. Alien to whom, exactly? Plato managed to write dialogues set in sequence. Hegel filled thousands of pages with historical development. Phenomenology begins with lived experience, which stubbornly insists on before and after. To declare linear time verboten is not fidelity to these traditions; it is a refusal to engage with what they actually say.
The pièce de résistance is the claim that history is “perpendicular” to time. This is the sort of sentence that sounds profound only because it is geometrically absurd. Perpendicular to time? Time is not a plane on graph paper. This is metaphor run amok, metaphor promoted to ontology, metaphor crowned king. It explains nothing while congratulating itself for sounding as though it has.
Then come the obligatory invocations of esoteric authority: Homo Intimus, νοῦς ποιητικός, Radical Subject. These are talismans, not concepts. They are introduced, not argued for; named, not justified. Each one functions as an intellectual escape hatch: when clarity threatens, another Greek term is released into the room to distract the audience.
By the end, we are assured that none of this is linear, cyclical, temporal, or even properly historical—yet it is somehow still “history,” still a “result,” still an “end.” The entire structure is immune to criticism because it refuses to inhabit any framework where criticism could land. It is not in time, not outside time, not cyclical, not linear, not empirical, not conceptual in any ordinary sense. It is, in short, a philosophical non-stick surface.
This is precisely the kind of writing that gives metaphysics a bad name: dense where it should be precise, grand where it should be modest, and obscure where it should be honest. It does not clarify Hegel; it mythologizes him. It does not rescue philosophy from idealism; it baptizes idealism in ever more elaborate ritual language. And it does not deepen our understanding of history or consciousness; it merely replaces explanation with exaltation.
Hegel does not need this sort of help. He is difficult enough without being transformed into a prophet of cosmic interiority whose ideas can only be grasped by abandoning time, history, and common sense altogether. When philosophy stops arguing and starts chanting, the Absolute has not revealed itself—it has been quietly replaced by rhetoric.
Obviously Hegel mimics Aristotle. But in a baroque way. Hegel’s density, abstraction, and totality make him adored by Marxists.
He’s hard to falsify
His theory is easy to ritualize
Also perfect for commentary, exegesis, secular priesthood. Hegel gives ideology confidence disguised as philosophy.