Georg Hegel's notion of Absolute Knowing should be viewed as the rationally necessary advance from religious consciousness to religious self-consciousness, wherein the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness may be discerned. However, before we can begin to unravel the various strands woven into this observation, it is necessary to first contextualize this observation within German Idealism, especially in the thought of its chief proponents, Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte. The context must also be continually informed by the inherent tension, perhaps even paradox that is housed in Hegel's philosophy.
Hegel's own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the "Preface" to his Philosophy of Right captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. He says there, "Philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts."
On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase "its own time" the suggestion of a historical or cultural conditionedness and variability that applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself. On the other hand, there is the hint that such contents are being raised to some higher level, presumably higher than the more everyday levels of cognitive functioning; those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example. This higher level takes the form of "thought," a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of having "eternal" contents, such as Plato propounded.
This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being Hegel went on to describe as a "finite-infinite." This description is the very nub of the tension in Hegel: he seeks to bring together the universalist dimension (as prefigured in Immanuel Kant's transcendental program) with the culturally part...