The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad.

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn.