From Logic to Nature to Spirit

The Logic, as such, concludes with the Idea's comprehending its own self-comprehension, and thus ceasing to be a mere “content and object,” for itself, and becoming instead “science,” which knows itself (WL 6:572/GW 12:253,13/843). As such, however, it is still “enclosed within [eingeschlossen in] pure thought” or “subjectivity” (WL 6:572/ GW 12:253,15–19/843). But

This positing or contraction, Hegel explains, is not a process of “becoming” or “transition,” like the one that produced “Objectivity” (which anticipated many features of what we might think of as “nature,” such as mechanism, “chemism,” and so forth). The pure Idea is already “absolute liberation,” so that it contains “no immediate determination that isn't already posited and Concept”; consequently, no “transition” can occur in it (WL 6:573/GW 12:253,27–32/843). So the right way to describe what goes on here, Hegel says, is to say that “the Idea freely releases itself, in absolute self-assurance and resting in itself” (WL 6:573/GW 12:253,38–39/843). In order to be equally free, the form of the result is the “absolute externality of space and time, existing for itself without subjectivity” (WL 6:573/GW 12:253,2–4/843).

What kind of “freedom” is this, we might ask, by which something that is absolutely “external” and lacks all subjectivity comes into being?