This seminar made an attempt to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. The matter of thinking presses upon thinking in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the heart of the matter and from there to thinking itself.
For Hegel, the matter of thinking is: Thinking as such. In order not to misinterpret this definition of the matter—thinking as such—in psychological or epistemological terms, we must add by way of explanation: thinking as such—in the developed fullness in which what has been thought, has been and now is thought. What this means here we can understand only from Kant's viewpoint, from the essence of the transcendental which Hegel, however, thinks absolutely, and that for him means speculatively. This is Hegel's aim when he says of the thinking of thinking as such that it is developed "purely in the element of thinking." (Encyclopedia, Introduction, 14.) To give it a short title, which yet is very difficult to
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