Kant is considered the destroyer of metaphysics, while Hegel is regarded as the philosopher who gave back to metaphysics the rights that Kant had torn away from it. In reality Hegel only completed Kant's work. [1] The conviction that faith is knowledge, the hostility to Holy Scripture carefully hidden under the appearance of respect, the denial of the very possibility of any other participation in truth than that which science offers — all these sufficiently testify to the goal that Hegel had set for himself. For him there is only one source of truth; he is "convinced" that all those who wished to find the truth have always and everywhere gone to the sources from which his own philosophy sprang. In his Logic he writes: "The quality of the concept consists in negating itself, in holding itself back and making itself passive in regard to what is, in order that the latter be not determined by the subject but be able to show itself as it is in itself." And in the Philosophy of Religion he declares: "In faithful prayer the individual forgets himself and becomes filled with his object."

     If this is so, it is obvious that "in philosophy religion receives its justification from the thinking consciousness... Thought is the absolute ruler before which the content must prove itself true. And of the very Christianity that he calls the absolute religion, he says in a tone that brooks no contradiction, "the true content of Christian faith is to be justified through philosophy." This means: being is situated entirely and without residue on the level of reasonable thought and everything that suggests — no matter how remotely — the possibility of another dimension must be energetically repressed as fantastic and non-existent. "Just as man must learn to recognize the sensible on the basis that it is there and that it is, just as man must accept the sun because it is there, so man must accept science, man must accept truth."

     Whatever Hegel may do, whatever his efforts to convince himself and others that freedom is for him more precious than anything else in the world may be, finally he comes back to the old way, recognized by and comprehensible (that is to say, reasonable) to all: to constraint. In the metaphysical realm where philosophy dwells, as in the empirical realm where the positive sciences live, that Necessity of which Aristotle and Epictetus have told us so much alone rules and governs. Whether one wishes it or not, one must recognize what is given by the senses, just as one cannot escape from the "truths" of the religion that Hegel calls Christianity. Yet Hegel himself has no need of Christianity because the science of logic grasps, without the help of Christianity, the unveiled truth as it is in itself and for itself as well as God's eternal essence before the creation of the world.

     I do not know if Hegel inadvertently betrayed himself by uniting in such a tangible way the "truth" of concrete, sensible reality with the religious truths in the general notion of constraining truth, or if he deliberately emphasized the indestructible bonds that exist between metaphysical and positive knowledge. I am inclined to believe that he did it deliberately just as, in speaking of the marriage at Cana and of the healing of the paralytics, he deliberately concluded with the Voltairean aller à la selle. But whether it was deliberate or not, it is clear in any case that for him neither metaphysics nor religion can draw their truths from sources other than those which teach us, using the formula of Spinoza, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles — and this even though already in the Phenomenology of the Spirit he speaks with extreme arrogance and scorn of the methods of mathematics. This is why I have said that Hegel only completed Kant's work. It is known that for Kant metaphysics reduced itself to three fundamental problems — God, the immortality of the soul, and free will. When he posed the question "Is metaphysics possible?" he set out from the assumption that metaphysics is possible only if the answer to these three problems will be furnished us by the same authority that enlightens us when we ask if one can inscribe a rhombus in a circumference or if one can make what has been not to have been. Now, according to Kant, to the questions "Can one inscribe a rhombus in a circumference or make what has been not to have been?" we obtain answers that are completely precise and obligatory for all or, as he puts it, universal and necessary: one cannot inscribe a rhombus in a circumference or make what has been not to have been. But to the three metaphysical problems such answers cannot be obtained: it may be that God exists, as it may be that God does not exist; it may be that the soul is immortal, as it may be that it is mortal; it may be that free will exists, or it may be that it does not exist. All the "critique of pure reason" comes down basically to this. Indeed, if Kant had fully expressed his thought or, rather, if he had formulated his conclusions less cautiously, he would have said: God does not exist, the soul (which also does not exist) is mortal, free will is a myth.

     But, beside the theoretical reason, Kant also assumes a practical reason. And when we address the same questions to the practical reason the situation immediately changes: God exists, the soul is immortal, the will is free. Why and how Kant transferred to the practical reason the powers that he had so pitilessly wrested from the theoretical reason is unnecessary to recount; everyone knows it. What is important is that Hegel's metaphysics is basically not at all distinguished from Kant's practical reason. To put it differently, Kant's practical reason already contained, under an incompletely developed form, all of Hegel's metaphysics. This seems almost paradoxical, but it is so and it could not be otherwise, because both of them set out from the traditional conviction that there is only one source of truth and that the truth is that to which every man can be led by constraint.

     Almost every page of Hegel's writings reveals to us that his metaphysics was born of Kant's practical reason. Such is the meaning of his ontological proof of the existence of God: with Hegel as with Kant, it is not the theoretical but the practical reason which here "proves." Even more clearly does this come out from the following thought of Hegel: "When a man does evil, this evil is at the same time given as something which in itself is nothing, as something over which the spirit has power, so that the spirit can bring it about that the evil should not have occurred. The meaning of repentance and atonement consists in that the crime, by the fact that its perpetrator has been raised to the truth, is apprehended as something which in itself and for itself has been overcome, which of itself has no power. That what happened should so be made not to have happened cannot come about in a sensible way but rather in a spiritual way, inwardly."

     Hegel's entire metaphysics is thus constructed: where the theoretical reason stops, feeling its impotence and incapacity to do anything whatsoever, the practical reason comes to its aid and declares that it has a remedy for everything. Only the terms differ: instead of "practical reason" Hegel says "Geist." Obviously no force in the world can bring it about that what has once been should not have been, and the crimes that have been committed — even the most terrible, Cain's fratricide and Judas' betrayal - will remain committed for all eternity. They belong to the domain of pure theoretical reason, and by that very fact are subordinated to the power of the implacable Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded. But it is not at all necessary that what has once been should not have been in the sensible and finite world, just as there is no need for the marriage at Cana or the resurrection of Lazarus. All this breaks the natural relationships and is consequently a "violation of the spirit." The practical reason has found something much better: "inwardly," "spiritually," through repentance, it will make what has been not to have been.

     Here, as frequently happens in reading Hegel's works, one asks himself if it is really he who is saying what he thinks, or if it is the Necessity that is speaking through its intermediary, after having hypnotized him and changed him into a stone endowed with consciousness. It may even be assumed that Cain and Judas, if they had not known repentance, would have forgotten what they had done and their crimes would have been drowned in Lethe. But repentance is repentance precisely because it cannot come to terms with what has happened. This is the origin of the legend of the Wandering Jew. And if you do not like legends, I recall to you the testimony of Pushkin:

The long scroll of my memories unrolls before me;
And in reading my life with disgust,
I tremble and curse.
I moan bitterly and bitterly weep,
But I cannot blot out these overwhelming lines.