Hegel's Grand Synthesis

This book offers the first genuinely systematic treatment of Hegel s eschatology in the literature. It is an investigation into Hegel s project to demonstrate the ultimate unity of thought and being (consciousness and reality, self and world). The author traces the project through Hegel s epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of history. The grand synthesis creates a basic tension, an ambivalence, that reaches its most acute formulation in Hegel s eschatological language of a final completion or fulfillment of history. This conflicts with his dialectic and Heracletian metaphysics of becoming. Berthold-Bond concludes that a substantially new approach to Hegel s eschatology is needed."