Heidegger presents Hegel’s “immediate” presence of the Absolute as consistent with the terra firma of modern philosophy in which the “true is that which is known in unconditioned self-awareness.” Truth in the modern sense grounds representation not on the adequatio rei et intellectus, but on intellectual representation itself “insofar as the intellect represents itself, and assumes itself of itself as representation.” The act of knowing, in this sense, retreats from particularized representations of objects. Heidegger, by illicitly situating Hegel within the modern epistemological tradition, fails to grasp the critical upshot of Hegel’s notion of the Absolute as arising not from without or externally, as if metaphysically distinct, but rather from a determinate negation of that tradition that privileges the autonomous subject of representation and leads the subject into a state of metaphysical skepticism concerning the noumena that underlies our representations of objects. Hegel attempts to render the Absolute as “immediate” not as something external and separate, but fully immanent to consciousness itself.

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