"What is never really undertaken in these summaries is Hegel's reconceptualizing philosophy's attitude towards *mediation*, even though this is what he spends much of the Preface and Introduction of the Phenomenology doing. It's critically important to have this be the first thing presented in any review of Hegel, because the whole of Hegel's system relies on overturning the traditional attitude. His reworking of mediation is what enables him to posit history as a progressive unfolding of self-consciousness. It's what enables the sensibility of determinate negation in his conception of dialectics. It's quite simply his first premise, and if one were to demonstrate an error in Hegel's attitude towards mediation, the whole edifice would fall.

Hegel's critique, to be brief, is simply that mediation--i.e., thinking, perceiving, sensing---is unjustifiably posited by philosophers since Plato to be a distortion of the Truth, or the "Absolute" in Hegel's vocabulary. He's also directly responding to Kant's implicit skepticism of course. In the traditional view, Truth, the Absolute, God as such, Kant's thing-in-itself, is taken to be the ultimate unmediated *actual thing*, the philosophical simple, the uncaused cause (not to say these concepts are all identical, but they are all certainly related as part of what Hegel critiques in terms of how we conceive of them as unmediated simples). Accordingly, our senses manipulate the *actual thing*, the thing-in-itself and transform it by means of mediation into a *perceived thing*, the thing-for-us; there is my subjective representation of X and the "real and simple" X, and the two are separated by the unbridgeable gulf of mediation. It is precisely this epistemic attitude, namely that truth lies at the pure undistilled beginning and that our representation of it could only ever be an improving imperfection, that is at issue, since by virtue of this attitude, we enter into a host of unavoidable skepticisms---a condition that Hegel takes to not merely be a problem for philosophical knowledge but for cultural and political life itself. Hegel's revision of this attitude then is simply to reverse the polarities. Whereas the traditional view places the Absolute in the beginning and treats it as an external*, for it is seen as the source from which all things spring and thus that externality towards which all our knowledge must ideally correspond, Hegel proposes that we conceive of it as an *end (or the whole process of its unfolding towards that end) and treat mediation as an internal project of the Absolute itself. This is how for Hegel moments of falsehood, contradiction, or negativity, are themselves part and parcel of the truth, for mediation is considered as the Truth becoming itself by becoming other than itself. The key passages here, for anyone curious, are 20 and 21 of the Phenomenology of Spirit---and for anyone interested in learning some Hegel, read these two passages over and over. In my reading of Hegel, this temporal restructuring of the Absolute and this optimism towards the role of mediation is absolutely critical in understanding how Hegel lends himself to progressive politics in a way that the right wing will never successfully claim. For the right, the Absolute remains the beginning pure and simple; all history is a deviation, a fall from paradise, everything is always getting worse, and the purpose of politics is to return to the simple. "Every day we stray further from God's light" is quite literally the essence of the right-wing attitude: difference from its normative ideal is conceived of as mutation, external threats, even as pathogens. But for Hegel (or what Hegel should've ascribed to if his politics were consistent with his system), the normative ideal generates its own difference, internally, and to conceptualize that unfolding as distortion or even degeneration would be in error. In a quite plain example, gender queerness is seen by the right as an external enemy: a degeneration of normalcy brought in by the absolute Other (the cultural Marxist---the Jew). But in the Hegelian perspective, gender queerness could only ever be the logical result of the actualized expression of gender normativity---it is the self-generated negative internal to itself, and in truth, represents its development in the process of self-becoming. It wasn't a malicious Other that brought in gender queerness, it was rather that gender normativity itself sublated itself via its own internal movement---and it is this movement that Hegel grasps in terms of dialectics''.