“I have used Hegelian methods in a most un-Hegelian cause: to establish just that sort of ultimate other-worldliness which Hegel is so often at pains to dissolve”. The Discipline of the Cave, p. 16.
“Hegel, as careful students will know, only made use of his dialectic to establish a vastly enriched humanism and this-worldism, in which das Jenseitige, that which seems to lie beyond the cave, is brought wholly within the compass of human experience, so that human rationality when raised to the fully self-conscious forms of art, religion and philosophy, simply becomes the all-explanatory raison d’etre of everything. Other philosophers, both earlier and later, have, however used something like Hegel’s dialectic to go beyond the confines of the human cave. Plato and Plotinus have used alleged discrepancies in ordinary modes of conceiving things to draw us up towards higher realms of being, Spinoza made use of an ‘intuitive science’ to take us beyond the mutilated perspectives of ordinary experience, and Bradley, clad in a loosely woven robe of Hegelian and Spinozistic fibres, rose by dialectic to a strange type of purely sentient experience which he said was that of the Absolute.” The Discipline of the Cave, pp. 80-81.
“Finite existence in the here and now, with every limitation of quality and circumstance, is, Hegel teaches, when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence which is everywhere and always. To live in Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City…” (Hegel's Use of Teleology, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 132).