Is There a Connection Between Hegel and the Enlightenment Philosophers?

Hegel's point is when you use the universal now or this, then it doesn't just go away. You actually are able to apprehend it and kind of preserve it, but you only do that by having recourse to some kind of universal. So even these little terms, which we think are the most immediate kind of terms imaginable, Hegel thinks are implicated in the universal. And thus what we're doing when we apprehend something through sense certainty is actually thinking through it via certain universals that we have. Even so for him, there are no truths that are just immediate. They're all, and so the point is to take stock of the way mediation plays a role in our coming to