“For a brief time Hegel ..had been captive to the illusion that the French Revolution was the restoration of classical Athens in his midst, but by the December 1800 ..he was convinced that the ideal of reconciliation with an apparently alien world could not be achieved by recapturing a lost past” – Holderlin ..through ..the concept of love, pointed out to Hegel the way beyond the Fichtean dilemma of having to choose between theoretical and practical reason, i.e., between domination of the self by the not-self or object and domination of the not-self by the self. Domination, whether theoretical or practical, is incapable of achieving the authentic reconciliation of subject and object possible only through love. Dieter Henrich has persuasively argued that this thought, planted in Hegel by Holderlin, is the germ of Hegel’s own mature standpoint (Henrich, 9-40). Ineffable “love” will in Hegel’s vocabulary shortly become “life,” and will end up as the conceptually intelligible infinite “Spirit”

– Introduction to Hegel’s Letters http://ift.tt/1NaLL4u