Hegel, recognition, and religion

HEGEL SUGGESTS, on more than a few occasions, that a complete appraisal of our ability to discursively represent the world should terminate in the realization that God is the proper object of science. He likewise suggests that our knowledge claims about what we take objective reality to be are instantiations of the self-thinking processes through which the divine mind purveys the selfsame reality as a manifestation of itself. Why else would the absolute Idea with which the Logic culminates, and which denotes the apex of our conceptual and inferential powers, be homologous to the noesis noesoes of Aristotle? (1) Thus it comes as no surprise that Hegel has been impugned by his critics for overstepping what Kant sets down as the lawful boundaries of our theoretical cognitive capacities. (2) Indeed, so long as he is seen as an out-and-out metaphysician--in roughly the same way as his contemporaries saw Spinoza--otherwise opposing positions along the philosophical spectrum will occupy common territory in rebuking his speculative excesses.