Abstract
Wittgenstein says that Hegel sees identities where he himself sees differences. This is interesting because it is a good way to characterize their final conceptualizations of knowledge, respectively spirit and language play, but also because it is one of many examples of a more general pattern of evaluation of Hegel's system by his followers.
They usually either deny that the whole is true (Adorno), or assert that what we are for us, our self-concept, is always inadequate to what we are in itself (Sartre). Our knowledge in itself always contains some sort of a hole or gap.
So Hegel usually comes off as a fool who betrayed the revolutionary ideal of the torn self-consciousness in favor of the benefice of the Prussian state, in which all self-consciousness is unified and all the socks carefully mended. In my paper I want to outline a different reading of the whole problem, which sees Hegel as a cautious man who does not want his philosophy to be clumsily represented after he dies.