No. Hegel’s „speculative reason“ is neither a supersensible gift nor a form of religious intuition. It describes rather the highest form of logical penetration of actuality. A decisive misunderstanding consists in regarding reason as a „higher organ“ existing separately from everyday understanding.
Not separate faculties, but one living activity
For Hegel, spirit is no apparatus with various isolated „drawers“ or faculties, as the older psychology assumed. It is pure activity. There is therefore not „understanding“ on one side and „reason“ on the other as two different tools.
Rather it is the same spiritual activity, which takes a different form according to the depth and kind of its object. Hegel describes this process as three necessary „moments“ of every logical movement (cf. Encyclopaedia §§ 79–82):
- The moment of understanding (fixing): Spirit relates to the content by analysing, delimiting and establishing it. It says: „A is A“. That is indispensable for clarity in everyday life and in science. Here spirit acts as understanding.
- The dialectical moment (movement): As soon as spirit penetrates a content more deeply, it notices that rigid boundaries become fluid. It recognizes contradictions — for example, that „pure freedom“ without laws turns into its opposite, the tyranny of contingency. In this phase of liquefaction spirit acts dialectically.
- The speculative moment: Finally spirit comprehends the connection. It no longer sees the contradiction as a dead end but as part of a higher unity. It recognizes that the opposites — individual and state, say — condition one another. Here spirit acts as speculative reason.
The form of spirit follows its object
How reflecting spirit appears depends on its object. To solve a mathematical equation, the form of understanding suffices. But to understand complex realities of life such as right, art or history, spirit must take the speculative form, in order to do justice to the living and contradictory nature of these contents.
Why does this often seem mystical?
Hegel conceded that the speculative may appear „mystical“ to rigid understanding. But that is only because the understanding wants to force everything into an „either–or“. Reason, by contrast, recognizes the „both–and“ of living development. The passage in which he says so is worth reading in full:
The mystical [is] indeed something mysterious, but only for the understanding, and simply for the reason that abstract identity is the principle of the understanding, whereas the mystical (as synonymous with the speculative) is the concrete unity of those determinations which count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition. […] Everything rational is thus at the same time to be called mystical; by which, however, only this much is said, that it goes beyond the understanding — and by no means that it is to be regarded as inaccessible to thinking and incomprehensible at all.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 82 Addition
In sum: speculative thinking is no „descent“ into the dark, but a waking up to the wholeness of the matter. It is the „exertion of the concept“, which follows every step through logically instead of stopping at rigid definitions.