Modern philosophy has reached the consensus of bounded rationality, and many philosophers try to transcend the finiteness of concepts to seek new possibilities of metaphysics. As a result, sensibility, emotion, life, will, body, things, practice and history, which are marginalized in traditional philosophy, have been pulled to the throne of modern and contemporary philosophy. Based on his grasp of the spirit of the times, Professor Sun Litian called 2 1 century "the era of experience". [1] What is the relationship between traditional metaphysical speculation and the experience of modern philosophy?

We generally believe that speculation is rational, conceptual, ideological and logical, and experience is life, emotion, imagination and intuition. However, as far as speculation transcends intellectual thinking and common reason, it is not an abstract activity of self-consciousness, but is related to the concrete spirit as a whole. Therefore, speculation not only does not hinder the various styles of spirit such as feeling, emotion, imagination, consciousness and will, but also penetrates them with thoughts and promotes them in a spiritual unity that embraces all styles. This means that speculation is a holistic activity of the spirit of unity of self-consciousness and life, and it has the character of experience. German classical philosophy is a master of speculative philosophy. Let us discuss the relationship between speculation and experience with the help of Kant and Hegel.

First, between man and absolute: "upward road" and "downward road"

Hegel called philosophy "knowledge of truth" about "absoluteness". In the philosophy of spirit, art, religion and philosophy are the three links of absolute spirit, and philosophy grasps absolute in the way of concept, not in the way of emotion and representation. Due to the transformation of the spirit of the times, Hegel made a special comparison between religion and philosophy: they are essentially the same, but the essence of truth is expressed in two languages, "one is the popular language based on limited categories and one-sided abstract thinking, and the other is the language of specific concepts" [2]. Therefore, religion can involve people with different academic qualifications, while philosophy, as a scientific understanding of truth, is competent by only a few people. Religion, with absolute content and representation as its form, is nothing more than "a powerless vertex with no content, keeping itself in an abstract emotional state". [3] Philosophy, especially Hegel's philosophy conceptualizes and logicizes belief and representation. It is in this sense that people call Hegel's philosophy "speculative Christianity".

Hegel once said that if you want to be a speculative philosopher, you must first become a Spinoza. Spinoza was the first philosopher who kept God and absolute in scientific understanding after the rise of modern science. "Love God rationally" was the moral result of his ethics. From this point of view, "speculation" has two meanings, one is the absolute eternal content and direction of God, and the other is the conceptual scientific understanding. Here, science is not an ordinary intellectual science, concept is not an abstract intellectual category, and cognition is not a purely static activity. Concepts can understand infinity (truth) because they are speculative and contain absoluteness. In a word, speculation is thinking towards absoluteness, or thinking about absoluteness.