Insofar as relational sociology is grounded in an ontology of social relations, it must relate to the most systemic and systematic ontology generated in the history of Western metaphysics – Hegel’s ontology of the Subject as both Substance or Object and Self. Hegel thinks of the unity of the difference between Subject and Object. This unity appears and unfolds in the relations between the Subject or Knower and the Object or Known. The relations linking Subject to Object constitute the various modes and phases of what Hegel and German Idealism call “knowing.” Hegelian knowing is worlds apart from the now familiar and standard accounts of what it is to know in contemporary psychology and cognitive science. For Hegel, knowing has nothing to do with the mental representation of an object in persons’ subjective or collective minds. Hegel thinks of knowing as a mode of being, of being in an understanding of the world. To know is not to mirror or represent an external object and reality but a way of existing in a truth. Knowing originates in neither the Subject (“Idealism”) nor the Object (“Materialism”) but is the unity of their difference. This unity appears in the manifold relations and modes of relational disclosure occurring in the space and time between Knower and Known. This text is not a contribution to Hegel scholarship or an attempt at summarizing Hegel’s philosophical system. It does not place Hegel’s philosophy into a historical-comparative framework, nor does it contribute to the sociology of knowledge. Instead, we try here to think with Hegel, not about him.