It is objective, or public, or Absolute, Thought. Hegel was a supreme master at this sort of thing. Fair enough, you say. Perhaps the following passages will clear things up.
The first is from the preface to the Phenomenology , the second from its last chapter:. The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result , that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. Though it may seem contradictory that the Absolute should be conceived essentially as a result, it needs little pondering to set this show of contradiction in its true light.
The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute, as at first immediately enunciated, is only the universal. Spirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and movement in this ether of its life and is Science.
It is the rationality of spirit in its world existence. Its movement is that it makes itself what it is, i. This method is not only physiologically but ethologically sound. Of course it should never be used first.
You need first to earn the respect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, or the like: then apply the violent solecism. Tell them, for example, that when we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was born out of wedlock. You cannot go wrong this way. Hegel is full of philosophical thunderclaps. The book really has very little to do with the discipline of the same name. This section has made a deep impression on thinkers from Marx to Francis Fukuyama.
It describes the way that we come to recognize and deal with the fact of other people, other self-consciousnesses. This, Hegel says, leads to a struggle for recognition, a contest that quickly escalates to a life-or-death struggle:.
They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case. Does this sound like anyone you know or have ever heard of—excluding, that is, current or potential guests of your local penal establishment? I know, I know: that is a terribly vulgar question.
After all, Hegel is not talking about you or me; he is talking about the necessary unfolding of self-consciousness as it struggles into a recognition of its own freedom. If you find that convincing, then you have the makings of a true Hegelian. It might be easier to start, as he does, with simple sense certainty. At the beginning of the Phenomenology , Hegel tries to get us to unsettle some of our simplest, most taken-for-granted ideas about what counts as knowledge.
We write down this truth. If now, this noon , we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale. The Now that is Night is preserved , i. This self-preserving Now is, therefore, not immediate but mediated; for it is determined as a permanent and self-preserving Now through the fact that something else, viz. W hat should we think of this argument? Badly, anyway. It threatens to destabilize the meaning of some perfectly good words by, so to speak, falsely existentializing them.
Part of learning language is learning the limits of language: grasping what it cannot tell us as well as what it can. It recounts in vivid detail the doings of Hilda the hippo, Squeaky the mouse, and many others.
Our son, aetat. In the end, what are we to think about Hegel? Think whatever you want. Is anybody? Dear Prof Hegel…please say some true things about Hegel to help us all understand. And perhaps you could help us understand who exactly it was and how that person took his work and turned it into what appears to be a system of mind control for the West of today.
Thanks so much for your contribution to our understanding. As you may have noticed, this post has very little actual Hegelian philosophy in it. That was completely intentional. I admit I am no Hegel scholar. While getting acquainted with Hegel, I noticed that there is fair amount of Hegel hate. People genuinely do not like Hegel.
I wanted to understand why. Deductive formal logic as refined by Descartes, Bacon, and Newton into the scientific method has advanced mankind toward truth across nearly every discipline over the last two hundred years. We have progressed orders of magnitude more in that short time than we had in the preceding two thousand centuries.
Anyone who chooses dialectics over formal logical deduction is doomed to wander in a desert of lies. The dialectic is an observation about the nature of evolution itself, be it at an individual, cultural, or ideational level. The dialectical is a useful tool, in conjunction with deductive reasoning, to understanding a thing. No thinking person assumes that they have all the variables.
Or at least, nobody who understands science or epistemology purports to know in advance all the elements that will play into a dialectical movement.
Just because Hegel himself abandoned deductive logic and arrogated to himself the position of the absolute knower does NOT make that leap a necessary part of the dialectical movement.
Nor does his misuse of the tool he is largely credited with inventing make that tool useless for others. We are ignorant beings, but excellent tool makers.
And we need all the tools we can get. My bad. I thought a forum like this would be a good place for open-minded philosophical discourse.
I always enjoy watching people feed themselves on their preconceived notions. I bet all your friends agree with you on every conceivable point as well. Must be lonely. You enjoy that. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Only the rulers are free. Moving further west and forward in time Hegel next comes to Persia, a theocratic empire where the first stirrings of the consciousness of freedom can be seen.
The sun is worshipped, and it shines on all; on ruler and subject alike. Then westwards again to classical Greece, which becomes the first stage in the true consciousness of freedom. Its democracy allows freedom for many, but the social system is based on slavery.
Still, philosophy and independent thought, free of the state religion, gently nudge humanity along the path of the consciousness of freedom. There it brings about tension between the authorities and the individual. Persons with a penchant for free thought took refuge in Stoicism, Skepticism, or Epicureanism — schools of thought that Hegel regarded as limited, if not negative. The consciousness of freedom receives a huge boost from the rise of Christianity, which eventually weakens the Roman Empire.
The Catholic Church taught its members that they were made in the image of God; that they possessed infinite value and an eternal destiny. But the Church grows corrupt, its hierarchy indulges in greed, lust, and indolence — perversions of the true religious spirit.
The subsequent strife sparks the Reformation, which Hegel regards as the launch pad to the end of history. In this way individual conscience could determine truth and reason.
The Reformation laid the groundwork for the next stages — the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Then heads began to roll, literally, as the Revolution turned to terror and the guillotine. Putting Reason on a pedestal isolated from the community had brought about the failure of the French Revolution, according to Hegel.
Freedom was postponed while the rule of power took over, embodied in Napoleon. But that is eastwards! But the parliament was weak, most people had little or no say in government, and the king could impose strict censorship. Despite these restrictions, Hegel believed that freedom is best nurtured through a constitutional monarchy. The monarch in his case Frederick William III embodies the spirit and desires of the governed, who have now become free. Hegel thus declares his own Prussian society the final stage of the development of the consciousness of freedom.
What happened to the westward movement? Hegel, the great champion of speculative thought, should not mind a bit of speculation from me at this point.
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