More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 9 - August 12, 2023
Bastille Day.
A day to celebrate french genocide of catholics
divisions between faith and reason, between Church and State, between the infinite and the finite. Each in turn sought to resolve the paradoxes which Kant had bequeathed them by re-weaving Kant’s categories into a new, seamless, system.
Positivity = “Institutions… from which the spirit has flown”.
the state is something purely mechanical — and there is no [spiritual] idea of a machine. Only what is an object of freedom may be called ‘idea’. Therefore we must transcend the state! For every state must treat free men as cogs in a machine. And this is precisely what should not happen; hence the state must perish.”
The result is a life-and-death struggle for recognition by the other. The self who submits, rather than face death, becomes the slave.
“Serious study of the ancient classics is the best introduction to philosophy. But perhaps not a road open to everyone.”
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) perfected a form of deductive argument called the syllogism.
Hegel usually referred to the Phenomenology as his “psychology”, because it was the only one of his writings which deals with the world, not as it appears to Absolute Mind (or Spirit) but to quite ordinary minds — like our own. It traced a path from our everyday commonsense states of mind to the vantage point of “Systematic Science”.
knowledge is still tied to “representation” (Vorstellung) or image-ination,
“imageless”.
Subjective?
it is also presence of mind.
Reading Hegel gives one a sense that the movement of thought will coincide with a vision of harmony that awaits us at the end of the whole process. Every serious reader of Hegel can bear witness to the intoxication of such moments.
In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel attacked his erstwhile colleague, Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), “commander-in-chief of prevalent shallowness” and a “pettifogging advocate of arbitrariness”.
Hegel argued that such moral subjectivism can be used to justify any crime. This moral subjectivism leads to an aversion to any objective or codified system of law, and to moral relativism.
And he was absolutely correct
The Greeks knew only that some men are free. To Christianity we owe the insight that all men should be free. But it takes the entire Christian epoch to arrive at the point where freedom for all humanity becomes practically possible.
Simple historical truth
The histories of civilization, religion and philosophy improve and progress as they advance from their beginnings in the East and reach their peak in modern (that is to say, Hegel’s) times. By contrast, art reaches its peak in Greece. The modern period is treated as a period of artistic decline.
“This collision, this nodus, this problem is one whose solution history has to work out in the future.”
As early as 1828, he wrote to Hegel about his efforts to “actualize and secularize the Idea”.
Christianity already sees and directs man as a natural being
Philosophers are doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel.
Only a permanently self-critical approach to theory can avoid paralysis.
In the twin principles of liberal democracy and the market economy — that is, in both the political and economic spheres — the struggle for freedom and recognition has in principle been won.
What remain are the particularisms of “private interest” and (the “bad infinity” of) “freedom of choice”, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. A new capitalist fundamentalism claims to have swept all appeals to humanity or to any larger ideals into the dustbin of history.
What can we gain from understanding Hegel today? By now, the answer should be evident. For the last 150 years, almost every major development in philosophy from Marx to Derrida and postmodernism can be seen as confronting the challenge of Hegel’s system. Nor is Hegel’s influence confined to philosophy only — it has had dramatic consequences in the spheres of political ideas and politics itself worldwide.
“Philosophy always comes on the scene too late to give instruction as to what the world ought to be. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there, cut and dried, after its process of formation has been completed… When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then a shape of life has grown old. It cannot
Simple truths are usually the most profound
be rejuvenated by philosophy’s grey on grey; it can only be understood. It is only with the fall of dusk that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings.” Hegel, Philosophy of Right
Very poetic
