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“… 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 contrast between faith and reason is in our time a contrast within philosophy itself.”
It could be said that Hegel was ultimately to intellectualize Romanticism, just as he was to spiritualize the Enlightenment.
Self-consciousness, or subjectivity, is immediately a consciousness of a lack of something — the object. Freedom has its beginning here, in Desire. Self-consciousness is consciousness aware of its own unity and purpose. But it is also consciousness divided, isolated from other consciousnesses. If humankind is to lead its history self-consciously, Hegel must show how individual self-consciousnesses can be related to one another in an essential way. He has to show how freedom can both divide, and ultimately also unite, human individuals.
In the short last chapter of the book, Geist (Spirit or Mind) comes to know itself. It recognizes itself in the world it has shaped and created
only now with a sense of our own thinking existence which reaches back over time and in it sees its pattern and purpose.
It wins truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself…
To embrace the whole energy of the suffering and discord that has controlled the world and all forms of its culture for some thousand years, and also to rise above it — this can be done by philosophy alone.
It is science which has led you into this labyrinth of the soul, and science alone is capable of leading you out again and healing you.”
“Serious study of the ancient classics is the best introduction to philosophy. But perhaps not a road open to everyone.”
Every stage or phase or moment is partial, and therefore partially untrue.
preserves
The totality is the product of that process which preserves all of its “moments” as elements in a structure, rather than as stages or phases.
The whole is an overcoming which preserves what it overcomes.
Hegel’s special term for this “contradiction” of overcoming and at the same time preserving is Aufhebung, sometimes translated as “sublation”.
“overcome and preserved”
of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity.
he never used the terms thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Yet, he confides in a letter, if he had harboured any hopes for a possible Napoleonic victory, he would have “put a rifle on his shoulder” and gone to join him.
This moral subjectivism leads to an aversion to any objective or codified system of law, and to moral relativism.
having purposes and striving deliberately to achieve them.
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.
Property is not something natural — as it is for John Locke — but founded on convention.
While possession relates to the individual, property relates the individual to society.
Hegel calls these institutions of civil society the “external state” because they are treated as mere instruments for achieving personal aims.
endorses constitutional monarchy. The state is no work of art;
Hegel admitted that he was never able to free himself of “anxieties and doubts“.
Hegel claims to show that history itself — with all its accidents and unforeseeable events — obeys a certain logic and could be said to reveal an idea. For Hegel, that idea is Freedom.
Spirit is opposed to (the contrary of) nature.
Stage One — the ancient Orient — only one (the ruler) is free. Stage Two — classical Antiquity — some (but not slaves) are free. Stage Three — the Christian-Germanic epoch — begins with the realization that all should be free, or, as Hegel puts it, that “man as man is free”.
“Freedom” implies a future without any foregone conclusions.
“the future” remains a mere category — defined simply as something inaccessible to the form-giving (or form-revealing) activity of philosophical reflection.
“The past is preserved by the present, as reality,
in philosophy, on the other hand, with what neither merely has been nor merely will be, but with what is and is eternally:
passed over in embarrassment, even by his most enthusiastic commentators.
It is exactly “such charlatanism” — “especially Schelling’s” — which had led to the Philosophy of Nature being discredited.
Science is Incomplete Understanding
But Hegel demands an Idea of Nature.
To think in terms of the understanding, as is done in mathematics, the natural sciences and traditional metaphysics, is to think in terms of fixed or uncriticized categories, to think undialectically or in pre-philosophical terms.
Nature has no history and shows no development. Its rigid and timeless laws must be obeyed,
Art, religion and philosophy are humanity’s supreme attainments or (what amounts to the same thing) aspects of the self-revelation of God or the "Absolute”.
Hegel treats art as being capable of conveying the deepest metaphysical or philosophical insights and as intimately linked to both religion and philosophy itself.
Art and religion are intimately linked because both are grounded in sensation. Both depend on “picture-thinking'' in their attempts to apprehend the divine.
