Understanding Hegel: Through the Eyes of an Electric Pinocchio
To Hegel, the history of the developing self-conscious mind was the same as the history of philosophy. Through out time, conflicting theories have laid claim to their one exclusive form of truth. Hegel implies that we should not focus on these conflicted ideals but view each as “elements of an organic unity”. This places Hegel as part of a progression of philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, and Kant) who can generally by described as Idealists, whom regarded freedom or self-determination as real and being important for the soul or mind or divinity.
By placing heavy emphasis on taking the contradictions and tensions he saw not only in philosophy, but also in society as a whole Hegel attempted to interpret them as part of a comprehensive unity he described as “absolute knowledge”. He believed everything was interrelated and that attempting to separate it from reality into various parts was wrong. However, Hegel’s triadic dialect is perhaps too simplistic. From Hegel’s point of view, an analysis of a apparently simple idea will reveal it’s underlying contradictions, and these contradictions will lead to the dissolution of the idea in it’s simplest form. Then these contradictions will lead to a development into a higher-level and more complex form of that same idea.
These ideas of Hegel’s may have remained a mystery to me if I had not by chance been reading the works of Philip K. Dick and Daniel F. Galouye at the same time. After reading Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant Hegel began to fall into place for me and make some sense. In this story an android discovers that he is not a real boy and tries to move beyond his programming. Consulting the computer he possesses he begin...
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...a helpful tool for thinking. Hegel would argue that the failure of The Thirteenth Floor was a necessary error. After all, Hegel believed error to be imminent to the truth, that truth needs error. Hegel would say that in order to understand the world we need our mistakes.
Hegel stood on Kant’s concept of individual minds constructing their reality, he then expanded it further into a system of thought to explain all of reality in terms of the Absolute Mind. That is revealed to our finite minds in every area of human knowledge. This Absolute Mind is the unified totality of all rational truth. It contains a unity-in-diversity, organizing all knowledge and experience into it’s whole. Only by studying all areas of human knowledge can aspects of our reality be exposed. Only the Absolute Mind can have this full understanding of reality by uncovering the rational structure.
Take a minute to relax. Enjoy the lightness, or surprising heaviness, of the paper, the crispness of the ink, and the regularity of the type. There are over four pages in this stack, brimming with the answer to some question, proposed about subjects that are necessarily personal in nature. All of philosophy is personal, but some philosophers may deny this. Discussed here are philosophers that would not be that silly. Two proto-existentialists, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, were keen observers of humanity, and yet their conclusions were different enough to seem contradictory. Discussed here will be Nietzsche’s “preparatory human being” and Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”. Both are archetypal human beings that exist in accordance to their respective philosopher’s values, and as such, each serve different functions and have different qualities. Both serve the same purpose, though. The free spirit and the knight of faith are both human beings that brace themselves against the implosion of the god concept in western society.
ABSTRACT: Levinas depicts a pluralism of subjectivity older than consciousness and self-consciousness. He repudiates Heidegger's notion of solitude in order to explore the implications of the Husserlian pure I outside the subject. A hidden Good constitutes the Other in the self: a diremption not at the expense of the unity of the self. Levinas stands with Nietzsche on the side of life which requires and is capable of no justification whatsoever. But for Levinas the totality is ruptured by the thought that there is a unity of self undiminished by its immemorial responsibility for the Other, a unity of self beyond totality. This self containing the Other is the transcendence of the Ego otherwise immanent in Husserl's pure intentionality. Just here Levinas' thought is most perfectly distinguished from Sartre's notion of the transcendence of the Ego as complete exclusion from the immanence of intentionality. The pure I is otherwise than the Hegelian absolute Elastizität: incarnate and inspirited, the "self tight in its own skin." The transubstantiation of Ego to Other has not yet occurred to thought in Levinas, but what does occur here is the altersubstantiation of the I. The Other in the Same is an alteration of essence. It is precisely through thinking the contraction of [the modern] essence [of consciousness] that Levinas thinks otherwise than being, beyond essence, thinks "a thought profounder and 'older' than the cogito." Humanity signifies a "new image" of the Infinite in the preoriginary freedom by which the Self shows the Other mercy.
In sections 190-193 of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Sprit, Hegel looks into the relationship between the lord and the bondsman. In this examination of the relationship, Hegel makes the move to find out what both the lord and bondsman offer to each other in terms of existence and or identity. The formulation that Hegel made in the selected sections is that the bondsman had more to gain in terms of intellectual growth than his lord who becomes intellectually dormant due to the bondsman acting in the likeness of his lord.
Heidegger’s idea of how we have to realize ourselves, by saying that we are in a state of falleness and that during this we are the slaves to the one or human drama. Heidegger explains that we are included in this creature and for that we are categorized. This leads us to being constricted to Daesin and this will not lead us to reach our full potential as beings. We are part of this public creature and we are categorized for being as such.
Nagel is a profound philosopher, who defends a customary view of science a way to gain knowledge of the world. In the argument, Nagel makes it clear that there is good reason to believe that God doesn’t exist, however, he does make it clear that his views make fall along the lines of Buddhism. Nagel claims that he his questioning the theological proposition to believe in God. Nagel has given two points in proving that God does not exist. The first point goes along the lines that of that God exist, however, they don’t have a good reason to believe in God but they also have no good reason to not believe in God. Or we cannot truly understand the concept of God exist because according to Nagel its nonsense- although, we understand it as an expression
Kierkegaard suggests that Hegel, at his core, does not understand that the nature of man, or at the very least the nature of faith, which is in a constant state of moral uncertainty. He illustrates the state of man with various analogies on Abraham's sacrifice of Issac in “Fear and Trembling,” suggesting that Abraham should either be considered a murder because he would have killed his son, or a man of faith because of he obeyed God unwaveringly. Kierkegaard wirtes, “I return, however, to Abraham. Before the result, either Abraham was every minute a murderer, or we are confronted by a paradox which is higher than all mediation” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 51). He makes the claim that while the ethical is universal, the individual who has a personal relationship with God takes on a higher importance than one would with Gies...
Kung, Hans. The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought As Prolegomena to a Future Christology. T&T Clark, 2001. hard cover.
In the first stage of his examination of what the sensual might offer in the way of knowledge, Hegel examines the object apprehended by a sensing c...
In today’s society, the mind is a set of cognitive elements which enables an individual’s consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory. In addition, without our minds and/or conscious experiences, a person would not be able to understand what makes them who they are. Similarly, in Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” Nagel claims that even though there is something it is like to be an organism, humans are not capable of fully knowing what it is like to be a bat. In addition, Nagel supports his claims through the importance of an organism’s conscious experiences, memories, and knowledge which allow an individual to identify themselves. Therefore, in this paper I will discuss Nagel’s argument which I believe
As presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the aim of Life is to free itself from confinement "in-itself" and thus to become "for-itself." Not only does Hegel place this unfolding of Life at the very beginning of the dialectical development of self-consciousness; Hegel characterizes self-consciousness itself as a form of Life and even refers us to the development of self-consciousness in the Master/Slave dialectic as an essential moment in the fulfillment of this aim of Life to become 'for-itself.' The following paper delineates this overlooked thread of the dialectic. The central thesis is that each step along the path of self-consciousness' attempt at making the truth of its unity with itself explicit, is simultaneously a step in the realization of the aim of Life: to become 'for-itself.' In the review of the Master/Slave dialectic, it reveals itself that the necessary condition for the fulfillment of Life's aim lies in work. Yet...
In his work, Who is Man, Abraham J. Heschel embarks on a philosophical and theological inquiry into the nature and role of man. Through analysis of the meaning of being human, Heschel determines eight essential traits of man. Heschel believes that the eight qualities of preciousness, uniqueness, nonfinality, process and events, solitude and solidarity, reciprocity, and sanctity constitute the image of man that defines a human being. Yet Heschel’s eight qualities do not reflect the essential human quality of the realization of mortality. The modes of uniqueness and opportunity, with the additional singular human quality of the realization of mortality, are the most constitutive of human life as uniqueness reflects the fundamental nature of humanity,
The Transcendental Deductions of the pure concept of the understanding in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in its most general sense, explains how concepts relate a priori to objects in virtue of the fact that the power of knowing an object through representations is known as understanding. According to Kant, the foundation of all knowledge is the self, our own consciousness because without the self, experience is not possible. The purpose of this essay is to lay out Kant’s deduction of the pure concept of understanding and show how our concepts are not just empirical, but concepts a priori. We will walk through Kant’s argument and reasoning as he uncovers each layer of understanding, eventually leading up to the conclusion mentioned above.
...ectively bring together the right ideas presented by the rationalists and empiricists and strengthen the foundation of metaphysics. Kant uses the theory of transcendental idealism, the claim that gains of knowledge are based on perceptions of the mind, to prove the limitations of the human mind. Transcendental realists are proven wrong by Kant because of their inability to see that the mind is incapable of perceiving things in themselves. Kant resolves Hume’s scepticism by confirming that there are sources of reality perceived by sensations. Kant is successful in resolving the debate between rationalists and empiricists by applying a Copernican approach on understanding the human mind and its perceptions. By understanding the capacity of the human mind, we are one step closer to strengthening the foundation of metaphysics and understanding how knowledge is attained.
For William Connolly, Hegel’s method is present in his concept of Politics of Becoming (POB for short). This concept is tricky, because it’s equally saturated in neo-Nietzschian, Hegelian, & Schopenhauer’s philosophies. Therefore, hold onto the handlebars, we’re going on a rollercoaster ride through basic Nietzschian philosophy! Nietzsche, in essay one of the Genealogy of Morals, explores the concept of ressentiment as it emerged in Jewish culture during the Roman occupation of Judea in the first century.
Truth of oneself makes it visible when faced with absurd events in life where all ethical issues fade away. One cannot always pinpoint to a specific trait or what the core essence they discover, but it is often described as “finding one’s self”. In religious context, the essential self would be regarded as soul. Whereas, for some there is no such concept as self that exists since they believe that humans are just animals caught in the mechanistic world. However, modern philosophy sheds a positive light and tries to prove the existence of a self. Modern philosophers, Descartes and Hume in particular, draw upon the notion of the transcendental self, thinking self, and the empirical self, self of public life. Hume’s bundle theory serves as a distinction between these two notions here and even when both of these conception in their distinction make valid points, neither of them is more accurate.