Posted on 11/10/2008 11:37:17 AM PST by betty boop
Many people have referred to Obama as a "messiah" - tongue in cheek of course around here - but I suspect quite a few have fallen for the magic and believe his Second Reality is "real."
As you say, he will be held accountable for dealing in the First Reality. I predict many disappointments among his followers.
I'm pinging a few others for their insights.
I think Hegel is wrong, but he's wrong brilliantly and even helpfully.
I do NOT think that he tried to make philosophy the cookbook that he is accused of making it. I do think that often the lesser followers of a philosopher, even those who do not professedly turn him on his head, are more liable to a kind of spiritually blind defense of the philosopher's "system" which ends up making the system an idol and entirely misses the truth which the philosopher himself meant the system to serve and to portray.
I think SOME academics and those who try to take the life, love, and blood out of study, who are committed to study as an astringent and life-denying activity end up missing the point and tossing around amazing judgments and condemnations based not on what this or that writer actually said but on their extrapolation of philosophical musings into books of instructions. Some don't need Barron's Outlines or Cliff notes because they bring that approach to anything they read.
Can you tell I'm a tad peeved by this article? Having read (in March of 1971, as I recall -- get my my Geritol with a tequila chaser, please) Hegel's early explicitly Christian stuff, while I say again that I think he turns out to be wrong, I am not going to through him under the bus, at least not with the enthusiasm of this writer.
I agree with your sentiments and it’s not as if the “hierarchy of being” system is free of mysticism and magicalism. It seems to me the problem is with immanentism and not just Hegel himself.
I pulled out his “The Phenomenology of Mind” and scanned a few chapters. Chapter VI, on Spirit strikes me as more humanist in perspective than Christian.
“Reason is spirit, when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to the level of truth, and reason is consciously aware of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.”
IMHO, definitely not the human spirit of Pauline or Johanine writings.
For one thing, neither "spirit" nor "mind" adequately translate "Geist" as Hegel uses the word. And I think while he has, or thinks he has, Xtian influences in his thought, he is not trying to be a theologian. In the "Athens v. Jerusalem" division, he's sho' nuff on the Athens side, by way of German Idealism.
Anyone who has a world view has a theology whether they care to admit it or not. A "no-God' theology is still a theology, though a pretty puny one. Still, its adherents are among the most strident proselytizers on the face of the planet today. Go figure!!!
There it is. The assertion that failing to make an explicit reference to God is to assert that there is no God.
Applied philosophy ping
John Adams' insight is neither sectarian nor doctrinal. What it represents is a deep insight into human nature shared by all the Framers regardless of religious confession. It has deep roots in history, philosophy, and culture, and was a major concern for Plato, who saw that no political order could be any better than the general moral "tone" of the people who compose it.
The Constitution was designed for a free people who are morally responsible for their actions. When we speak of a system of self-government, which is what we in America supposedly have, we have to recognize that "self-government" begins in the good order of the individual citizen: Personal morality is the foundation of the system. If the people are "disordered," then so will be the society. And the Constitution itself eventually will come under attack.
I believe that is the point that John Adams was asserting.
Both Marx and Hegel, (and Lucaks, too) are as dead as their aesthetics. Hegel was a jolly fellow and very popular, so we'll give him that. His 'Phenomology of the Spirit' was ground-breaking for sure and is a must read if it takes ten years, but other reading can come first since the cites are few and far between anymore.
It might not have been to Adams, but the tendency is to apply it in the context of the religious beliefs of the person who is using it as an argument.
IMHO any philosophy that claims to establish positive truth is not philosophy, but something else masquerading in the costume of philosophy. And certain schools do assert this (e.g., positivism, phenomenalism, materialism; utilitarianism, etc., all post-Enlightenment "diremptions" from the classical philosophy). I'm just confirming your observation here PasorBob.
But this does not mean that there is no truth in philosophy. Philosophy explores aspects of reality that are not "physical," or "material." If I wanted to understand the relations between mind and world, for example, would science be of any help to me? Science doesn't have much to say about mind, or psyche, or spirit; and if it has a concept of "world," or even of "reality," it didn't get it from the exercise of the scientific method, but from philosophy.
So clearly philosophy must be a means of acquiring knowledge; for otherwise, how could worldviews arise in the first place?
Please tell me what Eric Vöegelin's "article of faith" is? I've been a student of his for a while now and am most curious to know your view of this.
Plus he was a very great literary artist. And so definitely, we do notice.
Thank you so much for contributing this insight PalinForever!
Thank you so much, weston, for this lapidary insight from the great "St. Muggs!"
You'll have noted that the main source of this article is Eric Vöegelin, for whom the present writer has particular enthusiasm. Vöegelin has well acknowledged Hegel's towering genius, as for instance here:
In the construction of [Hegel's] system, it is true, the Second Reality ... prevails and badly deforms the existence of the philosopher and spiritualist. But Hegel does not always construct his system. He can write brilliant commonsense studies on politics, as well as literary essays which reveal him as a master of the German language and a great man of letters. Moreover, the systematic works themselves are filled with excellent philosophical and historical analyses which can stand for themselves, unaffected in their integrity by the system into which they are built.Elsewhere Vöegelin states that the Phänomenologie ought to be required reading for every doctoral candidate in philosophy.
In short, Vöegelin is an admirer of Hegel. He takes him to task, however, for the "magical" aspects of his work, which Hegel himself put there of course. And so, Vöegelin comes to characterize Hegel as "the coexistence of two selves, as an existence divided into a true and false self holding one another in such balance that neither the one nor the other ever becomes completely dominant. Neither does the true self become strong enough to break the system, nor does the false self become strong enough to transform Hegel into a murderous revolutionary or a psychiatric case." ["On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery," p. 217.]
I don't think Vöegelin has thrown Hegel under the bus. Neither was that the intent of the present writer.
Thanks ever so much for writing, MadDawg!
Didn’t Eric Vöegelin write a book about the history of the idea of progress?
Yeah. The ones that survive not only get a doctorate but a medal for endurance AND treatment for PTSD.
Okay. So he wasn't trashing him as badly as a I thought. I've been doing polemics too long. Time for another retreat.
Not to mention the "revolutionary tendencies" of modern feminism. As for instance noted here by the novelist John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969):
I think it's apparent all through cultural history that when women did in the past get a slightly higher position in society, these are usually the periods of great innovation. With all our faults, this is an extraordinary age for tearing old ideas apart and remodeling the world. These, to me, are very strongly — how shall I put it? — Eve-flavored periods. They're periods when you suddenly feel the underlying, almost unconscious entrance of women everywhere in society. At the root of it, it seems to me, it's women quarrelling with the way men see the world, with the paternalistic, rigid, structured society, machismo society. I think women are paradoxically the more conservative sex and also the more revolutionary sex. — The Wall Street Journal, 11/20/81Jeepers, that one could have come out of an Obama speech, it is so steeped in the techniques of second-reality construction. Notable is the appropriation of the symbol, "Eve," while remaining silent on what the symbol means, or has historically meant. We need to recall "Eve" was tempted by "the" Evil One, and tempted Adam in turn, to fall away from God's Truth. And then maybe we can grasp what Fowler is driving at here.
To contrast this zeal for revolutionary change with the "first-reality point of view," we have the insight of another artist, Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director and designer of grand opera:
We have no guarantee for the present or the future. Therefore the only choice is to go back to the past and respect traditions. I have been a pioneer in this line of thinking, and the results have proven me right. People who think they can do better than previously, interpreting works of art in a new key, are very foolish. The reason I am box-office everywhere is that I am an enlightened conservative continuing the discourse of our grandfathers and fathers, renovating the texts but never betraying them. The road has been irrevocably lost, and there must be a search as to why and when this new breed of destructive thinking came into being, often encouraged by the press.Zeffirelli points to "the press" as helpful carrier of such unenlighted unconservatism. The novelist Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep and other novels, reminds us that Hollywood plays a significant role in this regard:If one believes Wagner had Nazi storm troopers in mind when he was writing about the Nibelungs, what is this except major presumption based on abysmal ignorance? Let's not forget what Leonardo said — the work of art ends in its conception. — The Wall Street Journal, 2/26/82
No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood. Please do not think I completely despise it, because I don't. The best proof of that may be that every producer I have worked for I would work for again, and every one of them, in spite of my tantrums, would be glad to have me. But the overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have really never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world. It is a great subject for a novel — probably the greatest still untouched. But how to do it with a level mind, that's the thing that baffles me. It is like one of these South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms — only when the thing is over the ragged dead men lie in rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that this is not funny, this is a Roman circus, and damn near the end of civilization.So much for the organs of transmission of what passes for "culture" these days — an insane asylum bursting with energy. On that happy note, let me conclude by thanking you, r9etb, for your excellent series of posts on this thread. It's so good to hear from you!
I think there is truth in this, but it isn't that the period would be "Eve-flavored" but rather a period of greater liberty. The position of women would be a marker; if women enjoy greater liberty its because liberty itself is in greater supply and more generalized. It doesn't seem surprising that liberty would lead to innovation.
I believe that is the point that John Adams was asserting.
- Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780)
U.S. courts frequently quote Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England as the definitive pre-Revolutionary War source of common law; in particular, the United States Supreme Court quotes from Blackstone's work whenever they wish to engage in historical discussion that goes back that far, or further (for example, when discussing the intent of the Framers of the Constitution). His work has been used most forcefully as of late by Justice Clarence Thomas. U.S. and other common law courts mention with strong approval Blackstone's formulation also known as Blackstone's ratio popularly stated as "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" — although he did not first express the principle.
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