Hegel and the Movement towards the Ideal Mode of Being
Early Years
One of the earliest documents we have from Hegel is the De Ecclesiae Wirtembergicae renascentis calamitatibus, or in English "On the Calamities of the Renaissance of the Württemberg Church”. This document is exceptionally rare. Because this was published while Hegel was only 23 years old and long before he began his career in Philosophy, there are only a handful of these manuscripts in existence. This is a dissertation Hegel defended in June of 1793 to finish his degree at Tübingen and be admitted to the Theology consistorial exams, written primarily in Latin with long quotes in German. The thesis primarily discusses the history and philosophical chaos of the Reformation in the “Königreich Württemberg”, or the Kingdom of Württemberg which is the current state of Baden- Württemberg, focusing on the metaphysical influence of Aristotle, a massive topic of Hegel's later works.
Hegel and Hölderlin defended the dissertation of the then chancellor of the University of Tübingen and first professor of the Theological faculty with seven other students to finish their degrees and be admitted to the theological consistorial examination in autumn 1793. This is the only publication in which both names appear together. Hegel's name is listed as the first defendant on the document, and Rosenkranz considered De Ecclesiae ... to be a work by Hegel: "He [Hegel] wrote in the manner of Spittler's and Plank's with thorough source research, which goes into the smallest details in the notes, a treatise: De ecclesiae Wirtembergicae ... He defended it in June.”
Hegel left his hometown of Stuttgart to study at Tübingen in 1788, where he met several would-be influential philosophers including Schelling and Hölderlin. After defending this dissertation in 1793 and finishing his degree, Hegel decided not to enter into the Theological school and instead spent eight years as a private tutor in Germany and Switzerland, before building out his philosophical models and becoming Germany's most famous philosopher at the time. This manuscript marks a pivotal moment in Hegel's life.
In his early Jena writings, we see the young Hegel wrestling with the basic questions of German Idealism. He is attempting to get out from Kant's shadow and distinguish himself from contemporary Kantians, Fichte and Schelling (whom he knew personally from his time at the University of Tübingen). They all wrestle with the Kantian questions of a priori knowledge and self-awareness, which can be understood as the various Cartesian manifestations of Aristotelianism colliding against the complex post-Luther religious landscape. He responds to the echoes of the Kantian problems of the Consciousness' perceptual unity and self-knowing.
Kant halted his logical analysis at the Soul (seele), arguing that we cannot know the ordering of the internal workings of the Nous. This was part of a broader rejection of Cartesianism and Aristotelianism resulting in his rejection of traditional Catholic and Protestant Cosmo-Theology and developed an Onto-Theological conception of perception (something Kierkegaard, who generally detested the German Idealists, rifted upon). Hegel, wrestling with the interpretations and reception of Kant through Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, rejected this truncated Epistemology and sought an absolute, scientific metaphysical system of knowing and rationalistic self-consciousness. Kant and Hegel share many philosophic roots, including the idea that the thinking "I" (Ich Denke) is the only possibility of a unified knowing. Thus we can talk about a coherent Kanto-Hegelian Onto-Theological concept of the Self despite their clashes.
In his first Essay in the Journal of Critical Philosophy he describes broadly his approach to Philosophy and his views on the current state of philosophy in Europe. His view of Philosophy is dialectal: every new philosophy is the inevitable re-iteration of its historical predecessors. Philosophy proper is “a totality of knowledge produced by reflection” and “Transcendental philosophy is a science of the absolute”. He is concerned with the future of philosophy and science because the Enlightenment thinkers wrongly conflated Science as knowledge itself, and partly blames Kant for continuing this Cartesian fallacy. This has created “An age that has such a multitude of philosophical systems in its history seems to create an indifference which life attains after it has tried itself in all forms”
Among the poignant observations Hegel makes, in mimicry of Kant, is the catastrophic effect of Cartesian Epistemology “flattening” all forms of knowledge into one, erasing the ancient relational forms which have upheld the human psyche since time immoral. Wading through the architectonic dribble that is Hegelian dialectic logic can be exhausting, but occasionally, you come across a brilliant, stark observation that makes it all worth it. His attack on Descartes here is one of those from his early writings in Jena:
Against Cartesian philosophy, which has expressed in philosophical form the generally spreading dualism in the culture of the more recent history of our north-western world - a dualism of which, as the demise of all old life, the quieter transformation of the public life of men as well as the louder political and religious revolutions in general are only differently coloured outer sides - every side of living nature, as well as philosophy, had to seek means of rescue, just as against the general culture which it expresses; what has been done by philosophy in this respect, where it has been pure and open, has been treated with fury; where it has been done more concealed and confused, the mind has seized upon it all the more easily and remade it into the previous dualistic being.
All the sciences have been founded on this death, and what was still scientific, that is, at least subjectively alive in them, time has killed completely, so that, if it were not directly the spirit of philosophy itself, which, submerged and constricted in this vast sea, feels the force of its growing wings all the stronger, even the boredom of the sciences - this edifice of an intellect abandoned by reason, which, worst of all, with the borrowed name of either an enlightening or moral reason, has in the end also ruined theology - ought to make the whole flat expansion unbearable and at least excite a longing of wealth for a drop of fire, for a concentration of living contemplation and, after the dead has been known long enough, for a knowledge of the living which is possible through reason alone.
In the more traditional forms of Protestantism, the ancient Neo-Platonism remnants in them clashed with the Nominalist Tautology enshrined in European thinking by the variations of Sola Scriptura triggered by Luther. This broken Cartesian Epistemology codified by Luther theologically caused a crisis of knowing beyond the empirically observable- it “ruined theology” as Hegel put it. And the 'dead end' of Scientism/ pure Empiricism created by this Protestant Epistemology gave rise to Nihilism and Anti-Theism, which has Nietzsche argued, was also the death of ‘humanness’ itself.
This Epistemological disaster which caused the insanity of Medieval Catholicism and it’s natural development into Protestantism, also ultimately undermines Empirical Science, for “If nature is only matter, not subject-object, no such scientific construction of it remains possible, for which the cognizing and the cognized must be one.” The nature of and relationship between Faith and Knowledge, both of which he refers to as “Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity”, reaching its dialectical Telos through the Absolute Geist.
Beauty as an abstract unity of the sensual substance: Supersensuous Truth
Art is an expression of Freedom that leads culture towards the union of the particular with the universal and the consciousness with the material, ultimately leading to true freedom of the individual. There is quite a bit of Proto- Phenomenology here as he recognizes that images, symbols, and rituals have real, profound, and meta-real impacts. He demonstrates an acute understanding of the Phenomenological patterns running through art and mythology, which he describes in nearly Jungian terms through an "Unconscious Symbolism". He analyzes a vast spectrum of art, from Fashion to weaponry to athletic movement and even comedy, which he sees as a very advanced art form. Hegel is not only analyzing beauty of the eye, but beauty of the mind such as we see in literature and storytelling writ large. He understands the character in a narrative as "an inner but unformed totality" and is deeply indebted to Schiller on his understanding of the relationship of Truth and Beauty and quotes from him directly throughout his works. Goethe, not surprisingly, Hegel has great admiration for.
A pathos of rich in a totality of Spirit runs through all great art, and thus, Beauty is intricately tied to Truth, which is the object of religion. So to Hegel, Beauty cannot be separated from Theology. To this end, Hegel muses on Greek Mythology, Zoroastrian scriptures (the Avesta), Hindu epic poems, Islamic poetry and art, religious architecture throughout history and puritanical Dutch simplicity. To throw in a Dostoevsky line here- "beauty is the battlefield upon which God and the Devil do battle". Hegel writes:
The real sublimity, on the other hand, we have to look for in the fact that the whole created world at all appears as finite, limited, not self-supporting and bearing itself and for this reason can only be regarded as glorifying accessory to the praise of God.
We have a "Sense" of beauty which bears opposite meanings simultaneously. We encounter the objects with external, physical contemplation through the bodily senses, and at the same time approach them with the full idea of their conceptual existence. This idea of their conceptual existence, which is necessary to observe them sensually, is the focus of his lectures of aesthetics. In the Philosophy of History, he writes “By the term ‘Ideal’, we also understand the ideal of Reason, of the Good, of the True. Poets, as e.g. Schiller, have painted such ideals touchingly and with strong emotion, and with the deeply melancholy conviction that they could not be realized.”
To Hegel, the sensuous, aesthetic experience of beauty, when properly understood, leads us to the supersensuous experience of consciousness. Art is the expression of the Idea; it reflects back the “pure I’s” understanding of itself. Art is pragmatic; beauty is pragmatic- it develops the Subject’s self-consciousness and corrects it’s metaphysical relationship to the Object. Here in Ästhetik he muses:
Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there’s nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.
Dasein is the Otologic Being of personal reality. Dasein literally translates "To be there" but it is a purely philosophic concept of Being which maintains within itself an antinomy of finitude-infinity. Hegel defines Dasein in his Encyclopedia as a specific type of Being: “the unity of being and nothing in which the immediacy of these determinations and thus their contradiction in their relationship has disappeared - a unity in which they are only moments". In modern Existentialism, it is correlated to Qualia. Dasein experiences itself through Beauty: “Now when truth in this external existence [Dasein] is present to consciousness immediately, and with the concept remains immediately in unity with its external appearance, the Idea is not only true but beautiful. Beauty is determined as the sensible shining of the Idea”
Beauty is realized through the particularization of the Universal, and the highest form of this paradox is the divine. Art is instantiating the General in the specific. Goethe and Shiller, Hegel muses, was a genius in his storytelling precisely because he understood this- because he "narrowly limited particularity from the life of the present, but at the same time, as a background and as the atmosphere in which this circle moves... the broadest, most powerful world events." This contrast generates sublimity. Tolstoy summarizes Hegel’s views in his 1898 “What is Art?”:
According to Hegel (1770-1831), God is manifested in nature and art in the form of beauty. God is expressed in two ways: in object and subject, in nature and spirit. Beauty is the illumination of the idea through matter. Truly beautiful is only the spirit and all that is involved in the spirit, and therefore the beauty of nature is only a reflection of the beauty inherent in the spirit: the beautiful has only spiritual content. But to manifest the spiritual must be in a sensual form. The sensual manifestation of the spirit is only visibility (Schein). And this very visibility is the only reality of the beautiful. So art is the realization of this visibility of the idea, and is a means, along with religion and philosophy, to bring to consciousness and express the deepest tasks of people and the highest truths of the spirit.
Truth and beauty, according to Hegel, are one and the same; the only difference is that truth is the idea itself, as it exists and is conceivable in itself. The idea, however, manifested outwardly, for consciousness becomes not only true, but also beautiful. The beautiful is the manifestation of the idea.
Goethe and Hegel: Mephistopheles as the inverted World-Spirit
Goethe’s relationship to Hegel the man and Hegelianism is a complex and multifaceted one, encompassing both personal and philosophical dimensions. On a personal level, Goethe and Hegel held a deep mutual respect for each other's intellectual prowess and creative endeavors. Hegel, a renowned philosopher, recognized Goethe as a literary genius whose works possessed profound insight into the human condition. He rarely had any critical comment on Goethe’s works. Goethe, in turn, admired Hegel's philosophical rigor and admired his ability to construct intricate systems of thought. We only have records of a handful of interactions between them, but these letters suggest a certain affinity and intellectual kinship.
Both Goethe and Hegel were Idealists. While Hegel's philosophical system is primarily associated with his concept of absolute idealism, Goethe's contributions extend beyond literature into various disciplines, including natural sciences. Hegel posited the idea that reality is inherently interconnected and constituted by dynamic processes of development and transformation, a dialectal process driven by the World-Spirit. This concept aligns with Goethe's holistic worldview, as exemplified in his exploration of the interconnectedness of nature and the harmonious interplay of different elements. Goethe's writings, such as "Faust" and "Metamorphosis of Plants," embody a dialectical understanding of nature, which echoes Hegelian dialectics.
Both Goethe and Hegel saw the “freedom” of man from the material world and the disjointed consciousness as the telos of humanity. Hegel's philosophy emphasizes the role of self-consciousness and the dialectical process of individuals realizing their freedom within the context of social and historical conditions. Similarly, Goethe's protagonists often embark on journeys of self-discovery, struggling with conflicts and ultimately striving for self-realization. This shared emphasis on individual development and freedom underscores their parallel concerns with the human subject and its relationship to the world. Hegel’s idea of the World-Historical individual- Faust is certainly one of these.
Goethe's contributions to aesthetics, especially in his treatise "On the Aesthetic Education of Man," delve into the role of art in shaping individual and societal consciousness but were dwarfed by Hegel’s writings. Hegel's philosophy of art, building on Kant’s aesthetic theories, seeks to understand the significance of artistic expression within the broader framework of human spirit and history. Both thinkers recognized the transformative power of art and its ability to communicate deeper truths about the human condition.
Goethe met Hegel several times but did not how big of a deal his philosophy would be. He writes in a letter to Schiller:
I spent quite pleasant hours with Schelver, Hegel and Fernow. The first one, in the botanical subject, works out so beautifully what I consider to be right that I hardly believe my own ears and eyes, because I am used to the fact that every individual, out of foolish addiction to original presumption, so readily departs from the simple path of progressive potentiation with grimacing side leaps.
With Hegel, the thought occurred to me: whether one could not create a great advantage for him through the technicality of the art of speech. He is a quite excellent man; but there is too much in the way of his utterances... What he lacks can hardly be given to him now, but this lack of presentational talent is on the whole the German national defect and compensates itself, at least to a German listener, by the German virtue of thoroughness and honest seriousness.
Schiller and Goethe had a plan to round out the Idealism of Fernow with Hegel. Goethe mentions trying to set them up:
I have already begun to implement your proposal to bring Fernow and Hegel together. By the way, tomorrow evening there will be a tea at my place where the most heterogeneous elements will come together.
Ontotheology and Super-Rational Realities
The 'Greater Logic' of Wissenschaft der Logik is Hegel's fullest reification of his dialectal model. It explains the delineation of his Dialectic from the Platonic dialectic and the necessity to re-infuse dialectical thinking into metaphysics and logic. The critical development in Western Philosophy made here is when Hegel unified the assumed bifurcation within logic created by the Stoics between the content and the form (object) of cognition, arguing that correct Logic is both the abstract thought of the Subject and the Objects themselves- a metaphysical union unseen in the Platonized Western world up to this point. This is the lasting contribution of Hegel; he moved beyond the Logos-Philosophy of the ancient Greeks into an Ontological-metaphysical model. Beyond highbrow philosophy, the Logik is critically important historically. After the 1848 revolution, Marx re-read Wissenschaft der Logik, and it was critical to his formation of Das Capital- to the point where it is impossible to develop a sound understanding of Marxism without understanding Hegel's 1812 Logik.
Within the Logik, the three books on Being (Sein), Essence (Nature/ Concept or Wesen), and Notion (Begriff) are interdependent of each other and do not represent a linear logical sequence, but what Hegel called a "circle of circles". The conclusion defines the concept of unified Being (Dasein) he begins mentions in the preface. The first section, Being/ Sein, pivots around his concept of Dasein- one of those many words that do not translate well into other languages. Dasein: The Otologic Being of the personal reality. Dasein literally translates "To be there" but it is a purely philosophic concept of Being which maintains within itself an antinomy of finitude-infinity. Hegel defines Dasein in his Encyclopedia as a specific type of Being; “die Einheit des Seins und des Nichts, in der die Unmittelbarkeit dieser Bestimmungen und damit in ihrer Beziehung ihr Widerspruch verschwunden ist, – eine Einheit, in der sie nur noch Momente sind // the unity of being and nothing in which the immediacy of these determinations and thus their contradiction in their relationship has disappeared - a unity in which they are only moments".
To this day, the general definition of"logic" usually refers to the form of Aristotelian reasoning, but not the 'content' or object, nor any spiritual concept. But here in Hegel, Logik is a supernatural element: "If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates ever relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need..." (L, S 14) Reason is the fundamental basis of consciousness to Hegel.
In the next two sections of Essence and Notion, Hegel dives into Idealism, Rationalism, Tautological relationships, Teleological aspects of the human soul, Empirical observations of the human mind and the dangers of this, Kantian Ontotheology (which he largely agrees with), and the relationships between his categories.
Hegel explains his objections to Kantian thinking in Phenomenology, but he goes into extensive details here. He deconstructs Kantian Transcendentalism Ad Nasium. Delineating Transcendental Idealism in-between his framework of Objective and Subjective logic, he picks apart Kant's philosophy as "analytical, not constructive". Despite his criticism, he still defines his frameworks in relation to Kant's, breaking apart Kant's 'thing-in-itself' concept in relation to the dialectal process while quoting at length from the Critique of Pure Reason. He praises Kant and credits him as "the impetus to the restoration of logic and dialectic in the sense of the examination of the determinations of thought in and for themselves." (SL S 1794)
Hegel finishes his Logik with a highbrow discussion on three aspects of the Idea; Life, knowledge, and absolute idea. All categories exist in the Idea, with it the "movement" of the concept ends. The Absolute Idea is "the sole matter and content of philosophy. Since it contains all determinations within it." Consciousness sees the identity of the subjective and the objective - of in-itself and for-itself, and ultimately, the subject recognizes itself as an object and the object is therefore also the subject in the penultimate unified whole; the uniform plurality (gleichförmige Pluralität) of objects which maintain distinction yet are one. The Absolute Idea is "the sole matter and content of philosophy. Since it contains all determinations within it."
The result of this philosophical evolution is a new form of "absolute knowing" within the consciousness which moves beyond the false duality of Thought & Object that Hegel referred to as 'Begriff'. Because of this unity, Thought and Experience can only general meaning in relation to one another; a basic tenant of the OntoTheology Kant laid the foundation of and Hegel expounded upon. Kierkegaard, while deeply critical of Hegel, would emphasize this element of subjectivity throughout his works- that while objective truths are necessary, they are utterly meaningless without a living relationship (a metaphysical experience) with the subject of those truths- what he called Contemporaneousness. St. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who studied at the University of Tübingen where Hegel also studied, taught, and wrote his Phänomenologie at) would phrase a sentiment downstream from this Kantian & Hegelian OntoTheology: "Being free means 'being free for the other,' because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.” Hegel drew a clear line between independence and freedom, two very different states which the average post-religious individual conflates. These logical forms Hegel outlines here in Der Logik are not merely abstract ideas, but they contain an ontological character of consciousness within them- what he called "das innere der welt", the interior of the world, which are simultaneously theological precepts as Reason is itself "the thinking of God."
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion are an analysis of the dialectal essence of religion as the movement towards absolute spirit.. To be human is to contextualize experience into a Gestalt; a consistent narrative that binds itself unto itself. Philosophical development is an answer to the Imperative of Dasein- to authentically "Be" as a continuum to the Delphic Oracle's command to Know Thyself. Religion is to Hegel „das Selbstbewußtsein des absoluten Geistes“ / "the self-awareness of the absolute spirit" and a "knowledge of the Essence". It is the dialectal rhythm that unites the Many to the One in a perfectly self-aware Uniform Plurality (gleichförmige Pluralität).
Philosophy needs Faith and vice versa, and Theology cannot exist apart from Philosophy. He writes “The object of religion, like philosophy, is eternal truth in its objectivity itself, God and nothing but God and the explication of God” // "der Gegenstand der Religion wie der Philosophie ist die ewige Wahrheit in ihrer Objektivität selbst, Gott und nichts als Gott und die Explikation Gottes“ and later: "In philosophy, which is theology, the only work is to show the reason of religion" // „In der Philosophie, welche Theologie ist, ist es einzig nur darum zu tun, die Vernunft der Religion zu zeigen“. Even though Hegel is not known for being an Ethicist, he does point out that Philosophy is critical to be able to be love anyone to begin with: "Another famous commandment: Love thy neighbor as thyself… is concerned with separating evil from a person and inflicting good on him. For this purpose it is necessary to distinguish what is evil in him, what is good against this evil, and what is his good in general; that is, I must love him with understanding; for unexamined love will harm him, perhaps more than hatred..."
Hegel describes the "Natural Religions" first, which begin with a desire for distinction from the Natural. Sorcery develops from this "unfree freedom so that the individual self-consciousness knows itself to be higher than natural things, and this knowledge is at first unmediated." Magic is "the oldest way of religion, the wildest, crudest form", which is merely man's attempt at direct power over the natural threats. Moving from Animism and Pantheism through polytheism up to the more advanced religions such as Hinduism, and then Tibetan Buddhism, he switches into the more abstracted natural religions of "the religion of light" (Zoroastrianism) and "the religions of pain" (Phoenician and Near- eastern Religions), into "the religions of the Enigma" (Egyptian, Mithraic and Greek Mythology). These are all the "Natural Religions''. The "Particular Religions" which are above these are the various Greco-Roman systems that span the "religions of beauty" all the way up to the "religions of reason". Upon Roman rationality, The Absolute/ Revealed Religion is developed: "Absolute religion is the revealed religion, the religion that has itself as its content, its fulfillment. This is the completed religion, the religion that is the being of the spirit for itself, the religion in which it has become itself objectively, the Christian religion." The God-Man represents Reason finding its apotheosis, for "Faith is the calm, pure consciousness of the Spirit as a Being".
He is primarily concerned with the essence of Religion-Philosophy, not so much the content, but does analyze various specific verses and teachings, from Hamartiology to Soteriology. Quite a bit of his philosophic discussion is within Epistemology (or Gnosiology as Eastern Orthodox Theology calls it), and he oscillates between Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions, with a particular criticism of Cartesianism “If nature is only Matter, not subject-object, no such scientific construction of it remains possible, for which the cognizing and the cognized must be one... the supersensible is not the appearance.. but rather is itself a Real reality” (PS § 147). He criticizes this medieval development which found its way into German idealism, from Jakob Böhme, the first of the German Idealists, all the way up to Kant, who dominated the philosophic landscape in Hegel's day. Kant likewise emphasized Ontologic, physio-theological proof of God's existence over the medieval Cosmo-Theological, Materialist apologetic, criticizing the ideological continuum from Anselm through all modern-day protestant apologists, who are all Cosmo-Theological and largely Aristotelean. This is an odd break from Hegel's normal dialectal view of historical ideological progression- he writes that the shift that Anselm made to external, cosmological arguments for the existence of God was a mistake that eventually will correct itself: "The cosmological proof has the ontological proof as to its basis; by promising us to lead a new footpath, it brings us back, after a slight detour, to the old one, which it did not want to acknowledge and which we are supposed to have left for its sake." Perhaps this is Hegel's best summary of OntoTheology: "The real attestation of the Divinity of Christ is the witness of one's own Spirit- not Miracles; for only Spirit recognizes Spirit."
Philosophy and Faith: Nominalism within Evangelicalism
Hegel received a lot of flak from theologians over his work as they did towards philosophy in general, and in his Lectures on religion, he defends Philosophy writes largely from these detractors: "Even the theologians, who are still only at home when in vanity, have dared to accuse philosophy of its destructive tendency, theologians who no longer possess anything of the substance that could be destroyed... Those who resent philosophy for thinking-religion do not know what they are asking... this is the outward appearance of humility, but true humility consists in sinking the mind into truth."
The irony here is that Hegelian philosophy- and German Idealism as a whole- has deeply shaped modern non- denominational Fundamentalism. So while these Lutheran theologians criticized understanding philosophy, Protestant Theology was being influenced by it, whether they like it or not. By the time Hegel died in Berlin, John Nelson Darby was developing a new Hermeneutic and Eschatological model in America, which is rooted in the German idea of Progressive history, which now dominates all forms of low-church Protestantism. The various forms of Covenant theology, which contradicted the Ancient Typological model used by all Christians throughout all time before Calvin's invention of it in the late 16th century, have been largely replaced by the new various forms of Dispensationalism, which are continuing to evolve. And in all of these, the delusion that they are “biblical” and not philosophic movements of tradition persists.
The Fathers of the Church essentially understood that the premise of their theology is religion with a thinking, understanding consciousness. The Christian Church owes the first beginnings of the content of Christian doctrine to their philosophical education... But even if it must be admitted that the Fathers of the Church studied Greek philosophy, it is at first indifferent where that doctrine came from; the only question is whether it is true in and of itself, but this is not examined, and yet that doctrine is the fundamental determination of the Christian religion...Yes, this has happened [denial of the origins of their beliefs] not only on the side of the Enlightenment but even on the side of the more pious theologians.
The nuances of the Trinity were introduced into Christian doctrine by the Alexandrian school, by the Neo-Platonists, the latter being a component of the former. But even if it must be admitted that the Fathers of the Church studied Greek philosophy, it is at first indifferent where that doctrine came from; the only question is whether it is true in and of itself, but this is not examined, and yet that doctrine is the fundamental determination of the Christian religion.
Hegel understands this anti-philosophic bend to be due to the fantasy of Sola Scriptura, a result of Medieval-Catholic Nominalism and Cartesian Epistemology. He was a Protestant Apologist, writing extensively against Catholicism, so his criticism of Sola Scriptura is naturally interesting. Reading it in the context of all of his lectures on Religion over the years, it seems to me to stem from his encounters with Protestant clergy- all of whom thought their interpretation of the Bible is "obvious" and immutable, unable to see that they are interpreting it through the lens of tradition just as much as any Roman Catholic does. Philosophy, then, they attacked because it threatened this illusion- this fantasy of Sola Scriptura- which is the lie their whole Weltbild (worldview) relies upon. He writes:
In the Protestant Church, the Bible was the essential basis of the doctrine... it was thought that exegesis, was only to take up the thoughts of the Bible. But in fact, the intellect had established its views, its thoughts, beforehand, and then it was seen how the words of Scripture could be explained according to them... Because this exegesis consults reason, it has come about that a so- called theology of reason has come into being, which is opposed to that doctrinal concept of the church, partly by itself, partly by that which it opposes. Here, exegesis takes over the written word, interprets it, and pretends to assert only the understanding of the word, to want to remain faithful to it the nature of interpretive explanation implies that pre-conceived concepts assert themselves in the process of interpretation. It is true that the meaning of the word is to be indicated, but to indicate the meaning is to draw the meaning out into consciousness, into the imagination, and the imagination determined in a different way then asserts itself in the presentation of what the meaning is supposed to be. Even in the representation of a philosophical system already developed in itself, e.g. of Plato or Aristotle, it is the case that the representations turn out differently according to the already determined mode of a conception of those who undertake them. From Scripture, therefore, the most opposite opinions have been exegetically proved by theology, and thus this so-called Holy Scripture has been turned into a disguise for heterodoxy. All heresies have invoked the Scriptures.
The relationship between Tradition and Scripture is to Hegel a Gordian knot. Hegel encountered the Thought-Ending Cliché of "where is this in the bible'' as often as it is used today, which is a tool maintain the illusion of this Tautology- this mirage of traditionlessness. He recognizes the folly of the reformation's idea that an individual or group could interpret the bible outside of tradition but recognizes the need to break off from the Magisterium. He recognizes that the Cosmo-Theological views of the Reformation were founded in Medieval thought, particularly the new model of Substitutionary Atonement (relying on Jerome's mistranslation of hilastērion into Latin as Propitiation instead of Expiation) created by Anselm: "first found in Christianity by Anselm of Canterbury: it is then found in all later philosophers: Cartesius, Leibnitz, Wolff." He seems to view philosophical "meta-cognitive" development as the solution to these problems inherent in the foundations of reactionary Protestant thought. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened at all. This anti-Intellectual, Futuristic, and deracinated interpretation of the Bible has been further codified in Premillennialism and Dispensationalism, which did not fully exist in Protestantism in Hegel's day. There were only a handful of Protestant Denominations while Hegel was publishing, but now there are over 30,000 active schisms and counting, and they are becoming increasingly self-descriptive in their self-understanding. New terms like “non-denominational”, “non-essentialist” and “deconstructivist” continue to be used to create the self-image as a new Christian who is magically above the historical forces that created their ideology. The Radical Reformation now has erased the Core Reformation. This Myth that one can be a "traditionless" Christian has only accelerated. History has rather proved Hegel’s point.
Across the Hegelian corpus, the Phänomenologie stands out as a magnum opus of Moral, Social, Political, Ontological, and Existential Philosophy. It is his most shallow and broad work which touches upon all of his major lines of thought he would reference and expound upon for the rest of his life. Historically, it is difficult to find the outer limits of the geschichtsphilosophischen/ historical-philosophic influence this work has had. It contains the master-slave dialectic which would be inverted by the Hegelian-Epicurean Karl Marx to create his ideology- the genocidal impact of which is impossible to fully comprehend. In this way, Hegel build the philosophic foundation of the western world and profoundly influenced philosophy and religion, the secular and the sacred.
Hegel had a clear goal to his philosophy; a perfect, scientific and harmonized Weltanschauung which would usher in a Utopian society. To get there, assist in the development of a new Metaphysik that can get us there: "the true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title 'love of knowing' and actual knowing- that is what I have set myself to do" (PS § 5, p3). In this aim, Kant and Hegel are two sides of the same coin; but Hegel makes several critical developments past Kant (some I would refer to as brilliant; others catastrophic). The Phänomenologie is the "Wissenschaft von den Erscheinungsweisen des Geistes" // the science of the manifestations of Spirit. It describes the ascent of Spirit towards absolute knowledge.
The structure of the Phänomenologie is chaotic because Hegel was in a time crunch to get the manuscript to the publisher because Napoleon was invading. Not a bad reason as far as reasons go. Beyond the questionable layout of Phänomenologie is perhaps the most interesting part of Hegel's work: the fragmented temporality. It is a deliberately incomplete, multi-faceted Metaphysik which Hegel designed to interact with future philosophies, cultures, and 'Geist' which does not yet exist; inviting new iterations of his Dialectics which do not merely build upon, but retroactively transform the original into something new. Or as Žižek puts it "correct Hegel in the spirit of Hegel". It is built to be an incomplete time-travelling philosophy.
The Phänomenologie is one of the most contrarian of his works as he is seeking to distance himself from Kant, Hölderlin (his former roommate), and perhaps more than any other, Schelling. While here in the Phenomenology, Hegel is primarily negative in his deconstruction of the problems with all current systems of understanding consciousness (Sense-Certainty, Perception and the Force of Understanding), he does chart a way forward in his 1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik). If we want to attain a legitimate Ontology of Objects, Hegel argues that what we need is a substance-kind conception of the infinite/ universal so that the individual is not a quality-less substratum nor a bundle of property-universals; but an entity defined as a single, essential, and unified property of the individual.
Hegel's great task is the restoration of the "dead bones" of logic by unifying the form with the content. He writes in Logik "In its relation to the Object, therefore, thinking does not go out of itself to the object; this, as a 'thing-in-itself', remains a sheer beyond of thought... Ancient Metaphysics had in this respect a higher conception of thinking than is current today...this metaphysics believed that thinking is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature... thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things forming one and the same content" (SL § 40-42). But over the centuries the "reflective understanding" ruined the philosophy since the time of the Greeks and stripped the living, spiritual content out of the useless form.
The Origins of Secular Eschatology
Orwell, in The Road to Wigham Pier, mentions Hegelianism as the underbelly of the most disasterous socio-political systems implemented in the 20th century:
"As for the philosophic side of Marxism, the pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis [The Hegelian Dialectic of progress- in this case, applied to the historical], I have never met a working man who had the faintest interest in it."
Later in the same work, he identifies the Marxist reinterpretation of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic as one of the faulty pillars of his early thinking:
"I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself."
The penultimate telos of Hegel’s infamous recursive Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis dialectical process is the mind coming to know itself as the ultimate reality; rationalizing external phenomena harmoniously and arriving at total freedom. Whether or not this "Speculative" triad known as the Hegelian Dialectical model can be properly uniquely attributed to Hegel is still debated in academia today. Kant used similar formulas of thought in his Metaphysiks and Hegel changed his terminology from "abstract–negative–concrete" utilized in Phänomenologie to "immediate–mediate–concrete" in Logik specifically to distance himself from the Kantian implications of these words. Whether or not the dialectical process is inherently Hegelian or not, the pinnacle of the pursuit of Absolute Knowledge is simultaneously Absolute Geist, which is almost uniquely Hegelian. While the Phänomenologie does not display a clear 3-tiered dialectic structure, it does contain an assortment of ascending conflicts which are resolved at a higher level of personhood and knowledge. Hegel is the first "Bodhisattva" of his Dialectics because the starting point is also the ending point in an intricate Tautology; in other words, realizing that Geist is the ultimate reality of the world was achieved by Hegel first and is simultaneous the Telos of individual and collective progress.
German Idealism greatly influenced the Russian great, for instance. Tolstoy would appropriate this Hegelian sweeping, oceanic view of a united Weltgeist organizing all human activities across all of history: "we lie in the lap of an immense intelligence". Dostoevsky read Hegel, and answered this idea of a rational, ascending history. He saw history as anything but a story of progress. Out of the piles of books in Dostoevsky's cell during his imprisonment in Siberia we know the name of only one of the authors due to the surviving journals of his friend Vrangel: Hegel. We know Dostoevsky requested Hegel's 1822 Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Philosophy of History) from his brother Mikhail while in prison, as well as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. While never mentioning Hegel directly in any of his works, we have what seems to be a reply to late German Idealism’s view of history which Hegel is emblematic of: "In short, one may say anything about the history of the world- anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat." Dostoevsky was foreshadowing the catastrophe of the Soviet use of the de-mythicized Hegelian dialectic through Marx, creating the genocidal Dialectic Materialism which assisted in the Holodomor and is still present in an array of Progressivist ideologies of today.
Hegel represents a tectonic plan shift to a focus on the Telos of history. Hegel combined the focus on the Natural from the Enlightenment and Marxism and Utopian Socialism takes the focus on history and fully secularizes it into an "Atheistic Eschatology" through applying a de-mysticized Hegelian rational historical dialectic (Dialectal Materialism). The Hegelian view of history is a type of rational, non-religious attempt at Eschatology. As Kant was a Christian Ethicist, who rationalized and sanitized Christian Ethics to be in line with the principles of the Enlightenment, so Hegel stripped out Chiliasm from the Apocalypse of St. John and made it respectable to a materialist metaphysic. But both Kant and Hegel realized at points that this Rationalization came at a cost- the cost of the Dionysian. They both criticized and contributed to a de-mythologized, thin and materialized European-style of Christianity. Hegel is at the tail end of the enlightenment, mourning its destructive influence and trying to rescue the good fragments for future posterity.
The Inversion of Hegelianism: Feuerbach, Marx and the deification of Socio-Political Theory
Hegel’s Enzyklopädie contains abridged versions of his entire Dialectical model broken down in three sections- the Wissenschaft der Logik, Natur and Geistes. His 1812 work Wissenschaft der Logik (the "greater logic") covers his understanding of Philosophy, Logic, and Reason which is summarized in part I of this Encyclopedia, and his 1807 Phänomenologie expands upon the importance of Geist more thoroughly than part III.
Hegel is a relatively obscure philosopher due partly to the unmanageable applicability of his ideas to a broad range of fields- influencing Theology, Sociology, Economics, Politics, Psychology, and other fields. Few philosophers have influenced such a spectrum of fields simultaneously and in opposite directions. His philosophy has been championed by far left and far right political ideologues, both believing themselves to be true Hegelians. The champions of Nationalsocialismus argued they were true Hegelians who implemented Hegel's vision of a perfectly rational society. Today's internet Social Justice Warriors utilizing a Faulcautian (power as the fundamental animating element of the human story) understanding of human relationships share with White Nationalists a common Marxo-Hegelian Anthropological model. Essentially, they are inverted mirror images of each other. If one were to look at Hegel's followers alone- a dizzying array of Humanitarians, genocidal dictators, Anarchists, Nationalists, and Economists of all stripes- one could never reverse-engineer what Hegel actually taught. But we can narrow the aperture down to a few ideological paths that are critical to understanding modern Western society today- and herein lies the importance of reading Hegel.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Marx all take their satirical distichons about religion from Feuerbach, and every aspect of Marxism can be found here in Marx's favorite Philosopher. The evolution of Hegel's Dialectical Idealism into Marx's Dialectical Materialism can be seen as Marx's adoption of the Master and Slave Dialectic with the transcendental elements removed (save a nearly mythical definition of the 'slave' category, which he maintained despite his infusion of Epicureanism). You see Marx maintaining Hegel's nearly spiritual praise of the oppressed: '[the slave] will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness" (PS S 193). When the consciousness moves through the Master and Slave Dialectic, it arrives at Stoicism, then escapes to Skepticism, and then becomes the "Unhappy Consciousness" of the modern consciousness in Hegel’s sequencing. Yet Marx pulls out this aspect of the Dialectic and moves it from the domain of abstract, metaphysical philosophizing about Qualia into a purely Materialistic Socioeconomic domain, a kind of Epistemological error that Hegel warns against. Instead of an individual spiritual transformation, Marx applies this dialectic to collectivist Socioeconomics.
As the first among the 'left Hegelians' who learned Hegelian Dialectics through the lectures of Eduard Gans, Marx copied and inverted (and defiled and misrepresented) Hegelian's entire Metaphysical model. This inversion is captured flawlessly by this line by Marx: "It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, conversely, their social being [Material existence] that determines their consciousness." // "Es ist nicht das Bewusstsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewusstsein bestimmt." Replacing the loci of human consciousness from spiritual Idealism to Economics, Marx also rips the heart out of Hegelian Ontology and only keeps the strawman superstructure of the historical thesis-antithesis- synthesis model. Feuerbach writes:
The German speculative philosophy forms the direct contrast to the old wisdom of Solomon. While the latter sees nothing new, the former sees only new things under the sun; while the Oriental loses sight of difference over unity, the Occidental forgets unity over difference; while the former drives his indifference to the eternal monotony to the apathy of nonsense, the latter increases his sensibility for the different and diverse to the fever heat of the Imaginatio luxurians.
Marx and Engels inverted Hegel in an insipidly obtuse manner. Marx openly boasts about de-mystifying Hegel- which removed the crucial element which holds his dialectics together. The mystical unity of Geist is the linchpin of Hegelian thinking- remove it and you have no evolution beyond Stoic/ Platonic/ Aristotelian logic. Half of the Logik is dedicated to exposing the errors and dangers of applying the form of reason without the object/context of that reasoning, which is exactly what Marx boasts about doing: "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian but is its direct opposite... For me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought. The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion... The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him, it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."
Instead of abstract beliefs about the nature of reality driving our existence, Marx inverted this to argue Economics is at the foundation of our reality from which everything else derives.
Hegel himself sufficiently refutes Marx’s arguments that material existence drives individual consciousness and that rationality exists outside of mystical (religious) presuppositions. Despite being downstream from Hegel, Marx did not take Hegel's warnings to heart, and perverted and misrepresented his core points. Within Hegel's Encyclopedia, we have a perfect reply to Marx's Hegelian Strawman of Historical Materialism:
A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.
Hegel is quite cut-throat in his condemnation of self-made Social Justice ideologues, warning against the self- destructing fallacies of Egalitarianism, which I would argue Marx & Co. in their well-meaning Collectivism commit:
The heartthrob for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction... it, therefore, speaks of the universal order as a perversion of the law of the heart and ist happiness, a perversion invented by fanatical priests, gluttonous despots, and their minions, who compensate themselves for their own degradation by degrading an oppressing others, a perversion which has led to the nameless misery of deluded mankind.
(PS S 377)
He also extensively diatribes against Collectivist ideologies that see individuals according to the categories to which they belong instead of seeing individuals as the most essential and fundamental unit of society:
The idea of bringing good into existence by means of the sacrifice of individuality is abandoned; for individuality is precisely the actualizing of what exists only in principle, and the perversion ceases to be regarded as a perversion of the good, for it is in fact really the conversion of the good as a mere End, into an actual existence: the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal." (PS S 390-91)
Hegel's description of "The idea of bringing good into existence by means of the sacrifice of individuality" is a flawless description of the catastrophic Egalitarian Socioeconomic ideas of the 20th and late 19th centuries which placed the social equity and the "greater good" over individual rights and immediately manifested the greatest Genocides the human species has ever known.
It should be pointed out that while Marx's errors are most proudly committed on the left, they have kaleidoscoped through history in asymmetrical ways, and are often now found in their reactionary counterparts. The purist versions of consumerist, materialistic Capitalism commit the same metaphysical flaws as Communism and Socialism; and much of our traditional storytelling in the Anglosphere warns about the Phenomenological ramifications of unfettered Capitalism on relationships. Think about classics all the way from 'A Christmas Carol' to modern movies like Hook and The Grinch; all of these warn against the unintentional American adoption of Marxist Materialism.
You hear self-described Entrepreneurial types saying, "persuasion is a part of everything" and assert that the purpose of working is "building the life you want to live". To this aim, they pursue 'health and wealth' as the penultimate goal of labor, and yet while explicitly mocking Socialism of all stripes and deliberately conflating the varieties, they are implicitly adopting Marxist Metaphysics. Often the same types who decry Cultural and Economic Marxism are unwittingly building their worldview on the Marxo-Hegelian dialectic of Historical Materialism. As Zizek points out, this obtuse worldview starts to mirror its perceived antithesis in an inverted but equal image. Those who roll their eyes at Socialism the most are often more Marxist in their Anthropological and Historical Metaphysics (Weltbild) than the actual self-described Marxists. To truly expunge Marxism, one must have a robust enough Metaphysical system to move into.
Hence the ideological paths through history from Hegel and Marx to the present day are a bit disjointed. Even in the parts of society that praise Marx, there are contradictions. For instance, the paradox of being Marxist and an Intersectional Feminist- when Marx and Engels extensively argued that the Patriarchy can only be defeated by a Capitalist system creating a wealthy leading class: "The Bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to every feudal, patriarchal, idealism relations" (The Communist Manifesto Part I). Marx was also tremendously Anti-Semitic, yet today's 'Anti-Racists' are invariably proud Marxists. The contrast between what Marx actually taught and Marx's followers put on display the demagoguery of modern socio-politics and the urgency needed in understanding the origins of these philosophies.
Modern-day secular Philosophy rather proves Hegel’s point that a priori mystical assumptions about the nature of reality are indispensable and inevitable, and denying their existence is merely fantasy. Rationalism is never pure or independent. What is rational is real and vice versa, but “that which is most real is not that what is most material, but that which is most meaningful”. Marxism assumes an Epicurean Epistemology and Ontology (really- it has collapsed Ontology into Epistemology), and as such, Hegel would argue, it has become an amoral religion that is ignorant of its own status of being a religion. This blindness not only kills the soul, but has led to, and will lead to again, great horrors. If we do not listen to Hegel’s warnings about collectivist secularism, we are doomed to continue this loop. 200 years later, Hegel still speaks critical wisdom against the madness of modernity.
Subject-Object Duality; the Sophistry of Perception
The Subject/ Object dichotomy and antinomy is dialectically resolved at a higher state of being. Hegel begins his Epistemology with a Cartesian unity of Thought and Being. The Universe is rational; if we approach it correctly, it expresses itself to us perfectly clearly. Any confusion about the world is due to our faulty approach to it. The real is rational, but the rational is inherently preternatural. Reason is observing the real correctly. Logic is not merely form, as it is in the Aristotelian model, but is form and content simultaneously. True reality is the unity of thought or Geist; the subject that embodies the relation of identity-in-difference to the world by finding itself in its 'other'. This Cartesian Aristotelian-Medieval ‘Weltanschauung’ is punctuated by Neo-Platonic views about the illusion of the Material universe.
A significant portion of Hegel’s’ corpus is his re-working of the Subject-Object paradigm used in the Empirical Subject. The collapse of the ancient Subject-Object paradigm caused profound waves of nihilism throughout human culture around the globe. For the first time in human history, the Subject found itself within a de-mythicized universe without distinction between it and the material world. When the world is stripped of subjectivity, the world is nothing but objects. Hegel argues this "scientific image" of the world created by Empiricism leads to incoherence and a false separation between the subject and object. It creates a self-defeating Tautology as it destroys what it is trying to understand; it divides what it is trying to unify: "The theoretical approach begins by checking appetite, it is disinterested, it leaves things to subsist in their own way, and thus immediately displays two aspects, subject, and object, the separation of which is fixed on this side and that. Our aim is rather to grasp and comprehend nature, however, to make it ours, so that it is not something beyond and alien to us." (Philosophy of Nature/ Encyclopedia EN: I, 246, pp. 197-98) Within this new Subject-Object divide of the Empirical world the classical models of meanings collapsed; consciousness itself (Qualia) becomes a mystery that cannot be explained by Empiricism alone, and as Nietzsche pointed out, this can only lead to Nihilism. Heidegger and others would pick up where he left off. He writes that the aim of unifying the separation in the mind caused my Stoicism and Empiricism is Absolute Knowing: "Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because ... it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and certainty with the truth." (PS § 51)
Hence you have Western thinkers who cannot draw a distinction between the ‘I’ and the material world, something Camus doubled down on: “I opened myself up to the gentle indifference of the [material universe] finding it so much like myself”. Hegel traces this problem back to the Stoics, which eventually reached its apotheosis in European Empiricism. While Empiricism is "formal Universality and Identity", it proves itself to be the "most abstract and poorest form of truth". But unlike Kant, Hegel does not believe that the "enigmatic core" of the soul is unknowable, and he presses on to find a way to 'absolute knowing'. This is one element that has led to a resurgence in the reading of Hegel; over the last 200 years, secular philosophers have not been able to find a way out of this labyrinth.
Hegel understood science is a tool, and properly so, but when you use it as an Ontological descriptor of Being, the subsequent collapse of the Subject-Object dichotomy destroys the human psyche and renders Nihilism and the socio-political exodus to Totalitarianism inevitable. Scientific laws describe, but they cannot explain. Hegel deconstructs three ancient interpretations of the Object: Sense-Certainty, Perception, Force and the Understanding and then moves to self-consciousness and the three understandings of the Subject: Stoicism, Skepticism and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness.
First Hegel argues that common Sense-Certainty fails to actually grasp the singular individuality of the object and is therefore not pure knowledge. The Object manifests itself only in accordance with how you interact with it; by perpetuating the act of definition you are adopting a specific frame of reference towards the object. Even in pure Empirical Observations via the Scientific Method, the Subject-Object paradigm is not erased in material reality; science can never describe the object itself, but rather, it can only tell you that if you approach the object in a specific manner (the procedure/ method), it will manifest this certain set of traits. Perhaps the most well-known example of this phenomenon is that light is either a particle or a wave, depending on the nature/ procedure/ method of your interaction with it. Even the most "objective" form of knowledge possible- Empiricism- is only a hypothetically pure form of knowing. In our multivariate reality, even science does not lead to any kind of true knowledge of the object. Hegel understood this, and when he argues for the "sufficiency of reason", it is a living, breathing reason with transcendental context and humanness present. Kantian and Hegelian Rationalism is not 'Rationalism' in the sense your friendly neighborhood Atheist would define it; for Reason necessitates a relationship with a supernatural reality.
Perception treats the individual object as a collection of universal properties. But both types of Perception- the "bundle" view that Particulars consist as bundles of instantiated universals and the "Substratum" view of Particulars inhering a multitude of uninstantiated universals above which its Oneness transcends, are both problematic because they cause the consciousness to oscillate between treating the Object as having Properties and Unities which are simultaneously independent of and dependent on our experience or interaction with the object. Here it’s helpful to pull in a line I read in the Science of Logic: "The truth is that the insubstantial nature of logical forms originates solely in the way in which they are considered and dealt with. When they are taken as fixed determinations and consequently in their separation from each other and not as held together in an organic unity, then they are dead forms and the spirit which is their living, concrete unity does not dwell in them..." (SL § 48) This violates ‘Haecceitas’, or individuality of an object, which is for Hegel a self-evident truth. This is another ‘bright spot’ of Neo-Platonism shining through Kanto-Hegelian logic.
In order to try to solve this problematic dualism of Interactionism, the mind moves to the Force and the Understanding model. But through this model, while it solves the one/many problem of Perception, consciousness is the fatality; "within this inner truth... the absolute universal... has been purged of the antithesis between the universal and the individual and has become the object of the understanding... The inner world is, for consciousness, still a pure beyond, because consciousness does not yet find itself in it. It is empty, for it is merely the nothingness of appearance, and positively the simple or unitary universal." Moving to the Dialectic of the Subject, Hegel deconstructs the self-consciousness models to Stoicism (seeking freedom in thought but not practical agency) to Skepticism (negation of the subject itself) onto the “Unhappy Consciousness” which then can now move through the master-slave dialectic, to a rational self-consciousness, to the dialectic of the Spirit, and finally achieve Absolute Knowing and peace.
Within his deconstruction of Reason, he builds upon the problems with the three major view of the Object and defines them more narrowly into Monism (submerging the Subject into substance), Radial Dualism (as in manichaeism), Holism ('identity in difference'; the subject can be distinguished from the world and find itself in it) and atomism (the physical world is comprised as bundles of individual components), all of which still exist in the modern world. He talks about many ideas which have no relevance today but were problematic at the time such as Phrenology and other Epistemological fallacies. Scientific Rationalism (Scientism) is a major aim of his ire, which still survives today despite being thoroughly deconstructed as a self-defeating perceptual framework.
At this point, Hegel moves from pure philosophy to Politics and statecraft, praising the Greeks for their belief that the individual can only be at home in the universe in a free and strong nation-state. It’s an abrupt shift to the modern reader, but this was one of Hegel’s main points- he loved government and saw good nations are the penultimate goal of humanity. This is quite at odds to a modern mind, especially an American mind, which sees the government as merely the guarantor of individual freedom, not the other way around. He goes into a brief history of the world, of the natural world, and Kantian Morality, but his other works dive into those much better. As in Kant’s' Transcendental Idealism, Hegelian Dialectic Idealism contains an aspect of the mystical as integral to the logical. He writes about the necessity of the spiritual for the human soul to arrive at a perfectly rational understanding of the universe: "It is in self-consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind it the colorful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present." (PS § 177, PP110-11)
If there is one idea to take from Hegel's Neo-Platonic Epistemology it is this: Trying to posit an 'objective' world outside of first-person consciousness is a deluded undertaking. For “the supersensible is not the appearance... but rather is itself a real reality” (PS § 147). The Cartesian Self (pure ‘I’) must know its self-existence absolutely within a living relationship with super-rational Spirit.
Historical Telos: We lie in the lap of an Immense Intelligence
Hegel represents a tectonic ideological shift to a focus on the end state of history. The intrinsic potentiality of the Weltgeist predestines a telos for humanity; every age has a zeitgeist that moves towards a goal. Tolstoy would appropriate this Hegelian sweeping, oceanic view of a united Weltgeist organizing all human activities across all of history: "We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence", although his Russian Orthodox roots rejected Hegel's understanding of Rational Dialectal history, as did Dostoevsky. Marxism and Utopian Socialism took this myopic focus on rational history and fully secularized it into an "Atheistic Eschatology" by applying a de-mythicized Hegelian rational historical dialectic (Dialectic Materialism). The Hegelian view of history is a type of rational, non-religious attempt at Eschatology. As Kant was a Christian Ethicist, who rationalized and sanitized Christian moral teachings to be in line with the principles of the Enlightenment, so Hegel stripped out Eschatology from the Apocalypse of St. John and made it respectable to a materialist metaphysic. But both Kant and Hegel realized at points that this Rationalization came at a cost- the cost of the Dionysian. They both criticized and contributed to a demythologized, thin, and materialized European style of Christianity. Hegel is at the tail end of the enlightenment, mourning its destructive influence and trying to rescue the good fragments for future posterity. In this way, Hegel built the philosophic foundations of the western world and profoundly influenced philosophy and religion, the secular and the sacred.
Hegel developed a new approach to the doctrine of Creatio Nova; the apotheosis, ultimate judgment, and resolution of all things. German Idealism helped create new Teleological varieties of Eschatology within Protestantism; Dispensationalism of the Radical Reformation for instance, and Progressive "de-constructivist" Evangelicalism is entirely built upon this shift in Theology from Aion to Chronos; from a cyclical understanding of time (and thus, revelation) to a dialectal understanding. Derrida's Postmodern Deconstructivism which still lives today in the Social Justice Warriors of the Intersectional-Identarian Religion (Feminism, the new race theories, etc) is a crypto-Hegelian "End of History" philosophy. Ever since Hegel, every socio-political movement has viewed itself as the capstone of history; ahistorical and self-righteous in its collectivist dogmatism, utterly incapable of self-introspection, self-awareness, or self-criticism.
