The thing that really blows my mind is that one guy wrote all of this stuff! If its this hard to understand, Hegel must have been some sort of divine prophet to have put all of this in words. Either that or he was the most insane man to ever live...
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Just for the sake of using the blog...
Force and the understanding was the craziest thing I have ever read in my life. The part that really bothered me about the reading was that I felt like I understood where he went, at least for the first part of the section, but I never had any idea how he got there. It is really unfortunate that this section was twice as long and (at least) twice as hard because it seemed like he was talking about really interesting and important things. Somehow in 25 pages we got from "Things" to "The simple Infinity, or the absolute Notion, [which] may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference; but rather is itself every difference, as also their suppression; it pulsates within itself but does not move , inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest." That is crazy. I don't have any idea how he got there in 25 pages. Also, How is Holy of Holies a void? I thought God lived there...
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Two things:
ReplyDelete1. I agree. I think was just run over by the FatU bus.
2. I think the Holy of Holies could be a void because when the Understanding gains entry into the inner world through appearance it sees itself, i.e. self-consciousness (which I suspect that could be a sticky situation for God). Check p. 103, sec. 165. He starts talking about curtains and such about the 11th line down.
Neither prophet nor insane, I think. A good bit of this craziness is the spirit of the times - If Hegel is brilliant, it is because he was able to demonstrate the transitions that Mr. Y notes are elusive. After all, Hegel takes himself to be describing a state of consciousness the world has already seen! Not some new prophetic vision. You might find similarly odd descriptions elsewhere in German Idealism and Speculative Physics. Schelling and his students...
ReplyDeleteI don't feel that it would be a good idea to try and read any of the other German idealists until after this class is over but what type of Speculative physics are you referring to exactly?
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