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- Nov 21, 2018Paul I don't really much want to dispute that. My angle (I prefer that term to "point" here) was rather that it doesn't much matter, simply because such a question, biology etc., would be "outside the concept". Here of course I might come into collision with assessments of Philosophy of Nature as such, or Hegel's, what it is. I certainly don't know EN as well as I guess you do. I read through the 1816 versión and have dipped quite deeply into the Jena volume on it. Now I have the German text of the mature Enc., the whole, so I hope to fill that gap a bit better shortly. I think John is making much the same point in his latest.That is, I am viewing nature, seeing Hegel too as so viewing it, as contingent and phenomenal, without denying that as such it has being, necessary in its contingency from the hand of God as we say, as precisely contingent (I am relying a lot on my recent Reading of LPEG on this point).One needs to reconcile divine immutability with the vita Christi. To give up the former horn of the dilema is to give up God, I rather think, and I think this is the mind of the Church, the believing community, now as ever, whatever Küng or Rahner or others may mean by their apparent assertions to the contrary. Now the Son is not separate from God, from the immutable divine nature, so if we are in Christo we are not either. This is the point so stressed by the Calvinists, and they like to find support for their view in Thomas Aquinas. On this basis time falls away. "There shall be no more time" one reads in Scripture, surely a deliberately self-contradictory statement.All these views as to the temporal determine how we shall view the life of Christ. Actually I rather think there is pressure on Christian culture to accept absolute idealism more and more. So much in the liturgy and Scripture points to it. I could be wrong of course. The appearance which is temporality is, after all, a real appearance. This has always been where the spade buckles but we have to follow through, "using the world as though we used it not". Liturgy has always been the place where this transcendence of representation is best represented. "You sit with Christ in the heavenly places" (which are not places), says your namesake. McTaggart had this to a T, or a McT. Geach, for example, couldn't accept it (the Latin, or Polish, Catholic prejudice against idealism), talking of "divine intentions". Hegel just says the end is realised, just as being an and the end. So the sense in which Christ was born in a manger, or I in Northampton general hospital, is not a sense in conflict with the nothingness in esse et posse of the world.It takes 2000 years but what is a year, that is the point. With the Lord a day is as a thousand years, i.e. indifferently, but that is metonymy for something the speaker doesn't have, perhaps, the linguistic tools to express, or holds back simply, viz. that time is a representation, "moving image of eternity" said someone, the same applying to movement as such, however. There are no events, finally, in this ontology (or just one, eternal, in which we are all taken up). It has to be so. That is the point of Hegel's logical analysis, whatever you may find him saying elsewhere, and since he there shows that all judgments are false you could say he and we should really not be talking at all, and yet we must, it seems.Am I one-sided though? I wish not to be: hence I point to the necessity of the contingent, of falsehood from which truth results, of evil in the maturation process etc. This process though is not as such temporal, that is our coded window on it. We are becoming what we are.I hardly believe we have a real disagreement here.Stephen Theron.From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com> on behalf of Paul Trejo petrejo@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: 21 November 2018 17:03
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perceptionStephen,I agree that Darwin was no philosopher, aside from his committment to empirical data. Yet I also think that Hegel is beyond a mere Evolution-of-Ideas. I find Biological Evolution in Hegel's Encyclopedia.Nothing as detailed as Darwin, obviously, but Hegel is clearly speaking of Biology, Zoology, Anatomy and Psychology in his Philosophy of Nature (ca. 1820). At the end he deduced the apes, and this is immediately before he begins his discourse on the development of humanity.This is biological evolution, and Hegel is implying it -- though not yet boldly, as Darwin will.I might be a lone voice in the wilderness on this point today, and yet I think that the facts are on my side, so that in coming decades I expect to read others who see the same facts.Nor do I neglect the Metaphysics of the matter. Hegel deliberately avoids empiricism. Hegel takes direct aim at empiricism. Empiricism is a flaw in Science -- not its crowning glory. For Hegel, Science is poverty-stricken without her metaphysical crown. Science needs to recover Speculative Philosophy, so that it can be well-balanced again. This is part of the problem of the modern world, according to my reading of Hegel.Here I will resort to religious picture-thinking. The Metaphysics of God the Father, who never changes, must remain distinct from the Metaphysics of God the Son, who changes by starting at the right hand of God, humbles himself to become servant of all, born in a manger, in rank poverty, who then proceeds to minister, then to Golgotha, then to Hades, and finally to rise again to the right hand of God.Is this not change? Is this not a trajectory? Is this not a development? And yet exactly this is what Jacob Boehme told us about the God the Son -- the Son actually *is* the Fall, the Creation -- and is Nature itself. It is just this Natural side that changes, that develops, that has this dramatic arc, which falls and then rises again.Thus, the Son is a metaphor for Evolution. This was the precise point of Jacob Boehme, in my reading. And Hegel took many clues from Jacob Boehme.As for the Evolution of Philosophy -- I take Hegel at his word. It starts with Plato, continues through Aristotle, and then takes 2,000 more years to develop to the level of Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.No change? No development? Surely, that's a one-sided interpretation of it. Surely Speculative Thought ENDS UP WHERE IT STARTED, because it is the Absolute Geist seeking the Absolute Geist. Thus, one can argue that there was no change -- ULTIMATELY. Yet to neglect the Fall and the Rise is to neglect the Son, according to Boehme -- and thus according to my reading of Hegel.Nor do I claim that Hegel was pushing biological evolution at the detail of Darwin. Hegel was advanced, but he could not jump over Rhodes. He was also a child of his time. He also had to wait until Dusk to fly with the Owl of Minerva.All best,--Paul------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------On Wednesday, November 21, 2018, 5:41:24 AM CST, stephen theron stephentheron@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:Paul,I think I both agree and don't agree. I think that from a Hegelian standpoint Darwin's theory is not philosophical, simply, set within time and the phenomenal as it is. Nonetheless, Hegel can be and is evolutionary, of course, from the philosophical standpoint, which is an evolution of ideas, bearing in mind that the Idea, and hence in a sense to be more specified, the ideas, is and hence are what Hegel finally identifies as "the true Being" or God or again the Idea or Thought.Thought, in ever thinking only itself, thinks in one moment as one trajectory the whole trajectory of temporal evolution, i.e. it does not itself "traject", change, develop, in that thinking.That means though, that philosophical evolution does not evolve. How is this? Well, for one thing, it reflects the eternal generation, i.e. proceeding, of the Son or Word (or, also, as included, the creation itself, your subject here, and necessarily too, as you say, I think). This simply means that the "method" of the logic is not an evolving one, either in its own concept or in its specific act, whatever that is. Logic, said Hegel, didn't he, as echoed by Gioberti, is nothing but creation, though I think one or other or both of them also affirmed the apparent contrary, unless it is an identity, which it is, viz. that creation is nothing but logic (I may have these the other way round, convinced as I am of their identity). This is possible especially in view of Hegel's account of the necessity, within the totality, of the contingent and, moreover, each and every contingent, viewed from the absolute standpoint.I think something like this is or may be the hidden meaning of Hegel's declaring that the fossils then being uncovered never actually existed: it must be coupled with his absorption of existence as a category. His going on to suggest that they were put there to mislead or similar, as I think he does, may recall maybe some early Christian rigorist assertions that Plato stole his ideas from the Jews or similar. But Hegel was not a rigorist, therefore I beg leave to see his declaration as tongue in cheek rather than "disastrous", as Charles Taylor solemnly judges. That is, I read this declaration as in harmony with his whole account of time and history (again much disputed), whereby historical figures are better seen as a gallery arranged in order of series contemporaneously rather than as anything philosophically characterisable as "past". The whole vista, in fact, of immediacy in narrative or whatever is misperception, in McTaggart's round but not so inapposite phrasing. I mean, thst is clearly Hegel's meaning, however he may go on to delve within the historical but illusory panorama. What is past, for him, never was or is. It always "was to be" (Aristotel's definition of "Essence") something else, as it is the office of essentially "ungrateful spirit" to elucidate, which I have perhaps not done very well here. Nonetheless this falsity from which truth must uniquely emerge, as required by thought itself. that it be self-vindicating (though what Hegel says here may still be something of a picture as to how this happens: in the end, anyhow, language itself always has its limits, which need not limit "my world", however, if we take "world" to mean final reality, as I doubt myself that Wittgenstein did. He took it rather to be my life-form only, his later philosophy seems to confirm. But for Hegel it is precisely death, life's negation, which is "the entry into spirit" (often billed as itself another kind of life, also in NT of course), but not in later Platonism really, which some theologians are losing their nervousness about - eternal life as "knowing", emanation, etc.).What I am trying to pin down is the extremely Biblical quality of Hegel's thought, which is the last thing, characteristically, that he wants to point out, specifically. It must show itself. It does. There we find said, by a man, a subject, a consciousness, "Before Abraham was I am" (which is usually shelved just by insisting on it as abstractly unique). Yet we are urged to have "the mind of Christ", who is put as saying "Greater things than I have done will you do" (I cited this to a Benedictine who said he was "not sure" that was in the text, but it is). It is added, however, "Because I will be in you" and that must be taken as true too, as it certainly is by Hegel. As he himself says, people just cannot believe that someone is proposing the nothingness of the world, of time, etc. It would be far easier if he proposed atheism instead and this, remarks Hegel, "is not much to humanity's credit", which shows well where he himself stands.Well, if you can improve on this I'll be glad. I was writing on it in my proof-text this mporning but would have difficulty in transposing that to here. I am aware that you may possibly not fully agree with me.Stephen Theron.From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com> on behalf of Paul Trejo petrejo@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: 20 November 2018 18:37
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perceptionStephen,I will agree with John Bardis on several points, the main one being this: there is no contemporary scholarship on Hegel's Nature (setting aside these new efforts of Winfield).Hegel's Nature is a theory of Evolution -- from the viewpoint of a dialectical philosophy of religion.Winfield misses this -- but so does almost everybody else. Very few writers have linked Hegel's name with Darwin. I can think of only one -- Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "without Hegel, there would have been no Darwin!"Though a critic of Nietzsche, I can agree with that snippet. Hegel's Dialectic is a theory of Evolution -- as well as a revival of Speculative Philosophy after Kant, justifying metaphysics and even the traditional Proofs of the Existence of God. This complicates Hegel, and also vindicates him.Those who remain willfully ignorant of this are ignorant of Hegel's whole philosophical career. How can we reach them? I have not yet found the words.All best,--Paul - << Previous post in topic Next post in topic >>