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- Dear Group (that is, if you are allowed to read this),
I am sending you this commentary (#8 Preface PhdG) to hegel@yahoogroups.com both directly by Verizon E mail and Yahoo.com. It is plain text.
I am also sending this specifically to the several E Mail addresses I have for the members of this Hegel Yahoo group, and to several of my friends who are interested in Hegel.
My membership in this Yahoo Group goes back several years, and until recently I was able to freely communicate with the group; and I might add, I have always conducted my self on line according to the decorum of the various Yahoo groups, and with the academic standards worthy of this great philosopher, Hegel. In addition I belong to the Hegel Society and had the pleasure of attending their meeting in NYC several years ago. It dealt with the Science of Logic.
I would appreciate it if whoever is in charge of the ‘imprimatur’ of my comments would respectively respond to me addressing the reasons why I can not be read by the Group, if in fact my writings have been blocked. It may however be a technical problem rather than a deliberate blockage.
If I don’t receive a response to this I will still continue to send my comments to the group and copy various recipients. Hopefully, at least, I will continue to receive the various comments from the Group.
I remain respectively yours,
Bob Fanelli
<8. With this demand there goes the strenuous effort, almost (over) zealous in its activity, to rescue mankind from being sunken in what is sensuous, vulgar, and of fleeting importance, and to raise men's eyes to the stars; as if men had quite forgotten the divine, and were on the verge of finding satisfaction, like worms, in mud and water. Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind's gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things ,earthly, and to
make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man's mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems too long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.>
From Harris, “Hegel’s Ladder1: The Pilgrimage of Reason:”
<This world used to be just an image of the other one. The eye of the spirit had to be turned forcibly to this life, and it took a long time. Now we need the awareness of Heaven again, and the measure of our loss is the immediate contact that is accepted as enough.> p45
My comments:
Since medieval and religious ideology have withered on the vine, there is a craving in Hegel’s time for replacement to this ethereal community, a frenzied effort on the part of all kinds, by Schelling, Schiller, Kant, and the like….Experience and empirical knowledge have overtaken all other ideology and hence the search for more meaningful beliefs….Hegel, of course will offer his PhdG. Now (in this early nineteenth century) the natural sciences have burst on to the scene and the sensate or power of empiricism have taken hold. Harris says, “that thread was broken by the Enlightenment which taught us our bourgeois values and made us worldly once again.” I think Harris gets carried away with the bourgeois values; the point is the Church and aristocracy were challenged in the eighteenth century and empiricism, soon to be called positivism or logical positivism took over.
How do we get the focus back to the stars and to the divine? Experience has taken over. Kant himself has split reality into two; that is, knowledge of reality from experience and the pure ethical substance of transcendent reality. Hegel clearly says ‘Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man's mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level.’ Even if we have to reach for the abstract divine, at least it goes beyond the immediate crassness of the sensate. We are wandering in the desert or wasteland of limited and arguably skeptical knowledge.
Thanks for reading this. - "positivity of religion" (Hegel):
8. With this demand there goes the strenuous effort, almost perfervidly zealous in its activity, to rescue mankind from being sunken in what is sensuous, vulgar, and of fleeting importance, and to raise men's eyes to the stars; as if men had quite forgotten the divine, and were on the verge of finding satisfaction, like worms, in mud and water. Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind's gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man's mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.
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