r0b’s Reviews > Hegel's Ladder > Status Update

...embodied in Diotima; and when she restores Hyperion’s sense of natural harmony at one point, he says to her: “I am become thy equal and divinity plays with divinity now, as children play with one another.”

Hölderlin’s Hyperion portrays the “seriousness, suffering and labor” of the human negative. But it falls short of true “patience,” and it can easily be read (or misread) as beginning from an ideal union with God (or Nature) in which there is no suffering and returning to a union in which the suffering and labor is drowned and forgotten. The ideal union is represented and...

...But the result does seem to be negative. Like Locke clearing the ground for Newton’s methods, the Phenomenology makes a clean slate for a new science of logic. But that is not all that it does. It is a science in its own right; and the critical part of the Preface, which now follows, shows us (in an empirical way) why it is necessary.

...Why can we not say goodbye to all that and embark joyfully on a new life in the speculative kingdom of absolute truth? From Hegel’s earlier comments about the Preface itself, and about how the “result” must not be sundered from its total process of development, we can readily supply our own answer. Our survey of the thematic content of the science has already shown that it is by no means merely a negative...

As a critical introduction to “Science,” the Phenomenology appears to the naïve reader simply as a great spring-cleaning operation. To make ironic use of a famous phrase of Locke’s, Hegel is engaged in “clearing away rubbish” (quite prominently the rubbish of John Locke and his “incomparable Mr. Newton”). But why can we not follow the precept of Jesus and let the dead bury their dead? Why can we not say...

Every human being that comes into the world is “lighted by the true light.” But to say that this is “God’s light” is only to say that it is the identical light that makes all of us human, and makes all of our experience human experience—that is, potentially rational experience, the experience that can express itself in human words.

...but now the thinking self must recognize itself as the motion of the world as “Spirit”—the total motion within which both the world (as Nature) and the self (as self-conscious thinking) are defined.

...He presents it here (as later in the logical introduction for the Encyclopedia of 1827) as the need to abandon the claim that the thinking self is a separate substance. The self must lose its status as a fixed point and recognize itself as a moment. Fichte changed the almighty “fulguration” of the Leibnizian God into the free self ’s philosophically conscious awareness of being a self-fixing point;..

To bring life and fluidity back into the eternal fixity of the realm of the Ego as the moral Understanding (the intelligible or supersensible world of speculation from Descartes to Fichte) is the function of Hegel’s dialectic. Thus, the description of “how thoughts become fluid” here is Hegel’s first logical definition of the dialectic in the Phenomenology....

...Then we shall arrive in the sphere of the Gedanken that are truly Begriffe.