Hegelian Idealism
· Sought to give an account of the universe and our place in it.
· The universe is orderly and rational (Logos).
· By using our highest faculties (reason and intuition) we can know our place in the scheme of things.
Kant argued for limitations on our ability to know metaphysical or “Absolute Truth.”
(We cannot know "things-in-themselves;" our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of human experience.)
For Kant, the human intellect must conceptualize the world with mind’s inherent categories which means knowledge of the world is always mediated. (Think of the near logical absurdity of conceiving of the world un-conceptualized.)
Though human knowledge is limited to the world-experienced (phenomenal world), we yearn to know the noumenal world, reality-as-it-is in and of itself such as the answers to metaphysical questions such as God, freedom, and immortality. However, for Kant we can have no theoretical knowledge of these though we continue (must continue) to act on these ideals.
Hegel
· was deeply influenced by Kant.
· attempted to go beyond the limitations established by Kant on Rational Thought.
· sought to demonstrate a connection between epistemology and metaphysics.
· accepted Kant's idea-that the mind imposes ideas on experience, but drew a different conclusion,
Claims that whatever exists is (must be) knowable.
Kant, Hegel claims, was mistaken when he said the noumenal world (the world of things as they are in themselves) exists, but that we cannot know it. What makes nature and the noumenal world knowable is that its essence is Spirit (which also is translated as Mind). Spirit, said Hegel, is the Absolute (God) -the total reality.
Hegel became particularly interested in what reason could do to unpack the Mystery of the Trinity and related Christian Mysteries (That Jesus is Man and That Jesus is God and That God is NOT the same as Man).
Claims that Absolute Spirit (or Mind) is a rational and dynamic process.
“The is real is rational, and what is rational is real.”
He viewed absolute knowledge as a mode of spiritual life having its roots in experience.
Reality
According to Kant, we c can think about the noumenal world (reality un-categorized), but never know it means. In that sense, we cannot have knowledge about "ultimate reality."
Hegel wanted to show a different the connection between epistemology and metaphysics. He argued that if we know there is an unknowable world, then it is not unknowable; it is "known." Hence all of reality is rational (yields to rational investigation). In this sense it is impossible to even conceive of an unknowable reality. All an object IS, is only all that can be known about it. Further, all reality IS, is only all that can be known about it.
Hence all of reality is rational (yields to rational investigation). In this sense it is impossible to even conceive of an unknowable reality. All an object IS, is only all that can be known about it. Further, all reality IS, is only all that can be known about it.
This led Hegel to his most famous statement- "What is real is rational, and what is rational is real."
Unlike Plato, who made a distinction between the world as it appears to us and reality, Hegel argued that appearance is reality. For him, everything is consciousness and thus everything is in relation to everything else. His view is similar to the Monist views of Parmenides and Spinoza. But while they claimed that the One is a single substance with attributes, Hegel claims that Absolute Spirit is an intricate process in which all objects are related. The Absolute Spirit is the world.
Hegel’s notion of “the Absolute.”
For Hegel, the Absolute is Spirit (Guiste) or Reason, both in itself and as it realizes itself in history.
It plays the same role for him that the Forms and the Divine play for Plato, and that God plays in Christian theology.
But the Absolute is not a creator distinct from the creation. Spirit: the totality of nature culture and history
The Absolute is (absolutely) everything that cab be which is identical with everything that can be thought.
Claims that Absolute Spirit (or Mind) is a rational and dynamic process.
“The is real is rational, and what is rational is real.”
He viewed absolute knowledge as a mode of spiritual life having its roots in experience.
History and The Absolute
Further the Absolute must not be thought of a static divinity, but dynamic divinity in process.
The process of that divinity (history) develops or “unfolds” in a dialectical pattern:
The three stages of which are Hegel’s version of: Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis.
It has been suggested that we think of this process as resembling a negotiation:
One party stakes out a position.
The other party stakes out an opposite position .
A mediator suggests a third position that gives them both what they wanted in a new way, so that their original positions are both denied and fulfilled.
Hegel thinks that history itself has this structure.
The overall structure of history is:
Spirit in itself
Spirit for itself
Spirit in and for itself.
That is, pure Spirit or Reason
Sprit self-alienated/ projected as its opposite (matter) out there as something it can contemplate.
Spirit reclaimed to itself as known matter.
Me
Me as my refection in a mirror (me as a self-alienated projection)
Me as my awareness of my reflection.
Just like God, in order to know myself I must turn my “self” into an object and then an object of my consciousness.
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
one in Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
The Nicene Creed (Curiously, NOT the Apostles Creed)
The process of mediation is the process in which these opposites produce a new synthesis of Spirit in itself and Spirit for itself.
Here is a political example that make this historical dialectical process a little clearer:
Thesis: anarchy – no rule, everyone on his or her own (Hobbes’ “state of nature”)
Anthithesis: monarchy – one person in charge, everyone else must obey.
Synthesis: democracy – the joint rule of all, everyone makes the rules, everyone must keep them.
When we view objects as separate from each other, we do not understand the dialectic process that will lead us to unity in the Absolute Spirit. He did not mean the Absolute Spirit unifies objects that were once separate. Rather his contention is that the very idea that the object known is separate from the knower is an illusion created by consciousness. This illusion is finally superseded with the advent of his philosophical system.
· History (of the world- in particular HUMAN history) is the Absolute Spirit in process. Absolute Spirit eventually comes to know itself through the human mind.
· Absolute Spirit expresses itself objectively in Nature before it becomes conscious of itself in human beings. Through our subjective consciousness of objective nature, Spirit “returns to itself."
· Absolute Spirit first becomes conscious of itself in the individual (Hegel called this subjective spirit).
· When it reaches a higher consciousness in the family, civil society, and the state, it becomes objective spirit. The objective spirit appears in interaction between people. (Cultural Institutions, Social Realities)
· Hegel called his triadic method the dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
· When Hegel said "The rational is real, and the real is rational, " he was saying Absolute Spirit expresses itself through nature, humans, and everything in the world.
The Three Main Parts of Hegel's Philosophy.
1. In Logic, Hegel examines the process by which we deduce the categories that describe the Absolute from our experience of the actual.
2. In Philosophy of Nature, the antithesis to the rational Idea (thesis), he investigates nature as a rational structure and pattern in all of reality.
3. In Philosophy of Mind, he argues that the synthesis is Absolute Spirit, and that the Absolute Spirit manifests itself in the minds of individuals, social institutions, civil society, the state, and in art, religion, and philosophy.
Logic
For Hegel, logic is a universal concept that forms and precedes the natural world (Logos- the Laws-very much like Heraclitus).
Absolute Spirit is the ultimate form, the Ideal, or what Hegel would call Absolute Idealism.
The dialectical system in his Logic is being, nothing (or nonbeing), and becoming. Because being and nothing are empty abstractions, he identified being with nothing. If I reflect on the concept of being, then I also must introduce the opposite concept-nothing. We cannot reflect on our existence without realizing what we are not. Hegel claims that this tension is synthesized in the concept of "becoming." If something is in the process of becoming (and everything is) then it is both being and not being
Again like Heraclitus he claims that reality is always in a state of change, therefore becoming is the basis of all existence. All action/history results from this process of becoming, and the mind is part of this process. If there is no process, then there is nothing or nonbeing.
Hegel's equation is being = nothing (or nonbeing), and being plus nothing = becoming (existence).
PURE BEING makes the beginning because it is on one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined....
When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeteminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another; and in the beginning there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we here have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being. It is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination: it is only and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. Essence also is indeterminate, but in another sense: it has traversed the process of mediation and contains implicit the determination it has absorbed....
But this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect is just NOTHING. Nothing, if it be thus immediate and equal to itself (is also conversely the same as Being is. The truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is BECOMING.
The proposition that Being and Nothing is the same seems so paradoxical to the imagination or understanding, that it is perhaps taken for a joke. And indeed it is one of the hardest things thought expects itself to do: for Being and Nothing exhibit the fundamental contrast in its immediacy, -that is, without the one term being invested with any attribute which would involve its connexion with the other. This attribute however, as the above paragraph points out, is implicit in them, the attribute which is just the same in both. It is as correct however to say that Being and Nothing are altogether different, as to assert their unity. The one is not what the other is. But since the distinction has not at this point assumed definite shape (Being and Nothing are still the immediate), it is, in the way that they have it, something unutterable, which we merely mean.
It may perhaps be said that nobody can form a notion of the unity of Being and Nought . . To say that we have no such conception can only mean, that in none of these images do we recognise the notion in question, and that we are not aware that they exemplify it. The readiest example of it is Becoming. Every one has a mental idea of Becoming, and will even allow that it is one idea; he will further allow that, when it is analysed, it involves the attribute of Being, and also what is the very reverse of Being, VIZ nothing: and that these two attributes lie undivided in the one idea: so that Becoming is the unity of Being and Nothing.
Thus, Hegel argued that the concept of being is “empty” (indeterminate, featureless). Therefore, it must be nonbeing or nothing, the antithesis of being The movement of the mind from being to nothing produces becoming, which is "the unity of Being and Nothing," and therefore its synthesis.
The second part of Logic is essence. Here, Hegel gave us pairs of related categories such as essence and existence, force and expression, cause and effect, action and reaction. He called these categories of reflection because they go beneath the surface of our immediate experience. Essence is not directly present to us, but mediated by what is directly present. Being is immediate, and essence is mediate.
At the essence level, we can relate different categories such as cause and effect. The cause, for example, passes into its opposite-the effect-which we conceive as something different from the cause. Similarly, the effect is an effect by its relation to the cause. At the essence stage, we can distinguish between appearance and reality and ask questions about what is real and what is appearance. If a thesis is to have any meaning, said Hegel, it must have an antithesis. We understand pain because we can relate to its opposite, pleasure. A thesis always carries its own antithesis (like “Being” and “Nothing” the ultimate thesis/antithesis pairing. To understand any idea we must understand at the same time what that idea is not -its contradiction. As it happens, consciousness of an idea inevitably moves from accepting something as true (thesis) to rejecting is as false (antithesis). When we relate the idea to its opposite we discover a new truth about them that transcends their previous meanings. Hegel called this discovery notion, the third part of his Logic.
At the essence stage, Hegel distinguished between cause and effect. When we see that the effect is identical with its cause, and different from it, then essence becomes notion. Notion becomes the synthesis on an even higher plane of subjectivity and objectivity. Hegel called subjectivity a category because we can have a thought about an object, make a judgment about it, and then reason out logical conclusions. Within subjectivity lies its opposite-objectivity. Subjectivity contains the idea of objectivity. If I am a subjective self then there must be an objective "not-self" within the subjective self. Subjectivity consists of psychological thought. Objectivity is what I see in anything external to me. The synthesis of the subjective and the objective is their unity in the Absolute Spirit.
Absolute Spirit
Within the Absolute Spirit, everything is becoming (changing). The is characterized by the dialectical process which on of conflict and resolution (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis). Paradoxically, all is permanent within the Absolute Spirit; conceived of in totality, it forms an interrelated, logical whole. (Ultimate Reality/ God)
Absolute Spirit is "the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose and has its end as its beginning." Hegel's concept of the Absolute Spirit is similar to Plato's highest principle, the Form of the Good, except dynamic in its evolutionary development.
The Absolute Spirit unfolds in the biological, social, and historical evolution of the world. With its aspects of freedom and self-consciousness, the Absolute Spirit develops and expands in its knowledge. Like the river that becomes broader as it nears the sea, history is the story of the Absolute Spirit evolving to greater consciousness of itself. History is a great narrative, each event furthering the progress of its heroic protagonist (Spirit) towards its final cognitive development- self-awareness.
Hegel's Absolute Spirit takes three forms: idea, nature, spirit. Each triad contains its own triadic stages
Philosophy of Nature
For Hegel, Nature is Absolute Spirit in External Form.
Nature is the world of sense experience. It is the antithesis of the rational idea (logic), but it is also united with it. Nature is the Absolute Spirit in forms, as physical objects, that we experience with our senses.
Through Hegel's dialectic, we have moved from the rational logical idea (thesis) to nonrational nature (antithesis) and finally to spirit (synthesis). Because nature must follow natural laws, the Absolute Spirit cannot fully express itself therefore, nature is unconscious of its divinity. This means a dialectic opposition between spirit and nature, between freedom and necessity.
Philosophy of Spirit
The spirit is a synthesis of rational idea (Pre-conscious Idea) and nonrational nature. The consciousness that manifested itself in logic and nature now returns to itself. It does this through the triadic dialectic of subjective spirit (thesis), objective spirit (antithesis), and absolute spirit (synthesis). Hegel divided these triads into a series of subtriads that proceed to his social and political philosophy, as well as his ethics, philosophy of history, art, and religion.
Subjective Spirit (Mind)
The subjective spirit or mind refers to the inner workings of the human mind.
It has three characteristics.
First, the soul exists in its elementary stage for conscious activity-the relationship of the mind to the body.
The soul, said Hegel, is a sensitive, feeling being, as a being, it can express itself to the world through its body. The hand "as the absolute tool," the mouth, and weeping and laughing allow humans to externalize their thoughts and feelings. In addition, the world affects the internal human body. When our organs react to stimuli in the light of our own experience, then the mind has evolved beyond the animal level and reached the stage of consciousness.
Second, the individual is conscious of personal feelings and desires that are like and unlike the feelings and desires of others.
Now consciousness can relate, reflect, understand, and perceive. At this stage of personality, consciousness becomes self-conscious by encountering another consciousness from which it seeks recognition. Self-consciousness as desire, finds that it cannot simply destroy another consciousness as it could a physical objects and satisfy its desires. Thus arises a conflict. Each person can become aware that the other person is exactly that-another person "They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another." There is simultaneously an antithesis and mutual need between them, and they also recognize that one solution to this conflict is to destroy the other as another person so that "each seeks the death of the other." However, as Hegel pointed out, if the struggle was the literal destruction of the other as a person, then there would be nothing left but a corpse incapable of personal recognition or relationship. At this point, a person "learns that life is as essential to it" as satisfying personal desires, and backs down from the struggle. The person who backs down from the struggle prefers life to independence and becomes subject to the other's will.
The person who does not back down, said Hegel, is the independent consciousness whose "essential nature is to be for itself." The person who backs down depends on the person who does not back down. The result of such a relationship is the lord and the bondsman' (master and slave). The master prefers independence to life itself and now controls the actions of the dependent slave who has less will. The master now gets the recognition originally desired from the slave who must treat him as lord. The slave gets no recognition at all.
But, said Hegel, such a one-sided relationship is unstable and the dialectic begins to work. The master ironically becomes dependent on the know-how and labor of the bondsman, thus the bondsman becomes other than a slave. The bondsman learns to master the environment by his labors and realizes a kind of recognition and satisfaction. This leads to acquiring a mind of his own, yet he still remains a bondsman subject to an alien will. These extremes of superior and inferior are so frustrating and miserable that they lead to new stages of consciousness-stoicism, skepticism, and the n unhappy consciousness.
In stoicism, the frustrations, limitations, and misery of lord and bondsman drive self-consciousness to an indifference of external events. The aim of stoicism is for people to be free by controlling their attitude, not trying to control events over which they have no control. In the stage of stoicism, the person becomes free through rational thinking. Yet Hegel pointed out that such freedom is empty, exactly because it is cut off from external reality. The highest values are truth and goodness consisting in "reasonableness." Unfortunately, because stoicism has no connection with the world, it becomes alienated from its own ideals.
Emerging from stoicism is the stage of skepticism. Here a person encounters him- or herself as "a real negativity." Hegel compared this stage to the '"squabbling of self-willed children" who go back and forth from one idea to another in bewilderment and end by contradicting themselves and each other. A kind of freedom of thought exists at this stage, but it is always negative because there are no stable ideas and values.
From skepticism, said Hegel, arises the stage of unhappy consciousness, which has internalized the struggle for supremacy of master and slave. Because consciousness wars with itself, "agony is inescapable." Unhappiness will always be the outcome in the quest for independence so long as the person assumes a separation between the subject and the external reality. To overcome this assumption, it is imperative for the individual to evolve from personal self-consciousness to universal reason.
Third. at maturity, the intelligence organizes ideas, devises language, and understands and interprets its reflections rationally.
At this stage, the mind expresses itself through reason, will, and moral choice. When it unites the first two characteristics, the mind reaches the highest truth finding an introspective stage of the subjective spirit. This stage is the Free mind, the unity of theory and practice. Human freedom consists of controlling desires with reason.
This will to freedom is no longer an impulse that demands satisfaction, but the character of the mind's consciousness grown into something non-impulsive. Freedom of the subjective mind is a principle of mind and heart destined to develop into the objective phase, into legal, moral, religious and scientific actuality.
Objective Spirit (Mind)
The subjective mind, said Hegel, naturally seeks the objective mind. The subjective mind looks inward, while the objective mind acts in the external world through sociology, ethics, and politics. Through the objective mind, we enter public life where we create rules, institutions, and organizations.
Like the subjective mind, the objective mind develops through three stages of moral experience. The first stage Hegel called abstract rights-legal and formal rights through laws and contracts. At this stage, we transform nature by creating property systems, economic organizations, and class distinctions. We interact with the external environment through possessions such as privately owned property. This is a condition of self-awareness that establishes the right of ownership.
The State
Individuals can have freedom and relevance only in a state. As a living unity of individuals, the state becomes the true individual. Hegel called it a unity in difference when the ethical idea is actualized. As such, the state represents universal self-consciousness. Some individuals are conscious of themselves as parts of this larger self. Because the state is mind objectified, it is only then that the individual could have objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life.
As the most universal form of humanity, the state is a rational and self-conscious force expressing universal reason. Just as the husband and wife lose their personal identities in their marriage, the citizens of a civil society lose their independence in the unity of the state.
The Constitution Hegel preferred I constitutional monarchy to a democracy, because the monarch representing the state fulfills the universal will rationally. The ruler puts the purpose of the Absolute Spirit into action. He does this through the universal will, not through his own personal will.
International Law Although individuals are subordinate to the state, the state itself is not subservient to other states. Each state is a living, independent, and sovereign unity, even when it is at war with another state. No authority is superior to the authority of individual states; therefore there could be no international or world authority. If by entering into contracts, states cannot settle their conflicts, then they must declare war. Hegel saw an ethical element in war that preserves the health of nations by uprooting their "finite aims." However, because war is a link between states and not between individuals, the state has a responsibility to uphold the rights of its citizens.
World History
For Hegel, the history of the world is the history of nations. Each state has some stage of the Absolute Spirit, because each state is the Divine Idea (Absolute Spirit) as it exists on earth. The dialectic of the historical process exists in the conflict between states. Each state expresses a "national spirit" of its own collective consciousness. And each national spirit represents a moment in the development of the Absolute Spirit. The conflict between national spirits also is the dialectic in history
The history of a single world-historical nation contains:
(a) the development of its principle from its latent embryonic stage until it blossoms into the self-conscious freedom of ethical life and presses in upon world history; and
(b) the period of its decline and fall, since it is its decline and fall that signalizes the emergence in it of a higher principle as the pure negative of its own. When this happens, mind passes over into the new principle and so marks out another nation for world-historical significance.
According to Hegel, a nation cannot choose the time in history in which it will be great. It "is only once that it can make its hour strike." But during the nation's height, special historical figures act as instruments of the Absolute Spirit. These heroes lift nations to new levels of development.
World history has shown the unfolding of reason through:
(1) the Oriental
(2) the Greek
(3) the Roman, and
(4) the Germanic
In an Oriental despot, only one man was free-the despot.
In Greece and Rome, only the citizens were free, not the slaves.
Under the influence of Christianity, the Germanic peoples developed the highest rational insight-that humans are free. The highest freedom occurs when we act according to the universal rational will of the Absolute Spirit (God).
Art, Religion, and Philosophy
Hegel thought the highest expression of reality was the Absolute Spirit, with subjectivity and objectivity integrated in the spiritual life. Our knowledge of the Absolute Spirit is actually the Absolute Spirit knowing itself through the finite spirit of humankind.
Hegel held that our consciousness of the Absolute Spirit progresses as the mind moves through three stages from art to religion and then finally to philosophy.
Art is a form of consciousness. It is one of the vehicles Sprit has used in its attempt to achieve “self-consciousness.”
The other two principle vehicles are religion and philosophy/science.
Art, for Hegel, is:
“the sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself,”
Hence the subject matter of Aesthetics is:
“the conception of artistic beauty as the presentation of the Absolute.”
Thus, consciousness of the Absolute is embodied in the work of art.
Together with religion in philosophy (science) the art of the world is the self-expression of the appearances of Spirit. We can chart the evolution of this “coming of age” of consciousness, if you will, as manifested in the history of art, religion and philosophy.
Hegel saw art as a triadic development
(1) symbolic
(2) classical
(3) romantic.
Symbolic Art
Symbolic Art is vague in its idea and form of expression. Hegel viewed symbolic art as the art of the Orient, of the East, which suggests a meaning without adequately expressing it.
Classical Art
The well-balanced classical art of the Greeks harmonizes the form and the idea (spirit) in equal proportion.
Romantic Art
In Romantic art, the idea (spirit) predominates over form. It is a higher means of expression than either Oriental or Greek art, because its content is of the inner spiritual world.
Hegel looked to poetry as the discipline to lift us from the sensuous to the spiritual, from art to religion.
Hegel’s three main stages of art work the same way:
Thesis: Symbolic art. At this stage, the Idea (the Absolute) seeks expression in a material form. But the material form is not adequate to the ideal content. It is commonly exaggerated or distorted in an attempt to embody this content. Examples abound in ancient Egyptian art, traditional Indian art, African masks and dolls, etc.
Antithesis: Classical art. At this stage, the material is remade to match the perfection of the ideal. But this happens at the cost of a clear connection between the idealized form and the forms we encounter in ordinary experience.
Synthesis: Romantic art. (Hegel, of course, lived in the Romantic period, so it’s natural for him to see this as a culmination.)
In Romantic art, the idealization of the form is adjusted to reflect inwardness, the real embodiment of spirit in the conscious, reflective human form. Hence delight, suffering, compassion, anticipation of the future, and other such states of consciousness are represented just as they are expressed through human bodies, by facial expressions and gestures.
The fine arts are arts that produce beauty.
Beauty, is the “adequation of form to an idea.” Beauty is spirit in sensuous form. We see beauty in plants and animals, but we also can create forms of beauty that are superior to nature The spiritual beauty of art is obvious in music and poetry, forms that not only imitate nature, but also, as Aristotle claims, express moral values and purify the emotions.
Art is "the self-unfolding idea of beauty." However, the history of the world will require an "evolution of countless ages" for the developing spirit of beauty to reach the highest realization of the ideal beauty.
A fine art embodies ideas in forms adequate to them.
Symbolic Art: spirit partly informs matter.
“Sensuous representation of an idea.”
Classical Art: spirit and matter are perfectly fused.
“Identity between form and content.”
Hegel: Byzantine art mixed the symbolic with the classical
Romantic Art: spirit dominates its material embodiment.
Among the arts, the most “spiritual” is poetry, because it has the least to do with matter and the most to do with mind.
These then comprise the 5 “Fine Arts”
Architecture
Sculpture
Music
Painting
Poetry (literature)
These art media (and only these art media) are the artistic means that humankind has turned to again and again to express their most important idea and values.
Imperfect arts – tapestry- cannot sustain the weight placed on them by confused and sentimental people –though for a time they may assume serious cultural significance. Note tapestry as best is a sort of degenerate form a painting, and there is not image (idea) one can express via tapestry that one cannot better)
Does art come to an end?
After the advent of Romantic Art, Hegel claims that Spirit assumes autonomous forms and art is superseded. Society no longer uses art as a vehicle to express its most advanced forms of rational expression or communication.
Hegel thinks art must now “end,” not in the sense that no-one will make “art” anymore, but in the sense that Spirit must go beyond the material embodiments of the Absolute.
The final expression of the Absolute, of Spirit in and for itself, is thought itself/ philosophy.
Religion
The Oriental Concept of God drew upon natural objects and animals.
The Greeks looked on their gods as having human bodily forms. They made their gods in their own image as objects of "naive intuition and sensuous imagination." The god's shapes were "the bodily shape of man.
However, the mature Christian intelligence recognizes that God is spirit.
Religion developed through a three-stage unfolding of the Absolute Spirit:
(1) religions of nature
(2) religions of spiritual individuality, and
(3) absolute religion
Religions of Nature
Religions of nature are Oriental religions in which humans use worship to control nature through magic. This level includes those who see the deity as boundless power, but not yet as spirit. Hegel traced these forms of religion to the higher religions that would lead to spiritual individuality. Included in this hierarchy are the Zoroastrian religion of Good combating Evil, the Egyptian religion of world mystery (Osiris dies only to live again), and the Syrian religion of the Phoenix rising from its ashes.
Religions of Spiritual Individuality
The three religions that represent religions of spiritual individuality are those that provide the cultural background of Christianity: (1) the Jewish religion of sublimity, (2) the Greek religion of beauty, and (3) the Roman religion of utility.
Absolute Religion
For Hegel, the absolute religion-the highest religion of the Absolute Spirit-is Christianity. He considered it the religion of the freely self-conscious Absolute Spirit. Christianity has the absolute truth for its content. The Christian Trinity has God the Father (Hegel's notion of the Absolute Idea), God the Son (the world of Absolute Nature), and the Holy Spirit (the unfolding historical reality in the form of self-conscious Mind or Absolute Spirit).
The Trinity functions through the Christian Churches as God the Father, the eternal all-embracing universal; God the Son, the infinite, particular manifestation; and God the Holy Spirit, individual eternal love.
Christ's death expresses the alienation between the finite (thesis) and the infinite (antithesis), and their ultimate reconciliation (synthesis). Without this doctrine, people would still view God as "other than" and beyond the world.
Although Christianity gives the highest religious expression to the truth of Absolute Spirit, only philosophy can fully clarify its truth.
Philosophy
In philosophy the artist's external sensuous vision (thesis) and the mystic's internal vision (antithesis) unite in thought (synthesis). In philosophy, knowledge of the Absolute Spirit is unique: the idea in and for itself Thus, the knower and the known are identical. As the synthesis, philosophy is the process of historical development and realization.
In philosophy, the Absolute Spirit reflects on its own impact on history. Philosophy is like the mirror of the Absolute Spirit. The history of philosophy is the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit's self-consciousness in the human mind.
On Women
Hegel treats marriage as a unity that transcends arid subordinates the individual personalities of the husband and wife. This does not have the same meaning, however, for the man as for the woman. She should dedicate her entire being to the family unit, which is the reason for her existence.
The man enters into involvement with the family, but his life exists also outside the family in his profession, in society, and in the state.
Following the ancient tradition, Hegel thought women could not reason abstractly, so they could never understand rational universal principles or the study of philosophy. Because their minds function at the lowest aesthetic stage, women act only on feeling and opinion. As rational beings, men must take the responsibility of managing affairs of the state and dealing with scientific subjects.
“One sex exhibits power and mastery, while the other is subjective and passive. Hence the husband has his real essential life in the state, the sciences, and the like, in battle and in struggle with the outer world and with himself . . . In the family the wife has her full substantive place.
Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts. These demand a universal faculty. Women may have happy inspirations, taste, elegance, but they have not the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the same as that between animal and plant The animal corresponds more closely to the character of the man, the plant to that of the woman. In woman there is a more peaceful unfolding of nature, a process, whose principle is the less clearly determined unity of feeling. If women were to control the government, the state would be in danger, for they do not act according to the dictates of universality, but are influenced by accidental inclinations and opinions. The education of woman goes on one hardly position only through stress of thought and much specialized effort.
Dialectic Materialism:
Marx's Response to Hegel
Karl Marx:
"the philosophers have only interpreted the world differently: the point is to change it."
Marx was a materialist, (the only things which exists are physical objects and physical forces)
Marx agreed with Hegel that the dialectical process takes place in nature and in history.
He rejected Hegel's idealism (that the dialectic is the progressive self-unfolding of thought) but claimed instead that history was the dialectical unfolding of Economic Systems.
In Das Capital, Marx wrote:
“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is fundamentally its direct opposite. For Hegel the thought process is the derniurge (or creator) of the actual, and actual existence is only the outward manifestation of the Idea. But I, on the contrary, regard the ideal as nothing else than the material reality, transposed and translated in the human head.
According to Marx, what makes us human is that we produce our means of sustenance. We are what we are because of what we do. We meet our basic needs in productive activities such as fishing, farming. and building. Unlike animals governed by instinct, we create ourselves by transforming and manipulating nature. Through production we generate a society that in turn shapes us.
Summary
The struggle of Absolute Spirit self-actualizing into perfection is what Hegel calls history.
History itself is a dialectic process that moves in three steps from an original thesis to a contrary antithesis and then, after a struggle between them, to a new idea that combines elements of each in a synthesis.
The Absolute Spirit first becomes conscious of itself in the individual, what Hegel called subjective spirit. It reaches higher consciousness in the objective spirit of family, society, and ultimately, the state.
The Absolute Spirit reaches it highest form of self-realization in art, religion and philosophy. Of these, philosophy is the highest form of knowledge. Through philosophy, the Absolute Spirit reflects on its own impact on history.
Hegel had pointed out that historical development is driven by the tension between opposites-thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Marx agreed with the dialectical process, but he did not think the force of the process was Absolute Spirit. For Marx, the economic life of the community is the force that creates change. Marx reasoned that a society's superstructure comprises and expresses itself in the way it thinks, as well as its political institutions, laws, morals, science, and philosophy.
The three levels that make up the foundation of any society are
(1) the condition of production
(2) the means of production
(3) production relations.
Marx also observed the dialectic at work in five epochs in history:
(1) the primitive or communal
(2) slavery
(3) feudalism
(4) capitalism, and
(5) socialism or communism.
Economic structure is the basis for each epoch.
The evolution of economic order is propelled by class struggles (the “haves” with the “have-nots”). Ultimately, over time, the system becomes so unstable that it collapses under its own internal pressures (sows the seeds of its own destruction).
In latter-day Capitalism, the conflict occurs between the two classes Capitalism creates and sustains; bourgeoisie (the capitalists) and the proletariat (workers). The conflict occurs between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Because the capitalists do not want to relinquish their power, revolution is the only way to better the workers' conditions.
In a capitalistic society, the worker labors for someone else. His labor becomes separated from him: It no longer belongs to him. The worker becomes alien not only to his work, but also to himself. He loses touch with his own inner being. Only when the workers of all countries unite in revolution will such exploitation cease.
The proletariat must rise and take over the means of production. When this occurs, a new "classless society" will begin. In such a society the people themselves own the means of production. Each person gives according to his abilities and receives according to his needs. Capitalism and alienation transform into socialism and communism. At this point there will be no class struggle since there will exist only a “Classless” society. Therefore the evolution of economic systems will cease and “History” will be over
