The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level.
georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegelquotes
1770 - 1831
German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was learning Latin declensions by age three, and enrolled in Latin school at five. His love of knowledge was instilled from the earliest age. Known for his attempt to synthesize opposites, like spirit and nature, to understand the whole, Hegel was an Absolute Idealist with a strong Christian faith.
His philosophies were influenced by Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and all the Greek philosophers. He has even been called the “Aristotle of modern times.” Hegel proposed a new form of thinking called “speculative reason”, and was the first philosopher to seriously regard the history of society as essential for understanding the individual.
The University of Jena hired him as an unsalaried professor where he worked for many years, and wrote extensively. Later, he accepted paid teaching positions at both the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. A school of Hegelianism eventually formed, but since Hegel’s ideas are experiential and not strict methods of set principles, philosophers of all types have been able to draw inspiration from his works over the years, whether atheist or believer, conservative or liberal.
There are four main books Hegel produced in his life (Phenomenology of Mind, Science of Logic, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) that clarify his dialectical system for finding a place for everything be it history, ethics, politics, or religion. Many of his other essays and works were compiled by students’ lecture notes, and published after his death from cholera in 1831.
Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.
To babble unintelligible prayers, to read masses, to recite rosaries, to practice ceremonies of religious worship empty of meaning, this is the conduct of the dead. Man tries to turn completely into an object, to subject himself entirely to the rule of what is alien. Such service is called devoutness. PHARISEES!
The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.
The Christian imagination has produced nothing but an insipid legend.
[T]he vanity of the contents” of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests “…since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain.
experience / interest / vanity
We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.
ideas / mythology / philosophy / rational
What is rational is real and what is real is rational.
The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.
Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us.