But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself…. Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.
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.
What makes comet wine so good is that the water-process detaches itself from the earth and thus brings about an altered state in the planet.
The true is thus the bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunken; and because each, as soon as it detaches itself, dissolves immediately — the whirl is just as much transparent and simple repose.
bacchanalian / repose / whirl
Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do.
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
deficiency / import / individual / value
By means of the simple folk remedy of ascribing to feeling what is the millennia-long labor of reason and of its understanding, all are spared the bother of rational insight and knowledge.
To the philosopher, infinity, knowledge, movement, empirical laws, etc., are things just as familiar {as family relations}. And as her dead brother and uncle are present to the peasant woman, thus Plato, Spinoza, etc. are present to the philosopher. The one has as much reality as the other, but the latter are immortal.
empirical / infinity / knowledge / movement / philosopher
No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.
We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one….. A new phase of the spirit is preparing itself. Philosophy especially has to welcome its appearance and acknowledge it, while others, who oppose it impotently, cling the past.
epoch / philosophy / spirit
Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.