It's your birthday again. Well I hope it feels like a miracle you got this far. I certainly don't believe in what fate has taught us up to this point in our lives. But at least you're on the radar. Too much fake bullshit people don't care to realize.
How does one have a conversation with the truth of such a subject.
Does this relate to the psychic, or is it purely metaphysical in origin.
What thinking causes such a truth to occur in history.
At what point did the thought of a psychic, the thought become magical, or inspired . . .that such truth actually exist.
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If the Absolute Spirit is responsible for the course of history, in an effort to achieve the ultimate goal of freedom, it seems incompatible that freedom is possible in a reality where everything is as it should be. How can individuals truly be free if their actions inevitably lead and create a world in which everything is as it should be?
http://www.schoolbites.com/summary.php?disp=term&id=217
It gradually becomes clear that Hegel does not contradict the premise of individual freedom with his proposition that the world is as it ought to be. It is the freely determined actions of individuals which comprise history and make it to be as it ought to be.
Hegel is attempting to cement the idea that history is a rational process by showing that Reason is capable of
(a)realizing and producing all of history on its own. Thus, everything and anything we might study as
(b)history has Reason not only as its justification, but also as its very substance (in the sense that it only exists by
(c)virtue of reason, and that its essential nature is nothing outside of Reason).
Hegel's theory in that they fail to address the medium between the transcendent principle and its effects in the concrete world.
the presence of laws without determining how they came to be, and religion generally refrains from even knowing what the divine will is.
But we are meant to see, at this point, that his system and method are consistent: he has a supreme power (Spirit, or the rational principle), and he has argued that it is self-sufficient (reason depends on nothing outside of itself). The arguments that the substance of history is Reason itself, and that Reason produces history, depend on the idea that the State is the only thing in history that really matters (since the State can undoubtedly be shown to come about through various forms of or attempts at rational progress).
The Germans, Hegel claims, were the first to recognize that the "freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature." This was possible through the tenets of Christianity, which ostensibly recognized all humans as fundamentally free (Hegel notes that religion is often the initial vehicle for this consciousness of freedom).
universal rights, the "final goal of the world," is the maximization of "Spirit's consciousness of its freedom, and hence also the actualization of that very freedom." Hegel immediately qualifies this statement, however, by saying that, since it is the "highest possible concept," it is a minefield of potential error.
This union of opposites is a matter of the "Idea proceed[ing] to its infinite antithesis...its determinate element...the ground of its formal being." This is self-consciousness, Spirit's knowing of itself as an "Other." The result is that infinite, abstract Spirit finds a finite, "formal freedom" in the world, finding the power of human "arbitrary free will" in itself where before there was only necessity. Hegel notes that the understanding of the "absolute bonding of this antithesis" is the very task of metaphysics itself.
the union of 1 -Spirit and 2- human will in 3- abstract terms: as the (a)union of freedom (human will) and (b)necessity (abstract Spirit), and also as the (c)union of the universal and infinite (d)(the Idea) with the particular and finite (human will).
The particularity (or individual will) side of this opposition is the realm of individual human happiness, where we change our environment to suit our desires.
world history progresses precisely through the antithesis discussed above. There must be "activity" for history to unfold, and activity is simply the mediating term between the universal Idea and external, finite, human particularity.
It may come as a relief to begin to hear about actual human beings, with their selfish drives, interests, and "passions." This seems suddenly to be a much more down-to-earth approach, especially when Hegel admits that history presents itself as a "slaughter-bench" inspiring "grief" and "helpless sadness."
Hegel wants us to grasp the sense in which human activity is the means used by Spirit to realize itself.
how Spirit "uses" humans for its own ends; in short, he must show a connection or even a unity between abstract Spirit and real human action.
"metaphysical logic": truth is the unity of the universal with the subjective particular.
unity of opposites has much to do with what Hegel refers to elsewhere as the "dialectic":
In more worldly terms, humans struggle to know themselves, and progress by negating some particular aspect of themselves in favor of a universal (the principle of the State). Thus, there is a dialogue, a progressive back-and- forth, between the subjective particular aspect and the objective universal aspect of this spiritual unity that drives history.
Though the hero may not be conscious of it, he is bringing the "unconscious Spirit" to consciousness, and therefore to actualization.
worldly particulars (which can be apparently chaotic or random) are used by universal Reason for its own purposes.
Thus, all the particular tragedy that occurs in the course of world history is a sacrifice of the particular for the universal.
Humans are the means of the greater rational goal, but they have a part in this goal themselves.
freedom also makes humans responsible for maintaining ethics and for any deterioration in those ethics.
When morals and ethics decline, it is because they are universals exposed to particulars, which limit them to some degree. Nonetheless, each decline has a higher purpose, and does not effect the overall progress entailed by the concept of freedom.
careless whims of the subjective will. The State allows the "only genuine ethical life," because genuine ethics only come from freedom in Reason (rational freedom).
World history, Hegel says, is only concerned with peoples who formed states. Any "value" and any "spiritual reality" is through the State alone, because the State is a direct embodiment of the "rational essence" of a given people; it is the essence of a people in a form that is "objectively there for them as knowers." In that sense, the State allows for self-consciousness, both of its people, and, through them, of Spirit. Thus, the State is also the realization of the Spirit in the world, "the divine Idea as it exists on earth," the thing in which "freedom gains its objectivity."
Thus, what is universal in the State is precisely the culture of the nation, and the "concrete actuality" of that universal culture is "the Spirit of the people itself." Religion is the most powerful aspect of culture by which the people may become aware of their own Spirit as the union between the subjective and objective wills. This self-awareness, Hegel says, is crucial to the development of Spirit. Religion provides a people with a definition of the deepest truth, with a "universal soul of all particular things." Thus, the way a people represents God constitutes their "general foundation," their absolute justification for the details of secular life. Religion gives the State a supreme justification, allowing its principles to be recognized as "determinations of the divine nature itself." Thus, the link between religion and the State must be preserved.
Hegel thinks this idea is largely fallacious, primarily because it does not deal with true "history" so much as with myth and speculation. True history, he argues, begins "at the point where rationality begins to enter into worldly existence." It requires a basic concept of individuality, moral right, and law- -in short, true history requires "substantial universal objects" and their instantiation in the State (this, Hegel notes, is the nature of freedom itself). History begins when history begins to be recorded as history, and this cannot happen without the concepts available through the State (namely, the idea of law or a "universally binding directive," which makes individual actions count on a universal scale in order to serve the State).
Hegel calls dialectic: progress, or "development" (an important word in this section), happens only because of this ongoing dialogue of Spirit with itself, this process of negation and improvement.
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