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Behold, your king!

Thinking hardly or hardly thinking? Philosophy

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“”He never quite got his hair under control.

—Alain de Botton

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and historian whose literary work is notoriously dry and boring to read (besides being almost unintelligible). His main works concern a woo propagating idea known as the 'World Spirit', and a solid idea known as the Hegelian Dialectic. A true child of Romanticism, he developed coevally with the growing German spirit of his time.

Main ideas

The World Spirit

The World Spirit is one of the main founders of woo-filled theories like the New-Age movement. In his The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes), Hegel argues that the Geist (ghost, spirit) is not a physical thing nor a transcendental thing, but a force that mediates in history through great men like Napoleon. Hegel believed that our unwitting hero was used by the Geist and then was disposed of, not to be used again once his purpose was complete. As a tie-in to epistemology, Hegel wrote that truth was absolutely subjective and that there were no absolutes in any sense of the word when concerning truth. Something socially acceptable in one culture may be a taboo in another (think wearing shoes in the house), and a truth in one era may be a crime in another (think slavery). Hegel taught that history moved forward in something he called the 'Dialectic' (covered below), and that the Geist is the sum of human experience (since humans are the only things with spirit). Hegel believed that the Geist would become a self aware, self-realising entity at some point in the future.

“”Hegel claimed that the Geist is developing toward an ever-expanding knowledge of itself. It's the same with rivers - they become ever broader as they get nearer the sea. According to Hegel, history is the story of the Geist gradually coming to the consciousness of itself. Although the world has always existed, human culture and human development have made the Geist increasingly conscious of its intrinsic value

—Sophie's World

The Hegelian Dialectic

The Hegelian Dialectic is Hegel's one solid idea. Hegel taught that it moved the Geist, and history, forward. In its simplest form, the Dialectic goes like this:

• The thesis starts us off
• The antithesis is the opposite of the thesis
• They fight, and their love-child is the synthesis

• The synthesis starts us off
• The antisynthesis is the opposite of the synthesis
• They fight, and their love child is the new synthesis

This is actually a solid observation made by Hegel about how history moves forward. Keep in mind though that the dialectic is not a two-iteration process and will keep going until the Geist becomes self-realising. As an example of the Dialectic, think about the not-so-old sexual revolution in the 1960s. The thesis is the Victorian era of closet sexuality, where it was shunned and taboo. The antithesis is the sexual revolution of the 1960s in which sexuality came out of the closet and was a major theme of the era. History had one extreme, Victorianism, then moved to the other extreme, the 60s, and finally we'll get a synthesis, something along the lines of a balance of sexuality in society. Not too much, not too little.

Legacy

The Hegelian Dialectic was used by Marx to help move his ideas about communism forward. Marx thought that the proletariats (thesis) would rise up to fight the bourgeoisie (antithesis), and at the end of the dialectic a perfectly classless society would be formed (final synthesis).

The Hegelian Dialectic was also used by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species, where the organism (thesis) comes up against its environment (antithesis) and natural selection will shape the population to make organisms better suited for the environment (synthesis).

The Dialectic is also used in the United States Congress, in which one part of the Congress (thesis) will create a bill, and the other part (antithesis) will make changes to the bill and the final bill (synthesis) is created by both houses.

The unfortunate propagation of woomeisters like New-age thinkers comes from the Geist, as eventually all of the human experiences will become part of the Spirit. Apparently, being New-age-y and meditate-y help us get there faster to become part of the One.