Tag Archives: Hegel

Hegel for Beginners

Outer v. inner direction. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had a decisive influence on Karl Marx, and he continues to exert influence on intellectual thought today. For this reason, it’s good to know the gist of Hegel’s theorizing … Continue reading

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What Is This Life?

According to a recent science article at the Huffington Post, Sara Walker, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University, along with some of her colleagues, has arrived at a fresh definition of life as seen through the prism of information processing: Walker’s team … Continue reading

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Headline to Catch a Philosopher’s Eye

At Bloomberg News today: Hagel Said to Top Obama’s List to Take Over at Pentagon Okay, so Hegel is spelled wrong.

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“The Master” Looks Really Promising

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In heaven as it is on earth? Are religious mysticism and Hegel’s “aufgehoben” (transmutation) sublimated forms of masochism?

The 81-year-old sociologist Peter Berger thinks that they are. In his book on the sociology of religion, The Sacred Canopy  (1967), he wrote this of mysticism (64): The extent to which the mystical surrender may be called masochistic varies empirically, … Continue reading

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Eschatology for Beginners

Something’s happening! Whether it’s a dawning Messianic era, the UFO rapture, a technological Singularity, or some soon coming secular utopia (Marxist, neoconservative, or otherwise), the problem of suffering in the world and our intellectual confusions are about to be resolved in the arrival of … Continue reading

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Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Image of a Prisoner at Auschwitz, Apparently Shot Attempting to Climb a Barbed Wire Fence, and Left to Hang There

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Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: An Image of Bodies Collectively Bound and Buried

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Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: “History counts its skeletons in round numbers”

From “Some Like Poetry”, by Wislawa Szymborska: History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, an ABC never read, air that … Continue reading

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Oh, Momma, I Died for a Comma?

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One Million “Commas”

The Nation revisits the question: How many Iraqis have died from Bush’s Iraq war? Answer: About one million. Money quote: [B]etween 800,000 and 1.3 million “excess deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war. That’s a lot of Hegelian commas. … Continue reading

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Quote of the Day

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote this arresting passage in his short story, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”: [P]eople appeared who began devising ways of bringing men together again, so that each individual, without ceasing to prize himself above all others, might not … Continue reading

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“The Devil Is in The Details”: A Poem by Santi Tafarella

The Lord God:   when we are awake and unhurried   we understand that whether a snake   or a river slithers past   both are an instant   The Serpent:   whether a snake is winding   to the … Continue reading

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