The Absolute and the History

The Absolute and the History: Statue of Jesus

The question of whether space is subjective or objective is meaningless in Hegel. We are spatial beings, this is the way we experience ourselves, and experience is the ‘final frontier’ in Hegel: you cannot go beyond it to see how this experience is made up. Such an approach is very similar to what Kant calls …

Immanent Creativity in Whitehead

Whitehead says that in every philosophical theory, there is an ultimate that is endowed with accidents (Whitehead, 1978, p. 7). In Whitehead, this ultimate is creativity. Accidents are necessary in order to characterize things. The logical meaning of accidents is predicates that are enounced about a logical subject. You do not know anything about something …

Through History Toward Meaning

It is important to note in the context of discussing some differences between Hegel’s and Kant’s approach to space that, unlike Kant, Hegel is not much interested in discussing the quality of space, i.e., its relatedness to our intuition or the way we perceive spatiality, but rather in its meaning. As in his general approach, …

Philosophy as Science

Undoubtedly it is strange to hear that Hegel backs his absolute idealism on history and not on a purely rational or metaphysical argument. However, he is not proceeding differently from the other representatives of German Idealism. Kant had already backed his transcendental idealism on the fact of science, in other words, on an event in …

Gravity as Expression of Universal Spirit

It may sound odd to say that matter is the first occurrence of Spirit in the real world because gravity is the most elementary feature of matter. But actually, this is the sense of Hegel’s words when he says: ‘Initially, matter is the form in which the self-externality of nature attains its first being-in-self. It …

Understanding Space vs. Intuiting in Space

While discussing space, Hegel states that the Kantian theory of space – if the subjective idealism of this theory is ignored – is a good explanation of space. And indeed, the way Hegel describes space here is very similar to what Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason says about space. Both philosophers insist on …

Glued to the Matrix of Your Past Self-Perception

Have you ever thought that during our lives, we constantly reshape the content of the experiences we make so that they match a specific personal pattern, a specific self-perception? To give a very intuitive example: a man who despises women might constantly misinterpret the behaviors of any woman he meets so that that behavior becomes …

Is the Universe Looking for Man?

The most important aspect of what is called categories is that they are not products of our thought or of reflecting reality, but that we meet them ready-made, as it were. We only become aware of them, and of the fact that they have always been there in our minds, while coping with all kinds …