The philosopher Georg Hegel was ahead of his time

[DocWatts]

Seems like a shame that the contributions of Hegel aren't discussed more in Integral/Developmental circles, as his dialectical model of how History unfolds was incredibly ahead of its time and influential for subsequent developmental theories.

Besides being a direct influence on thinkers like Marx, one can see some of the DNA of Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber in his work, with his idea that that all worldviews contain an element of Truth and that societies develop in a dialectical manner.

Or to put it more directly; it was Hegel's view that paradigms (a thesis) generate tension which gives rise to an antithesis, which later gets synthesized in to a new paradigm. This new paradigm then becomes the new thesis, and the cycle repeats.

Not hard to see how this was an early or proto version of transcend and include...

 

 

Edited July 13, 2021 by DocWatts

[Leo Gura]

It's worse than you think.

Hegel had direct consciousness of Infinity.

People like Marx never plumbed his depths.

Hegel was a giant among mental pygmies.

[DocWatts]

19 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

People like Marx never plumbed his depths.

Hegel was a giant among mental pygmies.

While an experience of Infinity isn't something I have a real Frame of Reference for at this time, as to this point I agree wholeheartedly.

Especially about something like Marx's dialectical materialism being a reductionist and partial interpretation of Hegel.

(Though to be fair to Marx,  he doesn't completely disregard developmental factors other than modes of production, they're just not at all the focus of his work).

Edited July 13, 2021 by DocWatts

[Leo Gura]

Marx was not conscious enough to understand idealism, so he corrupted it into materialism. Zizek makes the same mistake.

All socialists and Marxists essentially make this mistake. They don't realize that dialectal materialism is founded in epistemic and metaphysical error.

[Superfluo]

44 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Hegel had direct consciousness of Infinity.

Didn't Hegel devalue the role of intuition and higher state of consciousness? Didn't he firmly believe that reason was higher than intuition?

I have a friend of mine who chose philosophy at university, and he told me this.

Which I always found odd, because the stuff he talks about is clearly Consciousness.

[Girzo]

@Superfluo because in his days people were probably saying shit like "My intuition tells me the Bible is 100% right and Jesus Christ is our only savior."

The terms change their meaning slightly over the decades, centuries, as the context they are used in changes too.

[Leo Gura]

36 minutes ago, Superfluo said:

Didn't Hegel devalue the role of intuition and higher state of consciousness? Didn't he firmly believe that reason was higher than intuition?

I have a friend of mine who chose philosophy at university, and he told me this.

Which I always found odd, because the stuff he talks about is clearly Consciousness.

Hegel's notion of "reason" was different than how that notion is used in our culture.

Hegel's reason was more like the Logos, not a materialist reason.

[DocWatts]

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Hegel's notion of "reason" was different than how that notion is used in our culture.

Hegel's reason was more like the Logos, not a materialist reason.

I kind of get the sense that it was closer to being trans-rational rather than a reductionist or atomistic reason (or flatland reason, as Ken Wilber might call it).

[Twega]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

It's worse than you think.

Hegel had direct consciousness of Infinity.

People like Marx never plumbed his depths.

Hegel was a giant among mental pygmies.

@Leo Gura  His archnemesis Schopenhauer also had direct consciousness of reality/mind.

I recommend reading :

Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics

by, Bernardo Kastrup

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Marx was not conscious enough to understand idealism, so he corrupted it into materialism. Zizek makes the same mistake.

All socialists and Marxists essentially make this mistake. They don't realize that dialectal materialism is founded in epistemic and metaphysical error.

The book Nordic Ideology manages to state this in an illuminating and concise way, as part of a discussion as to why it's so important that meta-ideologies avoid these sorts of epistemological and metaphysical errors:

"Marx tried to identify the meta-ideology, to formulate it clearly, so people could create political movements around it and otherwise navigate the world with its help.

He made some important contributions, but he got some of the fundamental dynamics wrong. Analytical - not moral - mistakes that nevertheless cost many millions of lives. Oops."

Edited July 13, 2021 by DocWatts

[Superfluo]

@Leo Gura I see. Thanks

[Runtz]

@Leo Gura It would be cool if you made a video discussing Hegel, maybe in a blog type video, and compare his ideas with yours. I always found Hegel really difficult to understand like many others.

[DocWatts]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Marx was not conscious enough to understand idealism, so he corrupted it into materialism. Zizek makes the same mistake.

Any other contemporary works on Hegel that you'd recommend over Zizek? 

Since Hegel's actual writing falls in to the same pitfalls as someone like Derrida or Kant, with thier philosophy being notoriously impenetrable if you try to read what any of these figures actually wrote....

Edited July 13, 2021 by DocWatts

[Carl-Richard]

11 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Besides being a direct influence on thinkers like Marx, one can see some of the DNA of Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber in his work, with his idea that that all worldviews contain an element of Truth and that societies develop in a dialectical manner.

I strongly agree. Ever since I read about Hegel (which was rather recently), I started to see SD and its offspring as a form of Hegelian developmental psychology, in the sense that it highlights the dialectical movements as an intrapersonal process (within the individual) and not just as an interpersonal or collective process.

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, DocWatts said:

with thier philosophy being notoriously impenetrable if you try to read what any of these figures actually wrote

The trick to doing great philosophy is to not read what philosophers wrote

Quote

"The finite and the infinite are a single unity." — Georg Hegel

"Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know itself, to find itself, be for itself, and finally unite itself to itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to itself." — Georg Hegel

That's all you need to know.

[Twega]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The trick to doing great philosophy is to not read what philosophers wrote

@Leo Gura I like this quote: I'm gonna be using it

[billiesimon]

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The trick to doing great philosophy is to not read what philosophers wrote

What? How are you going to develop the existential concepts and frameworks? 

Let's take for example advaita vedanta's philosophy. It's full of nuanced and metaphysical vocabulary that it's going to boost your contemplation of reality. 

Maybe you were just joking 

[Superfluo]

@billiesimon Many philosophers were heavily academic and technical, which can hinder from spirituality.

[DocWatts]

@billiesimon

Because the majority of Academic philosophy is written for other Academics, rather than for the Public, and is filled with technical jargon that is likely to make the work impenetrable for non-specialists.

It will be more productive reading a book about Hegel than trying to make sense of any of Hegel's actual books or papers.

[Runtz]

@Leo Gura Look what I found.

"The life of God — the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things — may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things."

-Hegel