If something helps us to interpret experiences of the divine/supernatural, then it helps us to understand the divine/supernatural. This is to say that if something helps us to interpret something that we experience, then it helps us to understand that thing. For example, we can conceptualise this as translating language. People can speak to us in any language they want, but we cannot understand them unless we can interpret what they are saying in a way that we can understand it. This works the same for divine/supernatural experiences. To understand such a thing, we must be able to interpret it. Therefore, if anything can help us to interpret such an experience, then it, in turn, helps to understand that experience. — ClayG
Therefore, Hegel’s dialectical model can help us understand experiences of the divine/supernatural. — ClayG
:up:built into Hegel’s dialectic is the possibility of both being right and wrong in specific aspects...find a synthesis of both views. — ClayG
You seem to begin with an assumption there is a supernatural or divine. — Tom Storm
for the most part, traditional dialectics, by their very nature, start with the assumption that one side is right and one side is wrong. — ClayG
Whereas, the general consensus on this forum is that any claims of religious revelation or accounts of the divine arising from religious or mystical traditions generally should be disregarded as valid sources of knowledge and/or information and should be put to one side. Would you agree with that? — Wayfarer
For Hegel, we 'are' God. Theology itself is God. [ God is 'just' incarnate theology, etc. ] — plaque flag
Out of interest can you site a reference for Hegel actually employing the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model? — Tom Storm
Which means what exactly? That we invent concepts and that's enough to be getting on with? — Tom Storm
Is the metaphor the thing itself? — Tom Storm
Does by this account Shakespeare's play become Hamlet? — Tom Storm
Bloom quotes Hegel noticing that Shakespeare's characters overhear themselves and for that reason change. — plaque flag
I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof
We can investigate specific instances, such as life after death, theism, fairies, the soul, etc. I would need to take an evidentialist approach to these kinds of claims. — Tom Storm
How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof
So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" — 180 Proof
More clearly, the philosopher using Hegel’s model does not have to struggle against it, like they would have to with the traditional model, to find a synthesis of both views. — ClayG
#7:
... to take what thought has torn asunder and then to stir it all together into a smooth mélange, to suppress the concept that makes those distinctions, and then to fabricate the feeling of the essence.
...
What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love itself are all the bait required to awaken the craving to bite. What is supposed to sustain and extend the wealth of that substance is not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold forward march of the necessity of the subject matter, but instead a kind of inflamed inspiration.
...
Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity ... That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s needs is the full measure
of the magnitude of its loss.
... the whole which has returned into itself from out of its succession and extension and has come to be the simple concept of itself.
The actuality of this simple whole consists in those embodiments which, having become moments of the whole, again develop themselves anew and give themselves a figuration, but this time in their new element, in the new meaning which itself has come to be.
Any personal experiences? — Tom Storm
If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.
But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things [in other words, our being is contingent]. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself [unconditional being]. This is why it’s important for God to be infinite: because this makes God more himself (herself, itself) and more fully real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.
Hegel’s second main point is that this something that’s more fully real than we are isn’t just a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being more fully real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We have this experience when we step back from our current desires and projects and ask ourselves, what would make the most sense, what would be best overall, in these circumstances? When we ask a question like this, we make ourselves less dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire or to have the project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through our thinking about what would be best. But something that can conceive of being self-determining in this way, seems already to be more ‘itself’, more real as itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.
Putting these two points together, Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception of God that he criticized. If there is a higher degree of reality that goes with being self-determining (and thus real as oneself), and if we ourselves do in fact achieve greater self-determination at some times than we achieve at other times, then it seems that we’re familiar in our own experience with some of the higher degree of reality that we associate with God. Perhaps we aren’t often aware of the highest degree of this reality, or the sum of all of this reality, which would be God himself (herself, etc.). But we are aware of some of it – as the way in which we ourselves seem to be more fully present, more fully real, when instead of just letting ourselves be driven by whatever desires we currently feel, we ask ourselves what would be best overall. We’re more fully real, in such a case, because we ourselves are playing a more active role, through thought, than we play when we simply let ourselves be driven by our current desires.
I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. The World is God — plaque flag
I think so, and he more or less says as much ...I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. — plaque flag
... and he considered himself a (great world-historical) philosopher, ergo "Spinozist".You're either a Spinozist, or not a philosopher at all. — GWF Hegel
This is too pantheistic, even for Hegel (a christian pan-en-theist). As he (with Maimon) points out, Spinoza's metaphysics is acosmist. Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist").The World is God, and We are God's eyes, God's spies, God's neurons. — plaque flag
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