I am free when I have a consciousness of this my feeling. — Hegel
In great and high feeling I find everything I'm looking for. A conceptual freedom is literally worthless without its accompanying feeling. — ff0
By this elevation of the spirit to itself the spirit wins in itself its objectivity, which hitherto it had to seek in the external and sensuous character of existence, and in this unification with itself it senses and knows itself. This spiritual elevation is the fundamental principle of romantic art. Bound up with it at once is the essential point that at this final stage of art the beauty of the classical ideal, and therefore beauty in its very own shape and its most adequate content, is no longer the ultimate thing. For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.
But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier [on pp. 435-6, 505-6], does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.
— Hegel
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity. — Hegel
You apparently can decipher him, and that's admirable. — tim wood
On my bedside table these past several years is Kaufmann's translation of the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology. — tim wood
I suspect that outside of academia you find few to engage in discussion about him or his ideas. — tim wood
I harbor the suspicion that sometime someone will "distill" Hegel into radically shorter and more accessible language. — tim wood
It's true nature is the entire cycle of its being, revealed in what Hegel calls a dialectic of being, the initial, or prior, phases of which are overcome in sublation into the next phase, as the seed becomes shoot becomes a flower becomes rotting compost, and so on. - This dialectical process, happening in whichever however many ways (but not the schoolboy's thesis-antithesis-synthesis) being applied to being itself. If you want to "get into" the preface, I'll try to keep up. — tim wood
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