• Gregory
    4.7k
    "[W]e can simply let the inherently living determinations take their own course" because "I think badly whenever I add something of my own."

    This is what Hegel wrote in his lesser Logic (first part of his three part Encyclopedia). Here is some more from this book:

    "With our representations, two cases are possible: either the content is something thought but the form is not, or conversely, the form belongs to thought but the content does not."

    This is a really neat point and I was wondering what peoples' opinions and/or thoughts were about
    this. He goes on to explain (or at least try):

    "If I say 'anger', 'rose', or 'hope', I am familiar with all this through feeling, but I express this content in a universal way, in the form of thought; I have left out a good deal of what is particular about it, and given only the content as universal, but that content remains sensible. Conversely, if I represent God to myself, then certainly the content is purely something thought, but the form is sensible, just as I already find it immediately within me. In these representations, therefore, the content is not merely sensible, as when I simply look at something: either the content is sensible, while the form belongs to thinking, or conversely. In the first case, the material is given and the form belongs to thinking; in the other case, thinking is the source of content, but through the form the content becomes something given, which therefore comes to the spirit from outside."

    I believe that Hegel was an objective idealist. A subjective idealist believes the world is purely thought itself. An objective idealist, if I am not mistaken, would say that the world is truly material but we (the spirit or spirits) create it and then come to know it through the senses ever since we were babies. Hegel thought very Platonically about objects. He held matter to be truly material and scientific, but yet Hegel permeated the world with his "universal determinations", regarding everything as Platonic forms themselves (instead of how Plato saw them, as objects outside the world). Although I am more a nominalist, I find Hegel very spiritual and his mind very interesting. What he says in the above passage about God is interesting. He finds God inside himself as a form of thought (distinguishing between the form and content of the idea of God).
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