Portrait of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
4,859 words
Portrait of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Parts 1-3 here
Alpha and Omega
In the last installment, I introduced readers to Hegelian dialectic, to Hegel’s “objective idealism,” and to the major dialectical transitions in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The text consists of three principal divisions, which form a dialectical triad: “Consciousness,” “Self-Consciousness,” and “Reason.” (more…)
4,362 words
Parts 1 and 2 here.
Toward the Sunlight
In our last installment, we learned that The Phenomenology of Spirit is an account of how spirit, or humanity, traverses a highway of despair – a path along which it becomes disillusioned with various of its forms, all of which in one way or another implicitly aim at self-knowledge. In the end, it arrives at what it had sought all along, true self-knowledge or “absolute knowledge.” (more…)
Hegel pays his respects to Napoleon on his entry into Jena, 1807.
4,093 words
Hegel pays his respects to Napoleon on his entry into Jena, 1807.
Part 1 here
Introducing The Phenomenology of Spirit
In the first installment of this series, I introduced readers to Hegel and to Heidegger’s commentaries on him. We found that Hegel is the creator of an all-encompassing system of ideas or a “complete speech of the whole.” He offers his system not as philosophy, the search for wisdom, but as wisdom itself, or, as he puts it, “science” (Wissenschaft). (more…)
4,239 words
Every real philosopher is contemporaneous with every other philosopher, precisely by being, most intrinsically, the word of his time.
-Martin Heidegger[1]
Introducing Hegel
This essay, the first of several on Martin Heidegger and G.W.F. Hegel, constitutes a major milestone in my ongoing series about “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” (more…)
2,655 words
Aki Cederberg, photography by Justine Cederberg
Holy Europe
North Augusta, SC: Arcana Europa, 2024
Several years ago, a curious incident occurred at Rennes-le-Château, the mysterious church in Southern France that partially inspired the bestsellers Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The DaVinci Code. A young Arab woman dressed in a cape and mask used an axe to behead a statue in the church and to hack at the holy water font sitting on its shoulders. (more…)
The Temptation of Christ. Ary Scheffer (1854)
5,809 words
The Temptation of Christ. Ary Scheffer (1854)
Part 15 of 15 (Read all parts here)
Phenomenology as Gelassenheit
In our previous installment, we discussed at length Heidegger’s conception of Gelassenheit: “letting beings be” or letting things be “in their restful repose.” A question may have occurred to the reader: how exactly is Gelassenheit reached? What exactly does one do in order to achieve it? (more…)
Meister Eckhart
4,431 words
Meister Eckhart
Part 14 of 15 (Read all parts here)
The Concealment of Concealment
An authentic experience of beings is one that acknowledges that when beings present themselves to us in their meaningfulness, this presencing is always accompanied by absence. Whatever we may learn about beings, something else always holds itself back. We never completely penetrate things to know them in their entirety, thus there is always an element of mystery to beings. (more…)
Heidegger on a country path, 1966.
3,270 words
Heidegger on a country path, 1966.
Part 13 of 15 (Read all parts here)
The Will is Evil
The foregoing may lead the reader to ask whether Heidegger’s negative will, which gives rise to the metaphysics of presence, is evil. It is difficult to escape this conclusion, especially given that, historically, it issues in the present “dispensation of being,” which is das Gestell (“enframing”), modern technological civilization’s metaphysical conviction that all that exists, including humanity, is nothing more than raw material for exploitation. (more…)
Saturn Devouring His Son – Francisco Goya
2,767 words
Saturn Devouring His Son – Francisco Goya
Part 12 of 15 (Read all parts here)
Will and the Metaphysics of Presence
By 1941, when Heidegger lectured on the Freiheitsschrift again, he had attained considerably more critical distance from Schelling. Heidegger had come to decisively reject the “anthropocentrism” that had characterized his earlier thought, with its emphasis on “subjectivity,” and thus had ceased to fetishize “the will.” (more…)
The Three Fates by Paul Thumann (1834-1908)
The Three Fates by Paul Thumann (1834-1908)
4,742 words
Part 11 of 15 (Read all parts here)
Heidegger’s Critique of Schelling in 1936
Having now given a detailed exposition of the Freiheitsschrift, while simultaneously considering elements of Heidegger’s own exposition, we must turn to certain crucial issues. (more…)
4,329 words
(Read the previous installments in this series here.)
It has been several years since I have published an installment in this series. As faithful readers know, I have been concentrating on my series of essays dealing with Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, from Plato to Nietzsche (now numbering some twenty-five installments; simply search my name to find all of them). After a great deal of thought and research, I am returning to the story of Sigurd, Fafnir’s Bane, and will publish further installments on an irregular basis (though hopefully not once every few years). (more…)
3,712 words
Part 9 of 15 (Read all parts here)
The Birth of Spirit is the Realm of History
We have said much about the human capacity for evil, and the inclination towards it. But we must also speak of the opposing tendency, the inclination towards good. In what does it consist? Schelling writes that the “spirit of love” opposes a “higher ideal” to the tendency towards evil. (more…)
