I can see very clearly from the article below why Nietzsche saw the "will to truth", that Hegel pursued, as nihilistic. Will to truth is the pursuit of metaphysical truth. Shamanistic knowledge (reached through facing death) is that metaphysical truth does not exist. Rather, truth exists only as created truth and does not exist apart from human creativity and will. What we take as objective truth is really just humanly created truth. Since we are products of a very long history and do not remember or have direct experience of the past, we have simply forgotten that all truths are those which we ourselves have created.
Other ideas that randomly spring to mind: Well, this reading of Hegel below suggests that Hegel considered the pursuit of art as a search for truth in the immediacy. This is a very reductionist view of art, which does not allow that art, literature, etc. can produce other sorts of truths -- such as social and political truths -- rather than narrowly religious truths. In any case, the Hegelian approach to coming to terms with reality as it is outlined here leads to nihilism (both directly and indirectly, but above all in the absence of the God that was supposed to be at the pinnacle of Hegel's system) and does not entertain the idea that truths are known not through rational discourse but through neurological adjustments to novel situations. Where did the idea of "God" come from?
The article on Hegel shows that Hegel's God is an empty construct as viewed in purely rational terms, but assuredly the original God that Hegel's Geist is loosely (and abstractly) predicated on came about through men in the desert, whose minds came under tremendous pressure due to the desert heat to the extent that somehow the idea of a divine presence congealed in their minds. This they articulated through their holy texts. Another random thought: As for "intuition", it may have nothing to do with emotion in the narrow sense. Rather, it's a cognitive capacity relating to pattern recognition.
For myself, I've studied this Nietzschean stuff for years and years, but I didn't fully understand Nietzsche until I understood shamanism. Nietzsche is really all about the "death of God" which is actually ,in a practical and philosophical sense, the death of meaning, since without the existence of God, stable meaning itself is not assured. Bataille makes this clear when he says that the we encounter "nothing" in terms of his pursuit of "mystical experience". What he doesn't state so clearly is that this "nothing" is like a refreshing bath, cleansing us of the God-bothering ideology. Bataille derives many lessons from Hegel, but above all the dialectic. Bataille's perspective is atheistic in the final analysis.
Hegel's whole system, however, is structured around the supposition that God actually exists (not that this makes it inevitably useless -- not at all!]. So, what "seems" like a bloodbench of history/raw historical process is actually given meaning in terms of Hegel's system, since it is "objective spirit" (a certain conceptualisation of "God") "realising" itself in human historical events. But, as Nietzsche points out, Hegel's "God" is ultimately very abstract. Indeed, the more you move towards "God" in Hegel's system, the more you lose touch with what is real, experiential and tangible, to the point that you let go of the substance of life itself and end up with pure abstraction. So, you can understand, on this basis, that Hegel's system gives humans abstract meaning only at the expense of depriving them of fleshly meaning. One disregards what is most phenomenologically real in honour of some conceptualisation of progress that is fundamentally very abstract -- very empty, in practical human terms.
I note that Hegel links historical progress to an unveiling of metaphysical truth, via the historical "process". Like other, but less sophisticated Christian systems, Hegel's philosophy offers 'meaning', but ultimately (it would seem) in a way that effectively defers meaning, for the true meaning of history is in the hands of a God who does not reveal his direct meaning or purpose to those who participate in history in the present .
The tendency to accept this "deferral of meaning", whilst leaving the outcome in the hands of a god is actually considered by Nietzsche to be an existential cop-out and thus "nihilism". It is incumbent upon us to accept "God is dead", so that we make and come to terms with our own meanings*, rather than relying on a metaphysical system to assure us of meanings.
* i.e. develop, self consciously, human created meanings, in an awareness of an absence of God
The article on Hegel shows that Hegel's God is an empty construct as viewed in purely rational terms, but assuredly the original God that Hegel's Geist is loosely (and abstractly) predicated on came about through men in the desert, whose minds came under tremendous pressure due to the desert heat to the extent that somehow the idea of a divine presence congealed in their minds. This they articulated through their holy texts. Another random thought: As for "intuition", it may have nothing to do with emotion in the narrow sense. Rather, it's a cognitive capacity relating to pattern recognition.
Hegel's Phenomenology: The Moral Failures of Asocial Man
Author(s): Judith N. Shklar
Source: Political Theory, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Aug., 1973), pp. 259-286
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
For myself, I've studied this Nietzschean stuff for years and years, but I didn't fully understand Nietzsche until I understood shamanism. Nietzsche is really all about the "death of God" which is actually ,in a practical and philosophical sense, the death of meaning, since without the existence of God, stable meaning itself is not assured. Bataille makes this clear when he says that the we encounter "nothing" in terms of his pursuit of "mystical experience". What he doesn't state so clearly is that this "nothing" is like a refreshing bath, cleansing us of the God-bothering ideology. Bataille derives many lessons from Hegel, but above all the dialectic. Bataille's perspective is atheistic in the final analysis.
Hegel's whole system, however, is structured around the supposition that God actually exists (not that this makes it inevitably useless -- not at all!]. So, what "seems" like a bloodbench of history/raw historical process is actually given meaning in terms of Hegel's system, since it is "objective spirit" (a certain conceptualisation of "God") "realising" itself in human historical events. But, as Nietzsche points out, Hegel's "God" is ultimately very abstract. Indeed, the more you move towards "God" in Hegel's system, the more you lose touch with what is real, experiential and tangible, to the point that you let go of the substance of life itself and end up with pure abstraction. So, you can understand, on this basis, that Hegel's system gives humans abstract meaning only at the expense of depriving them of fleshly meaning. One disregards what is most phenomenologically real in honour of some conceptualisation of progress that is fundamentally very abstract -- very empty, in practical human terms.
I note that Hegel links historical progress to an unveiling of metaphysical truth, via the historical "process". Like other, but less sophisticated Christian systems, Hegel's philosophy offers 'meaning', but ultimately (it would seem) in a way that effectively defers meaning, for the true meaning of history is in the hands of a God who does not reveal his direct meaning or purpose to those who participate in history in the present .
The tendency to accept this "deferral of meaning", whilst leaving the outcome in the hands of a god is actually considered by Nietzsche to be an existential cop-out and thus "nihilism". It is incumbent upon us to accept "God is dead", so that we make and come to terms with our own meanings*, rather than relying on a metaphysical system to assure us of meanings.
* i.e. develop, self consciously, human created meanings, in an awareness of an absence of God
3 comments:
As for the title, it is a bit of a joke. Please understand the irony.
I don't mean he is a guy who wears horns, even 'tho I am a laydee.
Hegel's God manifests its atemporal self in the flow of history as Objective Spirit. OS is humans acting toward the creation of their own freedom. Humans are born with the ability to reason. Their reason is always striving towards Reason, the all encompassing, atemporal Reason which Hegel believes marks the Universe. Obviously, there is no reason to posit Reason and no science behind faith. Freedom and the limits put on it by necessity are enough. Living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries provides an historical context for the shaping of Hegel's religious faith.
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