A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes Read Online Free PDF Page A

In this perspective,the human mind seems like something created by two different elements which never meet each other.
    Man is precisely this hole .
    Again a formula from Hegel which will give you an idea of his rather complicated language: man is the principle through which the world’s reason arrives at self-awareness .
    Let us now take a look at Hegel’s logic.It is presented grosso modo in the following way:I assert that nothing exists, but because I assert it, then at least my assertion exists.Therefore the being exists (in opposition to the thing).But since the being in itself signifies nothing, in saying being , I must say that something is.By this path, I come to recognize that the category of the being may be thought about only with that of the non-being; what I already told you in speaking about the mind’s antinomy.But I simply want to show what is the starting point for this logic.
    The difference between traditional logic and Hegel’s is this: according to traditional logic, everything that is, is identical to itself and nothing contradicts itself.This is just the well-known identity principle by which A is equivalent to A.
    But in Hegel, nothing is identical to itself and everything contradicts itself.(The imperfection of reason in operation: as long as I have not entirely seen the cathedral, the sense is imperfect.A equals A is not achieved here.)This leads to what I announced at the beginning: it is thought which is the basis of reality.We need only compare the Hegelian world to the world of Aristotle or Saint Thomas to understand that the Hegelian world is truth in progress, where humanity devises its own laws and man becomes a rung in history.
    The importance which Hegel attributed to history surely contributed to the triumph of Hegel’s thought.
    In order to give you a more detailed idea of this thinking, which will show you to what extent my abbreviations are far from containing a complete picture, I would like to speak to you about an important book by Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind , vol.II.
    Chapter six (in order to show the path of his thought).The truly ethical mind is divided into two parts: the ethical world, the human and divine world and man and woman.
    This is subdivided into:1.Nation and family.The law of day and the law of night,which is subdivided again intoA.human lawB.divine lawC.the rights of the individual.
    2.The movement that one finds in both laws (always becoming):A.government—wars—negative powerB.(very important).The ethical relationship between man and woman in the sense of brother and sister.
    C.The reciprocal influence of divine and human law.
    3.The epic world as being an infinite thing, therefore a totality.
    The Hegelian analysis of these themes always consists of discovering and defining the dialectical movement to which they are subject.This leads him to truly astonishing results, to famous passages like the one on the dialectics between master and slave.
    I have not yet spoken about an extremely important theme for Hegel, State and peoples (nations).
    For Hegel, the reality of the State is superior to that of the individual.For him, the State is the incarnationof the Mind in the world.Here are some definitions which permit us to understand his notion of the State.
    (The State is the reality of the moral idea.It is the moral mind as will (intention), self-evident and substantial, which thinks by itself and knows and realizes what it knows as knowledge.)This horrible sentence shows the most profound sense of the Hegelian idea, which can be expressed in the following very superficial way: for earlier philosophy, man was subject to a moral law instituted by God or, as in Kant, subject to a moral imperative.In other words, man functions but the law already exists.But in Hegel, everything moves.In advancing, man crafts his own law, and there is no fixed law beyond that which is constituted by the dialectical process.In Hegel, not only man but laws are in progress because