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

they are imperfect.
    Again, two definitions of the State in Hegel.
    1.The State is the realization of individual will.
    2.The State is the mind which blossoms in becoming the world’s form and organization.
    Next he analyzes various forms of government.And he submits it to the dialectical process: the capitalist government provokes an opposing dictatorship,that of the proletariat.The dictatorship of the proletariat leads to a superior form which will know how to combine the good points of each previous form, etc.
    Thesis—antithesis—synthesis .
    You understand how greedily the Communists threw themselves on this idea.For them, revolution leads to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but afterward one arrives at the ideal State, which has nothing to do with strength.
    Hegel owes his glory first to Marx, and secondly to the Marxists.
    War , for Hegel, is also a dialectical process in which the immoral leads to the moral.
    Finally, the State transforms itself into the incarnation of the divinity.
    Hegel/Kierkegaard Kierkegaard’s Attack
    This is the last great metaphysical system to be formed.According to dialectical law in pure Hegelian style, the thesis meets its antithesis, and Kierkegaard is the antithesis.
    Kierkegaard was a Danish pastor, a great admirer of Hegel.Suddenly he declared war on him, in one of culture’s most dramatic moments.
    The following summarizes Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel:Hegel is absolutely irreproachable in his theory, but this theory is worthless .
    And why?
    Because it is abstract, while existence (it is the first time that this word appears) is concrete.
    In Hegel there are only abstractions and concepts; for example, I saw a thousand horses that all have something in common, and thus I formulate the concept of a thing: horse, four-footed animal, etc. But really this horse never existed, because each concrete horse has its color.In the way that classicalphilosophy has operated with the concept since ancient times, as in Democritus, or Aristotle, or Saint Thomas, up to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, is in the void .
    It says: man.
    Abstraction does not correspond to reality.It is from the other world, so to speak.It is here that thought finds its most violent internal contradiction.
    And it is the basis, to use Hegelian language, of an antithesis which leads us directly to existence .
    Existentialism is particularly meant to be a philosophy of the concrete.But this is a dream; in concrete reality, one cannot make arguments.Arguments always use concepts, etc. Existentialism is therefore a tragic system of thought because it can never be self-sufficient, it must be simultaneously both an abstract and a concrete philosophy.
    Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a reaction against Hegel’s.
    It is beginning with Husserl that existentialism becomes possible, since Husserl’s phenomenological method consists of investigations of truth as essence.
    It is a description of our consciousness, a sort of application of the Aristotelian method to the self.But while Aristotle’s philosophy is a classification of the world, Husserl’s phenomenological method consists of the purification and classification of the phenomena of our consciousness.
    Sunday, May 4, 1969
    Existentialism
    Existentialism was born directly from Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel.
    In fact, there is not just one existentialist school but several, among others, those of Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel (that sad fool), Sartre … But in fact, existentialism is an attitude that comes from Parmenides, Plato, Jesus Christ, Saint Augustine, up to our time.
    I shall try to tell you how existential philosophy differs from classical philosophy.
    In the first place, as has already been said with respect to Kierkegaard, it is the opposition between the concrete and the abstract .
    It is an extremely serious and even tragic thing for the mind, as we reason with concepts , thus with abstractions.
    Tragic because reasoning can be done only through concepts and logic,