Still further evidence that a) Hegel can’t get away from Kant’s pietism and b) Hamann would have been as right about Hegel as he was about Kant. Jean-Marie Schaeffer writes of the impact of the incarnation on history: “it is through God’s becoming man, through the life . . . . Continue Reading »
Andrew Bowie ( Aesthetics and Subjectivity : From Kant to Nietzsche ) challenges the typical postmodern characterization of modern philosophy by highlighting music. Heidegger views “the growth of the importance of music in modernity as grounded in an attitude to art based just upon . . . . Continue Reading »
Esau is a “hairy man” ( sa’iyr ), something we learn only when Jacob dresses himself in goat hair to approach his father (Genesis 27:11, 23). Jacob becomes a hairy one, subbing in for his brother. The only other use of the word in Genesis is in 37:31, where it describes the “kid” killed . . . . Continue Reading »
When Moses objects that he cannot speak, Yahweh assigns his “brother Aaron” to be his spokesman and prophet (Exodus 4:14; 7:1-2). The next time Aaron is identified as Moses’ brother is in Exodus 28, where he is given the garments of glory and beauty to approach Yahweh, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Greek art, Hegel says, brings art to its summit. This presents a difficulty: The greatest sensuous artistic form occurs within a polytheistic, inadequate religion. In Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s summary, Hegel resolves this by pointing to the very brokenness of the bodily form of Christ in . . . . Continue Reading »
Heidegger got it exactly right: “We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things . . . rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the . . . . Continue Reading »
Collingwood: “The reason why gramophone music is so unsatisfactory to any one accustomed to real music is not because the mechanical reproduction is bad - that would be easily compensated by the hearer’s imagination - but because the performers and the audience are out of touch. . . . . Continue Reading »
A few selections from Hegel, “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism” (1796; name given by Franz Rosenzweig in 1913); from Simon Critchley, Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Oxford, 2001) “I should like to give wings again to our physics which is progressing . . . . Continue Reading »
Hegel arranges art, religion, and philosophy on a scale. Art, bound to sensuous external stuff, is the lowest self-expression of Geist , religion’s representation ( Vorstellung ) climbs a bit higher, but the peak comes with the pure, transparent, total conceptual clarity achieved in . . . . Continue Reading »
Charles Taylor writes that for Hegel “Europe had to go through the Reformation before the rational law-state could be built. The Catholic variant of Christianity was not yet purified of its intrication with external forms, with sacraments and priestly power. Thus the Catholic . . . . Continue Reading »
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