: Hegel isn't even saying anything; he's simply babbling and attempting to sound deep and profound.Erm, no, what he is attempting to do, beneath a very bad case of Deutchephilosophenkrankheit (German philospohers isease, apparently they train them to write that way, and Hegel was a bastard with Elegent Variation...), was construct a throughgoing philosophical system, what underlies the definition above, is not an attempt to sound deap, nor even an attempt at original definition, but rather an application of this system.
: Each age has its necessary developments and philosophies for its particular age. Since real=ideal then whatever is real is ideal and, hence, rational. Thus, any development, any change, any possible future is in itself absolutely rational as the world-spirit moves humanity towards Absolute Knowledge. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini . . . each and every one a necessary development given the stages humanity was passing through at the time. Anything that ever happens does so because 'it occurs in its ideal reality within the absolute pervading continuity of advancing conceptuality of the absolute subjectivity of the objective world-spirit' (am I dialectical enough, yet?)
Erm, no, thats is a description of Dialectic, but i'll let that pass, however, it sounds fairly liek his view of history...
: Hegel just babbled. In fact, most of what I saw posted didn't even mean anything; it was simply profundity intertwined with profundity. On the most abstract level, even my denial of any validity of Hegel's thought should fall within Hegel's absolute dialectic. It produces it's own negation, as Hegel would have said, and is completely self-defeating and contradictory. Such philosophy takes a few true observations (see below)and then mixes it with insane babble to produce profound nonsense.
Now this is simply the philistine comment of someone who doesn't understand something, and has decided that therefore it is worthless, I could come up with similaraly incomprehensible paragraphs from most stanard science text books, if I take them and quote them partially. I'd imagine you'd say the same of Kant after a brief struggle with teh Critque of pure reason.
i understood what I posted, basically, translated, it said that there is no definitive truth,a nd objects may only be known by their relation to others....erm, which is basically what you say.
btw- may I recomend Francis 'End of History' Fukuyama to you, his a neo-liberal hegelian, I'm sure you'd love him.
: Hegel's whole philosophy in one sentence is "what happens, happens; what doesn't, doesn't". Well, no shit.
No, what happens had to happen which, compared, say, with a Empiricist approach to history, is actually quite a statement.
