The Owl of Minerva and the Spirit of Trust

By Dilip -

A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm? When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.. Hegel; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Edited by Allen W Wood, p 23

Hegel Today By Willem deVries  

Spirit is not some transcendent entity above and beyond the world. Neither is it simply identical to the material world. Rather, Spirit is identified with the social world and, especially, the normative structures that constitute human social interactions and, especially, human rationality. Such normative structures are necessarily embodied in material conditions and activities, but they cannot simply be identified with naturalistically (ie, non-normatively) described activities of material bodies.

Take chess as an example of a normative structure. An action such as making a chess move cannot simply be identified with a particular motion in space, because chess moves first need not require any particular motion, since one can play chess not only with different kinds of chess pieces, but without any pieces at all, and, second, it must be performed by agents following widely recognised and historically developed rules. Hegel’s story about the development of Spirit is a story about the evolution of the normative structures both realised in and governing human social structures and interactions – structures that make rational thought possible.

Semantic theory is key to the revival of Hegelian thought

This view of Hegel’s project addresses the supposed metaphysical grandiosity of the Hegelian system: it is not a knowledge of some otherworldly entity or realm, but an attempt to organise the knowledge (both theoretical and practical) accrued over history concerning the sensible and social world in which we live. Nor is the Hegelian system aprioristic: Hegel explicitly allows for the ongoing historical development of the categorial scheme in terms of which the world is to be articulated.

That is, while Kant thought that the categorial scheme that structures thought is fixed and immutable – simply given to us – Hegel recognised that human thought has been developing and refining itself over time, not just by the accrual of new particular facts, but also by reorganising them in new ways and developing new methods for revealing, even creating, new kinds of facts. There is room in the dialectical development of our categories to accommodate empirical discoveries that lead to new ways of thinking, such as the development of Newtonian mechanics. The historical consciousness in Hegel’s philosophy is an attractive point for many who find the ahistorical approach of mainstream Anglophone philosophy blindered...

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-anglophone-world-is-rediscovering-hegels-philosophy


The best books on Hegel: recommended by Stephen Houlgate


Gidon Halbfinger - As Minerva’s owl flies: the dark side of Hegel’s historicism


A Spirit of Trust. By Robert Brandom (2019)


Critical review of A Spirit of Trust


Hegel and the mystical tradition: Interview with Glenn Magee. By Stanislav Panin


Paul Sagar - The last hollow laugh - Francis Fukuyama and 'The End of History’


Stanley Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher passes


Susan Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought // Lecture: 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling'


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