In the overall architecture of being, time adds a new feature of externality to the externality of space: externality as succession. Whereas space was an externality as co-existence, time is an externality in which existing things, external to each other and therefore separated from each other, also succeed each other. This is a different feature …
Time and space, seen as contents of thought, are for Hegel, only possibilities. Both represent self-externalities, that is to say, magnitudes containing within themselves a multitude, a diversity of contents that cannot overlap. This is when we see time and space separately. Now, if we combine these two structures, the self-externality of space with the …
What is time? Saint Augustine, in antiquity, said that if no one asked him about the nature of time, he knew what time was. However, when someone asked him what time was, he could no longer answer that question. Apart from being only a rhetorical paradox, Saint Augustine’s words express our deep discomfort concerning such …
In Hegel, self-externality of space is only a logical condition for everything that exists. As logical, it concerns pure possibility and not reality. Space is everywhere opening itself into other self-external spatial contents. The difficulty of understanding Hegel in his explanations concerning nature is that we tend to understand the concepts about which he speaks …
In Hegel, unhappy consciousness is, of course, the result of the skeptical consciousness, of that consciousness that nowhere sees any truth. This consciousness has only itself, in its pure singularity, and nothing else, without any bonds to the world or others. The lack of bonds with the world consists of the claimed incognoscibility of the …
If he or she is unable to recognize the good character of a moral law but just obeys it, he remains in what Kant called the stage of nonage of reason, namely in a condition where he is unable to think with his own understanding but just follows what others are telling him to do. …
The question of whether space is subjective or objective is meaningless in Hegel. We are spatial beings, this is the way we experience ourselves, and experience is the ‘final frontier’ in Hegel: you cannot go beyond it to see how this experience is made up. Such an approach is very similar to what Kant calls …
It is important to note in the context of discussing some differences between Hegel’s and Kant’s approach to space that, unlike Kant, Hegel is not much interested in discussing the quality of space, i.e., its relatedness to our intuition or the way we perceive spatiality, but rather in its meaning. As in his general approach, …
Undoubtedly it is strange to hear that Hegel backs his absolute idealism on history and not on a purely rational or metaphysical argument. However, he is not proceeding differently from the other representatives of German Idealism. Kant had already backed his transcendental idealism on the fact of science, in other words, on an event in …
It may sound odd to say that matter is the first occurrence of Spirit in the real world because gravity is the most elementary feature of matter. But actually, this is the sense of Hegel’s words when he says: ‘Initially, matter is the form in which the self-externality of nature attains its first being-in-self. It …