To provide a multi-integrative, dialectic-democratic, humanistic-existential approach to the study and practise of philosophy, psychology, politics, business and economics, law and equal rights, history, holistic health, art and all other aspects of human culture that blends many of the best ideas from the past, and from a wide assortment of different schools of thought, with an equally wide assortment of innovative, new ideas from the present -- combined in such a fashion as to make them highly applicable in both the smaller, therapeutic setting, and in the larger, more general setting of life.
It is this integration of old and new ideas that makes Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy (Dialectic-Democratics For The Mind, Body, and Soul) , a new experience, a new 'gestalt' to use the German expression -- and unique in the marketplace.
Hegel's Hotel is dedicated to six sources (in no particular order):
1. G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), the most important philosopher in Western History, in my view, and to his class book, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807), of which this philosophical work is written to be a 21st century continuation and expansion of...
2. The Gestalt Institute of Toronto which taught me the dialectic-democratics of mind, body, and soul for the greater part of ten years in the 1980s, and which ultimately led me back through the psychology of Jung and Freud, and the philosophy of Nietzsche -- to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel.
3. General Semantics (and my Grade 12 English teacher, Mr. Kress, who introduced me to General Semantics), as extrapolated by the founder of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, (Science and Sanity, 1933)and his number one student, S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, originally written in 1938, originally published in 1941, updated many times since) who in turn introduced me to the study of psychology -- and then philosophy.
4. My son (Michael Bain) and daughter (Jennifer Bain) who are just starting their adult lives and who I hope continue to live happy, healthy lives.
5. My father, Gordon Bain, who has always been my number one source of idealistic, inspirational philosophical vision...
6. My mother, Viola Bain, and my long-time girlfriend of almost 10 years, Sharida Ali, both of whom are so easy to take for granted, because their presence is just always there, but both of whom have provided me with the type of family roots and grounding without which anything else would likely be meaningful -- and/or even talked about by me in any type of coherent, and reasonable fashion.
Question: Where do the best of the theologies of the respective Christian and Muslim (and probably all the most important) religions meet?
Answer: Within the core roots and boundaries of the family, the community -- and helping others (not trying to destroy them).
- dgb, October 18th, 2008.
