Ontology is the study of being. So this is an essay on ontology -- the study of being. Teleology, in contrast, is the study of becoming -- of behaving with a purpose towards a planned end goal. Thus, being and becoming, ontology and teleology, are dialectically connected in the dance of life.
Being and not being, becoming and not becoming, are also dialectically connected but in a different way. 'Being' is connected with 'self-contact'; in contrast, 'not being' is connected with 'self-alienation'. Both are connected to our 'essence'. When we 'touch' our essence, we have 'self-contact'. The more we steer away from our essence, the more we have 'self-alienation'. When we have good contact with another person, then we generally have good self-contact as well. Both include each other. When we have 'bad conatact with another person', when we are 'alienated' from this person, then we are not making good contact with ourself either. We have put up an 'Existential Wall'. We are hiding our 'Existential Essence' behind our existential -- or alienated/alienating -- wall.
Some people view God as our 'Creator'. We call these people 'religious'.
Other people believe in no such God. We call these people 'athiests'.
If we want to stick inside the parameters, the boundaries, of 'Aristolean, either/or logic', then this is where we stop. You are either religious or you are not. You are either an athiest or you are not.
But some philosophers -- most notably Heraclitus, Spinoza, and Hegel in unique but similar ways -- chose a different type of logic and a different 'spiritual' route.
This was the logic and the route of 'pantheism' and two types can be distinguished from each other: 'dialectic, integrative wholism and pantheism' (Lao Tse, Heralclitus Hegel) -- the idea of 'opposite polarities coming together in dialectic unity, wholism, and harmony'; vs. 'mono-wholistic or mono-thesistic pantheism'(Spinoza) -- which states that everything is wholistically connected (without the 'opposite polarity and dialectic unity' component that we get in Lao Tse, Heraclitus, and Hegel.
The 'spiritual, romantic, and/or religious component' of pantheism is connected to the idea of 'God being not the Creator (or not only the Creator)' but also being 'the Creative Process' -- in the idea that 'God is in everything' and everything is important because it is connected to God, a part of God'.
It has just been recently that I have read an intepreter of Hegel -- or maybe a few -- that have added this pantheistic element to Hegel. Before these latest interpretations, I assumed Hegel was an 'orthodox Lutheran' but maybe also, he was looking for integrations between the two.
Hegel's concept of 'The Absolute' is confusing, many of rejected it, as have I in previous essays. However, now I am getting new interpretations of what it means.
Previously, I believed that it was some fancy 'unrealistic epistemological and/or ontological ideal' where, at the end of our individual life (if we are a brilliant enough philosopher), and/or at the end of the evolutionary life of civilization, we encounter 'God' in the form of 'Perfect Knowledge' and/or a 'Perfect Existence'. Is there anyone amongst us who be so bold as to believe that he or she may some day encounter either Perfect Knowledge (The Epistemological Absolute) and/or Perfect Existence (The Ontological Absolute).
Maybe in these two regards, the concept of 'The Absolute' has some idealistic value -- but I am 100 percent sure that I will never get there. In fact, I am 100 percent sure that no one will ever even come up with a 100 percent 'Absolutely Epistemologically Right' interpretation of Hegel and Hegelian Philosophy. But that certainly will not stop generations of philosophers from still trying.
That is one of the reasons I like to be referred to as a 'Post-Hegelian' rather than a 'Hegelian' philosopher. Although fully acknowledging Hegel's hugely important direct and indirect influence on my philosophical work, at the same time, I still do not want to be boxed in by some wholely or partly right Hegelian stereotype based on what other astute or not astute philosophers believe Hegel to have said and/or meant in any part of one of his abstractive monstrosities.
Was Hegel religious? An atheist? Or a pantheist? Or partly all three? Hegel's philosophy was not a 'black or white', 'either/or' philosophy which often complicates biographical and historical interpretations of what he wrote and meant. Philosophically, politically, and religiously engaged in his famous 'dialectic logic' as opposed to the more 'Aristolean either/or, black or white, right or wrong logic' that we are all much more intimately familiar with. Thus, on the religious front, You will get a whole host of different interpretative variations relative to what and what not Hegel believed about God.
The most recent interpretation of Hegel that I am now working from comes from an essay by Alfred Weber, called 'The History of Philosophy'. You can find a short biography on Weber under this link....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Weber...and you can read the essay I have been reading by googling...Hegel, Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy...Here is a shorter excerpt:
....................................................................................
History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weber
Table of Contents
§ 66. Hegel (1)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart, 1770, and died as a professor in the University of Berlin,1831. Like his friend Schelling, he attended the theological seminary at Tübingen. Jena, where he renewed and then dissolved the friendship with his fellow-countryman, who was five years his junior, Nuremberg, where he had charge of the Gymnasium, Heidelberg, and the Prussian capital, mark the different stages in his academic career. We mention the following works: (1) Phänomenologie des Geistes (2) (1807); (2) Wissenschaft der Logik, (3) in three volumes (1812-1816); (3) Encyclopedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (4) (1817); (4) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (5)(1821); also, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, (6) Vorlesungen über die Æsthetik, (7) Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, (8) Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, (9) published after his death.
According to Fichte, the thing-in-itself (the absolute) is the ego itself, which produces the phenomenal world by an unconscious and involuntary creation, and then overcomes it by a free and conscious effort. According to Schelling, the absolute is neither the ego nor the non-ego, but their common root, in which the opposition between a thinking subject and a thought object disappears in a perfect indifference; it is the neutral principle, anterior and superior to all contrasts, the identity of contraries. Fichte's absolute is one of the terms of the opposition, that of Schelling is the transcendent, mysterious, impenetrable source of the same. Fichte's conception errs in reducing the absolute to what is but one of its aspects: the absolute of Fichte is the ego limited by a theoretically inexplicable non-ego; it is a prisoner, it is not really the absolute. Schelling's absolute is a transcendent entity, which does not explain anything, since we do not know either how or why to deduce from it the oppositions constituting the real world. The absolute indifference, far from being the highest and most concrete reality, is, at bottom, nothing but an abstraction.
According to Hegel, the common source of the ego and of nature does not transcend reality; it is immanent in it. Mind and nature are not aspects of the absolute, or a kind of screen, behind which an indifferent and lifeless God lies concealed, but its successive modes. The absolute is not immovable, but active; it is not the principle of nature and of mind, but is itself successively nature and mind. This succession, this process, this perpetual generation of things, is the absolute itself. In Schelling, things proceed from the absolute, which, for that very reason, remains outside of them. In Hegel, the absolute is the process itself; it does not produce movement and life, it is movement and life. It does not exceed the things, but is wholly in them; nor does it, in any way, exceed the intellectual capacity of man. If we mean by God the being transcending human reason, then Hegel is the most atheistic of philosophers, since no one is more emphatic in affirming the immanency and perfect knowableness of the absolute. Spinoza himself, the philosopher of immanency, does not seem to go so far; for, although be concedes that the intellect has an adequate idea of God, he assumes that the Substance has infinite attributes.
.......................................................................................
From this excerpt, you get Weber's short opinion on Hegel's view of 'God'. And you also get an idea of Weber's interpretation of Hegel's 'The Absolute' as 'the essential dialectic evolutionary process' -- not as the 'end goal and product' of this same process.
This is ripe with the potential for contradictory confusion unless we view this as a 'dialectical paradoxical playoff' as well. Either Hegel is viewing God in an orthodox manner as 'The Essential Creator of Man and Life on Earth'. Or Hegel is viewing God in a more 'pantheistic' way (like Spinoza) as The Process and Product of Creation itself (meaning that 'God is in everything and every creative process). Indeed, according to Weber -- and this is different than what I believed previously -- it looks like Hegel may have even viewed the Absolute -- and God -- in a 'dialectical pantheist way' (like Heraclitus) based on the idea of 'the integrative multi-bi-polar balancing playoff' between opposing and contradicting elements in both Nature and in Man. Perhaps evolving towards The Absolute and God -- which was my previous interpretation of what Hegel meant by the Absolute. So take your pick. God as The Absolute as revealed to man through the evolution of the dialectic process. Or God as the dialectic process itself evolving towards its -- and God's -- own self-revelation. Or both.
Scratch your head over that one for a while.
And I will come back to you shortly.
-- dgb, October, 18th, 2009.
...To be continued...
