In Hegel's Hotel, philosophers and psychologists from the past get to walk and talk in the lobby with each other, engage in passionate discussions with each other, attend conferences together, debate differences of opinion with each other...and integrate their ideas with each other...creating new 'conceptual mutations and evolutions and diversities and convergences...'
I am the architect of Hegel's Hotel. And the builder. And the innkeeper. And the host. And the conflict mediator. And the bouncer...
Today these philosophers and psychologists cannot speak for themselves. But their work still can. And I have taken the liberty to represent their work as best as I can -- critiquing it when I feel these critiques are justified and necessary.
In particular, I have taken the liberty to represent Hegel's ideas to the best of my evolving knowledge and ability...and to disentangle, modify, embellish, humanize, and existentialize these ideas when such action on my part seems warranted.
My type of epistemological and ethical idealism doesn't completely gel with Hegel's.
And I don't believe in the idea of living 'from the neck up' looking for some form of 'Absolute Knowledge' inside my brain....that doesn't engage with the outside world...Plato made this mistake...And Hegel followed suit...
Still the birth of existentialism can be found in Hegel's description of the 'master/slave' relationship.
And there is a special dialectic spirit and process in the confines of Hegel's classic work, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' that is arguably the pinnacle of Western Philosophy...
It is this spirit -- this dialectic-democratic-humanistic-existential spirit -- that I wish to continue and further develop in Hegel's Hotel...
In the words of Maurice Marleau-Ponty,
'All the great philosophical ideas of the past century -- the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis -- had their beginnings in Hegel...No task in the cultural order is more urgent than re-establishing the connection between, on the one hand, the thankless doctrines which try to forget their Hegelian origins and, on the other hand, that origin itself.' -- Maurice Marleau-Ponty (Lloyd Spencer, Introducing Hegel, 2006, pg. 158)
-- dgb, Nov. 30th, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
