Just for clarification purposes, you will never again read any translation of Hegel's most famous philosophical work the way you are likely to find it in a bookstore today as 'The Phenomenology of Mind'. This title name -- to me -- underlies the essence and purpose of this philosophical piece: to combine the philosophy of The Enlightenment with the German Romanticism and Idealism of the ninteenth century (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Holderlin, Schiller -- even the older, more 'dialectic-pantheist-idealist' philosophical ideas of Heraclitus and the 'rationalist-idealist' philosophical ideas of Plato and Spinoza).
Using the word 'Mind' in the title -- especially by itself -- just does not cut it. It does not capture the full underlying spirit of Hegel and the rest of the German Idealists. The key here is the English translation of the German word 'Geist'. Unfortunately, lately, it seems to be mostly translated as 'Mind'. I will conversely -- even though I have no background in understanding the German language -- translate 'Geist' to mean either 'Mind/Spirit' or simply 'Spirit' by itself. This, I perceive, as giving more justice to the overall intention, vision -- and 'Phenomenological Spirit' -- of Hegel.
And that is the underlying 'Spirit of Hegel' that I am trying my utmost to carry on in my own philosophical work here -- i.e., in 'Hegel's Hotel'.
Ironically, much of my latest work has been written from computers inside hotels, most notably, The Holiday Inn Express in Richmond Hill, and The Courtyard Mariott in Markham, to whom I give them both my sincere appreciation and thanks.
It is my ultimate fantasy to one day teach a seminar on Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy in the 'Hegel Room' in The Marriott Hotel in Heidelberg, Germany...
Maybe one day....
I am just trying to keep Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' alive, humanized, and existentialized, in and through my own philosophical work.
All we can do, is the best we can do to get to where we want to one day be...We all need to climb or jump over the Nietzschean Abyss to get from 'being' to 'becoming'...and start all over again...
-- dgb, Nov. 7th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
