Dreaming the Future Closer

[Warning: dense, presumes familiarity with Hegel] 

I daresay that most people who have made their way through any sizable portion of Hegel’s opus comes away with a sense of awe for the man’s intellect.  Many, to be sure, qualify that with a sense that there is something almost, well, too brilliant, too pure.  That history may so gracefully be ordered, progressively, by a series of dialectical movements just seems too good or too awful to be true.

And I think that qualification is pretty much spot on.  I think the idea of dialectics is spot on, brilliant even, but that it holds only for a single remove.  Dialectics breaks down, becomes mere abstraction, when its functions are linked together progressively. 

The reason may be put something like this: each dialectical movement is a leap forward of the understanding into confusion and a local resolution of it.  However, the resolution drawn is utterly local, related to the person(s) involved.  The movement can be resolved in a number of different ways, and each of those different (not contradictory) movements are dialectical so long as they are carried to their end.

This is, I suspect, the gist of Adorno’s concern.

This (hopefully) will be short, a hard little nub.

It’s simple really, but if we are to speak of spirit, of the sacred, as something serious, something real, we need to remember that just as Hegel reminded us that mind is a bone, so is spirit.

It’s a real thing.  It’s a distinct thing, too, not an amorphous daydream. 

To those who would respond, that it is not dead, is not inert ‘like a bone,’ I can only suggest that you consider what you mean by those terms.  In their most literal application, no, it is not like a bone.  It is a different thing.  But in their extended sense, those terms don’t even apply to bones.

That’s also a warning against fantasy, against the false comforts we grant ourselves by abandoning the things and retreating into our ideas of things.  Ideas are different things, and confusing the idea for the thing to which it lays claim is the road to illusion.

Spirit, like all things, wears our ideas lightly.  Just as our own ideas and words, too, remain in the silent kingdom of things, so does spirit.  So do we.  Let us curb our imagination accordingly.  Let us not dwell in false riches.