Term Paper on "Hegelian Dialectic Concerning Life, Death and Love"

Term Paper 10 pages (2993 words) Sources: 1+ Style: Harvard

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Hegelian Dialectic Concerning Life, Death and Love

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was born into the world of Kant and Rousseau, a world already turned from its medieval ancestry; a world modeled anew on the revolutionary Scientific dogma that reshaped the modern conception of the universe (replacing the Ptolemaic geocentric model with the Copernican heliocentric one); a world built upon the Enlightenment doctrine that grew out of the new Western Protestant ethos. Hegel was part of the new intellectualism, fired by the light of individuality, liberty, skepticism, and idealism. Hegel, a child of his age, would devise his own system of philosophy -- a philosophy that was both humanistic and modern and that would attempt to encompass life, death and love. What would later be called the Hegelian dialectic (an analysis incorporating the triad structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis), was the product of Kantian influence and neo-Kantian development (on the part of Johann Fichte, another proponent of German idealism). According to such a structure, Hegel would attempt to reconcile life and death. This paper will attempt to explain Hegel's dialectic concerning life, death, and love -- showing how life and death are irreconcilable in the Hegelian system, cannot exist as a system of unit, and how love is Hegel's synthetic response to the thesis/anti-thesis of life and death.

Hegel and God

Growing up in Protestant Germany in the era of redefining in which he did, Hegel's tendency was to move towards a new, self-established eschatology. This is not to say that Hegel would not take inspiration from the ancient Greeks that had influenced such medieval scholastics as Thomas Aquinas. But Hegel would also fall into the same vein as Kant and Fichte (and even Rousseau, to some degree) A.R. Bjerke succinctly defines Hegel by quoting from his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: "When we say, 'God is love,' we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is" (Bjerke 2011:77). Hegel is at once accepting of old world definitions and at the same time skeptical of the common sense that underlies them. Such a phrase as God is love cannot be stated without scrutiny. Hegel, like Hamlet, by questioning it throws doubt upon the "love," only to revive it through an association with the Spirit.

As Bjerke states, reason and love are intimately connected in Hegelian dialectic. Yet unlike Aquinas, who reconciled faith and reason with divine revelation of God (Who is Love), Hegel reconciles reason and love, without the faith of Aquinas. Replacing the faith (required to overcome death in the perspective of Aquinas), is the Spirit. For Hegel, "love has the shape of speculative reason and plays a historical role in the reconciliation of Spirit to itself" (Bjerke 2011:76).

The God of the medieval Western world was inaccessible to the new Enlightenment philosophy of Hegel's age. Hegel's philosophy required a reassessment of God, and he employed a new structure and ontology to create it. Part of the reason is that Hegel has called into question the nature of love -- or at least given it a new nature. From its medieval definition as an exercise of the will toward the good, Hegel reduces love to a "feeling" -- which takes God (since God is love) out of the realm of the rational and into the realm of the ephemeral. That which is changeless becomes ever-changing; that which is pure Spirit becomes linked to the emotions. Whereas Aquinas linked Spirit with reason, Hegel links Spirit with emotion -- the kind of emotion that Rousseau had promoted: unfettered, "true to self," and free: "Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling…love completely destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection" (Bjerke 2011:77). Such musings are the romantic philosophical outcomes of one who has experienced the throes of passion and reveal Hegel as one who has felt and experienced love and had difficulty controlling it (or making sense of it at all -- after all: "love destroys objectivity" -- a truly astounding claim). The fact cannot be readily ignored that Hegel did indeed, after all, father an illegitimate child with a young woman with whom he had a liaison. Whether Hegel's love was temporary, unreal, or ungoverned by reason is beside the point for the philosopher, for love destroys objectivity. If God is love, the consequences of such a belief must be dealt with.

That God, then, could destroy objectivity is a claim that would make sense to the young Hegel growing up in the world of Protestant hypocrisy. The scholastic pride in objectivity of the medieval world had been eschewed for the more individualistic, self-promoting doctrine of Protestantism, which denied authoritative interpretation. Christian ecclesiology was no more defined than what the next person made it out to be: if God was Love, there was no defining it strictly nor question of being at all objective about it. There was only the sense that Love was romantic, powerful, and all-consuming, like Goethe (another effect of the age of Romance and Enlightenment and a sure influence upon Hegel). The morality associated with religion and with Christianity especially, whereby men's lives are guided toward their final end, becomes elusive and evolutionary, changing according to "the Spirit." Hegel's Spirit sows the seeds for the pluralism of modern times by elevating passion and reducing reason.

The problem with passion's usurpation of medieval scholasticism's place set for reason is that reason is the government of passion. Passion left to rule itself (as Hegel and Rousseau both claim it must do -- Hegel attempting to rationalize such governance, of course) essentially must produce a new code of morality since the old code produced under the light of reason according to authoritative interpretation of divine revelation no longer can be justified in the light of Enlightenment doctrine.

Passion elevated means that reason is no longer at the top of the hierarchy -- which means that the sense which helped the Greek philosophers know the natural world can no longer be trusted. Knowing the world through one's senses, with the elevation of passion, becomes an untrustworthy exercise. The passions, in control, cannot interpret or act according to sense, since sense and sensation are intimately related with reason. Passion, having taken the place of reason, is left to create a new morality. This is the essence of the Hegelian dialectic. Life and death must be explained according to this new dialect, which, in other words, means that the entire universe (as understood in the old world) must now be explained anew.

Yet as Howard Gardner states, one "must figure out how intelligence and morality can work together" (Smith 2008). Gardner essentially undercuts the Hegelian premise that Love is an emotion. By linking intelligence with morality (a code of conduct), Gardner is emphasizing the rational over the passions. Hegel, on the other hand, like Kant and Rousseau, does the opposite.

Life, the Spirit and Death

Like the young Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Hegel saw Napoleon as "the incarnation of the World Spirit (the telos!)" (Life). He had completed Phenomenology of Spirit, and his identification of Napoleon as telos is telling. The arc of Napoleon's career is just as dramatic as the arc of Hegel's experiences with love: passionate, fiery, consequential, as full of death, as Hegel's romance had been of life. Napoleon represented the Spirit of the World. Hegel's Love represented the Spirit of Life. Again, here was another thesis and antithesis. The synthesis would prove to be a kind of evolutionary philosophical dogma: "Sprit, therefore, has the purpose (telos) and meaning to be actualized. In this sense, his basic conception came from Leibniz and Fichte, or even from Aristotle" (Life).

Hegel's point is that causality is based on teleology. That teleology is intimately connected to Love. Love without governance was like love overflowing, unrestrained -- like Napoleon's conquests. "Love can therefore be understood in the context of Hegel's first attempt to establish a philosophy of identity: a solution to the antitheses of Kant's logical categories and to the disunity of life in all its vagaries and determinations" (Bjerke 2011:77). This supposition would be expounded upon in Hegel's The Spirit of Christianity, a work that was an effort "to comprehend the unity of the oppositional structure of Kantian moral philosophy: duty and inclination, moral law and natural impulse, reason and passion" (Bjerke 2011:77).

What Hegel was essentially wrestling with was what the medieval world had previously understood as the concept of original sin: a kind of understanding that viewed human nature as fallen -- in other words, divided. Hegel's concept of the Spirit attempted to make sense of the conflicting elements in human nature: the good and the bad, the controlled and the uncontrollable, the parts that produced life and the parts that produced death.

Hegel makes a desperate attempt to rationalize the contradictions… READ MORE

How to Reference "Hegelian Dialectic Concerning Life, Death and Love" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

Epicurus's View on Death Essay

Epicurus's view on death

Death has remained the subject of many discussions in the past and the present. Many philosophers and historians have given their ideas about death. Many interesting… read more

Essay 5 pages (2062 words) Sources: 15 Topic: Aging / Death / Gerontology

---

Death "Somebody Should Tell Us, Right Essay

Death

"Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do… read more

Essay 2 pages (781 words) Sources: 2 Topic: Aging / Death / Gerontology

---

Life Philosophy How Shall I Treat Myself? Term Paper

Life Philosophy

How shall I treat myself? What is the most accurate and helpful view of my own nature?

A shall treat myself with all the respect due to any… read more

Term Paper 5 pages (1602 words) Sources: 5 Style: MLA Topic: Biology / Life

---

Death and Dying the Last Lecture a Video Essay

Life According to the Last Lecture

It is difficult to conceptualize and verbalize those things which should be seen as most important to us in life. This is, of course,… read more

Essay 2 pages (661 words) Sources: 1 Topic: Aging / Death / Gerontology

---

Death Rite or Ritual Essay

Egyptian Death Rituals

Ancient Egyptian death and burial rituals have been among the most elaborate in history. Even today, having uncovered many of the mysteries behind the rituals and mummification… read more

Essay 10 pages (3446 words) Sources: 10 Topic: Aging / Death / Gerontology

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>