Hegel: Adept

Six dialogues through the system itself

A course on the thought of G. W. F. Hegel.

Course outline

1. The Ladder: Climbing the Phenomenology — The book from my coat at Jena, climbed rung by rung this time: how consciousness educates itself from "this, here, now" through despair to absolute knowing — and why you must climb it yourself.
2. Against Kant: Swimming Before the Water — My reckoning with the master: why you cannot test the power of knowing before using it, why the thing-in-itself is a self-contradiction, and why the categorical imperative is an empty formalism.
3. The Logic: Thought Thinking Itself — The system's foundation, written between morning classes in Nuremberg: being, essence, and the Concept — how pure thought, beginning from nothing presupposed, derives the categories of every possible…
4. The Organic Worldview: Nature's Magnificent Impotence — Why an idealist needs a philosophy of nature: the Idea in the element of externality, the rights of contingency, life as a chemical process made perpetual — and death as the doorway through which…
5. The Architecture of Freedom, Beam by Beam — The Philosophy of Right at working depth: the formalism of right and the self-subversion of conscience, civil society's wound re-opened, the corporation, the state as concrete freedom — and the…
6. Absolute Spirit: The Statue, the Cross, the Concept — The system's summit: art as the sensuous shining of the Idea and the end of its highest vocation; religion as the truth in images — the death of God included; philosophy as the same content, finally…

Part of the Symposium course library.