“Love and education represent relative identities between lack of identities in which intuition dominates the concept (love), and the concept dominates intuition (education)”. –Hegel´s System der Sittlichkeit
The Master-Slave relation arises when there are no other channels of mediation between people, and Hegel refused to objectify this, that is, to make bourgeois private property the proper mediation.
Rose on Hegel: How can there be any reference to absolute ethical life in a society based on bourgeois private property, on lack of identity, on relative ethical life, where the real totality can only appear to these isolated individuals as abstract and unreal?
Hegel on Art: “Art in bourgeois society, whether it represents love, romantic adventures or divine comedy, denies the present and is an absolute, impotent longing for the past of for the future” –S.d.S.
Rose on Hegel: Instead of uniting concept and intuition religion debases real social relations even more than art. For art remains in the contradiction between intuition and concept. Religion, however, reconciles concept and intuition in another world, and thus makes our relation to both the world beyond and the real existence one of impotent longing. Religion, unlike art, maintains the image of intuition, the promise of a real transformation, but at the same time, prevents its actual development.
Rose: As long as the absolute is represented as God, it is inconceivable as the absolute.
A common notion of God = Un-freedom, inconceivability of the Absolute. Does then God reveal himself through private revelation (as in Christianity) or in public discourse (as in Judaism) in order to constitute himself as an un-common place, a stumbling block; God as an object in itself or a phenomenal thing that can be subsumed under the same standards we apply to the criticism of art and literature… Sometimes I have this perception that people who allegedly don´t believe in God, have believed at some point in their lives, and that their struggle with non believing is a strife so paralyzing as the sleep inducing effect of modern theology to step out of the natural boundaries of dogmatics without actually shattering the whole world and the way we live in it. In thought, to depart metaphysically from the idea of God is necessarily tantamount to throwing oneself into the bucket of freedom´s waters without knowing actually how to swim – by this I don´t mean people shouldn´t do it, it is perhaps necessary to drown. For those who are able to think systematically, it could be true that emptying the seat of God in the hierarchy of the absolute and in the metaphysical superstructure of the universe is equated to something like completely de-centering the world and expect each of the fragmentary pieces thereafter to function like autonomous centers in full awareness of their condition as “second-hand” capitals of faraway counties. Thus the center of the world isn´t completely dissolved, it just happens that the place for the absolute, for the metaphysical center, remains void. The question remains whether it is possible to live a life under the conditions of seamless freedom while being aware of the void at the very center. Modernity has been all about examples of how this experiment is possible: Paris in the 19th century and New York in the 20th century – yet their claims for the de-centeredness of the world have been so much vain as they have been narcissistic, for they as geographical aggregates of forms of absolute and relative aspects of life have stood themselves in lieu of imperial Rome. The cultural anxiety over the temporal nature of these surrogate metaphysical centers of the world understood geographically, culturally and politically, is very intense because palliative care is offered in a two-fold manner to the denizens of this world: They apply the intensity of time to the claim of eternity and also suffer from the tenselessness of eternity in the course of the experience of time. Precisely because the absolute can´t be reached in the traditional orientations of man in flat historical space, the movement has begun upwards and downwards: Babel and Atlantis. That´s the history of modern architecture; to break out of the two-fold tension of man within the circumscription of his limited physical capability, he is ought to head upwards not into heaven but into the outer space and downwards not into hell but into the depths of the Ocean and closer to the center of the earth which is not the center of the world neither the metaphysical place left absent.
More Gillian Rose: The cost of keeping religion within the bounds of reason is that rationality becomes inexplicable, and God or the infinite well unknowable. (Criticism leveled by Hegel at Kant and Fichte in the divide between theoretical and practical reason)
G.R. on Aufhebung: Aufhebung is usually understood to refer to a consecutive and higher state in a developmental sequence, for the experience of difference or negation, of reality identity, of a contradiction between consciousness´ definition of itself and its real existence which is mis-cognized ad re-cognized at the same time. The philosophy of history is thus the speculative reading of how substance became subject, or, how absolute ethical life became religious representation, or, how the state and religion became divorced. It is especially concerned with the religion which forced that divorce on representation, and which, read speculatively, is the idea of absolute freedom, the speculative Good Friday. Christianity is this religion, “the absolute religion”. It is the religion in which the absolute is represented as subject.
From Hegel´s Philosophy of Religion: The religious freedom from the real world cannot be maintained. If the real world is denied, then God can only be represented as a negative, in opposition to the finite world. The basic Christian experience is not of Christ, the mediator, of freedom, but of spiritual bondage to a dead God. Christ´s resurrection and Christian love should restore the unity and freedom of human and divine nature, but they can do so only if God is known as trinity. However, reconciliation in religion always remains implicit and abstract, because it is only achieved as religion, as a spiritual and not as a worldly community. Christianity thus cannot realize the reconciliation between the human and the divine which would be freedom. It can only repeat the dreadful experience that God has died, God is dead – this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that all that is true is not, the negation itself is found in God; the deepest sorrow, the feeling of something completely irretrievable, the renunciation of everything of a higher kind, are connected with this.
Note: When Christians discovered the nothingness together with the disruption of time in medieval philosophy, they found a way to make the Infinite relative and subject to matters of personality and thus not a concern of politics or culture. They found shelter in this nothingness and therefore freedom; as a consequence they sent political freedom “home to roost” and began their witch hunting all over the place. Subjectivity is a symptom of finitude, not of the infinite.
Question: Does Judaism NOT have a concept of freedom?
“The Phenomenology is not a success. It is a gamble”
About the death of God (G.R.): Absolute ethical life (…) is first presented according to its relation as the unhappy consciousness. This consciousness results from the loss of substance, and is characteristic of the pre- and post- Christian as well as of the Christian epochs. It is a dualistic consciousness for which God is dead. The death of the God may refer to the death of the Greek Gods, or to the characterless and hence and hence unknowable modern God, or to a God who is imagined (represented) and imaginable (representable), but who dwells beyond concrete existence and is therefore absent… The unhappy consciousness arose out of the experience of the death of the Greek Gods. This death does not have the significance of the death of Christ, of a particular individual become universal, nor does it have the significance of the death of Christianity, of the end of religious representation. It means the death of life as divine and gives rise to the denial of existence and of transformative activity and hence of actuality. Life is experienced as the grave.
G.R.: …Yet, the more these activities are debased, the greater the importance which is in effect granted them as isolated acts. Before thanks are rendered, they are unsanctified. Life if worse than a grave; it is hell, a perpetual agony: Consciousness of life, of its existence and activity, is only an agonizing over this existence and activity, for therein it is conscious that its essence is only its opposite, is conscious only of its own nothingness. (Quotations from P.d.G.)
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