/lit/ - Literature

>The 'beautiful', the 'holy', the 'eternal', 'religion', and 'love'
>are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite;
>not the Notion, but ecstasy,
>not the cold march of necessity in the thing itself, but the ferment of enthusiasm,
>these are supposed to be what sustains
>and continually extends the wealth of substance.
Hegel supposes that our notions of beauty, holiness, eternality, religion, and love, are not (of course) by themselves the fullness of God, but they are the necessary "bait required to arouse the desire to bite". These are notions which point to The Notion (God) and they 'ferment enthusiasm' and "are supposed to be what sustains and continually extends the wealth of substance". Or in other words if the Absolute and ultimately God is the soil which grounds us, these notions (beauty, holiness, love, etc) are like water which must occasionally be suspended in the soil in order to sustain us and continue our growth. In other words we must occasionally admire beauty, contemplate the holiness of God, go to religious functions, experience/express love, etc.
>In keeping with this demand is the strenuous, almost over zealous and frenzied effort
>to tear men away from their preoccupation with the sensuous,
>from their ordinary, private [einzelne] affairs, and to direct their gaze to the stars;
>as if they had forgotten all about the divine,
>and were ready like worms to content themselves with dirt and water.
Hegel wants to make the reader aware that these notions of the Absolute and ultimately God "tear men away from their preoccupation with the sensuous, from their ordinary, private affairs and to direct their gaze to the stars." In other words these notions of the Absolute remind us of what is truly important, (that being the divine, holy God) and these notions sometimes have to be zealous and frenzied just to shake us out of sense-certainty which often contents itself with brainless hedonism.

>Formerly they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery.
>The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of light
>by which it was linked to that heaven.
>Instead of dwelling in this world's presence,
>men looked beyond it, following this thread to an otherworldly presence, so to speak.
What Hegel is talking about here is extremely relevant to our modern society. We used to have vast, beautiful, clear skies above us, where light from ancient and distant stars and galaxies could enter our eyes and translate that wonder into the penetration of our hearts and souls, and in this way our minds could look beyond even the very depths of outerspace itself "following this thread to an otherworldy presence." In other words, let the small glimmering thread that is our sensation of the beautiful universe not be the end but the very beginning of our journey in God.
>The eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world;
>and it has taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly things used to have
>could penetrate the dullness and confusion
>in which the sense of worldly things was enveloped,
>and so make attention to the here and now
>as such attention to what has been called 'experience', an interesting and valid enterprise.
Hegel says that the 'eye of the Spirit' (or our connection with God) has been 'forcibly turned' (the connection has been severely weakened) or blinded by the various confusions and dullnesses of worldly and sensuous matters, and it has taken a long time before we have essentially come back to ourselves. And right now, in this century, decade, and even this very year, attention and investigation into what we happen to call 'experience' or in other words 'the consciousness of the human lifeform' and its connection to Almighty God is very much something we need to pay attention to and investigate.

>Now we seem to need just the opposite:
>sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it.
>The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that,
>like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water,
>it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general.
>By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.
Hegel supposes that in his time the people were Spiritually impoverished (i.e. they were losing their connection with God). This is relevant to our modern world as well, as we are so transfixed in worldly and sensuous matters that we have become impoverished, as if we roam a desert thirsty for a small mouthful of water or refreshment, and we are dying as a people because of it, or even more importantly, the impoverishment has lasted so long and gotten so bad that we are dying as an Earth because of it.

>This modest complacency in receiving, or this sparingness in giving,
>does not, however, befit Science.
>Whoever seeks mere edification, and whoever wants to shroud in a mist
>the manifold variety of his earthly existence and of thought,
>in order to pursue the indeterminate enjoyment of this indeterminate divinity,
>may look where he likes to find all this.
>He will find ample opportunity to dream up something for himself.
>But philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying.
Hegel says that the weak connection we have with God does not befit God, or in other words God is not a Being who is necessarily modest in giving spiritual nourishment nor spare in giving when sought with genuineness of heart.

Anyone who seeks spiritual nourishment from God with a genuine heart will find plenty, however Hegel is saying that "philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying" or in other words, philosophy/science must be careful when attempting this union with the Absolute so that philosophy/science is not damaged by people who naturally seek the spiritual nourishment of God yet simultaneously care little about science being damaged in the process.

A rather obvious example is the Creation Museum in the USA. I have little problem with the idea of a Creation Museum itself, because I believe it is important to have a variety of unique assemblages of people so long as they are nonviolent. Similarly I have little problem with the Amish. The Amish are people who live as if it were the 1800s (more or less). While the Amish may seem to be an oddity or even entirely backwards to some, I believe they give our modern culture a unique character, vibrance, and variety, and they are a wholesome, treasured culture of people. However, just as the Amish ought not be heavily intermingled with general society so as not to damage either one (imagine Amish people living in New York City), so too ought not the Creation Museum be heavily intermingled with general philosophy/science so as not to damage either one.

Such a union therefore is a delicate matter and must be attempted wisely and slowly so as to join the the 'spacecraft' with the 'mother-ship' with ease and without error.

It will be a few days before my next post because, again, I have other things to attend to.

>>15677367
God what this fuck is this? Christopher Langan legitimately makes way more sense than anything here.

>>15677533
You want me to comment on Christopher Langan?

I'll just say that raw brainpower =/= acuity.