Hegel: The Phenomenology of Geist Dr. Michael Sugrue

COMMENtARY:

I first read Kant and Hegel in 1968 and?intuited their centrality to modern though intuitively epistemology. My assumption at that time was that they were accepted universally as sufficient in themselves to assume to be the background program, so to speak, of all public debate and systematic inquiry. It bothered me that Christian apologists generally disdained Kant and failed, again universally, to not understand Hegel, especially when it came to deconstructing Marx. It was also clear to me that Marx didn’t?Hegel. I read Capital when I was 15 and the single cler figure I came away with was that Marx’s corruption of Transaction Theory cast his entire system into irrelevance, which comforted me in the knowledge that George Kennon’s Containment Strategy was was correct and would result in the collapse of Soviet Marxism as decadent.

What has surprised me, progressively, since I got back from Vietnam is the general lack of understanding of Kant and Hegel in the public debate, but it wasn’t until very recently that i could articulate an explanation of their metaphysical necessity because I didn’t understand the root cause of that lack of understanding at the source, which was the poverty of the linguistic register of everyone after Newton, including Newton, as to what, exactly, he had revealed with F=MA, which was what we now call Chaos Theory and, the emergence of Gestalt Theory from Hume’s theory of perception.

The Phenomenology of Spirit depends upon the utility of Geist to anchor Hegel’s Historical Gestalt at the core of his dialectical?synthesis that characterizes the epistemology of the narrative of the Bible, which is inerrant throughout. What Newton, Kant and Hegel combine to describe is the 4th Law of Logic which states that paradox cannot be reduced, that Kierkegaard’s objection to Kant’s mind and body duality is self-contradictory misses the whole point:?the relationship between the irrational properties of the?noumenal substance of Body and the rational capacities of the?Phenomenal Reality of Mind?is the paradox than anchors the Categorical Imperative of the psyche.?The?Transcendent value that connects Kant and Hegel is the Irresistible Grace of God and the connection between the dinga an sich of body is in dynamic relationship with the mind through the irrational fight0flight reflect of?the sufficient variety of the self-actualizing impulse of being which can be accurately?understood by the metaphor of the relationship of the Sunflower to the Sun.

Hegel’s Historie and Geschichte, that is, the Figure of Narrative and the Field of Sociology and Anthropology, of the Phenomenology of Spirit defines what I call the Historical Gestalt of his dialectical synthesis., This turns out to be the way Perception actually works and?defines the epistemology of LOGOS. What this epistemology revealed through through Newton’s calculus was chaotic fields throughout the physical universe that needed to be understood dynamically but nobody had the words, much less the concepts. to resolve Kierkegaard’s?objections until Kurt Lewin stumble across Group Dynamics looking for soemthing else.Heideger was bumping up against it by 1943 with the arc of his Dasein LOGOS and the Myers-Briggs Typ Inventor/Keirsery temperament constructs originated?from Kant’s Categorical Imperative by way of Jung, but nobody seemed to want to apply it to understanding Hegel, but Kurt Lewin’s Force Field political analysis is a direct application of Historie and Geschichte.

What I have come to realize recently is that the general objection to Hegel by Christian Theologians arises from Hegel’s rejection of Calvinism, generally, and the TULIP, Doctrine, in particular. Hegel’s position was that Martin Luther wasn’t a Calvinist and that the Luther abandoned the Total Depravity doctrine of the Roman Catholic confession when he posted the 95 Thesis, married a nun,, raised a passel of kids on beer on song and lived happily ever after. Hegel; correct posture was that the TULIP doctrine violated Free Will and was adopted to justify burning Michael Servetus at the stake. As a consequence of this rejection, Kant and Hegel have been written off by successive generations of Protestant preachers and apologists.

Here’s the thing: a lack of understanding of Hegel is the perfect cultural blindness for the rise of Fascism, such as has been the circumstance in American politics sine Reagan was elected. The John Birch Society thrives in a milieu where Hegel is dismissed and the systematic application of the Post Modern Historical Deconstruction of dialectical Marxism shapes the conventional wisdom. If Democrats and Progressives understood Hegel like William F. Buckley understood Hegel, the political treachery, subversion and treason of Trump and the January 6 rebellion would be recognized for the existential threat is truly is.

Here’s the thing: Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis is a method for analyzing Chaor. You begin with Chaos, you identify the Moral qualities of Geist in the Chaotic Field and isolate the Material qualities and the Synthesis of that dynamic yields Paradox. The intermediary between A and not A is the dynamic of the relationship and you cannot suspend that dynamic without reducing the Paradox of the chaotic field. And the epistemology of Figure and Field depends upon that dynamic quality to provide the perception necessary for the requisite variety of survival. As it turns out, the gestalt of Plato’s theory of the Forms employs the mathematics of Euclid embedded in Topology and Aristotle’s method for connecting the noumenal substance of the impermanent world with Plato’s eternal Forms is gestalt in nature.

I owe a debt to John S. Kloppenborg, a Canadian Biblical scholar, who introduced me to the concept/sound bite of LIGUISTIC REGISTER. Newton didn’t realize he had discovered Chaos Theory, Hume didn’t realize he had identified Gestalt Theory, Kant didn’t understand that he had created the universal schematic for the cognitive organization of the personality and Hegel couldn’t explain how the Team Building mantra of Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing was the basis of his historical processes because they didn’t have the words for what they found. Magic is any technology you cannot explain. That defines the Age of Ideology from Newton to Kurt Lewin in 1943.