"Oh, I have done. Now, this isn't a claim I agree with, because I think there is no such thing as Geist (N.B., not the Spirit of History--just Spirit. History is the story of the development of spirit.) But I think what H means by that is that the consciousness that is for Hegel the subject of history is embodied in particular political institutions that develop, so that human history can be understood essentially as political history. The converse to this is Hegel's view that history is the story of freedom, so that the development of constitutional liberalism, instanting human freedom politically in the state, is the highest development of spirit and in a sense the onject of history, its telos" --jks
Tonight I am in a more reasoned state of mind, since I am not listening to Beethoven, but Bach's Overture in the French Style (BWV 831).
Let's say the [onject] object, its telos. Despite my current dive into romantic and neo-classical poetry, Holderlin specifically, I am in some other intellectual realm even less disposed to believe in the existence of spirit than most people I've known.
This lack of belief creates an intellectual problem, because I have to find a way to explain what is meant when there is talk about society, nature, history, spirit and telos. The provisional idea is that all these entities exist, but as cultural forms, as symbolic entities that we manipulate in art, music, speech, writing, architecture, and stories. We animate these forms with all the techniques and craft that we can bring to bare from painted bodies dancing, to surround sound, 3D, giant screen films, to extended philosophical discourse. We make these animated entities speak, as if they were living things. This is what Derrida refers to as the mytho-poetics of being. [I can't quite figure out if D is trying to save it or erase it. In any case he seems ambivalent, naturally.]
The primary and much more technically developed and accomplished source for this crude premise comes from Cassirer's Phenomenology of Symbolic forms and his theories of culture. [I think Cassirer was involved in creating a Kantian mirror of Hegel's Phenomenology--if this idea makes any sense.] Among the important nuances of this idea is that the creation of mind, the learning process of children, acculturation and culture are mutually composed of these forms, and embody them, not as mystical essences, but as the medium which we learn to conceive, interpret, express, and enact the world--in short they are us and as such we express them in the symbolic acts we perform as thought, speech, movement, manner, costume, the totality which identifies us as belonging to a collective entity, a people, a society, a culture, a history.
This is the great lie of the arts, that if we pretend long enough and hard enough, and if the skill is accomplished enough, then these materials will come alive and be just as if they lived. And that goes for toys, poems, dead relatives, gods, and histories. We then discuss them as if they were living things with all the expressive vibrance, radiance, and comprehensive presence that entails. In other words analogy and correspondence are primary to both learning and expression.
This then is how I understand Hegel's conceptual universe. It depends critically on the inter penetrability of phenomena and noumena, the classical division of intelligible and ideal forms. In a metaphorical sense it is the merging of poetry and philosophy, art and science--Hegel's conception of science as philosophy.
And so, then I have no problem with the comingling and inter-penetrability of Machstaat with Kulturstaat. It was why I quoted this brief section from Cassirer. But the full ramifications of this idea lead in many directions. For example whoever or whatever controls the cultural institutions of a society, controls its dominant political and economic processes. And of course whoever controls the political and economic processes will determine the dominant cultural expression. But there is always a question of multiple ensembles, tiers, and hierarchies of order in these processes since they are far from homogeneous and isotropic in a sufficiently large scaled and technically developed society--that is to say in a class bound society. And this of course leads to the modes and methods of changing the institutional configurations.
However much I might subscribe to a Hegelian universe of cultural form as it has been adapted and figured in Cassirer' neo-kantianism, I always remind myself, this is imaginary--this is the artifice and magic of the arts.
Hegel's friendship with Holderlin was important in that Holderlin gave his poetry, or lend it to a philosophical reading. He created a union of phenomenal and noumenal worlds composed and selected as if it were a realm of root forms as Rilke called them. Rilke and Holderlin to a lesser developed degree meant of course the multiple meaning of the roots of words, roots of an idea, and their primal correspondences to phenomena. Hegel in a similar vain, but beginning within the philosophical tradition, returned to the classical world of phenomenal and noumenal forms and processes, and developed their union as if it were a form of poetry, or a realm of themes, similitudes and analogies. But both of these perspectives, the poetic and philosophical are driven by the romantic sensibility in which there is no separation between the world of phenomenon and the phenomenon of the mind. The interpretation of the world and mind is undertaken in a poetic vain in which a fully articulated sense and sensibility selects within a realm of symbolic (and/or emotive) expression particular forms and endows or discovers, discloses these to be noumenal and then extrapolates the particular as archetypal--that is collective or universal.
The technique or art of establishing this interpenetration or corelative mapping uses the logical identity or correspondence established in the Logic, where the triad of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis is made isomorphic to Being, Nothing, and Becoming. So then, the abstract ideal form, the simple logical assertion, is made to correspond to the primal unity of existence. The noumenal and phenomenal realm, reason and experience, the universe of discourse, and the universe of phenomenon are made one.
This is only true in an absolute sense within the universe of cultural forms and phenomenon. For example, these assertions have no meaning or application to the material processes of the physical universe. However, that isn't to say that some of the analytical structures shorn of everything but their bare logical armature find no application. They obviously do.
I have to stop here. Work tomorrow, etc.
Chuck Grimes