The Space Man Knows What’s Going On

Here’s a quick space man’s view of what the History of Philosophy might call the Enlightenment era, followed by my thoughts on their impacts.

The old dumb f’ers from those days had two main schools of thinking, all generated from the bastard Renee Descartes (of the “I think, therefore I am” bs) The rationalist (all is of the mind) and the empiricist (all is of the physical nature – body). We get the mind/body dualism from this era. Then the clever Kant finds a way to synthesize both extremes. Ultimately, Kant says the physical is there in and of itself (things in themselves… TIT my professor would abbreviate on the chalkboard and make everyone giggle), unknowable until the mind interprets it. 400 pages of description on how this is done, and that’s Kant’s genius. It was rather impressive, actually. I spent a whole 2 semesters studying only this one thing. It was grueling.

Hegel comes along on Kant’s back and says, hey, we’ve seen this before. Someone says one thing, then someone says the anti thing, then someone combines them together to form a new thing, then someone anti’s that thing and then someone synthesizes it and so on and so on, and the next thing you know, history unfolds, we get closer and closer to Truth and knowledge grows and everything reveals itself. Then he goes on to say that as this Everything reveals itself, we discover that this Everything-revealed is God, and the revealing process is the history of humans. Man is the motion to get to God through this cycle of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis as a new thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, etc. This implies a great many things. That man is really God unrevealed. That time is really an uncovering of hidden Truth. That God is hiding behind time (as an infinite being, where else would he hide?) It implies that there is a point where time ends, all knowledge is known, and man becomes God, or rather, God finds himself through his creation and time ends. This progression of history means that we are closer to God today than they were when Jesus was here. It also means that we are God but have amnesia until the clock runs out. Hegel really has a strong grip on thinkers today, because we (especially here in America) are really trapped in the 1800s in terms of religious/philosophical/social/political thinking.