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April 14, 2004
A Hegel quote. It is dense but it is good.
"The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything it came across, it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence.
Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. But it is far harder to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state than to do so with sensuous existence."
That is the opening of The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel is suggesting that the ancient Greeks faced the task of wresting abstract ideas ("universals") from the flux of the sensory. The moderns thinkers are suffocated by the proliferation abstractions--abstract categories, concepts, and numbers.
What then of postmodernity? What do we do in the world of the society of the spectacle and the realm of the internet and cybernetic?
Do we go from the universal to the concrete or particularity?
From the abstract universal to the concrete universal?
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