I answered your objection. If reason comes from will than reason can NOT give an account of Will as you try to do. Reason inly knows reason. What is prior to reasoning is beyond reasoning.

Religious is an ambiguous term. Schop like the religions of the East

I'm more inclined to wonder "how" reason can be Will. "Why" implies there's a teleology before mind, which Schop denies. Kant advocated for blind faith in God. Maybe understanding Will takes some faith since it's beyond reason. You don't seem to be satisfied with this line of thought nevertheless. Sorry

Kant didn't say if the thing-in-itself was an object or subject. Schop said it was Will but mind understands the Forms, not Will. So the thing in itself is unknowable for him and also how reason comes from will. I know you like to think of it like two sides of a coin, but doesnt Schop say *everything* is will? So reason is somehow will I'm guessing

Maybe Schopenhauer would regard a rational world emerging from Will as a kind of miracle. The Greek gods had trials and yet were gods. We are Will and yet have trials oriented to a purpose (on the secondary level). Isn't the problem of pain part of the PSR?

So you would regard all of neo-Platonism to be a waste of time?

We are all Will because it is everywhere and Will is beyond us because it is nowhere. Only an infinite method can grasp Will, so only no method can. The finite cognition can never understand the infinite. Science assumes will must be in a brain because science is a finite method. With regard to Schopenhauer's idea of Will's atemporality, I quote Heraclitus, "In the case of the circle's circumference, the beginning and end are common." Fire apply depicts the Will, and while Heraclitus thought the fire was also Logos, Schopenhauer was seeking to reject the PSR as ontologically basic. For him we can approximate what the Will is like by comparing different manifestations of will. Perhaps he thought Will randomly or whatever chose a rational world. So his grounded reason finds it has no ground. Nirvana?

The PSR is a concept of the mind, which has intuition and reason. Intuition is the source of our knowledge of the Will. Reason is the consequence of separartion and time. The mind and forms are all illusions. The only way we can talk about the world and noumena is through the categories however. Complete personal individuality is denied by German idealists, as it is in philosophies of India and the Islamic world, and yet freedom rather servile piety is teleogical end. But ye speaking of any teleology or forms is strange and can only be strange from the position that Will is fundamental.

What's doing the objectivication? Well i think it's Will, the primordial faculty. Reason-thinking come from Will. This is interesting because we usually think of a conceptualization and only then an act of will. But will produces thinking and it's object is the Forms. Then thinking reduces to its base, the primordial will. I assume after death for Schopenhauer we are again pure will, pure anarchy, complete freedom. No more thinking, at least as we know that

From my understanding mind (Idea) comes from Will for Schopenhauer. So instead of as for Aquinas where will is a power of the power of reason inside the soul, reason comes after will. But the escape from striving is the Forms for Schop. although Will wins over mind in the end (nirvana?).. This is all very fascinating. The subject creates the world so that the world can create it in turn. All in different respects. However pure will and reason/Idea are two dualities that must fold together into one principle. Freedom is the goal

My impression of Schopenhauer is that he was a brilliant writer with an unlucky hex over his head. He tried to split reason and will, as if they were separate things. Spinoza said all was mind with no will. Scopenhauer said all was will without mind. They both have a truth. All these idealist were talking about different aspects of the same thing. Like an elephant..

Are you questioning that Hegel is an idealist? Most scholars say he was. The world is universals and we are Idea. His lectures on the philosophy of religion is theology as well

In this model, the Father is the source of all knowledge, the thing about which all signs ultimately refer, the ground of being; the Son is the Word, the mediating symbol through which all things are known; and the Holy Spirit is the meaning, the interpretant, that which indwells the soul and interprets. T — Count Timothy von Icarus

Father= Absolute
Son= Notion
Holy Spirit= Concept

Do you read the texts differently?

Thus, the dark principle is inherent in the Being of beings; the root of self-will, and the evil that inevitably springs from it, are necessary to existence, and to the self-actualization of God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is like Ying and Yang. If we are free than our evil is not necessary. "Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived." (Kant's thesis for the Third Antimony). Paradox is essential to Hegel's scheme; he thinks paradox is good for the mind. It takes intuition and reason, the union of which is intellect. Then you can see freedom and fate united without having to combine their content.

The world is the unfolding of the Spirit. This table is a part of the unfolding. Therefore this table is Spirit. I think Hegel is making a distinction between the empirical and the rational. What is rational is actual and vice verse. But the empirical is just the empirical and we don't have to stop seeing leaves and kittens as other than finite things. It's about dialectic, which a mechanism cannot imitate

For Hegel on religion, the most important work is Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. I am going to reread it sometime this year. The arguments about pantheism have to be understood in line with the Phenomenology of Mind, section on "Perception", however, which ends by saying that we never encounter a particular, but always universals. The argument extends throughout that whole section. At the end of the lesser Logic's second edition's Preface, Hegel writes "(S)ince science is the self-development of the Concept , an assessment of science through the Concept is not so much a judgment upon it as an advancing towards it." That gets right to the heart of the matter. Hegel's does have his cake and eats it to because that is the only way to do dialectic in the sense that he understood that word. A Universal is the Idea, which is Concept, which is Absolute by way of Notion. That's the ordering I understand them in. Is that pantheism? I think these are matters which don't fall into a one word category

Yes the Absolute for Hegel is an evolution of Spirit. There is a tension between Fate and Freedom in Hegel, and a tension between God and empirical history. He has it both ways, with God at the top and the bottom (which approaches the top). That's all i have time to write now. I respond to all the rest above in a few hours

The question of whether there can be a mathematical infinity is a good question for mathematicians and physicists. We are back with Hegel being a pantheist in disguise. If the world is Spirit/God and God is infinite then the world is infinite. Yet reality is called the One by Hegel, because ultimately one and infinity are the same (Absolute Infinity). So it is pantheism. Parmenides wrote of non-duality, and his student Zeno tried to prove from logic that the world is both infinite and One. Hegel writes a lot about infinity because kant did

"Now it is evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get it's reality, if not from it's cause? And how could the cause give that reality to the effect, unless it also possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect. But this is manifestly true not merely for the effects whose reality is actual or formal, but also for ideas in which only objective reality is considered... [T]he very nature of an idea is such that of itself it needs no formal reality other than what it borrows from my thought, of which it is the mode. But that a particular idea contains this as opposed to that objective reality is surely owing to some cause in which there is at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality contained in the idea... Moreover, even though the reality that I am considering in my ideas is merely objective reality, I ought not on that account to suspect that there is no need for the same reality to be formally in the cause of these ideas, but that it suffices for it to be in them objectively. For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by there very nature, so a formal mode of being belongs to the cause of ideas".

That's Descartes in the Third Meditation. I think this argument is often overlooked, which is why i mentioned it in the OP

Kant's contemporary Jacobi, in his famous Letters on Spinoza (1785), wrote: "Through faith we know we have a body, and that other bodies, and other thinking beings are present outside us." I believe he was in line with Kant except that he uses the word "faith" instead of "intuition". If they are distinct that would be too many faculties

There are many editions of the Logic. I have the one by the Hackett Publishing Company. Check out the last paragraph of the preface to Hegel's second edition. It says, "Just as it was rightly said of the true that it is 'index sui et falsi' but that the true is not known by starting from the false, so the Concept is the understanding both of itself and of the shape without Concept, but the latter does not from its own inner truth understand the Concept."

Do you find this in your edition?

He goes on: "Science [his logic/dialectic] understands feeling and faith, but science can only be assessed through the Concept (as that on which it rests."

So the end is already the beginning. Hegel critizes Kant a lot, but he was insistent that his logic takes different steps and and reflections from Kant. Does he not say here that one must know one's own mind??

When Hegel speaks of understanding it is of a lower function than the intellect (which speculates in universals). Kant's intuitions where in his understanding. So what is true for the understanding may not apply to the mind as a whole, the intellect. This is the Absolute

Confused by what your objection is. There is a difference between understanding a thing and cognating it. Ultimately cognition is to understand the infinite but it can never grasp it. It sees what they called the beatific vision but it does not turn it into something finite by which to understand

I have no problem with scientific philosophy. Physics, as you say, is half philosophy, half empirical. What floats my spiritual boat is God as forms. But words like God or Deus is not really important. When i see a lion, i can cognate ever deeper understanding of its nature and animality. There is some kind of dualism that seems nevessary within our consciousness

For Christians (which I am not) the Trinity has 3 persons sharing one 'nature' (reason and will, mind). It's basically three persons in one person. I love to discover ideas in other traditions that apply in ways to my own thoughts and beliefs. If God is closer to me than i am to myself then there is no duality there. Aquinas himself says that God is IN everything as cause, as presence, and surprisingly in his essence. At the end of his life he called his theology "straw" (animal food, fit for animals), as he apparently had a non-dual mystical experience that surpassed his carefully reasoned works

That's interesting because in theology relation is the only difference between persons of the Trinity. They are completely one, but a one that relates 3 ways

Faith is a different, unique form of knowledge. Kant was in a bind because his reason could not prove there was something besides appearance and his intuition was locked unto the empirical. He spoje of faith but the leap was very great. The philosophers that came after him, starting with Fitche, wanted to go beyond understanding and beyond reason to intellect, a union of intuition and (abstract) thought. Kant keep his mental powers separate while others wanted a more holistic use of the mind

Yet without intuition you can't have faith, the act Kant considered the crown of practical reason

"ut the Idea that is all-embracing even with respect to content is set up by Kant as the postulated harmony between nature (or necessity) and the purpose of freedom: as the final purpose of the world thought of as realized." Hegel, lesser Logic, para. 55

"This" (experience) is what is- FOR us. Universe is a word that implies a cohesion of the world of sense and its laws. Compared to the Absolute the world is "no thing" because that implies separation. The only way to do life is to have goals, which is paradoxical because spiritual is about letting go. Yes there is a deep paradox between a spiritual message (like that of Jim Newman and Tony Parsons) and the driven life as described by people like Napoleon Hill. The line between paradox and contradiction is not, however always exact. Often its back to "I think therefore I am"

Have you read Being and Nothingness by Sartre? He takes the concepts of "in itself" vs "for itself" from Hegel, noting that the nothing, the in itself, is coiled up in being ("for itself"). To be for yourself means you have feelings and consciousness. Even a rock has an in itself, or is that the noumena.. Anyway, Spinoza at the beginning of the Ethics argues iirc that for God to be infinite, he would have to be everything. So i agree that Spinoza denied the existence of the world, and I think Hegel wanted to give history/reality more of a substance.

Thanks for information. If for Spinoza God is everything and yet God is not identified with the world, then the world is illusionary (as acosmism says) while what exists is Thought. So I am not sure any kind of materialism would work with Spinoza. I know Einstein liked him..

Here is some of the spiritual tradition that was a early precursor to German idealism (quotes taken from Timothy Freke's book on Christian mystics)

"In the reality, intuitively know by the mystics, we can no longer speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only One being, that is the super-essence of all." John van Ruysbroeck

"God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to the All. God is creating this whole universe, full and entire, in this present moment." Meister Eckhart

"I have seen the One who is, and how He is the being of all creatures." Angela of Foligno

"The one work we should rightly undertake is eradication of the self. Could you completely forget yourself even for just an instant, you would be given everything." Meister Eckhart

"The world is pregnant with God." Angela of Foligno

"Simple people imagine that they should see God as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God, and I, we are one." Meister Eckhart

"I AM can be spoken by no creature, but by God alone. I must become God and God must become me, so completely that we share the I eternally." Meister Eckhart

"Someone who is joined to the Lord is One Spirit." St. Paul

"If the only prayer you say in your whole life is 'thank you,' that would be enough." Meister Eckhart

We exist as nothing which is why Hegel speaks of positive and negative. Negative is passage, change, (whenever he uses the word negative, some change is occuring in the dialectic) while positive is philosophical determination of truth. Yin and Yang. Maybe negative is the matter and positive is the form. Hmm

Kant named the noumena such because all we can do is think about it. It is never in our direct experience. His phenomena is the contingent, the negative, change.

A "bad" or spurious infinity is one like life, where its the endless striving just for striving. An infinite object would have to be the universe, but "to be determined" is to be made (or remade) spiritual

Your quote is from his perspective as living a life like ours. It's not denying that heaven is actual and your there *although* we experiennce life now as a journey, not a destination

To my understanding Hegel held that God/Spirit is everything and everything is becoming, which in turn is the sublating (erasing and preserving anew) of being and nothing. Becoming is beyond being

I have not read Fitche but I've wanted too for a long time. These paradigms shift between philosophers because it is difficult to cognate spirit-forms and square it with our finite experience in the material world (or at least what we process as finite)

Does self consciousness come from the individual, or did God exist before you were born. "If I were to say God exists, this would not be true. He is a being beyond being... You must love not God, not Spirit, not Son, not-image, but as He is" (Meister Eckhart). So the starting point would be the same as the beginning in that the whole precedes the parts but the parts have all of the whole in them

As in Spinozian immortality? I think with death there is something gained and something lost. Which is you is hard to tell. But the movement of self-consciousness is all we ever experience now



It is relevant because we think with a brain AND with Infinite Intelligence. If the brain and spinal cord are made of form and matter we can distinguish the lots and images of both with regard to thought



Ive never thought of it that way before. However Spinoza identified God with nature, which changes. So it both changes and changes not, which was Hegel's point in his dialectic. If it's pantheism, then it has more belief in the reality of the world

Yes but Hegel writes "Spirit is activity in the sense in which the Scoolmen already said of God that he is absolute actuosity. The spirit's being active implies, however, that it manifest itself outwardly. Accordingly, it is not to be considered as 'ens' lacking all process, the way it was regarded in the older metaphysics, which separated s spirit's inwardness that lacked process from its outwardness. It is essential that the spirit be considered in its concrete actuality, in its energy, and more precisely in such a way that its utterances are recognized as being determined through its inwardness."

Hegel taught acomism, as did Spinoza. Thought, as with Aquinas, was the greatest good. Dear Hegel thought Aquinas wrong, however, in that God seemed static and overlording in the pre-Descartes world. Modern philosophy is subjected to more influence by the collective unconscious. Unconscious or subconscious anyway is the limit of life

Kant says that intuition speaks of God but reason speaks of the world. "Wisdom is willing and unwilling to be called Zeus" (Heraclitus). Why should we assume there is something in reality, a noumena, tha we can not explore?