Barbara and Adam Maitland have some unwanted guests in their vacation home and they are trying to find a way to get rid of them. Everything was fine and dandy until Adam had to go to the hardware store to get some needed items for his model replica of the small town of Winter River, Connecticut. On their way home they nearly run over a dog that was crossing the street, Adam swerves and misses the dog but crashes into a covered wooden bridge. Holding them up by standing on a plank of wood, keeping them from falling into the river below was the small dog Adam had avoided.
The dog becomes bored and steps off the plank and into the river they go and drown. They later find themselves back at home not thinking anything of it, Adam attempts to go outside and thinks he is just going to grab some things out of the car but is pulled through some infinite abyss into a new place filled with strange sand worm creatures. Barbara grabs him and pulls him back, Adam is surprised by her angst, “I’ve only been gone a few minutes” to which Barbara says “you’ve been gone for hours.” Other strange things start to happen, like strange people moving in. Luckily for them they have the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased”, in an emergency they need to draw a door, but don’t forget to knock three times.
Other than the sand worm realm which seems to be a barrier that prevents the Maitlands from leaving their home, they are in the same world in the afterlife as the one they departed soon after their accident. The physical world they occupy as spirits is the same physical world they once lived in. There is no idealistic world to which they moved on to, they live in the same world that they died in. That is to suggest the spirit should reside in an ideal world after it is no longer housed by a body. Descartes would believe so, the mind/spirit and body are two parts and make up the dualism of mind and body. This is how we can exist and God also exists but not amongst our physical world of our bodies but in an ideal realm of spirit.
Georg Hegel had another idea, there is no dualism, there is only one substance. Hegel’s philosophy falls more inline with the OG philosopher Aristotle and not so much of his successor Plato. Much like Spinoza, Hegel felt metaphysics was monistic in form, there is no fancy world of forms in which divine aspects present themselves, they are in the same drab world we live in we just need to experience them.
Hegel was on the path to become a Lutheran pastor but decided instead to pursue a career in the University as a philosopher, must pay better. However initially Hegel was not paid very much at all for his work, he more or less would work on tips. In order to get any sort of tenured position to be in the same conversation as Kant he needed to write a book. The Phenomenology of Spirit was the first book Hegel wrote, and, in the book, he attempts to explain the role of the spirit which traverses between two levels of consciousness. The first consciousness is reality everything visible and invisible and the infinite as well. As we realize what is true at any given moment as we explore further to peel away at more knowledge, we tend to meet the infinite and cannot explain much further and lead to contradictions or incoherent understanding. The understanding we obtain without the contradiction is our self-consciousness, I am here right now. I know this to be true.
Although the concept of the spirit is present in the Lutheran faith, it is part of the trinity. The spirit in the Lutheran faith probably would be considered to be in the idealistic realm, or the world of forms. Hegel’s use of spirit in his book does not transcend from some other world, it comes from the physical world and leads us to understanding, it would be more pantheistic than dualistic.
Seems like Hegel held on to some theological aspects in his philosophy, he was not convinced of Kant’s suggestion that all knowledge can be found using reason alone. Thoughts like that led to things like the French revolution, tired of being illtreated the people revolted against the aristocracy because well they could. In fact when writing his first book, Hegel would hear the roaring of French cannons during the Napoleonic battles that were going on just after the revolution.
Ideally metaphysics would just make sense, but it doesn’t, so we do what we can to understand the world however strange it can be sometimes.
Author: admin
Obviously my interests include philosophy. I think thinking and thought are the beginning of every great thing. It’s how we understand and perceive the world. Periodically I’ll change things up and blog about something math or computer science related or even a blog about mythology. I am not political, trendy, or savvy, but I do like a good story. That is why I try and find a movie clip that hints or encompasses what I want to blog about. Sometimes the relevance is there, sometimes it’s a reach and I just really love the movie that I put in the post. The intent and purpose of my blog is to make you think, make me think and together our thoughts can be shared in a collection of material.