Miss Esta’s O Face (and Jeb’s)
- taken by Mia’s posh iPhone
(That really was a hilarious night.)
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining the luminous summits.” – Karl Marx, 1872
The Marx-Engels Reader
Introduction • xxi
Yet this “scientific socialism” of Marx and Engels was not in a direct line of descent from the teachings of the classical utopian socialists, the early-nineteenth-century fathers of modern socialist thought. Its immediate intellectual source was, rather, German philosophy, particularly that of Hegel. The materialistic conception of history had originated in an inversion of Hegel’s idealist conception of history, an intellectual operation whereby the Hegelian dialectic was, as Engels expressed it in one of his later writings, “placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing and placed upon its feet.” … [Marx, Capital 1873] “It must be turned up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” So Marx and Engels.
The enigma mentioned above will now be apparent. Social theories normally do not originate through turning metaphysical systems of thought “right side up again.” How could Marx’s materialist conception of history arise by means of an inversion of Hegel’s idealist conception? Hegel represents history as the self-realization of a spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows:
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Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in self-objectification as culture – the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit’s “alienation” (Entfremdung) from itself, which appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of “absolute knowledge,” when spirit is finally and fully “at home with itself in its otherness,” having recognized the whole of creation as spirit – Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit’s part.
Such is the argument of Hegel’s great work The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), on which he elaborated further in later writings.
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There is something about quality which is akin to any spiritual enlightenment.
Just as someone can push their brains aside to let through a grand truth,
I think with productions like this you put very creative and
capable people together and let quality happen.
Quality with humor and song? All the better.
Thanks to Jeb for introducing me.
Thanks to the girls for singing along.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog
(watch multiple times, notice more)
This was created during the writer’s strike by Joss Whedon and friends.
wiki: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog
(I know I’m late to the dance, so why didn’t you guys tell me about this sooner?)
If you can’t get enough of Felicity Day, watch her show The Guild,
it’s damn good as well.
from the boxes
My YouLog
The Young Turks