Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has a good claim on being the most influential philosopher of all time. He is a philosopher of change, of progress, of history, of how our consciousness itself has changed, and, more than anything, of freedom itself.

Every philosopher that came after him has drawn on or responded to him in some way, but, more than this – the Cold War, communist regimes, liberal interventionism, conservative politics are all marked by the fingerprints of Hegel’s bold ideas.

To know Hegel is to know us, to know yourself, and, as we’ll see, to really know – a word we’ll come to interrogate – is a world-spanning, soul penetrating, painful, joyous, fulfilling journey that will change the foundations of how you think.

His most well-known work – 1807’s The Phenomenology of Spirit – is a modern epic, a heroic story, a heavenly ladder to, well, absolute freedom and absolute knowledge. It’s an education that spans the ages, a roadmap to the history of human thought, a story about how to become a philosopher – and a humble claim to know the mind of God and the universe too.

He summed up much of what was happening in the opening chapters of the modern age: what it means to be rational, to be empirical, to be romantic, to be emotional, to be modern and religious, to be heroic and do one’s duty all at the same time. He wanted to unite the individual with the universal.

He’s dense, impenetrable, infuriating, some say just a bad writer; some idealise him, others despise him, but to journey with him, as one commentator has said – to take on the task – is the most serious thing you can do in your life.

I want to show, while avoiding complex language as much as possible, how Hegel can change how you think, and show us how to see the historical in the personal, the big picture in the smallest action. Our fellow travellers will be ancient stoics, medieval Christians, modern scientists, unhappy souls and beautiful ones, romantic idealists, Napoleon, the reasonable thinker, the slave and the master.

And we’ll do it all by starting from a single simple thought – your simple thought – and developing into an entire universe.

This is also the story of a man, lost on the moors, searching for civilization, on a journey to try to find the meaning of human history. Continue Reading

Then & Now

A Bug’s Life: Master/ Slave Dialectic

Problem, Reaction, Solution.

Problem: Imagine being denied planning permission on your 27 story building development.

Reaction: Raise rents, Increase interest rates push part time employment and import hundreds of thousands of people = Housing crisis.

Solution: No purchasing power, No Private Property, No Privacy at all… You’ll own nothing and be happy? Now try denied a 127 story development, Some might even lobby on behalf of the developer.

Recently a friend of mine was denied access to further education via a State owned & run educational facility because of a Data Release Form. In an interview with the CEO (IanMolloy@ddletb.ie) he gave the speech Hoper gives in “A Bugs Life”

Our CEOs (Grasshoppers) want our Data not because they “NEED IT” or will die without it, it is because it is useful for organizational efforts, it is just to control and manipulate us. We do NEED food, water, home and clothing but they have already commodities our requirements for life, We are viewed as a slave class in the minds of the over indoctrinated managerial Class, We produce the food for us and them, We build infrastructure they benefit from, We maintain our working world and care for and educate each other while they consume it ALL flying to Davos, Bilderberg, WHO, IMF, ECB blablabla to plan our demise so the earth they are killing will not effect their way of life, just you and your family, below you will find a flyer detailing how our grasshoppers are steeling from you, your children and grand children. Are you going to keep making them strong?