Examples of thesis and antithesis

 

Thesis: British and French power hegemony after World War 1
Anti-thesis: Hitler
Synthesis: USA hegemony

 

Thesis: Traditional conservatism
Anti-thesis: Marxism
Synthesis: Globalism

 

Thesis: USA government losing domestic power
Anti-thesis: 9/11
Synthesis: Patriot act, NSA spying

History as a dialectical process

 

In concrete terms, this meant that historical advance did not proceed through a series of smooth transitions. Once the potentialities of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain mode of life, its historical role was over; its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly were now experienced as fetters, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations. Thus, each phase of the historical process could be said to contain the seeds of its own destruction and to “negate” itself; the consequence was the emergence of a fresh society, representing another stage in a progression whose final outcome was the formation of a rationally ordered community with which each citizen could consciously identify himself and in which there would therefore no longer exist any sense of alienation or constraint. Somewhat curiously, the type of community Hegel envisaged as exemplifying this satisfactory state of affairs bore a striking resemblance to the Prussian monarchy of his own time.

The Christian roots of Hegelian thought

In the spirit of the Romantic movement in Germany, Hegel pursued the goal of unifying man and God by virtually identifying God as man, and thereby submerging the former into the latter. Hegelianism was a "philosophic religion of self in the form of a theory of history. The religion is founded on an identification of the self with God" 1 It should not be necessary to add at this point that "the self here is not the individual, but the collective organic species 'self.'" In a youthful essay on "The Positivity of the Christian Religion," written at the age of 25, Hegel revealingly objects to Christianity for "separating" man and God except "in one isolated individual" (Jesus), and placing God in another and higher world, to which man's activity could contribute nothing. Four years later, in 1799, Hegel resolved this problem by offering his own religion, in his "The Spirit of Christianity." In contrast to orthodox Christianity, in which God became man in Jesus, for Hegel Jesus's achievement was, as a man, to become God!

 

To Hegel, Jesus is not God become man, but man become God. This is the key idea on which the entire edifice of Hegelianism was to be constructed: there is no absolute difference between the human nature and the divine. They are not two separate things with an impassable gulf between them. The absolute self in man, the homo noumenon, is not mere godlike … it is God. Consequently, in so far as man strives to become "like God," he is simply striving to be his own real self. And in deifying himself, he is simply recognizing his own true nature.

Alienation

It is a basic idea of Hegel's philosophy that whatever is, is, in the last analysis, Absolute Idea (Absolute Mind, Absolute Spirit, or, in popular language, God) and that Absolute Idea is neither a set of fixed things nor a sum of static properties but a dynamic Self, engaged in a circular process of alienation and dealienation. Nature is only a self-alienated (self-estranged) form of Absolute Mind, and man is the Absolute in the process of dealienation. The whole of human history is the constant growth of man's knowledge of the Absolute and, at the same time, the development of self-knowledge of the Absolute, who through finite mind becomes self-aware and "returns" to himself from his self-alienation in nature.

 

Finite mind, however, also becomes alienated. It is an essential characteristic of finite mind (man) to produce things, to express itself in objects, to objectify itself in physical things, social institutions, and cultural products; and every objectification is, of necessity, an instance of alienation: the produced objects become alien to the producer. Alienation in this sense can be overcome only in the sense of being adequately known. Again, it is the vocation of man as man to serve as the organon of the self-knowledge of the Absolute. To the extent that he does not perform this function, he does not fulfill his human essence and is merely a self-alienated man.

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