Magnetic Personality: Hegel

Nothing like Blipfoto to make you feel guilty for slipping and putting up lazy photos to capture an entire day. So I went back to the drawing board and chose to play with the colorful flash filters that came with my Tori Lomography Diana+ camera I got over the holidays. I made a yellow, blue, and green triptych of earplugs, a framed photograph of a sunset in the apartment, and a little Unemployed Philosopher's Guild puppet. But then I started to feel guilty and self-conscious because Blipfoto discourages borders and frames on photos, which seemed to rule out my beautiful (not really) Picnik-aided triptych. And then there's the problem of a triptych being composed of three photographs, not just one, which made me wonder if that actually satisfied Blipfoto's one image a day rule. So we're just going to go with Hegel.

I finally have the space in my life to take a crack at Frederick Copleston's entire A History of Philosophy series so I started with Volume I, Part I last night (Greece & Rome). Within the first few pages, Copleston bounded wildly from a discussion of Ionian culture to Homer, Hesiod, Plato, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and even to modern times, delving into Hegel's views on Indian philosophy. He had this to say:

"Hegel, in his history of philosophy, dismisses Indian philosophy rather curtly, on the ground that it is identical with Indian religion. While admitting the presence of philosophical notions, he maintains that these do not take the form of thought, but are couched in poetical and symbolic form, and have, like religion, the practical purpose of freeing men from the illusions and unhappiness of life rather than knowledge for its own sake. Without committing oneself to agreement with Hegel's view of Indian philosophy (which has been far more clearly presented to the Western world in its purely philosophic aspects since the time of Hegel), one can agree with him that Greek philosophy was from the first thought pursued in the spirit of free science. It may with some have tended to take the place of religion, both from the point of view of belief and conduct; yet this was due to the inadequacy of Greek religion rather than to any mythological or mystical character in Greek philosophy" (32, emphasis in original).