My Advanced Epis Outlines

Hans Geog Gadamer

outline

I. Foundations of our century?

• Not chronologically defined period
• Not “age of world wars”
• Epochal awareness seems to separate (no fear of catastrophe)

II. Rooted in the 19th Century

• Industrial revolution
• Development of natural Sciences

III. Yet a Departure from 19th Century

• WWI begins with an epochal awareness of leaving an epoch
• A conscious withdrawal even the sharpest rejection of it
• The impressions of the 19th Century as embodying inauthenticity, stylelessness, tastelessness: a combination of materialism and an empty cultural pathos

• Examples:

1. Cubist destruction of Form: no structure, no boundaries, no borders
2. Architecture: as opposed to historizing facades
3. Spiritual situation: anonymous responsibility

IV. Philosophy: Guarding the Limits of Scientific Orientation of Consciousness to the World

• not the simple tension between science and philosophy
• yes, science as the foundation of relation to world
• but how can science be united with traditional forms of relation
• Christian Church
• National consciousness of modern state
• morality of private conscience
• Then the question is: how can man understand himself within the totality of a social reality dominated by science
• Hegel responds
• last attempt to grasp science and philosophy as a unity
• critique the standpoint of subjective consciousness/spirit
• Speculative idealism
• criticism of philosophy of reflection
1. as illness of the romantic mind
2. feeble inwardness
3. external reflection - the raisonnement; a modern sophism
4. Kant and the categorical imperative
• Hegel's law-testing reason
• testing of the binding force of every ought to guide moral reflection to ascertain the moral will
• situations of moral action not ones we have the inner freedom for reflection
• Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
• suicide example: enough reflective sense to ask if it is in accordance to the law of life; to even consider suicide means no longer has reflective sense
• Hegel: morality is living in accordance to the customs of one’s land
• The Objective Spirit: a spirit that surrounds us all and over against which no one has reflective freedom
1. the transendence of the subjective spirit present in the orders of human community

2. a man as a member of a tribe

3. itself as transcended by an absolute spirit

• a form of spirit that contains nothing more in itself that is alien, or in opposition
• How are the objective spirit and subjective spirit related?
1. how is the individual related to world spirit (Hegel)
2. how the individual is related to the moral powers that are the genuine sustaining reality of historical life (Droysen)
3. where the invidual finds himself within the relations of labor, the basic structure of human society (Marx)
• The End: