Introductory Kernel for Future Work: From the Hegelian Conceptual Dialectic to the new Etheric Cognition
Scott Elliot Hicks
At the heart of Hegel’s philosophy burns a purifying, crystallizing fire. His speculative logic represents the preparatory steps toward a fully modern, Michaelic form of cognition: a clairvoyant thinking in which will-filled acts of human meaning and perception merge with the new life flowing through the world. Michael is the leading spirit of our time and is pouring down the highest new impulses of heart-thinking into humanity right now. Taking up these new seeds, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) pointed the way beyond the brilliant extract left behind by Hegel (and Fichte and Schelling): “The profound ideas of German idealism must gain further substance through what can come from the spiritual domain, enabling them to be raised from mere ideas to living beings of the spiritual worlds.”i In this light, Hegel’s system appears as a mighty, necessary precursor, a burning tornado in the furnace of thought that prepares the soul for true spiritual experience in the spiritual world itself. We can become more than faithful dogs or cows trapped in the night.
For Hegel, the Absolute is not an eternal, static perfection shining like a star at the top of a Christmas tree, but a dynamic, self-actualizing Spirit. As H.S. Harris notes, “The Urbild or archetype for the mind’s image of itself is its conception of its place in Nature.”ii The Absolute must particularize itself, becoming determinate through its own logical necessity. “It is rationally essential,” Hegel insists, “that the absolute not be something indeterminate, but instead particularize itself... and be recognized, known, and envisaged in it.” This is the archetype of self-actualization: the Absolute comes to know itself as determinate knowing, as Concept (Begriff), as Spirit.
In Hegel’s Science of Logic, the Concept is the living, self-moving totality in which thought and being are unified. It is not a token or symbol culled from sense experience, but the dynamic essence that generates and determines reality. Unlike the static categories that the Understanding provides to structure reality into little boxes, the Concept is reason in action, the concrete universal that particularizes itself, passes through difference and negation, and returns to itself enriched. As Hegel states in the Doctrine of the Concept, it is “the realm of subjectivity or of freedom:” the logical structure of self-consciousness actualizing itself in the world. The Concept unfolds in three syllogistic moments: Universality, Particularity, and Singularity. This triadic movement is not linear, but a circulatory process in which each moment mediates the others. In essence, the Concept is the logical expression of the Absolute’s self-actualization. It is Spirit thinking itself into existence. Crucially, in the Greater Logic, the Concept sublates or distills (aufhebt) the earlier doctrines of Being and Essence, preserving them within a higher, self-transparent unity. It becomes the “truth” of Being, because here determinacy is no longer immediate or reflected, but self-posited and self-comprehending. Thus, the Concept is the “free, creative power” that “gives itself its own content.” It is the rational core of all reality: the living fire of Spirit in its pure logical form, before it externalizes itself as Nature and returns as Spirit in time.
This process of human knowing (Erkennen) is no abstract, passive mirroring of the forms of nature or the technological artifices of mankind. In the Encyclopedia Logic (§24) Hegel clarifies: “The original calling of man, to be an image of God, can be realized only through Erkennen.” Cognition is the etherization of the will, the transformation of thought into world-working life. The human being is not only a cosmic mirror, but is united with its creative unfolding. This is speculative Idealism’s core: “The Idea,” Hegel writes, “is at once what is quite simply effective and actual as well” (E.L. §142). The Idea or flexible rational archetype has outputs in two directions: both in rational concepts and in the limestone, the fir tree, the clover.
The Concept’s work leads toward the overarching experience of the Ideal. The Concept is the luminous, dynamic node where thinking organizes comprehension in a field of pure knowledge. It is immanently real, active, and historical. Concepts are not isolated; each shines into another, linked to its opposite, its contradiction, its death and rebirth. To think the Concept is to experience a morphing, self-generating world of ideas—to participate in God’s creative work. It is like a revolving door that peers into infinite revolving doors on all horizons. Hegel leads this activity to a complete self-grasping of the human I in God’s I, as achieved in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s “Absolute Knowing.” Yet this occurs in a conceptual world not yet inhabited by living spiritual beings, such as the angels, spirits of fire and spirits of personality. Steiner’s work provides the crucial step: to pass through the door of the Concept into real spiritual life, love, and community with beings—the transition from Vorstellung (representation) to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. The complete transformation of the lower self into the higher spiritual self is then accomplished through the ‘essence exchange’ discussed in Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s Cognitive Yoga...
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