I think what this means is that logic displays the tools the individual mind has for ‘taking over’ thought of the past and present. And, courtesy of the Phenomenology, there is a lot of ground to cover. I used to wonder what differentiated the material covered in the section on “Spirit” from that covered in “Reason”: and, for a couple of years, my answer has been (variously formulated) that the chapter on spirit introduces, in its meditations on the metaphysics of morals, the “Great Moral Fact”: the space opened up by a morality of intersubjective recognition includes all of humanity’s rational conduct, all the wonders of the ancient world and all the terrors of the modern world.

“Spirit” is the “Great Moral Fact” of the holistic importance of all literature for descrying moral prospects in the present. Whereas it remains controversial whether the Quine-Duhem thesis that ‘the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science’ really portrays scientific research correctly, Gadamer’s unpacking of Hegel’s account of Bildung should make us comfortable with Hegel’s gigantic span of world-history considered under the heading of Spirit, “The I that is a we and the we that is an I”. The roots of literature in the historical experience of peoples really offer the ultra-modernist no escape from an historical depth to complement and counter-act the spurting excitement of a collected present. (Dante and Jonathan Franzen are together on this track.)

Purifying the “natural” approach of religion to this whole of humanity’s doings, Hegel’s logic, in its ‘absolute’ character which merely reflects self into self, takes its myriad forms and topics addressed because the individual’s experience of the Great Moral Fact of world culture and literature necessarily takes the form of individual cogitations and velleities. In a Kantian spirit, Hegel’s logic “projects” world-history (which it cannot be innocent of) onto modernity (which it cannot escape). The secondary efforts at elucidating this connection, the “moral” or social sciences, require that this encounter between Man and Civilization be kept in mind more or less whole. (I do not think any of this ought to be too shocking to experienced Hegel hands, but it goes some of the way towards explaining seemingly baroque features of the Science of Logic).

Comments strongly desired – I’d like to get clearer about this sort of thing.

Like I said, I took the War On Terror pretty casually; my whole life seemed like a terror attack, so I was dead to the deepening ethical significances of 9/11 as it ramified to Afghanistan (I was against it) and Iraq (I was for it, enough to write GWB an email telling him he was the commander-in-chief in a time of crisis; in a separate incident, I mailed him copies of Weber and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus). Does any of this make sense? I don’t know what you would ask of my sensibilities at the time. We didn’t put up an American flag, or commiserate about the events; even as a cautious supporter of the Palestinian intifada against the Israelis, I didn’t feel like I had very much to apologize for in terms of Islamist attacks. In early 2002, I took a plane trip back to Pittsburgh, where I went to college and started going crazy. A country on edge, Eastern standard time.

I was struck by how very similar airplane travel was after 9/11, making me think that people weren’t taking the ramifications seriously enough. Then the very-casually related Iraq War started piling up casualties, and I, faced with aggressive new liberals slagging Bush, started to keep quiet about anything not related to my system of delusions about academia. Over the years, I’ve read many articles about the World Trade Center (which I visited the top of as a child) and how its powerful futurism — viewed from Arab-heavy Northern New Jersey, it was like landing on the moon — is about as obsolescent as Saturn V rockets. More and more obvious ramifications continued to pile up as many terrorism-free but wary years followed.

On this anniversary, I guess what I can say is that the system of ‘social and economic organization’ represented by the WTC and its victims seems alive in the Lebensform of many Americans today; and that those of us emotionally distant from the tragedy of that day have missed a lot since. Still, the truth is the truth and like a T-shirt on an old Riot Grrl record had it I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN –

In a way, being older helps immensely: young people in their twenties are supposed to be shot from cannons, achieving the world even if they gain little from it. As a “zero-worker” for several years now, I was as “far from the madding crowd” as you could be — and it was okay, but it just takes something out of you to be off the grid that long. A friend of mine once asked me, as we were listening to a Notwist record: “Do you think you’ll still like this music when you’re thirty?” Something for young people in general to consider: do you think that your “idols”, your goals, the standards that you vehemently uphold, the praise you want to win from others — do you think it will still matter to you ten or twenty years later? Never occurred to me —