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- For a long time, philosophy has had to justify its mad attempt to talk about invisible essences. Take Hegel:
It is an error on the part of the philosophy of nature to attempt to face up to all phenomena; this is done in the finite sciences, where everything has to be reduced to general conceptions (hypotheses). In these sciences the empirical element is the sole confirmation of the hypothesis, so that everything has to be explained.
My question is: why is philosophy so obsessed with the invisible? With what transcends the “empirical element”? Is there a fear that a strictly empirical philosophy would be too boring? Why do even materialist philosophers produce transcendental concepts?
2. Philosophers keep telling us, there is a piece of (my) mind in everything. As Hegel writes, “Traces of conceptual determination will certainly survive in the most particularized product, although they will not exhaust its nature.”
3. Yet the most painful part of philosophizing remains the disconnect between Mind and Everything, between mind and the world-body. Ideas are less nodes of resistance than they are descriptions of end times. In every ideal Idea, there is the shadow of fallen world.
