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Dead Objects In Hegel's The Spirit Of Christianity

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Dead Objects In Hegel's The Spirit Of Christianity
Hegel's broken manuscript on Love is a great transition to one of his more popular works, The Spirit of Christianity, because he begins speculating the idea of love, and what it means to achieve that love. He attempts to answer many philosophical or otherwise unanswerable questions such as what it means to achieve "true union" and what it takes to maintain that bond. Since this manuscript was probably written "a year or eighteen months before The Spirit of Christianity" (pg. 302), many of these ideas were carried over into his new work in hopes of further speculating the conception of love and connecting them to Christianity. One of these ideas he introduces is the concept of dead objects and their relation to true union. Further, he ties it …show more content…
Even if true union is somehow obtained, the couple must continually be faced with difficult tasks such as indifference to possession and property and excluding all opposition. Hegel also counter argues by speculating if both individuals share the same possessions and property, then the individuals are not faced with such difficulty. This is impossible: "Even if the use of the property is common to both, the right to its possession would remain undecided, and the thought of this tight would never be forgotten, because everything which men possess has the legal form of property" (pg. 308). Even if it is agreed that the commodity of goods would be shared and equally common to both, it is still the right of one of the two individuals. Again, so many oppositions make true union nearly impossible over a time span. Shame enters the relation consistently because of the abundance of dead objects, and the individuals are forced to combat this shame, but this fight to eliminate shame is the very reason why no love is pure. Paragraph after paragraph, Hegel follows the same basic pattern: definition of terms, argument, counter argument, a counter argument to the counter argument, etc. Thus, Hegel seems to arrive at no solid or concrete conclusion. It is important to note that in the prologue, it mentions that a huge chunk of the manuscript was never recovered, but even so, the arguments present show that there are many conflicting views and ideas that clash with each other. Hegel's Love presents very surprising, genius ideas but had a tiny spark of hog posh that makes this manuscript an incomplete

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