Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lived from 1770 to 1831. He was a
German philosopher who used a historical perspective, coupled with idealism, to
bring about paradigms that would help shape the world. His thought would lead
to most of the great philosophical ideas of the last century: Marx and
Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis, to name a
few. One of his best known concepts is his idea that mind or spirit manifests
itself in a set of contradictions or polar opposites that are ultimately
integrated without losing the core concepts of either side. This can be
summarized as a process that goes from a thesis and an antithesis to a
synthesis.
With
Descartes, there was a split between mind and body. Hegel tried to integrate
those two back together. He was interested in the spirit, which we can think of
as God, as embodied in the world, in all matter. But this spirit can evolve; it
doesn’t stay at the lowest form of matter. Gradually, spirit can become more
conscious, more aware, more articulate. For example, consider a rock. That’s
physical matter, but there’s not really spirit in there. Spirit is conscious,
aware, free, rational; pretty much everything a rock isn’t. Hegel says that the
ultimate embodiment of this spirit is human consciousness. Human beings, for
Hegel, are not just accidents of nature; they are reason itself—the reason
inherent in nature—that has come to life and self-consciousness. Beyond human
beings – or the hypothetical idea of other finite rational beings that might
exist on other planets – there is no self-conscious reason in Hegel's universe.
And he thought of the overall spirit, which is moving along and evolving, as
being like God. God, to Hegel, is not completely separate from the human
spirit. God develops through the creation of a thesis, which has an antithesis
inherent within it, and the two form a synthesis, which becomes a new thesis.
And spirit, or God, has to be embodied in the world. It’s not separate from it,
as Descartes thought.
Hegel’s
philosophy of aesthetics portrayed art as having one particular purpose: to
allow us to contemplate and enjoy images of our own spiritual freedom—which
images are beautiful precisely because they give expression to
our freedom. In other words, art’s purpose is to enable us to bring to
mind the truth about ourselves, to enable us to become aware of who we truly
are as free human beings. Art is there not just for art's sake, but for
beauty's sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of free
human self-expression and self-understanding. Furthermore, art is not only just
a matter of form, but of content. Art must contain within itself the freedom
and richness of spirit embodied and living in the world. Since the spirit is understood
as “God,” the content of truly beautiful art is in one respect the divine. Yet, it's not separate from
human life. As we have just seen, Hegel argues that the Idea – or “God” –
comes to consciousness of itself only in and through finite human beings. The
content of beautiful art must thus be the divine in human form or the divine
within humanity itself
– as purely human freedom.
So
what does this mean for social media? Well, it presents a surprisingly
optimistic viewpoint. Due to the theme of progression through the thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis, the only way for a website - or any work that is to be judged – to
be considered “bad” is if it fails to be inspired and to, in turn, inspire. And
the best social media websites should somehow allow us to contemplate our own
spiritual freedom, and inspire us to discuss that freedom with each other.
Perhaps the idea of a social media website devoted solely to discussing human
freedom sounds a bit pretentious. And it is. This isn’t an explicit goal, but
rather, a by-product of a marriage of form and content into beauty. That beauty
will, in turn, inspire each viewer to privately ponder their own freedom and
their place in the divine.
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