iain mcgilchrist the matter with things review

More precisely, it is shown that Cusa mystagogical hermeneutics developed an analogical middle path between 'univocity' and 'equivocity', which keeps the balance between the extremes of a representationalist, scientific world-picture and the relativistic mindset of post-modern cultural criticism. Particular attention is paid to Cusa’s ‘doxological reduction’, which represents a spiritually grounded alternative to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and avoids the main flaws of the classical phenomenological tradition: Heidegger's forgetfulness of Epimetheus (the only seemingly stupid brother of Prometheus) and the 'fact / value' dichotomy of the post-Kantian tradition of modern philosophy. This comprehensive essay turns the telescope round: Looking with the eyes of Nicholas on Cusa on our ‘enlightened modern civilizations’, it argues that Cusa’s vision of the new beginnings of his time relates to the trodden paths of (post-)modernity like the dawn of a forgotten future to the dusk of a conceptually and imaginatively exhausted period of history. With 'the tremendous power of the negative' before which everything is 'doomed' as that core, this current is the greatest current in Western philosophy, and now, as dialectical materialism, is the epistemology of the future. I also argue that the response of the bourgeoisie to the revolutionary core that Marx and Engels brought out in Neoplatonism is fundamental to why Hegel's thorough-going Neoplatonism is not recognised and acknowledged. I address Magee's claim that Hegel was an Hermeticist and argue that Magee misrepresented both the Hermetica and Hermeticism in order to argue that claim.

I provide evidence from Hegel's own sources. My thesis also argues that Hegel's system, encapsulated in his Encyclopaedia, is based on Proclus' triad of triads and that Hegel was fully aware of Cusanus whose De docta ignorantia was also structured on that triad, never mentioning him both because of the degree to which he was indebted to him and because of the implications of that acknowledgement.

By arguing that Hegel was not only a mystic, but that he was specifically the consummate Neoplatonist, I address in my thesis the part his philosophy played in a continuum that was and is by its nature always open to development - running from the idealism of Plotinus (consciousness is primary) to its 'inversion' in the materialism of Marx (matter is primary).

Iain mcgilchrist the matter with things review