HEGEL’S REDEMPTION OF LOGIC AND THE LIFE OF RIGHTS – Daniel Perez
“Hegel always stood completely within his milieu. The riddles of his surroundings worked deep within him… Out of this spirit too arose Hegel’s Logic – no ordinary logic, but something entirely different… One is moved to say that the most singular of all kinds of human striving on the highest-level manifests itself in this Hegelian logic … understood as logos or universal reason.”[Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms, lecture 9, 27Aug1920, GA 199]
About 100 years ago a confluence of events unfolded in Europe. Steiner was giving lectures on the Threefold Social Order and central to this series was a lecture on Aug 27th 1920 to mark Hegel’s 150th birthday. Around that time, it was also nearing the end of the Spanish Flu epidemic, where similar to today the world was thrown into chaos. This summer will mark the 250th anniversary of Hegel’s birth and 100 years’ time from the recognition afforded by Steiner of the lasting deeds of Hegel’s profound work on logic.
Within Hegel’s Logic is a method of perceiving how a synthesis of knowledge and experience brings us into the spiritual. Rather than get pulled into one extreme, or one aspect of reality, we rise above these forces of opposition to live with a higher consciousness. The polarities of East and West, Capitalism and Communism, Cultural life vs Economic are all balanced in the middle region, in the breathing space of the rhythmic system.
We will elaborate an understanding for Hegel’s Science of Logic, and come to understand how his work on the ‘objective spirit’ envisioned the life of rights into the future. The expression of rights, morality and justice are all to be managed within the political domain. This domain is the middle of the three spheres of Threefolding and is the most connected to the earth. It is in many ways the least spiritual. For this reason, extra effort must be exerted to redeem the earthly Ahrimanic logic and raise this life of rights to the spirit.
Speaker
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Daniel PerezDaniel Perez has been a technologist since he was a teenager, at the dawn of the age of the personal computer. He has been programming since he was fifteen, while a student at Green Meadow Waldorf School, and later educated as an Electrical Engineer at the University of Rochester. His own near-death-accident at sixteen, then the death of his mother and father, before his 20th birthday, changed his deep focus on technology towards a balance in life: the threshold between life and death. His adult career has placed him in all areas of technology development, from space-based laser systems to video compression used for teleconferencing. He is currently a Senior Systems Architect for an industrial computer technology company in Boston. Daniel is also a published author of several articles on philosophy and on the board of Trustees for several non-profit organizations, including the Center for Anthroposophy. He met his wife at Green Meadow Waldorf High School and has a son and daughter, both graduates of High Mowing Waldorf School.
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