Hegel as Sorcerer: The "Science" of Second Realities and the "Death" of God

A friend asked for an explanation of a remark I recently made on a public forum that the great German philosospher, Hegel, was a “sorcerer.” I’m glad for this opportunity to respond. For the spirit of Hegel is alive and well today in the construction of any Second Reality, of which I regard the recent Obama Campaign to have been a splendid example.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a world-class philosopher — a master of classical philosophy, and a master system-builder. He is usually associated with the period of German Idealism in the decades following Immanuel Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted to elaborate a comprehensive systematic ontology, or “science of being,” from a “logical” or “rational” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological, “goal-directed,” even eschatological, account of human history — a model which was later appropriated by his notable follower Karl Marx, who developed Hegel’s “dialectical science” into his own theory of historical development (“dialectical materialism”), which by “historical necessity” culminates in communism.

Sorcery, or magic, is a conceptual system that asserts the human ability to control the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal, or supernatural means — through, for example, magic words, or an ability to present compelling appearances of fictitious reality.

A Second Reality is such an ersatz reality. The term was coined by Robert Musil to denote a fictitious world imagined to be true by the person creating it, who will then use his construction to mask and thereby “eclipse” genuine, or First Reality.

In 1807, Hegel published his grimoire — i.e., a magician’s book of spells and incantations — the Phänomenologie, which takes as its main goal the transformation of philosophy, the “love of knowledge,” into the final, complete possession of “real knowledge,” by means of his system of “absolute science.” Of his accomplishment the great German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) would write, “No modern propaganda minister could have devised a more harmless-sounding, persuasively progressivist phrase as a screen for the enormity transacted behind it.”

For Hegel, “‘Absolute knowledge’ was to be the form ‘in which the pure consciousness of the infinite is possible without the determinateness of an individual, independent life.’” In short, the Phänomenologie “admits no reality but consciousness…. [Yet] since consciousness must be somebody’s consciousness of something, and neither God nor man is admitted as somebody or something, the consciousness must be consciousness of itself. Its absolute reality is, therefore, properly identified as ‘the identity of identity and nonidentity.’ The substance becomes the subject, and the subject the substance, in the process of a consciousness that is immanent to itself…. The reader would justly ask what a consciousness that is nobody’s consciousness could possibly be?”[1]

And with that question, noetically astute observers realize we must be dealing with a Second Reality: It appears that “Hegel the sorcerer” wants to eclipse our image of reality by a counterimage conjured up to furnish a plausible basis for the action he calls for.

As Vöegelin notes, “in order to be effective as a magic opus,” Hegel’s system of absolute science had to satisfy two conditions:

(1) The operation in Second Reality has to look as if it were an operation in First Reality.

(2) The operation in Second Reality has to escape critical control and judgment by the criteria of First Reality. (I have noticed that President-Elect Obama excels in conducting both types of operations.)[2]

So, what is First Reality? In effect, it is the classical Greek (and Judeo-Christian) description of the context in which human existence is actually experienced and lived. That is to say, the human condition is specified by man’s participation in a Great Hierarchy of Being that extends beyond, encompasses, and shapes his existence as a man.

Being is a philosophical term referring to the fundamental structure or order of the world. Vöegelin, following the classical Greeks, defines being as “not an object, but a context of order in which are placed all experienced complexes of reality….” Thus the Great Hierarchy of Being consists of four partners: God, Man, World, and Society. The individual man, as “part” of this “whole,” finds his own humanity in his participatory experiences and relations with the other partners of the hierarchy, and most especially in his relation to God.

Strangely, given his “revolt” against God and man and the world, Hegel was a man who not only insisted on his Christian orthodoxy up to his dying day; but as already mentioned, he was a master of classical Greek philosophy. So clearly he was aware of First Reality in the above sense. His “magical opus” is motivated fundamentally by a desire to overturn and supplant it with a plausible Second Reality of his own imaginative construction.

The first “partner” of the Great Hierarchy that had to go was God. This was necessary in order to make room for Hegel as the “new Christ” who would usher in the “third religion” of his System of Absolute Science, so to be the Messiah, the New Christ, of the new age a-borning. The point here is that with God “gone,” man himself becomes a pure abstraction and, as such, an ideologically manipulatable entity and nothing more.

As far as I know, it was Voegelin who first drew attention to the element of sorcery in Hegel’s work — even though the language Hegel had been using from the first was the language of the “magic word” and the “magic force” (Zauberworte and Zauberkraft respectively). Vöegelin indeed identified the Phänomenologie as a sorcerer’s grimoire. My sense is if Vöegelin was joking here, he was only half-joking: Something very serious is going on. So we need first of all to understand what Hegel intended by evoking such language. As for instance, here:

“Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forth. The single man can elevate himself to dominance over an appreciable length of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity [i.e., the Geist of history] wants to move and if he learns from this knowledge to pronounce the magic words (die Zauberworte) that will evoke its shape (Gestalt).”[3]

We need to define our terms here: Geist can be translated from the German as either “mind” or “spirit”; but the latter, allowing for a more cultural sense, as in the phrase “spirit of the age” (“Zeitgeist”), seems a more suitable rendering for Hegel’s use of the term. Gestalt (plural: Gestalten) means the present historical configuration of events as the Geist inexorably moves or evolves in time towards the fulfillment of its final “absolute necessity,” at which point — in its final Gestalt, which in Hegel’s system is identified with the consciousness of Hegel expressing as the complete identity of absolute Self and absolute Idea — world history ends; and a “new age” of Man, “standing alone,” begins. Because man is now “alone,” Hegel teaches that now he has arrived at the point in history where he can grant “grace to himself,” to “save himself,” to perfect the human condition, without the salvific Grace of God.

And Hegel’s enormously influential student Karl Marx (1818–1883) took the lesson to heart:

“Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods,’ is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity. There shall be none beside it.”[4]

“A being regards itself as independent only when it stands in its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it owes its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another [including God] considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.”[5]

And so the “outside cause” — God — must “die” in order for man to be “liberated” for self-sanctification and self-salvation.

In light of such expectations, first of all, we need to remember that a “magic word” in itself does not evoke an actual creative act. Rather, it is the invocation of appearances, of illusions. “Magic words” do not have the power actually to change the structure of being, of reality; but only the way the sorcerer wants us to see it. If he is successful, then we are grievously misled.

Hegel’s famous epigone Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a field day with Hegel’s insights. He not only declared God “dead,” but claimed that “we” had “murdered” Him. Mankind, on this view, has finally gained the existential status not only to be in a position to “kill God,” but also to grant itself “grace” and “salvation” via human reason alone. Of course, these are the maunderings of a person who sadly died in an insane asylum. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is splendidly honored by the “progressives” among us to this day….

It’s interesting to note that many students of the Phänomenologie consistently over time have reported that to be drawn into the “magic circle” of this enterprise is to enter into a perfectly logically self-consistent construction — so long as one does not use the criteria of First Reality to judge it. But finally, all criticism by appeal to reality itself, i.e., as actually experienced by human beings in contrast with being merely cogitated or thought, is foreclosed by Hegel’s rule that his construction need justify itself through nothing but “the presentation of the system itself.” Thus we have the case of the magically disappearing world.

And so not only God is booted out of Hegel’s system; but also any sense of “objective reality.” The “world” is drawn into the sorcerer’s consciousness as conceptualizations only, as Gestalten, “shapes.” Once the sorcerer possesses the historical “shapes” in his consciousness, he has no further need of “the world,” of evidence from the side of actual experience of the world. Thus he intends to “eclipse” such experience by the force of reason alone, dispensing with human existential experience altogether through the power of “magical” imagination — which of course altogether destroys any avenue of critical judgment from the side of First Reality, which happily satisfies criterion (2) above.

Second of all, we need to appreciate the worldview implicit in Hegel’s remarks. Voegelin thinks the above-quoted passage — i.e., “Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity….” — reveals Hegel’s intense resentment of the human condition as well as its cause. Further, it is a key passage for understanding the diremption — meaning the tearing apart, or violent separation from all former historical notions of the human condition so characteristic of modern existence — at the foundation of Hegel’s enterprise:

“Man has become a nothing; he has no reality of his own; he is a blind particle in a process of the world which has the monopoly of real reality and real meaning. [Note it is not the world that has meaning; only its process has meaning.] In order to raise himself from nothing to something, the blind particle must become a seeing particle. But even if the particle has gained sight, it sees nothing but the direction in which the process is moving…. And yet, to Hegel something important has been gained: the nothing that has raised itself to a something has become, if not a man, at least a sorcerer who can evoke, if not the reality of history, at least its shape. I almost hesitate to continue — the spectacle of a nihilist stripping himself to the nude is embarrassing. For Hegel betrays in so many words that being a man is not enough for him; and as he cannot be the divine Lord of history himself, he is going to achieve Herrschaft [i.e., dominion, lordship, mastery, rule, reign] as the sorcerer who will conjure up an image of history — a shape, a ghost — that is meant to eclipse the history of God’s making. The imaginative project of history falls in its place in the pattern of modern existence as the conjurer’s instrument of power”….

Since the conjurer’s instrument of power is in this case to be obtained by the “perfection” of philosophy into a system of absolute knowledge, we need to define what philosophy is. The etymology of the word tells you the meaning of philosophy is “love of wisdom”: In the original Greek, philo refers to “love” or “lover”; sophia to “wisdom.”

Hegel’s main project, as it turns out, was to transform philosophy, the love of wisdom, into an instrument of Absolute Science, whereby “wisdom,” and all knowledge, are found to consist, not in the loving search or quest for divine truth, the complete possession of which is denied to mortal men in this lifetime; but in the “final possession” of absolute truth once and for all — the “absolute science” that can make men “immortal” in this world. In short, Hegel would like to transform philosophy into an exact science.

But if this were possible, then philosophy would instantly cease to be philosophy.

For although the insights of philosophy can advance, it cannot advance beyond its structure as “love of wisdom.” In the great tradition of the classical Greeks, eminently Plato and Aristotle (which Hegel had thoroughly mastered), philosophy denotes the loving tension of man “toward the divine ground of his existence. God alone has sophia, ‘real knowledge’; man finds the truth about God and the world, as well as of his own existence, by becoming philosophos, the lover of God and his wisdom. The philosopher’s eroticism implies the humanity of man and the divinity of God as the poles of his existential tension. The practice of philosophy in the Socratic–Platonic sense is the equivalent of the Christian sanctification of man; it is the growth of the image of God in man. Hegel’s harmless-sounding phrase [ i.e., philosophy must at last “give up its name of a love of wisdom and become real knowledge”] thus covers the program of abolishing the humanity of man; the sophia of God can be brought into the orbit of man only by transforming man into God. The Ziel [goal] of the Phänomenologie is the creation of the man-god….” — commencing with Hegel’s own self-deification as the redeemer of mankind now that the history of mankind, and notably his spiritual history, has been abolished by Hegel’s system of absolute science.[6]

In this, Hegel reveals his profound alienation from the idea of an established order of the universe. Indeed, he outright rejects any idea of order that has an origin other than in human consciousness, which he hypostasizes as “reason” or at least a facsimile thereof that the sorcerer can put over on his audience.

Voegelin provides some helpful insights into the consciousness of the sorcerer and his project:

“…Hegel experiences his state of alienation as an acute loss of reality, and even as death. But he cannot, or will not, initiate the movement of return; the epistrophe, the periagoge, is impossible. The despair or lostness, then, turns into the mood of revolt. Hegel closes his existence in on himself; he develops a false self; and lets his false self engage in an act of self-salvation that is meant to substitute for the periagoge of which his true self proves incapable. The alienation which, as long as it remains a state of lostness in open existence, can be healed through the return [to God], now hardens into the acheronta movebo of the sorcerer who, through magic operations, forces salvation from the non-reality of his lostness. Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel’s true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by ‘the energy of thinking,’ transform the reality of God into the dialectics of his consciousness: the divine power accrues to the Subjeckt that is engaged in self-salvation through reaching the state of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul cannot return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Second Reality. The sorcerer becomes the savior of the ‘age’ by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation.”[7]

In classical Greek philosophy, and especially in Plato, the epistrophe or periagoge in the above passage refers to the “turning around” to God (the transcendent Beyond of the cosmos) in open existence, in loving response to His call. The terms are analogous to the Christian “born again” experience. The term acheronta movebo means “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.” It is the satanic declaration of the sorcerer who chooses to close all of reality in on himself, the Subjekt. Given the classical experience, this can only be a system of anti-philosophy.

In [Plato’s] Republic, the Beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful and higher in rank of dignity and power that the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the Beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, ‘the god’ becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of his existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference.[8]

It appears that Hegel’s “revolt” is above all finally a revolt against, a rejection of the human condition, of the fact that a human being is never consulted about the terms of his coming into the world, nor of his departure from it. It is the essence of the human condition that a man is neither the origin nor the “end” of himself — “end” in the sense of telos, meaning purpose, or goal. Meanwhile, in between birth and death, there is a litany of evils to which mortal human nature is subject. “The life of man is really burdened,” as Voegelin put it, “with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora.”[9]

Notwithstanding, Voegelin reminds us that “as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence.”[10]

Now the “lot of man” as just given is a description of the condicio humana, the human condition. It is the very basis for the idea of a universal, common humanity, of the brotherhood of mankind. It is my conjecture that it is possible for a person to take great umbrage at this condicio humana, to deplore and reject it, to see it as a grievous insult to one’s own assumed personal autonomy; and so to take flight in an alternative reality that can be structured more according to one’s own wishes, tastes, and desires. And thus, a Second Reality is born.

As for me, all things considered, I’ll take First Reality, the Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society — any day, any time. I believe that human beings were put in this world to be creative actors, even if they never get to design the stage on which the acting is being done, nor to control the writing of the script by which the play unfolds. And meanwhile they not only act, but suffer the actions of other actors or forces — personal, natural, social — from outside themselves.

Yet to recognize all this is to recognize the very basis of one’s own existential humanity. And to realize that the lot of any other man is no different. To be part and participant of this divinely constituted, dynamic “sub-whole” of a yet greater Whole is a glorious privilege. To go hole up in a Second Reality, to me, would be to lose one’s reason and probably one’s soul as well….

Indeed, that appears to be the conclusion reached by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the great French poet, a noetically and spiritually sensitive person who understood himself to be living in an age of great noetic and spiritual disorder:

And he penned these lines that make it crystal-clear to whom our soul is to be sold:

[1] Eric Vöegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Collected Works Vol. 12, 1990.

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, MS, Fortsetzung des “Systems der Sittlichkeit,” c. 1804–06.

[4] Karl Marx, Doctoral Dissertation, 1840–41 (quoting a passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).

[5] Karl Marx, “National Ökonomie und Philosophy,” Der Historische Materialismus: Die Früschriften.

[9] Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works, Vol. 12, 1990.

[11] Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur,” introducing the Fleurs du Mal, 1857.

self-government” begins in the good order of the individual citizen: Personal morality is the foundation of the system. If the people are “disordered,” then so will be the society.
This is the heart of the matter. Read Daniel 9:8. A people who live in disobedience are a confused people.
And as de Tocqueville reminds us “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”

Spirited: Actually, the heart of the matter resides within the First Principle, “In the beginning God...” From there it works forward to and answers the question, “What is man?”
Though physically an animal, man is unique, for spiritually he is made in the image of his Creator. Spiritually, every man is an individual, with an individual mind (the citadel of the soul), moral conscience, reason, and volition (free will). Hence man has been endowed with the spiritual abilities so vitally necessary for self-governance. Viewed in this light, our founding documents, particularly the Declaration and Constitution, are great spiritual documents. In short, the spiritual is supreme.

From Spinoza to Hegel, and on through Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche-—all of these thinkers contributed to
the 20th century’s totalitarianin irreligions.

At the heart of these irreligions, is monism (oneness). Monism has the effect of destroying the individual and God, as it subsumes both man and God into nature (or matter, or the cosmos).

Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, for instance, were pantheistic monists. Marx was a materialist monist. In any case, the two types are simply the two sides of one coin, and are entirely compatible.

Paul summed up Christian theism and monism when he said, “Man will either worship and serve creation (monism) or he will worship and serve the Creator of creation (Christian theism)

As can be seen by this brief summation, monism is the antithesis of Christian theism.

I think there is truth in this, but it isn't that the period would be "Eve-flavored" but rather a period of greater liberty. The position of women would be a marker; if women enjoy greater liberty its because liberty itself is in greater supply and more generalized. It doesn't seem surprising that liberty would lead to innovation.

Liberty: Good. Innovation: Good; "tearing old ideas apart and remodeling the world": not necessarily good, not necessarily innovative, and not necessarily expansive of individual liberty. The Devil's in the details.

But I do take your point marron. We see in Iraq, for instance, a greater participation of women in civil society, and this has had a liberalizing effect on society in general, as it tries to move away from authoritarian or theocratic political models. If this trend continues, it ought to contribute to the overall prosperity and security of Iraq in the future, and so I hope and pray it all works out.

I'm just a little touchy about "feminism" in general, which is what I associated with Fowler's term, "Eve-flavored age." Frankly, I find feminism a puzzling term. Is Sarah Palin — a strong, self-determined, capable woman — a "feminist?"

When that term is used, I surmise what we're talking about is a person identifying with a radicalized group of females who either overtly or covertly detest and resent men, and whose "litmus test" of political association is the implacable demand for free access to abortion services at any stage of pre-born life or even after birth. Clearly Sarah Palin could not be described as a "feminist" on these terms, though Pelosi, Feinstein, Boxer, et al., certainly can.

Heaven knows I'm all for the advancement of women in society since I happen to be one myself. But I much prefer the Iraqi model to that of the Feminazis. It seems to me that the Iraqis are at least dealing in First Reality, while the organized feminists want to tear it apart and "remodel the world" in ways more conducive to their liking.

Just some more maunderings FWIW.... Thank you ever so much for your perceptive essay/post marron!

I'm just a little touchy about "feminism" in general, which is what I associated with Fowler's term, "Eve-flavored age."

And with good reason. I was trying to re-draw a distinction. Fowler was trying to credit "Eve-flavored" movements with liberty and innovation and I was suggesting that its the reverse; greater liberty for women is indicative of greater liberty all around, and greater liberty leads to innovation (and here I'm assuming "innovation" as a positive).

Liberty isn't really a thing itself, its really a visible indication of something else, which is respect for your neighbor. Respect for your neighbor is the outward reflection of love of neighbor. Where love for your neighbor is generalized it manifests itself as respect for your neighbor and that produces "liberty".

Love for your neighbor must precede the legalisms; the legalisms merely formalize what already exists in the human heart with or without formal law.

This is why you can't impose liberty. Liberty grows as love of neighbor grows in a society and it dies as love in a society dies. What we understand as liberty comes very much out of a judeo-christian understanding of the proper relationship of humans with respect to their creator and with one another. Liberty isn't limited only to the judeo-christian world but it is limited to those societies in which love, respect, for ones neighbor is generalized.

Frankly, I find feminism a puzzling term. Is Sarah Palin — a strong, self-determined, capable woman — a "feminist?"

She's Sarah Palin. Just as you are you.

Thank you both oh so very much for your wonderful insights!

As I recall, Palin called herself a "feminist" and the head of NOW in Los Angeles agreed that she is and supported the ticket as did some of the Hillary supporters.

But there are probably even more women who call themselves "feminist" but really mean that they believe women are superior to men and that they must have the absolute right to kill their unborn for any cause as if that were proof of their power. Seems to me that such a worldview is an abomination to God and therefore to liberty itself.

In my view, the legal status of women in a society does not prevent the strong woman, e.g. Jael (Judges 4), Naomi and Ruth (Ruth), Esther (Esther). They do what must be done despite the constraints.

More importantly, the legal status of a women in society cannot prevent the woman who loves God above all else, e.g. Mary the mother of the Incarnate Word Jesus, Anna (Luke 2), Mary the sister of Martha (Luke 10), and others.

But weak women like weak men - and women like men who love themselves (or any thing or any one else) more than God - are of no good effect either for themselves or the ones in their sphere of influence.

My two cents...

....it’s not as if the “hierarchy of being” system is free of mysticism and magicalism.

I don't see the great hierarchy of being as a "system" at all — unless by "system" you mean "universe" or "cosmos," and not its narrower sense of a philosophical doctrine. Rather, I see it as a simple description of the universal context in which human beings exist, thus comprehensively forming the irreducible bases of human experience.

On this view, to put it crudely, human experience only comes in these four "flavors," God, Man, World (natural world, physical world) and Society (community, polity). You can test the description for yourself by engaging in a simple exercise in self-awareness. Pick any ordinary day, just go about your regular daily routines; but while you're doing that, try to reflect on the types of experiences you are having involving any "other than yourself." If at the end of the day your experiences involved anything other than experiences of these four "partners" singly or in some combination, then I would dearly love to know what that was.

Of course, if you think the God partner is mystical and magical per se, then probably the description of the great hierarchy of being is senseless to you. But this result would be a function of your predisposition of unbelief.

Which brings us to the man "partner" and his relation to God. Perhaps the greatest insight of classical Greece and of Judeo-Christianity is that ultimately, it is the God–man relation that is key to the good order of man and thus of the justice of his relations with other men and with the other partners in being.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson spoke of the man who lives in "openness to God" as l'âme ouverte, or "the open soul." There is also the man who freely chooses to close his soul to God, the l'âme close. The idea here is that the man who closes his soul to God "deforms" himself. (I'll spare you the details for now and just mention that the good order of the soul in open existence under God was perhaps Plato's major preoccupation over a long and prolific life; and that the "turning around" of the soul (e.g., Plato's periagoge, or the Christian "born-again" experience) to Christ — the Way the Truth and the Life — is the divine remedy for such deformity.)

There are echoes of the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in Bergson's insight. Heraclitus maintained there are only two types of men, the "public man" and the "private man."

The public man — the mature, wise man — is such because he acknowledges the Logos, or the universal order of being. He sees it as "one and common" and thus binding on all men as the true source of order not only of the individual human being but of the good society. Thus the public man is a man who is "awake" because he understands that the order of the real world is "one and common" for all men. But there are others — the private men — who, not acknowledging the Logos, are in effect "asleep, each turn[ing] aside into their private worlds." They live "as if they had a wisdom of their own."

The analogy to Bergson is that Heraclitus' private men are cases of l'âme close. WRT the private men, the "many," Heraclitus put it this way (Fragment 1):

Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it.... That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be without any experience of it.... My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep.

The l'âme close, by not acknowledging the Logos, falls asleep into his own dream world, and thus becomes a private man. It is out of that dream world that all Second Realities arise....

Some things never change.

[ I don't see the great hierarchy of being as a "system" at all — unless by "system" you mean "universe" or "cosmos," and not its narrower sense of a philosophical doctrine. Rather, I see it as a simple description of the universal context in which human beings exist, thus comprehensively forming the irreducible bases of human experience. ]

Exactly.. humans are to "that concept" merely primates.. or monkeys with instinct and habits..

Pity that they cannot see the only way for humans to evolve is to be "re-born" into another creature.. Or primates to evolve into something "else".. They miss the very deep scientific truth of the evolution of humans.. to fulfil the metaphorical evolution of other life forms all around them.. They miss the punch line.. or the point of being born again...

Could be in the future they will be told this.. only to look at "some angel that tells them this and then goes.. "Duuuugh!".. when it dawns on them..

Amazing that some people will hear what they want to hear.. and see what they want to see..

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Hegel as Sorcerer: The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God

Hegel as Sorcerer:
The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God