The Grand Finale
Oooo you excited little critter you! I know you can't wait for me to reveal what Hegel's 3rd phase is! Good news: I'm a compassionate individual and you have to wait no longer!
Yes the 3rd, and final phase is called...
DIFFERENTIATED UNITY
The circle finally closes on itself like a golden 18th century ring. It's a marriage of the dispersed elements that were haphazardly causing mischief in the second phase. It's a new unity that's not primitive like the single life of the first phase, but not overly self-conscious like the adolescent 2nd phase. It's adulthood, and it's anything but boring!
This Differentiated Unity brings about a
new harmony as we can transcend our obsession with difference.
Hegel says that this is evident in
Christianity in which God & humanity, Law & grace, Self & Other are
reconciled. There may or may not be confetti involved.
It's love, see, that allows us to live by the Spirit of the Living WORD instead of the written letter of the LAW. Make sense? Ok it's abstract...
...but it's also not. Let me summarize:
When we are young (and when history is young, and philosophy is young, and thought is young) it is necessarily simplistic in its constructions of the universe. Ignorance is bliss and it's a jolly good phase what...if you can be satisfied with it.
Once consciousness (or global communication) allows for the idea of contradictory ideas, we are flung into an overly self-conscious phase in which we question everything, and for a while lose our identity. Woe is us.
But never fear, because if you are willing to expose yourself to the Dark Knight...no wait, the Dark Night, then the 3rd phase will dawn with new, unifying light: You can transcend difference without some tacky eclecticism. You can be yourself because you are accepted just the way you are because of something that's happened on a cosmic scale.
Once consciousness (or global communication) allows for the idea of contradictory ideas, we are flung into an overly self-conscious phase in which we question everything, and for a while lose our identity. Woe is us.
But never fear, because if you are willing to expose yourself to the Dark Knight...no wait, the Dark Night, then the 3rd phase will dawn with new, unifying light: You can transcend difference without some tacky eclecticism. You can be yourself because you are accepted just the way you are because of something that's happened on a cosmic scale.
"Oh there he goes talking about religion again," you may say.
Well firstly, yes.
