The Cunning of Geist Greg Novak

It is estimated that over 2 billion stars in our own Milky Way galaxy have planets orbiting them that could sustain life.  Are we on planet Earth a lottery winner, a one in 2 billion chance for establishing life and intelligent beings?  The odds suggest life exists elsewhere.  

However, although it took billions of years to life on Earth to evolve to where we are today,  there are stars are much older that our own sun.  Several billion years older in fact.  Why no evidence of extraterrestrial life?  No radio signals, no unmanned probes, no hard evidence of visitations.  Why not?  Could we be alone?

Hegel teaches that rationality and Spirit is paramount, what is real. If so, it most be universal, across the cosmos.  Are we the only place where it has actualized?  This episode explores.  
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"Creation ex nihlilo (creation out of nothing) or "Ex nihilo nihil fit" (from nothing comes from nothing)?

The notion of a creator God is fundamental to Western religions.  But is it true?  The opening of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, studied so long and hard by the Kabbalists suggests so, and the Big Bang theory gave reason for many to believe the cosmological argument for God (everything that began to exist has a cause). But the newest scientific data suggests something preceded the Big Bang.  And in our secular age, many prefer to follow the science, rightly so.

Planet Earth, the sun, our galaxy, and the universe itself, like all of us, is headed for the graveyard.  But cycles of nature appear everywhere. Could this also be true of the universe itself?  Does the universe resurrect? This episode explores the question in detail.  
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Hegel's "triad" of Being, Nothing, and Becoming are central to his ontology.  And it can also be used as a framework for personal achievement.  This episode explains how. 

The Being/Nothing/Becoming dialectic comes first in Hegel's Science of Logic, but it also presents the pattern for his overall project of Mind (Idea), Nature, and Spirit (Geist).  And it is just this framework that one must use in pushing to new heights of success in life.   

The basic approach is goal setting (Mind), assessing the path to take, including the obstacles to overcome (Nature), and boldly embarking on one's action plan in the world (Spirit).   

The correspondence of Hegel's triad  to real life achievement is the subject of this episode. 
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Hegel famously said  in his Phenomenology of Spirit, "Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Miiler trans., ¶17).  That the true - truth - is equally substance and subject.  

He makes this explicitly clear in the following statement, “What seems to take place outside it, to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, its own activity; and substance shows that it is in reality subject” (Ibid, ¶37).

Meaningful coincidences, Jung's synchronicity, are a demonstration of this truth.  And the mediation of the mental and material takes place in the immediacy of the present moment.  As Hegel said, "There is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation" (Science of Logic, Miller trans., pg. 68).

Episode 78 explores this important notion.




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Does Spirit evolve?  

How about God?

And what exactly does the term panentheism mean?

This episode takes a deep dive into process philosophy, process theology, and the evolutionary nature of "becoming."  

The pioneer work of Charles Hartshorne, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and of course Hegel, all in a way process philosophers, is addressed. 
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Wittgenstein is often mention as the most influential philosopher of the 20th century.  His focus on the meaning of words became an integral part of the so-called "Analytic" branch of the discipline.   

The later Wittgenstein contended that words are but tools, defined by their use within the context of the “language game” of the arena they are used, which is societally based and can evolve.  One of these sandboxes is philosophy, as well as science and religion.  And the language of one space does not necessarily hold water in another.  That there is not one underlying true meaning of the word beneath all of the different areas;  only how a word or phrase is used in context of the realm of "game" in which it is being used.

But cannot words be used to point outside of the realm in which they are used to Spirit, a higher power and purpose, and to the truly infinite?  And isn't this the purpose of art, religion and philosophy?  This episode explores.   
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