The concrete universal unfolding in time

By -

Hegel partially solved the problem of the relationship of the forms and their particulars with the idea of the "concrete universal." As Collingwood expressed this, the universal is only the universal of its particulars.

But even with this, we are only two-thirds of the way there. The concrete universal as a static entity is a dead thing. Its full meaning can only be realized by witnessing it unfold in time.

And now we have arrived, again, at the Trinity (or the Trikaya): the Father (Dharmakaya) is the universal, the Son (Sambhogakāya) the concrete, and the Holy Spirit (Nirmāṇakāya), proceeding from the Father and the Son, unfolds the concrete universal in time.

And this is why, contra Strauss, their is no opposition between Reason and Revelation. Revelation shows us truths that naked reason would never discern, but which, once revealed, are correctly understood as supra-rational, rather than irrational.

Comments

  1. Greg Pandatshang8:35 PM

    Interesting. I think when folks try to pair trikāya up with Holy Trinity, the first guess is usually to make Sambhogakāya=the Holy Ghost and Nirmāṇakāya=the Son. But it has occurred to me that this is based on the assumption that the Son = the incarnate life of Jesus, not, as per orthodox Christianity, a preexisting and infinite part of the Godhead. I can't claim to understand enough about Hegel's universal/concrete or about the Trinity to have an opinion about your alternate set of correspondences.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more