Rough Theory

I’ve been buried with work, and haven’t been keeping up on my Hegel posting, but will get back to the Science of Logic very soon. In the meantime, two celestial-themed Hegel posts from other sites. Tom over at Grundlegung draws attention to a special double issue of the online, open access journal Cosmos and History, on the topic of “Hegel and the Fate of History”.

Adam Roberts over at The Valve shares the following anecdote from Heinrich Heine:

Altogether, Hegel’s conversation was always a kind of monologue, sighed forth by fits and starts in a toneless voice. The baroqueness of his expressions often startled me, and I remember many of them. On beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the bessed. But the master grumbled to himself: “The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.” [Heinrich Heine, Confessions (1854)]

Somehow, this story has me thinking about Tom’s occasional Kantian Gloom Watch series. Perhaps there’s a good reason Tom has found only one entry for his contrasting Hegelian Glee Watch…

[Note: image modified from 2001: A Space Odyssey Internet Resource Archive]