There are a lot of interesting answers here, which is a rarity of Quora. And I really thing we need to go back and understand the Divided Line in Plato in order to understand this question better. The Divided Line is the core of our worldview. It is composed of two parts Ratio and Doxa. Doxa means appearance and opinion. But Doxa is divided into two parts which are grounded and ungrounded opinion/appearance. Now the question concerning belief has to do with our relation to doxa. Do we believe in the appearances/opinions we have. Belief implies that they related to the aspects of Being for us, i.e. Truth, Reality, Identity,  and Presence. If I believe in something I am positing that it is either Real, or True, or Identical with itself, or Present i.e. manifests some aspect of Being. If it does not relate to some aspect of Being then belief in it is moot because it will not influence any behavior. The problem we have I think is that we say we believe in things but mostly it is just talk. Heidegger calls this chatter inauthentic immersion in the Mitsein (They), i.e. ungrounded believe and appearances. What we really believe in, which can be contrary to what we say we believe in influences what we how we act, what we do, what we say we have and who we are.

So when you ask whether believing is a criteria for experiencing something I would say yes this happens all the time. If you look at ancient skepticism of Sextus Empiricus he said that we all agree on the things we all see, but it is the invisibles that we disagree about. Dogmatists have some preconceived idea of what the invisible things really are. Academics deny everything. And the Skeptic tries to keep the conversation going with regard to the invisibles to so that perhaps their nature will be discovered. This is the traditional role dialectics to consider distinctions by which we identify these invisibles, which when grounded   in reason is called non-representable intelligibles. Some invisibles are not only substantiated by grounded doxa (empirical evidence) and also by reason. So for instance examples of this are the forces of nature which are extremely substantial in terms of both evidence and reasoned argument. These forces exist whether you believe in them or understand them or not. In general a new phenomena needs some foothold in belief in order to get investigated. Sometimes there appears to be a new phenomena, and is believed in but turns out not to exist like cold fusion or polywater. This gets to what Kuhn calls Paradigm Shifts, and Foucault calls episteme changes. Heidegger says there are even shifts in the understanding of Being. All this has to do with belief. Basically if there was not belief emergent events where paradigms, epistemes could not occur. When you are in a paradigm or an episteme it is the beliefs that drive the normal science program. When the changes occur it is because some people change their belief so that a new science program can be carried on. But these beliefs concern what Is, i.e. some of the aspects of Being with direct effect on what is studied by science research programs. And sometimes those new programs uncover new phenomena or substantiate the new paradigm or episteme. Belief is key to this dynamic that drives scientific research. If you did not believe that some phenomena existed out there to be discovered, or substantiated, or replicated you would not research it. For example superconductivity is something that scientists did not believe was possible, but it could be replicated over and over to everyone’s disbelief because it seemed to violate basic laws of physics. It took 20 years to come up with a plausible explanation for the phenomena. Essentially no one believed it, but there it was replicated over and over again, so Science had to take it seriously and try to explain it. It took, belief of evidence of replication for scientists to take it seriously enough to explain it in ways that ran against laws that were thought to be unviable. But it was because replication brought a belief in the reality of this phenomena that was eventually brought into science as something explainable. If you did not believe in superconductivity it would be easy to ignore it because it was not something that you bumped into in the world without trying. On the other hand with polywater or coldfusion people wanted to believe that it was real, but no matter how much it was believed in Science showed it to not be true, not part of reality, not self identical but rather merely illusions, and something that could not be rendered present in replication experiment. Recently we had another phenomena like this which was neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. If it had turned out to be true then it would have changed the physics game in fundamental ways. The team itself tried to falsify their own results and failed. They only admitted that it existed after they had exhausted their ability to try to falsify it. But when others came in they thought of ways to falsify it that the team did not think of and this shows how well science works. Now if you believe in neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, if they don’t actually do so, then it has not effect on our experience of reality or truth or identity, or presence. Belief in itself in a phenomenon has no effect on its existence except for psychological, social, or cultural phenomena. But physical phenomena are not effected by our beliefs. But our beliefs play a key role in understanding them. With regard to phenomena that are self-generated by beliefs such as the gods for instance, their whole existence is in the belief. Take away the beliefs and they vanish. And so this should teach us a lesson. We should not invest in phenomena that is self-generated. And in fact we are slowly learning not to do that. But what happens is that we give truth, reality, identity, and presence to things that do not exist, mostly invisibles and this causes problems, because there are just so many non-existent things to believe in, for instance magic, witches, gods. These things are mirrors of our souls. In them we discover the flip side of Being, i.e. that it can be an illusion. In fact that is what distinguishes existence from Being. Being can be an illusion but existence cannot be an illusion. Both have all the aspects related to them. But with regard to Being we may be dealing with “truth”, “reality”, “presence” or “identity” and the situation where as Zizek says the appearance or the opinion of doxa is more real than reality, more true than truth, more present than presence, more identical than identity.

http://www.quora.com/What-if-there-are-phenomena-possible-in-this-Universe-in-which-one-needs-to-believe-first-in-order-to-understand-observe-rather-than-understand-observe-in-order-to-believe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon

http://www.quora.com/In-which-of-Kants-writings-is-his-concept-of-the-thing-in-itself-first-mentioned

A certain amount of information on a subject is needed in order to ask a question. This question is either missing something or is confused. So I don’t really know what to answer or how to straighten it out. Kantian Noumena posits that there is an unknown reality out there beyond our experience of phenomena through spacetime. Noumena do not live in spacetime as we project it and experience it according to Kant. Even objective spacetime is projected according to Kant. It is not that there is some projected spacetime that is subjective and another objective spacetime, all spacetime is projected in Kant, and so that is why he says that Transcendental Idealism is the only route to Transcendental Realism. But at the same time the phenomena as we see it is exactly what is there, it is not that there is some reality out there that is different from what we see, but it is precisely because we project spacetime and then the categories a priori that we can see things that are real to us. There is no reality other than reality to us. Best source I know on Kant is the Bersteintapes.com lectures. I suggest anyone with a question like this about Kant listen to those lectures, even if you think you know Kant. There are a lot of bad interpretations of Kant out there. Because Kant is complicated and deep people like to make more or less out of him than he deserves.

http://www.quora.com/Immanuel-Kant/Can-one-from-his-her-readings-of-Kantian-philosophy-explain-the-concept-of-subjective-Space-time

What comes to mind is Adrian Bijan’s Constuctal Law. It is a principle concerning how flows “live”, maintain their viability, by evolving their flow architectures over time with respect to volume, surface, or performance moving toward Laminar Flow. If you are looking for a principle to explain the growth of complex systems then the Constructual Law is a good candidate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Bejan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory

Constuctural Law:

For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve such that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/15/the-constructal-law-of-flow-systems/

http://www.quora.com/Complexity/What-are-the-constructive-principles-that-explain-the-growth-of-complex-systems

The difference is between the breath as what is breathed (spirit) and the breathing itself (soul). They are similar to the difference between arabic Nafs and Ruh in this respect, but Spirit is seen as something higher than the soul while the Nafs is seen as something lower than the soul. It helps to translate across to another language whose roots actually mean something like Arabic for instance, but other translations to languages with roots is also good to explore cross-cultural differences in meanings.

It is of interest that in many traditional cultures there are always two different words related to the core of the self, and normally one of them stays with the body in death and the other goes away somewhere. So in Arabic for instance it is the Ruh that goes away to God (Ywhw/Allah) while it is the Nafs that is tied to the body. Thus in Sufism whose coda is “Die before you die” is all about purifying the Nafs into the Ruh, but they are considered to be basically the same thing. While in other traditional cultures many times there is a difference in kind between the to etherial parts of the self.

In Egyptian religion the two parts of the soul are called Ka and Ba. http://www.philae.nu/akhet/KaBa.html

Hillman always connected Spirit to monotheism and Soul to the Imaginal of Archetypal Psychology which is related to Images. I do not believe that this is particularly correct but it does seem to be a trend to denounce the Spirit and return to the Soul as central. Spirit is latin and Soul is Old English. Spirit really does mean Air, and Soul has to do with something like the waves of the Sea that suggests breathing. So I think that the relation of Spirit to Soul is closer to the use of Nafs and Ruh only we see the spirit as being tied to the transcendental in our culture and the breathing as tied to the body, while in Arab culture it was the other way around.

We talk about Spirituality rather than religion which many find more acceptable because it is not dogmatic, and seems to be expressed in mystical paths across religions. Soul on the other hand is something closer to ourselves as living creatures. We talk about music being soulful for instance.

Spirituality has opened up a nihilistic market place where everyone and their brother are selling the snake oil of enlightenment for a fist full of dollars. Zizek says that this idea of Spirituality is the ideology of our day, which is caught up in the denial of ideology. And he says that, along with Adorno, that it is precisely what the state wants that we give up thinking, and will. He also says this new “oriental” ideology of spirituality, is basically a support for corporatism which I rail about elsewhere. I think he has a point there, although I think this only applies to the superficial nihilistic versions of these “oriental” religious philosophies and there are more genuine versions of them which are nondual in character for which you cannot make the same argument. Buddhism for instance does have a moral stance in the world even if some of its versions like Zen seem to have given up that stance, as it was incorporated into culture and interpreted more widely. One of my favorite movies is called Satori which is about a monster that eats thoughts. This is an interesting popular interpretation of Zen buddhism that may have some truth. I believe that Hui Neng tried to straighten out this kink in Zen in the Platform Sutra and the Southern School of Chan.

I think to the extent that people think of Spirit as a transcendental and soul as immanent to the body they are mistaken about the nature of enlightenment. At least in original Buddhism emptiness is nondual and is neither transcendent nor immanent. Same is true of Taoism with regard to the void. Other deeper nondual paths like DzogChen that merges the idea of Emptiness and Void somehow are even less likely to be associated with even the duality between nonduals like emptiness/void. I like the idea of reappropriating Old English terms like Feorh as having this nondual meaning. Feorh is not Geist which is Ghost in Old English. Rather it is connected to the blood and via that to life, and means also spirit, but probably originally in the sense of spirited. I would place Feorh as the nondual barzak (interspace/barrier) between soul and spirit or ruh and nafs. The reversal that makes spirit into nafs and soul into ruh is very telling, because it is precisely the seeking of a transcendental that throws you back into a degenerate form of immanence. What is closer to us the Soul is that which can be purified into the Ruh. But both of these duals, nafs/ruh or spirit/soul are separated by something nondual. In English I want to say that is the Feorh the original spiritedness  that lives in the blood and is not the Ghost/Geist which becomes Mind/Spirit in German as seen in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind.

In Sufism it is precisely the death of the Nafs that yields the Ruh in its purity. And so that dividing line between life and death is makes the distinction and that realm between life and death is called the Barzak which separates use from life in the next world through the time in the grave before bodily resurrection. Nafs in this sense which is I in Arabic means something like the ego. Ruh means something like what Soul means traditionally, as something preserved after death that exists in the grave and goes to the garden or fire after the resurrection with the body. Ruh means the purified self in a nondual state in my opinion. This is equivalent to the return to the orignal purity of children in some sense free of defilements that cling to the self. It is interesting that Jesus is referred to as the Ruh of Allah in Quran. Thus from an Islamic perspective what is special about Jesus is that he embodies, as we see him in the Injeel (Gospel of Thomas) as the wholly purified human being, the epitome of what we should associate with Spirituality. All other previous Prophets are in the position of Nafs to the Ruh of Allah, i.e. Jesus. The Barzak, i.e. nondual between these two kinds of Prophet is of course Muhammad. Within Muhammad (pbuh) are the nafs of all previous Prophets together with the Pure Ruh of Jesus which is the extreme of enlightenment without regard for immanence. What we see in Muhammad’s life is that this other option has its own characteristics and structure which we know about because Muhammad is a historical figure. We know more about Muhammad than any other human being alive or dead. So the Way of Muhammad is very clearly exemplified by all we know of him in his prophetic career. He single-handedly generated a heresy of the Western Worldview which was successful, unlike other Heresies that were crushed. Even when the Christians went to war against Islam they could not crush it. No one less than Nietzsche, unlikely as it may seem, has many good things to say about Islam. It is unfortunate in our time that some people calling themselves Muslims have decided to ruin that reputation, by doing horrific things in the name of this religion.

Anyway, when you see the difference between Ruh and Nafs as embodied in the prophets and you see Muhammad as the middle way between these two duals then that concrete embodiment in myth and history can give you a really good idea that these terms mean in Arabic and Islamic Sufism and that helps clarify in my opinion the relation between Soul/Feorh/Geist in Old English which I believe is something similar even though it is a completely different culture, and I would claim this is wide-spread. So for instance you have Ba/Akh/Ka in Egypt. Notice that the house of Allah in Mekkah is called the Kaba. I don’t think that is an accident.

We could go on to look at the Chinese idea of the split immaterial self called Hun and Po with Shen being the nondual barrier/interspace between them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hun_and_po
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_(Chinese_religion)

The problem we have is that we have lost the roots of Old English because so many words like Feorh have been lost in the oblivion of language change as French, Latin, and Greek words rushed in via  a former colonialization of the Angles and Saxons. But this gives us an opportunity to reclaim those words and use them for the lost sense of nonduality that was replaced by the radical duality of the Western Tradition. The key question here is what is the difference that makes a difference ala Bateson between Soul and Spirit. Spirit is the foreign word and Soul the indigenous word. But beneath that colonial overlay is the difference between Geist and Soul. Geist is only Ghost in English but in German it became the word for Mind and Spirit. Soul is the breathing, based on its connection to the sea, and Geist is the Spirit, i.e. what is breathed out as the last breath, what leaves the body on death, but then sometimes hangs around. Of course then the question is to think the Feorh as Spiritedness that is somehow in the Blood rather than in the Breath and Breathing. The heartbeat can be seen as more central to life than the Breath, we can hold our breaths for a minute or more but we cannot stop our hearts beating pumping blood throughout the bodymind. There are more heartbeats in our lives than breaths by a multiple of four I believe, if I remember rightly. All animals have about the same number of breaths and heartbeats in their lives regardless of their size and the difference is how fast they go, while humans have about 1/3 more than all other animals. So if Feorh is rooted in heartbeats and the blood flowing as the basis of “Spiritedness” leading to a kind of spirit then its complementarity between the moments of pumping is more central to us than the difference between our breathing and the air breathed. And of course when we enter the realm of the heart it is a whole different region of the psyche than that governed by the breath and its breathing. The Blood and its pumping is both part of the organism, while the breath is foreign to the organism and the breathing is the way we intervene with respect to this foreign substance, as invisible as it is, to take life from it via oxygen produced symbiotically by plants.  Both pumping and what is pumped are intrinsic to the organism while breath is extrinsic while breath is intrinsic. And of course now we know the blood carries that oxygen to the cells so that the two are interlinked. This interlinking of Breath and Blood is were we start to see the nondual aspect of what can be seen as duals. Breath and Breathed is Self/InvisibleOther, while Pumped and Pumping is Self/Selfing instead. But the fact that Self/Selfing transportation is transporting with comes from the Self/InvisibleOther distinction and dynamic means that the two are symbiotically interrelated and cannot be separated which is what makes them nondual. Nondual means that they cannot be divided, yet not because they are One, and not because their difference is illusory but because the difference is a necessity that is self reinforcing since both are intrinsic to life and one actually carries the other and the exhaling puts out the carbon dioxide that is necessary for our symbiosis with the plants. Blood also carries food, but we do not need to go there to prove our point Blood plays simultaneous roles in making life possible.

Note “pbuh” stands for “Peace Be Upon Him” which is a term of respect applied by Muslims to Muhammad especially but also to other prophets.

http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-soul-and-spirit

The antidote for this question is the poetry of William Bronk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bronk

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bronk/bronk.htm

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-bronk

http://www.quora.com/Is-my-life-all-about-me

In Kant Freedom and Responsibility are two sides of the same coin. We can only have freedom when we take responsibility and fulfill our duty. Doing what ever we want and not fulfilling our obligations is only illusory freedom, it is in fact the worst form of slavery, slavery to our desires. A good example of this is in Bernstein’s lectures on Kant at BernsteinTapes.com where he pushes the foot of a student. When ever we push someone else, we say sorry because we have taken away from their freedom of action. We are responsible not to push others around causally and we want the same respect from others who we want to not push us around as if we are an object. Heidegger has this also in Being and Time where he talks about how our touching a wall is not the same as contact between two objects. We can only be free ourselves if others do not push us around, i.e. render us to be mere objects, and thus respect our freedom to move ourselves. Our freedom to move is precisely given by the respect that others give us by giving us freedom to move, and that only happens if each of us responsibly gives others the freedom to move themselves. The interplay of responsibility and freedom can be seen in this very basic form of dignity and respect that we must give others in order to get it back ourselves. It is precisely this that is taken away from us in war, crime and in accidents where harm is caused. So the same principle applies on the large scale as the micro scale from the view of Kant and that is the categorical imperative in action. Only do what you can generalize to a law without creating chaos and violating the freedom of others and yourself. This is what you are responsible for doing yourself. And it is your duty to preserve this for others against those that would violate this principle, and so it is an active responsibility to preserve freedom, and dignity, and the rights of others, not just a passive assertion of self-control in a world where no one else is exerting self-control. It only works if it is mutual and where the free commons is preserved.

It is significant that the occupy movement used this term “occupy” which implicitly accepted their role as objects that “occupy” space and thus implicitly accepted their role of being pushed around by the Financial institutions. Human beings dwell, and it is significant that via foreclosure this dwelling is being threatened by Banks. Being pushed out of  their homes people felt that their most effective protest was to become the objects that the banks had made them out to be. See Building, Dwelling, Thinking by Heidegger.

http://www.quora.com/Philosophy/Are-the-ideas-of-responsibility-duty-and-freedom-of-an-individual-at-loggerheads

If we were to become Gods, then we would lose who we are, because we are known only to the extent we are contrast with Gods and we would lose our world that is made up of the fourfold according to Socrates of Heaven, Earth, Mortals and Immortals. We are in the time of the fleeing of the Gods according to Heidegger, and it is in our nostalgia for the Gods that have left us that we can think about becoming gods ourselves. We cannot replace the gods by ourselves within the worldview. I like what Morris Berman said in Coming To Our Senses that we have gotten rid of the predators and so that function in the world is now relegated to Traffic accidents. In other words we replace the ecological functions with something we create artificially and thus the world becomes degraded. The we begin to fulfill the function of the predator in relation to ourselves, say in War, Crime, Accidents where technology malfunctions, or is misused.

http://www.quora.com/Occult/Can-humans-become-gods

Using it to slowly and resolutely Think about significant matters seriously.

So little actual Thinking, i.e. slow thinking, goes on. We are in Fast thinking mode all the time which should really be called “schematization” not thinking, i.e. reacting based on what we think we already know.

See Daniel Kahneman Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking. I just started reading it. I saw him talk about it at the LA Times BookFair recently http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637
See also http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/15bb6522-04ac-11e1-91d9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uCeXsUuo 

For the history of Schematization see U. Eco Kant and the Platypus.

As Heidegger says in What is called Thinking to think is to thank what ever gives thought for the insights that arrive.

http://www.quora.com/Intelligence/What-is-intelligence-paralysed-without-Why

Quora admins take themselves too seriously as thought police.

This is very similar to the question: How can Quora not understand the nature of Questions and Answers and still run a Q&A site?

Not having a sense of humor and not knowing what they are doing kinda goes together.

People who take themselves too seriously tend to over value what they are doing and not notice that they really don’t “get it.”

Another quirk is that we have people who are administrators deciding the fate of answers on subjects that they are not experts.

This is not to say that all the administrators are the same or equally fallible. But like Quora itself many are out of their depth.

And quite honestly it detracts a great deal from the experience of using the site to know that there are thought police running amuck somewhere beyond the scenes and never knowing when they will strike again.

The only good thing about them as far as I can tell is that they probably protect us from a lot of spam.

http://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-on-Quora-have-no-sense-of-humor-for-responses-to-questions-that-clearly-can-never-be-answered

The mental representations we are talking about are you words you say to yourself in your head when you are thinking. They are not something mysterious. However, it is Locke that really brings the idea of mental representations to the fore, an although Kant accepts a Lockean account to a certain extent he really is not taking that as a main theme in my understanding. Rather, he is taking as his them what must exist as a necessary precondition for the possibility of having representations of language in your head and sensory presentations. Not representations are always lossy, i.e. abstractions of actual sensory presentations. It is the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience that are the transcendentals of Kant, not some dogmatic invisibles that cannot be verified. Also his ideas do not have a lot to do with Plato, but rather are a direct result of  his reaction to Hume, but also Leibniz and of course Spinoza and Descartes. He is basically trying to build a foundation underneath the physics of Newton, and so the structure of his philosophy is influenced a lot by the structure of the Calculus that makes the description of nature though laws possible. The key idea is the difference between Analytic and Synthetic judgments  and the difference between A Priori and A Posteriori judgments  The whole thing is about the nature of judgement. And judgments are something that can appear as statements in language once they are formed. Basically he is attempting to prove that there is something called the A Priori Synthetic and that is the Singular Space and is the basis of geometry. Today we would say it is spacetime, and would not separate out the schemas from spatial representations such as you get in geometrical proofs. Sensation is appears in a manifold which is an  A Priori synthesis. On the basis of that perception then there is the apperception of concepts that are then represented in the proofs as statements and diagrams of the geometrical situation, or equations for instance related to the calculus.

But the key point is that we project the a priori synthetic singular that then is the basis of the unity and totality of the manifold which then appears as a perception of something that gives rise to an apperception. When we consider that thing as a physical object we project on it the Categories which all objects share such as quality, quantity, relation and modality. The key to this projection is the positing of causality. Because causality comes from us, then we do not have to find it somehow in the world as an objective thing, and that is why Kant believes that the only road to Transcendental Reality is via Transcendental Idealism. A good source for further understanding is the Bernsteintaps.com lectures which goes though all the arguments in detail. Our tradition has been basically critical and idealist after Kant because his arguments for his position are so strong. He would have considered neural activity part of the noumena. Until we can relate the neural activities in fMRIs to what is actually experienced in consciousness I think it would remain part of the noumena even though we can now see it by peaking inside the functioning brain. It still does not relate to our experience, and in fact the more we find out about it the more mysterious it becomes because of its decentralized processing.

Suggest you read the Patton Commentary on Critique of Pure Reason if you are interested in finding out more information about Kant’s philosophy. There are a lot of strange interpretations of it out there and strangely it is hard to find a good commentary even though it is one of the most commented on books in our tradition. It is so complex that it is possible to make almost anything you want out of it. I went though a lot of bad commentaries before I found Patton. Basically he turns each sentence into a paragraph and keeps the context within the overall argument in mind as he unpacks each new sentence.

http://www.quora.com/Philosophy/Whats-a-good-example-that-illustrates-Kants-idea-of-mental-representations

This is a good question. And I don’t know the answer. Physicists are just getting started writing papers about the multiverse. I have been reading them some of them. First of all there is no spacetime in the multiverse. So how you would get from one spacetime continuum to the other is a very big question. Since we cannot get anything anywhere by any known means due to the speed of light in our universe, it is had to imagine how we would get from one spacetime continuum to another. We can imagine if it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light, then it would be even more impossible to move from one spacetime continuum to another. But since we are just starting to take the multiverse seriously I think it will be quite a while before we have any idea what it might actually be like in itself given the hints that we can get from the existence of our own universe.

http://www.quora.com/Multiverse/What-would-it-take-to-jump-between-two-universes

First of all the smiles of the Buddha are very constrained in most cases. It is not a wide smile but an introspective sort of subtle smile that I see on most representations. The point is that the Buddha knows he has escaped the wheel of Samsara, and that is why he is smiling. But he is actually smiling to himself, not to others, for he knows that others have not escaped yet. But he knows that others can escape because he has escaped and thus he is smiling to himself. It is the satisfaction of arrival. Every moment is that arrival which has been struggled for and attained. And so the smile is perpetual. But in the representations it means you can achieve this satisfaction yourself. And from the point of view of that arrival there is nothing to worry about any more. So it is assurance for the rest of us, and it is meant to spur us on to achieve the same state.

But of course it was realized that this was ultimately selfish, and so the Bodhisattva ideal was formulated to counterbalance the selfishness of the Buddha, however minute that might be, in as much as he entered parinirvana without taking us with him. So Bodhisattvas say they will wait to be the last to cross over into nirvana and enter parinirvana so that they can shower their compassion on living beings caught up in Samsara. Bodhisattvas tend to look determined. Determined to save all sentient creatures from delusion before they themselves give up reincarnation.

So the smile of the Buddha in light of the Bodhi Sattva ideal is his satisfaction that others will take care of the mortals he has left behind. It is the smile of a tremendous burden being lifted from his shoulders.

What people don’t get is that in Hinduism there was an infinite pressure on each person to be responsible for what ever they do. Reincarnation was devised to release the Gods from responsibility for the fates of humans. Buddha was not searching for release from the suffering of life alone, but the endless suffering of reincarnation,. When he achieved nirvana he actually realized that this wheel of samsara which put infinite pressure on each person, and caused them infinite suffering of continual rebirth in different forms forever was in fact an illusion. So the Buddha is smiling because he realized that Samsara was not real but illusory, and so there is no infinite pressure of reincarnation, but in fact reincarnation is merely the meaning of the habitas from moment to moment as quasi-causality continues to appear to flow in spite of emptiness being more fundamental.

Finally the Buddha is smiling because he realizes that even nirvana the opposite of samsara is also an illusion. there is no such thing as nirvana as any thing different from Samsara, these are nihilistic opposites and Buddha finds the nondual position between them, the middle ground where there is no extremes any longer. Emptiness of Emptiness means that the search for nirvana is a trick one plays on oneself, but this trick actually works, because the self gets caught up in this search to such extent that the whole self is invested in it, but when one realizes nihilistically that nirvana does not exist actually, but effectively it has in fact caused the self to disintegrate upon the realization, then one gets the subtle joke that is at the heart of existence. So the Buddha smiles at that joke he played on  himself which was effective even though it was itself also an illusion.

And the Buddha smiles because he realizes that the way of Nirvana is not really the ultimate way, but it is the way of the Bodhisattva, which is ultimate, even though without him there could have been no Bodhisattvas. In other words if he had not postulated nirvana as opposite samsara, then it could not be realized that the ultimate position in Mahayana would be that of not entering fully into parinirvana but waiting for all the others. Of course it is going to be a very long time before all the others are saved, and in fact it is probably never going to happen, which means there will be a lot of Bodhisattvas hanging around going though Samsara with us. So the ultimate position is the escape of no-escape, just like the Koan collection is the gateless gate. Ultimately the realization is that Nirvana is not a door out of samsara, because neither nirvana nor samsara exist and the concretion of this realization is ultimately DzogChen which denies both as extremes and fabrications which in Tibet is seen as the highest teaching in Buddhism and was also not just in Buddhism but also in Bon (the Taoism of Tibet).

In effect the smile of the Buddha has infinite depth as we read into it the various interpretations of Buddhism though the ages. And ultimately the Buddha is smiling because of the subtlety of the Dharma that he has unleashed that has given rise to so many different viewpoints on Samsara and Nirvana over the centuries. The Buddha is satisfied with the opening up of so many deep ways of looking at existence beyond the illusions of Being. You can get lost in the infinite depth of that self-reflective smile that comes from satisfaction of the overcoming of the intrinsic and endemic dissatisfaction (dukha) of human existence which is transformed by the dawning of prajna.

Catch sight of that smile in yourself and claim your freedom from delusion.

http://www.quora.com/Buddhism/Why-is-the-Buddha-often-smiling

Keep young people off the labor market as long as possible. The higher the level of employment the longer young people are kept in school. This delay reduces competition and also creates a filter that distinguishes classes of workers based on education. Significantly, what it takes to be successful at school is different than what it takes to be successful in work. Therefore, to be successful in life one must be good at both systems. The educational system represents Logos, and the Industrial realm represents Physus. Thus the difference between education and business is a way to enforce this fundamental distinction in our world view which is the duality between Logos and Physus. Interestingly the nondual between these Nomos appears in Education as the major discriminator in the filtering system that is weeding out students because depending on the subject math plays a greater or lesser role, and math is one of the hardest subjects for most people and so minimal math requirements are one of the bases for differentiating between students. However, in business the amount of math that is actually performed is normally not as great as we would be led to believe by the math classes that are demanded in school. Only specialists actually deal with the mathematics in industry. Rather the kind of Math that is mostly used in business is ordering math, financial and statistical mathematics and for software discrete math. The amount calculus or algebra used by most workers is paltry. Therefore, in the academic system math is used to discriminate between those who can and cannot pass the required math, and in business it is the domain of specialists. So what we see is that the distinction between education and industry or business is there to enforce the distinction fundamental to the worldview between Physus and Logos. And interestingly Education is a large filter for getting into jobs in the work force whose entry is governed by Education and Experience, and so since higher levels of education are needed for better jobs in many cases, this means there is a greater delay of entry into the higher tiers of the workforce. Between filtering and delay the higher the position in industry the more competition for those jobs is curtailed. In this way economic resources are distributed in a Pareto fashion with the more educated getting the higher paying jobs after the longest wait, and after the most filtering. Logos becomes the filter for the Physus, and Nomos is used as the highest gain filter within the educational system, but there is a great disparity between the emphasis on math and its actual use, with other kinds of math that are not emphasized in school having greater weight in industry and the knowledge of math being the discriminator for specialties in many cases. From a philosophical point of view it is interesting how the Logos/Nomos/Physus duality is enforced and the role that the nondual of nomos plays in the filtering in education and specialization within industry. This way of introducing economic reward and inequalities is seen as more fair than earlier distributions based on inheritance or other factors in the sovereign regimes prior to the dominance of democracy. It is considered fair because it is based on the inherent properties of individuals subject to educational filtering rather than extrinsic factors like birth into a given family that would allow inheritance of positions whether or not one had the skills or innate dispositions to perform well in those positions.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-purpose-of-education

Poetic Thinker = Heidegger
Thinking Poet = Holderlin

Another similar dual:
Poetic Thinker = T.S. Elliot
Thinking Poet = Wallace Stevens

Heidegger answers that Poetry and Thinking are the Same because they “belong together” in a profound sense.

Heidegger says that Thinking is really Thanking in What is Called Thinking to my mind his most important book.

When I was taking a course on Heidegger I of course went to read Holderlin’s Fragments. And I must say that they were fascinating, and what I got out of them was the idea of the Pleroma. What I was most impressed with was the poems addressed to the Titans, i.e. forgotten gods. But what is key in my opinion is the god lost in Oblivion, which even the Greeks had lost Alalu. That god in Oblivion is the first god, and therefore is the last god which we await the passing of at the end of the Metaphysical age.

Oblivion . . . . Forgetfulness
Unstriated . . . Striated

One of the complementariteis in the Pleroma.

The PoetThinker stands in the midst of the revolving opposites of the Pleroma.
For instance between Beyng and Being (Seyn and Sein).

At the center between Beyng with Oblivion, AND Being with Forgetfulness in “torrential time”, i.e. four dimensional time where the moments of  past, present, future and mythos intersect there are the complementarities of Void and Emptiness.

Being withdraws into Forgetfulness while Beyng envelops us in Oblivion.

The ThinkingPoet draws near the center of this cyclone revolving through Beyng/Being and Oblivion/Forgetting where torrential time manifests, but the PoeticThinker dwells in that torrent. The one at the center of the cyclone and the one who draws near belong together more than anyone else who is immersed in words, naming, speech, conversation at home in language’s home.

But as we know, “This is a house not a home . . .”

A primal example in our time is “All along the watchtower” by Bob Dylan.

Like “Kubla Khan” of Coleridge it jumps out at us from beyond the pale.

A glimpse of the archetypal within time, as Plato said WorldSoul is the moving image of eternity in time.

Or perhaps Ozymandius of Shelly is a better example here: http://www.internal.org/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley/Ozymandius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

Forgotten is the name of the king, misquoted are the words on the statue which was not seen by the poet before writing the poem which was written to cover the work of another poet who writes of an annihilated London. We have forgotten the poem of Smith, just as he has sunk into Oblivion as a poet who did not enter the Canon. Only because he wrote a poem to which Shelly responded do we know anything of him at all.

There is a statue of a great king, in the desert, whose statue calls attention to his great works that have vanished, only the name and the claim remain, and only just barely do they bear witness to the ravages of time before sinking into oblivion themselves.

The desert is a void, but the claim of great works has been rendered an empty boast by the action of time.

Great civilizations such as that in Mesopotamia and Egypt that lasted thousands of years, much longer than our own, have been forgotten and almost lost in Oblivion.

However, Archaeology has recovered them, and eventually scholars via the Rosetta stone broke the code of the languages, and retrieved from Oblivion what has already been lost before the Greeks became civilized.

We have not yet come to terms with this more ancient past that lies beyond Greek origins, not to mention Hittite origins before that in the Indo-European lineage. And now we know of even earlier Indo-European archaeological sites in Turkey that pushes back the dawn of history even further than the first river civilizations.

The first beginning is the one we knew that the Greeks begat and we took as our own origins, but the “other beginning” is now coming toward us from an even more remote past.

And so that brings us to the difference between Beyng and Being (Seyn and Sein) which is crucial, and which Kelly and Dreyfus seem not to understand in their Analytic interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy in light of Dreyfus’ parallelism between Foucault and Heidegger, that causes them to focus on background practices as the field of the manifestation of Being in the various epochs of the Western Worldview. They of course start with the Greeks, and have not embraced yet the Black Athena.

However, I think we should take Contributions to Philosophy: On Ereignis seriously. And when we do we see that the Turning in Heidegger’s thought is from Being to Beyng, and from Forgetfulness to Oblivion. Being recedes in forgetfulness and Beyng engulfs us in Oblivion. Being is Striated by the Meta-levels: Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, Ultra, while Beyng is Unstriated as Onefold, Strange and Unique. It appears that Dreyfus and Kelly do not understand Beyng and the role that it plays in Heidegger’s philosophy, or at least that seems to be suppressed by their Analytical reading, which is appropriate. While Being is made apparent by Ontological Difference, Beyng is what comes when we jump over Ontological Difference and ask what is the dual of the Forgetfulness of Being which is receeding from us. What that dual is, which is the Seyn of Hegel, is something that is engulfing us in Oblivion, like with respect to the Enframing. Late Heidegger is always hiding Beyng behind what ever he is saying in his essays after Contributions was written yet not published. Being and Time is the published work that establishes Ontological Difference as the basis for Fundamental Ontology. Contributions is the unpublished work that establishes the real background practice of Heidegger himself in his obscurantisms that speak from the point of view of Beyng without naming it, because to name it would be to lose track of it. So he talks around it in the later writings trying to indicate it, but we only come to know about it explicitly in his Contributions and the book on Mindfulness.

Like the statue of Ramses we have rescued the Sumerians and the Egyptians from Oblivion, and we find them even more alien than the Greeks who we take as our origin. We now know of the Me of Innana and the Book of the Dead and their central roles in their respective civilizations. We recognize that the Greeks received their idea of the Gods from the Sumerians, while the Wisdom of Plato came from the Egyptians. Over time we will realize that more and more of what we saw as Greek originations, were repetitions and remembrances from a more ancient past. That other beginning which has now been recovered, the earlier beginning symbolized by Alalu discovered in Hittite inscriptions, take us deeper by uncovering a generation prior to the distinction between Uranus and Gaia, i.e. Heaven and Earth, Mortals and Immortals, i.e. before the unfolding of the World. That other beginning lost in oblivion before the beginning we remember is what ultimately must catch up with us, and in fact it already overwhelms us but we will only know how much with the passing of that last God that brings to close the Metaphysical age.

The next age is Heterochronic, i.e. it has all four moments before the symmetry breaking that lost mythic time, when we lost the mythopoietic era from site, and started to realize that this was a break with the gods. In the Heterochronic era we have again four orthogonal timelines and what Heidegger once called torrential time. It was always here, but we lost sight of it in the Metaphysical Era due to the symmetry breaking of time, that appeared to make it appear linear or circular. Heterochronic era must be a further intensification of nihilism. But in a different way it is a revisting of the Mythopoietic without the gods, who have then all departed. In the Heterochronic Beyng predominates over Being for the first time.

So notice that the mythopoietic named for the time of the epics such as those of Homer mentions both myth and poesy together.

The poet is the one who harkens to the lost mythic moment of time that was lost, and continues the craft of poesy in the metaphysical era.

The thinker becomes predominant in the metaphysical era, and mostly as with the pre-socratics as physicists.

Much of Heidegger’s early thought revolved around solving the Krisis by bringing Quantum Mechanics and Relativity theory into the lifeworld to solve the Krisis pointed out by Husserl. Both of these contradictory, paradoxical and even absurd   theories when considered together at the Planck level split reality in a way similar to the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. Heidegger finds the source of these duals in the structure of Being itself, by partitioning it into modes or meta-levels. But this opened Pandoras box when Heidegger discovered -B-e-i-n-g- (crossed out) which later Derrida called difference and which was validated when it was discovered that Plato called it the third kind of Being in the Timaeus. Heidegger feared the onslaught of an infinity of modes of Being, and thus tried to find another way, without Ontological Difference, which he eventually found when he discovered the word ereignis and resuscitation Hegels “Seyn” from Old High German to signify the dual of Sein. The discovery of the term ereignis was the lightning strike of realization for Heidegger as he described. It means happening or appropriation and has many other meanings that come together to forge a way for Dasein to relate to Beyng rather than Being.

Ereignis is translated often as “an event,” but is better understood in terms of something “coming into view.” It comes from the German prefix, er-, comparable to ‘re-’ in English and Auge, eye.[13][14] It is a noun coming from a reflexive verb. Note that the German prefix er- also can connote an end or a fatality. A recent translation of the word by Kenneth Maly and Parvis Emad renders the word as “enowning”; that in connection with things that arise and appear, that they are arising ‘into their own’. Hubert Dreyfus defined the term as “things coming into themselves by belonging together.”
Ereignis appears in Heidegger’s later works and is not easily summarized. The most sustained treatment of the theme occurs in the cryptic and difficult Contributions to Philosophy. In the following quotation he associates it with the fundamental idea of concern from Being and Time, the English etymology of con-cern is similar to that of the German:
…we must return to what we call a concern. The word Ereignis (concern) has been lifted from organically developing language. Er-eignen (to concern) means, originally, to distinguish or discern which one’s eyes see, and in seeing calling to oneself, ap-propriate. The word con-cern we shall now harness as a theme word in the service of thought.[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology

See also http://www.beyng.com/

So while the Thinker becomes predominant as physicist in the metaphysical era displacing the poet’s prior preeminence, the two remain the same and must realize their belonging together in the Heterochronic era.

In the Metaphysical Era Being receded, and Beyng rushes toward us.

But in the Heterochronic era we are utterly overwhelmed by Beyng and Ereignis becomes the fundamental relation of Dasein to Beyng replacing its care for Being in the Metaphysical Era.
http://www.quora.com/AllThingsShining/What-is-the-difference-between-the-Poet-and-the-Thinker
Thus, in a sense what is wrong with the Background Practices as Being interpretation is that it is looking back, and sees the re-appropriation of marginal background practices from the tradition, as being the way of realizing the saving possibility, while it is fairly clear that Heidegger had something far more radical than that in mind, i.e. the overwhelming of us all by Beyng.

So in the tradition, there has been epochs of Being, along with episteme changes (Foucault) and paradigm changes (Kuhn) and theory changes and changed in facticity, etc. But there is an Apocalyptic vision of this coming to the end with the event of appropriation by which Beyng overwhelms us which blindsides us because we have been fascinated by the receding of Being, instead of seeing what was coming toward us, the bigger changes after the post-post-post-modern was exhausted. Heidegger sees himself as inaugurating this new era with his Contributions, which he kept hidden until after his death.

In a sense then he is saying that the Thinker has to end the metaphysical era because he was predominant in it as prose was predominant over poetry in this era, and techne over poesis.

What the poetic thinker in our time must come to terms with is the nature of the new era that has been inaugurated by the last metaphysical thinker (Heidegger not Nietzsche) who thought Beyng out of the poetry of Holderlin and the philosophy of Hegel as expressed in its most radical implications by Nietzsche. In the Heterochronic era there is no possible separation any longer between the poet and the thinker, speaker and listener become onefold, strange and unique via er-eignis.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VHQAMX8NLBbnpeEriZBWP9Wj45DRoKMizfBCjAZE7UE/edit

This is a big question. I am not sure why I was asked to answer it. As you might expect my answer is going to be more philosophical. And it is going to be in terms of the reification of our ideas that underlies this question. In another question I have talked about Corporatism and the relation between the people in the firm and the firm itself, which wants to be taken as a person, an imaginary person, but a person none the less. it is information systems that allow global decentralization of firms. It is via information systems that the firm is able to protect itself against its own employees. Sarbanes Oxley calls for CEOs to be accountable for what happens in their organizations. This has caused a lot of hardening of the Information systems against the employees. I will give one example. Team Foundation Server (TFS) from Microsoft is built on an auditing platform. The primary aim of that system is to keep track of what really happened during the development so the blame can be shifted from the CEO to employees if necessary for overruns etc. In other words if you have to go to court to defend yourself, you want some record of what really happened and TFS gives that in spades. But it has many other limitations that get in the way of development, but the primary purpose is to make auditing possible at a much more detailed level than ever before on software projects. So here is an example of an information system being placed at the service of development one of whose aims is to make development auditable so blame can be established in court. However, of course when you have such an information system at the center of development then it makes decentralization easier as it makes it possible to coordinate with overseas developers and when you combine that with conference calls and web conferencing you get the capability to design and develop anywhere. So systems like TFS are crucial for global deployment of human resources making that possible. But of course that does not mean it will work, it just means that the vehicle is in place that facilitates detailed coordination of development tasks, the rest must be left up to the humans in the loop to make sure that it actually works properly. But without that facilitation by a system like TFS then the workflows are much more difficult to manage in a distributed fashion. TFS has forms called Work Items that will carry the information necessary that needs to be shared and anyone given permissions to get in can see and update that information a historical record of which is kept of every change. So it is possible to know what has happened during development on an action by action level as never before made possible by the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) concept that has been introduced recently and has been championed by TFS from Microsoft and Jazz from IBM. Other companies make add-ons and add-ins to these overall frameworks so that a whole ecology is created around the basic distributed data sharing tool. So the role of Information Systems is to put these ALM facilitating systems in place and to manage them. But the implicit goal is to establish a system that can monitor closely what developers are doing on a daily basis as they perform each significant action with regard to their work. In many ways this is also the result of the adoption of Agile and Lean approaches as well as these systems facilitate management methods like SCRUM which are team centered and attempt to make the development team as productive as possible by giving them quasi-autonomy to self-organize around the product releases that they have signed up to do. This is a double edged sword, as the team is expected to be more productive, and their actions are more closely watched, but they are able to decide many of the actions they will perform themselves and thus become more effective (agile) and efficient (lean) together known as efficaciousness. We will see how this new direction in development goes as it is now supported directly by Information Systems of the type that offer ALM capabilities which makes possible more distributed development.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-role-of-information-systems-in-firm-decentralization

First of all I must say that Hegel is definitely one of the hardest philosophers I have ever tried to understand, and I would not even have been able to start if it were not for the Bernsteintapes.com course on Hegel by Bernstein. I had tried and failed to read Phenomenology of Mind for years getting no where, but Bernstein gave me enough of a starting point to get me into the reading and made it possible for me to understand some  of it. Then I went on to listen to Bernstein’s other two lecture courses on Kant, and that helped me to understand Kant better, and that of course has a trickle down effect on understanding Hegel better because one is getting the interpretations from the same source. So I highly recommend listening to Bernsteintapes.com lectures as a way into Hegel.

I have read a lot of secondary texts on Hegel, especially about dialectics. I have probably read every book about dialectics that exists, or near to it, well the english ones anyway. But what shocked me was that none of them mention that Hegel not only invented modern dialectics (however you can see it at work in Aeschylus in the Orestia if you look, so it is actually an old idea) but also he invented Trialectics. He does this at the point where he introduces work, and just as he is about to transition to Spirit. So this was a revelation to me, which seems to not have been picked up in the secondary literature which is quite amazing. There are some scholars that have their own version of Trialectics, but that is something else, and so the term is overloaded which needs to be considered when using the term.

Well the discovery of Trialectics in Hegel allowed me to go on and continue to articulate Quadralectics and Pentalectics which I did in my recent dissertation called Emergent Design. So the area that I want to say that Hegel applies to in life outside of philosophy is design, which I try to show in my dissertation. I think that the identification of Hegelian Trialectics is very important. Of course he does  not call it Trialectics which is why it is a close reading is necessary to discern it. But I think it is quite clear and the fact that he puts it in his discussion of work, and that work is the penultimate thing before the transition to spirit I think is quite significant. It implies that work is the foundation of spirit in some sense. That means the work we do together binds us into a kind of collective mood or conscious affiliation that allows Spirit to unfold. Geist means Mind and Ghost and Spirit. The old english equivalent is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gast which is life and spirit.

Middle English gost, gast, from Old English gāst; akin to Old High German geist spirit, Sanskrit heḍa anger

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghost

“Ghost” came.from the Old English ~gast~, related to the German ~geist~. ~Gast~ sneaks into modern English in “aghast” (be shocked, terrified, rendered breathless) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gast and “flabbergast.” The German ~Zeitgeist~directly entered English; it means “the spirit of the times.”

http://www.adishakti.org/_/holy_spirit_or_holy_ghost.htm

See also http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feorh

The upshot of this is that feorh has more to do with the blood of the living that confers spirit of life while gast/gost is more the idea of what lingers after death of a person who is no longer living. On the other hand in German it is Geist that has these meanings of Ghost and Spirit but also means mind which is conferred by the word Mood in Old English. Of course Heidegger gives mood a philosophical meaning in Being and Time being the non-specific mood of Anxiety that points toward the world and ones finitude within the world.

Heidegger says at one point in Being and Time that Dasein is Geist. In some sense, although Heidegger hides the fact, Being and Time is an attempt to go back to the Phenomenology of Hegel to recontextualize the phenomenology of Husserl. It is Heidegger’s attempt to distance himself from Husserl via the more archaic phenomenology and giving it new meaning. Significantly Hegel appears at the beginning and end of Being at Time. And Dasein is a key term in Hegel’s Logic, as Determinate Being, the first positing of a new thesis after the synthesis of Being and Emptiness as Heraclitian Flux.

Dasein is already embedded in the Mitsein and has to purify itself by understanding his relation to death so that Dasein can become authentic. Purified Dasein in some sense then can become pure spirit, i.e. the spiritual side of the community that embodies the holy spirit/ghost which is the neglected part of the trinity on which Hegel pinned all his hopes as a way to revive Christianity in a Pietist framework [The Mirror of Production Baudrillard). So we can understand that after a century of ideological struggles between Fascism, Capitalism and Communism that eventually they would all become alike via their struggles with each other until now we have Corporatism which is a combination of the three that supersedes them all. We still think of ourselves as Capitalists who live in a Liberal Democracy, but in fact the struggle against Fascism and Communism over the last century changed us and now we are entering the area of globalization and corporate oligarchy in which corporations are seen as persons as a recent Supreme Court decision shows. As Ron Paul points out Obama is not a socialist but a corporatist. He is working to increase the power of corporations, because that is where the re-election money comes from. The Occupy movement does not know what they are against because we have not really identified Corporatism as a threat to democracy yet. But it is clear that the Republicans have sold their souls to the Corporatist agenda and also it is clear that this is a danger to our Liberal democracy. Liberal Democracy is a form of government that provides liberty for the individuals, not corporations. But now corporations are posing even more as persons and claiming the rights of citizens, super-citizens. With regard to corporations we are at once employees, shareholders, and customers of corporations. But these corporations are mandated to screw over employees and customers and citizens to maximize shareholder value. Thus corporations do not protect the Commons but feed off of them. Zizek in his speech to Occupy Wallstreet said that the only part of Communism that was still relevant was the idea of protecting the commons. Occupy Wallstreet attempted to occupy the commons, and they were tolerated for some time, but eventually thrown out, for reasons of sanitation.

It is interesting that Hegel’s Spirit did not become a major influence in sociology. It probably had some influence on Comte. But Comte began Positivism as opposed to speculative philosophy. Positivism wants positive empirical data to support its assertions rather than speculative reasoning. And because Hegelianism was an underpinning of Marxism it was always suspect even though Marx turned Hegel upside down and replaced idealism with materialism. Thus after Comte sociologists speak of Durkheim and Weber and sometimes Marx but almost never Hegel. But it is with the idea of Spirit that Hegel really inaugurated the concept of Sociology, even if he did not give it that name, because he was talking about the shared culture of societies that develop over time and the logic of that development as mirrored in philosophy which demonstrated the evolution of consciousness into social conscience. This is why the story of Antigone. She contradicts Creon’s edict over burying her brother and upholds traditional communal and family values against the values of the state. An interesting modern-day version of this way of thinking is Community without Unity by William Corlett http://books.google.com/books/about/Community_Without_Unity.html?id=J6cU5wVfsHcC

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-life-lessons-learned-through-reading-Hegel-that-are-useful-in-other-parts-of-life

Sean Kelly in his lectures based on All Things Shining calls the Furies the “Old Gods” and sees Aeschylus as trying to reconcile these forces in Greek society. The furies were already suppressed by Homer he points out who mentions them by his count only five times. However, he misses the point that Poseidon is motivated by revenge and thus the furies are present though this only indo-european god who acts as the foe of Odysseus.

But then who are the furies? I had an insight into this recently as I was listening to a lecture by Betty Smith who wrote the Greek Dialogues, in which she produces discussions between the gods concerning the meaning of the events in the mythic history fictively as they occur. My insight was that there are many triplets of Greek goddesses and other creatures, the furies being an example. But we also have the Norns/Fates, the graces, the muses, etc. My insight is that all these female triplets are the same with quantum superposition of different characteristics and all of them go back to their source in the negative fourfold, which according to Aristophanes is Chaos, Covering, Abyss, and Night. The Furies are closer to this origin than the others as their characteristics are closer to that of the negative fourfold which is the feminine metaphysical principle lurking unrecognized behind the fourfold of Socrates that Heidegger takes up which is Heaven, Earth, Mortals and Immortals. I talk about the genesis of this feminine metaphysical principle hidden in our tradition in my book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void [See The Birds first came the negative fourfold, then came Eros, then came the Birds, then came the Gods which would include all the generations from Hittite Ahlu, to Uranus, to Chronos, to the trinity Zeus/Hades/Poseidon. Of course, the exaltation of the Birds is a joke, but it is really a serious joke, but we cannot delve into that meaning here. The point is that the Negative Fourfold is even before Uranus splits from Gaia, i.e. before Heaven and Earth are cut asunder. And that means before there was a difference between mortal and immortal as well. So they are very old Gods indeed. and they are not going away, and so that is why the Furies must be reconciled and cannot be merely abandoned instead.

http://www.quora.com/AllThingsShining/Who-are-the-Furies

Sean D. Kelly contrasts Homer and Aeschylus in his reading of the Oresteia [http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/. The contrast comes up between Homer who mentions the Furies only five times (by his count) and Aeschylus who centers his whole play on attempting to reconcile them with the “new” Olympian gods. However, what Prof. Kelly misses is that revenge is a key part of the Odyssey, in the revenge that Poseidon is taking against Odysseus for the harm he did to the Cyclops Polyphemus [Aeschylus. It is just that Homer is not trying to resolve the conflict but merely avoid it in order to get Odysseus back home. But revenge is the context that produces the interference to that goal.

http://www.quora.com/AllThingsShining/Where-is-revenge-in-the-Odyssey

When in doubt, and if you want a real answer to a real question then I would definitely suggest Stackoverflow as your best bet.

http://www.quora.com/Quora-Policies-and-Guidelines/If-Im-having-trouble-deciding-whether-my-question-is-better-asked-on-Quora-or-Stack-Overflow-which-would-Quoras-creators-prefer