History 10

We're at history ten and we're pursuing our inquiry. We're trying to educate ourselves and to prepare, in a way, for a very grand threshold that appears in about three weeks. And that is the appearance of science. And it's not that science appears at any particular time. And then that's it. But like all occurrences in reality, there are accumulations of waves and a wave form builds up and there is a threshold beyond which then The conditions of reality began to reflect the dimensions of having passed through a threshold in the creation of the universe. The imperceptible differences in actuality and non actuality built up and eventually became density waves, and the accumulation of those allowed for the subatomic particles to gel and become atoms, so that this is a very deep process. It's the process by which reality itself happens. And so our education is rather a real development, and not just a cultural inculcation of some kind of imposed Idea. For the last 200 years, it's been apparent to philosophy, to the philosophic consideration of intelligence, that there is a difference between a concept and an idea, and the initial development of that comes from a one of our thinkers that we're using in this part of history, Hegel and in Hegel, one of his earliest books published in a translation rather recently. This is 1995. His book, not translated into English from the original lectures till 1995, is called Lectures on Natural right and political science, and they were given at the University of Heidelberg, 1817 1819. It's interesting to us, because the pair figure that we're using with Hegel, because we're always pairing figures in our education. They're like goalposts that we want to go between and not get stuck on either one. And so we use pairs of figures because it gives us a chance at least to see where there is a goal, where there is a threshold, and that we want to go past that and we want to go through that. So the pair of two Hegel is Jacob Burckhardt, and he was born about the time these lectures were given. And it's interesting because Burckhardt Became the historian who gelled the idea of the Renaissance. His publication of his book, it's been reprinted maybe a thousand times. The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy came out in 1860. He was deeply influenced by Hegel's philosophy, as was everyone in the 19th century, but in particular he was influenced by a French take on Hegel, which is not the same as a German take on Hegel or an English take on Hegel. Hegel was the great philosophic star of his day. He was the star lecturer of his day and eventually went from Heidelberg and moved up the ladder until he became the great professor in Berlin. At one time Hegel lectured in the same place as Immanuel Kant, and while Kant would have an audience much like I would have. Hegel's rooms were filled to overflowing. There were students hanging on the windowsills trying to listen to him. He was the great man. I believe he became the rector of the University of Berlin, as well as the head of the philosophy department. And had he have not died of a disease in 1831, he would have probably become, who knows, one of the great political figures of his day as well. While Kant always went through the same ritual disposition, it was said that you could tell the time of day by what Kant was doing. Hegel was wearing ermine lined coats with the collars and the hair coming down like this great intellectual genius and delivering the most startling lectures imaginable. And he was concerned and were using his great lectures on the philosophy of world history. And these lectures on the Philosophy of World History are the last section of his lecture series on the lectures of Natural Right and Political Science. And at the very beginning of his lectures on the Natural Right and Political Science. And those lectures were always in translation, later on truncated to being published and translated as Hegel's Philosophy of Right. His Philosophy of Right in that rights are the key idea in political science in political forms, and it is the idea of rights that is the foundation upon which law is based. And the entire ensemble of these powerful ideas and their conceptual origins were deeply codified by Rome 2000 years ago. The structure that has lasted longest is the structure of Roman law and Roman law gave a kind of an impetus to the way in which the Roman Empire styled itself. You had rights as a citizen of the city of Rome, anywhere in the Roman world, and someone who did not have those rights was outside of the authority invested in economic, military, and political power. If you were a citizen of Rome, even if you didn't live in Rome, you were a part of the Roman power structure, and the empire was made for you, for you to exercise your control of the world. And anyone who wasn't a citizen of the Roman Empire was outside of the ability to question your rights, to influence your power. Indeed, your rights and your power ran roughshod over their lives. This entire ensemble came down in Hegel when he did his lectures on natural rights and political science. At the very center of the book is a section called The State. The state and all European states took their power from the way in which the Roman Empire set up the template, and Roman law still in force affected individuals and at the center of the state The very next section of portions in Hegel is called The Power of the sovereign. And the sovereign is not just the King, but the sovereign is he who has the single unitary authority to not only wield power, the power of the state, but to delegate out citizenship and power to everyone else so that they are all, in effect, magnetized to his magnet, and that the sovereign therefore has an energy monopoly on the way in which events will run, and that this is the source of the ability to govern. And after all of these considerations, Hegel finally comes to world history that somehow world history must unfold according to this kind of plan and structure. And the only other consideration is that some deep current of actualization runs through history and is only commandeered by the political forms, by the legal structure, by the state, by the sovereignty. And it is because these forms commandeer this energy that they have this authority. But the energy in world history itself is that of an independent spirit, that there is a creative spirit in the universe who Goes through the various forms and is up to those in control to make sure that their authority has no competition from other people. Saying that they have access to this spirit of creative energy in the universe. Only they have this and that. Because they have this, they can franchise it out. And every subsidiary form politically, legally, governmentally, individually has its place, its coordinates, its understandability because of this delegation. Now, when Hegel first did his lectures on natural right and political science, which later on came to be called Hegel's Philosophy of Right at the latest edition of. It is published by Cambridge University Press in the early 1990s. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, and they give it the full formal title by which, philosophically it's known elements of the Philosophy of Right. And right at the beginning. Section one. First sentence. The subject matter of the philosophical science of right is the idea of right. The concept of right and its actualization, the idea of right. So that right away in Hegel, you come to the power of the idea. And immediately Hegel stops right there and makes a discrimination, he says. Philosophy has to do with ideas and therefore not with what are commonly described as mere concepts that he splits ideas and concepts off. Philosophy has to do with the ideas. Not the concepts. On the contrary, it shows that the latter concepts. Are one sided and lacking in truth, and that is the concept alone. Not often what is called by that name, but which is merely an abstract determination of the understanding. That there is something in an idea that has actuality that a mental form, Because it has been integrated in such a way that it bears a direct connection to an existential objectivity. The symbols have a mental objectivity. They have an actuality and philosophy. Being a very sober consideration deals with ideas, not with concepts. And ideas are formed. They're formal. So that. Concepts are transitory and they come and go in the course of natural existence, whereas ideas are much more powerful. They're the essence that's distilled Spilled out of the existential coming and going out of the transitoriness. And they're made very objectively firm. In fact, they're made firm in such a way that really powerful ideas have a universal validity. And this, of course, becomes both a blessing and a curse for the 19th century. And Hegel's philosophy, as some of you may know, a derivation of it that used a. As one critic once said, Karl Marx stood Hegel on his head. And Marxism was a development out of this kind of inverted Hegelian understanding, an idea Marx actually was not a very profound thinker. Burckhardt gives us a deep insight into the way in which history, at the beginning of the 19th century, was being powerfully stylized in Hegel's philosophy of history, in the Hegelian take on the nature of the state and the development of power. Different from Hegel, Kant, who was his intellectual equal. Kant focused on the mind on the way in which the mind, in terms of its reason, came to deep, a priori universal understandings. Hegel emphasized the way in which this was translated from ideas Into the world and became political structures which determined the course of history. When we factor Burckhardt in with Hegel, though, we come to a very interesting realization that Hegel's maturity when he was in university, when he was first beginning to feel his intellectual capacity, the biggest event in the world at the time was the French Revolution. And as a young student, his best friends were visionary poets like Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin. And these young visionary men knew each other. They were friends. They were a coterie. They were like the filmmakers Spielberg and Lucas and Coppola. They knew each other as students. And so when they made their works, they used each other's ideas. And the young professorial Hegel was a poetic visionary and not a system making idealist. And it's important to realize that. But in the development of the German philosophical tradition, Hegel was taken out of that context, out of that personal autobiographical origin, and put into an abstract, intellectual, academic presentation. It did not become you to know a great deal of the details of Hegel, whereas it became you to know the testable details of Hegelian isms. Whereas the Hegel take on the spirit moving through historical forms in the French tradition received an attention where the emphasis was on the personal effect that would happen when you were sensitized to the spirit moving through history, and you didn't pay all that much Germanic attention to the details of the forms of commandeering of power. You tuned yourself to the energy moving, and you felt it in your person. Because the French tradition was largely affected by the French Revolution, there never was a French Revolution in Germany. So that the. When it came time for someone like Jacob Burckhardt to come into his maturity to write his great historical books, he was not influenced by German philosophy, the German philosophical Hegel, so much as he was influenced by the French historical tradition that got its aegis from a Hegelian appreciation of the French Revolution, and the figure that most characterizes this is a French historian named Michelet. And here I have an English translation from 100 years ago. Michelet. French Revolution. Its full title is Historical View of the French Revolution, and Michelet, whose history of France came out in the 1830s 1840s. Michelet's history of France was conceived and written about the same time that Henri Balzac was writing his great novels, and if you put all of Balzac's novels together, Balzac said that they constituted an epic of humanity, which he called the comedies humaine, the human comedy. That this was the array of incredible variations of human beings, incredible interpenetration of life, characters that one could hardly believe existed, and yet not only exist, but exist in proliferation. And they're all over Paris and so contemporary with Balzac's Human Comedy. Michelet's History of France tried to show the complete array of what was going on and how the French Revolution was a complete watershed in this development, but volume seven of his history of France is entitled The Renaissance, and Michelet looked at the Renaissance as the first indication that somewhere down the line, instead of there being special spiritual visionaries who would get what the Renaissance was about, that there would come a time in some future age, some future century after the Renaissance, when the general populace of human beings would get the vision and that that was the French Revolution, that it was the Renaissance reaching the men and women on the street and not some philosophical, gifted, visionary thinker. But it was men and women on the street who got the vision. So that Michel's historical view of the French Revolution coming out in the 1830s 1840s. Hegel died in 1831. Balzac, writing and Hegel's philosophy being talked about all over Europe. And in the midst of this, it is Michel's writing that influences Burckhardt most. That he wanted to understand that there was an ongoing current of vision That was a spiritual energy, and that the forms that man makes only corral that energy. Only try to shape that spirit in terms of its application to current events. Current lives. Current situations. But Michelet. In his work. When you come to the very beginning of it, in this translation, it's on page 32. Burckhardt reading this. Right at the beginning of his historical career. Michelet says, harkening back to the Roman Empire, harkening back to the genesis of the way in which the Roman Empire brutalized the population of men and women. In the first half, the first two thirds of the first century AD, that in fact the brutality. Reached its apex and got cinched into the Roman character in a very short period of time. It was there. The brutality was there in the aristocracy for several generations before. It finally settled in and glued the Roman population into a brutal nightmare of distorted living. And that event happened that coagulation of brutality into the people happened in the 60s, the early 60s A.D., the time of Nero Caesar, and that the most poignant thing, the symbolic center of the arena in which this brutality was glued and cemented into the population, was the Colosseum in Rome. And the event in the Colosseum was the brutal death of slaves and of captives and of persona non grata in the Colosseum, especially those who were thrown to the lions. And of course, right away, if you have any kind of acquaintance, you say, well, who who was thrown to the lions in Nero Caesar's His time in the Coliseum, and they were the Hellenistic Jews called Christians. They were thrown to the lions and Mishlei in section five right away at the beginning of his French Revolution. The key to the development of his whole history of France. The section is called How Free Thinkers escaped. Escaped. And he says in here, after a grand festival. Michelet, writing in the history of the French Revolution, but writing back in the Colosseum in Rome in 6065 A.D., after a grand festival, a great carnage in the Colosseum at Rome, when the sand had been moistened with blood and the lions were lying down. Cloyed Surfeited with human flesh. Then, in order to divert the people to keep them entertained, a special little dessert was prepared for them. A special little brutal comic dessert. A slave who was emaciated. And so they were skin and bones, and the movements would be clumsy, which the crowd then would laugh at because they were like gawky motions. This emaciated, half starved, dazed slave was given an air, and if he could carry it from one end of the Coliseum arena to the other and put it on the altar, he would be spared. He would be freed, he would be saved. But he had to walk across the blood soaked sands of the Coliseum, with the lions still munching on his friends and his dazed, clumsy steps were laughed at because this was their kind of cartoon. This was the comic fool in the brutal mode for the people. Michile brings it to our attention. He half dead with fear, stooping, shrinking, cringing as if to sink into the earth, would have exclaimed, doubtless could he have ever even given utterance to his thought? Alas, noble lions, I am so meager! Please let me pass. Michel says, never did any buffoon, any mimic, produce such an effect upon the people. The extraordinary comical contortions and agonies of fear convulsed all the spectators with laughter. They rolled on their benches and the excess of their mirth. It was a fearful tempest of merriment. A roar of joy. Then he says, and of course, all of this deeply influencing the way that Burckhardt was going to write all of his histories, because Michelet was of that generation of French historians who understood that something desperate had happened to their generation, and that the generations just before this event were supposed to be the most sophisticated, calm, clear eyed generation that had ever been bred on the planet. The generation just before the French Revolution was the cream of the enlightenment. The great philosophers who were the most calm, reasonable, dispassionately brilliant and excellent generation of men and women who had ever lived. Voltaire and his ilk. Men and women of the great grand, intellectually sophisticated salon life. That was the cream of history. And it was their enlightenment world that led directly to the French Revolution. Curious that someone paralleling Michelet later on in the 20th century said it was the smug, self-assured English Victorian mentality that called forth World War One. The self-assured English Victorian assumed that they were exempt from the vicissitudes of history, that they had crawled ashore from the seas of evolution, and they had arrived, and that their flocked, velvet wallpapered parlours with the grand doily covered furniture was always going to be secure, because this was the ultimate beautiful crime of being civilised. And it didn't occur to them at all that old rusty iron wheeled Artillery could shatter all that in less than a day. But Mitchellii mitchellii 150 years ago, already understanding and saying he's writing about the French Revolution, but he's writing about it after Hegel. He's writing about it. While Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history about a spiritual power, a spiritual energy frequency that courses through history and man's forms can only seek to corral it temporarily, to focus it like a lens, to make sure that it has in its instrumentality the ability to focus and use that spiritual power and energy. But it doesn't originate it. And Michelet, Mitchell, writing with a Hegelian spiritual understanding of world history, focusing on the French Revolution, and he says this finally. Others. Meaning others now reading me will laugh. Woe to them! I can never laugh. And beholding that spectacle, those fasts, those contortions, those efforts to deceive, to dupe the growling monsters, to amuse that unworthy multitude wound me to the heart. Those slaves whom I see passing yonder across the bloody arena. Are the sovereign of the mind. There the sovereigns of the mind there men and women who think for themselves. He's transposing it from ancient Rome to contemporary France, to contemporary Europe, to the Europe of the 1830s, the 1840s, the 1850s. He's saying the people who are being laughed at by the multitudes now, trying to carry this little egg of wisdom, of insight, seem ridiculous to them. And no one more ridiculous than somebody who's trying to carry a idiosyncratic personal vision that nobody else gives anything about, he says. And you can see why. Burckhardt's. Book begins The state as a work of art. It's not a political form at all, Michelle says, those slaves whom I see passing yonder across this bloody arena are the sovereigns of the mind, the benefactors of the human race. Oh, my fathers, oh my brethren, Voltaire, Moliere, Rabelais, beloved of my thoughts. It is you whom I behold, trembling, suffering, and ridiculous. Under that sad disguise they have to disguise sublime geniuses privileged to bear the sacred gift of God. Have you then accepted on our account that degraded martyrdom to be buffoons of their fear degraded? No, never. From the centre of the amphitheatre, they addressed me in a kind voice. Friend. What matters if they laugh at us? What do we care at being devoured by wild beasts, at suffering the outrage of cruel men if we but reach the goal provided this dear treasure laid safely upon the altar, be recovered by mankind, whom it will save sooner or later. Do you know what that treasure is? Liberty. Justice. Truth. Reason. When we reflect by what imperceptible degrees, through what difficulties and obstacles, every grand design is accomplished, we are less surprised on beholding the humiliation, the degradation to which its originator is often subjected, who would undertake the task of following from unknown depths to the surface. The progress of such a thought. Who could tell? The confused forms, the modifications, the fatal delays it has to undergo for ages? With what slow steps does it emerge? From instinct to musing to reverie, and thence to the poetical curiosa? How long is its progress confined to children, fools to poets and madmen? And yet one day that madness proves to be the common sense of all. And in this is an essential realization. Recovered in Italy in the 1430s. And that's what Burckhardt says was the Renaissance and the figure, the central figure who saw it, who discovered it was Cosimo de Medici. And the central place, the hearth where he took that sacred flame was the city of Florence. And even though Florence had had extraordinary figures before, they never had the hearth lit by the vision of the spiritual energies that make history illuminated. The previous Florentine genius that one could have pointed out to was Dante, and Dante's Divine Comedy is the great medieval Gothic cathedral in poetry. It's the ultimate Gothic cathedral of the Middle Ages. And yet, Cosimo de Medici is a Renaissance, the first Renaissance figure, and his closest friend as a young man was the sculptor Donatello, and in Donatello, the great sculptor that signals the beginning of the Renaissance is his. David. David. David, the old Jewish king from 1000 B.C.. David, who was the builder of the city of Jerusalem, as opposed to the Caesars, who were the builders of Rome. So that in the Renaissance, for the first time in maybe 1500 years, Jerusalem is opposed to Rome as the ideal city, the visionary city of where the spiritual energy of history receives its crystalline lensed ability to make the rainbows of possibility for men and women, so that their lives are realistically reflected in various possibilities that are open to them and not constrained by authoritarian power. Delegations from sovereigns, from states, from police chiefs, from police, from any petty official who doesn't want you to do anything because he just doesn't like that you're going to do something. Let's take a break. Let's come back to where we left off. Jerusalem and Rome. Cosmos. Kosmo's buddy was Donatello. It's interesting. Later on, when the Italian Renaissance became really powered up and muscular, probably the greatest single sculpture of the Italian Renaissance is Michelangelo's David. And when you look at the colossal power in Michelangelo's David, the the big, gnarly hands of a northern Italian craftsman, his David stands not only nude, but powerfully defiant like he's the ultimate halfback in whatever game you want to play. He's going to score Monumentally huge, standing in his own alcove, which is as large as anybody's chapel. But Donatello's David is different. In fact, Donatello did two Davids. His first. David is like a very quiet, intelligent young man, the kind of figure that you would have seen in knightly romances of the young apprentice knight who's trying to show the masterful knight that he's ready to assume that mantle. But later on, in one of the most brilliant, sophisticated sculptures ever made, Donatello makes a lithe, nude David that looks in its It's willowy, a silhouette for all the world, like the kind of Buddhist sculpture that you would see from Thailand, from Southeast Asia, of the Buddhist monk who's walking so slim, lithe, willowy and walking to show the grace of strength rather than the muscular power of strength. And when one looks at Donatello's lithe, nude David, later David, he has the big broad brimmed hat and one sees, if you look not directly at the sculpture, but just at the tone of the sculpture, one sees that this is a hermetic figure. This is Hermes, the messenger with his hat and his winged litheness, who has come to guide not to win by fighting in power, but to win by guiding out of the situation completely that the victory belongs because you can move on. You can move through transformational thresholds that leave that entire complication behind. You don't have to win that fight, because that fight belonged to a situation which can be left behind. You can emerge to perfect victory not by fighting, but by transforming out of the need to fight there in the first place. All this is a deep, ancient Hermetic tradition, and its tradition in the way in which the Italian Innocence, discovered it, brought it back into play, was a most curious event, and it centered around Cosimo de Medici. His plan that we've talked about, of translating all of Plato and of making the young Marsilio Ficino, the son of his physician, raising him to be the translator for this, and then devoting his one of his villas, the villa up in Fiesole, on the hills up above Florence, making that the Platonic Academy a place, a villa devoted to study of this whole platonic tradition And the discovery that in classical times that that platonic tradition wasn't just Plato. Even though Plato's works were dozens of great dialogues, they were but one stage in the platonic tradition, and that Plato, who was born in the 400 BC, that the tradition that he was in resulted some 900 years later in what was called the platonic theology, and it was developed at that time in the five hundreds A.D. by a man named Proclus and Proclus is whole. Huge work was centered around a work called the Platonic Theology and the program was not just to translate Plato, but to translate the entire tradition. And not only that, 900 years from Plato through all of the developments to the great apex of Plotinus, to the final culmination of Proclus, not just that 900 years, but that there was a tradition that Plato participated in himself, and that the platonic tradition is but a phase, but a lineage within something that is even larger. And one of the great figures in antiquity who was a precursor to Plato was Pythagoras, and that Pythagoras lived at 500 BC. So that if you take Pythagoras to Proclus. It's a thousand years. It's a millennium. And that that thousand years was the classical Greek, platonic and also Neoplatonic and also Pythagorean and also Neopythagorean. And when you put all of these together within the context that it fit the larger tradition, it was not the platonic tradition, but the Hermetic tradition, because the Greek, Pythagorean, platonic, Neoplatonic Neo-pythagorean tradition was 1000 years in a tradition that went back many thousands of years, and that the original matrix out of which that came was Egypt. Egyptian wisdom. And they discovered they remembered something that had been conveniently forgotten by the Roman Empire that Plato studied in Egypt. Just like Pythagoras studied in Egypt, and that their sense of enormity of tradition, enormity of time came from Egypt, came specifically from the Heliopolis center in the Egyptian delta, which was based on the Osirian religion. Osiris, the god of the dead, but not the god of the dead, as in dead end, but the god of the dead as in resurrection. And when they pieced together that this Pythagorean platonic tradition belonged within the older Egyptian Hermetic tradition, they began to realize that the cycle of life included a cycle of death and resurrection of transformation. And when they saw it that way, they looked at their Christianity, and they saw that the medieval Christianity of the church was a Roman form that didn't understand either the platonic Pythagorean tradition or the deeper, more ancient Egyptian Hermetic tradition in the first place. And that not only did Plato and Pythagoras study in Egypt, but that Moses studied there also. He grew up there. He grew up in that tradition. And therefore it occurred to them that maybe the Torah contains a schooling as well as the platonic dialogues, as well as the Pythagorean writings, that maybe all of these belong together. Our lineages within this larger matrix of the Egyptian Hermetic Wisdom. And what was that? What was that wisdom? They didn't know. In the Italian Renaissance, they didn't know. There was no archaeology then. There was no uncovering of artifacts. There was no discovery of hieroglyphics and how to translate. No one knew. They went by how the classical Greeks related to it. And they took that as gospel. It wasn't until the time after the French Revolution and the later life of Hegel, the beginning of life of Burckhardt, that there was such a thing as an expedition to Egypt specifically to find out what this Egyptian traditional matrix was. And the figure who sent that expedition, who led that expedition to Egypt was Napoleon himself. Because he was setting up a new Roman Empire himself, not a Roman Empire based on their authority then, but an empire based on our complete severing of ties with their history in the first place. Napoleon said the French Revolution has already cut those ties so that we come into play brand new. We do not have the bad habits that they had. We don't have the historical, if we can put it in this term, their karma. We don't have their karma. What we have is our own, and we need information and facts so that we can put together something of our own and lead his expedition to Egypt. And he didn't take just armies with him. To conquer Egypt was not hard to conquer. In Napoleon's time, he took an army of savants, French wise men, to unearth the materials and to piece together. Champollion, who was the first to make headway in translating hieroglyphics, was one of the chosen figures. And out of that whole development came people like Burckhardt, because they were based on Michelet, who came directly out of that. And at the same time, the development of modern mathematical analysis of transformation came out of this at the very same time, Fourier, whose books on transformational series have been standards for 200 years and mathematical texts that are still there, comes from that same era. The understanding of Fourier's mathematical transforms are purely Egyptian, Hermetic. And what was that? It was what the Italian Renaissance discovered through Ficino and his cohorts of translating that the ancient Hermetic wisdom of the Egyptians had a quite different outlook on the way in which history unfolded. That, as far as man was concerned, the most that man could do existentially was to live day by day. That's all you can do. You're awake for a day and you can stretch that day to 12, 15, even 18 hours. You can occasionally stretch it to 24 hours, but you're eventually going to have to sleep. So essentially, man's existential actuality, when you really look at it, is that he is awake day by day, and in between he's asleep. Night by night. So that man's existential existence, in point of fact, is a discontinuity punctuated by sleep all the time. And the ancient Egyptian theology, the Heliopolitan recension going back to 3000 BC, it was already mature in 3000 BC, is that RA rises every day The sun rises every day and makes the day. If RA didn't rise, there would be no day. And when that day is finished by RA setting, that day is complete. That day is not only existentially complete. What you did that day, but that day is now boxed as an eternal form. That day exists as that day forever. And tomorrow is a new day. I think Scarlett in Gone With the wind says tomorrow is a new day. Another day. It's that tomorrow, as it's day is also going to have its box. And you set those days side by side and you can align them. And that the line of days is so huge that it extends for millions of years And that the God who moves freely through that line of days, of millions of years is the Lord of history, and the spirit that moves through, that has no name but those gods, that structure the forms of the days, linking together to make larger time forms. Those time forms have gods who have names, and they have. They occur always in pairs, male and female pairs, and that the transformed pairs Isis and Osiris, and that what is transformational about Isis and Osiris is that they connect the unnamed Named God of the spirit, moving eternally through the millions of years of days with those who live within those boxes of days, within those sets of days, making those time forms so that the gods that can be named are structures of time forms, and the God who cannot be named is the eternal spirit that moves through all those days, all those millions of years, and also through those gods. Well, 500 years ago, when it was found that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church of the 1460s in Florence were but a small postage stamp compared to the vast postal system of eternity. It became a cause celeb. They didn't know what to do with this. They looked around and they saw. We can understand this, but everyone else. How would you teach them? There's no way to do this. It takes so long to have just a few select geniuses to understand this. There's no way to tell the people. And 500 years ago, there was no way. So a double standard came into play. That was a double standard in the ancient Greek tradition. Also, there was a double standard in the ancient Egyptian tradition 5000 years ago. The truth is available to those who are special, and everyone else will have to be held at arm's length and handled so that they don't get out of order. And of course, this becomes at the time of the American and French revolutions, an intolerable assumption. Who is deciding for men and women what the limits of their intelligibility can be? And people like Franklin and Voltaire and Jefferson wanted to upset that entire situation. And the French Revolution especially wanted to not only upset that situation, but to make sure that it would never come back. So those who were responsible for this must be killed. Those who were participatory in this must be guillotined. And as that inescapable application went on, the French Revolution decayed into what has become historically known. That period is called the terror. And the very people who wanted to bring that liberation from the old Roman Coliseum, things found themselves viewing crowds of Parisians who were eating their lunch while little children were being guillotined, back to the very thing that Mitchell was talking about in the Colosseum in Rome, with the guy trying to carry the egg across the arena. The brutalization of the people. And it didn't happen over some long bludgeoned period. It happened within about a year, and it shocked them to death that men and women can be men and women who you could talk to and knew could be brutalized to that extent that quickly. It was unbelievable. It was fearful, not that the events of the terror were not fearful already. But what was really scary is how quickly ordinary men and women can become bestial and enjoy it. And so someone like Hegel in writing his philosophy of right after not only the French Revolution decayed, but after Napoleon. He's very careful about what you're going to do, about talking about history and political forms, and you can understand why it's so carefully worded to make sure that it doesn't get out of hand again. We just now barely emerged from that, and a great deal of the formalism in the later Hegel is to make sure that all of this content is delivered in an educational form of method that takes sophistication to learn, so that by the time you learn the method, the content will come to you in such a way that you have pieced it together logically and not just come upon it as some kind of carte blanche to just take over. And the difficulty is, is that it also goes too far in the other direction, because all the systems of the 20th century went the other way. That the old idea of the median ground. Turns out the middle path is the historical Buddha, said the middle path. And it's very difficult as long as it is a middle path, you are always shying away from extremes and you're always having to recompute of where the middle is. And that is not sustainable, because as long as you try to take a middle path, you will end up playing a ping pong game between extremes all the time. And Hegel's philosophy was reduced to this kind of intellectual ping pong game of thesis and antithesis and synthesis, always trying to find the synthesis and always trying to take any thesis and its antithesis to find its dialectical synthesis. And that becomes the new thesis for a new. And you can see that it becomes a hierarchical nightmare of intellectual tiptoeing until you can't sustain it. It's not sustainable. Of course, the confidence now at the beginning of the 21st century is that with supercomputers and genetic controls, that one can now make that happen because the controls are on the molecular level, the atomic level. And what are they going to do to fight that? But the fact is, is that it isn't because someone or some group are heretics against that authority. That authoritarian structure is that it doesn't work because of its structural limitations. It produces brutality and idiocy all the time. It's built in. It will always do that. The very first play about super machines it's called r u r r period. U period r period. Rossum's. Universal robots, written by a Czech named Karl Capek, written in the 1920s and an R.U.R.. The sophisticated robots take over making themselves and they realize that man is dispensable. It is a dead end because that kind of structure produces brutality and universal death all the time, because that's how it works. That's what it does. So that there is a very peculiar quality when you come towards what turned out to be the end of Hegel's life in 1830. He's 60 years old. He's the most famous thinker in the world at that time, and he's writing in a section of A revised second draft of World History. The section is entitled The Realization of Spirit and History The Realization of Spirit in History. And he says this. To try to define reason in itself. If we consider reason in relation to the world, amounts to asking what the ultimate end of the world is, and we cannot speak of an ultimate end without implying that this end is destined to be accomplished, to be realized. We therefore have two points to consider. First, the content of the ultimate end itself, i.e. its definition as such, and secondly, its realization ends and means we must. First of all, note that the object we have before us. What is that object before us? World history. We're trying to apply our method of dialectical rationale to world history as an object. We're looking at this belongs that the object we have before us, world history, belongs to the realm of the spirit. This disappoints an awful lot of Hegelians who grew up thinking that they're talking about objectiveness, as in what you can pound and what you can make into laws. Belongs to the realm of the spirit. And in fact, one of the major Hegelian works done when he was in his mid 30s is called The Phenomenology of the spirit. One of the really great books in world history, The Phenomenology of the spirit. But here he is in 1830, quarter of a century later, near what turned out to be the very end of his life, in the second draft of writing about world history. And as he's writing, he's so intelligent, he's so experienced by this moment, by this time, that as he's writing, he's realizing something he hadn't realized before. Not a content, but a realization about realization itself. It's a big moment in history. The world as a whole comprehends both physical and spiritual nature. Notice there's not only a physical nature, there's a spiritual nature. And if you put these two natures not together as two, but if you montage them in such a way that they become a single matrix, within a couple of years of this, an American who could no longer be a preacher in churches, who turned out to be a philosopher in public named Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a little essay called nature, 1836, which is the focus of what became the American Transcendentalist movement. And Emerson says in nature, he says that there is no way not to know that the material nature and the spiritual nature are one and the same, and that there's something in us that falsely tears them apart. And whatever it is in us that tears them apart. Tears ourselves apart as well. So that man ends up being an opponent to himself all the time. Out of this damnably bad habit. Because if you've torn nature apart, turn the spirit from the material apart. What compunctions is that going to have of tearing you apart? That this brutalization on the visionary level makes it possible to be very calloused about being brutal to individual human beings, their sacrifice without even blinking an eye, because you've already sacrificed the vision. And in this one finds the very scary basis, as we saw in Hannah Arendt, that totalitarian governments do not even look at the care of persons as being relevant at all to any issue. It's not even something that one would address. But here's Hegel. A couple of paragraphs later, he says. He writes, after the creation of the natural universe, man appears on the scene as the antithesis of nature. He is the being who raises himself up into a second world. The general consciousness of man includes two distinct provinces, that of nature and that of spirit. The province of the spirit is created by man himself. And whatever ideas we may form of the Kingdom of God, it must always remain a spiritual kingdom which is realized in man, and which man is expected to translate to translate into actuality. The spiritual sphere is all embracing. It encompasses everything that has concerned mankind down to the present day. Man is active within it, and whatever he does, the spirit is also active within him. So you have this kind of like a target thing, and that each level, each concentric level of this target makes a threshold of unknowingness for the next one and the next one and the next one. So that of the deepest core is hidden many times over. Now when you graphically project this out, it becomes like a Ptolemaic universe with concentric spheres, with the center at its core. This is exactly the shape of diagrammatic cosmology that was challenged by Copernicus, that was mathematically shown to not even obtain in actuality by Kepler, and was intellectually vanished by Newton. So that one of the things that flies in the face of all of this is the development of science, especially mathematical physics, because by 1830 things were very far along in that realm. Even a little guy like little Michael Faraday, Who was who got a job sweeping out Humphrey Davies office and got so interested in all these experiments and taught himself Michael Faraday, who became one of the great founders of contemporary physics. And he used to give talks on Friday nights in London to anybody who would come in because he was just like them. He said, I'm just like you. I'm just somebody who came off the street. I got the gift of seeing how this works, and here's how it is. And his great little book is not the Principia mathematica, but it's called The Story of a candle that if you could understand chemically and physically how a candle works, you would be shown the transformational wonders of the universe, of how it really works. It doesn't work because it's there. It works because it continuously transforms. We know, and I mentioned a couple of months ago, Norbert Weiner's a great introduction into cybernetic theory that if there weren't a continuous transform, there's no way that anything beyond the moment would ever occur. It is through continuous transform that anything continues to happen. And Einstein, of course, took it even further, saying that such things as gravitation are incidentals of the way in which time space itself is curved, and are not something which you can find the. All of this at this time came to a focus in Burckhardt's great civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. And when it came out in 1860, and we're going to go into it more next week because it was so startling, and it put Burkhart potentially on the anvil of world criticism at a critical time. He wisely refused to publish any further in his lifetime. Some of the major things that he came out with, some of his major works. And when he died in 1897, the very next year, 4 or 5 very profound works were all published at the same time. What were they? One of them was his history of Greek civilization. Forget that Italy of the Florentine Renaissance is in the Italy of the Roman Empire. Their origins both go back in a matrix conceptual thing to Greece. And what happened there? So his history of Greek civilization didn't let it be published until 1898. Another thing that was published is the altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, also published 1898, that the altarpiece in the Renaissance is markedly different in function and character from a medieval cathedral altarpiece. And the third great work that was published in 1898 was his study of Rubens, Jean Paul Peter Paul Rubens. Y Rubens. Because Rubens with Rembrandt is the last great clear flash of the Italian Renaissance. Rubens lived from 1577 to 1639 and after Rubens. Rembrandt alone, like the pilot of a ghost ship, held the Renaissance. And when Rembrandt died in the end of the 1660s. 1669 the Renaissance was over. The last caretaker pilot of that whole era was gone, and it was like a queue because these things happened by queue also. It was like a queue. In the 1670s, for something completely new to come in, and what was completely new were the first letters that Sir Isaac Newton was writing to the Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldham, and it was the beginnings of mathematical physics, which inherited the transform responsibility of the Renaissance. That's why modern math is so good at transformational analysis. It's the hermetic teaching of our era has been for a long time. Burckhardt. His three books History of Greek Civilization, The Altarpiece in the Renaissance Italy, and Rubens is startling because when you look at Rubens, all of a sudden you realize what an incredibly misunderstood figure Rubens was, and how the misunderstanding of the Renaissance so quickly set in that even in his own time, Rubens was not seen as Renaissance, but as Baroque. In art histories, if you take it anywhere in the world, Rubens belongs to the Northern Baroque. They don't see him as a Renaissance artist at all. Oh, no. No, no. He's painting. My God, he's painting in the 1600s. Well, so is Rembrandt. Shakespeare wrote hamlet and The Tempest in the 1600s. Come on, folks. One of the characteristics that one finds at the first artistic expression of the Italian Renaissance that really still grabs, grabs the imagination around the world is Botticelli's great painting called the Primavera Primavera spring and his Primavera. Extremely famous work. And over here are the three graces. And next to them is Mercury Hermes. These three graces. Here's a little closer view of these three graces. Re-occur in Rubens towards the end of his life, as these three graces neuter lust, diaphanous clothes, they are women that are there not to look good, but women who feel good when they're embraced. That there is such a thing as the tactile enjoyment of conscious person extends to the human body, not being beautifully Calisthenic lay there for exercise like some spartan ideal, but being there to enjoy the largesse of the feminine life of children, of husbands, of food, of delight, of singing and dancing, of the whole Renaissance array of what it is to be human human beings. And of course, Rubens did exactly what his Renaissance forebears did. He amassed a huge private library. He was always fascinated by antiquity. He spent most of his time when he was a young man, collecting antiques, and one of his prized antiques that he found on a trip. One time he found a bust of Seneca.