[D66] Hegel hekelde de sterren

[A.O.]

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/hegel-and-the-advent-of-modernity

Hegel and the advent of modernity
A social ontology of abstraction
Jamila M. H. MascatRP 2.01 (February 2018)

...

Heinrich Heine, a devoted pupil of Hegel, mentions him several times 
throughout his Confessions (1854). Among his memories, one is 
particularly telling with regard to the theme of this article: ‘One 
beautiful starry-skied evening, we stood next to each other at a window, 
and I, a young man of about twenty-two who had just eaten well and had 
good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the 
blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: “The stars, hum! Hum! The 
stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky”.’ 11 In the addition to 
§341 of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel recalls this episode and somehow seeks 
to justify himself concerning his cynicism and his lack of enthusiasm 
for celestial bodies: ‘It has been rumoured round the town that I have 
compared the stars to a rash on an organism where the skin erupts in an 
countless mass of red spots: or to an ant-heap in which, too, there is 
Understanding and necessity. In fact, I do rate what is concrete higher 
than what is abstract, and an animality that develops into no more than 
a slime, higher than the starry host.’ 12