Out of the logically, rather, mythologically, constringent density of the Absolute, there springs a Child of Spirit destined to become the embodiment of his Father's repressed urge to glory. As this child gaily bursts into space and time created with every skip and jump in order to mold clouds of images with which to play, and like all children afterwards, cherishes some, coldly discards others. The child enjoys the destruction of his volatile creation as much as its maintenance.


For it is all within the father's portrait of himself: to inhale, cough, and spit out the crude delimitation of dialectic necessity. The havoc this nervous spirit strews in his sprawling playroom is looked upon by his created playmates as impulsive imperatives, which they must learn to accept yet hope otherwise—there is no cutting through the scheme of things. Though a once glorious star is reduced to a black hole, or a mighty creature doomed to extinction, there is the counterpoint of renewal just as Aphrodite, her eye-lids closed on her pedestal of black night, awakens and swallows the surrounding darkness by her glorious love. The cruel dialectic of thesis and antithesis is by human necessity processed by synthesis to safeguard the sanity of the consciousness faced with a universe of brutal fact.
  
Those of Hegelian stature take the synthesis farther by joining hands with this mischievous, vigorous child and skip to the thumping of this giant enterprise of unending creation, destruction, reshaping. They acknowledge they are but dimly conscious counterparts, tagging along in the junk yard of Divine Whims. Still, they are not about to be totally discouraged, for they snatch from the deadening, relentless process hoodwinked glints for a growing reality of philosophic salvation through which they contemplate beauty of spirit in the face of dead, primal fact.
Spirited by Hegel they reason that universal beauty not contemplated is the denial of life and truth—nay, the denial of the very meaning of Hegel's wrenching process. The Absolute must venture from its security of reflexive, self-consciousness so that it may spew forth a challenging order to unpredictable things. They grant that the universe is but a cheap mirror, but to deny the image is to crawl under the covers with the primal father who still sleeps while sonny plays. Who wants to know when he will wake and call in his frolicking son?

Copyright © 2000 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 1, 2004.