> And AJ Ayer would say that the "Absolute is green or whatever" is a
> meaningless statement. So?
though he is an important figure in the empirical-analytical tradition,
he is not the scholar to read to know about Hegel. Ayer is a lot
more interested in knowing how we perceive the color green, or
how his bathroom smells, than in understanding that "spirit is not
an essence already finished prior to its appearances, an essence
keeping itself back behind the mountains of its appearances but is
only something actually true through the determinate forms of its
necessary self-revealing - and is not...a soul-thing standing in only
an external relation to the body but something internally bound up
with the body through the unity of the concept" (Hegel). But I am
sympathetic to shopkeepers and their daily sensations -which is
why Hegel gives them their due place as the first - most
elementary - conceptual step in the ladder towards Absolute
Knowledge.
