RE: The Hegelian Dialectic: An Explaination
Thanks for your input, the synthesis of spirit and matter is described in the "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences" (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse), unfortunetly I can't find my original notes so I can't tell you the specific passage.
I would say that Hegel is definetly dualistical and he puts the mind above matter. When he describes god as the world spirit and god is above everything else, then you can conclude that there is a hierarchy where the spirit is above the matter. The way I understand the synthesis of spirit and matter is that humans are in one way spirit but unlike god they are also matter but not in a way that there is a unity of the mind and the body, they are still somewhat independent.
I am in no way an expert on this topic so it is not unlikely that I misunderstood or simplified some aspects, if you wrote your master thesis on the Science of Logic you know much more about this than me, so I wouldn't take me as a reference.
In my view Hegel either was wrong with the dualistic thinking of mind and matter or people misunderstood him. Because right now we live in disastrous times, wherein the ideology of "mind over matter" became a perverted thinking, stating, that the matter "the male and/or white human" is arranged above "the female and/or black human".
In my personal view this kind of thinking is one of the major reasons for many global issues such as exploitation of nature and exploitation of people (i.e. human trafficking).
I once believed everything I learned about Hegel until I started reading about the critics of patriarchy.
Both, Hegels philosophy about the absolute respectively his philosophy of science and the critics of patriarchy, have the same foundation: mind and matter. Both terms are very important for my thinking and I researched a lot about the critics of patriarchy after I finished my degree in Germany. I concluded that something is wrong about the dualism between mind and matter. Maybe people missunderstood it in a way some "Neo-Darwinists" missunderstood Darwin. Darwin might have said "survival of the fittest", but what he meant was "survival of the one best adapted". There is a difference in that. Maybe people did the same with Hegel.
If they did (I'm still not sure), than Hegel is a bit responsible aswell, speaking of god referring to a male entity in his readers view. Both, putting mind over matter (in my view they're egalitarian or at least NOT directly connected with a certain sex) and refering to the male god must have laid the ground work for what manifested in a clearly dualistic thinking we face all around the world.