Late yesterday staring at Refdesk I noticed that it was Hegel’s birthday, which brought
back volumes of unclear memories in sharp focus.
Painfully I relived my lack of prowess and academic success as a philosophy minor, but also
recalled how reading Hegel, on the one hand, and his ancient antecedents like Heraclitus, on the other,
animated me and my thinking.
The brief Hegel reverie, vague as
the crazy heat has rendered me, was a cool lucidity infusion. I remembered (because I needed to) that insanity is catching, as in
contagious. I’ve always been able to
draw a picture of this for the non-second sighted. Now the picture draws itself.
