http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phac.htm
....Consciousness has found “seeing” and “hearing”, etc., pass away in the dialectic process of sense-experience, and has, at the stage of perception, arrived at thoughts which, however, it brings together in the first instance in the unconditioned universal. This unconditioned element, again, if it were taken as inert essence bare and simple, would itself be nothing else than the one-sided extreme of self-existence (Fürsichseyn); for the non-essential would then stand over against it. But if thus related to the latter, it would be itself unessential, and consciousness would not have got disentangled from the deceptions of perception; whereas this universal has proved to be one which has passed out of such conditioned separate existence and returned into itself.....
There is nothing in the words themselves that could explain what this is supposed to mean. It should be obvious that Hegel was highly intelligent fraud or madman.
....http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Phenomenology_of_Spirit#The_Phenomenology_of_Spirit_.281807.29.....
- ... History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time......
The quote from Hegel is poetic nonsense. History is an effect that never repeats itself, because each generation has different circumstances. It is on the same level as
- Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.) [back]
and designated meaningless by http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/#fnt_2
Nassim Taleb's premise with his Black Swan is flawed , namely that history repeats itself, as some sort of force. History is not a force , but an effect, it never repeats itself because each generation has different circumstances. Because his premise is flawed,his conclusions are flawed.
The Black Swan is a metaphor, trying to rationalize post-factum the catastrophic decision by Paulson to place Leeman Brothers into liquidation. When the US government signaled that they are not willing to everything in their power to save the world economy, everybody became paralized with fear. When Paulson realized his mistake, it took over $15trillion to re-establish that trust in the US system. Such an event will probably *never* take place again, because we have learnt from our mistakes.
Nassim Taleb is wrong, we can't let banks collapse, it will send of a chain of events that could plunge civilization and China into an implosion. What governments needs to do, is regulate banks and for voters to insist on this.