Rod Hemsell The Philosophy of Consciousness

way of thinking in a fundamental and profound way. It is as if 'mind' entered into a new dimension of its manifestation.

I would like to illustrate this way of thinking and the impact it has had on society by reading a few passages that are paraphrases and explanations of Hegel by Herbert Marcuse. We have read numerous passages from Hegel, which have often seemed to us to be rather complicated and obscure, but these passages from Marcuse, who was one of the foremost commentators on Hegel in the 20th century, are much easier to read and understand, and they also place Hegel's thought in a contemporary context that is more relevant to us and the conditions of human society today. Marcuse published his classical commentary on Hegel, titled Reason and Revolution, in 1941, which was also the year of the first exterminations in Auschwitz. It was also one year after Sri Aurobindo wrote the second 500 pages of The Life Divine.

Marcuse began his successful career in philosophy as an expatriate German in America, with this remarkable book on Hegel, at exactly the time when the holocaust was getting underway in Germany. And I think it is important for us to bear this context in mind as we hear what he has to say about the philosophy of Hegel. Marcuse was also one of the foremost advocates of a change of consciousness that he perceived emerging in the 60s, symbolized for him by the student revolts in Paris in 1968.

The entire argument that he presents can also be viewed in our context, seventy-five years after his 1941 book, after an unprecedented period of social, economic, and technological development,–as a result of the relatively free will of human beings,–that has been dominated by a philosophy of positivism which is not idealistic at all, as Marcuse will tell us.

Positivism is a philosophy which holds that human beings actually do not have free will and everything that happens on earth is a product of natural laws. It is also a philosophy that is based on a fundamentally materialistic view of existence. Everything is determined by laws of physics or chemistry or biology or sociology, but whatever happens to be going on is exactly what ought to be going on. That's why it is called positivism. Whatever power is in place in government or whatever forms the society and economy are taking, are all quite OK because everything moves in life according to such natural laws and we can't do 157