Proverbs on the Path to the Absolute

Abstract

Chapter 15 presents a philosophy of proverbial wisdom written into and out of the spirit of the dialectic. Its colors are black, white, and grey. The proverbial wisdom engages what the ancients called contraries: binaries of values and qualities twisted and turned in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. In its middle, the chapter reads from Hegel’s two great prefaces, to the Phenomenology of Spirit and to the Philosophy of Right. In one preface, we meet cows and cats in a contest of black with grey; in the other, the owl of Minerva in a contest with a pure dove, presumably white. The philosophical issue is monochromatic formalism, that is, a tendency of a theory, associated with a picturing of a freedom, to give, in contrary senses, nothing away.