WE CAN'T GET AWAY FROM PHILOSOPHY although we try.  Sure, we might prefer to focus pragmatically on web3, regenerative communities, meditation practice, psychedelics and shadow work, but there will inevitably be an army of Big Picture & Big History abstract theorists menacing us on all sides. 

Many members of our emerging communities are obsessed with Wilber, Whitehead, Henriques, Bhaskar, Plotinus, Steiner, Heidegger and even Hegel. 

Hegel?

Yes, Hegel. 

As we stand collectively before a Metacrisis rooted in the pernicious metaphysics of modernity and the dusty rivalrous habits of Game A, we long for civilization transformation.  We strive to become self-aware agents capable of inhabiting a world of unfolding processes that do not ignore their own hidden antagonisms.  This is a very Hegelian moment. 

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is mistakenly conceived as the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" guy and/or the naive "end of history" guy.  But if we can get beyond that simplified populist appropriation, we might discover the first great thinker to lay out an evolutionary-historical perspective that moves forward toward a transrational new civilization of the spirit.  A science-friendly, developmentalist and nondualist who placed insufficiency, incommensurability and absence at the heart of an engine of historical progress. 

Cadell Last has been unfolding a new approach to online Big Think education that he is testing with his upcoming Philosophy Portal course on Hegel starting in January 2023.  If we can't escape philosophers, we might as well learn a little bit about them.

Cadell Last is an anthropologist (M.Sc) and philosopher (Ph.D) with "an interest in biocultural evolution, mind-matter relation & speculative futures."  That sounds about right.  In the upcoming course, Cadell examines Hegel (for a time between worlds) from the combined perspectives of diverse philosophers, theorists and participant-lecturers sourced across the Liminal Web.

The idea is to deploy a multi-tiered, multi-phasic online learning experience that reintroduces Hegel, dives deeply into his Science of Logic & unpacks -- in novel, updated, colorful ways -- the basic shift in metaphysics that may still be necessary in order to get beyond the limitations of the Enlightenment while transmuting ourselves into subjects whose self-reflexion is capable of operating sanely in a world of transformational opposition and developmental history.  

Yes, Hegel.