Enter the Alien

(LARGE PRINT VERSION) AN ALIEN WORLD IS EMERGING. The 21st century presents human self-consciousness with a qualitatively different environment, largely as a consequence of scientific thinking and action opening global communications and connectivity. In this anthology, a community of Spirit has meditated on the idea that the great idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel can be used as a starting point for thinking this alien world. Hegel, of course, could not have predicted this world...
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(LARGE PRINT VERSION) AN ALIEN WORLD IS EMERGING. The 21st century presents human self-consciousness with a qualitatively different environment, largely as a consequence of scientific thinking and action opening global communications and connectivity. In this anthology, a community of Spirit has meditated on the idea that the great idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel can be used as a starting point for thinking this alien world. Hegel, of course, could not have predicted this world (and nor would he have tried), however, Hegel was well aware that Spirit found itself in a new Scientific age, and that this age would have disorienting consequences for Spirit's capacity to inhabit the world at all. Considering that many contemporary intellectuals relate to the present moment with ideas of crises of authority or value and meaning, it makes sense that starting with Hegel could in many ways bring deeper conceptual clarity and orientation. How does "The Hegel Event" help us to sense-make (1) contemporary problems of the theory-practice divide in the sciences, (2) Westerners increasing interest in Eastern spiritual wisdoms, (3) higher and more complex forms of sexual expression, (4) debates on idealism, materialism and realism, (5) human development post-psychoanalysis, (6) the nature of abstraction in the process of becoming, (7) artistic expression beyond religious icons, (8) the philosophical foundations of mathematics, (9) logic of everyday life, and (10) the dominance of contemporary atheism? Through mediations of the immediacy of these dimensions, we hope to show that it is worth starting with Hegel to sense-make in the 21st century.

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"The collective work Enter the Alien: Thinking 21st Century Hegel is an extraordinary achievement. Instead of interpreting Hegel from a safe historical distance and judging what is still alive in his work, it treats Hegel as our contemporary, as a philosopher whose time has finally come today. And it is a profoundly Communist work: a collective endeavour in which the new picture of Hegel emerges through the interaction of multiple individual interventions. For this reason, the volume should be read (at least) two times, so that one is able to grasp how the meaning of a single text is affected by what precedes and by what follows. It is thus one of those rare works which are 'Hegelian' already in its form. Thinking as 21st Century Hegel is simply a volume about what thinking means today. So it is not a book for specialists but a book for everyone who seriously wants to think!"

Slavoj Žižek, Hegelian Philosopher, author of many ground-breaking works, including: The Sublime Object of Ideology, Less Than Nothing, Absolute Recoil, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Hegel in a Wired Brain.