There is a mystery element within our consciousness that we are unaware, objective categories manifest within the mind itself which bind to the very subject of experience. Before Kant rise to prominence, David Hume distinguishes our innate ability to recognise the causation of objects as uniform repetition closest to determinate truth. Still, he left out the question of the medium which brings the cause and effect as a unified proposition. How is it possible to cognise the concepts of causality in the first place. Immanuel Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber after reading Hume. Shaken into a state of limbo for 13 years, before publishing his magnum-opus, on the Critique of Pure Reasons, changing the trajectory of philosophy towards a new era.

Hume lived in the period of the enlightenment where (to put it simplicity) the stage of philosophy battle is between the rationalist and the empiricist prevails. Hume would position himself as a sceptical empiricist, qualifying as one of the big three on the side of the empiricist. He dismisses the rationalist as too abstract and un-practical. Our imagination is too limitless, able to access into the realm beyond the universe in our mind and travel into uncharted chaos. But we need to ground ourselves back into reality.

Confucianism is a philosophy practised in the East, written obscurely by Confucious himself and his student as a guide to the Way of the Tao. The reason for his obscurity is that the interpretation of the writing is multi-dimensional; each point is in relation to each other. I’ll take my hermeneutics from the book, A guide for the perplexed, quoting from the author, Yong Huang, a liberal view on Confucianism. I’ll draw comparisons from the Western philosophy to make some distinction as well.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) tackles the question of experience. Not ordinary experience but dialectical experience in our pursuit of absolute knowledge. The Introduction is simply a short preliminary conception, only justifiable by going through the entire book. By searching section by section, digging into the text, contemplating and re-contemplating, discovering and re-discovering, can we understand Hegel (and any book) to the fullest in a dialectical sense?

But look… still we have to start somewhere. So here’s an attempt of an introduction to the Introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The way we perceive the world around us has an underlying structure. That structure comes from philosophy, written by PhD professors in the past or contemporary. People adapt their liberal ideas to counter the fallacy in the previous generations. The next generation adapts those idea unconsciously. Today, with the rise of democracy and technology, we have an implosion of different ideas. Too much so that we come to accept that my truth may not be your truth. The world today is relative and subjective. You see here I’m making a very bold statement from experience and observation from the world around me that I say is true. It’s probably not until we analyze the history of philosophy.