Bush is absolutely an "unconscious tool."

Hey, I've known unconscious tools, and calling Bush an unconscious tool is an insult to unconscious tools.

I prefer to call him a deadender.

A great thinker whose name i do not recall once said: "Freedom, oh, freedom, well that's just some people talking."

Hey Nigga Schola,

Does unity really evolve from a dynamic manifestation of contradiction and negation? Are you and I simply unconscious tools motivated, like all other men, by base desires such as ambition, greed, and glory?

I believe we need our negations, our contradictions to exercise the soul. Because I know that what we label our being has no real presence without that negation. The negation becomes an engine in the dynamic of what was called existence.

I often contemplate these things sitting in my Auburn trailer park bathed in the light of my computer screen eating a hot dog. (Sure I spend most of the time fantasizing about having sex with my older cousin in his pickup truck.)

But sometimes I realize how much you need the ignorant gay crackers of the world, the very negation of your cosmopolitan sophistication in order for you to offer the contradiction to our cracker realities. Observing the dialectic of Nigga Schola-Ignorant Gay Cracker provides our readers with an expanding evolutionary whole. I am the hated cracker, hot dog juice running down my filthy tank top, and you are the knowing one, the balance between my disgusting existence and that bright glowing world of your urban readers.

And yet I cannot help but contemplate whether Alexander's soul wasn't more than just the expression of a slurry cultural energies working through him.

Just as I cannot help but contemplate if the bulge in my older cousin's Levis is not in some way unique to him, or rather is it a unique expression of a common humanity. But by dissipating my older cousin's throbbing Levi bulge into the common humanity, by saying the bulge in his Levi's is the same as all others, confusing my cousin with humanity at large, I make my cousin's Levi bulge infinitely important, and at the same time nothing at all.

I'm probably wrong about this, but I prefer to see my older cousin's Levi bulge as uniquely his, unlike any other in all humanity, and certainly unlike any other Levi bulge in my Auburn trailer park.

Also I'm thinking Alexander may have done some things out of love unconscious for Hephaistion, but my guess is his political strategies were uniquely his own.

With Bush - rather than Hegel, I'd look to Marx's writings about capitalism to understand Bush's motives. While it'd be comforting to see Bush as the tool in some universal movement towards freedom, it might be that Bush simply does what makes Halliburton and Exxon the most money.

Charles,
There's another difference. Hegel -actually penned- the words you quoted.

And because ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Iraq's baby-steps had to proceed through the lowlands of Abu Ghraib. In other words the subjective experience of freedom in the Sartrean sense of the freedom that was at it's height under the occupation, needed Abu Ghraib, and only afterward can the dialectic swing full circle to bring that freedom into objective consciousness. I'm sure that's what W means by incremental steps. (Though it seems to me that a step, by it's very nature is incremental. But if George can utter a sentence that has pleonasm as it's worst fault, he's having a very good day indeed.)

Intellectual masterbation feels a lot better than talking about real issues.

If freedom is the goal of the Geist, if power comes alive through disappearance, then what Hegel is saying tallies well with what Matthew Stadler and his subject have said about the zwischenstadt, the city-in-between, the rock and the ocean of reason massing together around the man of reason, who is invisible.

Bush's power is ephemereal, precisely because he is not free; he does not desert, but asserts himself into society, thus plunging into the chaos, the river, the stream, of infirmity, and the lack of free will.

Conciousness then springs from an apparent, but not real, weakness. Conciousness is "play."