thoughts on quotes from Hegel

Hence spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time so long as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e. so long as it does not annul time.

Spirit appears as embattled agency. Agency is the seed, Spirit the blossom. Agency is a tension between the real past and the ideal future (existential time). Or we might say that time is "interesting" only within agency's journey of self-knowledge. Time is annulled (ideally) when the agent becomes Death / God / Spirit. He or It remembers the process of his or its self-discovery. What had to be lived moment by moment in terrible suspense now exists as a completely present "skeleton" in which the details are recognized as not terribly important. So our particular childhood trauma is not particularly interesting. The thinkers who happened to inspire us and the terminology they happened to use are not important. A ladder thrown away. Perhaps it had to be some thinker or some terminology, but from the cloud the variety of ladders isn't important. It's enough to think of the ladder in general. (A philosophical reconstruction of history.)

"Not till it has surrendered the hope of cancelling that foreignness by an external, i.e. alien, method does it turn to itself, to its own peculiar world, in the actual present. It turns thither because to supersede that alien method means returning into self-consciousness."

"Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially; distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one respect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present."