‘Spirit is a bone’ is a phrase uttered, or more precisely, written by the nineteenth century German idealist and continental philosopher Hegel. Its meaning is multiple, but suffice it to say that it combines my two primary interests: spirit, or knowledge, the mind and truth on one end, and the manner and means by which we discern that truth (the method) on the other.
When Hegel declared that spirit is a bone, he identified the limited nature of truth seeking itself. For a long period of our history, the phrenologist determined the intelligence of man by the skulls weight and length. History moved forward with this truth as a universal.
Suffice it to say that this website is not a monograph or an genealogy of ignorance. On the contrary, what you will find at Spirit is a Bone are simply my opinions, ideas, fragments, notes, thoughts, links, as well as more well-formed essays and blogs.
Outside of Hegel’s ruminations on phrenology, “spirit is a bone” is also one of the central concepts that he employed to describe his concept of infinite judgment, or absolute knowing. So Spirit is a Bone represents the very core of subjectivity in the Hegelian mode, mainly as the gap between the material stuff of existence, (the bone) and geist (spirit); a convergence of opposites that is constitutive of spirit itself and remains its condition of possibility. Thus, the spirit cannot subsist in pure being and relies on the materiality of the world to exist.
Daniel Tutt
