Math as God

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Please bear with me as I explain Hegel's philosophy. 
Excuse me, stumbled on this while searching for an answer to: 
"Well, What Dooooooo you believe in---MR.. RUSSELL!?!?!?

RUSSELL, WITTGENSTEIN, AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
Grant Schuyler

Please bear with me as I explain Hegel's philosophy.

Hegel thought that Geist (German, "mind" or "spirit"; thought of not only as a mental faculty or abstract force but almost as a person) had advanced through the successive cultures of history growing more and more conscious, self-conscious, and rational. This process had culminated in Geist's realization as what Hegel called the Absolute Idea (Geist in another guise, perhaps as God). God or the Absolute Idea had realized itself as the best contemporary, that is, the best 1820s European, philosophy and political culture. By implication, the philosophers, philosophy, and political and cultural systems of Hegel's time were the best that had ever existed, the realization of complete liberty, and the goal of all history. And the philosophic method of the philosophers of Hegel's time -- reason (Verstand), was somehow superior (it was implied) to the method of thinking used by ordinary people and scientists. In contrast to philosophical reason, these lesser beings used the (by implication
 inferior) mental faculty most philosophers since Locke call understanding (Vernunft).

"A tidy system it was," said Russell in 1959. "Once we [Moore and himself] applied rigorous logic to Hegel, he became fragmentary and puerile."

Having rejected Hegelian absolute idealism, Russell looked for a new basis on which to have the absolutely certain knowledge of the world that Hegel had believed his philosophic system delivered.

Russell thought that one might discover the basis of certainty in mathematics

http://home.ca.inter.net/~grantsky/wittgenstein.html