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Hegelian dialectics: the most robust philosophical enterprise ever launched to account for the endurance of meaning and desire in a world comprehended and shaped by scientific ("reductive") reason.
Hegel speaks of reason's instincts, of the cunning of reason. We would do well to take these paradoxes seriously again.
The "good enough for me God" indicated by Kauffman used to go by the name of "Geist" or World-Spirit, and has been taken quite seriously (ie, you study it in High School) in pretty much every part of the world except North America.
What is needed is a serious attempt by biologists and philosophers to square Hegel with Darwin, and to see if it's possible to preserve a liberal respect for accident and radical contingency in the nature of things (a sensitivity which is very much intact in Hegel but emphatically dislodged by Marx, who had his reasons) with the traditional dialectical materialist model of purposiveness in creation and meaning in history that we associate with theological and Marxian traditions.
Consciousness cannot be apprehended by anything other than consciousness.
Studying Hegel changes your Everything.
