Owl of Minerva
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The owl of Minerva is the owl that accompanies Minerva in Roman myths, seen as a symbol of wisdom. It was used by the nineteenth-century idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel to mean philosopher. Hegel noted that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" -- meaning that philosophy comes to understand a way of life just as it passes away. Philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it only understands in hindsight. He had in mind the transition from eighteenth-century feudalism to nineteenth-century commercialism and democracy.
"One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it... When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." -- Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), "Preface"
"To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one. To pit this single assertion, that "in the Absolute all is one," against the organized whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development -- to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black -- that is the very naïveté of emptiness of knowledge." -- Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (1807), "Preface"
