The infinite in Hegel's philosophy
"We usually suppose that the Absolute must lie far beyond; but it is precisely what is wholly present, what we, as thinkers, always carry with us and employ, even though we have no express consciousness of it. It is in language that these thought-determinations are primarily deposited. Hence, the instruction in grammar that is imparted to children has the useful role of making them unconsciously attentive to distinctions that occur in thought."
Recently I've been rereading Hegel's The Encyclopedia of Logic, which the above is from. The Prefaces were interesting and early in the Introduction he writes, "In the Preface of my Philosophy of Right p.xix the following propositions will be found: What is rational, is actual. What is actual, is rational." Hegel mirrors Spinoza to a great extent. He speaks of believing in God, even the Christian God, with his mind, yet he writes "But what we have here is the free act of thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own object for itself thereby, and giving it to itself." Spinoza, as for as I know, never said we were God. So my question on this thread is how we can know whether we are finite or infinite and what this means. Hegel seems to develop an argument about the infinity of the mind from the simple fact that we can think of infinity itself as an object of the mind. The cause has to be proportionate to the effect. Hegel draws a distinction between the form and the content of thought. Form is abstract and logical. Content has will, emotion, and imagery involved in it. But for him, God himself can be the content of thought: "It is only in thinking, and as thinking, that this content, God himself, is in its truth." Spirituality, as for as Hegelians are concerned, is closer to us than we are to ourselves. For him when we rationalize about infinity, whether in mathematics or logic, we indicate that there is a part of ourselves which is infinite through it containing the abstract content of infinity. This seems to be an elaboration of Descartes's ontological argument (from his Meditations).
So maybe the question is, if there is and can be something infinite, what would that be?
Recently I've been rereading Hegel's The Encyclopedia of Logic, which the above is from. The Prefaces were interesting and early in the Introduction he writes, "In the Preface of my Philosophy of Right p.xix the following propositions will be found: What is rational, is actual. What is actual, is rational." Hegel mirrors Spinoza to a great extent. He speaks of believing in God, even the Christian God, with his mind, yet he writes "But what we have here is the free act of thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own object for itself thereby, and giving it to itself." Spinoza, as for as I know, never said we were God. So my question on this thread is how we can know whether we are finite or infinite and what this means. Hegel seems to develop an argument about the infinity of the mind from the simple fact that we can think of infinity itself as an object of the mind. The cause has to be proportionate to the effect. Hegel draws a distinction between the form and the content of thought. Form is abstract and logical. Content has will, emotion, and imagery involved in it. But for him, God himself can be the content of thought: "It is only in thinking, and as thinking, that this content, God himself, is in its truth." Spirituality, as for as Hegelians are concerned, is closer to us than we are to ourselves. For him when we rationalize about infinity, whether in mathematics or logic, we indicate that there is a part of ourselves which is infinite through it containing the abstract content of infinity. This seems to be an elaboration of Descartes's ontological argument (from his Meditations).
So maybe the question is, if there is and can be something infinite, what would that be?
Comments (118)
The Real (e.g. Spinoza's substance, Democritus-Epicurus' void, Laozi's dao ...)
Yes
The whole.
From the preface to the Phenomenology:
And:
He continues:
The universal is unity of the immediacy, direct and unmediated, of knowing and being, of knowing and for knowing.
With regard to Spinoza he says:
Hegel thinks Spinoza shocked the age not because, as is commonly assumed, it threatened the status of God as distinct and separate, but because it threatens the status of man as distinct in his self-consciousness.
Self-consciousnsss is not preserved. In paragraph 46 of the lesser Logic he writes "But the need arises to be cognizant of this identity or of the empty thing in itself." Nonetheless he immediately says next that, "To be cognizant, however, means nothing else but the knowing of an object according to its determinate content." Emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness. Humans have a sense that something "needs to happen" to make everything alright. Its all already happened and never happened. And we all know the sun will rise. Cantor reasoned that there cannot be an final all-encompasing infinity but that exactly is what the idea of God is. To form an infinite idea requires an infinite mind (?)
That's similar to hylomorphism - 'matter-form' ism. In hylomorphism the 'form' (which is NOT the shape of something, but more like its principle or essence, that which makes it what it is) is grasped ('seen') by the intellect ('nous') while the material substance is received by the senses.
[quote=From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.; Macmillan Co., 1941; https://thomasofaquino.blogspot.com/2013/12/sensible-form-and-intelligible-form.html]EVERYTHING in the cosmic universe is composed of matter and form. Everything is concrete and individual. Hence the forms of cosmic entities must also be concrete and individual. Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.
Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.[/quote]
Yes but Hegel writes "Spirit is activity in the sense in which the Scoolmen already said of God that he is absolute actuosity. The spirit's being active implies, however, that it manifest itself outwardly. Accordingly, it is not to be considered as 'ens' lacking all process, the way it was regarded in the older metaphysics, which separated s spirit's inwardness that lacked process from its outwardness. It is essential that the spirit be considered in its concrete actuality, in its energy, and more precisely in such a way that its utterances are recognized as being determined through its inwardness."
Hegel taught acomism, as did Spinoza. Thought, as with Aquinas, was the greatest good. Dear Hegel thought Aquinas wrong, however, in that God seemed static and overlording in the pre-Descartes world. Modern philosophy is subjected to more influence by the collective unconscious. Unconscious or subconscious anyway is the limit of life
that really has no bearing on anything in that quote, which is essentially Aristotelian in orientation. And Aristotle never spoke of 'spirit'. What caused me to quote that passage was your 'thought being composed of matter and form', which is what that passage is about. But I don't know if it's relevant beyond that.
Hegel was one of the first thinkers (following(?) Maimon) to differenntiate Spinoza's acosmism from pantheism but I think its more accurate to identify Hegel's metaphysics with (Christian) pantheism.
If you mean individual self-consciousness, it is aufheben. A moment in the self-movement of the whole. In this way self-consciousness is preserved.
As in Spinozian immortality? I think with death there is something gained and something lost. Which is you is hard to tell. But the movement of self-consciousness is all we ever experience now
It is relevant because we think with a brain AND with Infinite Intelligence. If the brain and spinal cord are made of form and matter we can distinguish the lots and images of both with regard to thought
Ive never thought of it that way before. However Spinoza identified God with nature, which changes. So it both changes and changes not, which was Hegel's point in his dialectic. If it's pantheism, then it has more belief in the reality of the world
The whole and not just individuals comes to self-consciousness. The death of the individual is not the end or death of self-consciousness itself even though the realization of self-consciousness comes about through individuals within the whole.
Does self consciousness come from the individual, or did God exist before you were born. "If I were to say God exists, this would not be true. He is a being beyond being... You must love not God, not Spirit, not Son, not-image, but as He is" (Meister Eckhart). So the starting point would be the same as the beginning in that the whole precedes the parts but the parts have all of the whole in them
For Hegel, I think the Absolute, the unbounded, the infinite, may be properly understood as Spirit. It is that that is never at the fore of conscious but always subterranean in its operations. Consciousness, self-consciousness, etc. actualizes insofar as it actualizes Spirit. Spirit is, maybe, a bit like a book before it has been written.
I have not read Fitche but I've wanted too for a long time. These paradigms shift between philosophers because it is difficult to cognate spirit-forms and square it with our finite experience in the material world (or at least what we process as finite)
Does Hegel say this?
To my understanding Hegel held that God/Spirit is everything and everything is becoming, which in turn is the sublating (erasing and preserving anew) of being and nothing. Becoming is beyond being
The movement of Geist (Spirit/Mind) is the movement of the whole to its self-realization, its consciousness of itself. The movement has come full circle.
From the preface to the Phenomenology:
Are you looking for an infinite thing, or something determined to be infinite? It sounds like you are trying to classify the infinite using what Hegel calls the 'understanding,' which would be a type of bad-infinity. Bad infinity being the infinity of earlier philosophers such as Locke and Leibniz who would derived infinity from traditional metaphysics as a iterative process.
Your quote is from his perspective as living a life like ours. It's not denying that heaven is actual and your there *although* we experiennce life now as a journey, not a destination
A "bad" or spurious infinity is one like life, where its the endless striving just for striving. An infinite object would have to be the universe, but "to be determined" is to be made (or remade) spiritual
Spinoza does not say "God IS Nature" (Deus natura est ~ pantheism); he says instead "God, OR Nature" (Deus, sive natura ~ acosmism). An excerpt from a letter ...
[quote=Spinoza, from letter (73) to Henry Oldenburg]... But some people think the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus rests on the assumption that God is one and the same as Nature understood as a mass of corporeal matter. This is a complete mistake.[/quote]
(Emphasis is mine.)
A post from an old thread "Philosophy and Metaphysics" wherein I clarify why Spinoza's metaphysic is not consistent with identical to pantheism ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/528116
A post from an old thread "Pantheism" ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/636415
"In the reality, intuitively know by the mystics, we can no longer speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only One being, that is the super-essence of all." John van Ruysbroeck
"God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to the All. God is creating this whole universe, full and entire, in this present moment." Meister Eckhart
"I have seen the One who is, and how He is the being of all creatures." Angela of Foligno
"The one work we should rightly undertake is eradication of the self. Could you completely forget yourself even for just an instant, you would be given everything." Meister Eckhart
"The world is pregnant with God." Angela of Foligno
"Simple people imagine that they should see God as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God, and I, we are one." Meister Eckhart
"I AM can be spoken by no creature, but by God alone. I must become God and God must become me, so completely that we share the I eternally." Meister Eckhart
"Someone who is joined to the Lord is One Spirit." St. Paul
"If the only prayer you say in your whole life is 'thank you,' that would be enough." Meister Eckhart
We exist as nothing which is why Hegel speaks of positive and negative. Negative is passage, change, (whenever he uses the word negative, some change is occuring in the dialectic) while positive is philosophical determination of truth. Yin and Yang. Maybe negative is the matter and positive is the form. Hmm
Thanks for information. If for Spinoza God is everything and yet God is not identified with the world, then the world is illusionary (as acosmism says) while what exists is Thought. So I am not sure any kind of materialism would work with Spinoza. I know Einstein liked him..
Natura natura (i.e. Modes aka "everything") is not divine (i.e. not eternal, not self-caused) according to Spinoza, only natura naturans (i.e. Substance (which is eternal & self-caused)) is divine. "The world is illusionary" only in the sense that it merely exists, or is contingent, sub specie durationis but is not real, or necessary (re: Substance), sub specie aeternitatis.
Classical atomism (Epicurus-Lucretius) insofar as atoms are conceived of as Modes and void is conceived of as Substance works fine enough for me (& Marx, Deleuze et al).
Have you read Being and Nothingness by Sartre? He takes the concepts of "in itself" vs "for itself" from Hegel, noting that the nothing, the in itself, is coiled up in being ("for itself"). To be for yourself means you have feelings and consciousness. Even a rock has an in itself, or is that the noumena.. Anyway, Spinoza at the beginning of the Ethics argues iirc that for God to be infinite, he would have to be everything. So i agree that Spinoza denied the existence of the world, and I think Hegel wanted to give history/reality more of a substance.
"This" (experience) is what is- FOR us. Universe is a word that implies a cohesion of the world of sense and its laws. Compared to the Absolute the world is "no thing" because that implies separation. The only way to do life is to have goals, which is paradoxical because spiritual is about letting go. Yes there is a deep paradox between a spiritual message (like that of Jim Newman and Tony Parsons) and the driven life as described by people like Napoleon Hill. The line between paradox and contradiction is not, however always exact. Often its back to "I think therefore I am"
When we rationalise about infinity we invariably run into error. That is, when we think of infinity (or God) as an object of the mind we are reducing it as such - rendering this idea-concept finite to some extent. The way I see it, God as an object of thought is necessarily reduced, but God as embodied thinking-about-God is in its truth - inclusive of and inseparable from our embodiment (with all of its will, emotion and imagery).
How we draw the distinction, whether between abstract, logical form and wilful, emotional content or some other agential cut, is both arbitrary and meaningful. How we describe God or infinity says as much about ourselves and our assumptions in what we exclude, what we embody in order to relate to God from within God.
Quoting Gregory
Relation
That's interesting because in theology relation is the only difference between persons of the Trinity. They are completely one, but a one that relates 3 ways
Quoting Hegel, Logic, paragraph 10
It is fair enough to question whether Hegel achieved the escape velocity to get beyond the presumptions Kant made. But he did give it a shot.
Although I've never read any of his writings, I'm superficially familiar with Hegel, due to his prominence in modern philosophical discussions. But, I'm not qualified to speculate on his particular notion of "absolute" or "something infinite". On the other hand, this thread may not really be about Hegel's formulation, but about any unwarranted assumption of an extra-sensory "something infinite" underlying the 4-Dimension world we all know via the physical senses. FWIW, my personal opinion of Infinity is based more on scientific concepts than on philosophical theories.
Unlike impractical Philosophy, for its pragmatic purposes, empirical Science typically ignores infinities as mathematical nuisances. That's because Logical thought requires well-defined boundaries. However, modern Cosmology --- a hybrid of science & philosophy --- has not been able to dismiss the real possibility of "something" outside the rational brackets of space & time. Which may also be free from the limiting laws of physics, hence essentially Absolute. Anything unconditional may not play by the conventional rules of human Reason, though.
The Big Bang theory, although initially met with derision by some anti-creation Astronomers, is now as fundamental to Cosmology as Evolution is to Biology. Yet, "what had a beginning" implies a Creation event, and leaves open the child-like question of what caused the Bang, and set the initial conditions for evolution to expand on. That's why, In the 21st century, some theoretical Astrophysicists, lacking experimental evidence, have begun to explore a variety of pre-Bang scenarios mathematically, since empirical methods are useless for a place-beyond-Space and a time-before-Time.
For instance, Inflationary Universe theories instantaneously expanded in the literature, but the fervor now seems to have cooled. Likewise, serious Multiverse and Many Worlds proposals have become staples of Science Fiction, but not of practical Science. Yet, mathematical physicist Max Tegmark continues to develop his theory of an immaterial time-free Mathematical foundation of the Reality we observe with our space-time senses. But, for the most part, speculations on Infinity & Eternity have been left behind as playthings for feckless philosophers. . . . including yours truly.
That said, all I can say is that whatever-it-might-be, the "something infinite" is not likely to be a being in any empirical or anthro-morphic sense of existence. Which may be why the ancients conjectured about some imaginary immaterial forms of being : such as Souls & Spirits. And Pure Math, per Tegmark, may be a modern term for immaterial "spiritual" existence. Mathematics is the science and study of quality, structure, space, and change. Those are abstractions that exist in rational minds, not in in the physical objects to which they are attributed. Hence, as ideal metaphysical concepts they are literally infinite ; not bound by the laws of physics.
However, mental abstractions do exist in some sense, don't they? Where is the realm of ideas? Plato postulated in his Theory of Forms, that they are timeless, absolute, and unchangeable. Likewise, my own notion of The Infinite, is built upon the concept of Form, defined as the active, determining principle of a thing. As we experience it in the 4D world, that Principle is equivalent to causal Energy plus defining Pattern/Code. I call it EnFormAction. But what is the ultimate Source of Guided Causation in the Real world? Frankly, I don't know. But, as an un-employed amateur philosopher, nothing in the world is keeping me from guessing about that mysterious "something" outside the world. :smile:
PS___My take-away from the philosophically floundering fact-free fairytales of Infinity is that it's a fool's errand. Yet, a philosophical forum is a fool's paradise. We can freely speculate without fear of consequences, except for derision by those defending fact-based belief systems such as Materialism & Realism. But ridicule is not a legitimate philosophical argument. So, "sticks & stones" . . . .
Is The Inflationary Universe A Scientific Theory? Not Anymore :
Inflation was proposed more than 35 years ago, among others, by Paul Steinhardt. But Steinhardt has become one of the theorys most fervent critics. . . . Inflationary cosmology, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/09/28/is-the-inflationary-universe-a-scientific-theory-not-anymore/
Is the universe written in math?
That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics specifically, a mathematical structure. Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". . . . The MUH is based on the radical Platonist view that math is an external reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
I have no problem with scientific philosophy. Physics, as you say, is half philosophy, half empirical. What floats my spiritual boat is God as forms. But words like God or Deus is not really important. When i see a lion, i can cognate ever deeper understanding of its nature and animality. There is some kind of dualism that seems nevessary within our consciousness
Confused by what your objection is. There is a difference between understanding a thing and cognating it. Ultimately cognition is to understand the infinite but it can never grasp it. It sees what they called the beatific vision but it does not turn it into something finite by which to understand
In the passage quoted, Hegel questions outlining conditions in which the 'understanding' may or may not be able to function. To that degree, he is challenging speculating upon the conditions you describe.
When Hegel speaks of understanding it is of a lower function than the intellect (which speculates in universals). Kant's intuitions where in his understanding. So what is true for the understanding may not apply to the mind as a whole, the intellect. This is the Absolute
You will have to cite where you get this interpretation from for me to follow along. I am not sure we are reading the same texts.
A methodology with which to understand relation itself.
And in agential realism (based on quantum mechanics), which describes phenomena as ontologically primitive relations - relations without pre-existing relata:
There are many editions of the Logic. I have the one by the Hackett Publishing Company. Check out the last paragraph of the preface to Hegel's second edition. It says, "Just as it was rightly said of the true that it is 'index sui et falsi' but that the true is not known by starting from the false, so the Concept is the understanding both of itself and of the shape without Concept, but the latter does not from its own inner truth understand the Concept."
Do you find this in your edition?
He goes on: "Science [his logic/dialectic] understands feeling and faith, but science can only be assessed through the Concept (as that on which it rests."
So the end is already the beginning. Hegel critizes Kant a lot, but he was insistent that his logic takes different steps and and reflections from Kant. Does he not say here that one must know one's own mind??
That's Descartes in the Third Meditation. I think this argument is often overlooked, which is why i mentioned it in the OP
Arithmetically "infinite?" no actual thing. Geometrically unbounded? many things (e.g.) planets, moons, suns, apples, donuts, melodies, knots ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/825315
Interestingly, Saint Augustine's semiotics are extremely similar to Peirce's Hegel-inspired semiotics, and his method is De Trinitate is very similar to Hegelian dialectical. I wonder whether either read his work; I imagine Hegel would have as a theology student.
From a paper I am working on:
Anyhow, also relevant to how Hegel's thought developed is that he read a lot of Christian mystics. I note some similarities here re: self-generation and eternal return/becoming/circularity.
-From Light to Light - anthology edited by Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman
The "darkness" also shows up in Pseudo-Dionysus' "Darkness Above the Light," the Ein Soph of Kabbalah, and the Unground of Jacob Boheme. The influence of mysticism is most clear in the fact that Hegel essentially cribs the first moves in the Greater Logic from Boheme.
Jacob Boehme and Christian Theosophy - Magee
Actually reminds me of some interesting stuff from the philosophy of information as well- the idea of lack of ignorance = lack of any suprisal, and thus any information, the way a 1 or 0 of itself, lacks any information, just as an infinite series of just 1s or just 0s does as well. There is definitely something to be written comparing the Science of Logic with information theory.
But what about Bad Infinite versus Good Infinite? Does the unbounded live up to the good type? Seems it still has limits.
The question of whether there can be a mathematical infinity is a good question for mathematicians and physicists. We are back with Hegel being a pantheist in disguise. If the world is Spirit/God and God is infinite then the world is infinite. Yet reality is called the One by Hegel, because ultimately one and infinity are the same (Absolute Infinity). So it is pantheism. Parmenides wrote of non-duality, and his student Zeno tried to prove from logic that the world is both infinite and One. Hegel writes a lot about infinity because kant did
[Quote]If, however, we remember that, for Hegel, to say that God is spirit is to say that God is trinity of persons and that the movement of trinitarian life involves (1) God in himself (universal), (2) the emergence of the reality which is this world in creation (particular), and (3) the divinizing of one man in the Incarnation (individual), all issuing in the dialectical identification of infinite Spirit and infinitized finite spirit, it may seem somewhat less strange.[/quote]
Hegel's Conception of God - Lauer. I didn't want to post another long quote after the others but, first, your post recalled this to me, and second, I think this book is an absolute gem of Hegel scholarship and it doesn't get the attention that Taylor, Houlgate, Pinkhard, etc. get, which is a shame because it is great.
What I don't see in your descriptions is the long centuries of suffering required to approach the universal as something we could talk about. That is the central theme of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the lectures upon the Philosophy of History.
And those ideas prompt me to wonder about the following: Hegel considered the religious as a necessary element of our existence but went to some effort to distinguish that from philosophy.
Do you read these texts with distinctions like that in view?
Yes the Absolute for Hegel is an evolution of Spirit. There is a tension between Fate and Freedom in Hegel, and a tension between God and empirical history. He has it both ways, with God at the top and the bottom (which approaches the top). That's all i have time to write now. I respond to all the rest above in a few hours
There is a tension between Fate and Freedom in all of philosophy. I am asking how that plays out particularly in Hegel's writings.
I assume that your equation of God with Platonic Form*1 may imply A> a separate-but-equal dualism of Ideal & Real, or B> a hierarchical superior vs inferior or ultimate vs proximate Reality (Heaven vs Earth). My philosophical BothAnd*2 dualism has a similar motivation, in that it attempts to reconcile Physical Reality, consisting of material objects & causal forces, with Metaphysical Ideality, consisting of imaginary concepts in individual human minds. Yet for religious purposes, those notions are typically projected into a unitary universal Mind. Which may seem philosophically necessary, but beyond the bounds of science, hence unprovable.
However, that Ideality may or may not be actually a supernatural Platonic realm of perfect Forms, or ding an sich perfections in the Mind of God. As far as I can tell, those higher realms are imaginary, existing in individual human minds, hence opinions that must be accepted by faith in the myths we tell each other. The commonality of supernatural notions among mankind, may or may not indicate that there really is some mysterious Force or Form or Agent in the Great Beyond. So, we disagree on the exact nature (features) of the inferred Absolute Form or form-maker.
Despite the uncertainty, we like to think of Ideality as a super-reality --- more real than apparent Reality. For the purposes of my own "scientific philosophy", I sometimes use the concept of G*D metaphorically to represent the unknowable pre-BigBang source of the energy & laws that necessarily existed prior to space-time, in order to explain the HOW questions of the BB. However, since I have no direct channel of communication to that hypothetical Designer, I must remain agnostic about the WHY questions. That's also a Deistic philosophy. :smile:
*1. Plato's Theory of Forms :
In basic terms, Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that the physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world.
https://study.com/learn/lesson/plato-theory-forms-realm-physical.html
*2. Both/And Principle :
[i]*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity), the whole of which our perceived reality is a part.
*** Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? whats true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
*** This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until observed by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
I think throughout your post you equate spirit with God. I think that is incorrect. God, (or religion) as far as I know in Hegel, is thought in the form of its presentation (Vorstelliung). God is thought posited as something outside of us, thought not grasping itself, but its image. Spirit is thought and this thought does not arise wily nilly. Thought, in spirit, captures its own history. It follows its own trail so to speak and understand itself as something with a trail and with turns and twists in its history. The history of spirit, which is actually none other than spirit, is the realization of thought for itself. Essentially it reaches past 'God', because it needs no representation outside of itself when it has spirit, i.e., itself.
We are not 'God', but we realize we have created him, he is a thought determination. In essence Hegel already proclaims the death of God much more dramatized by Nietzsche.
Now the absolute, something that spirits culminates in, is, I think, nothing else than the here and now. The here and now that thought always tries to comprehend and put in a process in history. The now is immediately taken up by thought and translated as a moment in a chain. For me for instance the 'now' is in the post I am not typing, the touch of my fingers on the key board, the exact sensation of contemplating the now, while writing. I put this 'now' immediately within the story of Tobias on this forum, of this forum in general, of its place in philosophical literature and so on. In that sense the now is infinite, your life is a history of infinite 'nows', passing by too quickly to comprehend, nothing really and still... it is always now, the now is inescapable and infinite until thought itself disappears. Is that possible? Well ... if thought is there than it is not dead and if it is dead there is no thought to consider its demise, see Epicurus. Likewise, thought, for better or for worse, is the infiinite, the measure of all things and all there is.
For Hegel on religion, the most important work is Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. I am going to reread it sometime this year. The arguments about pantheism have to be understood in line with the Phenomenology of Mind, section on "Perception", however, which ends by saying that we never encounter a particular, but always universals. The argument extends throughout that whole section. At the end of the lesser Logic's second edition's Preface, Hegel writes "(S)ince science is the self-development of the Concept , an assessment of science through the Concept is not so much a judgment upon it as an advancing towards it." That gets right to the heart of the matter. Hegel's does have his cake and eats it to because that is the only way to do dialectic in the sense that he understood that word. A Universal is the Idea, which is Concept, which is Absolute by way of Notion. That's the ordering I understand them in. Is that pantheism? I think these are matters which don't fall into a one word category
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Father= Absolute
Son= Notion
Holy Spirit= Concept
Do you read the texts differently?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is like Ying and Yang. If we are free than our evil is not necessary. "Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived." (Kant's thesis for the Third Antimony). Paradox is essential to Hegel's scheme; he thinks paradox is good for the mind. It takes intuition and reason, the union of which is intellect. Then you can see freedom and fate united without having to combine their content.
The world is the unfolding of the Spirit. This table is a part of the unfolding. Therefore this table is Spirit. I think Hegel is making a distinction between the empirical and the rational. What is rational is actual and vice verse. But the empirical is just the empirical and we don't have to stop seeing leaves and kittens as other than finite things. It's about dialectic, which a mechanism cannot imitate
Should I conclude from these remarks, that the development of universals, that took up so much of Hegel's efforts, was merely a footnote against the theology you read in his texts?
Oh jeez, that's a tough one. I think so, just considering it now, but it's one of those things where I fear my intuition might get flipped if I begin digging into it.
Even with Augustine, who I have read a lot of with this in mind, the later work does still seem to blend the role of Christ and the Holy Spirit on occasion. I don't think Augustine himself ever explicitly maps the Trinity to his semiotics, mostly because he gets distracted by pastoral life and theo-political arguments, and never returns to his model in De Dialecta. But I also am fairly confident that it is heavily implied by the later works, if not strictly followed to a T.
Right. Good doesn't imply evil, it implies the possibility of evil. I was corrected on this once and it is a good subtlety to note.
Yeah, I have come around on liking dialetheism and paraconsistent logics quite a bit. What they are missing is a definition of truth that is as robust and well-stated as the coherence, correspondence, and axiomatic views IMO. I have always wanted to learn more about Lawvere's formalism of Hegel's dialectical with category theory, but the amount of background work needed to make sense of it has kept me from getting there.
I feel like, if I could understand that, and ground up categorical constructions of quantum mechanics, ZX calculus, quantum logic, and the like, there might be some really neat comparisons there. I found a paper once on an information theoretic creation ex nihilo, the "Bit Bang" that got me thinking about that, but it was way outside my comfort zone to vet.
:up:
Are you questioning that Hegel is an idealist? Most scholars say he was. The world is universals and we are Idea. His lectures on the philosophy of religion is theology as well
The absolute cannot be simply universal because that would leave particulars as somehow unreal. It goes against the grain of the dialectic. In the logic the idea becomes more and more concrete, while a universal without concretization remains abstract. Also I remember his discussions about sugar cubes from the 'Pheno' and how both taking a nominalist view of a sugar cube as an essence misses the point as well as the view of a sugar cube as a collection of universal properties.
I think statements like: "The world is universals and we are idea" are quite meaningless. I am obviously not the idea, only perhaps some sort of instantiation or I partake in it, or whatever. I tend to read Hegel far less metaphysically thick as I just think that makes matters too obscure. Hegel's point is I think much more simple: through the history of philosophy, culminating in Spinozist, Kantian and Hegelian thought, we have come to see the development of thought as a process in which is enriches itself, but always also returns from where it came, a consideration of what is most abstract and general. That is still a bold statement but at least loses all the exalted religious metaphorism. By reading him as such, it is also easier to place him in the history of philosophy. He 'historicized' thought and made it possible to think about the way we think historically.
Hegel was an "idealist." He was a devoted Lutheran who saw the truth of religion as integral to the truth of philosophy. But he also said philosophy had to travel a long way before that could be realized.
The movement involved terrible suffering. Hegel did not make light of that or apologize for it in the way some did. The role of reason followed a different path from simple devotion to a belief.
What about we as matter and bodies?
This is why i used the term "bi-reality" in the other thread. It's dualism submerged in unity. We create the world (philosophy), and the world thru atoms make us (science). Reconciling this is the goal of Hegel's entire body of work. More on this latter..
Quoting Gregory
Do we create the world? How do we do that?
The dualism between mind and body is real in Hegel, but at the completion of Spirit all is One, as it always was. Few point this out, but Hegel has matter "sublate" mind as well as mind sublating body. We are one with Spirit so we are in the creating of the world, but not to the denial of us being immediate bodies within Nature. I was gathering some Hegel quotes last night. I will post them latter in the day
The concept "spirit" is too abstract if not unclear and esoteric in Hegel. Does it contain both mind and body? Or is it some disembodied entity? Or is it something which instantiates when body dies?
Esoteric does have its place in knowledge. Yes Spirit is mind, body, matter. It is the actuality of all things. You can call it God in fact. It arises in all things and experiences in all things. YOU are your Ego but the true ground is Spirit. It is at the beginning and yet not at the beginning because it is at the end
1) Subjective
2) Objective
3) Absolute
Which spirit has the esoteric aspects?
Absolute Spirit is entirely mystical, hence entirely esoteric
Ye it's abrigded. I'm gonna try to finish it again. Kant influenced Hegel's whole generation. Everyone was talking about him. By the time of Hegel's death Hegel himself was one of the most famous professors in the world
Will was higher than Platonic Forms for Schopenhauer, while Forms and Nous are equal to Will in Hegel's works. Schopenhauer was clearly unfair to Hegel. Hegel had a lot to offer philosophically in terms of Schopenhauer's type of philosophy. Schopenhauer's "Will" was without direction, ultimately free. Hegel says there is Fate founded on Reason. They are both right in a way
Will translates into volition. How does intellect get to be understood? Going by its original Latin roots, intellect could be understood as the understanding. Not understanding when interpreted as anything other which is understood e.g. a concept, an idea, etc. but instead that intrinsic and often accumulative understanding of the first-person agent which facilitates the agents capacity to so understanding that which is other than itself: again, with concepts and ideas as examples of the latter. (Example: both a dog and a human toddler has some such proto-understanding as agents which facilitates their understanding of the external world but, while the dogs understanding is capped at a level far lower than any adult humans, the human toddlers so-called proto-understanding of things understood readily holds the capacity to develop into the vastly more content-filled proto-understanding of an adult human.)
If one entertains this definition of the intellect, then ones intellect shall be one aspect of ones will at large maybe being the most pivotal aspect of will conceivable. Such that there can be no will in the complete absence of any and all understanding.
And this perspective, in a way, then brings to mind Viktor Frankls Will to Meaning; here, in the sense of intending ever-greater (nonquantitative) magnitudes of what Ive here tentatively termed ones intellect as proto-understanding via which one understands, and in this one sense knows; to include a yet awaiting potential understanding of the world, or reality, or even of being itself.
In our human form understanding and will might be one faculty with two modes. One "soul". But in metaphysical questions of the origin of the world distictions between Will and Intellect can be useful. Will has active power. Intellect is passive, Platonic Ideas
I can readily understand that. For what its worth, I don't myself subscribe to an origin of existence; an origin of the universe as its commonly known sure; but not of existence at large. I can accept that the will is active and the intellect passive, but from the perspectives I so far adopt, in so conceiving, the whole reason for being of the will is to best satisfy the desires of the intellect. Eudemonia, for example, is not found in the active will's doings per se but in the passive intellect's state of so being, for lack of better words, happy.
I concur that the intellect gives happiness, but so does the will. It's interactive. Schopenhauer was so dark in his writings because he placed will over reason and Spinozian philosophy is so bland because there is no will that is truly free in it's freedom, able to choose between options. Part of myself just accepts science as it is taught but there is a strong intuition for something else behind all the spinning atoms and emerging chemicals
It sounds like Will is some sort of agent or force with no principle on its operation. Is it something that is contrary to rationality or intelligence? All biological creatures seem to have will to life. For example, a spider will run for its life, when it is about to be stepped on, or vacuumed off from the floor.
Sun flowers keep turning to the direction of the Sun lights. All for their survival and growth i.e. will to life.
Could it be life force prior to intelligence or reasoning founded under the bio structured all living bodies?
Or could it be even one of the principles for the existence of the universe and world?
Or maybe will doesn't exist at all. It could be an illusion believing in the existence of will? Would it be rather intentions or motivations for the actions performed by the intelligent beings? There are reasoned actions as well as willed actions.
The fact that we can perform actions driven by will means that will could combine with reasoning.
When reason and will combine, they become motivated actions.
But there are wills which operate in the bodily level seeking pleasures, comforts and life.
It cannot be because that already presupposes terms, such as atom or world. For Hegel it is the 'movement of the concept' that creates such dualisms.
Quoting Gregory
I read this in light of his criticism of Kant that his categories are 'formal'. Kant 'deduced' them, in some merely mental exercise. For Hegel they would show themselves both mentally as well as in the history of the world, in the emergence of spirit. The processes by which the world shows itself are the same as the operations of thought. 'Substance as subject'.
Quoting Corvus
It is not some metaphysical entity but merely the manifestation of reason in the world. The world is not without reason, in the sense that what happens is rationally understandable. There is indeed and always was a 'hole' as Gregory explained in Hegel.
They work together but also have their autonomy. Will is setting down the law of action in view of something seen by Reason for the reason that it wants it because it wants to exercise freedom. Reason is the seeing into truth
Remember how he has nothing sublate itself and being and being in turn sublate nothing and itself. Everything sublates everything else in Hegel, although thatbis not the total history of the movement
Quoting Tobias
Very good
The 'substance' of Aristotelian philosophy resulted from the Latin translation of the Greek 'ouisia' . But ouisua is the Greek verb meaning 'to be'. So the meaning of 'substance' in philosophy was originally nearer than 'subject' or being than the usual meaning of the word, which is a material with uniform properties.
Furthermore, the general idea of the 'unity of mind and world' receives support both from classical metaphysics and also current cognitive science (per Charles Pinter's 'Mind and the Cosmic Order'.)
"Consciousness is spirit as concrete knowing, a knowing too, in which externality is involved"
Preface to the first edition of the Science of Logic (1812)
How does reason manifest in the world without reasoner or reasoning?
Quoting Tobias
Isn't some parts of the world unknown, irrational and mysterious? We don't exactly know why the world exists, or how it began. Who was the first ever folk in the world? Does God exist?
Julian Young's book on Schopenhauer says Schopenhauer's Will was Kant's Thing-in-Itself (pp.54, Routledge, 2005, Schopenhauer, juilian young), and he was wrong.
Reasoning is going on, but what reasoning is is itself a manifestation of spirit, the flow of the idea. There is also different reasoning going on, religious reasoning, legal reasoning scientific reasoning and so on. They are however not a-priori there. The reasoner likewise is not prior to reasoning but as much constituted by reason as itself constitutive of reasoning, but perhaps I misunderstand your question.
Quoting Corvus
That we do not know something does not mean that we cannot know it. for Hegel we can know it as there cannot be anything apart from knowledge. How could we say something 'is' when we cannot even know it as a something? God for Hegel I believe is reason personified, but it is always a personification. My grasp of Hegels philosophy of religion is not that great though, but he sees in the elaboration of God a similar process of development as he sees in reason.
Quoting Gregory
Yes, but in that process being and nothing are not gone. They become 'moments' in this case of becoming. In a higher order being then returns as 'Wesen'.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well possible. I think Hegel takes a lot from the ancient Greeks. He decried himself as Heraclitian all the way I believe. See also 'Hegel and Aristotle' by Alfredo Ferrarin, I only read parts of it, long ago though.
.The thing in itself I have neither introduced surreptitiously nor inferred according to laws which exclude it, because they really belong to its phenomenal appearance; nor, in general, have I arrived at it by roundabout ways. On the contrary, I have shown it directly, there where it lies immediately, in the will, which reveals itself to every one directly as the in-itself of his own phenomenal being .
(Schopenhauer, WWR, Vol 2, App., pg 85, 1818, in Haldane/Kemp 1909)
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Funny to have S brought into a thread on H .oil and water:
.It became the fitting starting-point for the still grosser nonsense of the clumsy and stupid Hegel
(Ibid, pg 8)
It being Ks lacksidaisical invention of the ding an sich, re: being the lesser nonsense. Schopenhauer had less than even precious little respect for Hegel, berating the young Hegelians as well, for wasting their time at his lectures, much less cracking one of his books.
FYI.
Peculiar for us, maybe? Wonder what the peer-group at the time thought. Truth be told, I dont know Ss relation to H as well as I know his relation to K, other than in the former he is not gentle in his derision.
Schopen's philosophy was largely based on Kant's system, hence he couldn't have had been overly and unfairly critical to Kant.
I dunno, man. He spent 184 pages rippin Kant a new one. Right after page one, where he says Kants the greatest philosopher ever .until he came along to show how he could have been even better.
"Logic is his [mans'] natural element, indeed his own peculiar nature. If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by doing so transforms it into something human".
Preface to the second edizione, Science of Logic
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ruAPCcdklS4&pp=ygUbd2h5IHNjaG9wZW5oYXVlciBoYXRlIGhlZ2Vs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tNP5O3GXKdo&pp=ygUUV2VpZ2llc3QgaGF0ZWQgaGVnZWw%3D
Indeed. :grin:
Even Kant was branded as an idiot by Nietzsche.
Think of how Spinoza held that the world was God's thought and that this God had no free will. Then think of how for Hegel the world is Spirit enfolding into it own's complete freedom.
Hegel believed in fate and free will, compatabilism
I was thinking about what reasoning could be. There is no such things as reason, but reasonable acts, rational decisions and thoughts about the world, objects and movements.
Spirit sounds like the mind of the ghosts, i.e. the dead. Reasoning is the mind of the living. The fact that Hegel wrote about spirit sounds like he must have had believed in the life after death.
In Kant, our knowledge is limited to what we can experience. Beyond that is the world of unknown. Some say that it is Kant giving room for faith alongside knowledge. Does Hegel go beyond the limit? How and what sort of knowledge is possible on the world of unknown in Hegel?
Yes, Hegel goes beyond those limits. Somewhere, I believe in the Pheno, but perhaps in the Logik, he writes something along the lines of 'if you pull the curtains away, the room where the thing in itself is supposed to be, is empty'. The thing in itself is constructed by Kant, as a product of his dualistic thinking. There is no 'thing in itself'. 'A world of the unknown' is contradictory because how can we know of such a 'world' and in what way would something posited as absolutely unknown, constitute a world? He leaves no room for that which cannot be understood, which actually led to large criticisms of Hegel because it gives his philosophy a rather 'absolute' character. After Hegel came Nietzsche's abyss, Heidegger and the post modern emphasis on the 'finite'. Or think of someone like Vico who held that there is always something that escapes determination. I wonder how strong these criticisms are though. I think Hegel also allows for something that necessarily escapes, but not for a 'world of the unknown'. The knowledge that is possible for Hegel is knowledge of knowledge. We learn how we know, how we think and that is all there is to know. Knowledge is self knowledge.
No, not at all. He uses spirit in a similar way like he could use a concept like 'substance'. However with 'spirit' he indicates that substance is not dead matter, but living, as in a 'spirited individual'. Don't let yourself be bewitched by some modern connotations of a word or connotations a word has in contemporary engllsh but might not have in 18th century German.
So Hegel criticised Kant setting up his own system of philosophy. But almost all the philosophers after Hegel criticised Hegel's philosophy, it looks. Nietzsche doesn't appear to have engaged with Hegel's philosophy directly, but he seemed to have disagreed on Hegel's concept of absolute spirit quite understandably. I, myself, cannot quite grasp what absolute spirit means. It sounds like as you said, personified God, or could it be something else. I am new to Hegel, so trying to understand as much as possible from the discussions while reading some of the articles on Hegel as well as the original texts too.
But why would anyone personify God? It seems a futile and meaningless attempt.
Kant's thing-in-itself is only dualism, if one looks at Thing-in-itself as some concrete legitimate entity even if it is known to be unknowable. It is contradictory, and as Hegel saw it as nonexistence and illusion, then it cannot be dualism anymore.
Knowledge of knowledge? Knowledge must be true and verifiable as truth. If not, it is not knowledge. There are different types of knowledge. Analytic knowledge is from math and geometry. Empirical knowledge is from the observation of the world. There are also types of knowledge which is neither analytic nor empirical such as self knowledge or subjective knowledge on one's own mental state, which is private to oneself the owner of the mental state. But knowledge on God or the universe doesn't belong to any of these. Does Hegel deny then knowledge of God?
Quoting Tobias
Not many folks used the concept "spirit" in their philosophy in history. Even Aristotle doesn't appear to have used it. Aristotle used the concept of soul which is close to spirit, but not quite the same. But then you mention substance and spirit, and I wonder what the relationship between the two concepts could be. Substance sounds like material stuff that things and objects are made of. Spirit sounds mental in its nature. Perhaps you could elaborate more on the two?
Well, that he is criticized a lot only attests to his importance. And, according to Hegel, it is exactly how the dialectic (aka thought) works. I do not see that at all as problematic. I think you have it the other way around. Spirit is not personified God, not at all, in fact, God is personified spirit. Spirit is the idea that the movement of thought, its dialectical development in a process of position, negation and negation of the negation, permeates the whole of reality. It can also not be otherwise, because thinking is being, we cannot conceive of anything as other than thought and so the process of history works in a similar pattern as our thought process. Spirit though is itself a very empty idea, you cannot point to it and say 'hey, this is spirit', so people tend to personfy it and that personification is called God. Philosophy though is for Hegel a more fruitful endeavor and more apprehensive of spirit than religion.
Quoting Corvus
Hegel is a monist. I do not understand what you mean here very well I think...
Quoting Corvus
Such a definition looks more like Gettier than Hegel. For analytic philosophers truth is a truth value which can be assigned to propositions. That is not what Hegel is getting at. For Hegel knowledge is much more akin to 'recognition', a recognition of the logical categories (quanitty, quality, measure, being, nothing, becoming etc) that we have imposed on the world. That was also Kant's problem. Hegel criticizes Kant but also embraces him. He tries to make Kant practical and thinks the 'modern' train of thought is capable of more than Kant thought possible.
Quoting Corvus
It has some commonalities with philosophical concepts like stoic anima or Aristotelian energeia I guess. Schelling was a predecessor of Hegel, he used it. The notion comes up in a specific philosophical tradition, that of German idealism. It has made marks though. In both German and Dutch the science of the humanities is still called 'Geisteswissenschaft', of geesteswetenschap.
Quoting Corvus
The material that objects are made of and its mental conception are not different things. Only in our ways of conceptualizing did we find it necessary to make distinction between mind and matter. There is nothing objective about the distinction though, it is a product of mental activity. Since thought dictates all the conceptual distinctions we make, 'substance' is a mental thing. Substance is subject, 'spirit'.
There is a passage in Logic that describes that as the problem of the 'knower' determining the conditions of cognition independently of the attempts to know:
Quoting Hegel's Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of The Philosophical Sciences, page 116
Learning to swim while in the water is to become aware of the movement in which 'subject' and 'object' occur in life experiences:
The way the Phenomenology passage nestles the 'objects' referred to in Logic prompts me to qualify your statement:
Quoting Tobias
The "simple self-subsistent existence" is what was being sought "outside the water" by Kant. For Hegel, however, the isolated ego is no longer juxtaposed by 'true' objects.
Independent beings are seen through a process of living. the sections from 168 to 173 of the Phenomenology lay out how this Life generates our experience. In 170, Individuals are described as:
The limits to knowledge for an individual are depicted as floating in a larger sea:
Saying God is personified spirit, that sounds like a religious claim. In philosophy, God is to be proved either via reasoning or presenting the evidence of the existence of God.
It is understandable to say spirit could be personified God as a part of assumptions or inferences for further arguments for the proof of God, but saying God is personified spirit sounds like the claimer has already accepted the existence of God without any proof or evidence blindly, which doesn't quite sound like a philosophical claim.
This sounds ambiguous too. The expression "the movement of thought" doesn't make sense at all. Thought is always about something, and it always happens in the thinkers mind. Saying "the movement of thought" without any clarification, who the thinker of the thought is, and what the content of the thought is, saying thought is moving to some direction sounds like a groundless personification of thought, which breaks the logic of thought.
It is more akin to a sociological claim. I do not think God is to be proved at all actually. Hegels point is not to prove or disprove the existence of God but to understand the function of God as a category of though.
Quoting Corvus
I suggest that if you like to read Hegel you read him on his own terms and not provide your own assumptions as gospel. You reenact some kind of dualist philosophy of mind I guess, but that is not where Hegel is at. He does not abide by the categories of analytic philosophy.
Yes, you misunderstood me there. Everyone knows Hegel is a monist. I meant, from what Hegel was saying, Kant's dualism doesn't make sense, unless of course, Kant believed in the concrete existence of Thing-in-itself. He didn't.
Why saying the world beyond experience is unknowable makes Kant a dualist? "unknowable world" doesn't mean it exists. It is unknowable on whether it exists or not. I have been denying Kant was a dualist. Some other folks think Kant was a dualist. I hope this point makes sense. If not, please let me know.
There are some common grounds between Hegel's philosophy and Analytic philosophy. They are not totally opposite ends with no common grounds. There are many analytic philosophers who are deeply influenced by Hegel such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell. I found parts of Hegel's writings in SL and PS highly analytic in fact.
Using the logical analysis on the original writings of philosophy is not just for analytic traditional folks. All philosophers do use the analysis for making the texts clearer and more understandable for us. Not doing so would be seen as acts of denying the legitimate philosophical analysis, and could even be regarded as acts of unnecessary and meaningless abstraction of the original texts.
Yes, th Pittsburgh Hegelians are indebted to Hegel. Hegel uses rational argumentation to that extent he is 'analytic'. I do think his concepts are very different though and he does not attach equal importance to conceptual definition.
Quoting Corvus
I have a great admiration for Hegel, he is my favorite, but I have a hard time holding him up as an example of clear writing...
Quoting Corvus
I do not know if there is one 'legitimate' conception of philosophical analysis. The tradition includes writers who are highly mystic such as Plato or Al Ghazali, poetic like Nietzsche, logical like Russel or Wittgenstein and social scientific like Foucault. I find Hegel interesting because he seems like a bridge, his concerns are metaphysical, while he also initiated a 'historic' turn.
Quoting Paine
Thanks for these Paine. You are right to qualify my statement. It is not that Hegel goed beyond the limit, he does not recognize it as such. The thing in itself is a consequence of Kant's formality.
Hegel seems to reenlist a lot of these terms for his own purposes.
That's the history of philosophy in a nutshell ;)
I would be interested in your view of this interpretation: I understand the in-itself to refer to the world (or object) prior to or outside the way it appears to the observer. We don't see the world (or object) as it is in itself, because the very act of perceiving requires that what is seen has been assimilated by the observer as an appearance. So the 'in itself' is not anything, but it's not a 'mysterious entity' or 'unknown thing'.
As per this interpretation:
[quote=Emrys Westacott;https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/the-continuing-relevance-of-immanuel-kant.html]Kant's introduced the concept of the thing in itself to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions.[/quote]
There's also the much-overlooked distinction in Kant's texts between the in-itself and the noumenal. They're not synonyms.
I would say my philosophical method is not analytical as such, because I have never read analytical philosophy much.
I would rather think my method could be the Socratic methods which utilises the natural reasoning seeking for the proper definitions and commonsensical reasonableness in the discussions.
From my experience of reading the posts written by so called the analytic folks, some of them seem to suffer from total lack of, or narrow and shallow knowledge in history of philosophy, grave misunderstandings on, or total lack of the basic knowledge of logic, and delusions of self grandeur symptoms, which make them think that anyone who doesn't agree with their views must learn from them. Hence the reason, having the second thoughts, reluctance and caution on accepting the school itself as an ideal philosophical methodology, or associating with the name in any degree. It gives impression that whether the symptoms could be the negative effects from reading the philosophy.
Hegel also distinguished between "natural" and "spirited" to demark what is actually human. Alexandre Kojève quotes from a helpful essay of Hegel in his Introduction To The Reading Of Hegel:
Quoting Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, page 236, translated by Nichols Jr.