Not reading Hegel.

Quoting unenlightened

Hegel remains (a) German. and (b) difficult.

These are my usual criteria for selecting philosophers to read ;)

Quoting unenlightened

But he keeps popping up all over the place, and he seems to be an influence on various people that are an influence on me, so by way of passively absorbing something of him with minimum effort, I have started listening to the podcast, The Cunning of Geist, by Gregory Novak. available wherever you source your podcasts.

I've now listened to episode 1. This should be good to listen to when I'm feeling the itch.

Quoting unenlightened

I didn't study Hegel in my undergraduate days, because he was too woo for school.

I read The Phenomenology of Spirit, but my mentor came from the continental cut of cloth so it was encouraged rather than frowned upon. So not woo, but philosophy -- stuff that's interesting and worth exploring with the rational methods of philosophy.

Quoting unenlightened

Now I want immediately to deal with something that has become problematic here, because of the reification of individuality as the only manifestation of mind. The idea that mind is brain, and therefore there is my mind, your mind, and everyman's mind - and nothing else minded, has to be put in question to grasp even the title of the podcast.

I'm on board, naturally.

Quoting unenlightened

And I'll just include a reference for McTaggart, on time. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mctaggart/
and that's my introduction to the introduction.

I re-read that entry recently due to the physicalism thread. cause and time are linked, and physicalism typically gets support from causation, so I think it natural.


This is probably a better way for myself to ease my way back to Hegel. I believe he's important for me and in general, though I find him terribly frustrating.

Quoting unenlightened

The cunning of geist is that the mind/spirit of the age will use what you think of as your mind for its own grander purposes without you necessarily being aware of it or of its purposes.

The flipside of that view of living in a particular situation with a limited view of the horizon is that the 'dialectic' starts with the desire of an individual. The impulse of the tyrant is located in the formation of logic as experienced by a proposed 'first' logician.

Got through episode 4 tonight, on true infinity. This is great. He has a clear passion for Hegel and an admirable humility.

I’m on board. Dude is fantastic to listen to.
No comments yet but I know this will be extremely rich listening

002

Quite a lot of placating of science-botherers here to counterbalance the woo of the introduction. Speaking of which, I have decided that A Course in Miracles is too steeped in Christian language and symbolism to be combined here, and the metaphysics is very different anyway. I might try to do something with it at some stage, but not here.

so we get the first classificatory system logic, nature, and geist, more or less titles of books or book sections, but the suggestion here already is that geist is in a sense the working out, or the interaction, of logic and nature. And this triadic form looks like it's going to be thematic, and the introduction of time as a way to resolve inherent contradictions.

003 This is the beginning of the logic.

Presuppositionless Being, is the same as Nothing. "If something has no attributes or properties at all, it is in fact nothing." So being and nothing cannot be distinguished and being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being. So there is the third term again, 'becoming'.

And from there we go into a discussion of time and flow, and becoming of course encompasses unbecoming, which you may or may not have heard of elsewhere. It is mentioned here that time is not in the logic as such, but as it is the 'science' of logic it immediately plunges into being and seems to imply time even though time is not a dimension of logic as such.

Hopefully that will become clearer as we go on, or someone here will clarify it for me?

Quoting unenlightened

The cunning of geist is that the mind/spirit of the age will use what you think of as your mind for its own grander purposes without you necessarily being aware of it or of its purposes.

I have not listened to the podcast, but based on what is said here, rather than putting the question of mind into question it sounds as if the question has been answered in favor of a universal mind with its own purposes. Accordingly, and I use the religious terminology intentionally, Hegel is the prophet of Geist.

This raises the question of the relationship between his writing as a reflection of or a response to the zeitgeist. Of whether what we read reflects Hegel's own mind, his own thinking as opposed to what he he needs to say given the beliefs and thinking of others.

As I read him, time is the realization, the development and working out of eternity. The completion of the circle - from eternity to time to the self-knowledge of being/eternity through its becoming/time.

Quoting Fooloso4

I have not listened to the podcast, but based on what is said here, rather than putting the question of mind into question it sounds as if the question has been answered in favor of a universal mind with its own purposes.

Well that is my understanding of where we are heading in broad terms, but for sure Hegel doesn't answer on page one, but arrives there, and I am listening to what is a tertiary source not reading the original, so if you want to argue, I am not your man. I am looking to understand what is being proposed and that is all. Please don't critique Hegel on the basis of my student beginner's crib-sheet.

Quoting unenlightened

Please don't critique Hegel on the basis of my student beginner's crib-sheet.

I have struggled with Hegel over the years. Some years ago I participated in this thread.

My intention was not to argue but rather to pose what I take to be a guiding question. I have not made up my mind. Or should I say, it has not been made up for me?

Reply to Fooloso4 Well if you don't have 50 hours or so spare to listen to the podcast, I'll try and give you a shout if I hear anything that might sound like a bit of an answer. But a quick scan of the first couple of pages of that thread confirms for me the wisdom of letting someone else do the hard work while I sit in my armchair and nod. But you do have me about right, in that I am looking for a philosophy that will sustain a view of psyche and consciousness and personal identity that at least leans somewhat in the direction of geist, because the individualism of today feels immiserating and false.

Quoting unenlightened

But you do have me about right, in that I am looking for a philosophy that will sustain a view of psyche and consciousness and personal identity that at least leans somewhat in the direction of geist, because the individualism of today feels immiserating and false.

I am suspicious of the idea that world history culminated with and through Hegel.

Reply to Fooloso4 Yeah, that sounds like bullshit to me too. One of the interesting things about the podcast is that it aims to relate Hegel to modern stuff in physics, psychology, etc. Things have moved on already, and in some ways may have contradicted some of Hegel's thought. but in other ways they may confirm or extend it. I'm looking forward to some stuff on brain hemispheres...

Quoting unenlightened

It is mentioned here that time is not in the logic as such, but as it is the 'science' of logic it immediately plunges into being and seems to imply time even though time is not a dimension of logic as such.

Hopefully that will become clearer as we go on, or someone here will clarify it for me?

It's cool that he's starting with The Science of Logic because that's where I dropped off last time I seriously pursued reading Hegel. It was just a smidge too dry for me at the time to want to keep going.

Flipping open the Table of Contents the first mention of "time" comes from page 234 in my Miller translation. Miller in the translator's preface:

...above all, [the student] must 'mark, learn, and inwardly digest' what Hegel himself has to say in his Prefaces and Introduction and, last but not least, in the chapter entitled "With What Must the Science Begin?'. This chapter is of great importance for understanding of the beginning of the Science of Logic, for in it Hegel has made it quite clear why he begins with pure being

My thought is that time is derivative rather than comes along with becoming. I can't remember how time, as a concept, gets introduced, but that's how I'd put it from memory and listening -- so time is implied by the passage of sentence-to-sentence and by the notion of becoming, but it's not a proper concept or moment at this point.

005

Super interesting interpretation of the Christian story through Hegel: the notion that Jesus was real, and his death is the second coming that brings his spirit upon all the people -- so we don't have to wait, it's already here, but in a "picture-thinking" rather than "hard-thinking" way.

Through ep 004.

I’m beginning to be convinced Hegel was an absolute moron. Interesting

Reply to AmadeusD :monkey: ;)

While I agree withReply to Fooloso4 Reply to unenlightened I wouldn't go that far.

The perspective I think of Hegel from is Kant -- I think he's attempting to respond to Kantian arguments, or at least the influence of Kantian arguments, in favor of a different kind of absolute. Where Kant claimed his system, if true, is complete, Hegel claims that if it's true then this implies important things about knowledge in philosophy. He's attempting to build a philosophy that overcomes Kant's antinomies and deduction of the categories because he's proposing a different sort of logic -- which is why the stuff about philosophy counting as a kind of knowledge resonates with me, at least. It makes sense.
 

004 True infinity.

Very abstract. Dasein is determinate being, which is being, limited by not being what it isn't.

Then, by negation again, what it isn't is other, from Dasein - a becoming unbecoming {can be seen as} Etwas, a something that implies an other.

And then with a quick "go and read Hegel or a commentary" and a bit of hand waving, we arrive at a being that is self defining and self creating, and by 'going beyond it's own limits, produces true infinity. And this is a move that is very reminiscent of the Laws of Form, where a function is inserted into itself, that feedback also producing an infinite, and eventually producing time also.

In fact it's starting to look like the Laws of Form is pretty much a Hegelian calculus:
Make a distinction between being and nothing. Call it the first distinction...

And I'm also hearing echoes of Bateson here, but I need to think a bit more about that.

But if I think about this as verbal mathematics constructing an abstract system, the arguments are only important to avoid contradiction, and what is more significant is definition and construction. Looked it in this light, there is as much woo here as there is in set theory.

Reply to Moliere
What is different about the logic is that Hegel connects it to the process of people living together over time.

For instance, the question of what is moral cannot be reduced to a set of universal principles applicable to all times. But to say it is completely arbitrary according to custom is also not acceptable because that ignores a logic displayed in human interaction.

Without that background of interaction, the statements are mere theological musings upon a completed world. The discussion of Master and Slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit crashes the cosmopolitan party.

Reply to Paine I'm not following your final paragraph very well, but it's OK because I agree that the emphasis on others is an important part of Hegel's philosophy, and so is time. I view Hegel's logic as an attempt to connect the classic philosophical categories to the process of science's development in history, where science is understood in the wider sense as "a systematic body of knowledge" rather than the modern sense of "these topics".

The differences between Kant/Hegel... are huge. One might be tempted to say incommensurable, except we can read them and compare. I only mean to point out that I believe Hegel's target is the influence of Kant -- I believe he is targeting Kant's philosophical arguments on the limitations of knowledge because they were influential, and certainly conflicts with his project of establishing knowledge in philosophy, including metaphysical knowledge.

Quoting unenlightened

In fact it's starting to look like the Laws of Form is pretty much a Hegelian calculus:
Make a distinction between being and nothing. Call it the first distinction...

Quoting unenlightened

But if I think about this as verbal mathematics constructing an abstract system, the arguments are only important to avoid contradiction, and what is more significant is definition and construction. Looked it in this light, there is as much woo here as there is in set theory.

Yup. That's how I read him. And there's definitely echoes of Hegel in the Laws of Form, which is interesting... but I'd stay on guard too because Hegel has a way of seeming to relate to everything.

But, yeah, no magical thinking at all. Odd or incorrect or of the times or whatever thinking, but not magical. At least as I understand him.

Quoting Moliere

I believe he is targeting Kant's philosophical arguments on the limitations of knowledge because they were influential, and certainly conflicts with his project of establishing knowledge in philosophy, including metaphysical knowledge.

I agree. I am not following the podcast so I won't go further in that direction. I will just point to Logic where Hegel says Kant is declaring where one cannot swim without getting wet himself.

005 - 009

There's plenty of interesting stuff here but I'm not learning anything much about Hegel, so if anyone wants to comment feel free, but I'm going to move on to

010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary

The first thing I want to say is that to my mind there has been a mistranslation, whereby the distinction Hegel makes between understanding and reason has become inverted to the normal meaning of the terms in English, such that 'reason' in Hegel refers to an intuitive grasp of significance, whereas 'understanding' is a narrow definitional approach. It surely ought to be the other way round?

Apart from that, and the mystery of the origin of the story of The Master and his Emissary, (which sounds Chinese to me, or possibly Middle eastern), Gilchrist channeling Hegel seems to work quite well and make good sense. I remember reading split brain studies back in the day and being fascinated and revolted in equal measure.

Then we get to sublation, where the left brain precision focused Emissary reports back to the right brain master and its findings are integrated into a world view.
Or else, if one is suffering from an excess of modernity and left brain dominance, which results in a rigidity of thought, where the emissary has taken over, and become dictatorial, the integration is not complete and the mind remains divided and in conflict - and thus 'unhappy', or un-at-oned.

Quoting Moliere

Hegel's target is the influence of Kant -- I believe he is targeting Kant's philosophical arguments on the limitations of knowledge because they were influential, and certainly conflicts with his project of establishing knowledge in philosophy, including metaphysical knowledge.

Yes, I get the feeling there's a underlying "This is at you, Immanuel..." with a but of a sneer - But, i agree with unenlightened that it's taking some handwaving to get past Kant's base-level limitations of reason.

Reply to unenlightened Found this to listen along to an interpretation of Hegel at the part cited in episode 010 quoting paragraph 53 of The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Reply to Moliere Cheers. Another voice, another perspective.

011 The Hegelian Dialectic

Here is a paper on Marxist dialectic as the result of his "inversion" of Hegel.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2022.2054000

Looks like a total misunderstanding to me from my ignorance.

So my point about the poor/inverted translation above is made at the end of this episode in a quote from David Bohm no less, who I have read before and so I wonder if I already heard this before and forgot it. Or maybe I'm just smart.

I'm trying to get a sense of what is going on here, and I'm taking a cue from the title of the first book, and 'phenomenology' seems to relate to Kant's term but Hegel applies it inwardly rather than outwardly , and so he begins with logos and psyche in the first instance - ie geist. So his phenomena are being and nothing and they are interdependent because a phenomenon has to be a a Batesonian 'difference that makes a difference'. and that is the phenomenon which is to be understood and reasoned and developed into - for example - 'subject and experience' as one might understand things. Materiality, for Marx, or the Noumenon for Kant have to be derived from geist, and cannot be fundamental.

Quoting unenlightened

Here is a paper on Marxist dialectic as the result of his "inversion" of Hegel.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2022.2054000

Looks like a total misunderstanding to me from my ignorance.

Read the paper over the day. I think it's a fair interpretation of Marx, but I'd also separate out Marxist from Hegelian dialectics. The one thing I'd disagree with the author of the paper on is that Hegel's argument is fallacious, because the accusation of fallacy requires a logic and Hegel is working at that level of generality where since he's building a logic there's a choice to be had -- you can choose Hegel's logic, or the one that paper chooses (which is far more popular, and gets along with Marx, so fairs fair)

011

Glad to see the podcast highlighting the thesis-antithesis-synthesis being an oversimplification that doesn't exactly correspond to what Hegel wrote. And I like his quotes of Bohm in relation to Hegel. The Bohm quote about the in-itself and the for-itself and the in-and-for-itself is a better rendition. I didn't realize Bohm was a victim of McCarthyism. And I agree that the most important part of the dialectic is that it is a movement.

EDIT:

Decided to skip 012.

013

Good intro to a classic. I encourage others thinking along to read it

014

I agree with the title. Freedom is the core of Hegel, same as Marx. This would be the center if we could connect them together.

I wasn't jiving with the QM interps, tho I suppose that's predictable.

There's some Epicurean handwaving with the swerve.

But I prefer the existential approach where we obviously must choose things every day. So it's worth noting that these descriptions won't tell us what to do.

013. Master and Slave dialectic.
I listened to this twice and really struggled. Reading the text, (in contradiction to my title) the penny dropped, or at least I made my own sense of it, that you can tell me is wrong and stupid.

[quote=Hegel-184]... this other is for itself only when it cancels itself as existing for itself , and has self-existence only in the self-existence of the other. Each is the mediating term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself; and each is to itself and to the other an immediate self-existing reality, which, at the same time, exists thus for itself only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.[/quote]

This describes what happens when a mother first looks at her newborn, that confirms the sociality of human consciousness. If there is not that mutual recognition, then one or the other is dead. And it is different from the birth scene of sheep or cows or chickens which recognise each other separately, and thus more as objects than subjects.

Hegel is talking from the pov. of the infant primarily. Birth is the physical separation, and the look is the mutual recognition, but self-consciousness proper has yet to develop, because ...

[quote=186]... its truth would be merely that its own individual existence for itself would be shown to it to be an independent object, or, which is the same thing, that the object would be exhibited as this pure certainty of itself. By the notion of recognition, however, this is not possible, except in the form that as the other is for it, so it is for the other; each in its self through its own action and again through the action of the other achieves this pure abstraction of existence for self.[/quote]

One has to grow up, and become independent. So we arrive at Freudian territory.

End of part 1. (more to follow)

Ecosia showed me this, which reassured me I am not entirely alone:

To put it in a nutshell, to follow Freud’s image, the unconscious is a gap, and meaning is the stopgap. Meaning provides a narrative, which begins already in the work of “the unconscious philosopher”; the work of meaning is a counterpart to the workings of the unconscious. The unconscious and the philosopher are a couple in an odd division of labor: one makes the holes, the other fills them in. If there is a diagnosis of the philosophical endeavor as such at stake, then this business of philosophy starts already in the unconscious—the philosopher has an accomplice in the unconscious, which starts stopping the gaps even before philosophy starts filling them in. The unconscious is effaced at the same time that it is produced, and the one who effaces it is the unconscious philosopher struggling to make sense and provide a narrative account free of gaps. The philosophical illusion is structural, it has its basis in the unconscious itself as effacement.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/34/68360/hegel-and-freud/

One commonality is that both made claims to "science" that ring somewhat false in terms of current usage. But then Science at the time did have ambitions that it has since relinquished. But I am not going to go very far into that rather peculiar stuff about death, so reminiscent of Freud's 'death wish'.that then leads to the Lordship and Bondsman relation, which I take to be a "normal" result of childhood trauma that permeates the human world as the everyday insanity of government and social organisation. I'll leave it at that for now, but I might have more to say when I know Hegel a bit more.

Quoting unenlightened

One has to grow up, and become independent. So we arrive at Freudian territory.

There is that connection to individual development. The logic of the text can be found in Lacan's Mirror Stage. But Hegel is saying that the 'duplication' also takes place between isolated persons. The dynamic unfolds through the logic of fear and service. Freud does not close that circle.

Quoting Paine

But Hegel is saying that the 'duplication' also takes place between isolated persons.

What is an isolated person in the context of child development? One has to be raised by someone surely - wolves at the least?

Reply to unenlightened
I guess the common ground for the psychology of the child and the dynamic Hegel is describing is that the awareness of isolation comes through recognizing the other. In a theory like Lacan's, however, the doubling is an unavoidable part of development that needs to be distinguished from the results of good or bad parenting as discussed by Winnicott, etcetera.
But laying out those differences look different according to what model of personal autonomy one is building. So there is large gap between how Freud imagines the personal and psychologists like Vygotsky do.

I there is another gap between these developmental models and what Hegel is attempting. I have not been engaging with these writers you point to who follow this line of thought. I will look at the Ecosia article and see if it helps my thinking upon this.

014 Freedom.

Our man is a bit confused about this. That's my impression, anyway. Because the story Hegel is telling seems to make freedom exclusively human, or that's my impression so far, but then it is also a property of geist as 'world-spirit' and hence talk of panpsychism. and then matter has no freedom, but quantum particles do. It's not just hand-wavy, it's a contradictory muddle. I'm going to try and make some sense of it, by departing from the podcast a bit.

Suppose we start with a many worlds, non-collapsing universe that evolves physically but remains probabilistic. Now intuitively, my suggestion would be that Schrödinger's cat has enough geist to collapse its own wave function, and will obviously collapse it to the state in which it is alive (because it can't see itself dead). So the form of geist's freedom is in the first instance the necessary choice of freedom itself, that is, the choice of life. Thus natural selection selects for freedom to select.

How say ye?

Reply to unenlightened

I gave it a relisten, and I think you're right to say he's confused: I think he presents something of a rationalization for Hegel, but one I wouldn't be tempted to make.The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807, and The Origin of the Species in 1859, and the theories of the universe he's reconciling with Hegel come even after that.

But I also can understand the desire to provide this reconciliation on a podcast -- it's not just introducing basic concepts of Hegel, but is pointing out how Hegel can relate to our day (and so be worth studying, in spite of the difficulty).

I just have a different motivation than him so it's OK that I disagree with the rationalization.

Quoting unenlightened

Suppose we start with a many worlds, non-collapsing universe that evolves physically but remains probabilistic. Now intuitively, my suggestion would be that Schrödinger's cat has enough geist to collapse its own wave function, and will obviously collapse it to the state in which it is alive (because it can't see itself dead). So the form of geist's freedom is in the first instance the necessary choice of freedom itself, that is, the choice of life. Thus natural selection selects for freedom to select.

How say ye?

I think that works. Just supposing that consciousness emerged in some kind of event that likely is the birth of religion then, supposing natural selection to be true and reconcilable with Hegel, that would be a good guess for reconciliation -- in the beginning there was no consciousness, only the atoms and void which somehow formed creatures which, in these many-worlds, we happen to be in the branches in which we're alive because while there are branches in which we're not, we obviously wouldn't be a part of those branches. We only get to experience the branches where we do come out alive, so even if it's a fluke that happens only once in a universe we just happen to live in that universe where it happened.


A problem for many-worlds though: it exacerbates the binding problem in that there's no cause or reason for why I continue to inhabit the branch that I do if my choices make a branch in the universe. Do consciousnessness multiply with every choice that we make, and along with that universes? Why on earth am I in this branch, and not the one where something else happened?

It would seem to me that that's where the coin-toss has to come in: you had a 50/50 chance, or whatever the odds were, to go along for the ride in this branch. Maybe someone else went along for a ride in the other branch. But if that's the case then we're back to a random universe we experience, stochastic and not freely chosen.

I think of The Phenomenology of Spirit as a story about the birth of Humanity. There's a rational beginning to this story, but the conceptual structures don't necessarily fit in with the historical timeline allusions throughout the text. It skips forwards and backwards, at least by my memory, to make connections. It's as if Geist has always been moving and the Phenomenologist can step out of the phenomena and describe them, as a scientist would, but then coming to realize that this is itself an act of Geist, or experiencing Geist and that all the worlds philosophies are expressions of this structure. So even if the historical timeline as we'd normally construct it is linear, I'd say Hegel's time is not linear because he's still talking about conceptual structures that are the basis of reality. So at the Birth of Humanity, or the beginning of consciousness, we'd have access to all the structures which are described through the history of philosophy, they just wouldn't necessarily be articulated yet, or would need development from the concepts that were expressable at the time -- while Geist lays the foundation.

For Hegel he just lives in a moment where enough has been accumulated by philosophers that he can begin to build a body of knowledge with it, contra the Kantian impulse to limit knowledge to the natural world.


Or, well, that's how I'd put it right now. Though I'm rusty.

A thought --

In comparing the Block Universe to Hegel, and using McTaggart:

The Block Universe as ontology posits that the A-series is an illusion.

I think Hegelian time does the opposite -- the B-series is an abstraction built from the A-series (which is not composed as McTaggart describes time for the A-series, though I think the analogy works to get a sense across)

Reply to unenlightened

I think the article sides with Freud a bit :D -- I don't think there are gaps for Hegel. I'd reconcile them by saying that Philosophy is a higher kind of knowledge than Psychology, and so the very explication of the unconscious makes us conscious of the unconscious, but that this is already a stepping-across a barrier such that we can engage with the unconscious by making it explicit, and finding its rational core. In a way Freud could be read as completing Hegel instead of in conflict, if we prioritized Hegel instead. (which is kind of the omni-move of Hegel -- every philosophy has a time and a place...)

******
https://www.coppelia.io/graphing-the-history-of-philosophy

And to see the whole graph at once, though it can be hard to read:

https://dailynous.com/2014/04/21/graphing-the-history-of-philosophical-influences/

Interesting to note that the graphing technique separated out Freud from Hegel, though unfortunately for what that article highlights it looks like he gets lumped in with philosophy by it.

I'm considering following his instructions because I'd like to play with the graph.

EDIT: Oh, and the significance is that it's an analogy for Hegelian "time" -- if we let the philosophers' names stand in for their ideas, then we have a kind of "mapping" between concepts which can serve as a visual picture of how Hegel's concepts might relate -- and perhaps "Geist" is a kind of movement along these relationships (or, better -- they even change relationships over time and move about)

I gave up after ep. 08. I do not think I enjoy anything Hegel has to say 0 but ill still read Phenomenology and Logic.

Reply to AmadeusD :D

It's frustrating, but I find it fascinating too. The influence cannot be denied, so there's the part of me that likes the history of philosophy and charting the lineages of ideas.

But then the strangeness of it all is part of its fascination, and trying to wrap my head around the strange is something I find rewarding in philosophy. It shows me another way of looking at the world.

Quoting Moliere

The influence cannot be denied, so there's the part of me that likes the history of philosophy and charting the lineages of ideas.

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely want to know about Hegel and his influence (and his actual, rather htan interpreted, response to Kant).

It just always feels too mystical, despite Greg's protestations in the episode in whcih is protests the Mystic label.

Reply to unenlightened Reply to unenlightened
The Ecosia article is very interesting. The difference between the unconscious not being able to negate the way the 'rational' processes work is food for thought.

When I responded earlier, I was thinking in terms of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents as the point of contrast; Frustrated individuals living in a world they never made, to quote Howard the Duck. A dimension Ecosia is not taking on directly.

I will have to mull the ontological versus the psychological assumptions made by Ecosia against Hegel talking about historical development.

Reply to Paine point of order. Ecosia is my greenwashed google substitute. Get it today, folks, and plant some trees while you search Think e-flux is the publisher.

Quoting Moliere

I don't think there are gaps for Hegel.

Geist is gap; freedom is gaps in the block; being and gap are indistinguishable. What I like most about Hegel so far is his starting place. He starts with phenomena appearing to an empty mind. This neatly cuts out all that interminable talk of internal and external and their disconnection. It's like Descartes without the ego-god-thinking thing bollocks. And that might eventually become a physical science with mind and freedom accounted for. Or maybe not...

Quoting Moliere

the whole graph

Bah, humbug! I don't know what you get from all that. It would help a bit if the display took account of time because "influence" tends to be a bit one way - the living not having much influence on their ancestors and such.

016 Time.

"There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief."

I'm just not having Einstein's block time. He was never reconciled to quantum mechanics, and nor, still, is his theory. Get a haircut, man! Never was and never will be And Hegel clearly makes time emerge from the causal feedback that also produces life and real infinity. And it emerges dialectically from the overflow of being and nothing that is becoming. You are nothing, and the creator! Creation means something new and therefore time. Riddle me this: if time is an illusion, what is the speed of light?

I'm actually pissed off with clever people telling me my life is an illusion as if they know what is real.

017

This episode discusses how the Hegelian dialectic is a reflection of reality itself rather than a unique philosophical method used to understand reality.  It will show how common left-brain understanding (verstand) fails in comprehending dialectics by breaking it into three separate moments, rather than holistically seeing three inseparable sides of "every notion and truth whatever."   As Friedrich Engels points out, the dialectical process of the reality of the being is "the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy." 

That first sentence is a fine double knot.

LET: "The Hegelian dialectic" = "a reflection of reality itself "
LET: "Not the Hegelian dialectic = "a unique a unique philosophical method used to understand reality"

THEN: A a unique philosophical method used to understand reality is not a reflection of reality itself.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who the fuck makes sense at all?
Mirror, mirror on the wall, mirrors can't reflect it all.

Back to Zeno, back to real infinity, back to the process of becoming as the resolution of paradoxes. There is no resting place in the flight of the arrow, it never is, but always is becoming, so equally the Hegelian dialectic never is but is always happening.

"Being is, and nothing happens."

If you read this one way, it describes the block universe, but read it another way, and time is how being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being. It's all matter of whether one looks from inside or outside the universe. Personally, I'm looking from inside.

I might add that when looking at the universe from the outside, one necessarily brings the process of looking out with one, and this is what enables one to see the universe as static and [s]at the same time[/s] also conceptually creates a second dimension of time.

018

Quoting unenlightened

Geist is gap; freedom is gaps in the block; being and gap are indistinguishable.

I can make sense of that. All I really mean is to point out that for Hegel there's no limit to knowledge, at least as I understand it. That's the big difference between Kant and Hegel: for Kant the barriers to knowing are established until someone can come up with a better argument for how a priori synthetic knowledge is possible. For Hegel he believes these barriers are temporary, and through the dialectic can be overcome.

So the picture that Freud pointed to in the opening of the article:

[Philosophy] departs from [science] by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent […]. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological value of our logical operations […]. And it often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen / Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus. [With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.]”

I think in this sense, too, Hegel would deny gaps -- that is, he provides a picture of the universe that is without gaps, and at least rational (coherency some would probably deny)

But in terms of the block universe, yes I can see Geist being gap, freedom putting gaps in the block, and also the unity of being and gap in that being and nothing are everywhere intermixed.  

What I like most about Hegel so far is his starting place. He starts with phenomena appearing to an empty mind. This neatly cuts out all that interminable talk of internal and external and their disconnection. It's like Descartes without the ego-god-thinking thing bollocks. And that might eventually become a physical science with mind and freedom accounted for.

Yes!

For all of my protestations, there really are good parts in Hegel. My favorite passage comes later when he's reflecting upon art. His various theological notions are also ones that make a good deal of sense to me, even though I prefer a more civic and earthly interpretation of such things.

016

Glad to have these distinctions. In talking about different kinds of time I fear that it's too queer or abstract to be worth exploring, but I also come to these distinctions because of texts like Hegel's, and realizing different theories of history express time differently than the natural sciences do, too.

I think I'd tack on something like an Epicurean notion of time, as competition to the cyclic, etc. -- though I can understand how a Hegelian wouldn't want the universe to be merely stochastic.

019 020

This is hard for me to write about and I have been putting it off.

First, there is a problem with finitude in that it is defined negatively. 'Fin' is end, and the finite ends. This seems to show up in physics in various ways, substance dissolves into waves, finite particles are not particularly anything, but probably... So there is the same relation between finite and infinite as there is between being and nothing, which is one of instability; each becomes the other.

Now I'm going to quote myself from elsewhere when this was in the back of my mind and I was thinking about something else:—
Quoting unenlightened

Well I think I understand a distinction between physical, biological, and social determination, roughly like this.
Physics decrees that everything falls towards the ground with a terminal velocity dependent on size and density such that it cannot move further from its place of origin further than the average horizontal wind speed at the time takes it.

Biology overcomes or rather exploits physics in the Dandelion by producing a seed with long 'fingers that trap a large volume of air producing a seed with a terminal velocity due to gravity so slight that the mildest turbulence in a gentle zephyr will propel it upwards to such an extent that it can travel the whole globe. Just one of many ways that biology attains heavier than air flight. Spiders manage the same thing by spinning a kite-string of silk into the breeze until it is long enough to pull them into the air.

Intelligence evolved as a way of speeding up adaptation to an unstable world by the preservation of social learning, such that if one monkey learns to fish for ants with a stick, or crack open an oyster with a rock, the tribe will copy them without biological evolution occurring, and the behaviour will be preserved as long as it benefits the tribe. And thus the limits of biological determination are likewise circumvented.

Biology does not break the laws of physics, and intelligence does not break the laws of of biology. Nevertheless much different shit goes down in the city from what goes down in the wilderness., and what goes down in sterile conditions. Humans are biologically flightless, but have learned to fly round the world.

Now I feel as if this triad of my own, that also defines a direction towards complexity and freedom rather close to Hegel's but in modern terms, through the exploitation of feedback that creates fractal complexity down to the quantum level, and thereby can exploit the fundamental freedom from finitude inherent in the physics and direct it.

The evolution of the universe to a state that allows life, and the evolution of life that allows intelligence dives a direction towards meaning that in Hegel becomes the moral imperative. And the hippies, who never read Hegel except through the distorting lens of Marx, nevertheless caught the essence of the thing. How could all this ever have been about the silly little thing that is a human individual? But the struggle of the whole of humanity to get off the slaughter bench of history and be free to create - that is something! "All I want is all the life in me to be free." Free love and peace, man!

020
[Quote= episode blurb]This episode traces the increase in human freedom from the totem ritual of the prehistoric primitive horde through the male genetic bottleneck in the agrarian revolution to the Hegelian “knot” in liberal democracies. This knot, which needs to be worked out, is more prominent today than ever. It is when individual and identity group demands come in conflict with principles that uphold the state.  [/quote]

"DNA analysis has shown that 8,000 yrs ago 17 women reproduced for every man.
Male parentage began to decline at the beginning of the agrarian revolution. " Novak 020 (my rough extract.)

My own take on this is rather different from Novak's. He starts from a typical primate society of males competing for dominance, and seeks to explain the genetic bottleneck thereby. This I do not think works because it does not explain what changed or why. Not Freud, but Marx has the better explanation here. The agrarian revolution produced surplus. It produced settlement and accumulation, land must be cleared and improved to become productive and the labour produces an asset as property.

This gives an importance to inheritance to intelligence as distinct from its importance to biology. The 'natural' inheritance system would be matrilineal, because there is no question who the mother of an infant is. And it is this natural system which would have to be overturned in order for male dominance as between men to become dominance over women and specifically the control of female sexuality.

The patrilineal system of inheritance is what demands the control of women's sexual partners and this motives the dominant males to impose sexual exclusivity. Property motivates, and also provides the means for a male to continue to dominate well past his prime, when nature would have him deposed by youth.

021
Not much Hegel, but quite a lot of McLuhan. And an interesting light shed on this discussion: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14989/how-to-do-nothing-with-words/p1

... amongst other stuff.

022
[quote= Blurb]Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1981 book "After Virtue," argues that moral discourse since the Enlightenment is not rational and therefore empty. He believes the reason for this is that the morals of the Enlightenment lack purpose - teleology. The scientific revolution, armed with Darwinism, brought an end to "purpose." One was left to define morality on their own terms. This led to the moral relativism of the individual.  

But now a new tribalism has returned, with the left-brain, visually oriented individualism of the Enlightenment giving way to the right-brain, auditory tribalism of the Global Village.  And with it a return to moralistic thinking.  

 Hegel believed that morals consisted of group ethics that progressed over time, centered in one's family, one's socials spheres and communities, and the state itself. Perhaps the Hegel Renaissance seen over the last few decades is a result of the correspondence of his teachings to this new reality.   [/quote]

As you might imagine, I am quite onboard with blaming the Enlightenment for everything; the relativising emotivising and downgrading of morals, and the overemphasis on the individual.

However, the "right-brain, auditory tribalism of the Global Village" does not, I fear signal a return to social values. Rather, it is rampant individualism with an additional private army. Novak has allowed his genial progressive positivity to get the better of him. We are heading for the slaughter bench of history.

If the purpose of life is to transcend the limits of physics, and the purpose of intelligence is to transcend the limits of biology, then the purpose of existence is freedom - the nothing that 'directs' everything.
The will to freedom is a better formulation that the will to power, because power is always only relative - a big fish in a small pond would only be a small fish in a big pond.

But freedom is the left hand of responsibility; this is how ethics is sublated from the direction of history. Thus the measure of freedom as progress is kindness. As Margret Mead relates, the first sign of civilisation is a healed fractured femur, because without the sustained care of the community, one with a fractured femur could not survive. Political correctness, however, knits no bones.

Reply to unenlightened Yup.

Just finishing up episode 20, but I empathize with your: Quoting unenlightened

Novak has allowed his genial progressive positivity to get the better of him.

A bit Panglossian at times -- not that it's bad to hear, but I have my doubts.

Slightly out of order, but here is a McGilchrist talk - 30 mins overview of his stuff in case anyone is unfamiliar.

Episode 21.

Interesting parallels between McLuhan and Hegel. I've heard a lot of Novak's quotes, but I cannot remember from where (did I read McLuhan and forget that I read him, or is he just that influential?).

I agree with him in describing our society as a tribal one.

Interesting theory about how electronic communication enabled eroding national ties by making that space "shorter" or "instantaneous", so that one's identity and community can more easily become more important and different from your nation.

His continuation of the Hegelian analysis of McLuhan's tetrad reminds me of Marx in that the technology enables a new social order.

Here is a quote from a link on https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15210/the-idea-that-changed-europe/p1 from @Wayfarer

Also fascinating is Gillespie's detailed analysis of Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. The latter is usually depicted as an atheist (or his religiosity dubious at best) and his philosophy as chiefly political but Gillespie believes him sincerely religious (if not exactly orthodox) and reveals the underlying metaphysical concerns behind his thought.

And so Gillespie says, even in modern times, we are bequeathed with a similar wrestling between humanity's political ambitions (the expansion of freedom) and the inability to reconcile this with science's inherent determinist worldview. Likewise, in the post-9/11/ confrontation with Islam (which makes a brief appearance at the end) we are again confronted with the fideism and absolutism of Islam which sees the West's assertion of individual autonomy as a challenge to God's omnipotence, for whom our only response ought to be obedience.

Here is fundamental point of Gillespie's thesis

"… the apparent rejection or disappearance of religion and theology in fact conceals the continuing relevance of theological issues and commitments for the modern age. Viewed from this perspective, the process of secularization or disenchantment that has come to be seen as identical with modernity was in fact something different than it seemed, not the crushing victory of reason over infamy, to use Voltaire’s famous term, not the long drawn out death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed, and not the evermore distant withdrawal of the deus absconditus Heidegger points to, but the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an infinite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality), social forces (the general will, the hidden hand), and history (the idea of progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason)."

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/707174301


I include it here just to exemplify an (unattributed) Hegelian influence. (unattributed in the review, that is, the book itself is surely more forthcoming?)

Anyway, connections, connections, and I'm planning on coming back to this thread properly shortly - when the planting season and decorating season is past its peak.

Quoting unenlightened

Anyway, connections, connections, and I'm planning on coming back to this thread properly shortly - when the planting season and decorating season is past its peak.

Hegel has been here for a couple centuries, give or take, so I'm sure he'll be around after the more important things.

I look forward to reading your posts and talking Hegel.