Unstructured Conversation about Hegel
EDIT: Because the PoS is so dense and tedious, I'd like to open up the original thread to the lectures and really any text. Let's just talk about Hegel.
Hi. I'd like to start a conversation [s]about this book, perhaps especially the famous preface.[/s] My idea is that we could quote passages from here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm We can then just see what we can make of them. IMV, it'll be more fun and more illuminating to just open the game up to any passage that resonates for any forum member. Share it and share what it means to you. As I see it, it's at least as much about what we can make of it now than it is about what was originally meant --assuming that some fixed meaning was initially there in the first place.
I'll start with the first paragraph.
[quote=Hegel]
For whatever it might be suitable to state about philosophy in a preface – say, an historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about the truth – this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth.
[/quote]
In short, philosophy is not like math. In math we can immediately use a theorem that we know to be true (without thinking about some particular proof.) The theorem has a proof-independent content. The proof just assures us that this idea 'at the top' is true. But in philosophy the bare generality is more or less worthless. It's only the detailed explication of the generality that gives this generality 'body' and content.
In other words, the thesis in question drags its entire history behind it as its body. It is the history of its generation. If we present some thesis apart from its engendering, we present a sort of vacuity. God is X. But what X means developed/develops historically. To understand X is to have (re-) lived the story of X. Without this detailed, contentful reliving of X's history, we are attached vague predicates and saying little or nothing about God (or whatever else.)
Hi. I'd like to start a conversation [s]about this book, perhaps especially the famous preface.[/s] My idea is that we could quote passages from here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm We can then just see what we can make of them. IMV, it'll be more fun and more illuminating to just open the game up to any passage that resonates for any forum member. Share it and share what it means to you. As I see it, it's at least as much about what we can make of it now than it is about what was originally meant --assuming that some fixed meaning was initially there in the first place.
I'll start with the first paragraph.
[quote=Hegel]
For whatever it might be suitable to state about philosophy in a preface – say, an historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about the truth – this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth.
[/quote]
In short, philosophy is not like math. In math we can immediately use a theorem that we know to be true (without thinking about some particular proof.) The theorem has a proof-independent content. The proof just assures us that this idea 'at the top' is true. But in philosophy the bare generality is more or less worthless. It's only the detailed explication of the generality that gives this generality 'body' and content.
In other words, the thesis in question drags its entire history behind it as its body. It is the history of its generation. If we present some thesis apart from its engendering, we present a sort of vacuity. God is X. But what X means developed/develops historically. To understand X is to have (re-) lived the story of X. Without this detailed, contentful reliving of X's history, we are attached vague predicates and saying little or nothing about God (or whatever else.)
Comments (37)
Yeah. I like Kaufmann's better. I was hoping not to have to type out the quotes.
Quoting tim wood
Right. But I'd personally put stress on what we can make of it for ourselves here in now in our own lives. I've never gotten around to learning German, so I feel disqualified from understanding myself as a scholar who should aim at figuring out what he really meant. For me our English paraphrases/interpretations are central.
Quoting tim wood
You're right. I'm jumping ahead. But I like your response here. This is already the kind of thing I have in mind. Something like our own thinking against the background of a difficult influence.
I agree that we have a dynamic model here. I also don't think we have to relive the thinking of philosophy. What I was getting at is not that exactly but rather that empty generalities or summations only make sense against a background of how they were arrived at. If we attach predicates to life or God or truth or whatever and call it a day, we often haven't accomplished much. We have to elaborate. The philosophy gets done or has its content in this elaboration. It's not that prefaces are impossible or non-philosophical in an extreme sense. It's more like the difference between a 20 page summary and the 200 pages that 'derive' these summarizing 20. In short, we do not have lossless compression.
Quoting tim wood
I can live with that rule, but then I'd probably want to jump around more. There is lots of fat and verbiage that I'd want to skip. On the other hand, I have accumulated a nice set of passages that really mean something to me. Starting with the first paragraph was perhaps a misstep. I couldn't help jumping ahead.
Quoting tim wood
to which I can only agree.
The problem is perhaps with the book chosen. For experts, the PoS seems to contain at leat the seed of everything. That's what I've read. But I usually only enjoyed reading Philosophy of History and the lectures and certain speeches he gave publicly. When he decided to, he could write clearly.
[quote=Hegel]
There is an age-old assumption that thinking distinguishes man from the beast. This we shall accept. What makes man nobler than the beast is what he possesses through thought. Whatever is human is so only to the extent that therein thought is active; no matter what its outward appearance may be, if it is human, thought makes it so. In this alone is man distinguished from the beast.
Still, insofar as thought is in this way the essential, the substantial, the active in man, it has to do with an infinite manifold and variety of objects. Thought will be at its best, however, when it is occupied only with what is best in man, with thought itself, where it wants only itself, has to do with itself alone. For, to be occupied with itself is to discover itself by creating itself;’ and this it can do only by manifesting itself. Thought is active only in producing itself; and it produces itself by its very own activity. It is not simply there; it exists only by being its own producer. What it thus produces is philosophy, and what we have to investigate is the series of such productions, the millennial work of thought in bringing itself forth, the voyage of discovery upon which thought embarks in order to discover itself.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroduction.htm
The first point was that thought, free thought, is in itself essentially concrete. This implies that it is alive, that it moves of itself. The infinite nature of spirit is its own process in itself, which means that it does not rest, that it is essentially productive and exists by producing. More precisely we can understand this movement as development; the concrete as active is essentially self-developing.
...
Customarily we have in regard to what is in itself the high opinion that it is what truly is. To get to know God and the world is to get to know them in themselves. What is in itself, however, is not yet the true but only the abstract; it is the seed of what truly is, the tendency, the being-in-itself of the true. It is something simple, something which, of course, contains in itself multiple qualities, but in the form of simplicity – a content which is still hidden.
...
The big difference consists in this: Man knows what he is, and only when he does so is he actually what he is. Without this, knowing reason is nothing, nor is freedom. Man is essentially reason; man and child, educated and uneducated, each is reason; or rather, the possibility of being reason is present in each, is given. Still, reason is of no use to the child, to the uneducated. It is only a possibility; and yet, not an empty but a real possibility, with its own orientation to fulfillment. Only the adult, the educated, knows through experience that he is what he is. The difference is simply that in the one case reason is present only as a tendency, only in itself, whereas in the other case it is so explicitly, beyond the form of possibility and posited in existence.
The whole difference in world-history is reducible to this difference. All men are rational, and the formal element in this rationality is human freedom; this is man’s nature, it belongs to his essence. Still, among many peoples slavery has existed, to some extent it still does, and people are satisfied with it. Orientals, for example, are men and as such free, and yet they are not free, because they have no consciousness of their freedom but are willing to accept every sort of religious and political despotism. The whole difference between Oriental peoples and those who are not subject to slavery is that the latter know that they are free, that to be free is proper to them.
The former are also in themselves free, but they do not exist as free. This, then, introduces an enormous difference into man’s world-historical situation, whether he is free merely in himself or whether he knows that it is his concept, his vocation, his nature, to be as a free individual.
[/quote]
As I read this, we evolve via self-consciousness. We discover ourselves as freedom. But this means we were potentially free all along.
A passage which is quite in keeping with the spirit of Western philosophy. I say this, because I have doubts about the use of the word 'thought' for what Hegel is trying to convey. Quite why is very hard to explain, but the following quotes from Krishnamurti come to mind:
Here there's the recognition that thought, on the one hand is 'crooked', being 'conditioned', and 'the operation of memory'. But there's also the recognition of an 'intelligence' which is directly aware of the whole machinery of thought. So in this philosophy, 'thought' is by its very nature conditioned, it is 'of the order of time'; whereas 'intelligence' is 'that which reads between the lines', i.e. it is insight, apprehension of the real meaning, so is of a different order to discursive thought. (It is close in meaning to the Eastern term jñ?na, meaning insight, knowledge or wisdom)
And that can then be compared to the original meaning of nous, which is explained as follows:
So, I take Hegel to actually be speaking about something much nearer to nous (and perhaps the 'active intellect' of Aristotle) than what we casually and habitually convey by the use of the general term 'thought'. So I have used the word 'reason' in that top example, because it conveys the idea that we're not simply talking of 'discursive thought' in the sense of an internal dialogue, but in terms of 'the intelligence which sees the meaning of things'.
In respect of his statement about 'orientals', he is plainly reflecting the prejudices of his age, but it's worth noting in passing, that from the 'oriental' viewpoint, the very clever and apparently autonomous Western individual, although democratically and economically free, may yet still be a 'slave to passion', as very few seek to live in the light of the kind of 'reason' that Hegel is speaking of; it is indeed 'the road less travelled'.
I like this. I've been trying to say something similar from a phenomenological angle. Experience isn't so neatly conceptual and machine-like. 'Between the lines' gets at this. I have in mind something like the poetic overflow of language, as well as the continuity of language with life.
This reminds me (in a good way) of the flow of life. We rip apart this flow with our categories. But within this flow we aren't subjects looking at objects, etc., but the world itself worlding. We are doings-in-progress. But our quest for some certain system encourages us to build a castle of concepts in a way that ignores our unthematized know-how.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's an interesting angle. From my related but different interest in reading between the lines, I find this quote from the preface of the PoS highly significant.
[quote=Hegel]
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
[/quote]
This is already OLP to some degree. The terms we use aren't fixed. He sees that we tend to glide on the mere surface of language. We take the chess pieces for granted. We don't ask why we understand the situation as a chess game in the first place.
Quoting Wayfarer
Actually Hegel was very critical of a certain notion of freedom. I'll try to find the quote in P of History.
[quote=Hegel]
In such a time, a people, therefore, necessarily finds a satisfaction in the idea of virtue. Talk about virtue partly accompanies, partly replaces real virtue. On the other hand, pure universal Thought, being universal, is apt to bring the particular and unreflected – faith, confidence, custom – to reflection about itself and its immediate (simple and unreflected) existence. It thus shows up the limitation of unreflected life, partly by giving it reasons on hand by which to secede from its duties, partly by asking about reasons and the connection with universal thought. Then, in not finding the latter, it tries to shatter duty itself as without foundation.
Therewith appears the isolation of the individuals from each other and the whole, their aggressive selfishness and vanity, their seeking of advantage and satisfaction at the expense of the whole. For the inward principle of such isolation (not only produces the content but) the form of subjectivity – selfishness and corruption in the unbound passions and egotistic interests of men.
[/quote]
Not the quote I had in mind, cuz only the intro was handy. But as I remember it, Hegel thought that freedom was built on a kind of discipline or socialization. We are 'free' to fulfill our better nature. Something like that!
That's pretty silly. Hegel is often as clear as Russell. And Russell could be a real dufus at times. Repeating negative gossip is lazy, man. Not that I really give a damn if you or anyone else respects Hegel. By all means, enjoy your prejudice. I decided not to like David Bowie for awhile once. It was fun.
Ah yes, and others. I like the idea of actually 'looking' at this flow every once in awhile to see if I'm not floating away on a pile of seductive abstractions. I've been manically-ecstatically inspired by certain thinkers in a way that closed me off to other people. My words were the words. In retrospect, they always appeared like oversimplifications. Maybe that's what we always work with, oversimplifications.
To be fair, some of Hegel's prose annoys the crap out of me. But he was sometimes quite clear and even eloquent, at least in translation. I find it hard to take you at your word that you have read much Hegel. Maybe you have. I don't know. But I've railed against thinkers before myself --and then come to love them.
Does the quote below really sound like gibberish to you? It sounds to me like a potent critique of a certain kind of philosophy.
[quote=Hegel]
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
[/quote]
I think he's talking about endemic assumptions being deceptive. Why so many words?
As I read it, he's talking about a certain kind of philosopher taking classic metaphysical terms for granted --as if they had fixed meanings that were ready to be put in play. Instead, as I understand him, the meanings of all these terms are dynamically and systematically related. So these points aren't really secure at all. Thinking evolves dialectically as a system, as a whole. To me this is good phenomenology. It digs beneath the crust of convention. It goes back before the first wrong move.
IMV, there are not too many words there. But of course you are welcome to your dislike.
Yes, but in all those words he did not manage to get this bit out.
Add your sentence to mine and you have more information than his whole paragraph.
I'm not sure I'd characterise this as phenomenology, but standard metaphysics, this is not about experiencing life but conceptualising it.
Consider the title of the book. No doubt Heidegger was more radically phenomenological. And lots of Hegel is still too metaphysical for my taste. But I think the quoted passage is pretty damned phenomenological. The 'familiar' is the 'how' of our grasping that we take for granted. We tend to focus on the 'what,' the message as opposed to the medium. But here Hegel is pointing at the medium. The water is usually invisible to the fish. He's pointing at the water.
That was an ugly, seemingly covetous moment for Schopenhauer. If memory serves, Schopenhauer more or less ignored the historical. From his 'mystic'-biological perspective, the same thing happened again and again. There was nothing new under the sun. Man didn't change. He had the same illness subject to the same cure generation after generation.
Hegel, on the other hand, understood that he himself was only possible as Hegel because of so much that had come before. Man did change. God himself evolved. The truth evolved. The truth or cure was something like a final stage of the lie, of the illness. Error itself became truth in its tendency to eat itself. If the fool persists in his folly, he shall become wise. If the understanding persists in its ripping-out of partial truths, it will end up with the whole truth. As those partial truths fail, they patch themselves up in a way that accumulates. But this happens in a social context. So truth cannot arrive until different kinds of societies come and go, until the right conceptual language is painstakingly created by a kind of universal mind that only exists in particular philosophers who pass on their work (the current state of Mind) through the 'machine' of language. (Or that's what I got, roughly.)
Oh yes. I've read his bio. Even in my first philosophy book (Durant's Story) I think this was mentioned. I find it hard to choose. They both pay attention where the other one does not.
In philosophy as such, in the present, most recent philosophy, is contained all that the work of millennia has produced; it is the result of all that has preceded it. And the same development of Spirit, looked at historically, is the history of philosophy. It is the history of all the developments which Spirit has undergone, a presentation of its moments or stages as they follow one another in time. Philosophy presents the development of thought as it is in and for itself, without addition; the history of philosophy is this development in time. Consequently the history of philosophy is identical with the system of philosophy.
[/quote]
As far as I know, no one hammered this idea home like Hegel. I'd be glad to be corrected. The path to truth is the truth itself. But the path (thinker on the path) only recognizes this having gone down the path. He is (potentially) the thing he seeks. His seeking of what hides from him within himself is the unfolding of that same truth. God 'builds' God as God seeks God. And God exists only within finite individuals, as their shared higher thinking and feeling. But individuals and societies are intertwined. So philosophy, distributed throughout these individual minds, grows alongside and dialectically with social practice. The story goes, I think, that a more or less perfect, non-alienating society of [s]saints[/s] citizens arrives.
It's a beautiful idea. I don't really expect the end of history. But what a vision!
I do not think he's talking about the how at all. That would bring him in to the realm of psychology if he did. He's talking about shit you absorb, mostly uncritically, the points of reference we take for granted, and that this could be problematic "deceptive".
But that's more or less what I meant. The 'how' or the method or the approach is what we take for granted. As I read him, Hegel is criticizing a certain understanding of philosophy that is taken for granted. Within this taken-for-granted paradigm, the 'bad' philosophers do indeed ask questions and doubt things. But what they didn't think to question has them trapped. They questioned the 'what,' the focus of their attention. They argue passionately about God and truth. They do word math with the subject and the object and the who-knows-what. But they assume that these words have fixed, clear meanings. They want to do a kind of theological math, after all, and that's what they'll need language to be like.
They also assume that God or Truth is a frozen already-finished entity. All they have to do is snap the right word-numbers together. But for Hegel the meanings of the words evolve as we do philosophy. Even more radical, we create God (or self-conscious Reality) as we do philosophy. Or God creates himself through us as we try to figure out the truth about God/Reality. God has to misunderstand himself as a fixed object. God has to misunderstand language as a sort of math. Such creative errors are the stairway to reality becoming fully conscious of itself.
It's pretty wild stuff. It's not software for everyday life, but it is 'speculatively' plausible --or just a fascinating dynamic auto-theology.
[quote=Hegel]
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”.
[/quote]
We take the medium (our own manner of taking) for granted. It's a smell that we've become used to. Yet the medium controls what messages are possible. The quote above points backs to our otherwise untested pre-grasp of the situation, which is the foundation of our conscious grasp. I think this squares with what you wrote, though I've thrown in some different metaphors.
[quote=Hegel]
The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity – he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying.
Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness of meaning; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude.
[/quote]
Sorry, Hegel. That's all you.
This is all very well and nice, but practicing what you preach is my minimum standard. If he wants to take the skeptical stance, he can't remain a Theist.
And if he thinks he has transcended the problems he lays out then he is deeply arrogant and wrong headed.
What use is Hegel when you have Hume whose skepticism he had till the end?
Perhaps you'll agree that his theism (or my rough portrait of an interpretation of it) is far from non-theoretical theism. For many, he might as well be an atheist. Calling self-knowing reality God and insisting that the cruelty in history is necessary for God to become God is far from ordinary theism. Theists tend to want an afterlife and a fixed truth and a fixed moral law. They want the Eternal. Hegel sacrifices all of that. God himself is not outside of time. He needs time. He is born through time. He grows like a tree or a human infant.
It's even 'Satanic,' one might say. Since what we really have here is a ferocious humanism that wears the cloak of tradition. Hegel himself was (roughly, in his own mind) the most updated version of God. Reality knows itself 'rationally' or 'essentially' in human language. The philosopher is reality's self-knowing eye. It's goal is to know itself as freedom, as God. What it overcomes is the traditional theism that projects God outward as a sort of hidden or distant object.
The Trumpet of the Last Judgment by Bruno Bauer is an ironic investigation of the Satanic/humanist core of Hegel's philosophy. It's a great, largely forgotten text.
It's still arrogant and lacking in skepticism. He's just inventing his own conceptual certainties by talking about that which is not evident.
Quoting charleton
To me he's just a vivid personality. At his best, he's great (for my purposes). At his worst, I can't say. Because I stop reading when I'm bored. We can debate whether he's over-rated, but who cares, really? The whole game of famous names no longer appeals to me much. There's a tendency to make implicit arguments from authority. There's a tendency to let it be known that one has read this or that 'officially great' philosopher. Then one can praise or blame them, implying that one is brilliant enough to understand them or, even better, brilliant enough to understand them and see how they went wrong.
Either praising or blaming seems to depend on a sort of fame worship. No one plays this game much with the unknowns.
That's why I like the idea of just focusing on ideas, independent of their source. Sure, indicate your influences if you must, so it doesn't feel like plagiarism. But I'd at least personally like to get beyond the itch to project my having-read-a-real-lot. As I see it, I don't possess what I can't express in my own English. Once I do possess it, it's independent of the source.
Have you tried Adorno?
Even if Hegel exaggerated (or doesn't satisfy us today), his idea that the plurality of apparently opposed philosophies constituted one living, evolving, distributed philosopher leaping from dying individual to dying individual through the medium of language is seemingly worth being exposed to.
[quote=Hegel]
This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself. Its result is the Notion which it takes up of itself; the history of philosophy is a revelation of what has been the aim of spirit throughout its history; it is therefore the world's history in its innermost signification. This work of the human spirit in the recesses of thought is parallel with all the stages of reality; and therefore no philosophy oversteps its own time.
...
We must, therefore, in the first place not esteem lightly what spirit has won, namely its gains up to the present day. Ancient Philosophy is to be reverenced as necessary, and as a link in this sacred chain, but all the same nothing more than a link. The present is the highest stage reached. In the second place, all the various philosophies are no mere fashionable theories of the time, or anything of a similar nature; they are neither chance products nor the blaze of a fire of straw, nor casual eruptions here and there, but a spiritual, reasonable, forward advance; they are of necessity one Philosophy in its development, the revelation of God, as He knows Himself to be.
...
At this point I bring this history of Philosophy to a close. It has been my desire that you should learn from it that the history of Philosophy is not a blind collection of fanciful ideas, nor a fortuitous progression. I have rather sought to show the necessary development of the successive philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes another preceding it. The general result of the history of Philosophy is this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of the one principle; in the second place, that the succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science; in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that preceded it. We can now, for example, be Platonists no longer. Moreover we must raise ourselves once for all above the pettinesses of individual opinions, thoughts, objections, and difficulties; and also above our own vanity, as if our individual thoughts were of any particular value. For to apprehend the inward substantial spirit is the standpoint of the individual; as parts of the whole, individuals are like blind men, who are driven forward by the indwelling spirit of the whole. Our standpoint now is accordingly the knowledge of this Idea as spirit, as absolute Spirit, which in this way opposes to itself another spirit, the finite, the principle of which is to know absolute spirit, in order that absolute spirit may become existent for it. I have tried to develop and bring before your thoughts this series of successive spiritual forms pertaining to Philosophy in its progress, and to indicate the connection between them. This series is the true kingdom of spirits, the only kingdom of spirits that there is - it is a series which is not a multiplicity, nor does it even remain a series, if we understand thereby that one of its members merely follows on another; but in the very process of coming to the knowledge of itself it is transformed into the moments of the one Spirit, or the one self-present Spirit. This long procession of spirits is formed by the individual pulses which beat in its life; they are the organism of our substance, an absolutely necessary progression, which expresses nothing less than the nature of spirit itself, and which lives in us all.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpfinal.htm
Metaphors like the Holy Spirit come to mind. Language is deeply and utterly social. We are great as individuals, one might say, to the degree that we can enter deeply into this social language and make our thinking relevant to what is highest in all us. To the degree that we think deeply or truly, it might be said that God is continuing his journey of self-knowledge in and through us. But maybe it's better to speak of God's self-invention through human history as well as through human concept. Desire drives the process. Work changes the world that changes us. Even or especially war plays a role here, as forms that oppose God's expansion and/or enrichment of Himself are violently destroyed.
Yet all this 'God' talk is arguably a mask for an unbounded humanism. The human thinker is the self-knowing essence of reality. Time works towards the god-man's complete self-consciousness, which is also the end of history.
Ideology, right? Yeah. But good stuff, even if only to taste and to spit out. The general shape of it applies IMV to the journey of individual self-consciousness. We work through various stages of understanding the world and our place in it. Do we ever really drop anything? Or do we add another layer? Recontextualize the past without forgetting it? We contain neutralized past selves with our present selves. I think of Shakespeare. He was and was not Hamlet and Falstaff. They lived in the theatre of his mind. Unseduced, he could nevertheless play with hundreds of perspectives --fundamentally a worldly man, no stranger to the usual lust and ambition, no saint --though he understood saints, I'd guess, without having to be one.
Been awhile, but yeah. I liked some of it, but never real fell in love with guy. I have a vague sense that he was a bit righteous and effete for my tastes.
[quote=Hegel]
...
We must regard it as commendable that our generation has lived, acted, and worked in this feeling, a feeling in which all that is rightful, moral, and religious was concentrated. – In such profound and all-embracing activity, the spirit rises within itself to its [proper] dignity; the banality of life and the vacuity of its interests are confounded, and the superficiality of its attitudes and opinions is unmasked and dispelled. Now this deeper seriousness which has pervaded the soul [Gemüt] in general is also the true ground of philosophy. What is opposed to philosophy is, on the one hand, the spirit’s immersion in the interest of necessity [Not] and of everyday life, but on the other, the vanity of opinions; if the soul [Gemüt] is filled with the latter, it has no room left for reason – which does not, as such, pursue its own [interest]. This vanity must evaporate in its own nullity once it has become a necessity for people to work for a substantial content, and once the stage has been reached when only a content of this kind can achieve recognition. But we have seen this age in [possession of] just such a substantial content, and we have seen that nucleus once more take shape with whose further development, in all its aspects (i.e. political, ethical, religious, and scientific), our age is entrusted.[9]
...
But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14
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https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/1818/inaugural.htm
But how seriously can we take the social question? If our voice is more or less lost in the noise and the world rolls on without us, are we not largely just posing for ourselves and others? Aging and dying or just getting sick or poor rips us away from our righteous and/or utopian cultural criticism.
That's when the dark passages in the old King James or the wild prose works of Samuel Beckett speak the moment's truth. Or the poets and novelists --the true phenomenologists?
Hegel purveys the fantasy in its undiluted form of being the supreme know-it-all, God Himself incarnated not as a carpenter but as a dude that reads a lot.
I've had this kind of thought myself. It occurred to me at some point that my mind was bigger than anything it could contemplate. All the things I wanted to be and/or God were 'inside' this mind-self that wanted to be or know the holy or the sacred or the infinite. So I was chasing something smaller than the chase. Therefore only the chase itself could be God. 'I' was 'God.'
I got very high on this thought, because it put me above everything. It put me above every mere idea. It was the answer. I had untied the knot. I was myself what I was chasing --the last place I'd think to check. Indeed, 'it' was in the last place I looked, just like dad said it would me, the smartass.
But the high wears off, more or less, and it becomes clear why 'I' was the last place I looked. Because I am just some guy who woke up here. And I won't be here long. And I can't control (or only somewhat) how comfortable my stay will be. I am left 'beyond' ideology in a certain sense, but at all beyond the drama and trauma of life. And this same big thought also closes off for me the beliefs that others enjoy. I don't know if I'd trade it, complain as I might. The 'negative' path (left hand path?) leads to a kind of self-posession, it seems. Yet it's also beautiful to passionately believe, to find something worth worshipping. Dangerous, sure. But I feel a little old in my 'self-possesion.' I may have stumbled into this position a little early, chronologically speaking.
Overall the idea is that experience is primary. At the beginning, we are only a potential, or a principle, and then end is but a desire, or purpose, and the middle is where things truly happen, what he calls the Spirit. So it is only when doing that you truly learn anything, and the notions or knowledge we get from it, are only moments in time. We create forms as we go along, but they are obsolete as soon as you move along. They become mere recollections of things past. An actuality of the potential, but what makes the self one, is that underlying principle, not the concrete forms it takes.
What happens today, is people have forgotten how to learn. They want the definite and "final" answer to things. In so doing, it becomes lifeless, and not understood properly. So he is against those Absolute ideas that are not integrated in experience.
So in order to get a good understanding of science, you would have to actually go through the process of it, just like it was done in the past, with errors and all. Its only then you can really grasp the truth. Same with morality, or put together, philosophy.
Just one example, some people will say God is good, but that is a kind of dogma, which is not obvious to experience. Its only by living existence, that you realize it is good, and in which way, and that it is a process, not a finality. If someone is simply taught God is good, then they will look around and find faults with the world, and say it is a lie, but the reason is because they haven't lived goodness, or don't realize they do. Putting it in the absolute like that, suggest that everything is perfect, while this perfection is not in the present, but in the future. Its only by taking the whole that it becomes perfect and good. Taking it as absolute stops the process of learning and living. You could say the same of any type of value or truth.
Its not dissimilar to what Plato was doing, taking his student where they are, and making them realize what they already knew, but had "forgotten". Or that they should have known if they had thought about it in the first place. They thought they knew, because some concepts were familiar, but what the dynamic of those concepts are, they didn't know until they lived it, or thought it.
Hegel adopts another approach though, which is more about narrative or stories. He is counting stories here, but they make his words live for those that follow it. Just in that preface, he is covering a lot of ground, but they are the beginning, and it is a beginning philosophy totally misses, the way it is taught today. It seems to cover the basics though, or what it is to learn. Quite classic, I like it.
Would you say this about Buddhist or Hindu monks?
I'd say the atonement tradition of Christians is far more likely to be "Satanic" than Hegel. The Cross theology has God "cleaning" sinners who don't deserve it just because some other dude died ("someone better feel pain over this, ah!"). It's a theology made by sinners to make sinners feel better about not changing their lives.
And it's not just about what Hegel said, but the powerful method he used to bring the mind to an infinite state. He was as great as Buddha.
That said, the Britannica encyclopedia says that towards the end of his life he was going to give a talk about the "proofs for God" and had written out what he wanted to say. Has this survived history?
I agree with you on this. One of the things that always sticks with me from Hegel is his contempt for summaries. Philosophy doesn't offer some tidy result. Only the entire journey is the (temporary) truth. And what is familiarly known is not well known. It's what we take for granted that blinds and traps us.
Sort of related: As I get older, I understand that various moral prohibitions --the ones I rebelled against in my arrogant and sloppy youth -- turn out to be more positive than negative. I mean that they aren't so much prohibitions as expressions of priorities. (My changing attitude toward sexual promiscuity comes to mind, but the issue is broader than that. )