What is this?
Anyways, I want more of this.
A noble effort, but he didn’t understand existence.
America really, really has a great opportunity to fix European philosophy if they would stay out of politics and think a bit more clearly.
Nevermind the metaphysics, Hegel’s political philosophy is a quite nice third way alternative to utility and Kantian models. It is generally classed as communitarian, and while his dialectic deduction is beautiful and elegant, one really can ignore it while still understanding the Sittlichkeit. Also, His understanding of society and the individual is far superior than his social contract and Hobbsian competition.
Anyway, what he basically wants, Gobbo, is for civil society to be freedom producing at the level of institution in an immanent manor. Instead of rational efficiency being the structuring force for society, that we’re supposed to believe is the ultimate expression of Capitalist freedom, Hegel suggests that society is individuating. It frees us from nature, it frees us from our base desires, and it liberates us from each other. Society allows us to create our own world, and it creates who we are, so it should be organized not only according to production, but according to all facets of our soul. Hegel thinks society should reflect us fully.
I like quote from Emerson:
“The rejection of Christ may well be a less dangerous element in the communist position then the acceptance of Hegel”
Hegel also, in so far as I followed the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (as far as i got in that Tome!) seems to be very concerned with skepticism as a destructive force (I guess Kant was too!) and seems to want replace it with some form of determinate negation where by your initial position is refuted but then you extend or broaden your concept to bring it up to a higher level (incorporating the refutation)ready to be negated again.
This sort of nagging doubt that you don’t have everything “under wraps” drives you on to further development.
So there is in his epistemology a process of expanding you knowledge till (at least in theory!) you concepts will actually completely map onto the world
(spirit find itself in his terms!)
I don’t know where this (a one to one mapping of concepts expressed in language onto the actual world) lies after Witty’s Philosophical Investigations not to even touch De Saussure, the limits of language and the teeming masses of post structuralism.
But still that idea that knowledge is attainable and that this is a progressive endeavor driven through determinate negation is a nice philosophical idea even if there is no absolute knowledge
(as Hegel seemed to think!?)
Yea - there’s a bog standard sketch of the Phenomenology of Spirit - does any one have a decent guide to Hegel and especially POS - I’ve tried a few and none satisfactory.
Your man Axel Honneth (the German critical theory fellow) bases himself very much on the early Hegel and the idea of individuality being actually defined via social recognition much as Sittlichkeit as outlined
Yes more work needed Krossie!!!
As I noted elsewhere, Nietzsche does in the thesis, antithesis, synthesis bit very well. Natural processes ,which we experience, contain no such distinctions. These are no more relevant to experience than are Kant’s noumena, phenomena, transcendence BS., with which Emerson might agree. So, when can we get from paradigms about reality of the human condition that satisfy logic to those that go beneath what works according to socio-historical solutions?
I don’t think it’s a bad way to look at how you expand your concepts and I’ve known that state of being very unsatisfied with my current state of knowledge - some how knowing it was incomplete even without an inkling of what the complete picture was or would eventually be. I like the idea that you somehow realize you are at the edge of your concepts though you don’t as yet know why or by how much.
That’s the moment of negation (antithesis) and its a real state of mind I find - sort of banging the head of a wall!
So he presents a certain optimism (versus skepticism) for the process of acquiring knowledge even if you have no certainty of the goal and uncertainty as to your grounds.
His stuff about historical evolution, the geist of an entire people etc I don’t really get.
I don’t really think it can or should be extended to nature or indeed human life write large
so as far as human social/collective life, history, experience in general is concerned
yes I agree!
Maybe he should have restricted himself to just an individual trying to expand their concepts and go beyond various skeptical dead ends and not got into this collective spirit trying to find itself though you’ve got to admire the hubris of him?
No?
I’ve never really got Hegel so could be way off beam here!
kp
Nature is a dialectic. I thought Hegel specifically references the synthesis of the seasons.
i know Engels wrote an awful book on the dialectics of nature - not sure about Hegel
Anyhow MAJOR APOLOGIES I fished the “Emerson” quote out of Stanley Cavell’s book “Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow”
Went back yesterday to see what it said in reference to Hegel and Emerson and whadda know the quote is by one William Empson - a famous English critic and not repeat not Emerson.
Further as Cavell has Empson is showing a “questioning attention” to Hegel as opposed to outright opposition
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Empson
Anyhow I went on to read Emerson’s circles again and that’s so Hegelian its scary.
Mind you Emerson doesn’t refer to him but calls himself a christian idealist.
But it has all the Hegel elements - the predominance of a collective idea, the constant growth of the conceptual circles, the end of one set of development being the very start for another and so on.
Take these little bits for example:
“…Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision. …The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself…”
Surely close to pure Hegelian dialectic there (though he never mentions Hegel by name!)?
The additional factor seems to be “the genius” - Emerson’s ubermensh who he has building on and synthesizing all the collective experience up to his appearance on the scene
(and yet as he steps up throwing it into the fire - forgetting or not knowing where he is going - yea I didn’t really get the stuff at the end!)
gutenberg.org/files/2944/294 … #2H_4_0010
OK that’s today’s non-sequeters - hey the topic is broad!
kp
Nature is dialectic? No! Our interpretations of nature are perhaps dialectic. In the physical world being is becoming–evolution, change, flux. The thesis, antithesis, synthesis concepts are a mental construct, not a physical reality. We really need to get beyond those limited ways of describing our experiences of what exists. We need a language that can describe flux and change without bracketing particulars of a process into opposites requiring abstract descriptions of how these interact. We need a language that does not need to separate in order to complement.
Spring is a part of our planetary revolvings as related to direct sunlight. It is a synthesis of nothing. It is a part of motion of our planet that brings certain environmental changes.
Agreed. And life is a synthesis of nothing. How to live is though.
You sound as though you want to solve Zeno’s paradox simply by doing away with it, by disappearing the discreteness in any movement through time-space, including a Hegelian dialectical one.
Ultimately the question is, are space and time infinitely divisible? Here is a link showing David Bohm’s solution to the paradox, which I believe would be compatible with yours and is very appealing. http://beliefinstitute.com/article/congruent-solutions-zenos-paradoxes
In fact, for quantum physicists, randomness seems to be more fundamental than physical objects. Wholeness is the essential nature of things. To continue with Bohm, the article continues with the idea that:
Thanks, Jonquil.
The writer who sets me straight on what can be expected from empirical science is Thomas Kuhn. He shows, correctly IMHO, how the paradigms of scientific and mathematical theories are dependent on a “boxed in”, specialized set of assumptions. This is not a denial of the discoveries, scientific and technological, that such paradigms have engendered. It is simply a denial of assertions that truth, reality, certainty, etc. can only be found in such paradigms.
For me, this is the old noun vs verb controversy, which does go back to Heracitus, Parmenides and Zeno of Elia. The “noun” or constant is necessary for our descriptions of what we experience, even though the nouns describe process. Our structure of language, which I believe evolves from our experience of being structured organisms, requires the subject/verb relationship to be this is that or this does that to that. This way of articulating what is the relationship between self and other is probably an adaptational necessity and not a philosophical problem as Nietzsche seemed to think.
As for Bohm, it is difficult, but not impossible, for me to see the reduction of all matter to energy as consistent with Eastern concepts of holism at the source.
Interesting points, lerellus. Bohm also had difficulty with the way language is structured. In fact, to show the problem, he invented new kinds of verbs that would actually represent the real nature of holistic reality. (ref. Wholeness and the Implicate Order)
Both Bohm’s implicate order and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theories are about as testable as any other theories. There’s no way to disprove a hypothesis of this level of generality, although it’s possible to conceive of evidence accumulating which would make it look unlikely. As far as the implicate order is concerned, since that’s even more general, it would be much harder to discuss evidence. Yet, it’s a way of looking at the subject which brings it all together. And it has a promise of being truthful.
The scientific idea that the ability of a theory to predict and control nature proves its truth is moot. It merely proves that we can turn this crank and get the right answers in a certain area. If you restrict yourself to these areas, your theory naturally appears unassailable.
Amen. And for me Goethe’s “On Nature” is just as viable as Engels or Hegel’s. Uncertainty may be our only route to progress or, at least, to clearer understanding. Like Haeckel, Hegel tried to provide a rational theory of everything. We can only wish that could be done. Platonic idealism is not the solution.
Bohm deals with the issue of domains of influence in his book. The idea is that quantum theory deals with the widest domain known so far.
Lerrellus, is it really possible to provide a “rational” theory of everything? By that I mean that there might be domains of existence and experience that are either not rational or are supra-rational. I wouldn’t throw Plato out just yet.
Is this what you meant by Goethe’s “On Nature”? http://www.nature.com/nature/about/first/aphorisms.html
I believe that Goethe was an inveterate holist like Bohm and me (and of course Steinbeck and Ricketts as well).
And for those who love the idea of natural Consciousness, as we holists are inclined to do, Goethe says this:
Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, said that humans are the consciousness of the earth. Goethe said something very similar in his aphorisms on nature, as follows:
Isn’t that just sublime? Isn’t it also possible that were we humans to actually know that down to our bones, we could never act any way but in accord with nature? Nature is us, so acting in opposition to it is opposing ourselves; and yet we do not seem to know it. What a great loss is that utter sense of wholeness that was our birthright.
Jonquil,
I’d go even further than JFK’s assertion that we are the hands of God on the Earth to assert that we are God’s body and eyes. I do like holism (mine is mostly Spinozan). I do not think Plato’s concept of absolute ideals "We see shadows on the cave wall"or Paul’s Platonic assertion that “We see through the dim glass darkly.”; but, on dying we will know all there is to know about everything offers much hope for the living, changing experiencing human.
We don’t need to postulate ultimate and final solutions to our problems of being human, most of which are more utopian or afterlife than what we are capable of using in the proper day-to-day attendance to immediate relationships. The here and now requirement in no way negates aspirations or creative expressions. It is simply the POV from which we must start before we can arrive anywhere else.
If we see through a glass darkly, or in shadows cast by the fire in the cave of the mind, that is just how we see. The psyche can be a shadowy thing. However, the ideal forms exist universally a priori, as does the noumenal world of Kant, and the implicate order of Bohm with this catch, that it’s the Concsciousness which informs all consciousness that unfolds out of it.
I don’t have an issue with your take on solutions except that in the holist view, there is no real distinction between here and there, and all is now indistinctive from past or future.
We’re trapped in the prison of our own thoughts, and this prison creates the illusion that we are separate, that we are not part of nature, and yet the prison itself is also an illusion. The prison also is created by the thought, and that is the reason why it is trying to get out of that trap it has created by itself. So that is the kind of trap in which the whole structure of thinking is caught up, and tries all the time to get out of that, the trap it has created.
That’s the predicament of humans and self consciousness.
Well an example of an opposition of nature, well there are examples everywhere. A lion naturally wants to eat you, you don’t want to be eaten, so you’re opposing a force of nature, a natural instinct or intention. We’ve got lots of religions that contradict eachother and themselves. Different sorts of energies in the universe break eachother down and colide and disipate. Reality isn’t an expression of wholeness, or perfection, or completion, or oneness, or anything else like that. If it were, it would be totally different. Thinking that wholeness is our birthright is practically a form of creationism. The fact that it is even possible for one purpose to degrade another shows that nature is not of a single plan or purpose. In fact there is largely a huge lack of purpose and plans when the universal energies are considered. Big balls of simple forces entropically decaying and not being used for anything at all. The physical plane is a dieing wasteland full of foolish insects.