Anybody out there up on their hegel? Can anybody make him do a sexy monkey dance for us?
i read phenomenology this summer.
…i might as well have read it in german.
lol, I understand. We talked about this. I haven’t read the Phenomenology and I was kicking around the idea this Morning of reading it next month, but I don’t think I’m going to.
I remember when I read the Lesser Logic it seemed that Hegel was just all fucking jargon, which I really really hate in general. It pisses me off when I read Derrida’s reams and reams of over-written gallic crap about how identity isn’t what determines identity but rather difference. He goes on and on and on and on. Then I read Greg Bateson come to the same conclusion. And he sums it up with one sentence “A difference that makes a difference” and gives the example of a bag of marbles, some black, some white, all jumbled up in the bag. They are then sorted. The white marbles, different in color, are placed in one pile and the black marbles are placed in another pile, a different physical location. These two aggregates are given names, Pile One and Pile Two. Their identity is composed of the difference between their colors that made a difference between their physical locations. Bango! So anyway, jargon really gets on my nerves, because I spend an hour jargon hunting instead of reading. Bad postmodernism is sooo bad about this.
whitelotus, Bateson is too common and useful for you and your silly rarified beliefs
oh ofcourse, the phenomenology is all made clear now. brilliant insight. its too bad i missed that from the back cover of my copy before i started reading.
first what would a "philosophollogist be, exactly, lest I misquote you?
Have you read Bateson?
Hegel, like many old philosophers, were just plain wrong. Fuck Prussia. Fuck Hegel. Fuck Philosophers who think they solved the riddle and create more riddles with bad writing. And fuck you whitelotus.
I’m off to watch blue collar tv now. screw you all.
german sounds like a dead cow passing hard mucus. what is your love of german you sick Ilsa shedevil?
well, blue collar tv didn’t live up to its promise. Damn. Hegel, by the way, why talk about hegel? And whitelotus, you think german makes it clearer? You’re CRAZY if you think that. It’s much. much worse in German. At least the translators try to generously help the poor man along. The best word to describe Hegel is illogical. You can not deduce something’s relational properties logically just by knowing its inherent qualities. Hegel disagreed, and the mess that is his work, the pile of German crap, is the waste of space that ensued from yet another flaw in logic. he may as well be fucking St. Thomas Acquinas, because he’s so good at being WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. If whitelotus read all of it, I pity him. Hegel isn’t the beginning of destruction of Cartesianism. That honor goes to Descartes himself. Hegel was a big pile of monkey crap built on Kant’s big pile of monkey crap. That’s about as sexy as his monkey dance gets.
easy up on kant. i got feelings too.
easy up on Aquinas. i have feelings too.
If we’re going to talk about Hegel’s Phenomenology, why don’t we start with some of the interesting parts – like Lordship and Bondage. I asked in a previous post about the connection between this part of the work and Kierkegaard’s “Knight of Faith”. Any takers? It might give us an inroad to understanding him if we see how his contemporaries (perhaps Kierkegaard or Marx?) took him.
Regards,
my real name
I saw that!
No reason to say that. I’m against Hegel because its outmoded blind alley, albeit an important one. After all, without hegel, what would whitelotus have done with is life. Monooq, sorry man. Kant meant well. he was crucial, but his flaws spawned even worse flaws like solipsism, subjectivism and on Hegel’s side, ABSOLUTISM that reeks of logical flaw and is so german as to make me queasy. I do like how Kant got there though. He’s an invigorating step in the process, but he went from a dogmatic slumber to an undogmatic slumber. His categorical imparative has me voting for Kerry in spite of myself.
Hey, my real name, when did I earn this lack of credibility?
Gamer, you are wonderful! Actually the best words to describe Hegel’s writing are “Holy Fuck! Napoleon is invading the city! RUN!!!”
That hit home. 
How do I know whitelotus is full of shit regarding this whole German-is-wonderful thing? I had an Austrian professor named Erik Vogt who was kindish to his advisees (luckily I was one) but even more arrogant than our resident angry young man, whitelotus. Even More Arrogant. Let me say that one more time just so it sinks in. Even More Arrogant. Anyway, one time he stopped our Modern European Philosophy class in mid lecture to say “Just be glad you guys don’t have to read this crap in German (We were fumbling through some Kantian piece or another) . Or Hegel or Heidegger, for that matter. You have no idea what it’s like to read the Critique of Practical Reason in German. It’s the most dull thing imaginable”. So if Herr Professor Erik Vogt is saying that we’re all better off reading the shit in English, some little internet twerp isn’t gonna sway my opinion one damn bit.
Why do I like Hegel even thought he’s completely bonkers? Well let me pour up a beam and coke and I’ll 'splain ye. When I read the Lesser Logic, the only Hegel I’ve had time to read in depth, I see an incipient non-linear materialism - even though the geist is transcendent and all that usual hun crap. The Thing-for-others (i think that’s the right term) is the first time I have ever come across, in Western thought, an attempt to describe identity in terms of a network or a multiplicity (even though Hegel is usually reveiled as a thinker of oneness and unity by the fine frenchies in charge of the Academy today). The dialectics as presented in The Lesser Logic have some striking parallels with complex adaptive emergent systems. These are systems with a gajillion parts all interacting. This interaction allows the system to adapt easily to its environment and also creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Your brain is A good example, dear reader. So, to paraphrase Deleuze in his interviews with Claire Parnet - I would very much like to bugger Hegel and create a little materialist baby.
So, did you get this opinion after reading Bateson or what?
So you haven’t read any Bateson?
You don’t have opinions, because opinions have you. Very Lotusian.
Whereas Kant speaks with crystal clear explication, it is clear from Hegel’s utterly incorrent and disjointed ranting that Hegel was clinically insane.
Here are some Hegel jems from the Phenomenology that suggest Hegel was perhaps the greatest Sophist and charlatan who ever walked the face of the Earth.