“Marx labels the dialectical as anti-Hegelian --as an inexact, representative/transitory/liquid way to explain economics for example. By the nature of the dialectical explanation, Marx feels justified as more accurate due to the dialectical nature of anything. His work was criticized because of that. It was not measurable like chemistry or physics. Sounds like Deleuze had it right in interpreting Hegel as did the others you mentioned…Deleuze also has them pinned down to their own ‘way’ (Nz, K).” –Benjamin Myers from Facebook
“ Deleuzes problem with Hegel is that Hegel(due to Deleuze) never gets beyond “the law”. There is always a law to describe reality; but Deleuze is more interested in the being of ‘Desire’ as something which is close to movement, becoming, and the rhizome and far far away from morality(the law).” -Jacob Kvist also from Facebook
“Walter Kaufman wrote an interesting book which is kinda hard to find about
Hegel. I have it and read it years ago, so I don’t remember all the specific facts
about the book but Kaufman is really good and I trust him. I have virtually everything
he wrote including his Nietzsche. He is a good place to start and then work around
others. See what others say and then read Hegel. Use the others as a road map to what
Hegel is saying because Hegel is tough to read, really tough.” -Peter Kropotkin from ILP
And Zoot Allures as well from ILP:
“I have forgotten half of what I’ve ever read of or on Hegel. I don’t know if that is a bad thing. I can tell you Kierkegaard rejected Hegel’s notion of the rationality of existence… that a complete system of philosophy could capture the essence of everything and explain process and evolution in teleological terms. He called Hegel’s philosophy Lemonade Twaddle. Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer would have at least that much in common; an invested interest against Hegel’s philosophy.
The breaking from academic metaphysics and ontology at the time was characteristic of the oncoming period of existentialism… Kierkegaard leading the way. You know all this, but continental philosophy was at its highest moment Hegelian during that period, so Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel was unorthodox and unconventional.
Check out Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscripts if you get a chance.
I don’t recall Nietzsche ever saying much about Hegel other than in defending him from Schopenhauer… or a few brief comments about him here and there. What did you have in mind?
Engels use of Hegel was to make of historical materialism something philosophically scientific, so he needed the Hegelian dialectic of history. He wanted to be able to explain economic and therefore social evolution in terms of logical laws, something Hegel’s three dialectical laws could be used for. Those three principles could be said to be what motivates process and change, rationally… according to Hegelians anyway. Now Engels had a way to justify socialism as a dialectic development coming out of a conflict between a thesis (working class) and a antithesis (bourgeois) and resolving in a synthesis (socialism). Marx liked the idea but cut a lot of the Hegel hocus-pocus out. With Marx, the owl of Minerva had flown in the night in which all cows are black, my good man.
Here is an entire body of work devoted to the complete annihilation of a one George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This site belongs to a Marxist/Trotskyist/Wittgensteinean who holds a fifth degree black belt in logical jiu-jitsu and pulls no punches, d-six tre.
Haven’t read much Deleuze. I’ve only glanced at his stuff with Guattari here and there. I know he is Spinozean.”
And my response on ILP:
“First of all, thanks guys. That was some useful information.
Peter, I’ll definitely have to check into that Kaufman book, especially having benefitted from him myself in writings on Nietzsche (which I really need to get back to) as well as his writings on existentialism in general. You even remind me that there is another book of his I need to check out. I believe it was called Irrational Man or something like that.
Zoot, your points went a ways towards clarification. But since you are clearly a little more comfortable with Hegel and his influence on others, I’m hoping you can give me some insight on the main problem I am having. As I understand, according those a little more sympathetic to him, Hegel never really described the dialectic in terms of the triad: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This, as they suggested, is a misinterpretation. The actual dialectic, as was related to me through a secondary source (the audio book Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: the Giants of Philosophy), was a process of breaking a given phenomenon down to it most fundamental elements (the atomistic approach of Russell), working on those, then putting them back together in a new and approved way. The problem I’m having is that if the triad version is merely an oversimplified philosophy 101 version, it sure seems to go back a long ways and is shared by a lot of competent philosophers. I mean if it is a misinterpretation, you have to ask where it started.
As far as Deleuze, having gone as far as I have with him (I have a pretty full library of his (w/ and w/out Guatarri ) and secondary text on him (I would advise you that he is something you can take or leave. For me, because of the obscurity of his prose, he has been pretty much a love/hate relationship that can become a kind of carrot on a stick. For every book you attempt of his, find yourself having to turn to several other books in order to hope to begin to understand him. It takes a little more commitment than most people might want to give –like a marriage. This is why I often find myself referring to him as “that goddamn Frenchman”.
And I mean it: damn the French and their weird, obscure philosophies anyway!!!
Anyway, thanks again, guys.
PS: Kierkegaard is definitely on my reading wish list -that is whenever I manage to get away from that goddamn Frenchman.”
Finally, I got an interesting response from Scott Meyers from the Philosophy Now Forum:
“I had a hard time even trying to read Hegel in the past. And so I learned much of his value through the works of others. What I followed is what I’ve re-introduced in my own theory regarding logic and believe this was the intent:
It surrounds the concept in logic of “contradiction”. Normally, when we use logic, we assume that contradiction is itself the end or closure of any further dialect. Yet, as we all know, in reality, when we are confronted by a contradiction in the form of what we call a “paradox” (a necessary contradiction in reality), we are forced to find some real resolution to overcome it.
Think of this as beginning with some goal to go from point A to point B. Your ‘goal’ is to get to point B. When or where point B is at least perceived essential, if you come across some barrier that prevents you from going further, this acts as a local “contradiction” with respect to you achieving your goal. Now when this occurs in logic, we simply treat this as a dead-end that lacks any more information to help us. And just as many of us do, we often evade contradiction by simply walking away from it.
However, when we find a contradiction that is a paradox (meaning a contradiction in nature that MUST be resolved for some goal), then we must recognize the utility of contradiction as a means to discover. Still, most would agree that this can tell us something useful. Yet often, the default is to only infer that such a direction only informs us that it is a dead end.
What Hegel, I believe was intending to argue, as I do to here, is that in such cases, we CAN formulate a logic using that contradiction as a means to solve the problem in a dynamic way. By “dynamic”, I mean that we have to find a formula that uses the contradiction itself to discover a positive way to go forward, especially where we perceive it as necessary to get to that goal AND there is no other apparent options but through that barrier (the paradox).
To me, the solution involves using DeMorgan’s Laws to initially restate the problem in a different form. Then we negate this but grant it a ‘place’ to which it CAN be true, even if we cannot experience this ‘place’ necessarily. This ‘place’ is what we normally refer to as “another dimension”. It could be a parallel dimension, or it could be a perpendicular one. The parallel one would be hard to reconcile as there are no points in it which seem to meet in the same ‘place’ we are. However, if considered perpendicular, we can formulate a model that describes how this place could exist if it should in our own world. And if we can find a means for this to make sense, we resolve the contradiction by including this dimension as a logical “contrary” instead.
If you doubt this, this is how we actually derive the dimensions we use in geometry as models to make sense of our reality. The y-axis in a Cartesian plane is the contradiction of the x-axis at each point on the x-axis. For instance, assume we only ‘know’ of an x-axis reality. If we initially come across something in our reality that appears paradoxical, like that something, for instance, is AT point 3 and also NOT AT point 3 on a number line, this leads us to a contradiction. The solution is to ‘imagine’ some point not on our ‘x-axis’ world such that if it exists, it would have to mean something to each and every point away from this contradicting point in both directions that have symmetrical properties.
From Point 3, let’s assume the points 1 unit distance from this Point, namely 3-1 = Point 2 and 3 + 1 = Point 4. Wherever this ‘new’ point could be beyond this x-axis, from Point 2 and Point 4, they must have some NEW unit measure in common. They also have to be described in opposing symmetries that are also equivalent but opposite. So, from Point 2, we might describe the ‘unit’ to this imagined point, +1UP1. From Point 4, we might describe this as -1UP1. Each of these would have some “absolute value” measure in common. Recognizing that “UP” opposes “DOWN”, we might also recognize by symmetry that another such point in this New ‘place’ would be +1DOWN1 from Point 2 and -1DOWN1 from Point 4.
We already ‘know’ that we define these points as having an absolute value of “the square root of 2” via Euclid or through Analytic Geometry.
Without going through all the details, my point here is that there is a formulaic process to which we can resolve contradiction by finding where, if such a place exists, can be realized for functioning purposes. If this seems too complicated, let’s use a normal everyday type of example.
Imagine you read of someone who appears to be contradicting themselves from some interpretation we make upon reading them. For instance, let us say that in some translation of some past reference, we get some person claiming that “Some particular person was alive and dead during Easter”. Without further context, we’d either have to conclude that this person was either delusional or something else is ‘wrong’ here. For some, we’d chalk this up to delusion and conclude that we should simply ignore anything from this source altogether.
However, if we grant charity to the possibility that the original author had some fair meaning, we might fix this contradiction by recognizing that the original author may have written something like this but had different meanings of the words. For instance, while to us today, Easter is one particular day, it might be that to the original author, “Easter” may have been a celebration that lasted a weeks time. So given this extended ‘dimension’, the contradiction is removed because reasonably, someone who may have been alive during the beginning of this interpretation of “Easter” being a week-long celebration, this same person could have also died by the end of this week. Thus, this re-interprets the contradiction into a contrary or contrast by re-examination.
I like this example: Notice in the Old Testament that many people seemed to have lived extraordinary long lives? However, if you reinterpret what has come down to us in context to the way ancient peoples may have counted their ages, they likely used a system based NOT on years, but on moon-cycles (months) or even partial ones (weeks). Then an age of 144 would turn out to be a young lad of only 12 [because 144/12 months = 12].
Do you see the logic of this?”