*its oppositedubdobdeeNovember 15 2009, 15:00:59 UTC
I rather suspect that Hegel's commitment to thinking in absolutes and opposites will really get your goat: I'm inclined to say you should treat it as a forensic methodology rather than a description of the situation he's faced with at any given time.
Re: *its oppositekoganbotNovember 15 2009, 16:35:20 UTC
Well, I've got Kaufmann's explication on a facing page - otherwise I'd probably really be at sea - but one thing I take to be going on here (other than Hegel being a corrective to various German guys whose names begin with Sch) is the dismantling of mind vs. matter, dismantling the model that has the mind (Subject) either trying to get matter (Substance) right or trying to get itself right. So for Hegel, Substance isn't just sitting out there in its fullness as an expression of the Absolute, since Substance had a past and has a future, moves from here to there, has directions and purposes, all of these things that one (if one is a German philosopher in Hegel's time) would attribute to Subjects not to Substances, so - possibly - Hegel has moved the Subject inside the Substance. (If that's what he's doing it's a neat trick, reversing Kant, who'd for practical purposes moved Substance inside of Subject [if I've got my Kant right, and I wouldn't bet the farm on thatI think I'm reading this the way you do (though since we've read some of
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Re: *its oppositedubdobdeeNovember 15 2009, 17:03:00 UTC
i think i largely agree with this: the only bit i'm uncertain about is " later generations would call this 'difference'" -- you may be right, it depends which generations when i guess, and what exactly the "this" is they're calling difference
Re: *its oppositedubdobdeeNovember 15 2009, 17:13:54 UTC
i suspect hegel imagines he needs the concept of god -- or the "world soul" -- because he wants awareness ultimately to permeate all of substance as a totality of self-knowledge, which the entire collected self-knowledge of mortals might not add up to: hegelians like marx did indeed dispense with this for all practical purposes
dewey was also a hegelian to start with: and in fact there's a particular hegelian reading of marx which reminds me a lot of pragmatism, though it's not one that has much sway in actually existing marxist political movements...
It's no harder than figuring out size 10, if by "figuring out size 10" we don't just mean "What Chris actually said to Rihanna about size 10" or something of the sort, but also "understanding the roles that size 10s play in the world, and could play, and how this came to be, and what future worlds could develop from the activity of those people down with shoe and dress sizes and those in opposition to sizes, etc., and what lives we could lead." A lot of it wrestling with Hegel involves trying to understand whom he was arguing with and what he and his disputants thought was at stake and how they were using words. Then it becomes clearer, at least I hope it will.
Yeah, but at least when I try to figure out size 10, I get to listen to music.
Actually, in all seriousness, the reason I've never understood reading Hegel, etc. is because so much of the conversation seems to revolve around trying to figure out what these terrible writers were saying and why -- the conversation is about the conversation, and it never touches the real world. I remember arguing with a professor about Russell's "the king of France is bald" thing, and saying, "But that's not the way it works in language." And he said, "But that's the way it works in logic," and I said, "But that's not the way it works in language," and he said, "But logic doesn't care." And I thought, well, shouldn't it? If you're having a discussion about the logic of language, then shouldn't you actually care about the actual properties and uses of language? If the only way you can make your argument is by disregarding all the ways the real world doesn't agree with it, then it's not a very strong argument. I mean, is there something I'm missing
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not safe for girlboymusicdubdobdeeNovember 15 2009, 20:32:25 UTC
longish crooked timber discussion of whether heidegger is a romantic or not, which -- among other things, inc.wittgenstein and what constitutes rationality -- touches a lot on the issue of "talking past one another" (or perhaps just acts it out): and ends -- currently -- with an invocation of adorno's essay "how to read hegel"
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dewey was also a hegelian to start with: and in fact there's a particular hegelian reading of marx which reminds me a lot of pragmatism, though it's not one that has much sway in actually existing marxist political movements...
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reading hegel then STOPPING = a higher fun by far
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Actually, in all seriousness, the reason I've never understood reading Hegel, etc. is because so much of the conversation seems to revolve around trying to figure out what these terrible writers were saying and why -- the conversation is about the conversation, and it never touches the real world. I remember arguing with a professor about Russell's "the king of France is bald" thing, and saying, "But that's not the way it works in language." And he said, "But that's the way it works in logic," and I said, "But that's not the way it works in language," and he said, "But logic doesn't care." And I thought, well, shouldn't it? If you're having a discussion about the logic of language, then shouldn't you actually care about the actual properties and uses of language? If the only way you can make your argument is by disregarding all the ways the real world doesn't agree with it, then it's not a very strong argument. I mean, is there something I'm missing ( ... )
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