/lit/ - Literature

>>11157297
certainly. feels good knowing hegel has clicked for someone else

additionally, I recommend the Hermetic Hegel by Glenn Magee (honestly a bit more shallow than I expected, he spends more time going into Hegel's hermetic/boehmian/pietist influence in his upbringing than a deep dive into these ideas, but his notion of the Phenomology as a purifying, initiatic text has really fucking stuck with me)

and Hegel's history of philosophy (not philosophy of history) itself, he presents his ideas very lucidly. following passage is I think my eureka moment for Hegel, when everything that had been percolating in the back of my mind about how matter is both itself and the knowledge of itself as matter and it is precisely that ideality in/through which matter is disclosed (to itself) that is simultaneously the motor of its dialectical development:

>It has been shown above in reference to the existence of Mind, that its Being is its activity. Nature, on the contrary, is, as it is; its changes are thus only repetitions, and its movements take the form of a circle merely. To express this better, the activity of Mind is to know itself. I am, immediately, but this I am only as a living organism; as Mind I am only in so far as I know myself. Know thyself, the inscription over the temple of the oracle at Delphi, is the absolute command which is expressed by Mind in its essential character. But consciousness really implies that for myself, I am object to myself. In forming this absolute division between what is mine and myself, Mind constitutes its existence and establishes itself as external to itself. It postulates itself in the externality which is just the universal and the distinctive form of existence in Nature.

I suppose what Hegel's trying to articulate in general is that my perception of something is both the very condition of its existence and that by which this existence thwarts itself, negates itself, suggests something "more" which the determinate in front of me will never capture. I suppose what he's saying is that being is its own activity, or as Zizek says, the difference is not between two determinate things but between a thing and "the Void of its inscription". fundamentally, /that/ something is being presented to me is both necessary for my being able to assert its existence /and/ the impetus of my movement beyond it. "Being is its other" as Jean puts it: because I don't will this process, because I do not move but /am/ my movement as this infinite articulation of my ground, Mind is just what this dark ground's reflexivity looks like.

What Hegel essentially does is say: Mind isn't a feature of divine beings that deigned to descend to matter or whatever, Mind is precisely what the discursion of nothingness would look like to begin with (properly understood). If Nature is a "mere" circle, then the dialectic is a spiraling of that circle that is always-already confirming it