/lit/ - Literature

Please guide me, anon. Help me begin.

>>11156793
well, i'm not an expert on hegel, that's one thing. all i can really share is my own experiences. i'm a guy whose gotten kind of massively burned out dwelling on continental philosophy and other things. i've read most of the big names, i think, but never really had a major hegel phase. partly because i didn't really see the point, or maybe because i thought everything he was saying was completed by marx. marxism has always been a big part of my own thinking but, of course, things get really complicated later on.

so i guess one thing to do would just be to talk about what gets your hair blowing about philosophy in general. for myself, i kind of maxxed out on Fuck You I Got Mine philosophy. either because i genuinely wanted to be able to say Fuck You I Got Mine, or to cope with a world in which Fuck You I Got Mine was basically the endgame, and so, wat do? and maybe it is that way (or at least superficially, or for a little while, in this epoch, or whatever). but something about that still seems wrong.

but i shouldn't talk about myself. what's interesting to you, anon? why do you want to talk about hegel or any of the rest of it? i'm legit not baiting you or anything, i'm just a little bit gun-shy about presenting myself as any kind of guru or anything, a guy who knows things. i'm manifestly not.

but i really, really like this idea of consciousness as freedom, freedom as consciousness, that being a part of history: that the moved, the moving and the motion are all one thing - yessir, i will indeed have another one of those.

so yeah. that's sort of where i'm at. does desire have meaning? what do we desire? are we all just fucking greedy cannibal monkeys bent on $$$ and pleasure? that doesn't seem so great. but what do we do if the world is all just headless capitalism? after all, doesn't capitalism have its good side?

i find these guys tend to make more sense the more of the other guys you wind up reading. so, start with yourself:

what's the point of wisdom? does it even exist? does it matter? is it better to be a cynic in this world? is god dead? what would that mean anyways? is nietzsche all you really need? these kinds of things.

so just talk about yourself and maybe some other anons can connect the dots to hegel for us later. personally the idea that *all of this is just consciousness discovering itself* is like a fucking balm on a lot of continental hysteria. that's how it feels today, anyways. in a feels > reals world we don't know what to do, or think, and universities seem to be turning into battlefields. but what if it's all part of a necessary process? kind of a cozy thought.

maybe that's all just confusing as fuck. certainly this anon is long on desire and short on logic. but that's kind of what attracts me to the phenomenology these days.

id urge you to get familiar with zizek's hegel to at least debunk some of the standard teleological readings of hegel

or, inversely, get a sense of what hegel definitely isn't: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel

there's no comprehension of his ideas here, the writer reduces hegel's insights to a kind of proto-new agism, it's honestly as good a reflection of today's soundbite youtube educations as anything. just awful.

if you want a palette cleanser: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/hyppolit.htm

far more refined. compare all that tripe about a World-Spirit to this:

>Hegelian Logic is the absolute genesis of sense, a sense which, to itself, is its own sense, which is not opposed to the being whose sense it is, but which is sense and being simultaneously. This genesis resembles an organic growth, a perpetual reproduction and self-amplification. There is no external purposiveness, but an immanent purposiveness whose image in nature is organic life. The contradiction of this growth is its immanent intentionality; how can it grow? Does not its beginning already contain implicitly all of what its end will be? Isn't the immediate being at the beginning already the absolute Idea of the end? An artist constantly reproduces the same faces. Across his paintings, we can follow something like an intention which becomes explicit and precise, and which nevertheless was unaware of itself in the first works. He does not, however, repeat himself. This reproduction is creation; it is simultaneously intuitive and discursive. The totality is always immanent, the beginning indicates the end, only the end allows us to comprehend retrospectively the beginning.

>>11157219
beautiful. logic and existence looks dope af and exactly the kind of stuff i was hoping this thread would generate. will read. thank ye very kindly anon for contributing to the thread.

>>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

>>11157368
furthermore, another great line is (and I'm para-phrasing, not up on my Hegelese like that just yet) when he says something like "Mind is the identity between its identity and non-identity with nature". Really difficult to articulate, but it ties to Substance is Subject and what I was saying earlier about the ground's reflexivity: Mind is what "brings together" its identity and its non-identity with its ground, as /precisely that which emerges/distinguishes itself from its ground/. And in this sense, Mind is /nothing but/ the appropriation to itself of the /very otherness it creates by its own movement/.

you see what Hegel's getting at by all that talk about circles and spirals and shit? He's saying Spirit is its own Wound ("the hand that inflicts the wound is the hand that heals it"): Spirit exists as nothing but the movement to resolve its own movement.

>>11157404
what is it resolving though

>>11157404
I'm amazed how I'm going through the Phenomenology right now and yet this thread is making it sound like some occult shit rather than what it is.

>>11157420
its own movement as the movement that it is. it only exists to absorb the otherness of contingency into ideality, but an otherness which would never exist if it did not set itself apart from this otherness as something to absorb/articulate/sublate...

>>11157425
dunno what you mean by this, no transcendent "world-spirit" garbage has been invoked at any point itt

>>11157432
I mean that you are all making it sound a lot more complicated than it is, and giving it the sort of edification Hegel disapproved of.

>>11157442
No, I'm discussing Hegel's thought in a thread on Hegel's thought. If you think that's an over-complication of his ideas then you don't understand him

>>11157368
it's partly the stuff on wealth that is killing me. i've been contaminated by nick land's neurotoxin and have done my share to propagate acceleration on these boards. i think land is worth reading for those reasons, mainly for dissolving what to me was an absolutely enervating preoccupation with language. when i discovered acceleration it was like, okay, here we go. boots on the ground again.

but that led me into those weird dark places of infinitely echolocating in the darkness and the Outside and so on, the weird black arts and so on. a world of catallaxy - the mind coming under the sway of that alien power that hegel writes about - is where i have been for a while. and it's taken some poking around to figure out why i just wasn't satisfied with all of this, for reasons i couldn't explain.

but, as you've explained (are explaining) there are still these other ways of looking at all of this. chains of questions of reciprocity and mimesis and so on, these kinds of things, infinite loops of irony and simulation...eventually you just don't really want to be a critic, but try to grasp some underlying logic or process behind it. i'm kind of raised on criticism of a society that can run perfectly well on a headless catallaxy in which capital itself does away with its material substrate, but when you want to sort of ask how it is that you could think this in the first place, or how to deal with the consequences of that in other than critical terms...things like this.

i've read some zizek. in part, his constant bewilderment, frustration and grief is what made land more attractive - aren't we always attracted to people who seem sort of less fucked-out or grimly knowing about these things? if capital wins, always wins, then part of you wants to be on the side of that, to ground yourself. but in a great age of mimesis, or in the way that acceleration presents it, you can't really be on the side of capital in this way. it's all just fucking phantasmagorical like this.

ah, but what if this is a kind of phase in the unfolding knowing of these processes? what if viral-mimetic outer space-capitalism is another necessary process? this has all of my attention. the butterflies in my stomach rearrange themselves in funny new patterns for the thought of it.

>the hand that inflicts the wound is the hand that heals it
there's a line in kafka as well about this:
>all that matters is that the wound fit the arrow.

raaaargh. good stuff anon, very very good. posts are extrabased, exactly what i was looking for. going to work on L&E.

>>11157451
Or maybe you're just an insecure boy that likes to make it seem like what you're doing is far more worthwhile and important than it actually is.

>>11157460
Mhm. Put up or shut up.

>>11157452
>mainly for dissolving what to me was an absolutely enervating preoccupation with language

yeah, thanks, glad I'm not the only one who thinks you have to be a bit of a mole man to be so fixated on language and language games. it gets old.

basically hegel's great insight is Mind is both constituted by its boundaries AND posits them, that any appeal to some noumenal blank outside our experience can only ever occur within our experience proper, which is what he means by Being carrying its otherness in itself. He pretty much says: we could not have a concept of the absolute if the absolute wasn't already on "our side" of the process, and indeed, IS nothing but this process of its self-cognizance.

what hyppolite's talking about up there is that fundamentally the absolute is "discovering itself as it thinks itself", it is finding itself in realtime just as you're doing the same living day-to-day and growing as a person. circles within circles within circles. "Spirit is a bone" - Spirit coincides with its substrate, can only coincide with the obscurity of a ground that mobilizes its activity.

it's important to remember Spirit isn't the process of gradually unveiling a necessity that was "always there", but that which cannot but help ground necessity retroactively in the very activity of its subsuming contingency to ideality. or, really simply put: Spirit doesn't tell a story because there's some mega-Story from on high, unfolding within history, but Spirit is just that which "narrativizes" being on principle. Zizek makes a great point: we aren't reconciled to a shitty state of affairs by appealing to some transcendent necessity actualizing itself in time, but only by the fact that there will be a reconciliation /precisely as long as there is that which can effect it, which can't HELP but effect it, ie Spirit/. the legitimacy is always self-grounded, manufactured by those who have to pick up the pieces because they're there to pick up the pieces, and everyone else is rotting in the ground and that's that.

it's not like capitalism was teleologically necessary in an aristotelian sense, but it was necessary in the sense that Spirit's self-articulation in realtime nevertheless is what got us here... and we're also trying to figure it out in realtime too. Last thing: Hegel says you only hit on the right option after fucking up, precisely because what the fuckup taught you will always be more valuable than getting it (partially) right the first time. so spirit just is this interminable series of fuck-ups and brushing itself off (not like it's reincarnating in individuals over and over or something; there is nothing but these individuals)

i earnestly believe what land is doing is articulating why capitalism right now is the fuck-up and what we have to do to get and get the inevitable wakeup call barreling down the tracks over with already

>>11157524
>he reads hegel only to end up fixating on capitalism and the tired old critiques
I want to wake up from this stale world.

>>11157542
I think you missed the other hundreds of words on the nature of the absolute and Spirit you absolute pillock

>>11157548
Brainlet, you're talking about Hegel and Zizek is your go-to reference. I don't need to know more about you and how you interpret Hegel to know you're drooling over your keyboard as you type. Go on concerning yourself with your petty bullshit as you think you've unlocked the keys to the universe and are on your way to curing society through bland criticisms. You don't deserve Hegel.

>>11157542
not the anon you're responding to but i'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting him.

speaking for myself, the attraction of hegel is in fact to do precisely the opposite of fixating on capitalism and tired old critique. for one thing, acceleration is hardly tired old critique. it may be on the way to becoming a meme for the time being it's anything but tired and old.

again, tho, what that anon is saying - at least, what i'm pretty sure he is saying - is not that fixating on capital is the answer. i'm with you on waking up from a stale world but if that's to be done we can be a little more charitable to each other when that's actually being discussed. that anon has some cool as hell stuff to say and this isn't samefagging.

plus some random tumblr art to charm you.

>>11157556
The man mentioned not only Zizek but Land. My charity has limits tbqh.

>>11157554
stop posturing

>>11157556
I only brought up capitalism cause you brought it up, I'm perfectly content with talking about Hegel's Spirit, in fact he's so complicated I've been kind of misrepresenting the ground I've been talking about: there really is no ground, ground is just a retroactive presupposition of this activity, there's nothing but the difference that mobilizes it. the process hangs in the air - but not in a fichtean, self-positing sense because I've said Spirit is caught up in its own negativity, its otherness-to-itself that it can never fully appropriate without extinguishing its very drive

>>11157573
>posturing
Says the retard that's churning out entire paragraphs in Reddit speech.

>>11157578
yeah those redditors and their absolute idealism

you touched in the head or what kid? you got something specific to say about why I'm fundamentally off the mark? you gonna school me with some world-spirit bullshit? lol

another thread in which girardfag talks to himself for 7 hours

>>11157583
No, I'm talking about Reddit spacing and also your annoying lack of fucking punctuation despite posting endless crap. And I like how you assume that I'm some loon because I'm not a Marxist, as I assume you most certainly are.

>>11157594
kek. it would be, except that i'm a total illiterate when it comes to hegel. so no can do this time. this time i'm here to learn from the wise.

unless, of course, you *want* me to go on a shitposting rampage. but there was enough of that in the last thread.

>>11157605
whatever bud

Unity is revealed by difference: the universal is only such as it is revealed by its particularizations. The old maxim of God revealing Himself by hiding Himself is relevant here, except that Hegel's caveat (since Thought is always internal to Substance) is God can ONLY reveal Himself by hiding Himself.

bumping patrician thread

>>11156750
not sure what you're expecting tbqh, it's basically the logical conclusion of consciousness and not of truth
I was wondering why he never converted reason to the notion of the absolute unity and suggested that science somehow could reveal partitions of the Absolute

>>11158473
brofist

>>11158508
>not sure what you're expecting tbqh, it's basically the logical conclusion of consciousness and not of truth

you say that like that's somehow a small thing. that's fucking tremendous and exactly what i'm finally starting to absorb through my thick skull. because i'm coming to this from out of the accelerationist darkness: that is to say, from granting the possibility that maybe all we can know of truth is whatever we find of necessity on the way to a Skynet bootstrapping itself into existence through turbocapitalism. the fact that i don't really like this doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong; what i'm intrigued by is the possibility of hegel anticipating some of the modern vortexes we can wind up in. and this in turn is not to say that acceleration is not in itself interesting, because i think it 100% absolutely is; i just don't want to become a completely embittered and cranky old fuck brooding on bitcoin like Scrooge McDuck if in fact there is another way of looking at things. as there may well be.

>I was wondering why he never converted reason to the notion of the absolute unity and suggested that science somehow could reveal partitions of the Absolute

i mean i'm still not sure what it is that conforms accurately to hegel's idea of systemic science. marx's own idea, which is to say, just look at the material process of things, isn't a bad idea. the marx-hegel bromance is big and arguably the most fruitful for modern philosophy. even if the fruit starts to grow rather strange indeed by our time and in some cases is arguably downright poisonous.

but rather than talk about myself i'd be more interested to hear your perspective on this.

>>11158668
I mean hegel is honestly a pretty dark philosopher, spirit consolidates itself by its dismemberment, if Skynet bootstraps itself into existence, wipes us out, and retroactively narrativizes the whole of human history as just the prelude to its birth, who the fuck's gonna stop it? we really do live in an (externally) meaningless, contingent universe (according to hegel), but as such that contingency is paradoxically the only truly legitimate ground for meaning

>>11158692
this is my thought also. i kind of find something weirdly regenerating in the dark. and on top of that, despite having given every attempt possible to not give a fuck about the world, some part of me really feels really ugly inside when i read posts on /lit/ or wherever else by people who are just in absolute despair about things.

i think generationally speaking we're in a kind of a weird place like this. we know we shouldn't be too idealistic about things. that's for certain. not only because it leads to disappointment but because it can lead to all kinds of fuckhead simplifying of things that are complicated and should remain that way. complexity is okay. complexity is fine. complexity is beautiful. complexity may even be civilization-preserving.

and so you've used the magic word, contingency. it's one i find myself using a lot. how to explain it? it baffled georges bataille and others too. and just kind of jumping the gun and doomsaying all of it doesn't really make the world any more cheerful.

if the titanic is sinking, the fact that there aren't a million luxury lifeboats out there isn't a reason to just sink. a world of contingency is a great place to do philosophy in. who knows but we're actually at the beginning of something really interesting, for all the doom and gloom?

>>11158914
and it's a great place to love in, the ideal place actually, for all the victims of serial killers out there at least there is such a thing as love. the dark /is/ regenerating, because for hegel we are just that darkness casting its eye on itself. as children of the void, we are simultaneously foreign to it (as its children, as beings), and fundamentally at home. the void is destructive and regenerative, and this is actually a key alchemical insight that i believe hegel is really only systematizing.

a lot of people are in pain and a lot of people are despairing because the way forward is over a precipice and we've outgrown the way back. for example: i have nothing to philosophically justify my belief in a personal god - transcendent to the immanent closure of hegel's system - other than the reality of love. that's it. the old illusions really have died. and nietzsche did hit on something true, schelling too, that only against the background of its impossibility is true transcendence thinkable. is this all wishful thinking? idk. it sounds suspiciously teleological but i do think this is the teenage phase of the hegelian mind, maybe young adulthood, where we're struggling to articulate a brave move forward. what the man experiences in a lifetime humankind collectively experiences across its history. which isn't to say anything's "guaranteed" us a happy end. we could very well end up wraping daddy's porsche around a tree, collectively speaking.

>>11156928
You are a chatterbox. Careful not to hurt yourself my friend.

>>11159034
More like he's got more than two neurons to rub together based on his having actually having interesting things to say itt. Quick minds think quick and they write quick. Get used to niggerboi

>>11158985
>for hegel we are just that darkness casting its eye on itself
yeah. that's really it. if you were ever spooked by The Other - one of the great philosophical buck-stopping tropes for our neo-victorian age - hegel kind of nicely sweeps that stuff aside. there is no other. there's only you on the way back to a more interesting version of the same thing.

>a lot of people are in pain and a lot of people are despairing because the way forward is over a precipice and we've outgrown the way back.

this. so much this. and we think to ourselves, fuck yeah, romanticism! but the Outer Dark and so on really is pretty fucking wild. of course, *that's also you.* it is in your head - even when your imagination is carrying you away completely.

>which isn't to say anything's "guaranteed" us a happy end. we could very well end up wrapping daddy's porsche around a tree, collectively speaking.

i'm like 99% committed to this being an inevitable outcome. that's the thing. unleashed capital really is the opening of pandora's box.

but the other side of this, and it's why i find myself really falling hard for the phenomenology, is that this too can be understood as being inevitable, even necessary. it *is* a question about freedom. why else do we envy Fuck You Money? we think, if we had the money, we wouldn't have to do X. and for better or for worse, we live in a world in which that is true, or at least partly true.

but maybe this has to happen. maybe we really do have to take a good deep bite of this forbidden fruit called late capitalism (although there's a wise tweet i read somewhere that said, 'why are we calling this late capitalism? shouldn't we just be calling it *early* capitalism?' - and that made sense also.)

the question about freedom remains. hegel's historical perspective on this is amazing.

>only against the background of its impossibility is true transcendence thinkable

like they say, easier to envision the zombie apocalypse than a change in the narrative today. you can't joke about this stuff, not really. i mean it works for Trolling The Libs or whatever but the actual story of philosophy as it continues to unfold is just too fucking crazy not to pay attention to. every time we think, okay, that's it, it's over - that's exactly when it turns out *not* to be over and some Great Idea or Great Person arrives.

anime power lines b/c why not.

>>11159034
kek that's nothing. that's me when i *don't* know what to say. you should see the fucking hay-bales i produce when i actually think i know what i'm talking about. it's fucking shameless

Hegel is nothing but dumb mysticism. Spirits don't exist

>>11159210
>there is no other. there's only you on the way back to a more interesting version of the same thing.

very well-put, life is the circuit of progression and return to the void. but as Mind - in human consciousness - this end is always qualified by the beginning and the journey undergone, because it could not not be qualified, /because/ there was someone "there" to experience it. see this is the thing with hegel: there's just this formal necessity for development and the content might as well be arbitrary. there will always be content as long as there is movement in Mind: there will always be a story to tell as long as there is that which tells stories (as Zizek puts it), there will always be something to see as long as there is a seer (relatively speaking, of course, at the absolute level, what is the seer seeing but his own existence infinitely adumbrated? there's a fichtean undertone there that I do not intend but oh well)

>this. so much this. and we think to ourselves, fuck yeah, romanticism! but the Outer Dark and so on really is pretty fucking wild. of course, *that's also you.*

yeah i'm pretty interested in land's love affair with alterity and the 0 and the non-knowledge beyond knowledge's limits, but a non-knowledge he always-already articulates within a language, of course. but also a language straining at its own constituve horizons. always these interesting coincidences of interiority and exteriority, transcendence and immanence. i think land, like all these anti-correlationists, like the mystics, they want to cut the circle of mediation any way they can. isn't that circle fundamentally samsara?

>the question about freedom remains. hegel's historical perspective on this is amazing.


y'know it really is, he says the same reality that convinces us of its necessity /necessarily/ must point to freedom. that is, this reality isn't denying us anything because everything we feel it is denying us is just as much a child of this reality. /because/ existence is dialectically closed (doomed to infinite self-mediation) /it is free/, because freedom is nothing but what is born in the /recognition of this closure/.

>every time we think, okay, that's it, it's over - that's exactly when it turns out *not* to be over and some Great Idea or Great Person arrives.

yeah and that's exactly it, the limit always-already overcome by our setting it down. i mean this is hegel's key insight: thought being able to think what it cannot think (as some noumenal x in the Beyond) must mean it is nothing but this self-positing and self-overcoming of limitation.

in this way hegel is something like a meta-philosopher, he is the only one to really articulate the process of philosophy as such, jettison his system and its contextual trappings and the truth is still the truth: whatever say after him and after capitalism will necessarily be a part of this process, it just won't thematise itself quite the same way as Hegel did

>>11159321
>land, like all these anti-correlationists, like the mystics, they want to cut the circle of mediation any way they can. isn't that circle fundamentally samsara?

it is. i'll shill for heidegger here:
>What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way.

we're well-versed in vicious circles from nietzsche (and vicious circuitries, from land) - but you nailed it. there is no way out of the circle of mediation. well, there is, if you're deleuze, i guess. you can melt and become one with de/reterritorialization. but in the end don't we all want *recognition?* ultimately?

>there will always be a story to tell as long as there is that which tells stories

yes. even hysterical ones. but you have to. you have to fucking do it.

> /because/ existence is dialectically closed (doomed to infinite self-mediation) /it is free/, because freedom is nothing but what is born in the /recognition of this closure/.

the question then, is why does this cause so much despair? but maybe it's because this is hard to digest. but isn't this kind of the idea of psychoanalysis, or at least in some way? to say, 'well sir, you are cured. by which i mean, you are now just as fucked as all the rest of us. but look on the bright side: you know this now, and, moreover, perhaps you are not so lonely...'

the hegel-lacan romance is a beautiful thing.

>the limit always-already overcome by our setting it down. this is hegel's key insight: thought being able to think what it cannot think (as some noumenal x in the Beyond) must mean it is nothing but this self-positing and self-overcoming of limitation.

it's why we *settle* for capitalism, or what money can buy. the blocked dream, the thwarted hope, the uncashed cheque and the souvenir wish. we wind up like dragons. iirc there's a line in campbell about this:

>he who does not become a hero becomes another victim to be saved.

there's no *real* becoming-hero. the circle repeats. you overcome limitations only to re-impose them again - but, i mean, this could be a blissful experience as well, no?

>whatever say after him and after capitalism will necessarily be a part of this process, it just won't thematise itself quite the same way as Hegel did

i agree. completely. falling too much in love with capital is like a kind of stockholm syndrome. yes, it wins. but no, it does not love you, and trying to love it will send you back to your therapist time and again.

aah anon those are some fucking tremendous posts. thanks very kindly for the well-thought out responses, was just the thing i was looking for. as for happiness and wealth, which we were discussing earlier, there's a line in L&E on this that i liked:

>Happy is he who has made his existence conform to his character, to his will and to his fancy and so enjoys himself in his existence. World history is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it.

straight facts. that book is outstanding, btw.

>>11159463
>but in the end don't we all want *recognition?* ultimately?

certainly, ultimately death will cut the circle for all of us, but that is the agonizing paradox at the heart of it all: if i want to completely cut my dependency on the Other for my selfhood, i have to throw that selfhood to the fuckin' dogs. i always loved this bit from plotinus: the hero in the act is never reflexively thinking himself as brave, heroic, etc. he just does it, and history calls him such after the fact. if i want the predicates of sexy, successful, captivating, i have to fundamentally relinquish my desire to be these things - which, by extension of course, is the relinquishment of the very gratification and fulfillment that i'm striving for in the first place. "don't be a thirsty nigga" - we get what we want when we don't want it.

the striving-after is its own hindrance, and this speaks magnitudes to that hegelian tension between being and the self-othering that it is: whatever determinate space i occupy, i will always displace by my occupying it, like a rock in a glass of water. i literally can't get out of this fuckin' metaphysical chinese finger-trap without a radical cut of the circle, and by extension the very totality of concerns that precipitated the act in the first place. very ugly (also liberating?) catch-22.

>the question then, is why does this cause so much despair?

because fundamentally, the lacanian and Hegelian insight are one: only when you've given up and accepted the futility of repressing/obfuscating/deflating the problem, can you do something about it. isn't hegel's system fundamentally "the first step is admitting the problem [the first step is admitting consciousness is necessarily imbricated in the absolute negativity that it is, and any attempt to cut this circle necessarily reinforces it]": the philosophy

>it's why we *settle* for capitalism

yeah we settle for it because we identify with the limitation and not that which posits it. it doesn't have to be so abstract: people kill themselves over social media, okay, you're just as ugly, unloveable, mediocre, etc. as the world at large is telling you you are, fine, but what is it that's saying it? and again, the great hegelian insight here: to be able to condemn your deficiencies from a bird's eye view like this betrays an integrality of self/knowledge that /precisely refutes it/. again, limits and that which posits them. and this is pretty much what buddhism is a systematization of (and descartes too, but it's very diluted with him), that what detaches from its facticity is distinguished from this facticity by the very reality of the act.

and this is what people are afraid of, that consciousness is not its content because the content is arbitrary flow, and what we are is the no-thing that holds it, void, the eckhartian desert, the divine darkness of the godhead

>>11159557
>and this is pretty much what buddhism is a systematization of (and descartes too, but it's very diluted with him), that what detaches from its facticity is distinguished from this facticity by the very reality of the act.

i was thinking something like this today, that relationship between hegelian thought and buddhist thought (another thing i am not really so familiar with, but still). buddhist ethics and buddhist logic are really a thing. i *really* like what you're saying here, about the idea of being about to condemn your own deficiencies from that bird's eye view.

one thing that comes to mind here is actually how spectacularly germane hegel would seem to be in the present age, and not because of any kind of question about the marxist overthrowing of capitalism - nothing at all like this. but just in terms of *guilt management.*

we live in this consumer society, and it is driving everybody fucking crazy. it is driving the entire *world* crazy, this absolute victory and transcendence of capitalism over every aspect of life. even the chinese and the russians are in on it now, everybody is, we all have to be, and we are implicated in a global finger-trap of absolutely monstrous proportions, potentially WW1-esque if you want to get really hysterical with it.

but just *guilt.* *guilt and happiness.* i mean there isn't a soul alive that doesn't experience or think about these things; byung-chul han (and you might check this guy out anon if you haven't already) talks about the burnout society in this way, how we are unable to cope with the excessive valorization and accomplishment-drives of our own society, which are driven by...what? nothing else but the need for recognition, thymos, all the rest. quite frankly this seems like a fucking retardedly good time to read hegel and go bananas with this stuff.

>and this is what people are afraid of, that consciousness is not its content because the content is arbitrary flow, and what we are is the no-thing that holds it, void, the eckhartian desert, the divine darkness of the godhead

the bromance between the hegelians and the christians has been a good one too. i reckon it will only get better over time as well. maybe we just have to sort of quietly stand here while a flood-tide of mayhem and garbage washes over. i don't know. but it feels slightly easier to do it and not fly into a festival of triggers when you realize that there's actually a *reason* for this happening and a pretty consistent way of understanding that this part of a fucking carnival of narcissism and weaponized failed desires.

just guilt. guilt studies and how to deal with them. without the projection. just understood metaphysically, as belonging to the great game of the ego. sometimes it feels like a big house that, when you move in, you think is only an apartment, and turns out to be some combination of versailles and one of the labyrinths from saw.

>>11159688
>byung-chul han (and you might check this guy out anon if you haven't already) talks about the burnout society in this way, how we are unable to cope with the excessive valorization and accomplishment-drives of our own society, which are driven by...what?

Yeah this is great stuff. I've actually read Agony of Eros, in fact I think it's kind of anti-Hegelian, insofar as capitalism is this paranoiac refusal of alterity and Otherness, this constant deliberation at the cliff edge where constantly simulate the plunge with vidya and media instead of taking it (and I just started Fanged Noumena and the intro's talking about the same thing, that Kant can't think that the domestication of what exceeds reason is performed by that very excess itself /as reason/). you're right about it being a vicious circle, and I know Marx says something like capital is THE "subject" that posits its presuppositions, elevates the means that it is into its own end, since we make money to essentially optimize our making of more money.

it's bad, it's really bad, people are just fuckin' thirsting for the predication/ontic self-stability that is having a set virtual identity, a set image, with this set page and set friends and set likes, I mean fuck we're quantifying how much people like us now, it's sick but in a weird way unavoidable... I love hegel for his insight into these circles, and the irreducible dignity he affords the knowing mind.

but is that knowledge just a gilded impotence? maybe it's only such now with capitalism, maybe capitalism really has succeeded in neutering even these truths about the loftiness of the self-transparent mind, I mean shit look at Western Buddhism...

I think right now we have an ego absolutely in love with how the image and capital qualifies it, with this inexhaustible well of forms that technology, media, celebrity, even porn is giving us, this accelerated Darwinism that is exclusionary on a level never seen before, that fetishisizes only the perfection that can captivate a nation or the world, because it has no use for the quiet beauty that used to captivate a village. this near-infinite turnover of faces and moments and outrages that just keeps cycling through because it can because we motorize it.

we're learning that there's a human type just not made for this globalization of the self-image, so the vast, vast majority of us are reduced to slaves and hanger-ons of the globalist teat because we just don't have what it takes to take anything by storm anymore. until mediocrity itself self-weaponizes with radical Islamic fundamentalism or this burgeoning incel uprising... who knows. whether or not this knowledge is neutered by capitalism honestly can never kill the detachment and peace of mind that it affords. the disengagement from the ouroborous of capital and the hunger for self-recognition to stave off that inner void

great fucking stuff. once you know someone's on your wavelength it all just comes pouring out

>>11159808
>just started Fanged Noumena

can confirm that nick land's wild ride does indeed go places. i got into him right after heidegger and obsessed over him for years. i was convinced that heidegger had nailed something essential about being-in-the-world and still do. land just drew the consequences of what would happen if the metaphysics of production really *did* run amok.

it's weird to discover hegel *after* all of that, but you read guys when you read them.

>thirsting for the predication/ontic self-stability that is having a set virtual identity, a set image, with this set page and set friends and set likes, I mean fuck we're quantifying how much people like us now, it's sick but in a weird way unavoidable

pic rel. a favorite.

>but is that knowledge just a gilded impotence? maybe it's only such now with capitalism, maybe capitalism really has succeeded in neutering even these truths about the loftiness of the self-transparent mind,

i think it *wants* to. that would be the golden goose, the holy grail, the machines of the matrix taking over. and in a way *we* kind of want that too also, i think. we want - and it's not all bad - that smooth utopia. we may even get it in the end.

>I think right now we have an ego absolutely in love with how the image and capital qualifies it, with this inexhaustible well of forms that technology, media, celebrity, even porn is giving us, this accelerated Darwinism that is exclusionary on a level never seen before, that fetishisizes only the perfection that can captivate a nation or the world, because it has no use for the quiet beauty that used to captivate a village. this near-infinite turnover of faces and moments and outrages that just keeps cycling through because it can because we motorize it.

this all day. and pornography is absolute death like that. i say this as a guy with Detailed Files. but it is.

>we're learning that there's a human type just not made for this globalization of the self-image, so the vast, vast majority of us are reduced to slaves and hanger-ons of the globalist teat because we just don't have what it takes to take anything by storm anymore.

the last one especially. it's a double-bind. but maybe it will be like the Yojimbo ethos: in the end, those two equally shitty gangs killed off each other, because desire had made them so predictable. in the end it's like the innkeeper and one other guy who survive. maybe that will be how it goes for us too. no Revolution but a kind of logic of fate that brings to an end that for which the time had come. kurosawa was no stooge.

>the disengagement from the ouroborous of capital and the hunger for self-recognition to stave off that inner void

aye sir. my thoughts also. but maybe this is how it is done. i wonder if maybe, on the far horizon of all this hysteria, we come to try Enlightenment 2.0 in no other way and for no other reason than to realize that the flawed and imperfect meatbags that we are really is all we have.

>>11160059
>can confirm that nick land's wild ride does indeed go places.

fantastic right from the jump dude, the way land critiques deconstruction's infinite deferall of the messianic moment as unwittingly (or?) playing handmaiden to this endless discursivity, 'cause they can't take that leap, and y'know this is hegel's system, as perfect a description you'll find of the circle anywhere, but always terminating at the absolute boundary of its cyclicity. what you're saying in the rest of ur post is so relevant its kinda freaky

>and in a way *we* kind of want that too also, i think. we want - and it's not all bad - that smooth utopia. we may even get it in the end.

look at the turnout at marvel films m8, and that's speaking as someone who'll catch the big ones opening night a blunt deep not cause im that big of a fan but because i want to be a part of that clean sanitized hyperreal where everyone's funny and attractive and your friend as much as anyone else, for a night anyways. we really, really want that smooth utopia, and you and I are here just shitposting against the torrent.

>this all day. and pornography is absolute death like that. i say this as a guy with Detailed Files. but it is.

top kek same. at one point anyways. the orgasm: eternal return at its purest.

> maybe that will be how it goes for us too. no Revolution but a kind of logic of fate that brings to an end that for which the time had come.

yup m8, and this "logic of fate" is what the traditionalists called kali yuga, the contingent harnessing of contingent forces will eventually blow up in your face. and the trads are the innkeepers left standing in the smoke.

>try Enlightenment 2.0

ill go with hegel with this one, nothing's guaranteed, but if we overcome this will be just the civilization that has conquered something so tied to the nature of its parts, and judging from how bad land sells it they'll be near-angelic

>>11160059
here's a question that sort of percolated in my mind also: suppose you were giving advice to some kind of space-alien traveler that had to spend some portion of life here on earth without being detected. or maybe it's some transmigrated soul come up from a buddhist hell looking to escape the great wheel of karma, death and rebirth. the metaphysical care and feeding of this alien is your priority: what kind of advice do you give a being like that? in some sense this is borrowed from the stoics, who have this simple piece of advice: be your own friend. be your *own* combination virgil-dante through this thing.

i don't know if this is interesting or not, but it's sort of like a thought experiment: some other being, a tabula rasa, is obligated to get through this world, in some way, without falling into the death-traps of guilt, reciprocity, and mimesis. just get through it for some space of years. how the fuck do you deal with humans so addled by their desires?

or maybe this is just what it feels like for the buddhists and the christians all the time, thinking on the afterlife and so on. that you're shuttled down to this world for a bit, and you do your thing, and then you go back upstairs at the end of it all and they grade your report card. i don't know. but the longer time goes on the more sense theology makes and the less sense everything else makes. but hegel was just so fucking interesting for keeping it dialectical: *you are going to repeat this.* i thought for a while that nietzsche was the truth in this regard, but all nietzsche did was make me fucking brittle and shitty to the point of implosion. the hegelpill goes down a *lot* smoother.

will splice in some more SMAC here. mostly for the flavor text on this one, if you can read it. you can be paranoid, you can be naive, or you can be in that sweet spot in between. acceleration is good times for that romantic nihilism, but you cannot beat that feeling for the evolution of consciousness.

anyways, pardon the schizo-ramble posting. i know i'm all over the place, but...well. you only live once.
>and maybe not even that

>>11160138
the first essay in that book is the best one, and one of the best things Uncle Nick ever wrote. Kant/Capital, meltdown, circuitries and teleoplexy are all A++ reading. here's the link for teleoplexy.

https://track5.mixtape.moe/zphjim.pdf

land absolutely abolished a great many spectres of marx that needed to be cleared out of the room, like it was ghostbusters. unfortunately, what he left in their place was cthulhu, but i mean, at least we're moving the plot forward.

>we really, really want that smooth utopia, and you and I are here just shitposting against the torrent.

yep. ah well. at least we'll be screencapped for posterity
>we will not be screencapped for posterity

>yup m8, and this "logic of fate" is what the traditionalists called kali yuga, the contingent harnessing of contingent forces will eventually blow up in your face. and the trads are the innkeepers left standing in the smoke.

yeah, the kali-yuga has really basically entered my vocabulary now, thanks to /lit/. and kali-yuga just makes too much sense: it's the *unbridled rage of kali.* the craziest part of that myth is that kali herself only becomes that way after being polluted with the blood of that infinitely mimetic demon - she wasn't bad from the start, but she *intervenes* because she is petitioned to join a *losing war*... nothing in the universe stands against unbridled rage. that myth is a fucking killer when you start to see outrage culture everywhere.

kali only becomes kali because a much more benevolent goddess chooses the *wrong* way to deal with a demon. rage is the killer. but anyways.

>if we overcome this will be just the civilization that has conquered something so tied to the nature of its parts, and judging from how bad land sells it they'll be near-angelic

yeah, i think land basically just likes corporate formalism because it's like humanity's last best hope against being drowned in a flood-tide of underdeveloped schizophrenia and general degeneracy. he's nothing else if not consistent in his politics, but i think galactic hyper-libertarianism leads to the same scenes and breakdowns that nietzsche had watching the horse flogged in turin.

hegel's preferable. you can get behind Spirit making itself known. that's what i find so endearing about him: this is a question about freedom, and when that happens, large numbers of humans have to *get the fuck out of the way.* these things are knowable and, who the fuck knows, they may even be *good.* so do not repress them and do not be a fucking shit-heel about it. because for the time being it may well be a pic rel kind of situation - a lot of daggetts and no batman.

ah well. shitposting against the torrent, as you say. this indeed it is.

fun, tho.

>>11160152
i really like the virgil-dante bit, reminds me a bit of socrates' daimon, it's like people have lost a center outside their center if that makes any sense, i mean kant drew the line tight around the subject, and it's really only gotten tighter in some respects, it's a kind of perverted centrality antithetical to that traditional centrality, because the latter is centered outside itself, on its vector, as it were, the harnessed volatility of a conquered will-to-power, and this is what we have a bit with the nominalist/voluntarist turn in theology like milbank says, the subject just coincides with itself and no longer overlaps with a transcendental space which its individuality occupies only arbitrarily. it seems the real bigbrains today are the ones who don't shirk from this realization, trads just bend this deathless libidinal force up, land down.

i mean hegel stands ambiguously re: land cause land both refutes and confirms hegel, i mean he denies hegel's system and the sovereignty of speculative/reflective thought, etc. but he confirms hegel in that his understanding of the libidinal substratum that deploys the dialectic as something like an epiphenomenon itself represents a stage in evolution of the absolute's understanding of itself so. yeah.

>>11160230
ill get to reading that. he's sharp af.

>kali only becomes kali because a much more benevolent goddess chooses the *wrong* way to deal with a demon.

and doesn't that relate back to spirit's necessary dialectical fumbles, like kali intervenes through a logic on her own cause the logic dictates that first way will inevitably always have to be the *wrong* way relative to the second, and energy released between the phase changes is kali (at its most extreme)

>large numbers of humans have to *get the fuck out of the way.* these things are knowable and, who the fuck knows, they may even be *good.* so do not repress them and do not be a fucking shit-heel about it. because for the time being it may well be a pic rel kind of situation - a lot of daggetts and no batman.

yeah this is great, and i think land, zizek et al have the honor of being hegel's famous owl of wisdom that only flies at dusk. we have such a good grasp on how fucked we are because there's been enough time to make a reflexive understanding possible, and this always signifies the dying of one era and the bleeding into the next.

great stuff

>>11157542
>>11157554
>>11157605
You can't talk about Hegel today without also talking about capitalism, you reactionary chud.

>>11160426
Hegel was a capitalist. This is his ideal society

>>11160454
http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0124-61272013000100004

Can I just read the phenomenology straight with no other philosophical experience? Going to try it anyway

>>11160494
Ok, I opened it up and got to the first act of the preface "It is customary to preface a work with an explanation of the author’s aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he believes it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the same subject. In the case of a philosophical work, however, such an explanation seems not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject-matter, even inappropriate and misleading. "

Does this mean he doesn't recommend you trying to read other philosophers to try and understand him because it will be misleading?

>>11160494
i find the analysis section at the back pretty helpful for the shorter explanations of what hegel is saying. otherwise it's easy to get lost or just miss out on the really interesting stuff.

also kojeve's book is pretty cool also. from what i understand, for some people it's actually not what hegel intended at all, or that it's kojeve doing something completely different with hegel's ideas. but it made a big splash in philosophical circles when it came out. it's pretty amazing to read just on its own, and you really get a sense of how massive his thought was in the 1930s and the effect it was having on the world. definitely one to check out at some point.

>>11160521
He’s just saying that it’s inappropriate for a philosophical work to have a preface. He explains why later. You should watch half-hour Hegel

>>11160663
Half-hour Hegel? Is that enough time to explain the whole book?

>>11160676
God no, maybe even a lifetime isn't. Get crackin'

Are you diving right into Hegel without any philosophical experience? Cause you'll hang but he won't feel as profound as he should be

>>11160676
lel. it's a lot longer than half an hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgnp5Dy-v88&list=PL4gvlOxpKKIgR4OyOt31isknkVH2Kweq2

>>11160683
I think I get Hegel though. Its something about consciousness

>>11160676
It’s a series of half hour videos. It’s honestly more time than Hegel probably deserves.

>>11160494
Rationalists cannot into phenomenology, unless they redefine phenomenology, like they did for empiricism.

/lit/ are the young Hegelians of today. These threads are the new Berlin milk cafes

>>11160685
I this guy OK to trust? I don't want to sink in 4 hours only to find out he is supporting some kind of anti-marxist or conservative agenda

>>11160741
>I don't want to sink in 4 hours only to find out he is supporting some kind of anti-marxist or conservative agenda

Stay away from Hegel, we don't need another left Hegelian reducing his the dialectic to hermeneutics

>>11160754
What are you trying to say? That we shouldn't try to apply him to reality?

>>11160769
Stop tainting everything with Marxism, please. Hegel was a thinker on a far higher plane than Marx. I'm tired of everything being subordinated to an economic/political critique

>>11160741
sadler's pretty safe. from what i understand he's gotten more involved with stoicism. and on interviews and other things he tends to not get excited about extremism and radical stuff.

he is a very large man, but this is a widely-known side effect of reading hegel. you should expect to grow to 150-175% of your usual size by the time you have finished the phenomenology. whether or not this fades over time or is permanent is something that may vary from person to person.

>>11160776
Marx was just trying to be real about Hegel. Why are you trying to hinder Spirits progress to the absolute?

How hard is Hegel to read in German?

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6698/pg6698-images.html

Is it more complicated than just being able to read it? Like do I have to know the cultural and historical meanings behind certain words?

>>11160779
first off you're basing this on an erroneous interpretation of hegel as teleological-historicist, second, the absolute was already achieved with hegel's system (properly understood), third, the overthrow of capitalism would hardly qualify as achieving an absolute any kind, only another stage in the interminable dialectical progression

>>11160732
i like this.

>>11160788
OK well if we reached his absolute then there is a problem because society isn't perfect. What do we do about it?

>>11160732
just need to shop Sadler's head onto Hegel

>>11160820
once again you're misunderstanding what he means by absolute, the dialectic consummates itself in the knowledge of precisely the dialectical progression that it is, that there is nothing beyond the horizon of this movement. society isn't perfect because as long as we're here to perceive it won't be, and for exactly the same reason friendo, it already is.

>this thread

>>11160776
Lel. Try actually reading Elements of the Philosophy of Right if you truly believe that economics weren't important to Hegel.

P.S. Hegel read about the Haitian revolution in Minerva and he deeply admired the revolutionaries; so much so that the event, which he considered a Universal event, influenced The Phenomenology of Mind. In fact, his master/slave dialectic was inspired by the revolution as well. Trying to remove material historicity and hermeneutics from Hegel's work is deeply reactionary, chud.

>>11160830
It will be perfect under communism through, trust me on this, I've thought about it.

>>11160788
>third, the overthrow of capitalism would hardly qualify as achieving an absolute any kind, only another stage in the interminable dialectical progression

Doesn't change the fact that it's still going to happen, much to your chagrin apparently

>>11160847
Hegel talking about economics =/= economics being a central concern

>>11160849
political panaceas are naïve at best. marx betrayed his mental handicap when he believed alienation is only an effect of capitalism

>>11160858
Not only is it going to happen, its also the final stage. The last stop on the train ride of dialectical progression

>>11160858
and what succeeds it (it won't be communism) will itself be superseded in time. as if time stands still for utopias. marx's big mistake was thinking the struggle comes to an end.

>>11160863
Alienation is a lot more prominent in capitalism.

>>11160874
Marx was only dealing with the class struggle. Under communism people are all working together. Under that then we can work toward molding a society that focuses on improving human life

>>11160869
if you think the dissatisfaction and restlessness intrinsic to the human condition and what spins the wheel will somehow come to an end with the tearing down of every mcdonald's worldwide or something, well. uh. on second thought, you should read hegel

>>11160874
What comes after capital being owned by the public? Nothing. It could only revert back to different classes.

>>11160883
societies can never heal the ontological realities of death, suffering, pain, and to a lesser extent, evil, at best prepare you for them, at worst disavow them. there are no collective solutions. you can't take the social with you into death

>>11160888
Communism would do a lot better for the human condition than capitalism. Do you see great works of art being put out currently?

>>11160892
reducing everything to class struggle is puerile, class struggle is just an effect of the difference constitutive of all ordered systems, especially society. the understanding of which you'll find far more potently worked through in hegel than with marx. capitalism is a symptom of the Wound, not its cause

>>11160900
That's why we have to trust in Hegel through Marx and then again through Nietzsche. Its the only way, trust me.

>>11160902
by that metric the premodern would do a lot better for the human condition. im not defending capitalism. im denying communism is the answer to the forces it exacerbates and is exacerbated by.

Our present task is to rescue the idea of universal human history from the uses to which domination has put it. If the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis. Hegel's moment of clarity of thought would need to be juxtaposed to that of others at the time: Toussaint-Louverture, Wordsworth,
the Abbe Gregoire, even Dessalines. For all his brutality and revenge, Dessalines saw the realities of European domination most clearly. Even more, Hegel's moment would need to be juxtaposed to the moments of clarity in action: the French soldiers sent by Napoleon to Haiti who, upon hearing these former slaves singing the "Marseillaise," wondered aloud if they were not fighting on the wrong side; the Polish regiment under Leclerc's command who disobeyed orders and refused to drown six hundred captured Saint-Domiguans.There are many examples of such clarity, and they belong to no side, no one group exclusively.

What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization
of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken?

>>11160874
Marx only claimed that class struggle will come to an end, and it will. Struggle itself will not.

>>11160950
equally naive, to assume you can have society without the struggle between superior and inferior orders

Hegel was wrong.

Wanna know why? He misunderstands God and equates him as just a part of the ideal when he is clearly more than that.

>>11160900
>societies can never heal the ontological realities of death, suffering, pain

that's where you're wrong kiddo

>>11160957
Its not about "superiors" and "inferiors" its about working for the same cause. No more conflict of interest through different classes.

>>11160968
But conflict will still exist, and stratify itself across a different division.

>>11160941
>It is one Idea in its totality and in all its individual parts, like one life in a living being, one pulse throbs throughout all its members. All the parts represented in it, and their systematization, emanate from the one Idea; all these particulars are but the mirrors and copies of this one life, and have their actuality only in this unity. Their differences and their various qualities are only the expression of the Idea and the form contained within it. Thus the Idea is the central point, which is also the periphery, the source of light, which in all its expansion does not come without itself, but remains present and immanent within itself. Thus it is both the system of necessity and its own necessity, which also constitutes its freedom.

>>11160973
I don't think these "conflicts" will have too much of an effect on people unless you can think of some certain examples. Most of todays problems stem from capitalism.

>>11160976
so is hegel predicting that all modern ideology would fundamentally proceed from kind of veiled christian gnosticism?

>>11160984
There were wars before capitalism, you know. it's why Marxists are so hopelessly myopic, they can't see beyond the horizon of capitalism's culpability for our shitty miserable lives, and not something deeper which rabid production and consumption only mask

>>11160992
By capitalism I mean private class ownership of capital.

>>11160991
he's saying in that specific passage that all difference necessarily presupposes the common identity by which these differences are made intelligible. I mean yeah Hegel was pretty Christian, but his system is very much his own, like Boehme he wanted to discern the trinity in all things, but unlike his theological predecessors he did not believe this trinity was transcendent

>>11160920
Why are antifa chicks so fucking ugly, bros?

>>11160997
doesn't matter, marx critiques it well, he's a treasure trove for that, no doubt about it, but let's move on please. land's capitalism as an epiphenomenon of the universe's entropic sinking into absolute death is far, far more fascinating

>>11161007
I personally find her attractive.

Faith is certainly pure consciousness of essence, i.e. of the simple inner being, and thus is thought—the cardinal factor in the nature of faith, which is usually overlooked. The immediacy of the presence of essence in it is due to the fact that its object is essence, i.e. pure thought. This immediacy, however, so far as thought enters into consciousness, or pure consciousness enters into self-consciousness, acquires the significance of an objective being which lies beyond the consciousness of the self.

>>11157524
First of all: I think your posts are one of the most worthwhile things I've ever read here. With that said, I think that your reading of Hegel's Spirit is somewhat metaphysically deflationary. You have this kind of obsession with pointing out constantly that Spirit isn't something above and beyond the totality of finite beings/individuals/consciousnesses/whatever, and from what I gathered reading Frederick Beiser's "Hegel", that is a common mistake. This is what he says about it:

>Now that we have seen the organic context of Hegel's early reflections on love, it should be clear why both inflationary and deflationary accounts of the concept of spirit are inadecuate.

>Inflationary accounts see Spirit as a single entity existing beyond its embodiment in specific individuals; but, true to his organic concept, Hegel will insist that any organism, any living force, exists only in particular individuals, only in its individual embodiments.

>This does not mean, however, that it is logically reducible to these embodiments, given that an organic whole is prior to its parts and makes them possible. Deflationary accounts go astray, therefore, if they see Spirit as nothing more than its embodiments within particular individuals. This not only fails to see how the universal is logically prior to the particular; but it also separates the experience of love from its place in nature, which Hegel would regard as a false abstraction.

What do you guys think about this book? I'm reading it after having a negative experience with Hegel (but still feeling like he was actually trying to say something important despite his obscurity) and I gotta say this book is really changing my mind on him.

It is clear that the extent to which we can equate what Hegel sees as the positive elements of civil society with the structure of modern capitalism as a mode of social organization and production is highly questionable. One primary reason for this is that modern capitalism – as opposed to the largely pre-industrial, market-based form that was emerging in Hegel's time – has been overcome by a more comprehensive organization of social relations and institutions. Modern capitalism is therefore characterized not simply by exchange and by the pursuit of private interests (as classical liberals posit) but by a small subset of private interests that seeks out the supportive power of state institutions, law, and social policy to be organized in its own interests at the expense of the universal interests of society (i.e. neoliberalism). To the extent that capitalists are able to capture the institutions of the state, they are able to influence and steer policy and other political institutions toward their own interests. But even in a less direct way, economic necessity permeates other aspects of social life, displacing the broader concerns of the common interest and need, whether expressed as of wages, jobs, and the environmental impact of industry, tax revenues, and the extent of regulations on business, and so on. Hegel would see this as the expression not of a rational state, but rather as a state that is not fully developed, a derationalized state that has succumbed to the particularist powers of civil society, to the market, to atomistic individualism, and to the power of the particular over that of the universal interest.

Indeed, for Hegel the ideas of an unfettered market, or one where market relations dominate society, are seen as anathema to the very purpose of politics which is to reconcile the divisions created by the sphere of needs and economics by reconciling particular interests with the whole. In short, our capitalist society is a society that lives without a rational grasp of the true purpose of modernity, a Verstandesstaat, limited in its capacity to conceive let alone actualize modern freedom.

>>11161010
>let's ditch marx for a drug-addled edgelord schizoid

no thanks

>>11161058
thanks. I think it comes down to my (and Zizek's) assertion that whole is only disclosed by the parts (and vice versa), and the priority of the whole over parts you're citing here. I'm not sure in what sense this whole is prior, certainly everything is "collapsed" into the Here of sense-certainty, which then unfolds contingently in time like a flower, but I'm not sure if that gets at it. I mean, can't I say the parts have to be logically prior to the whole? not that I'm trying to be another stale old reductionist. I mean becoming just is this oscillation between Being and Nothingness, and there's really no priority, because as soon as you have abstract pure "is-ness" you necessarily have nothing. but whatever. thanks for pointing it out bud. always learning.

Is there anything Sadler gets wrong about Hegel?

>>11161011
proud epsilon baka

>>11161154
I doubt any of us know Hegel better than him to be able to say

>>11156928
Thanks for this, it was good. I wish I could have a conversation with you in person.

>>11161436
my pleasure anon. good luck. thanks for contributing to an interesting thread also, you never know where these things are going to go

this thread seems interesting, i'll give it a bump

>>11160741
He’s not Marxist, and he leans conservative (he’s fairly moderate). He’s Catholic. But his videos are good.

>>11161154
There was exactly one video of Sadler’s where he says something that I thought was off the mark, and I can’t even remember which one it was. He’s solid