/lit/ - Literature

>>22373649
Hegel completes Kant like Simon completes Garfunkel and Hall completes Oates. like that.

>>22373649
I don't think the thing-in-itself is really the Kantian horizon but I'm not done reading him by any measure, and my understanding of the supersensible is limited. I believe Hegel is saying since there is an inner world of consciousness, there is an inner logic to the world of appearance as well- which is basically the world of laws (he talks about this in a different part I think), and we know this because we are objects and have an inner being. However we don't start to see the truth behind appearance, that is the actuality or scientific truth of the matter until we actually choose to do so ourselves. The reduction of the inner world of appearance to force or laws (which Hegel reduces to one thing iirc) likewise must mirror something in consciousness, which we reduce to a single thing, self-consciousness. Furthermore if you notice that we can't immediately proceed to the actual truth then you see the mode of knowing in self-consciousness is limited and you have to go beyond it to something where self-consciousness is merely an element (ethics). And that is what Hegel does with the thing-in-itself, because when you establish laws grounded on the self-conscious as an element rather than the self-conscious as the thing-in-itself (which for Hegel is just an element in his system that denotes when something is identical to itself, with the thing being the the totality of the development, or appearance... or some other category). So if the the object of the sensibility/understanding is the thing, and the thing-in-itself is the truth behind the thing, then what you have prior is self-conscious as selfsame, or self-consciousness as the element of something else. Self-consciousness in an ethical setting for example posits that we can know the in-itself, because the ethical appears from consciousness or self-consciousness. Or something like that.

>>22373649
I have no idea what that paragraph means but if self reflection is the way to get past appearance then it seems related to these posts
>>22305959
>>22306017
>>22306027
>>22306035
>>22306055
Wherein I posited that the collapse of subject object distinction and pragmaticism allowed the cognition of yourself as you are in yourself, therefore allowing you to cognize a noumenon and hence discover the general form of all noumena. Unfortunately the Kantian never responded to my replies to his quote, so I guess I might as well post it here to see if there are any more problems from a Kantian perspective

>>22373777
all those posts are deleted

>>22373788
>>/lit/thread/22305959

>>22373751
Sorry this might be confusing.

A 'thing' for Hegel is the totality of the development. He uses this as a logical term that precedes nature, since Kant basically uses appearance to mean nature/the source of our perception. Kant is trying to say that the thing-in-itself is the unknowable thing, but logically for Hegel we do know the thing-in-itself because the 'thing' is the 'totality of the development', or, 'sufficient ground for concrete existence'; the 'in-itself' is logically just the selfsameness of the thing.so to say thing-in-itself for Hegel basically means the thing that makes the appearance what it is. The in-itself is just a logical category that says something is being considered through itself. Hegel might be trying to say something like we don't know nature through nature, or nature-in-itself, we know nature through science, or nature for-itself.

>>22373649
Hegel is essentially saying that when Kant posits the thing-in-itself he is speaking on what he himself said could not be spoken of. Because anything beyond phenomena is unknowable for us simply positing it’s existence is an act of deception outright. The curtain here is symbolic of the divide between us an Noumena and when it is pulled back we find nothing but ourselves. What he means by this is that in our positing of the thing-in-itself is actually just us hanging the curtain and hiding behind it. This is a necessary development in self-knowledge though because once we step back over the curtain again we realize that even the curtain itself, as a positive barrier to the Noumena, is a deception and that there is no Noumena. (Either that or the Noumena is empty) This is an essential step in what he’s working towards next which is the play between the universal and the specific and how the universal itself is a necessary fiction to understand the specific. But, because we realize that there is no essence of a chair in the Noumena (because it is empty) the classic essence/presence dichotomy is undermined such that we can say that essence is grounded in the particular and expressed through the universal. Each chair is fully the essence of that specific chair yet it is only through the universality of knowledge that each chair can be known as a chair. This may seem a bit strange but you have to realize that Hegel isn’t building a system to know everything perfectly. He’s not trying to erase contradiction, but instead to allow it space for the development of thought. The impasse between universality and particularity are what allow for new conceptions. Most people tend to overlook this fuzziness at the edges of all concepts but it was Hegel who first pointed out that this fuzziness isn’t detrimental to knowledge but instead constitutive of it.

>making love to men daily, but in my imagination
What did he mean by this?

Anybody else find wordy people to be really dumb?

Part of the riddle in my eyes is revealed in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. In it, Hegel shifts Kant’s dichotomy of appearance->reality to appearance->notion. We cannot talk about a thing-in-itself because by positing a reality behind appearance, we are already setting up an ideal, subjective object (by ideal I mean both relating to ideas and ideal as in perfect or complete in a scholastic sense). By saying “the appearance doesn’t reflect the underlying object entirely” we are assuming there is more to the object and creating an alternate “half” of the object in our mind. What we then find out is that, as we learn more about the object and interact with it, what was once considered beyond appearance is incorporated into our concept of the object and we modify our notion of the object-in-itself. Thus, there is not an immovable barrier between the phenomenon and the noumenob, because in Kant’s system, all possible phenomena and experience is structured by the fixed categories, whereas for Hegel, the categories themselves change and develop dialectically and thus our relation to the object as phenomenon vs noumenon changes and develops in turn.

This is my understanding but I don’t claim to understand Hegel’s system or epistemology fully so I would appreciate alternate perspectives.

>>22373751
>>22373777
>>22373806
>>22374017
Thoughtful answers. I think there's something important about the fact that the naive idea of how our perception works leads to the thing-in-itself, but upon reflection it feels as though some kind of vicious circle or bootstrapping is happening to sustain this naive perception. I get the sense this is what Hegel is trying to describe in the first hundred or so pages of the Phenomenology. Nietzsche has a few takes on it as well
>our sense organs create.....themselves?
>if you try to get at the mirror you instead get the things in the mirror, and vice versa
Those aren't exact quotes, but why does it seem like so few try to attack this issue? Is it just inherently too confusing to think about?

>>22374205
These are good points too. Another question about thing-in-itself: what is the status of the "objects" we encounter in our dreams? We think the lamp we see on the desk during waking life has an independent existence, a lamp-in-itself, but what about the dream lamp we see at night? Is the dream-lamp-in-itself supposed to be the electrical activity in our brain? But is this any different from the waking lamp-in-itself?

>>22374173
It means he was trying to sound poetically grandiloquent or he genuinely meant it. If he genuinely he meant it, the question is did he envision himself as a woman or as a gay man while doing so?

>>22373649
Wait a bit, you're not at that point yet. At this point of the PhG Hegel just argues that in all the duplication we find in the use of the understanding we only end up finding ourselves, as in, we are unkowingly just looking at our selfconscience, while assuming that we are dealing with an object that is outside of the subject. This is all that is said at this point. What you're looking for, I think, is the actual integration of the object in the subject. This has not been reached yet. You'll find glimpses of it in the section on Reason, and an actual proof in the section on Absolute Knowing.
Since you have a long way ahead of you before you reach those parts (which are completely unintelligible unless you've worked your way through the rest of the book) you might either want to endure the journey, or read the Science of Logic (not the Encyclopedia one) up to the section on infinity, where Hegel, imho, gives the clearest argument when it comes to the reasons why we can actually cognize the thing in itself (spoiler alert: cognizing the limits of reason means that you have already overstepped said limits)

>>22374173
He's not actually gay, he was just trying to impress a 19yo pretentious arthoe. An actually gay man would have simply joined a fraternity

>>22373649

Yeah. And Schopenhauer saw it too. You can't know the thing-in-itself except through a narrow opening - yourself. You know that you exist. You know what you are. You know your experience of existing. That is the narrow gate to reality. Reality is consciousness. Immaterial world. Mind. We all exist in God's imagination, so to speak.

God is real, Christianity is real, God is existence itself, Jesus is the mind of God, the Holy Spirit is the reflective spirit between God and Jesus. The only answer in life is ultimate humility before God and giving up the dragon chase for true answers. The answer is inside of you.

>>22374259

The answer is so simple. Here you go everyone:

>reality is unknowable because it is, for lack of a better term, God's imagination
>we are made in God's image, so we perceive reality as God intends us to
>we can never know actual reality (God) until death
>the physical world does not actually exist as something physical, but we perceive it as physical, so there is no real difference to us
>humans, having rational minds in the likeness of God, can "create" objects and ideas as well, through our rational mind

There, that's it. I can't believe Kant and Hegel and all the others struggled with this so heavily. The problem was they were trying to work backwards from perception to reality, which is impossible. You first need to have faith in God and then work downwards from reality to perception.

I mean, did these dudes even read Aquinas?

>>22374282
It was about androgyny. So probably a woman.

>>22373649
The thing-in-itself is itself in the thing.

>>22374529
https://youtu.be/59HpKD3u6ks

>>22374527
>cognizing the limits of reason means that you have already overstepped said limits)
this