/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17013901]

I got filtered bros...I even pushed through Kant...goodbye....

[Anonymous No.17013984]

PoS is an alchemistic grimoire. Check Eric Voegelin's interpretation of Hegel.

[Anonymous No.17014036]

>>17013984
if this is the argument i am familiar with then this is a very shitty interpretation. hegel had much more concrete ideas in mind though not as lofty.


>>17013901
read a few paragraphs at a time and then read the commentary afterwards! the preface is especially brutal to get through.

[Anonymous No.17014051]

>>17013984
if this is the argument i am familiar with then this is a very shitty bad faith interpretation. hegel had much more concrete, repeatable things to say than alchemists, though no less lofty. stop regurgitating this dogshit autistic received knowledge that is both reddit, dismissive, sensationalist and not even true

>>17013901
read a few paragraphs at a time and then read the commentary afterwards! the preface is especially brutal to get through.

[Anonymous No.17014080]

>>17014051
i dont think he meant it in a dismissive way. his philosophy in some ways has lots of similarities with the mystics and alchemists. im certain hed at least agree with their fundemental philosophy of as above so below.

[Anonymous No.17014188]

>>17014080
Hegel is not a mystic or alchemist. Schelling wrote him a letter praising him for destroying superstition forever. As above, so below, to my mind suggests some sort of concordance at all levels of being, where in Hegel the only inevitability is contradiction, not concordance or even synthesis. Hegel is all about the determinate. And about communal processual truth based on reason in language operating intersubjectively. Nor is he about solve and coagula. Hegel can get to solve but then through a parallax shift would understand it as coagula, not as a separate movement or duality, but as a pure formal shift. Hegel would ridicule your “anything I don’t understand is magic” retard take.

[Anonymous No.17014197]

>>17014188
>Hegel is not a mystic
Spirit

[Anonymous No.17014252]

>>17014197
Hegel uses all kinds of ordinary words in idiosyncratic ways, often developing them to mean their opposite. He rails against mysticism in the fucking preface of the phenomenology.

[Anonymous No.17014261]

>>17014252
Explain the idiosyncratic and non-mystical meaning of Spirit.

[Anonymous No.17014312]

>>17014261
For Hegel Geist is the rational, self-conscious activity of a community

[Anonymous No.17014321]

>>17014188
Hegel got slurped up by Kant's biologism and then attempted to 'reconcile' it with his frankly bad reading of Spinoza. OP should just read Ethics and bypass the whole of German idealism, read Will & Rep, and then just read Nietzsche (who in fact did this himself albeit dismissed Schopenhauer) whose kaleidoscopic demi-Spinozism remains viable.

[Anonymous No.17014415]

>>17014321
Schoppykins still mad that Hegel’s doddering lectures took all his students away.

[Anonymous No.17014455]

>>17014188
damn. it sounds like hegel wasnt interesting at all and made up his own special names for things that dont matter and then made some really uninsightful remarks in really complex ways to justify his position in academia

[Anonymous No.17014467]

>>17014188
>in Hegel the only inevitability is contradiction, not concordance or even synthesis. Hegel is all about the determinate. And about communal processual truth based on reason in language operating intersubjectively.
what the fuck does this even mean? god i hate continentalism

[Anonymous No.17014471]

>>17014455
damn. it sounds like you got filtered and are mad about it rather than just ignoring stuff you know is beyond you and moving on with your life

[Anonymous No.17014482]

>>17014415
Hegel was the nicest of men too; really comes out in Kaufmann's bio.

[Anonymous No.17014585]

>>17014188
what the fuck does any of this mean

[Anonymous No.17014612]

>>17013901
Read Robert Brandom "A Spirit of Trust"
Brandom includes everything reasonable in Hegel while taking all the dumb shit out.

[Anonymous No.17014620]

>>17014188
>peopls replying wtf does this mean
how tf did you even expect to understand hegel if you dont get this

[Anonymous No.17014633]

>Within the first part of Phenomenology, Hegel treats individual conscience or education and how to raise it to philosophical knowledge, given that individual consciousness usually remains, for the majority of people, trapped in its own isolation.
>Within the second part, Hegel moves on to the Spirit, or its general manifestations throughout each historical period, be it from antiquity, the medieval age, absolute monarchy, the Enlightenment etc.
>in other words, he traces the path of the Soul by creating a systematic philosophy that he started as a young man and completed in his old age.
>His magnus opus needs no preface; the reader should consider this as a warning: one must plunge himself directly into it. For Hegel, philosophy is a result of elaboration, an act of conquest done by reflection, that grows and becomes so rich and full that the uninitiated may find themselves forever trapped outside of his thoughts.

This thread got me interested in him again. Wish me luck bros.

[Anonymous No.17014661]

>>17014633
which commentary are you citing anon?

[Anonymous No.17014671]

>>17014633
none of this makes any sense at all

[Anonymous No.17014680]

>>17013901
I don't read people who don't make an effort to even be legible. Keep the pseudo-intellectual shit to yourself friend.

[Anonymous No.17014702]

>>17014671
It isn't supposed to. It abuses the feeling of ignorance the stupid have when they confront the smart precisely through saying nothing and so having the audience confuse their retaining nothing with the aforementioned feeling. That is how the charlatans of german idealism became popular. The only sensible ones in the group were kant and schopenhauer.

[Anonymous No.17014711]

>>17014680
What is impossible to say can't be said. There is no sense of putting a moral imperative behind it ("should").

[Anonymous No.17014718]

>>17014711
>the state of german philosophe readers

[Anonymous No.17014723]

>>17014471
ok

[Anonymous No.17014725]

>>17014671
I certainly dont understand how thinking that it's possible for individual consciousness to *not* be isolated is not mysticism, given there's not exactly some objective material groupthink matrix we can jack into and experience each eachothers consciousnesses. All you will ever have is your own consciousness and a weak approximation of other's, unless you embrace the possibility of a mystical union of minds.

I'm starting to think the people who claim to understand Hegel are lying or delusional.

[Anonymous No.17014732]

>>17014661
A french translation from the 60s
>>17014671
I'll try to break it down. Will help me as well to reword it.
1) how to go from the individual to the collective level
2) how the collective manifests itself

Anyway, my tea is ready. I'm going in.

[Anonymous No.17014739]

>>17014467
>>17014585
If you're more specific I'll maybe explain. I've had a bit to drink, but I don't think I'm off the deep end here. Schelling was his friend and roommate and another major figure in German Idealism. As above, so below is an occult principle. Concordance at all levels of being is my interpretation of "as above..." The inevitability of contradiction is demonstrated throughout the phenomenology and science of logic, in the phenom. the realization of which is the final section, absolute knowing. Determinate as opposed to indeterminate, fuzzy, cloudy, mystical. Determinations are the effect of negation: a thing is one thing, in part, because it is NOT another, and it is very important for Hegel (and everyone) to be able to tell things apart, determine. Truth is the process of truth, philosophy is the history of philosophy. It's the effect of many people self-consciously working together to create it by talking/interacting with one another. Truth isn't the end result, boxed answer, it's the period that ends the sentence: the period only refers you to everything that came before it. Solvé and coagula are alchemical principles. Think solvent, dissolution, and coagulation, reforming. Here's a two hour talk getting into the idea of the formal shift turning a loss/dissolution into a positive site of freedom: https://youtu.be/DRsrYi-wXro

hope this helps :^)

[Anonymous No.17014742]

>>17014732
>A french translation from the 60s
the title anon... the title....

[Anonymous No.17014756]

>>17014718
>Anglo-Saxons: Wittgenstein, oh prophet Wittgenstein! Enlighten our feeble minds! What is your fifth commandment!
>Wittgenstein: Thou shalt not imagine a square circle!
>Anglo-Saxons: A god... he speaks with the tongue of a god! Oh, how unworthy we are of your wisdom!

[Anonymous No.17014778]

>>17014742
La Phénoménologie de l'esprit, traduction par Jean Hyppolite, 1941 (not the 60s, fucked up the date)

[Anonymous No.17014779]

>>17014612
Brandom sanitizes Hegel back into Kant. He completely misses the point. You may as well just read more Kant.

>>17014725
>there's not exactly some objective material groupthink matrix we can jack into and experience each eachothers consciousnesses
it's called language, though it isn't objective or material, it's symbolic and mediated.

[Anonymous No.17014784]

>>17014711
The reason is to argue that what is impossible to say would not be valuable if you figured out a way to say it.
Let's imagine the qualia of a particular experience. You create a new word, "acran" to mean "the qualia of that experience." You then say, "That was acran." See, what you just said is worthless. I can say it if I change linguistic rules to allow myself to say it; I shouldn't say it because I shouldn't change linguistic rules.
Remember, Witt loved linguistic rules and believed philosophy's attempts to change them to find "truth" were all inherently wrongheaded.

[Anonymous No.17014786]

>>17014778
merci mon ami ;_)

[Anonymous No.17014791]

>>17014779
>sanitizes Hegel back into Kant
I disagree. Brandom has a clear understanding of Hegel's idealism and inferentialism which is very different from Kant's own views. You can say Hegel is similar to Kant according to Brandom, but he isn't Kantian.

[Anonymous No.17014793]

>>17014784
>The reason is to argue that what is impossible to say would not be valuable if you figured out a way to say it.
But I can't figure out a way to say it. Hence "impossible to say".

[Anonymous No.17014794]

>>17014756
Based Wittgerstein and god bless Anglos

[Anonymous No.17014812]

>>17014739
give an example to
>The inevitability of contradiction is demonstrated throughout the phenomenology and science of logic, in the phenom
what are the things contradicting? how does that reach absolute truth? is he saying that the history of philosophy is opposites going against each other and they will reach the truth at the end of the road?

[Anonymous No.17014815]

>>17014793
Yes, you can. If you changed the language to allow for it, you could.
Wittgenstein's point is that philosophy tries to change language to allow for assertions that it views as "logical" or "true," and that, if none of these assertions can be made in ordinary language, they don't have any value at all.

[Anonymous No.17014830]

>>17014725
i think what he means by consciousness is like "the zeitgeist" as opposed to sentience or qualia. i dunno tho, can a hegel-fag confirm?

(this is exactly the problem with continentals, they use the same words but mean different things and they never acknowledge the context)

[Anonymous No.17014866]

>>17014779
I can not experience your consciousness through your words, though, I can merely be party, in a very limited way, to a few of your thoughts. Sharing selected ideas with someone else through the medium of language does not, and cannot, break that barrier of isolated consciousness. So what does, besides mystical experiences like shared dreams, clairvoyance, etc.? Hegel isn't mystical... so what does he mean?

[Anonymous No.17014901]

>>17014866
>I can not experience your consciousness through your words, though, I can merely be party, in a very limited way, to a few of your thoughts.

not disagreeing but wasn't this the aim of modernists? to convey consciousness through language? albeit as you say in a fragmented manner

[Anonymous No.17014908]

>>17014812
>chapter 1
>Being
>a. being
>Being, pure being – without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly. If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would thereby fail to hold fast to its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. – There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure empty intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or, it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

The notion of being contains within it nothingness, contradiction. The contradiction is internal to the thing, not two things contradicting.

It doesn't reach absolute truth. Hegel demonstrates absolute knowing, the knowledge that contradiction is absolute (another contradiction?) He is not saying that the history of philosophy is opposites going against each other and they will reach the truth at the end of the road. But there is a movement perhaps vaguely akin to that.

[Anonymous No.17014924]

>>17013901
Philosophy texts have traces of both the literary and the didactic, in differing amounts for different writers. I find Kant more difficult to read than Hegel, but I find Kant easier to recap and jump around within like a textbook whereas the PoS in particular almost has a "plot." Just keep trying anon, that's all I can say

[Anonymous No.17014935]

>>17014866
Yes it's limited and mediated, but it's still experience. All experience is limited and mediated. Even shared dreams etc. are limited and mediated. If you're so curious about what Hegel means you should try reading him.

[Anonymous No.17014940]

>>17014791
http://journal.instifdt.bg.ac.rs/index.php?journal=fid&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=296&path%5B%5D=296

[Anonymous No.17014978]

>>17014940
Indeed, Brandom does say Hegel is closer to Kant than most of academia says. That doesn't mean Brandom says Hegel isn't distinct from Kant, which seems to be what you're saying he's saying.

[Anonymous No.17015002]

>>17014908
>The notion of being contains within it nothingness, contradiction. The contradiction is internal to the thing, not two things contradicting.
where is the contradiction? being implies nothingness. but nothingness isnt. i see no contradiction here. implying something isnt being it, so the two opposite things arent being being at the same time but rather only implying each other.

[Anonymous No.17015028]

>>17014978
I'm saying that Brandom misses the point of Hegel: that contradiction is ontological, not epistemological. Without that move you lose Hegel. Thus: may as well be reading Kant. Not "you are just reading exactly Kant"

[Anonymous No.17015036]

>>17014680
Ironic considering Wittgenstein didn't make any effort to be legible in the Tractatus, and admitted as much.

[Anonymous No.17015041]

>>17015002
>Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.
This is a contradiction

[Anonymous No.17015043]

>>17015036
>doesn't even have to try
>still more legible than hegel and other german philosophers
How does he it?

[Anonymous No.17015073]

>>17015041
Reality is full of contradictions

[Anonymous No.17015081]

>>17015041
>>Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.
but thats untrue. plus meaningless

[Anonymous No.17015091]

>>17015081
>Being, pure being – without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly. If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would thereby fail to hold fast to its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. – There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure empty intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or, it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

What's untrue or meaningless here?

[Anonymous No.17015121]

>>17014815
What is the difference between ordinary language and non-ordinary language? Is the distinction itself nameable?

[Anonymous No.17015127]

>>17015091
>It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness
how does he reach this?
>Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.
or this? what the fuck does indeterminate immediate mean? is there supposed to be a comma after "indeterminate immediate"?

hes using words in a way that doesnt apply. these words are meant to be communicative of nebulus concepts used for functionality. they cant be defined because they werent derived from reality, but rather a seeming reality at the human level.

[Anonymous No.17015133]

>>17014866
Not him, but you have yourself a limited experience of your own mind. Lots of things you forget or aren't even conscious of. Most of what happens in your mind is hidden or comes at you apparently without prompting or justification. You can notice that you have intuitions, but can't "feel" spontaneously where those intuitions come from or why they take one form or another. It's even possible for distinct parts of the brain to have separate experiences to an extent.
The consciousness is less an unified process than we tend to think, which means in some respect it's not as irreducibly different from two persons communicating as we tend to imagine.

[Anonymous No.17015141]

>>17015043
He's not really more readable than Kant or Nietzsche, certainly not more than Schopenhauer. His lack of readability in the tractatus is not in making long convoluted sentences but in keeping with a terse, autistic formulation that leaves little in the way of explanation. We tend to imagine philosophical illegibility as being only of the "long convoluted" kind, but one excess is not better than the other.

[Anonymous No.17015152]

>>17015141
Kant is too autistic to be thought of as readable, his ability to make you drift off and glaze over is a more powerful sedative than sleep medication. Nietzsche isn't even a real "philosopher" and Schopenhauer admittedly is rather straightforward, but that's because he put effort into being so unlike his other autistic contemporaries.

[Anonymous No.17015153]

>>17015127
>hes using words in a way that doesnt apply
bro just give up on philosophy it obviously isn't your forte

[Anonymous No.17015164]

>>17015133
>The consciousness is less an unified process than we tend to think, which means in some respect it's not as irreducibly different from two persons communicating as we tend to imagine.
Not an unreasonable argument when you realize the human brain is basically a conserved patchwork of smaller brains. Essentially there are other people, and beasts, in there.

[Anonymous No.17015240]

>>17015164
>>17015133
This is very true an interesting, I hadn't really even gotten to the obvious point that we are even isolated from a complete understanding of our own consciousness. But then isn't it all a cope?One's understanding of what somebody is saying to you is no different than your ad hoc rationalizations for doing irrational things. There is a haze of confusion over all knowledge. Is Hegel suggesting that through philosophy this haze can be to some degree lifted? Or is he just explaining that it can't be? I guess I'll have to try and read him myself.

[Anonymous No.17015285]

Hegel is occultism for retards.

[Anonymous No.17015383]

>read pos
>feel i kinda get it
>come into these hegel /lit threads
>everyones spouting gibberish
What's going on? Am I retarded or are you all?

[Anonymous No.17015533]

>>17015285
hahaha wow anon that was prettyy clevever!
>>17015383
90% of people on these threads havent read hegel or have read extremely summarized versions of him. read commentary/studies instead, because you wont find any insight here.

[Anonymous No.17015568]

>>17015152
Kant is pretty readable, although what he tried to get at can be difficult sometimes. But that's mostly Critique of Pure Reason, his most difficult work by far. Groundwork of the metaphysics of moral for instance is pretty accessible.

Nietzsche is certainly a philosopher, and it's not really up to you to decide. He's been part of the philosophical conversation since before his death, he wrote inspired by earlier philosophers and inspired later philosophers, and is commented on and answered to by others philosophers as if he was one of their own, he is taught in every philosophical faculty in the Western world as a philosopher, etc. You'd need to arbitrarily change the definition of philosopher to exclude him.

>Schopenhauer admittedly is rather straightforward, but that's because he put effort into being so unlike his other autistic contemporaries.
Not sure what you mean, Schopenhauer is readable therefore it invalidates the fact that he's readable?

Anyway the bar for readability isn't very high if we're talking 19th century and 20th century German philosophers. So even if Wittgenstein was more readable than them it wouldn't be much of an achievement. Compare with non-pomo French philosophers, compare with Plato, with most medieval philosophers, even most of Aristotles, about half of English philosophers, pretty much all of italian philosophers, etc. All more readable than Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.

[Anonymous No.17016440]

>>17014778
Have this one as well. Apparently there is a good commentary from J.F. Marquet, which could help to understand the book.

[Anonymous No.17016503]

>>17015153
Not him but if you can’t explain to someone the ideas a reader has in a digestible way you don’t understand it either lol

[Anonymous No.17016510]

>>17016503
If it was possible to dumb it down, Hegel would have done it himself.

[Anonymous No.17016584]

>>17013901

[Anonymous No.17016825]

>>17014197
*Geist
Lost in translation anon

[Anonymous No.17016859]

>>17014188
checked

[Anonymous No.17016884]

finally a good Hegel bread

[Anonymous No.17016949]

>>17015568
>You'd need to arbitrarily change the definition of philosopher to exclude him.
Considering how hard it is to parse a coherent argument (which is not later contradicted by Nietzsche himself), I don't think you'd have to change the definition at all.

[Anonymous No.17017719]

bump

[Anonymous No.17017752]

>>17014261
objective spirit for example means for exemple the state society, ethics and law

[Anonymous No.17017777]

>>17015121
Ordinary language is how a term is used in day-to-day conversation and thought. Non-ordinary language is how it is used in philosophy. "Spirit" would never be used in day-to-day conversation how Hegel used it.

[Anonymous No.17017930]

>>17014312
It’s the eternal creative ideal substance.

[Anonymous No.17019554]

>>17014924
>PoS in particular almost has a "plot."
This is a good way to put it, its written so that taking a "scene" and its "characters" (Hegel's terminology) out of context makes them essentially illegible.

[Anonymous No.17019574]

>>17013901
Is he the final boss of philosophy?

[Anonymous No.17019586]

>>17016825
It should be concretely explainable in any language if it's not a mystical concept, I reckon.

[Anonymous No.17020070]

>>17019586
>I require spoon feeding at every step

[Anonymous No.17020092]

>>17020070
As we can see, the mystic cowers behind word games and refuses to explain himself.