A History of Philosophy | 57 Hegel

then to read Hegel I'm not unrealistic enough to expect that you have already read Hegel since you've just been doing an examination but you will find that Hegel while when you get into a cab Eulerian his style is fairly straightforward reading initially he seems verbose there's a little book by Brenda Blanchard called on philosophical style and the literary style if you can call it that of philosophers in which he suggests that people like Jonathan Swift George Bernard Shaw would say that major Andre was hanged if H Bradley whose British idealist about the turn of the century would say that he was killed one of his colleagues bows and ket would say he died Kant would say his mortal existence achieved its termination and Hegel would tell us that a finite determination of infinity had been further determined by its own negation but if you were listening you caught in that final statement of what it means to say that moderate major Andre was killed you caught an expression of Hegel's dialectic listen to it once again a finite determination of infinity yes the infinite the absolutely all-inclusive being our finite determination of that that's an individual okay for thesis he exists had been further determined by its own negation yes his existence is negated giving further specificity to that event to that period in history so to say a person is killed comes you see with all sorts of trailing implications and what Hegel is doing in simply the simple idea that this guy was killed is seeing it as part of a much larger picture well it may be a matter of literary style but quite plainly the philosophical framework that he's working with comes out in his style so let me start then our discussion of Hegel by reminding you of the things that I say last time concerning these German ID lists generally I may not be realized I may be not unrealistic enough to think that you've already read Hegel having just done an exam but I am realistic enough to think that you are likely forgotten what we said about the German idealists last time so let's let's pick up a little bit there I said we were going to get a new metaphysic absolute idealism in which every individual event and entity is an expression of the all-inclusive process so that your self-consciousness is just a passing moment in the self-consciousness of the divine the divine which is working out its full freedom and self-expression in the course of history and so that Hegel saw for instance Napoleon they were after all contemporaries he saw Napoleon that way as embodying in an individual way distinctive but in a in our world significant way embodying the free creative movement of the spirit of a culture in history overcoming all opposition in the path the sovereignty of creative spirit now this is obviously not a mechanistic cause effect and model it's a process model that sees organic interrelatedness of everything within the all-inclusive one so if you're talking then about the place of Napoleon in history Hegel would do it this way that all history converges on that individual that event and all history opens up from that point on music history gives birth to Napoleon and the Napoleonic event is pregnant with all the future history so he calls Napoleon a world historical figure a world historical figure one in whom the past is summed up and one that is loaded with future yet the notion of process organic into relatedness they're very figures of speech er biological figures so that metaphysical monism absolute idealism a monistic idealism everything is spirit at work freedom bursting out all over is hail very much romanticist now while that's one side of his metaphysics it is I think one which has come to be no ppreciate ignore in the twentieth century perhaps the second half second two-thirds of the 20th century then it was appreciated in the early part of the 20th century if you pick up works on Hegel that were written in the period from 1900 to about 1930 40 you'll find that he's depicted as a rationalist rather than a romanticist and well maybe but certainly not in the 18th century since he's depicted as a rationalist because he says that the the rational the real is rational and the rational is real so he seems to be saying that whatever you decide is rationally necessary that's the way reality is which sounds very rationalistic but what does he mean by the statement that's the question what does he mean by the statement he means that the real is a creative manifestation everything that's real is a creative manifestation of see I'm not even spelling it right manifestation of mind spirit that's what the real is and so of course to say that everything that's real is a creative manifestation of spirit is to say in that sense it's rational or spiritus the real is rational and to say that the rational is real is simply to say that the the categories of thought which structure creative thinking and creative activity that the categories of thought are also categories of reality which is of course just what Aristotle had thought that the categories of thought are also categories or reality so that when we get into his logic in just a little while we'll be seeing that he spells out all sorts of categories logical categories that remind you in a way of cants categories Kant had said the categories of thought of purely subjective are only categories of thought Hegel says phooey like categories of reality except that he says it in German well that's what we'll have to see obviously a good question but the categories of thought are also categories of reality so keep in mind that the starting point for Hegel is the the all-inclusive creative spirit whose creativity is being freely manifested in the ongoing movement of history now that's the second theme in his metaphysics that there's a third and the third theme in in a way is an echo of the earliest Greek thought now if you can cast your mind back to about four or five hundred BC or alternatively just the last August and September you'll remember that even before the pre-socratics got going in the Greek poets like his Eon some extent home Sophocles Aeschylus there's a recognition that the the the universe as a whole is an ordered unity of which a just society a well-ordered society a city-state is a microcosm of which a just person with a well-ordered moral life is a further mini Kazem so that you get this macrocosm microcosm business and the individual and the historical state and the universe as a whole are all made in the same image ordered unity now that's what underlay the Lagos concept of the pre-socratics and the theory of forms that is it develops in Plato you remember that story I hope well Hegel likewise and he uses the term Lagos yes he Hegel sees the individual as a microcosm of the whole you're a microcosm of what absolute spirit is you're in the image of God and the state and he's thinking of the nation-state since this is romanticism in the 19th century in the nation-state is a further microcosm of the whole a manifestation of creative spirit work in history so when we get to his major work the phenomenology of mind the German term is Geist which is perhaps better translated spirit like the old anglo-saxon word ghost Geist nothing a phenomenology of spirit will find that his description while he talks of self first and then society and then culture and a whole historical sense what he's doing is unfolding as it were this mental meandering that traces the dialectical unfold of self-consciousness but you never know whether he's talking adjust of the self or of a society and social consciousness or of history and the unfolding of history is he simply because what goes on in one is sort of like what goes on in the other and what goes on in the whole the individual the society the universe is on so that as you read that thing about the master-servant relationship and which i think is the first selection you'll say yes this is about how the individual achieves some sort of self-awareness of position in relationship to you see but you could read the same sort of thing about how a nation achieves its own identity in relationship to and this whole process is the process of the absent in the dialectical unfolding of things so so keep in mind that analogy to the early Greeks particularly the microcosm macrocosm a kind of aspect and the the way in which these processes are ordered at the micro and the macro level are always rationally ordered yes rationally ordered because the real is rational in all processes of history irrational in his sense of rational yes what is his sense of rational well that moves us of course from his new metaphysic and to a new methodology to a new methodology what we've had in the preceding century or two is the attempt at a demonstrative metaphysic demonstrative knowledge deductive reason syllogistic mathematical reasoning starting either with self-evident truths or empirical generalizations and of course it's that kind of demonstrative metaphysic that both human Kant was so critical of and in effect Hegel agrees with their criticism he's not trying to do that kind of demonstrative metaphysic he's not trying to prove his conception of reason in other words is not the conception of deductive proofs his conception of reason is what you might call thinking trying to understand trying to get clear about something for for that eighteenth-century business a reason involved ideas which form propositions judgments which are developed further in syllogisms so that in effect the unit of thought in the tradition from from D card on is really the proposition the judgments we make and it was because Kant was likewise committed to that Oh third Kant tried to find the categories that underlie the judgments now the key difference for Hegel is that Hegel makes the focus of thought reason not the proposition that the concept the McGriff the concept that's quite a difference you see if you're thinking in terms of propositions you try to see what a proposition logically implies and you try to state it in another proposition but if you're thinking in terms of concepts you're trying to clarify a concept you're trying to explore conceptual relationships one concept gives rise to another concept as your mind meanders along and I use that term the entering intentionally doesn't always go in a straight line meandering doesn't it's almost a trial and error working through various concepts so that as you try to do get an understanding of a particular concept the concept of being or the concept of justice whatever it is you you start with something of a an initial idea that first comes to mind you start that is to say with a direct awareness you're directly aware of some concept nothing and that initial concept you begin with is mediated by a process of reflection in which you say to it well yes no you know and you're not satisfied with it you see another side of the picture so there is a process and not only of direct awareness but of mediation through that reflective meandering you see a to a of a clearer fuller outcome a clearer conceptualization it seems to me this is much more descriptive of the way most people think isn't that the way it is for you it it is for me you know there's a sense in which the kind of reflection which goes on throughout a college career could be seen something like that you start with some sort of an idea of an education and then you're confronted with an idea of liberal arts education that you're never really assimilated before and you move from a pragmatic to a purist liberal arts one you know and then the two seem to come together in your mind at the time you're graduating you begin to see all of the possible transfers of learning that are possible from a philosophy major to every occupation you can imagine which is travel okay let's hope we think sorting through our ideas or if you prefer to say playing with your marbles but trying to get clear about things so one he's much more concerned with this conceptualization now it's that creative thinking process which is the life of the mind music the lives of life of spirit and your outward life becomes a manifestation of the inner conceptualization so that human life is the life of mind the life of spirit and in the German since that's culture the spiritual life is culture and what's embraced in culture in the final analysis is art religion philosophy where our art gives some sort of sensory image as a way of playing with the concepts and religion uses symbols in playing with the concepts it's philosophy that gets straight at the heart of the thing conceptualize it so the whole process is going going down there to that bad end now in talking of this new method notice two things I call the new method last time phenomenology yeah a phenomenology of mind of spirit phenomenology is descriptive of the law a description of the log-off structure logy is a study of study of what a study of the log-off structure the log our structure of what the phenomenon of thinking the phenomena of the life of spirit the life of the mind see it's a descriptive process so you get the new method there but you also get the new logic the dialectic the thesis antithesis synthesis and it's at that point that we can turn to this outline that I gave you just now now you you notice that that on this outline you have all sorts of triads three points three points and three points within each of the three points and three points within each of the three points that are within the other three points that are within the first three punch wheels within wheels are turning yeah the the overall three points you see our first logic second nature third spirit I think it's not until you get to spirit that you get the conscious outworking of the concept what you have in in logic of course what you have in logic is is nothing but the the logical structure if you like the form our thorns the conceptualization follows and for that matter that history follows whereas in in nature what you have is the world of Natural Sciences here you have the the objective material on which in which the Spirit is manifested that a preconscious let remember I call this a gradualism in which the varying degrees of the manifestation of spirit well look at the logic and we'll look at the others later on you notice that everything numbered one is a thesis everything number two is an antithesis everything number three is a synthesis ok the thesis is what is immediately apprehended comes to the mind immediately the antithesis is the mediating stage as a synthesis is where it comes together with comprehension thesis antithesis synthesis the initial concept is always very abstract and as comprehension grows it becomes more and more concrete so it's a movement from the abstract to the concrete and the most concrete expression of thought is in culture well let me try an overhead and see if that will help us get on Milt them with what he's doing and this will be a little bit of an exercise in reading tape is that too small Tesla's No move it back a bit do you want to nurse it it's that better let's sharpen it up yeah that's a bit better okay I should have blown it up I mean enlargement you see we want to get the process concrete now that's not very that's about it I think okay remember that the traditional laws of logic begin with the law of identity a equals a in fact maybe I should begin right there and swing over to the other one notice what he says this when the principles of essence are taken as essential principles of thought they become predicates of a proposed subject which because there are essential is everything true of everything and the propositions thus arising have been stated as universal laws of thought what propositions propositions that are principles of what it is to be of essence what is being on your outline of logic you notice that you start with being and then move to essence what it is that it is existence what it is essence incidentally where did such get his famous terminology for existence precedes essence Hegel you see such is using a hog alien dialectic as we'll see when we get to him okay so the universal laws of thought that's the first of them the maxim of identity reads everything is identical with itself a equals a negatively law of non-contradiction a cannot at the same time be a and nada this maxim instead of being a true law thought is nothing but a law of abstract understanding now remember that I said that he regards the traditional laws of logic as true a trivial is a trivial why well because he's not concerned with some propositions static proposition about a static reality such that a equals a at every time now he's not concerned with such sheer abstractions from reality reality is process the unfolding meandering of thought and in that process nothing stays the same now that doesn't violate the law of thought which says a equals a at the same time the trouble is there's no same time tomorrow as yesterday different time and so the law of identity may deal with abstract understanding but not with concrete conceptualization of process you see so come back to the other one identity is in the first place the repetition of what we had earlier is being but has become through super session of its character of a medium Asst yes if you look on the outline of the logic you'll notice that within the quality the logical quality affirming remember quality in logic is affirmative or negative you see you start with being and then you move to the negative non being okay from the affirmative being to the negative non being to the synthesis of the two becoming you CMI the same as I was yesterday identical or not yes both the same and not else a because I'm in a process of becoming so thin identity is the repetition of what was being now is becoming because the immediate nosov being that was has been superseded Super Session it's been superseded it's therefore being as I D ality that we talk about it we're talking about identity some ideal abstraction that isn't in a process of becoming it's important to come to a proper understanding of the true meaning of identity and for that purpose we must guard against taking it as abstract identity to the exclusion of all difference now that's the touchstone for distinguishing bad philosophy from what truly deserves the name of philosophy identity you in its truth as an ideology an ideal notion of what is is a high category of religious modes of being as well as other forms of thought and mental activity the true knowledge of God begins with knowing him as a year's identity absolute identity unchanging yes he but does that apply to anything in time is there any such an changing identity in time in history to know so much as to see that all the power and glory of the world singsing to nothing in God's presidents because he is who he is unchanging identity in the same way identity as self-consciousness my own personal identity you remember the question of personal identity in John Locke and others what constitutes my identity as a person identity a self-consciousness in what distinguishes men from nature particularly from brutes which never reached the point of comprehending themselves as I that is a pure self-contained unit so in connection with thought the main thing is not to confuse the true identity which contains being and characteristics transfigured in its changing processes don't confuse true identity with the abstract identity of therefore all the charges of narrowness hardness meaninglessness directed against thought from the quarter of feeling there's some of your amend assists rest on the perverse assumption that thought acts only as a Faculty of abstract identification formal logic confirms this assumption by laying down the supreme law of thought a equals a if thinking were no more than abstract identity we couldn't but own it to be feudal tedious trivial no doubt the notion the idea to were identical with themselves but identical only insofar as at the same time they involve distinction well you follow that line of unfolding the concept of concrete identity which is identity through difference rather than the abstract ideal identity of something in which there is no process of change now but the same token take a look at what he says about non contradiction where it's the the second paragraph now this is the excluded middle law sorry excluded middle instead of speaking of the maxim of excluded middle remember something is either a or non a there's no third alternative instead of speaking but a maximum of excluded middle which is a maxim of abstract understanding we should rather say that everything is opposite neither in heaven and earth neither in the world of mind or of nature is there anything such as an abstract either/or those that law of excluded middle maintains whatever exists is concrete with difference and opposition within itself I'm one thing I'm becoming something else the finitude of things will then lie in the want of correspondence between their immediate being what I am now and what they essentially are is the I am not yet fully what I am in essence in principle we're all in process thus in inorganic nature the acid is implicitly at the same time the base it's only being consistent its relationship to its other the acid is not something which persists quietly in the contrast it's always in effort to realize what it potentially is in process contradiction in that sense is the very moving principle of the world it's ridiculous to say that contradiction is unthinkable sure you can think both a and nada insofar as they apply at different times or in different respects Aristotle knew that if a contradiction is the moving principle of the world is ridiculous to say contradiction is unthinkable the only thing correct in that statement is that contradiction is not the end of the matter contradiction contradicts itself okay you move from the antithesis to the synthesis it's only one side of the contrary so the proximate result of our position realized as contradiction is the ground of being the ground which contains identity as well as difference superseded deposed two elements in the complete enocean thesis and ethicists synthesis now does that make sense see what he's saying the traditional laws of logic Aristotle himself qualified the with the phrase at the same time and in the same respect the so to think that those laws of logic give you a corner on a changing process obviously mistaken they're dealing with something you hold in your mind in abstraction from the concrete process of reality where you think of the essence of something in abstraction from the process of actualize in that in reality you know you can look at a squealing squalling we called baby one of those things that takes in liquid at one it lets out both constantly and say this is a rational being well you are speaking in abstraction about an ideal essence which plainly has not yet been achieved but obviously we're also in as much as there is that what Aristotle calls potency potential the process of actualization is going to be going on is going on but no research in which what it is now in reality is being addicted by what it is becoming namely toilet-trained to the parents grief relief and that charming childhood in antithesis to the babyhood is somehow rather going to be itself transcended in a way that both contradicts and preserves what the youngster was in infancy and what it was in childhood but going far beyond that now if everything every finite being is actually in crosses of become you see in the first dialectical movement under logic those categories the concept of being is sheer abstraction if by that you mean unchanging the process of non-being is sheer abstraction you move from those abstractions to the more concrete concept incoming yes it new or concreted it's the more the comprehension of the concept and it's not until the concept of being is amplified and fleshed out in the great overall synthesis that you finally get what being is in its fullest reality namely absolute all-knowing completely free sovereign spirit Hegel thank you so when he says about contradiction that it's the moving principle of the world he's not saying that the world is teeming with contradictions and that self contradictory propositions are true and now he's simply saying that the process of history things are changing does that relativize everything is it relative eyes ethics not so not safe I'll have to see why okay you want to pause there and reflect Steve yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm glad you raised that see I'll take this off if you wanted again say but I but I'm glad you raised that Steve because he does indeed and I wanted to to make that point we have in well actually on this table of logic let's see where is it no I guess yeah under logic three the concept one the subject and small one the initial immediate concept okay at that stage in expounding the categories he points out that a cut that concepts and here's another triad can be universal in particular or individual well you know that's the case already in ordinary logic the universal all men are mortal particular some people are liars individual Socrates is mortal okay individual now what he's doing is pointing out that the universal concept which you might come up with is sheer abstraction it's an abstract ideas the traditional way of talking about it it's an abstract idea there are no real universals running around separately in some Platonic heaven yes see it's abstract thought on the other hand the notion of particulars isolated discrete particulars of an atomistic sort as in John Locke and Descartes and so forth these little Lucretia Adams a thought without any intrinsic connectedness to anything else that is a further abstraction that stands in antithesis to the first abstraction thesis antithesis reality concretely is neither universal in that sense nor particular in that sense you're not an island no man is an island see we are what we are in relationship to everything around us so that the the individual the the individual the concrete individual you'll see who is what he is by virtue of everything that every relationship that is fed into making Steve what he is and everything that will go out from Steve's or history shaping things that emerge you'll see all of that that relationality is what defines your identity you see what you are doing as an individual and what we all do as individuals is to concretize Universal possibilities now the universal is simply abstract possibilities listen and what we're doing is concretizing realizing actualizing that was abstract possibilities you see all of history has had the potency gradually coming coming coming closer and closer to producing fruit for Steve showing us how he's emerged now obviously the world historical figure like Napoleon is vastly different on the Winston Churchill Gorbachev but for every one of us is the same sort of who would you be if it weren't for those forebears and got together who would I be if my dad had married the other girl he was going with first win it how can you tell when is emerging well you sound as if there's a static point emergence as a process takes a long time well no because actually if I were to draw and accurately remember a diagram as an abstraction to the one would flow into the other you'll see no stop no stuff process change so this is how he deals with the theory of universal Steve you see are they are abstract universals concepts yes are the real Universal potentials yes are the real universal well only as their concretizing individuals the individual synthesizes you'll see these antitheses of universality in particularity to concretize a universal is to actualize possibilities in particular ways so his theory of universals is no there are no platonic universals but there are embodied universes incarnated which is sort of an echo of Aristotle in another way one yeah but not Windows no you see the atomistic model of the 17th century was of pellets of matter that are indivisible and having no intrinsic relationship to any other he's rejected that line it's is of individual units of force windowless without any intrinsic causal relationship to anything else Hegel doesn't want that the process is one of interdependence yeah think of it more as a biological process one ism different from Parmenides so this yeah well yeah remember that for Parmenides the basic issue or the basic theme is that there is a way of truth and a way of illusion now Hegel is not calling individuality illusion he's not calling change illusion if you like he has synthesized the two concepts of permanence and change what permanence what permanent form structure reason at work in history the creative unfolding of the concept the self understanding of the absolute yeah the structure of the process is there but - no this isn't Parmenides saying individuals are a loser now at the same time when we get to his social philosophy we'll begin to see that her gallium thought tended to generate conservative political thought and you can see why conservative political thought which views the state as having more significance than what we would call the individual Italian fascism was a kind of neo Hegelian political philosophy the philosopher of Italian fascism was a man named Giovanni Gentili who was Mussolini's Minister of Education for a while and he was a Hogg alien philosopher neo her Galia now don't equate fascism with Nazism philosophically that pulls apart polls but that's the tendency and in more all irenic forms you get conservative political thought coming out in britain so that her galleon ism provided a philosophical framework for certain kinds of political conservatism there an emphasis on taking your place in society and doing your duty we'll talk later of FH Bradley British philosopher who has a classic essay on ethics entitled my station and its duty and if you say it with a broad English accent you begin to get the point my station and it's Duty you know and you get the ideal of the person with his place in society knowing his place of his responsibilities that come with that something that's unknown in American society with its fluidity um alright let's see take a look at the outline on logic would you in the light of this and notice the Triads all the way down you can't mistake them if you think that quality and quantity are antithetical concepts quality and quantity well they are until you synthesize them in them in rather concrete measures so much of such a sort yes a you'll find that Stumpf talks about the being not being becoming business and under essence notice that the the initial notion is of a ground of existence this is a theoretical concept being as it is in itself in its own identity that's what you're after in contrast to mere appearance which is the antithesis nizzy and then you get the concrete actuality you don't talk simply of substance in the actuality or causal processes but of reciprocity reciprocity within an organic whole the interdependence of things within an organism but then more concretely the concept but Gryff where you see yes in talking about a subject you have the concept of the subject then the judgment then the syllogism where you say that's the structure of traditional logic yes ideas judgments and syllogisms sure that's the most abstract way of thinking it's abstraction the antithesis is when you don't look at the subject that way but objects if you like share experience and periodically but you need to bring the the rational structures together with the object in order to grasp the idea the concept now what you have under logic as I say is simply share categories structures of thought that's all structures of thought that applied a reality unchanging structures and when you get into the realm of nature you notice that he's dealing with abstraction first namely laws of nature what are they but generalized abstractions laws of nature and the mechanism he's thinking of cause-effect mechanisms so what you have under that first thing with space-time motion in matter and cause-effect mechanisms is the mechanistic science but then you get beyond the abstractions of mechanistic science to the actual interplay of forces and by now chemistry as a science you see where you see that there are interactions not just one way cause effect relationships as in mechanics but reciprocal causation but the thing that's really beginning to emerge is the biological concept the organism the organic model and here he sees emerging the idea of teleology because biological processes are aimed oriented growth with a view to producing fruit the biological process so he gets back into the teleological there but as a teleological process all the way through okay then next time we'll be dealing with the section dealing with mind spirit picking that up we have five minutes no we don't it's gone alright but polarities like subject and object Universal and particular appearance and reality ideal and real these polarities are antitheses that we have to get beyond that's why and this is getting back to your question how do we know that the rational is the real you see if the difference between appearance and reality is abstraction then you take immediate appearances as real in degree appearances that is to say the first appearance of something the immediate awareness provides you with an awareness of reality but with an imperfect conceptualization and so knowledge is always a matter of degree understanding is a matter of degree well isn't that the way it is if you're trying to gain a conceptual understanding of anything but even though we know in part we still know the part we know which is why in response to both conceptualizations the evaluation is yes no yes a yes in this regard now in some other regards all right we'll pick up next time

Channel: wheatoncollege

Views: 146,599

Rating: 4.8937197 out of 5

Keywords: wheaton, college, illinois, A History Of Philosophy, Arthur F. Holmes

Id: ARarjQYOhA4

Length: 62min 3sec (3723 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015