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Any Hegel fans here?

antireconciler

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I've had a fascination with Hegel's philosophy for a few years but haven't really understood it well. I want to know if there are any members here who have read him and really understand the way his system goes together. Or, if you can build the world from scratch with nothing but reason, showing why everything that is is the way it is, including life, the world we see, conceptual categories, subjectivity, embodiment, death, religious experience, etc., then that's good enough too. j/k

Just looking for someone I can ask questions of or consider the opinions of or reflect with concerning Hegel's system. Even if you aren't an expert.

Also of interest to me is how A Course in Miracles integrates with Hegel, because they seem to so very nicely, and I enjoy ACIM very much too.

Or, if you just like Hegel, here's a good place to show your support! :D
 

nozflubber

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given that I like Kant and admire some of Marx's keen observations, I'm sure I'd like Hegel too.... if I could actually understand him. And I'd don't think it's due my verbal comprehension, but rather Hegel's aversion to clarity
 

Valiant

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Fans? I snicker at the choice of word. Hegel was a good philosopher, but not exactly the kind of guy that have fans... :D
 

antireconciler

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Fans? I snicker at the choice of word. Hegel was a good philosopher, but not exactly the kind of guy that have fans... :D

Really? I wonder why ...

I only got part of the way through the Phenomenology of Spirit before admitting that there was simply too much I wasn't understanding. I have been reading Charles Taylor's commentary, however, and that's something that I can understand and it really is like unlocking the text and what's inside just really makes me really enthusiastic. I'm actually really glad for the T types who can just read it and not want to throw down the book because sometimes I do because it's so exciting I can't concentrate on what I'm reading anymore.

Some people can just write brilliant philosophy and some people can just understand it and talk about it like it's normal ... must be nice! :laugh:
 

nozflubber

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Some people can just write brilliant philosophy and some people can just understand it and talk about it like it's normal ... must be nice!


Hegel's more of an exception than the rule, to that. I forget where I read it/who i heard it from, but a contemporary philosopher said he could only understand Hegel when high on Nitrous.
 

jtanSis1

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I take it all in with a grain of salt. The trick is to keep each main idea seperate from the others and not try to integrate them till later. Also, try having a pad of paper nearby to keep track of insights and main points. The main issue with philosophy is that most of it contradicts the others, so you want to take what you like from each part.
 

antireconciler

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I'm a fan. Read my signature.

Oh. I'd forgotten about that. ^_^ Woohoo!

I take it all in with a grain of salt. The trick is to keep each main idea seperate from the others and not try to integrate them till later. Also, try having a pad of paper nearby to keep track of insights and main points. The main issue with philosophy is that most of it contradicts the others, so you want to take what you like from each part.

That, I think, is what's so nice about reading a commentary first, and why I struggled with just trying to pick him up and dig into it. I got lost in the details. What's cool about it though is that any particular detail is like a scaled down version of the system as a whole. It's quite disorienting because you're not sure where the beginning or the end is. You just get a feeling of needing to take in everything at once and not being able to.

Hegel's more of an exception than the rule, to that. I forget where I read it/who i heard it from, but a contemporary philosopher said he could only understand Hegel when high on Nitrous.

What's frustrating to me sometimes is that any particular point isn't that difficult. Once something makes sense you're just dumbfounded that you didn't get it before. It just seems to exercise a mode of thinking that comes only with difficulty. Equally frustrating is that it becomes so difficult to explain because you find your interlocutor asking you questions that they systematically can't appreciate the answer to. ANY simple question is like opening Pandora's box. They don't see the interconnections between their question and a hundred thousand others, but instead think they've asked an isolated question warranting an isolated answer. It often frustrates people when they can't get that.

"The ten thousand questions are one question. If you cut through the one question, then the ten thousand questions disappear."
 

FDG

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Lol, Hegel must have been the worst philosopher to date, a real complete crackpot. Nothing of what he says makes sense.
 

SpottingTrains

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Seems fairly interesting. What book would you recommend the most for someone who was interested in his ideas?

Also...I thought this thread was about Katherine Heigl also T.T
 

Dwigie

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Lol, Hegel must have been the worst philosopher to date, a real complete crackpot. Nothing of what he says makes sense.

Considering this is one of the philosopher I will be studying this year in philosophy class and that my teacher is constantly singing praises about him, I'd like to ask you why you think that.:shock:
I haven't read his books but will have read parts of them by next week.
 

EcK

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Lol, Hegel must have been the worst philosopher to date, a real complete crackpot. Nothing of what he says makes sense.
Never studied hegel, so I can't really be the judge of that but, try some descartes.
The man is an idiot, there's no other way of puting it. And really, I'm not saying that lightly, I did try and try again.

I think his theories survived only because he was as dumb as the general population.
 

the state i am in

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one of my best friends is a card-carrying hegelian/foucaldian. everything needs updating to keep up with the current needs of modern discourse.

my favorite thinkers are gilles deleuze, ludwig wittgenstein, gregory bateson, carl jung, and pierre bourdieu (a post-structuralist marx-influenced ethnologist who, to my taste, is eminently more readable (theoretical!) than other similars like foucault, latour, etc.)

i think hegel is very interesting. i think his philosophy evokes concepts necessary to unseat kant's staid sense of the world as architectonics. hegel shifts underneath the surface. a philosophy of history, change, transformation. opening up ideas and connections to past concepts, heraclitus, eastern, etc. a great bridge for nietzsche, heidegger, and others who paved the way to post-structuralism. which, while maybe way too texty and literary-discourse based (philosophy of language in the mid 20th cent!... not that there's anything wrong with that...), is pretty much a theory of semiotics and meaning and how meaningful signification and systems and information and communication work in an abstracted theoretical topological way.
 

antireconciler

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I'll try to animate Hegel briefly because I really like the feeling of doing so, in the same way I like happiness.

Kierkegaard complains that so many things he says can be reduced to various paragraphs in Hegel's Logic and Encyclopedias, as though the whole strength of what he says is lost if that is true. It seems Kierkegaard is complaining that reducing his thinking to something systematic takes away a vital component of it, such as the place for faith. K. seems to adhere very fundamentally to a common and typically Christian dichotomy between reason on the one hand and faith on the other. The two are thought to be mutually exclusive, and this is exactly what Hegel would deny. K.'s complaint appears to be that reducing all matters of human activity to reason takes away the whole freedom and moral struggle associated with right action, and that the absence of this leads only toward determinism or fatalism. It is a common fear, even today, and we see that it is probably exactly this resistance which stopped Kant short of a true idealism, and left him still with a gap between ontology and phenomenology.

Yet somehow, for Hegel, clear rational thought is the very ground of freedom. We see that where there is unclear thinking, there is only a mind without mastery, which is instead fated to reaction against an unknown to it, which appears foreign and alien. Choice, ironically, can only appear where one is not compelled by forces which appear contingent and purely given limitation. Indeed, the whole point of Hegel's philosophy is to undo the fixed and rigid and unrecognized in the mind, and this is also to say that the end of Hegel's philosophy is perfect knowledge. This must be a process of rational recognition, which in turn is nothing other than that of seeing with rational clarity.

The fundamental drive in Hegel's dialectic is the force of contradiction which appears in every thought which is NOT fixed. The fixed is purely given, as though indifferent to one's self, and in this respect, the relationship is one sided. To NOT be fixed is to resemble the self in that it is affected just as it affects. In this respect, it is reflective. The other finds it's negation by the self just as the self find its negation in the other. Hegel observes, taking from Kant, that consciousness is in fact entirely impossible without consciousness OF something. In other words, consciousness is that which returns to itself THROUGH what it is not. The self can be aware of itself ONLY IN CONTRAST to its other. But since this is the foundation of its existence, it is also the foundation of the OTHER'S existence, or else the self could never return to itself out of its other. It would only find the alien in which causation was only one directional.

So, if contrast or "negativity" is the foundation of consciousness, and, as Kant shows, the unitary "I", or self, then the self just IS negativity, and so too is everything before it. Everything IS, for the self, because it is negated by an other, and his just means that one's self is also IN what one is not, or that everything goes over into its opposite. But you see that this is a process of contradiction, but also a necessary and ontological contradiction. So, as a genuine ontological force, for Hegel, the whole force of the temporal becomingness of the universe is set in motion. Again, everything is not merely explained to rational consciousness as being, in itself, what is not something else, but this is also the very ground. A consequence is that Hegel must break from Kant's notion of the real noumenal world beyond thought which we can say nothing about. Nothing can stand in a one-directional relationship for Hegel, which affects, but is not affected and, importantly, for consciousness, because it will always manifest in contradiction. In fact, the mind cannot conceive without contradicting itself the existence of anything beyond it, yet this is so easily overlooked because so much of the alienness many insist on relies on their not comprehending this.

But you see that this contradiction in the mind is no different than the ontological force compelling temporal becomingness, and this is why Hegel ends up with a kind of philosophy of history too, because the consequence here is that philosophy and human thought itself is fueled by the force of contradiction in its eternal attempt to reconcile opposition in the same way the whole of the manifest universe is. In other words, the whole of history is explainable in terms of RATIONAL NECESSITY, and this is where Hegel draws his notion of fate ...

Anyway, the whole idea of the rejection of the alien (or passively "given" before consciousness), though, should make sense for our atheists here who so despise the Christian doctrine of a supernatural being, that God exists separate from and above the universe. This is a commonplace objection and it is forceful because it is rational. But now, if only they saw that the "realist's" idea of a world beyond objective thought which they so readily adopt is NO DIFFERENT in concept from the Christian doctrine they object to so fervently. The latter places a conceptually real entity into the beyond-class of concepts, namely, the world beyond the mind, just as the former does, namely, God beyond the universe. They appear different only because the contradiction of existence for the self of that which is not for the self is not seen so readily as the idea of an entity (God) beyond the sum of all entities (the universe). Our "realists" are ACTUALLY supernaturalists! How ironic! There IS no beyond because there can be no one-sidedness for consciousness! It is literally contradictory. As a consequence, reality truly appears before you because appearance is exactly what reality is.

Charles Taylor's book, Hegel, is a magnificently accessible introduction to Hegel which I am currently reading. It is a wonderful wonderful book.

A world where nothing is alien, is a world where fear has been completely eradicated, and human bonds of community have taken in and embraced the universe whole. So strongly is my whole being united in the desire to forward this end that it is the same as saying that world-love is the meaning driving my existence of which I am an expression, and it is why Hegel excites me so much. Anyone will laugh in joy to see another dance to the same melody of theirs because singing is a song of sharing to begin with, and both are the instruments of each note and measure.

Hegel's philosophy derives from an astounding celebration of life. I love life too, and I want to celebrate it. :heart: :D
 
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