Contemporary Readings of Hegel (Session 1)

Hello everyone. Welcome to the new Center for Recession Practices Seminar with Ray Bracier, Contemporary Readings of Hegel. This is the first session. I'm going to pass the mic and the camera to Ray to begin the class. Ray, go ahead. Okay, thanks Mo. First of all, I hope everyone can hear me okay. Secondly, the connection here in Lebanon is, you know, unreliable. There are power cuts. We should be okay for the next two and a half hours because the previous, well, the power cuts, we just missed

one per cut now. So I'm hoping that the connection will remain stable. So first of all I'd like to maybe just kind of ask if people wouldn't mind maybe just introducing themselves and letting me know whether or not how familiar they are with Hegel. Whether they've studied Hegel before or the degree of their interest in Hegel. And that will also help me kind of get to know you, remember your names as well. So would someone like to start to volunteer? I begin calling everyone's name because then they mute themselves

so everybody not unmute, right? So I begin from the left. And what I see on the screen is my left is different than everyone. So sorry about that. Aaron, do you want to start? Yeah, sure. So hi, I'm Aaron Marcus. I am coming to you from Berlin this time. And my background is in sort of political science, political philosophy, and intellectual history. I was in German. I have covered Hegel, not in depth, but certainly a background and some direct reading in college about five years ago, and more recently with Peter Wolfendale and Ben Woodard in a class. Okay.

Excellent. Christian, you're next. um i uh i started reading uh uh i've been uh i've been reading philosophy for a few years now i started with like some um like anarchist and marxist stuff like freshman and sophomore more year of high school i read situationist and that got me onto hegel and i started reading some hegel um uh and like i really started reading some hegel then like marcuso junior year of high school. Then I read, um, uh, the spring I read, um, some Zizek, and over the summer I read some about, uh, Kant, and then I went through, uh, and I studied Delos, um, a lot, and, um, then I started

reading more contemporary stuff. Um, uh, I really, uh, I feel like I'm pretty decently well-versed on Hegel, uh, someone who I reference a lot, and I go back to teaching mostly. okay Avend do you want to go next we have difficulty hearing you can you hear me now yes we can hear you now okay alright hi I'm Avend I'm actually in the middle of a sound check right now so I might be darting in and out of this seminar but I'm going to try to pay attention to it as much as I can I'm really glad to be here to be part of it But Hegel, so I'm just actually reading through the phenomenology on my own.

I've never taken a class in it, but I have taken a seminar at New Center with Reza Negarastani last year and started reading Brandome. So I guess that's my angle. I'm particularly interested in philosophy of history. I've been meaning to get around to it. I've basically been meaning to get around to Hegel. It's one of those things. But phenomenology is very thrilling, and I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you have to say about it. Thank you, Avan. Hunter, you're the next. Can you hear me? Yes. So, yeah, I studied Hegel as an undergrad. I took a class on phenomenology of spirit.

and I live in New York I'm pretty yeah I mean I like I read the Zizek book on Hegel that's that's assigned in this you know a couple years ago and so I have very much familiarity but but not from the random angle I don't really know anything about about like Philadelphia school philosophers thank you Kevin do you want to speak a few words next? Yeah, hey, so I'm Kevin. I'm in New York. I've been a fan of the New Center for a while, especially the new rationalism stuff. But this is my first real seminar, I guess. I had the 101 on Hegel.

I read the preface and the introduction. And yeah, I'm really excited to, I've been studying Whitehead recently, And I'm really excited to see how they compare. So, yeah, look forward to this class. Thank you. Maria, you're next. Hi. So my name is Maria. I'm also in New York, and I'm an artist. I have a pretty basic understanding of Hegel, but, like, other people, like, I've been meaning to get around it, especially as like kind of studying systems of philosophy that are like different than the post-structuralists and especially Deleuze, which has been my thing that I've been most dedicated to in the past years.

And so, so I'm really excited about really getting, getting at it from your angle. Thank you. Mika, Mika, you're next. If you want to turn your camera on, that would be lovely too, but it's not obligatory. Can you, can you hear me right now? Yes, we can hear you. I actually will not have video today because my camera's on my laptop. No problem. Okay. So, yeah, I took the seminar, I mean, most recently a year ago on the philosophy of system with Ben Woodard and Peter Wolfendale. But, I mean, I've also been in, I mean, not Hegel directly, but I've been in seminars strictly dedicated to Spinoza and Kant. actually never had a lot of like background and lessing and um a lot of the other writers who's

that sort of led up to the german idealist moment or whatever but i've never actually spent time dedicated to hegel even though i've read quite a bit of like the science of logic phenomenology of spirit the encyclopedia and a lot of the secondary literature um but yeah i'm mike i live in philadelphia how's it going very good thanks okay next is oliver oliver do you want to speak a few words about your familiarity with Hegel. Or unfamiliarity. Yeah, I've tried understanding Hegel. I've spent a lot of time reading through texts and really haven't, well, I can hardly describe anything of Hegel's thought apart from the philosophy of history.

So I'm open to and very keen on learning a lot about Hegel in this course. Fyodor, you're the last. Hi, I'm Fyodor. And yeah, I'm sort of going through the phenomenology of spirit right now on my own. So I'll be excited to hear more. I'm pretty new to his thought, I think. I'm reading the Weiser book on German idealism, the struggle against subjectivism. Okay. Thank you. So just before Craig starts,

I just want to say that I sent everyone an email that includes a handout for today. And also I want to tell everybody that we updated the syllabus and the syllabus now has all the weekly readings there. and as we move along I will be adding the pdfs and the links to the online there and some of them the links are already on the reading so you don't need me to add them so just follow through that that area in the classroom and for the google classroom most of you are already on it some of you have not accepted my invitation so please accept the invitation and join the google google classroom because the material is going to be there and the first email I sent out today had the link to the Google Classroom and the code you need to log in. But remember, for this session, like these Hangouts, you can come in with your regular Google account. Anyone with the link,

as long as they're logged into Google, can attend the class. But for the Classroom, you have to be logged into your NewsCenter email. So maybe sometimes it's just easier to be logged into the NewsCenter email for both, because if you have to go between the two of them during the class, it's going to be hard for you to manage that. So maybe you want to like, if you're planning to go to the classroom, please log into the news center email so you can go back and forth between the two without needing to like log out of one and log into the other one. I don't have any other extra notes. So I say, and I myself, because I would like to have a little bit of an active role in a class like you guys as a student, I want to consider myself also a student. But my knowledge of Hegel is probably less than all of you guys.

But, you know, don't worry about me, Ray. You can adjust the level of this course to what you heard from the others, not me. I will catch up. So, yeah, so here you are. This is the first lecture. Go ahead, Ray. Okay. Right. Well, so first of all, I'll just try to quickly go over the syllabus for the course, which I hope everyone has. So this is really what I'm offering is a compressed version of what was actually originally designed as a 14-week course. So there's been a lot of compression, which unfortunately means that I'll be trying to go through a lot of material in a short span of time.

The Hegel readings will all be from Stephen Hulgate's Hegel Reader, which I believe Mo has made available as a PDF. and the syllabus specifies which texts of Hegel's we'll be looking at on specific weeks. But then obviously we're also going to be focusing on some contemporary interpretations of Hegel. Most importantly, those by Robert Pippen and Robert Brand on the one hand, and those represented in the continental tradition by three thinkers in particular,

Rebecca Comey, Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek. And the reason for this very selective circumscription from among the vast contemporary literature on Hegel is because I think these, in the, if one compares and contrasts the Pippin-Brandom reading with the Comé de l'Argizek reading, there's a really kind of startling antagonism vis-à-vis the understanding of Hegel's contemporary relevance,

but also vis-a-vis the possibilities of rationality and the understanding of philosophy's relationship to history and to the 20th century history in particular. So the course is an attempt, so basically, in a way, the title of the course is an attempt to activate Hegel's thinking rather than simply try to engage in a kind of purely exegetical reconstruction and because hegel is the is the thinker who most famously insists that philosophy

is conditioned by its own time and that philosophical conceptualization is internally conditioned by uh contemporary social historical conjunctures it seems to me that it's impossible to abstract an interpretation of Hegel, an attempt to make sense of Hegel today, from the ways in which his thinking is taken to either be anachronistic or of absolutely decisive contemporary

urgency. And Eagl's thinking can be considered anachronistic if one considers him to be the consummation of a metaphysical tradition that has been allegedly deconstructed in the 20th century by Heidegger and his his acolytes but also by criticized in the analytic tradition so if one way of them one of the things that's a stick here is trying to read to see if a known metaphysical reading of Hegel is possible but not only possible would actually necessary and interestingly both the both factions of Hegel interpreters that we'll be examining and

they both insist that Hegel is not the the metaphysician of absolute spirits which he was taken to be at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. So, in a way, one of the wagers of the seminar will be to try to make sense of Hegel non-metaphysically, without these traditional, independently of a traditional metaphysical framework, in which metaphysics is defined as the a priori knowledge of substance,

and substance, the paradigm for what substance is, is delivered by Aristotle. Substance is what truly is. substance is what is in and by itself so both all the fingers will be again the interpreters will be looking at rejects think that Hegel has successfully superseded this Aristotelian metaphysical tradition but they draw radically divergent consequences from this allegedly successful overcoming or supersession and this is and I think in trying to identify the precise contours

of the antagonism or in terms of the nature of the contradiction I think something really Hegel's decisive contemporary relevance can be exposed. In other words, Hegel is a thinker who insists that all thinking proceeds by way of antagonistic contradiction, so that the contradiction about the meaning of his actuality for us today is the key to understanding, is the key to making sense of Hegel now. So that's the interpretive gambit. Now, this is also connected to the claim, which I hope we'll try to make sense of, that Hegel

is the thinker who introduces time into thinking. Most of what Hegel does is, you know, Hegel is famous for allegedly introducing the obligating philosophy to become self-consciously historical, to become self-conscious about its own historicity. But Hegel is not simply a historicist because Hegel thinks that history is intelligible. has an intelligible structure. And this of course is one of the most notorious claims of Hegelianism and one of the reasons for which it was frequently lambasted. The suggestion

that there is, that history is animated by some kind of teleology and that the unfolding of time is teleologically structured. So already we see, given that teleology is another, the insistence that substance is teleological, substance, the being of substance is necessarily purposeful, Hegel's overcoming or alleged overcoming of Aristotelianism, needs to be understood along with a transformation of the notion of purpose, or telos.

This is, I think, the other kind of crucial parameter in the debate over his contemporary relevance. whether it's possible to jettison Aristotelian essentialism, and yet still retain a notion of rational purposiveness. Because Hegel does insist that a purpose can be retrospectively discerned in history. and it's the nature of this retrospective discernment which is both which is debated

about by the interpreters we're going to be examining. I mean to be to be blunt or to be kind of very schematic on the one hand we have a reading where the Pippin random reading where it's always possible the resources of rationality advance by making sense of retrospectively making sense or rationally justifying what seem to be historical contingencies, accidents. On the other hand, you have this alternative reading which says that Hegel is a thinker

of trauma in some sense. The way to understand Hegel is in terms of the working through of trauma, which is why obviously Kome, Dolar and Zizek are fundamentally inspired by psychoanalysis and they try to interpret Hegel through this psychoanalytic prism which is for which the claim that reason could also reason could somehow successfully integrate these historical

catastrophes or these eruptions of unreason is a fantasy some kind of unfortunate delusion so so I think that what I hope is that although we're going to be looking at trying to focus on the crux of Hegel's speculative machinery. I think the stakes are quite high in terms of understanding, in terms of the implications of a proper understanding of Hegel's conceptual armature. So just to go quickly glance at the syllabus.

I can put it on my screen up so we have the actual syllabus on the screen. Do you want the reading side or your text? The reading side. Yes, the one thinker who I haven't mentioned, who we're also looking at, is of course Adorno. Adorno, who is arguably a thinker who draws inspiration from Hegel, but is also in a way formulates the kind of canonical objection to Hegelism as simply being a kind of theodicy, which is simply no longer viable after the catastrophe of the 20th century.

So we'll also be, in week seven, we will be looking at Adorno's critique of Hegel. And interestingly, where it overlaps, but also where it diverges from the readings proposed by uh, Kome, Dollar, and Zizek. Um, okay, well, are there any questions about the, uh, about the syllabus or about the readings? So if you have questions, unmute yourself and ask the question, but please be brief because we want to save the time for, um, discussion and for the lecture. So yeah, two, two short questions for me. Um, the first is, uh, with regard to these kind of groupings with the reader,

would you suggest I mean it seems kind of obvious to divide them into continental and analytic would you could you think of like a better way of categorizing them or like naming these what was interesting about I guess Pippin and Brandon is the Robert Pippin's book we're really going to be for the first few weeks focusing a lot on Robert Pippin's interpretation and Pippin's book, 1989 book Hegel's Idealism was in a way I think a decisive inspiration for Brandon but is the proposed this you know a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel that would

that made, in a way, that kind of made Hegel intelligible for philosophers reared in the analytic traditions. Pippin himself, although he's, you know, he's a scholar of German idealism, but, you know, he certainly wouldn't describe himself as an analytic philosopher. And of course, Hegel is, you know, paradigmatically anti-analytic philosopher. He's a speculative philosopher. And to understand what Hegel means by speculation is also, Hegel's notion of speculation is this kind of preemptive critique of analytic philosophy in terms of the priority of analysis and argument. Brandom, even more interestingly, so Brandom is a philosopher whose work is, you know,

categorized as belonging to the kind of the analytic canon, but actually his position within that tradition is controversial. First of all, Brandom is a systematic philosopher who's developed, you know, famously kind of inferentialism and analytic pragmatism in between saying and doing. And he has a, he's a, well, his own conception of his philosophical projects is basically, I think, hangs to the analytic tradition by the slenderest of threads,

which is why he is, you know, he's viewed with considerable disdain by lots of, by analytic metaphysicians and more orthodox, you know, proponents of the analytic ideal. ideal. So if you look at figures like Timothy Williamson, who's a very influential contemporary analytic philosopher, and was someone who in his own work, in his book The Thorsier Philosophy, defends the analytic ideal. He thinks it needs to be corrected, but he thinks it needs to be radicalized in terms of achieving a greater degree of

mathematical precision in the formulation of arguments and he takes a very dim view of Brandon's work if he wrote a review of random reason and philosophy which is if not scathing certainly very unfriendly so I really so I actually think that the you know the people in random don't really qualify as analytic philosophers and the what they're trying to do is difficult to kind of reconcile with the analytic self-conception. As for the Adorno, Comé, Dolar and Zizek,

Yes, I mean, I guess they would count as continental philosophers, but continental philosophy is also, has a very kind of, I guess, antagonistic relationship to Hegel. All the kind of the key developments in 20th century continental philosophy were anti-Higelian. Adorno is, I mean, his work, I mean, I think his criticisms of Hegel are rhetorical and actually unconvincing, but he sees Hegel as something, as representing a conception of philosophy which has lapsed,

which is simply indefensible and probably pernicious. Dolar and Zizek self-identify as Hegelians, but obviously their interpretation of Hegel is filtered through the work of Jacques Lacan. So they have a very eccentric, or rather they kind of represent a very eccentric position vis-à-vis what could be called mainstream continental philosophy. and what's interesting is that they fully defend Hegel against the attacks made on them and specifically against the attacks made on them by the post-structurists on the one hand but also by figures like Adorno so I think that's a very interesting stance however it's not clear because

psychoanalytic inspiration it's not clear that they're interested in salvaging the you know hegel's commitment to the powers of rationality the powers of conceptualization and this is something i think uh we'll you know need to examine when we come to discuss their work In other words, they're Hegelians, but they're Hegelians who are not interested in science, or what Hegel called Wissenschaft, the possibility of a speculative science of actuality.

So this is also, so in a way, although these Lacanian Hegelians are very scathing about the allegedly deflationary reading of Hegel proposed by Pippen and Brandom, they themselves propose a deflationary reading. But it's a deflationary reading of another kind. And I think understanding in what sense they too, despite their protestations, are engaged in a conjunctural deflation of Hegel is important. So, what I propose to do, because, you know, already time's moving on, is, okay, I'd like to kind of maybe look at the first handouts.

If you could put it up on the screen. Yes, you can continue talking, I'll put it up in one second. So unfortunately we haven't had time to look at Pepin's book. Pippin's book is going to be our starting point in a way because I think it's the best place to get a grip on this claim that Hegel is not simply a metaphysician.

He's not Aristotle after Kant, as he is sometimes accused of being. He is, in fact, on Pippin's reading, a radical Kantian. He's someone who accepts Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics, but someone who thinks that there are dogmatic residues within Kantian critique, so that Hegel wants to push critique even further to the point where it becomes speculation. And so the first handbook consists of some quotes from Hegel.

of these quotes the first four are from text that well first four are from the encyclopedia logic but also from the text known as the the Berlin phenomenology which is a an early version of the not an early version but a series of lecture courses on the philosophy of mind that Hegel gave us in Berlin when he's a professor. And these, so these quotes are there to help us make our way into the preface to try to

kind of make some sense of some of the, you know, the startling things that Hegel says in the preface where he uses this vocabulary which it is all too easy to simply interpret metaphysically. I mean in a way that the terms he uses invite a metaphysical interpretation. So the challenge is to try to make sense of them non-metaphysically. Now, Pippin insists that Hegel's speculative supersession of Kant is rooted in his radicalization

of the principle of apperception, what Kant called the transcendental unity of apperception. So this is the first quote on the handouts. Now it's important to remember what Kant means by the transcendental unity of apperception. So Kant says that the I think, which must accompany all my representations, is the ultimate synthesizing principle which guarantees the unity of possible experience.

When Hegel uses the word I or self-consciousness, and when I and self-consciousness are roughly equivalent in this context, he is using this term, these expressions of a straightforwardly Kantian provenance. This is coming directly from Kant. And of course the most important thing to understand about Kant's conception of apperception is that apperception is a transcendental function and not the self-relation of some kind of

mental substance. So the principle of our perception in Kant is the destitution of Cartesian substantialism. It's also that which, in a way, rescinds the Cartesian claim about the transparency of consciousness, So the mind's transparency to itself. Because Kant will famously insist that on the absolute difference between the transcendental I and transcendental perception and empirical perception,

so that empirical perception, which is the sense in which we aperceive ourselves experiencing, For Kant, it is a perfectly objective phenomenon. It's something that is part of the domain of experience. It's an object of possible experience. And therefore, it is always conditioned by pure perception. So the self-consciousness that Kant sees working in pure apperception is not a kind of empirical self-consciousness or psychological reflexivity.

and it's very very important to to keep emphasizing this otherwise the whole you know one's understanding of you know Kant and Hagen in particular will be I think goes very badly wrong from the beginning so for instance the first quotes here is the word I expresses the abstract relation to self and whatever is placed in this unit or focus is affected by it and transformed into it The I is, as it were, the crucible and the fire which consumes the loose plurality of sense and reduces it to unity. The tendency of all of man's endeavors is to understand the world, to appropriate and subdue it to himself.

And to this end, the positive reality of the world must be, as it were, crushed and pounded, in other words, idealized. So, now what's, this is an emblematic quotation because first of all, it says that the eye expresses an abstract relation to self. So for pure perception is a self-relation. So we need to kind of try to understand what this means. well basic idea is that in the for chance

pure a perception is the synthesizing agents which binds the subject and the predicate of judgment this synthetic binding which is the core of judgment is what constitutes experience so experience is propositionally structured because it is constituted through judgment through the synthetic a priori And it is apperception that affects the a priori synthesis of the subject and the predicate in the judgment.

Now, what else is happening in synthesis? Well, famously, every judgment is a synthesis of concept and intuition. And the concept is a function of the understanding, whereas the sensible manifold is received from sensibility. So the two Kantian faculties, understanding and sensibility. Kant insists that concepts without intuitions are empty.

So he thinks that in order for a concept to have objective purport, in order for it to be about something in the world, and in order for a conceptual characterization to truly characterize the way the world is, it must be combined with an intuition. It must have been synthesized with an intuition. But the intuition is, in a way, this source of exteriority. Intuition is that aspect of the mind through which the mind is conditioned by what is external to it.

So the first move, now all of Kant's critics, but Fichte, you know, Fichte and Schelling in particular, in a way begin by questioning the dualism of concept, what they take to be the dualism of concept and intuition in Kant, which is also the distinction between understanding and sensibility. And already in the B edition of the first critique, we see in the famous, you know, the rewriting of the Transcendental Reduction, we see Kant emphasizing the, we see Kant making this, in a way, recalibrating the relationship between understanding and sense of

In the first version, in the 1781 edition, he appealed to what he called the transcendental imagination as the mediator between understanding and sensibility. So the transcendental imagination was postulated as this hidden power which ultimately bound concepts and intuitions together. and it had this role as this go-between for understanding and sensibility. In the B edition, Kant famously subordinates the imagination to the understanding.

He seems to argue the imagination is nothing but a lieutenant of the understanding. And so that's apperceptive synthesis is already at work in what Kant calls formal intuition. so that the unity of the manifold of intuition, the sensible manifold, is already guaranteed by pure perception. So he's extending the grip of the understanding and also reason, as far as reason governs the operations of the understanding,

into sensibility. And this is a, for Hegel, this is a kind of an absolutely decisive move because it means that if the concept is already at work in the sensible manifold, it means that the mind consciousness is not, subjectivity is not affected by something that is wholly exterior to it consciousness is a kind of self affection so consciousness in a way relates to itself through the sense of will manifold by in a way by kind of

receiving or apprehending the sensible manifold so and this is already this attenuation of the sharp contrast between the receptivity of sense and the spontaneity of the understanding implies that in a way that spontaneity and and receptivity are simply aspects of a single fundamental phenomenon. And Hegel grasps onto this. So Hegel in a way says that it's seizing upon this Kantian insights and pushing itself further

Unfortunately we won't have time to discuss Fichte here, but Pippen has a very interesting, very illuminating discussion of Fichte's role in helping Hegel arrive at his own position. I'm sorry, I need to stop for a minute. No problem. Just maybe decompress a little bit and we can go back to Ray when he comes back.

If anybody has any comments, go ahead. It's better than that and have a deadline. Which section of the critique of pure reason did he say was the one that Kant revised? Oh, the preface. Malibu actually has a really good lecture on it, and I've actually been taking notes. The transcendental imagination is like a mediator between sensibility and thought. But the important thing that differentiates Hegel from Kant is whereas Kant holds apart the duality of sensibility and thought, Hegel conjoins them in a single positive. So, whereas Kant sort of

shirks away from the imagination in favor of sort of like a cognitive application, Hegel like emphasizes the revelatory aspect of imagination where it reveals the structural necessity that posits its conditions. Thank you, Christian. We made this agreement, like Ray said, that there might be a moment that he needs to step away from the computer, so this is why we have this interruption. So if anybody else wants to just talk. Okay, I'm back.

No problem. If you want to turn your camera on, that would be lovely. Yes. Okay, here we are. I'm sorry, but did you, if anyone wants, I should have said, if anyone wants to make a comment, please feel free to interrupt. You missed Christian's brilliant comment, but it would be too much to ask him to repeat it but maybe if others want to make a comment go ahead and if not we can continue on and wait for later okay so yes let me yeah so so basically the

basic idea is very simple it's that the you know the understanding is already at work in intuition so that you have a kind of conceptual intuition so the way in which the manifold is synthesized is already conceptual that's that's the basic idea and the because the eye for the I think which must accompany all my representations is this pure perception Hegel when Hegel talks about the eye in in his work and especially in the phenomenology, you know, he means transcendental perception. So this is what, I think this is how we ought to understand

the claim that the word I expresses an abstract relation to self. Why? Because I is in a way the the synthesizing power which in a way has to, in a way, estrange itself or has to externalize itself in order to relate back to itself. and what in in cancer in can't schema this is very simply the relationship between well can't calls a transcendental unity of our perception the

objective unity of our perception because in a way it yields the objectivity of the object as well subjectivity of the subjects and in a way all the idealists all of you know can't successors fix upon this this kind of this insight. No. If you want the notes, I can put them up again. It's okay, no, I have them here again. So this is why, so if we look at the second quote on, just to comment on the, again on this, the first quotation. So this is the sense in which the eye is the crucible and the fire which consumes the plurality of sense and reduces it to unity.

So in other words, the sensible manifold is conceptually integrated by the eye. I mean, the most important thing here is that this eye is not a substance. This eye is not a thinking thing. Kant's famous characterization of pure perception is that the I or he or she or it, the thing that thinks, thinks is not an object of possible experience for Kant. and it's not something that we can become aware of because all our awareness is conditioned by this abstract self-relation.

So the thing that thinks, the true nature of the thing that thinks is something that is unknown for us, whether it's forever unknown or whether it can be somehow made into, whether it is cognizable is a complicated issue in Kant himself in terms of the issue of relationship between theoretical reason and practical reason. but it's because this I is merely an abstract self-relation that it has no substantial identity, so it has no essence.

This is why pure upper perception, or the I, as this abstract self-relation, is not a thinking substance. So, in a way, this is why this is an explicitly anti-Cartesian concept. This is not a kind of subjectivism, at least as that word is ordinarily understood, post-Descartes. And when Hegel writes that the tendency of all of man's endeavors is to understand the world and to appropriate and subdue it to himself, the reality of the world must be as it were crushed and pounded.

He means that insofar as this abstract self-relation is at work, is the condition of experience. It's the condition for the unity of the world in which we think and act. So this is why it's the world has no substantial positive reality. positive reality when he goes is the world has no positive reality by positive he means it does not the reality of a self standing substance of something that is in and through itself the the its reality it acquires

positivity after having been conditioned by this self relating negativity he means when he says it must be as it were crushed and pounded in other words idealist so the idealization of the world is a condition sexuality idealized the idealization of the world is a condition for its actuality where actuality is Hegel's technical term for reality and this is a term that is again has to be understood in a non Aristotelian register because Hegel's actuality is not the actuality of towards which all substantial becoming

tens for Aristotle okay any remarks or Ray there's a question on the side but on the sidebar that says can you try to explain I pure a perception in terms of rules and that's Aaron and maybe if you don't understand it properly or you have problem with it maybe Aaron can re-explain this well actually I do think I understand and it's something that Pippin actually emphasized I mean the point okay what is the when when can't contrast the spontaneity of a perception with the receptivity of sense oh what is spontaneity means well transcendental

spontaneity is precisely the is rule governance it's the it's the ability to bind oneself to a rule and the contrast is between the rule govern nature of a perceptive spontaneity which unifies the manifold under a concept and the and the causal regularities which unfold in in nature so that the contrast is between rules and call a perception is spontaneous insofar as it is rule governed whereas you know sense is is receptive in so far as it is in so far

as it involves the kind of causal efficacy something causing affecting our nervous systems in a certain way so what Hegel is doing is taking this this contrast the claim that a perceptive spontaneity is always rule govern and in fact is the the deployments of a rule and concepts for Kant's are just rules for combining representations this he think this rulish spontaneity which is a characteristic of rationality of sapience

of course the sentience is itself you know we embedded okay in a kind of in what he will call a shape of spirit so what what he was doing all this hopefully will become a bit it's very schematic right now but what Hegel is doing to The Kant famously is Hegel is re-embedding, you know, transcendental apperception in a historical and cultural context. But he's not simply effecting a kind of empirical historicization.

And understanding why he's not doing that is, I think, crucial to understanding Hegel. So, the phrase that Brandom is very fond of him is that transcendental constitution becomes social institution. What Kant took to be the rule-governed spontaneity, which was the condition for all experience, an experienceability of an objective world in Kant, becomes itself embedded in a world, a world understood as a kind of a socio-historical context.

But this embedding, this re-embedding of a perceptive spontaneity is not an empirical reduction. And understanding why it's not is, again, this is another sense in which Hegel has to remain faithful to Kant. In other words, there's two ways of relapsing, of defaulting on Kantian critique. One, obviously, is by resubstantializing what Kant had painstakingly desubstantialized, which is to say the I, which is both the self and the object. But the other way is through regress and the way of skeptical empiricism,

an attempt to collapse apperceptive spontaneity back into merely association or habits or convention and in a way the historicist reading of Hegel simply does this, it's just another version historicism is a kind of empiricism and it just takes a cultural historically circumscribed cultural life form as its basic empirical units. But this is empiricism. So it's absolutely decisive to see that this is not what Hegel is doing.

that Hegel's historicization of subjectivity or of a perceptual spontaneity is precisely not a kind of historicism. Does that address the question you were asking? Yeah, I believe it does. I think in terms of asking, yeah, I was sort of asking for this brandomian version of, I think thinking of this as like a functional schematic of thinking,

of like the rule of the rule govern activity of thinking and Hegel kind of, if I understood you correctly is taking this and placing this into sort of the social context as opposed to Kant choose more thinking of this as the rules that govern individual thinking whereas Hegel thinks it is a system of rationality that's produced by multiple. Yes, but we have to be careful here. You're having a difficulty, Aaron. You might want to repeat the last few phrases you said. Sure. Yeah. just to repeat, I was kind of trying to restate what Ray had just said and thinking of the comparison of Kant as phrasing the I as a term of the systems of rules that govern thought and

and the relations of the mind to the self, whereas Hegel thinking of this as an activity taking place between multiple agents and the rules that govern rational exchange between them. Yes, but however there's a crucial I think Clarification that has to be made is already it's a I think it's an error to accuse Kant's to say that for Kant our perception is the individual thing he explicitly says it isn't there's The thing that thinks is the same in all of us It's the it's the I or he or she or it the thing that thinks is the same so it's impersonal and it's already intersubjective. So it's a mistake. Whatever Hegel's advance over Kant is, it's not introducing intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity is already there in Kant's conception of pure unperception. And so the claim that Hegel is socializing what was merely, what was still too kind of individualistic in Kant, I think is a complete misreading. And again, it's a kind of a, it just, it's a kind of a really serious misreading of precisely, you know, of Hegel's radicality, because it underestimates Kant's radicality. So what Hegel is doing, when he, in a way, re-embeds Amperceptor's spontaneity in a shape of Geist, what he calls a shape of spirit, part of what the difficulty of understanding Hegel is that this is not what a shape of spirit, of spirit the historicity the historical coordinates in terms of which one could

identify a shape of spirit are precisely not given they're not empirically detectable which is why it's a mistake to read the phenomenology as a kind of straightforward as a narrative in any kind of not only in an empirical sense but in any kind of chronological sense. What, in a way, part of Hegel's point is that the historicity of spirit is only perceptible for spirit itself in a more radical form of self-relation.

And this is very important for understanding the phenomenology in terms of as a science of the experience of consciousness. Consciousness is both the subject and the object of the phenomenology. It's both the subject matter, the phenomenon that is under investigation, but it's also the cognizing agent. and I think this I'm trying to kind of get to grips with this which we'll do next week when we look at the introduction we'll see how in a way there's a second and third order continuity at work in speculative thinking in Hegel's own speculative thinking because the connections that

the historical because the structure of history the logic that is that hegel thinks is discernible in history is precisely not an empirical data something that can simply be kind of registered just so I think that and I think on this point in particular there's a lot of again there's a vulgarized Hegelism which simply always insists this mantra that you know Hegel historicizes Kant. What exactly would that mean? What does it mean? What is historicity? As if the you know historical indexing could be somehow with some kind of straightforward operation that

could be carried out given all of you know Kant's... that would just be another kind of dogmatism or gratuitous skepticism so that's I think it's really important to insist that this is not what's engaged in okay right let's see if we can maybe move on a little bit more through the handouts so this is why so I'm gonna try to move a little bit quicker now so this is why you know hegel right now there can be no consciousness without self consciousness I know something and that

about which I know something I have in the certainty of myself otherwise I would do nothing of it the object is my object is other and at the same time mine and then in this latter aspect I am self-related again the crucial thing when reading passages like this is to understand that the eye here is not an empirical or a phenomenological I enough a Sirlian sense this is the eye of pure perception it's not a thinking substance and and the object by the same token is not an extended substance or something in material such so if then we go into the third quotation number three as this self-certainty with regard to the object

the interjections are by Robert Pippin because this is a quote identity selected from Pippin Pippin writes the implicit self-relation wherein I take myself to be intending this in such a way abstract self-consciousness therefore constitutes the drive to posit what is implicitly and sick ie to give content and objectivity to the abstract knowledge of itself and conversely to free itself from its sensuousness to sublate the given objectivity and to posit the identity of this objectivity with itself and and Pippin interjects that is to understand none of the fundamental ways in which

I take myself to experience the world as empirical or sensuous, and yet still to understand their objectivity, that they are not just my way or my species' way of taking things to be. Now, what's important here is that this, the self-certainty with regard to the object, self-certainty, again, this is an expression that invites a kind of Cartesian misunderstanding. It's not about self-certainty, it's about justification. It's about what is a perceptive consciousness for Kant? It's the ability to justify any assertion or any judgment one makes about the way the

world is, things being thus and so. Kant's point is that to be a cognizer, to be a rational agent, is precisely to be able to, when challenged, to give a reason for one's assertions, to be able to justify one's judgments. may be empirical or a priori. So self-certainty here has to be understood in terms of the capacity for justification, the capacity to play the game of giving and asking for reasons. And this means that anytime I, you know, in perceiving any object,

in taking anything to be thus and so, I must also aperceive myself as taking it to be thus and so. And this simply means that I must be able in principle to identify the rule which governs this aperceptive synthesis. So this is what it means to relate, you know, The implicit self-relation which underwrites my relation to other is the ability for rational justification, the ability to deploy concepts and assertions to justify any judgment that

one makes about the way the world is and this means and of course this superset synthesis is precisely what is never empirically or sensibly conditioned for Kant it's the because because the distinction between reasons and causes to deploy a concept in accordance with a rule is precisely to to engage in a perceptive spontaneity in a way which can never be which can never be be identified with an empirical causation an empirical mechanism this is

the so here so what striking these are straightforwardly kind of Kantian kind of claims on Hegel's part here he's kind of radicalizing Kant but the the can't in provenance is still very clear and finally quote number four the eye is no this subjectivity this infinite relation to itself but therein namely in this subjectivity lies its negative relation to itself direction differentiation judgment the eye judges and this constitutes it as consciousness it repels itself from itself and this is a logical determination I think this is

a very I think illuminating passage so already because it's it's presaging the terminology of the phenomenology here the I know is subjectivity but subjectivity as in in a post-cantian sense subjectivity as something which is a self-relation a self-relation which is not a kind of substantial reflexivity it's not the self-relation that consciousness allegedly has in the

Cartesian tradition but it's now an infinite self-relation this we're not quite I think we're not yet ready to understand what Hegel means by infinite self-relation but that hopefully again that will become clearer as we proceed but now he introduces this term negativity so the eyes know this subjectivity this infinite relation to itself but this self-relation is a negative self-relation it's a negative relation to self and he calls it and striking here is that he identifies it with judgment so the eyes negative self-relation is in a way kind of expressed in the form of judgments and

And what is judgment? It's the subject-predicate judgment. Because judgment involves a kind of splitting between the subject and the predicate. But a splitting which also kind of recombines them. That semantic resonance is explicit in the German Urtalt. so what and again again this is a if one thinks of chance in a way the the eye the eye of pure perception underwrites all judgment and what is judgment judgment is synthetic a priori so so judgment is the combination of a subject term and a

predicate term as prior to any sensuous determination and this a priori synthesis of the subject in the predicate is what yields the object of experience and ultimately a world a unified world of experience so the link between subjectivity negativity and judgments is I think absolutely crucial for understanding Hegel especially what Hegel says about his own project and the

the preface of phenomenology so he's saying that the eye judges so it's the agent of synthetic judgment and this constitutes as consciousness in other words it's through the activity the spontaneous determination of judgment that the eye is conscious not only of itself but of the world so what Hegel is suggesting here is that this there's a kind of there's a logical determination that underwrites the the self relation that yields empirical experience by empirical experience he

means you know what you know every no subjective awareness in the kind of the non philosophical sense as well as awareness of things being thus and so in the world. Okay, any questions? Anyone? Okay, just let's take some, let's order it. Because Christian posted a question first, let's go for Christian first and then maybe Kevin and then no, actually then Hunter and then Kevin. Okay, Christian, go ahead. But please be brief because, you know, it's good to save the time for explanation.

Yeah, it's not really a question, but I just obliged to say it. Like, it's like, as far as, like, judgment goes, it simultaneously is a disjunction of the abstract universal determinations in a conjunction in the self-relating negativity. So it's like, it's like what it does is it, it, it, it posits, um, uh, Luz is actually really useful here because it's his, the positive determinations end up, uh, going into disjunction.

or for him it's the exterior necessity implies itself in the positive presence but then you jump to you know synthesis from disjunction where instead of you know predicates are implied by an external necessity the external necessity itself reveals itself in the conjunction of the positive predicates. Okay, that's, I think I follow, and you mentioned, so you're referring to Deleuze's

account of just disjunctive synthesis here, I take it. Yes. Yeah, because conjunction, I think, is the self-same negativity. It's consumption. It's exteriority revealing itself in presence. Yes, yes. Basically, yes. That's exactly what's going on here. Okay. Do you want, let's move to Hunter. And Ray, I don't know if you can turn a light on, because it was really actually beautiful that the change of light was announced through the Islamic call to prayer in the background of what you were talking about.

And then we kind of saw the light kind of like disappearing right after the announcement of the prayer, right? So it's like now it's kind of like night almost. So go ahead. I just wanted to raise kind of like the, like perhaps like naive critique of Kant. Like that how can you... enumerate features of transcendental apperception without treating it like a subject that has predicates you know that sort of at the end of the day you can be as sophisticated as you want but you're basically treating it in subject predicate form can you talk a little bit about um okay yeah well that's that's a very good question um i mean so can't go on yeah and

And also how knowledge of it is possible if it's not an object. So is it something? Because it doesn't seem like he's talking about what, in the 20th century, you would call phenomenology either. How does a perception access itself and produce knowledge about itself? OK, very good question. So obviously Kant's critical operation unfolds via transcendental reflection. So in other words, what he's doing is he's identifying conditions of possibility for experience. And the identification of conditions of possibility proceeds by cataloguing these different,

it proceeds to a kind of a functional decomposition of cognition of so he's trying to identify he thinks that so he takes I mean Kant thinks that anyway it's a cliche to say this but I think it's not true that Kant's is simply trying to kind of respond to kind of human skepticism directly can't thinks that knowledge in the form of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics is a kind of is given so he thinks that there's a kind of a factor of pure reason which is

this you know mathematics and mathematics physics so then he's trying then he's saying that given that this knowledge is what he thinks that given that he thinks that any critique any skeptical questions about the veracity of this knowledge will beg more questions than assuming the veracity of this law of this knowledge does so then so he thinks that he can identify these conditions of possibility and what does that mean it means identifying you know the kind of the two forms of intuition space and time is

form of intuitions and the kind of the the 12 you know the pure concepts the categories of the understanding and then he shows how they all work together and then he also distinction sensibility understanding and reason and he shows how all these things work together in order for us to have the kind of knowledge exemplified by geometry and physics now if a skeptic says to counts I don't believe that geometry and physics count as knowledge, Kant can then say, and will respond to this kind of skeptic by saying, well look, what do you mean by knowledge? What is the yardstick? Because a skeptic is obliged to justify his doubt. If you doubt something, you must be

able to justify your doubts, and in fact you can only doubt something if you're certain about something else. And of course, as Kant sees that the weakness of the skeptical position is that the skeptical has to help him or herself to a set of data, a set of givens, which they claim are somehow immune to skeptical doubt, which would be the data of sensation or consciousness prior to judgment. And of course, his whole claim is that there is no... He thinks that this kind of human skepticism is predicated on an epistemic atomism,

the claim that you can decompose experience into primary units of sensation. And Kant thinks that this atomism, this epistemic atomism, is an abstraction from what is in fact a kind of an integrated experience and he thinks that it's rooted in ultimately this about metaphysical prejudices so Kant's response will kind of rejoin to skepticism will be to say look if you doubt what I have accepted as paradigmatic instances of empirical knowledge

you must be able to point to an instance of empirical knowledge which you think is somehow indubitable and what would that be? that would be something like some kind of sensation some register of sensation or some stratum of awareness which is somehow uncontaminated by judgment and Kant will simply say there is no such strata because Kant, his whole claim is that in order for you to experience yourself as having any sensation, a sensation of this such, whether it's this red facing surface or whatever, he thinks that judgment's already operative there. So he thinks that, but that's only half of the answer to the question.

okay the the other so that that would be the kantian rejoinder to empirical skepticism however transcendental skepticism would be the claim that well given the um given the unknowability of things in themselves you know the transcendental skeptic would say well look even if what you say is true about these necessary conditions for creatures such as ourselves having these kinds of experiences and knowing these things about the world. He said, well, there's no guarantee that the forms of intuition and the categories have the kind of universal, the generic or

universal import that Kant claims for them and and this is in a way I think that Hegel is responding to transcendental skepticism so I think Hegel takes Kant to have refuted the empirical skeptic but Hegel is responding to transcendental skepticism where the transcendental skepticism will say look first of all your catalog you know you're the way in which you've deduced the categories in the wind which you've identified the forms of intuition is rhapsodic it's completely kind of arbitrary and gratuitous it's not kind of methodologically and rigorous and so I think I mean was that the kind of the

the worry that you were you know kind of you were identifying the yeah yeah and I think there's probably a lot more to be said on it, but we can go on to the next question too. Okay, okay, okay, thanks. Kevin, do you want to ask a question or something, or should we move on? Yeah, if we have time, I'd like to ask a question, but if we don't, that's fine. No, no, go ahead. Absolutely. Okay, so it's kind of similar to Hunter's question, actually, and you touched on it here and there while answering it, and I'm sure it's been talked about a lot in academia, but there seems to be, like, in my head so far, it's just a vague association, but there seems to be an obvious connection or similarity between, you know,

this transcendental schema and the early Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. And specifically, I want to ask if you think there's some kind of fruitful contrast between the function of negative judgments, the synthetic a priori, and Wittgenstein's answer that it's kind of unsayable or nonsensical to express the pure structure of reason, of language, the world, whatever. So are you asking... So I'm asking if Hegel is challenging Wittgenstein's quietism about the ineffable? Are you asking whether the

transcendental a priori is ineffable just as a logical structure of the world is ineffable for the early Wittgenstein? Yeah, I guess I'm looking for the comparison more between Hegel and Wittgenstein in the sense that, you know, like since it doesn't have any sensible content in itself, the I think, you know, how can is it is there some kind of fruitful comparison with Wittgenstein who said it's nonsense because there's no sense content? Well, Hegel will insist that it's possible to...

He says he thinks that there's nothing that's inexpressible or unsayable. and he thinks that there is no I mean he thinks that in a way the mistake is to think that you can you can simply work by a kind of transcendental asset a sense from condition to condition and he thinks that if you do this you will run aground in the way in which Fichte ran aground with the eye as kind of this kind of self-positing this pure self-relation which strives to kind of achieve a kind of unity with a not-eye but this this striving is an infinite striving a pure ought which can never be actualized. I think

what Hegel is going to say is that he thinks that if something is ineffable or unsayable, it's simply because it's being approached in a one-sided way. It's being abstracted from the context in which it is intelligible. And I think he thinks that philosophy is precisely the duty of philosophy is precisely to you know to fc and f about to kind of say the uh the unstable but he thinks that there's no mysticism required for this because it it's this is precisely the responsibility of the speculative proposition this is what he thinks speculative thinking can achieve um and

this is why his his critiques of both um both appeals to intellectual intuition um to kind of to attain the absolute, the idea that you can only experience the absolute, but this experience will remain necessarily incommunicable and that there is a, you know, Wittgenstein about when he thinks that, you know, value, what is most kind of important, what is, you know, questions of ethics and aesthetics are precisely, you know, inexpressible. He thinks that this kind of resorts to mysticism is the the in a way the kind of the obverse of the primacy

on argumentation on the idea that discursive argumentation and the a kind of a mere you know perpetual indulgence in the game of giving and asking for reasons will somehow kind of get us to the truth will overcome every obstacle so I think he has a critique of both he's a he's got a critic of those who preemptively delimit the powers of discursive rationality but also a critique of those who reduce the resources of discursive rationality to kind of wealth the logistic reasoning in a kind of a poster is a tealian sense or so to those who have who who remain at the level of synthetic judgment but don't yet a set

you know proceed to what he calls speculative judgment where the subject and the predicates can change places so so I think I mean look I mean there's I I think there's a hell of a lot to say about Wittgenstein and Hegel. That's about all I can manage for now. But I mean, it's a very rich, I mean, yes, you could say lots and lots of things. But I suspect that Hegel would view Wittgenstein as Chukantian. Because it's also about finitude. He's reasserting the disjunction between the finite and the infinite. to actualize the infinite and bring the infinite down to earth famously

so uh should we continue on with the notes how would you like to proceed ray well yes let's see if i can we should make some headway into the the preface then of of the phenomenology. So I don't think we're gonna get through all of it because maybe I put too many quotes on this. But so this is just basically, so I think that once we understand, this kind of, this preliminary I think was necessary in order to avoid simply reading Hegel as a metaphysician in a bad sense, and to kind of to get some sense which he is radicalizing Kant as opposed to simply rejecting him and how he some of the

terms he uses such as I subject science and actuality must be understood in this post Kantian register, this radicalized extension of Kantianism. It's not to say that Hegel remains Kantian. He goes beyond Kant, but only by acknowledging the significance of Kant's achievement. So I've divided up this. If there's any number of the quote you want me to go to, just let me know and I scroll

up to that so we have that on the screen. Well, look, let's begin with number five, okay, which is the first, you know, section, paragraph 13 from the preface. Only what is completely determined is at once exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and appropriated by all. The intelligible form of science is the way open and equally accessible to everyone. And consciousness, as it approaches science, justly demands that it be able to attain to rational knowledge by way of the ordinary understanding.

For the understanding is thought, the pure I as such. And what is intelligible is what is already familiar and common to science and the unscientific consciousness alike. Through its having afforded direct access to the former. Now, I think this is... So, the phenomenology is an attempt to develop what Hegel calls a science of the experience of consciousness. and the science that you know the word he uses his vision shaft means in the philosophical and intellectual context in which Hegel was writing science is not necessarily empirical so the vision shaft you know appeals to kind of formal

science empirical science natural science human science social science any anything can be you know this in shaft and it but a philosophy for for for Hegel is you know the preeminently scientific because it has to to be the the kind of the rational understanding which you know ultimately incorporates or better articulates all other forms of knowledge so what's interesting is that he thinks that philosophy must have must be systematic and systematicity for

Hegel entails scientificity the assuming the form of a vision shaft he thinks that there's a he distinguishes here here between the what he calls the unscientific consciousness and science or the scientific consciousness and he thinks that one ascends to science from unscientific consciousness but he thinks that there's a necessary link between the two now that and I think the mediator is the understanding because the understanding verse stand is obviously he can't keep he describes it the understanding is

thought the pure is such so the understanding he's using the term understanding in a Kantian register where the understanding is the faculty of judgment of objective determination and although science I don't know if you want to repeat last sentence you said because there was some interruption just but just the last sentence okay yes the what connects the unscientific consciousness or the pre-scientific consciousness and scientific consciousness for Hegel is the understanding and he's using the understanding is you know the you know Kant's understanding you know the faculty of judgment the faculty of objective determination which he which he makes explicit here by calling it the

understanding is the pure eye and such so the agent underwriting the the activities the operation of the understanding is pure perception and in a way it's the kind of it's the mediator between the ordinary on pre scientific consciousness and science no science is tied to reason and I think that he thinks so Hegel here is saying that one can ascend to one can satisfy the demands of reason through the mediation of the understanding.

This is why he says science has an intelligible form, which is open and equally accessible to everyone. This is a remarkable claim. he's saying that you know what he's doing in the phenomenology which is a science of the experience of consciousness which is the which will prepare the way for the science of logic he thinks it's open and accessible to everyone no one is debarred from ascending to this kind of science the scientific knowledge but in order to do this they have to to be willing to know everyone is capable of precisely because everyone possesses understanding and

understanding is the the the capacity for you know for sapience for for cognition. So I think this is important because in a way speculative knowledge, the kind of speculative knowledge that Hegel claims is achieved in his own philosophy is, you know, democratic. It's radically democratic and it's something that is that doesn't exclude at least in principle a controversial claim if one for

Hegel's psychoanalytic interpreters because there's going to be a claim but there's certain inspectors of rationality is precluded from understanding certain certain conditioning factors according to that view but I wanted to flag that as as the opening step as the opening kind of one of the decisive opening moves and the in hails understanding of what of hope philosophy must be prosecuted systematically and in a in achieved scientific form and this is why it's because he thinks that philosophy

must you know ascend to the status of a science and actual science that he it must have a way of determining its subject matter it can't receive its subject matter from any other discourse or discipline it must be self-determining it must be able to determine the its own subject matter and also determine the concepts and categories through which it articulates that subject matter so and he the second court is his famous kind of his alleged jab at shelling it's not clear whether it was actually kind of a targeted at Schelling or one of

Schelling's acolytes but anyway so that this is number six on the hand that to pit this single insight that in the absolute everything is the same against the full body of articulated cognition which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment to palm off its absolute as the night in which as the saying goes all cows are black this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity the formalism which recent philosophy denounces and despises only to see it reappear in its midst will not vanish from science however much its inadequacy may be recognized and felt rising of absolute actuality has become entirely clear as to its own nature so two things what the cognizing of

absolute actuality must become entirely clear as to its own nature in other words both what we mean by absolute actuality and how it's possible to know it are things that have yet to be determined the things that must be clarified and they will be and is integral to this science that hegel is is developing a question real quick yes all right so um you said that um philosophy or science is self-determining doesn't reveal itself through any exterior discourses and whatnot.

To me, and then what you said, though, with how cognition, the cognition of absolute necessity hasn't been fully determined yet. So to me, it seems like we need to arrive at the cognition of absolute necessity through further determination of the methods, investigations of knowledge in our specific contemporary situation. Well, okay, that's another very good observation. Now, it sounds as if Hegel is doing this, but actually, this is Mladen Dolar in his work on Hegel

has actually pointed out that the prefaces extremely is already kind of curious and challenging because what Hegel is doing is actually he's criticizing Kantian formalism, transcendental formalism, the claim that in order before you must be able to identify you know you must be able to understand how not knowing is possible. So in other words, you need to have a method before you can actually achieve or realize your scientific ideals. And it sounds... This is how Hegel almost responds to basically how Heidegger influenced post-structuralism.

because Heidegger's almost a good Kantian and almost is Hegelian, but he's not because it's still purely historical. It's like, well, Hegel's entirely right. It's like almost he reveals Kantian transcendental formalism through a very specific historic horizon. Like, it's definitely entirely necessary and absolute, but it's through, reveals itself through the particular empiric attributes and predicates. Yes. Yes, yes. What I was going to say is that Hegel is precisely rejecting what he thinks is the

formalistic prejudice which says that you need to have methodological principles in place before you can proceed in an investigation. And actually he's saying, no, you have to begin. There is no, as we'll see, he rejects the idea of a principled beginning or a kind of a foundational. And he says you begin in the middle, you begin with mediation. and there is no what he's doing throughout the preface is both criticizing those criticizing on the one hand the Kantian who says that the absolutes will is going to be inaccessible because

because once you've identified the proper, the transcendental methodology that explains how knowing is possible, you realize that this limits not, this sets kind of limits on knowledge. He's criticizing that, but he's also rejecting what he thinks is the kind of the Schillingian kind of enthusiasm, which proposes to install itself in the absolute right away and claims that it can somehow know the absolutes and then proceeds you know and you know takes the absolute as something this this kind of primary data which will then be kind of

you know somehow kind of be elaborated and in a way so he's saying that he's criticizing both who want a method for knowledge before you can begin to know but also those who think they already know we think that they're already installed in knowing and therefore and he thinks that once they've made this once they've simply installed themselves in the absolute there's nowhere for them to go this this kind of the identification of the absolute will be vacuous it will lack they're incapable of you know articulating a conceptual determination of the absolute so it's it's funny he seems to be saying he's

doing two things at once he's but so he's criticizing kind of you know a kind of Methodism, a formal Methodism, but he's also criticizing a kind of, well you could call it kind of, you know, matterism. People who claim to be able to immerse themselves in the, you know, the things themselves, like the Zacchae's Elps, from the beginning. As if there's a primal phenomenon which provides a precondition for all subsequent knowing. And the emphasis on mediation will be that you have to begin from a point of, which, you know, from a mediated point, which is both in between, which is in between principled formalism and a kind of, you know, absolute, an appeal to absolute immediacy.

So this is why I think he thinks that the way to truth is through error. You have to be, because the true is the whole, which means that the false is simply an aspect of the whole or a part of the whole. the whole and because any part of the whole will be false any beginning will you know what is what we call falsity or error is a necessary component for the act of the articulation of the truth and this is why he thinks that the articulation of this actuality in order for science to be actual and for it to

have of absolute actuality it must be self articulating which it must be self differentiating in a way which will be simultaneously subjective and objective hence you know the next claim that actuality is actually the substance becoming subject, which is Hegel's most famous encapsulation of his project. Is that okay for now as a response? Or would you like to ask a follow-up? I really like what you had to say about that.

It does come into what we're asking in this class, which is, you know, you can look at the traumatic aspect of, you know, the Slovenian school and Kome and whatnot as like a working through. But at the same time, it's like, I also want to say that like we ought to drive like Like I don't know if they're empirical enough, you know That's basically what I'm saying because like I think that like I'm sorry

I think like I think um Because I think that you need to get really specific, as far as the Freudian, Lacanian, unconscious goes, I think that as far as determination by language and whatnot, I think there's much more complicated physical vectors that end up expressing themselves. And I think this is why I actually like Freud almost more than Lacan, because in his 1895 project and his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I think he really gets at it, understanding the unconscious from an energetic perspective.

you know and then so and then that also calls I think for a consideration of thermodynamic principles and energy principles perhaps like so you know I think I don't like I just don't like I don't think they're absolute enough basically these principles or oh sorry um the um like i think that they that with like object a and like the structural

it's almost like they're too content even you know they're too like because like actually I saw someone post a Zizek quote on my Facebook and talks about how the real is inaccessible but like I think that the real always reveals itself in presence I think like we can almost look at like I want to look at positive like for example position like quantum positioning and if you think there's like a position is always in relative to a very particular specific locality.

So particles reveal themselves in the manner of expressions to an absolute, vis-a-vis, a local point of positivity and presence. Okay. Do you see what I'm saying? I just This is kind of like what I kind of focus on myself But like Do you see Are you cutting something to where I'm headed? Yes, I understood I think I understood the Starting point It's non-local The idea I think is that All local positivities Reveal themselves through a non-local

non-local necessity, causality. Okay, okay. Yes, that's, I mean, it's taken, it's not, yes, no, that's certainly, you know, something, you know, relevant, but it's not, you know, I think we need to kind of try to reconnect it to where we were before. And I took you to be saying at the beginning that basically that these transcendental, what Kant identified as transcendental determinants which are

necessary, transcendently necessary for the experience, they are rooted in contingencies. They are themselves kind of anchored in contingent material forces or factors. Is that what you started off by saying? Christian, I just want to interject and say, as the sidebar shows, there's other questions and maybe we can move on because it seems like it's going to become like a dialogue. Let's see if other people… Hopefully we can be able to come back.

The next point is, so number seven is, actuarity understood as substance becoming subject. So this is again another one of the most famous sentences from Hegel, paragraph 17, in my view which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself. Again, this can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself. In other words, this is not some kind of principle. It's in a way that he's saying that this assertion is as yet meaningless. We're not in a position to kind of to understand it. Everything turns on grasping and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject. At the same time, it is to be observed that substantiality embraces the universal,

or the immediacy of knowledge itself as well as that which is being or immediacy for knowledge so before I read let's let's just stop so in a way part of so this this self relation whose kind of manifestations we've been tracking in these quotations. He's saying this self-relation can be understood as a becoming subject of substance. And what does that mean? What he's saying is that, in a way, any appeal to self-evidence is going to be the substantialization

of an accidental determination. So in a way, he's saying that anything, you know, the term, Hegel's whole point is that Exist substance is not out there substance is not actual it's precisely that which is not yet actual so in other words, so we're not we can't simply invoke extended substance sensible substance or intellectual substance as a starting point or a data for this for the for philosophical understanding and

And on the contrary, the point is to de-subs- philosophical understanding proceeds through the de-substantialization of any kind of immediately posited data, whether it's a kind of a state of affairs, a state of affairs which can be kind of either worldly or psychic. So this is, I think this is tied to his distinction then between, he says, substantiality embraces the universal or the immediacy of knowledge itself as well as that which is being or immediacy for knowledge. So substantiality encompasses two types of universality. One is the immediacy of knowledge itself, immediate knowledge,

when we think we have immediate knowledge of something, as well as that which is being or immediacy for knowledge, as well as the immediacy, the objective immediacy, which is available to be known. and and what he's saying I think is that both both forms of immediacy are incomplete universalities so in other words that they are they are insufficiently they're abstract universals as opposed to concrete universals the immediacy of knowledge itself so any appeal to a datum something that we think we know a starting point whether it's empirical or transcendental an abstract universal

it's an immediacy an unmediated immediacy but also any appeal to a kind of to a being to some kind of to some objective datum or fact and will also be another kind of abstract universal so the part of the obligation is to concretize the universal which involves desubstantializing these you know illusory immediacies so anything that is simply kind of which is posited as given where and we're in one abstracts from the positing so this is you know this is

where we begin to see Hegel's radical rejection of any appeal to not only immediacy but self-evidence or any kind of a placeholder for that which is allegedly first or prior in the order of knowledge. so and then if we continue reading the the quote it continues if the conception of god as the one substance shocked the age in which it was proclaimed here he's referring to spinoza obviously the reason for this was on the one hand an instinctive awareness that in this definition self-consciousness was only submerged and not preserved and on the other hand the opposite view

which clings to thought as thought to universality as such is the very same simplicity is undifferentiated unmoved substantiality so again I'll stop he says the problem with a kind of spinosism a kind of spinosistic monism which affirms a kind of the primacy of substance and of thoughts or subjectivity as simply a kind of a you know aspect or an attribute of substance is that it doesn't acknowledge, it submerge what he calls the spontaneity of apperception, of self-conscious apperception. Self-consciousness here means apperception once again. So he's saying that this kind of an appeal to the immediate,

you know, to append thought or subjectivity to substance as an attribute is to in a way deny trans discovery of spontaneity of transcendental spontaneity which is itself this kind of you know self relation this fundamental self relation so this is this would be an excess on the side of substantial objectivism but there's a there's a an equal and contrary error which would could be called substantial subjectivism which is the opposite view which clings to thought as thought to universality as such and here he claims that anything

that begins by simply by by taking kind of the thoughts own self-relation as the starting point as fichte did i think he has fichte in mind here is equally ends up substantializing thought resubstantializing thought because i think that hegel's critique of fichte is that because fichte um he never gets beyond this abstract self-relation between the i and the not and the self-positing of thoughts you know this kind of unconditional kind of immediacy of self-positing thought, then he inadvertently resubstantializes. He's resubstantialized thinking, and he's frozen the self-relation. And he's frozen it because, I think for Hegel,

he hasn't yet discovered the power of the negative. He hasn't understood that at the core of self-relation is negativity and negativity is the differentiating force for hegel it's negativity it's the fact that um thoughts you know the the eye this uh perceptive self-relation is a negative self-relation that is the key to its transformation to its kind of a and self-determination a self-determination which is simultaneously subjective and objective so finally the third option he rules out okay and I think if the first option he he ruled out with Spinoza the

second one was fixed at the final one is shelling if thought does does unite itself with a being of substance and apprehends immediately or intuition as thinking, the question is still whether this intellectual intuition does not again fall back into inert simplicity and does not depict actuality itself in a non-actual manner. So the recourse to intellectual intuition intuition which is a kind of a shortcut to the absolute or you have a kind of you have an immediate immersion in the absolute or the unconditioned if you simply kind of say

that thinking if you identify a perception with intellectual intuition as he thinks Schelling and Fichte both did in their own way, you, to what he calls this inert simplicity, which fails to, in a way which, you know, misprizes the absolute because it is incapable of grasping it in its actuality. So here the term actuality, the claim is that the desubstantialization of the given or the datum is the key to the actualization of substance, or rather of their self-relation as a process, which is the fundamental, the core of Hegel's entire project.

desubstantialization is necessary as the actualization of the universality of the universality of subjects as well as the universality of substance and this is the task he is setting for himself so in a way his claim is that Hegel what's peculiar about Hegel is he's saying that if you start with a positive datum, you're actually starting with a kind of a negative abstraction. You have to begin with negation to arrive at a concrete determination. And this negation and the

negation of negation is precisely actualization actualization is self relating negativity as the negation of negation so this is why he's saying that so this is important because there's two things to be said here now if you think in a way at this point the key thing is that if Hegel is simply saying that the absolute is you know is not yet actual but needs to be actualized he's simply positing as a kind of a you know as a virtuality or possibility and but that would still be a kind of substantialization and then legitimate substantialization so what hey so he can't be saying that the absolute is

out there you know and then externalizes itself in human subjectivity the substances out there you know externalizes itself in human subjectivity or consciousness okay and then is reunited with itself at the end of some kind of process and this is in a way the the metaphysical reading of hegel this is what the metaphysical reading claims it says that um the it understands the becoming substance of subject as realization where there is a kind of a virtual starting point as if substance has this ghostly or virtual kind of existence you know prior to it's you know it's kind of a self externalization and then the

externalization and inevitably is consummated in the reunification of subjects and substance but I think so I think this is the wrong reading which we're rejecting but the way to understand how we're rejecting is that if Hegel is working with the negation of negation it means that the negation of negation can't simply reinstate you know a complete a wholly actualized substance okay this is why and if Hegel is serious about his claims about the

infinite how the infinite can be brought down to earth and how the actuality of the infinite can be can be known and cognized then the the process of self-relating negativity cannot be circumscribed by you know either kind of with a virtual point of inception which would be the non-actuality, the not-yet-ness of substance and a final culminating point or point of termos which would be the definitive actuality of substance. And to understand things in this, this is the kind of picture thinking, I think, which misunderstands Hegel's claims.

So whatever this process of actualization is, it's not the actualization of a self-identical substance. Substance as some kind of, you know, the standard, you know, post-structuralist kind of attacks on Hegel or that he's ultimately a thinker of sameness, of self-identity, identity so that the negative is only a detour which will be kind of ultimately reintegrated into a kind of consummated positivity and okay I mean okay Zizek and others have kind of done a lot to kind of attack this but I think you know if one it's clear that this is he can't this would be a kind of you know a really

serious kind of misunderstanding given everything he's told us about his attempt to radicalize Kant. Because basically this would turn Hegel back into a kind of a pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysician. Okay. Great. Yes. I just wanted to say that first of all, in the actual two and a half hour time that the seminar has, we have about 12 or 13 minutes left. I don't mind at all if you have time and you want to go over time but there's we needed a few minutes to this to explain to people that they are going to make like the writing assignments and also talk about the fact that you're taking two weeks off because you're traveling and how are we going to

deal with that I can explain that but at some point you have to give me the cue to do those two things because I already have that but also there are a few questions on the side if you look at them. Maybe you pick one that's the most relevant of between Mika's question, Kevin's and Hunter's and maybe respond to that. And then we save some time. But, but if you feel like going over the board, because it's the first seminar, I have no problem letting this run over two and a half hours. It's all up to you. Well, okay. Well, let me, I'll try to respond to the questions, the three questions. And then, yeah, I think that will, and then we should, and then we'll stop and then make the you know okay okay so I think so Mika's question is about

which is yeah the German word which can be can mean actual or real do you want to quickly describe it but please don't get into too much detail because we don't have time you're on Okay, I'm not sure what's going on with Mika. Okay, Ray, just take it as is. I'll go on to the next question then. Yes, yes. Kevin's question, I wonder if certain conditions like severe autism provide a counterclaim to universality of the self-relating negativity, or would Hegel say that autism is a dysfunction in the ability to actualize oneself? of problematic in tone and connotation well no autism okay I mean now I think

you have to be careful here because no no hesitate to use words like kind of you know cognitive impairments or kind of you know there's that's what has to be careful about one says about this this kind of stuff but clearly the self-relation is not wouldn't it wouldn't really kind of an autistic subject is just as capable of this self-relation in a hegelian sense in so far as it takes anything to be thus and soul okay because any kind of the cognitive apprehension of oneself and

one's world is you know kind of depends upon the the operations of this you know this self-relation so no so I think that you know this the universality of self-relating negativity no it's it's not a Kantian universal so it's not like it doesn't have the universe penalty of a chance you can have transcendently priori but it's it's a universality which is he thinks is implicit even in which is concretely realized even in cognitive well alleged cognitive dysfunction okay because in a way there would the the I

mean I think because it precisely because it's not it doesn't invoke a norm or a standard from which you can simply deviate or from which you can kind of so it's here's a relationship between the universal and the particular is not where you can have a kind of you don't have a kind of a universal norm or standard which can be challenged through a kind of an exception okay the points for Hegel is that every you know a true universal is concrete in so far as it's it's always concretely realized in apparent dysfunctions or malfunctions or contingencies

or accidents. So it's not as if, so first of all, in a way you wouldn't even need to to characterize it as a dysfunction for Hegel. He says that it would still be, he would I think insist that there's still it's still an instance of this concrete universal because the concrete universal that invoke involves the mistakes the alleged mistakes or in a way kind of I mean I apologize for this kind of language I'm going to use but the debilities that would affect a kind of an autistic subject are really

no different in kind from the debilities that affect you know any other kind of you know myself or any alleged kind of standard or default or paradigmatic paradigmatically you know able psychological subject. So, no, so I really think that whatever you can criticize, people have, you know, lambasted Hegel's universalism, but I actually think that if you understand what he means by universal, I think that disease, sickness, death are precisely not exceptions to the universe. This is why he talks about the labor of the negative. And the relationship

between the necessary and the merely accidental is completely... The accidental becomes necessary for him. So yes, I don't think that that would be a credible counterexample. Okay, I'll I'll go on to the next question from Hunter. I'm curious about F.H. Bradley and British Absolute Idealism. Would that view count as a naive reading of Hegel with a ghostly subject and substance virtually pre-existing their actualization? Also in your view, does Hegel really say clearly whether his system unfolds in a determinate way or not?

or is the debates over that pointing to a sort of aporia in his position okay well i don't know the um bradley um or mc tagger as well as i'd like to so but they are taken they're usually taken to be the exemplars of the metaphysical interpretation of that where the absolute is this kind of this actuality and this you know effective actuality which of which everything is a part and I'm not sure what they have to say about actualization

though i mean for i mean for mctaggart time is unreal so everything is already actual um i don't know i'm not sure what bradley says about this but i suspect it's something similar so in this view you'd have you know you've got a kind of this eternally actual absolute okay where which is misapprehended or misperceived by finite subjects. And now whether that is in fact, I mean, maybe there's a reading of Bradley McTaggart, you know, that is more, you know, interesting and that could actually, you know, absolves them of this charge. I suspect that probably such a reading could be developed. Do you think that that world of reading Hegel

has relevance today? Like, do you think that in contemporary readings of Hegel, that that's kind of just a conservatism that isn't a meaningful part of the discussion? Or like, just about the syllabus for this course, yeah. Sure. It's not, I mean, you can't, I mean, look, you can't, in a way, given what Hegel says, like the the misunderstand or the alleged misunderstandings or errors about what Hegel is really up to are as you know as important to understand what he is really up to so there is nothing that has that deserves to be discounted or dismissed and I think that those thinkers you know those thinkers are

actually you know unfairly treated lots of Victorian and Edwardian thinkers are really kind of you know have been kind of caricatured and in fact if one examines them you know they're far more subtle and interesting and mctagre is a really you know fascinating figure so i would say that so i say that you know there would have to be that's something that would have to be worked out you'd have to read them figure out whether or not they really are um The problem would be Kant, not Hegel. I mean, really the question is whether or not, it's not, you know, their fidelity, their problematic fidelity to Hegel, the question is Kant. And if Kant is the decisive turning point, the question is if Hegel has successfully gone beyond Kant,

the question would be have they managed to kind of successfully go beyond Kant in the sense of can they defend themselves against the Kantian charge of dogmatism, of metaphysical, of rationalist dogmatism. And then the second part of your question is, does Hegel really say clearly whether his system unfolds in a determined way or not, or is the debate over that pointing to sort of aporia? yeah well he thinks no he thinks it does the system does through this accumulation of determinations and he and it unfolds both you know the first first in the phenomenal

analogy and then in the logic and science of logic the question I think that the key question is I think for Hegel that this unfolding can only be has a kind of retroactive structure so that this you discover determination is retroactive because you discover what something always already was so in a way the unfolding see I think the thing for Hegel is that the unfolding it's not linear it's not moving forward from start to finish the unfolding is actually moving backwards and forward at the same time. It's the, as it's, as you, as you cumulate negativity, which is the cumulation of determination,

that's kind of cumulation is retroactive, because it's, you know, the kind of, it's what always already was, essence is what, you know, always already was, and therefore you discover what has been This is why philosophy is retrospective. This is why the Isle of Minerva flies at dusk. Philosophy cannot be prospective, and speculation for Hegel isn't future-oriented at all. It's actually about understanding how what is came to be. And once you've understood how what is came to be, that changes your relationship to... This is the other thing we'll, I think, talk about more later.

but um should we move on to Mika's question who was kind of on not ready in the moment Mika go ahead just on on mute yourself and you're on okay your mic has stopped working so if you want to type it type it or just type your question and and then we'll go from there. The question is simple. What determines the transition of that term, Wurkurschleet context, grammar, or is it a play on words by Hegel? It's not a play on words by Hegel. In the German, I mean, I'm not a fluent German speaker, but...

It means actuality, but also... So actually, it means actuality, or effectivity it's translated Hegel's early translators translated as reality so the famous claim the real is rational the rational is real in that phrase from the philosophy of right the word that Hegel uses is fuck like I what he's saying is that the rational is actual and the actual is rational but what I think the way to understand what he means by actual is is effectivity but can it be truth or does hegel never use it for truth no he thinks that the true is the whole and

the whole um can only be uh is necessarily actual so there is an intrinsic link between truth and actuality or virtual kite bar height and virtual kite those are the two german words So they're intimately connected and Hegel is saying that what is true is what is... Effective is a better word than actual because effective doesn't have these so many Aristotelian resonances with potentiality. But actual also has that relation to act which then connects it to what you just suggested. Yes, yes. What is now effective or operational.

So if the questions are done, let's just... One quick one from me. Okay, go ahead. It's more of a procedural one actually, because I wanted to know, I guess both Ray and everyone else, to what degree people were interested in this kind of translation questions. and comparing the original German. I have what looks to me like a good side-by-side of the phenomenology in English and German that I'm going to use as a reference. I don't know if anyone else here speaks German and if that's useful for them to bring up questions like that or not, but I can screen share it and use it as a reference if other people think that will be a good use of our time. Go ahead. Sure. Sure, yes. Yes, I think that would be excellent.

You mean you want to do it now or you want to say during the time? Yeah, during the course of the class over the next couple weeks. That would be great. And I would share your screen when you have them on. But remember, you can only share one screen, so somehow you have to put them together in another application together. Oh, no, it's a side-by-side translation. They're on the same page. Yeah, they're right next to each other, so it's a good reference. That's great. Is this the Pinkard translation of the phenomenology? Yes. The author is Terry Pinkard. Terry Pinkard. Yes, that's a very good. It hasn't been published yet, although it's been around for six years. I think it's going to come out with Cambridge, who published the new translations of the science of logic. But it's an excellent translation.

And it's, yes, very helpful because it has a German. You can also share the whole document on the classroom if you want, but it's up to you if you want to do that or not. Yeah, I'll put it up there. Okay, so back to some real actual procedural stuff here. The first thing is, I have a question, Ray. So by next week, you want us to read both readings for the first week and the second week? Because some people did not get the readings early enough to come to the class. So basically, read the one and two, right? And basically, then the writing request is basically what me and Ray discussed in terms of assignments. And correct me if I'm wrong, Ray. This is what I understood from what we discussed yesterday is that you would write four short pieces of like one or maximum two pages on these eight readings.

So basically, you've got two readings now, the first one and the second one. By next week, you produce a 500-word document that is like your reflections on the lecture and on the readings. And basically have it up and available prior to the class so it can be used and commented on in the classroom. and then somehow these four pieces of writing somehow will try to synthesize them or integrate them into some Some one text or several texts or something by the time the class rolls That's sort of like the sort of like assignments for the seminar Okay, yes, yes, that's funny So basically that is based and and I really encourage you to really take it

it seriously and do it because this is a, this is an amazing opportunity to sort of like interact with Ray. And I would, I would put them together, create a document that then Ray can easily access as one document rather than like several bits and parts and going between. I would like post them with everyone's names and it would be one Google doc shared by everyone for later reflections and editing and all that. And hopefully we can end up with something really awesome out of the class and hopefully publish it somewhere. So that's sort of like the idea, but I'm not going to get ahead of myself. Just like for next week, make sure you have that 500 word written. So that's that part. The other part is that Ray is away for two sessions of the class. One of them is going to be on November 8th.

The other one is November 20th, right? Am I right, Ray? Yes. What we decided to do is that we're going to, in these two weeks, there will be no classes. on November the 8th and November 20th. It's November 6th. November 6th. November 6th, November 20th. And November 20th. I'm sorry, I apologize. And what's going to happen is we're not going to extend the class two weeks because then it's going to get deep into December and raise classes in American University of Beirut is already done. So basically one extra class will get added on December 4th. And then between the last planned class and December 4th, we will have a substitute session, which will decide later through email what day and time will work for everyone.

So basically, in the last two weeks, we will end up with three sessions closer to December 4th. So we can decide that one. But as far as we know, there will be no class on November 6th and then no class on November 20th, an extra class on December 4th. and another extra class prior to December 4th. Between November 26th and December 4th, there will be another class basically, and we decide upon it later. So this is basically what we decided and all that. So I hope, and I'm gonna like put that in an email and send it to everyone, including those who could not make it to the class, so they can also receive it. So yeah, so we already are actually 10 minutes over time. Ray, do you have any final remarks So any kind of like clue you want to give to people in the way they approach their writing?

If you have a few words, then we can maybe end. Any kind of advice, any kind of like... I would say, yes, resist the temptation. Above all, resist the temptation to write like Hegel and to simply, you know, use his terminology. just you know contrary to you know everything he says about you know the spectators proposition etc so I think because in a way the challenges because the ideas are really you know deep and difficult I think it's it's it's more helpful to try to be as clear to achieve the maximum degree of clarity and precision by and by focusing on something very very limited yes that's

that's what I you know I would say and pep and I think is a good exemplar I mean his book is not easy but you know he translates Hegel into and Hegel's you know very you know deepest insights into a kind of you know into a tractable uh you know in english um uh idiom so only thing is i would you know try to try to kind of uh to limit yourself in a way um but also to that way you'll get deeper into things if you're more if you focus more on a single thing or a single issue you'll get more out of it because you'll end up something with something which is crisper and it will be more

or I'll get more out of it and so will you. Okay everyone, that was really lovely. And I'm going to end the broadcast. So thank you so much, Ray, for your incredible lecture and discussion. And see you everyone next week. Okay, thank you.