Hello everyone, welcome to the third session of Contemporary Readings of Hegel with Ray Brace here. I'm going to pass the mic and camera to Ray to start the seminar. Go ahead Ray. Hi, thanks Mo. Okay, so right, last week we discussed Hegel's introduction to his phenomenology. And now we're moving ahead. Today what I'd like to do is basically his discussion, his account of the phenomenology of sense certainty, which is the natural consciousness in his account. And then we're going to leap directly to the transition to the self-consciousness.
So we're going to basically try to introduce the topic of sense certainty and Hegel's account of the dialectic that unfolds in this first stage of natural consciousness. And then we'll, unfortunately, we're going to have to skip over the subsequent stages of natural consciousness, which is his discussion of the thing and its properties and then force and understanding, which ultimately all prepare the transition to self-consciousness. But we're going to have to make a very compressed account in order to try to get to where we ultimately want to get to.
So there should be a handout up on screen, which is basically recapitulating the crucial moves or the crucial kind of transitions in Hegel's account of natural consciousness as sense certainty. So all the, now there's quite a lot of these on the handouts, but I think that once we see, once we see what's going on, you know, it's not going to be necessary to read all of them, but just to focus on the crucial segments which are highlighted. Okay, so now we know,
So, once again, to recapitulate from last week's class, so, the Phenomenology is a science of the experience of consciousness, and according to Hegel, all consciousness is structured around the distinction between knowing and truth, or between the truth of the object as it is in itself, independently of its relation to consciousness, in which it is known by consciousness. And Hegel says that the criterion of truth, the criterion which explains this distinction between reality and appearance, what the thing is in itself and what the thing is for us,
is imminent to each of consciousness. So it's imminent to even the most rudimentary form of what Hegel calls natural consciousness, which he also calls phenomenal knowing. And as we discussed last week, rather than imposing a criterion of truth onto consciousness or onto experience, Hegel wants to show how each stage in consciousness, insofar as it's articulated around its own eminent distinction
between these two moments, a moment of truth and a moment of knowledge, or the in itself and the for it. each the consciousness discovers the inadequacy of its initial formulation of the difference and overcome you know supersedes the first its first kind of construal of this distinction and in so doing generates a new object so the movement is one of this is what we call the movement of phonological recursion which was briefly described on last week's handout. And this is the movement of phonological recursion is the movement through which consciousness
acquires or undergoes a transformation not only in what it knows but in its knowing of the object. As Hegel put it, it's not just what consciousness knows that changes, but the object of its knowing. So now we begin with what Hegel presents as the most rudimentary form of natural consciousness, and this is sense certainty. So, sense certainty is immediate, the most immediate form of knowledge from the vantage point of the phenomenological observer.
So Hegel writes, the knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object, anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is. So, immediate knowledge is also a knowledge of the immediate. And as Hegel then explained, it's a consciousness in which there is no distinction between subject and object as yet, strictly speaking. speaking as as he puts it in the in paragraph 91 which is a I've highlighted the the crucial
crucial sentence in bold consciousness for its part is in this certainty only as a pure I or I I am in it only as a pure this, and the object, similarly, only as a pure this. I, this particular I, am certain of this particular thing. So, initially, what we have is an experience of immediacy, an experience of the immediate consciousness of a particular thing. So both the consciousness and the thing of which it is conscious are characterized as thisnesses, so sheer particularities with no other determination as yet.
however immediately this insofar as the consciousness is the experience of something you know to be conscious to be in Hegel's sense is to make a distinction is to make it you know all consciousness is structured around a distinction between what is for it and what is in itself so already even in sense certainty this immediate consciousness consciousness of the immediacy of this conscious state and this object this kind
of experienced object splits into two into two kind of into two poles so as Tegel puts it, in sense certainty, this is from paragraph 92, in sense certainty, pure being at once splits up into what we have called the two thises. One this as I, and the other this as object. And at this stage, so once this, so given that he thinks that to be conscious is to be conscious of something, he says it's to be conscious of the difference between you know this you know subjective experience
experiencing subjectivity and this thing that is being experienced so even those sense certainly doesn't begin with any kind of has no category or your determinations it doesn't kind of it doesn't understand the object through any kind of attributes or properties or any other kind of conceptual characteristics but rather it allegedly experiences it as an immediate being, this kind of indivisible ontological unity Nevertheless, within this block of sheer immediacy, there is still a subject pole and an object pole.
But at their most, you know, this is the kind of the minimal degree of distinction between these poles, between the subject and object pole. but then consciousness in order to hegel's account consciousness must ask itself what is this so this is the the next movement in the dialectic in paragraph 95 if consciousness is is conscious of an immediate something well you know this implies if of this has is a being it has
a kind of it must have a quiddity it must have some kind of wartsness it must be possible to characterize it in some way at this stage we can't give it any richer determination than a differentiation in terms of indexicals so we say this you know what I am experiencing is that this here and now so that this itself can be kind of decomposed into this now and this here you know an immediacy in time you know this now and an immediacy in space this here and as hegel puts it to the question um the problem is that any attempt to spit you know to
kind of um to specify or um to say uh what this is here and now will immediately evolve some kind of determination or characterization which has a conceptual a conceptual dimension which will bring in the universal which reinvokes the universal. So for instance, you know, as he puts it to the question what is now, let's say that one answers now is night. The point is that every, although that is true, the you know when I say no is night or now is day this claim has a as an
absolute truth to it the point is that the question what it is that makes it true is precisely something that goes beyond the the brute particularity that is intended in saying that this is now or this is here. So in other words, Hegel wants to, is beginning to introduce a discrepancy between what is meant by saying this here or this now and what he thinks the conditions for meaning, the conditions, the conditions
for any this being meaningful. So the next passage in paragraph 96, you know, says, and he goes on words, that the now does indeed preserve itself, is not night. equally it preserves itself in face of the day that it now is as something that also is not day in other words as a negative in general so what he's saying very simply is that the um the uh what allows thisness indexicals such as this here and now to successfully pick out
a particularity is precisely the fact that they are universals. So in other words, the reason why it's always true, if you say this here and now, any claim articulated in terms of these indexicals will be true, but precisely because any indexed particularity of space or time can only be successfully indicated through the universality of this indexical term.
So what makes it possible to truly state something using this here and now, especially that this here and now are in fact universals which are common and for Hegel that means that they are constituted by negation he def as he puts suits the know is a negative in general and in fact negativity is a hallmark of universality for for Hegel and in fact what he will say is that the relationship the distinction between the universal and the particular is itself nothing but the is the kind of the the
the negation that is constitutive of the universal, such that an abstract universal always involves extracting the particular from its necessary relationship to universal or vice versa, and to grasp the intrication or the interdependence of universal in particular, says Hegel, is grasp of the concrete universal. The concrete universal is, you know, the universal constituted by which in a way can even be, can stand an exception to the abstract universal and the concrete particular is also the particular that is not a merely abstract particular
juxtaposed to the universal but the particular that is constituted by a default in the universal so as he as he writes you know the same this is the paragraph 96 again a second bold passage a simple thing of this kind which is through negation which is neither this nor that and not this and is with the indifference this as well as that such a thing we call a universal so it is in fact the universal is a true content of sense certainty so okay clearly so the
first stage of Hegel's analysis is to show that universality is already at work everywhere even at the most kind of allegedly fundamental stratum of of conscious experience there is you know the universal is at work and it's at work because insofar as we are conscious of something and where this once again for hegel this he means insofar as intentionality is operative insofar as we are we succeed in being aware of something something, some way, somehow, then universality is implied in this consciousness. This universality is not yet, as he will say, for itself.
So, the next stage in this dialectic begins with paragraph 97, where he brings in the role played by meaning and language in this experience of sense certainty. What Hegel is saying is that insofar as human beings, insofar as what he's discussing is consciousness, and consciousness is a cognitive consciousness, it's knowing, it's being conscious of something and knowing that something is the case, saying that the ability to have a conscious experience in this sense will require is in a way sedimented in the structure of language so here we have a
he's going to say that what we mean when we say that something is here and now or or what we mean when we say that this is happening to me here and now, is something that is articulated through language, which has conceptual content. So the fact that we don't, as he puts it, envisage the universal, the universal as a this or being, doesn't avoid us uttering the universal. So in other words, in order to know about what it is that we are experiencing, we have to say something.
We have to be able to say what it is that we're experiencing. And as soon as we do this, as soon as we have recourse to language, we put the universal into play. The universal comes into play. hence Hegel will say well two things to note here so that there is no meaning there is no stratum of experience which is of cognitive experience which he which is intrinsically pre-linguistic there is no non conceptual awareness for Hegel the ability to have an experience to have an experience of some things being thus and so is already you know already implies the ability to say what it is that is the case even if it's this year now and you know the ability to you know just say
what it is that we are experiencing will be mediated by linguistic conceptualization so this is why he writes in paragraph 97 but language as we see is the more truthful in it we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say and since the universal is the true content of sense certainty and language expresses this true content alone it is not it is just not possible for us ever to say or express in words a sensuous being that we mean so this I think what he means here is a if we mean or intend
a sensuous particularity, an absolute sensuous particularity, which would be absolutely or unconditionally present to us without any modicum of generality or universality, we would not be able to say it. It would be effectively inexpressible. But his claim is not just that it's inexpressible. He's not going to say that, you know, we'd be able to experience, you know, absolute particularity but we just can't express it in words. What he actually, I think, wants to show is that the appeal to an absolute particularity or absolute
immediacy is itself you know a kind of shadow cast by the necessary mediation of the universal so in other words the idea of an absolute business business which has no watchness is just a shadow cast by this the whatness sorry I just have to... Hello?
Hello? I can hear you. I can hear you. Yep. Hello. Can you hear me again? Yes, we can hear you, sir. Okay. You just have to turn your camera on. Oh, sorry. Yes. Okay. Right. Sorry. I'll continue. So, yes. The claim is that, yeah, what he's going to say is that the idea, which is still prevalent and much contemporary philosophy that there is such a thing as a you know absolute experience of particularity or the non-conceptual is itself can only be you know relies on the resources of conceptualization in order to be posited as this kind of you know
unconceptual residue right i'm sorry for interrupting you can you hear me uh yes Please go back to the beginning of what you said right after you came back after your pause because none of us heard that and you just jumped in abruptly so we missed the beginning of what you said. Okay, so yes, I'm talking about paragraph 97 of meaning and language. So Hegel's point here is that the meaning of an indexical term such as this, here and now, in order for us to successfully intend the particularity that we are experiencing,
relies has a conceptual content which is universal so although if we want to to say you know just to say if we want to intend a sheer particularity which has no you know no generality whatsoever, which is untainted by any kind of generic characteristic or predicate. In other words, a sheer thisness, a thisness without any suchness in Aristotle. Aristotle defined substance as a this such, a particularity, something that is a particular,
you know, a unique particular which has some kind of generic attributes. It is somehow being. The attempt to decouple thisness from suchness or particularity from universality is a kind of fiction generated by the structure of universality as such. In other words, we wouldn't be able to... So in other words, we... Language allows us to intend the particularity of which we are aware,
or the particular object, the particularity which we are experiencing here and now, but only because it's already raised it up into the medium of the universal. So in other words, what makes it meaningful to say this here now, is precisely that this here now is the negation of any fixed or frozen moments of particularity. I realize I've been repeating myself for a few minutes now, but is that okay? Is that relatively clear?
Yes, very much. Okay. So this is why he says language is the more truthful. Language has more truth in it than what we believe about our experience. He's saying that language as a medium of the universal is more truthful about what it is that we are experiencing than what we believe or what we think we know about our experience. And he's saying that what is, you know, the truth of our experience is precisely what is expressible in language. and the idea that there is this pre-linguistic stratum of experience of sheer particularity is itself a kind of it's what seems to us our own experience
appears to us but it's not the truth of it so in other words there's a reality appearance distinction here once again and the appearance of particularity, a sheer absolute particularity, is ultimately an appearance whose truth is that particularity is always as this such, always has a suchness to it. In other words, has a conceptually, you know, articulable universality implied within it. okay so so now we move on to the next stage the first stage of mediated immediacy in section 99 where Hegel writes so once we've gone through this
initial stage Hegel writes pure being remains therefore as the essence of this sense certainty since sense certainty has demonstrated in its own self that the The truth of its object is the universal. But this pure being is not an immediacy, but something to which negation and mediation are essential. Consequently, it is not what we mean by being, but is being defined as an abstraction or as the pure universal. Meaning, for which the true content of sense certainty is not the universal, is all that is left over in face of this empty or indifferent now and here. So our meaning, which is the true content of sense certainty,
what we meant to say or what we intended, is not the universal, but now it's a residue. okay it's a residue which is decoupled from the truth of the business the business which is experienced in sense certainty now just actually before I move on one thing that's it I think that is you know important to bear in mind in this whole account is that in or think about the philosophical stakes here is that what Hegel is also talking about is this is a kind of a revisitation of again the relationship between the
universal in particular but also of you know the distinction between let's say sensibility and understanding the canton distinction between sensibility and Hegel no when Hegel talks about the negativity which he thinks is you know contained within any indexical such as you know this here now so if you say when you point to this okay that this can be decomposed into a spatial and a temporal components so the no you know any no that you utter will always kind of immediately you know laps into the past it will become past it will be
superseded by the next now okay which will itself be superseded by another now so in time there is going to be a kind of you know an interminable kind of of a supersession of this now's but in space also the spatial this if you say this here you know this point in space or this location it will also be superseded by a change of location so what he's what he's actually I think getting to is that spatial temporal difference or understanding or awareness of spatial temporal difference is conceptually determined. So that there is the differences
in space, you know, differences in temporal points or differences in spatial points, at least at the level of conscious experience, are necessarily treated by universal and where The universal is that there is no pure point of space or of time that is somehow, you know, that presents itself in conscious experience.
What he's saying is that to be conscious of this here or this now implies, to successfully intend this here and this now implies a relation, which means that once again there is no substantiality, there is no kind of dimension, ontological dimension of spatial temporal presence which somehow precedes conceptualization.
So I think this is the other thing to bear in mind here. So in other words, what he's saying is that sensibility does not present us with a pure experience of space or of time, which is then conceptualized, to which concepts are then applied. What he's saying is that even the most minimal awareness of a spatial temporal point, a spatial temporal instant, is already conception. so can I ask something yes somehow this insight
from a couple of centuries ago goes really well with Metzinger's ideas of how we conceive the world so that's just like really fascinating that scientists can actually kind of like prove that in a way right well yes but I mean this much I mean, what Hegel is doing here is, you know, there's a kind of a critique of Kant, or it's not a rejection of Kant, once again, it's a radicalization of Kant's claim about, you know, the role played by conceptualization, even at the level of sheer intuition. So the claim that there is a, you know, that intuition is already conceptual. And, you know, for Kant, you know, what is, you know, is the spatial temporal manifold.
You know, the manifold of sense, which allegedly presents itself in consciousness. But just as, you know, Kant says, you know, that there is already kind of the understanding, you know, pure perception is already at work to synthesize the manifold, the spatial temporal manifold, you know, so that the apprehension of the sensible manifold is already conceptual. And Hegel, in a way, this is, he's making a similar point, except he's getting rid of I mean, remember the German word concept, begreif and begreifen, to conceptualize means to grasp. Grasping or of handling is already in a German word for concept.
So to conceptualize is in a way to kind of do something. and you know to kind of you know so I was going to use the word manipulate but maybe that's not quite the right term to use here but but what the key claim is that there is no again a critique of a metaphysics of particularity which insists that spatial temporal differences are non conceptual and in In fact, even Teague says that the relationship between space and time and any particular spatial or temporal point is not conceptual
because Kant says all of space is contained in any point in space and all of time is contained in any point of time. so that you don't have the relationship of subsumption. So concepts subsume their particular instances, whereas Kant says that sensibility is not conceptual, and space and time are not universals, because you don't have subsumption there, you've got a kind of containment in which the again the whole is implicit in
the parts already implies the whole and I think what Hegel is doing is that he's accepting this claim that there's a you know the claim that all of space or all of time is in any particular points of space or time but he's saying that this is precisely a characteristic of the universal so in other words it's precisely because the universal is not a substance or no the universe was no kind of substantiality and is not defined in terms of it's not defined in terms of self identity because it contains difference within
itself and if I is different from itself and because the universal is the principle of differentiation of auto differentiation that's why the universal is precisely what allows us to think you know spatial temporal difference is already conceptual for Hegel and universal for him being all self-relating negativity so in a way even the term universal is inadequate it's not you know the term it's a kind of a distinction because it always implies no contrast to the particular what he will to think dialectically or
to kind of to achieve achieved a properly dialectical understanding is to is to to to sort of grasp of the concrete universal the concrete universal is something which is in which neither the universal nor the particular can be thought of a self present has already constituted identities which are somehow kind of you know brought into contact with one another so that the universal is precisely and you know so already here he's going to prefiguring his later he's saying the universal is a not this so like if you say you know no the universality of the nose to not be this no or that no simply for the here but
it's precisely that not being this or that now that allows it to also lets it be this now and that now equally and indifferently so I guess so I guess what Hegel is saying is that there is what he calls the kind of the concept the concept is a kind of is a difference but it's a self-relating difference and contradiction and no contradiction will be the stuff of will be the essence of
everything is the stuff of being I can put it that way so can I ask a historical question so if what Hegel is saying was already implied by Kant and what Hegel did was just made it more radical and explicit then what happens with later on when this lesson is forgotten and we back to some kind of like you know phenomenology that that somehow forgets this well there are historical reasons I
mean one Hegel okay they're all the the readings that we are considering all take Hegel to be advancing beyond chance as opposed to regressing you know before him which is to say that Hegel is not engaging or rehabilitating dogmatic metaphysics or what Kant called dogmatic rationalism rationalists claim to be able to do the dogmatic rationalist claims to be able to deduce the fundamental structure of reality through concepts alone this is metaphysics as a
a priori knowledge of substance. Substance is what truly exists. And if you can know about the characteristics of substance a priori, which is to say independently of experience, then you're engaged in your traditional metaphysician. So this is not, you know, what Hegel is doing. All the people we're looking at, whether it's Brandom or Comey or Dolar or Zizek, they all reject, and Kepin obviously, they all reject this kind of metaphysical reading. However, what happened was, well, Hegelism fell into disrepute,
and it fell into disrepute precisely because it was, you know, know when it was taken to be simply doing this simply to be metaphysics once again and because Hegel is such a difficult thinker and his texts are so demanding it was easier to make sense of him as you know a kind of metaphysician after all than as someone who you know is you know who has a critique of can't but yet has not physics because it's very difficult to understand how Hegel cannot be a metaphysician or cannot be a dogmatic metaphysician.
And to cut a long story short, I mean, you know, developments in, well, I mean, there's a kind of contingency about this, about, you know, Hegel's fall from favor. I mean, you know, the split between left and right idealists, he was seen as an ideologue, you know, again, he was denounced as a kind of reactionary ideologue on the one hand, or as a kind of fomentor, you know, of social sort of revolutionary subversion. So he was a polarizing figure. It made it, you know, easier for him to be rejected. Subsequent developments in science in the latter half of the 19th century led to a resurgence
of Kantianism and really neo-Kantianism, dominant academic philosophy, not just in Germany but in Europe, as a direct consequence of the collapse of Hegelianism. All the most interesting reactions to Hegel, if one thinks of Marx and Kierkegaard, I mean, these were men who kind of had no antagonistic relationship to the academy and to university discourse. So that's why Hegel kind of, Hegelianism mutated into so-called British idealism, which is a kind of you know or was taken up and also in America but in a in a form which
is where the absolute is seen as is understood as a kind of substance so these are these are all the kind of and this is what reaction against this you know it was kind of Russell's react rejection of Bradley etc early analytic philosophy and film a movement like phenomenology was also I mean how Searle you know notoriously was you know at least at the beginning of his career had not read much of the history of philosophy and I think he was you know he was aware you know his philosophical interlocutors were neo-cantians on the one ram who certainly didn't take you know there's all the indications are
that they simply did not take a hegel seriously anymore or figures like Frigga you know oh you also has little or no time for Hegel so hegel hey those insights were forgotten because in a way they were well you could say maybe the time was not right for them. Some of the things he was saying I think were so radical that their radicality exceeded the available conceptual resources. There was no... the only way in
which the most radical consequences could be played out was you know politically or in some kind of non-conceptual register if one thinks of you know the way in which Kierkegaard constructs his existentialism kind of as a critical dialogue with with Hegel's philosophy so he's not but he's not simply kind of you know Hegel is not simply I think it's the way to think of him is as radicalizing Kant's or completing Kant as opposed to kind of reiterating Kant's insights and sorry this is a as far as Metzinger goes so Metzinger I think much
Much of what Metzinger says is straightforwardly Kantian. And in fact, a lot of, I mean, those of you who have read Ian Grant's work will know that in the immediate aftermath of, you know, the early days of, you know, the Kantian fallout, so German idealism dominated the scene, but there was also an alternative to German idealism, which was this kind of, this resurgence of this kind of physiological reading of Kant's, which became led, developed into scientific materialism later in the 19th century. The claim that the operations of the faculties as laid out by Kant's philosophy could be
understood in a naturalistic register as simply operations of the mind-brain. there's already a kind of naturalistic reading of Kant in the you know in the early 19th century but it didn't have well I think it had a subterranean influence and it's influenced in you know when naturalism became you know I kind of a live philosophical option so the question the real question is whether these insights can be reframed in a naturalistic context,
or whether they actually challenge the perhaps residual metaphysical assumptions of contemporary naturalisms. to be asked. Thank you. I see lots of questions kind of coming up. We can take them if you will. I can help kind of facilitate that. Okay. Let's go up and see what's going on with the question. I see the question. question I was hoping we could also touch on Pippin's reading especially
chapter 5 where he begins to describe the problem of skepticism having a bit of difficulty understanding it I think I can hop in and say a little bit more too yes go ahead um Pippin seems at least in chapter 5 which is what I've been focusing on a lot it seems like he's contrasting hegel's absolute idealism to various types of skepticism one of which he calls the robust realist skeptic um and i can read a quote too but it seems um and then he even quotes an article called realism versus idealism by
Joel Kopperman. Peter could you please turn your video on? Sure. Can you see me? Yes. So yeah I'm I guess I'm trying to grapple with the way that Pippin is understanding Hegel's idealism specifically because it seems almost classical um in in the sense that the uh the universal requires the articulation uh through the subject um i'll just i'll read a couple quotes because okay that will help me more
Okay, so here's the first one. A philosopher who might be inclined to travel with Hegel away from realism to accept the transcendental objections to empiricism and to be sympathetic to Hegel's criticisms of Kant's transcendentalism might indeed find Hegel's systematic pretensions to a self-developing notion to be the greatest barrier to any further travel. And this is right after he makes, Hegel calls, or Pippin says that Hegel believes Kant and Fichte to be skeptics.
And it seems like the problem of skepticism has to do with the unknowability of noumenal world. There's a lot of quotes that make Pippin's reading of idealism seem really strange to me. Okay, no go ahead, yes. I can read just a couple more. Okay, so... let me pull it up right here
the the robust realist skeptic is the strangest skeptic that Pippin keeps talking about because it sounds so you know that's that's the easiest I think to sympathize with one of the other quotes that he says is the robust realist insists the world is as it is independently of any activity of ours knowledge worthy of the name must be able to give some account of how we know which of the claims or beliefs we make about that nature are true ones Hegel has set himself the task
of rejecting such realist doubt while defending the objectivity of results, what he calls spirit's experience of itself. Indeed, he thinks he can establish that such results, despite such skeptical suspicions, they constitute absolute knowledge. I'll post that in the side part too. And then another, I'll just one more quote and then I'll stop. Nothing about the introduction's description of the inherent skepticism that results from the notion mediated or apperceptive nature of natural consciousness would make sense unless Hegel had rejected traditional ontology and the noetic intellectual intuition that was its epistemology.
I'll put that here too. Okay. Right. Yes, now I remember those passages from Pippin. And, okay, what Pippin is saying is that there's a kind of skepticism. Well, look, if you look, consider Descartes, okay? What does a Cartesian skeptic claim? Simply that it's possible for us to be systematically wrong about the way the world is. So in other words, that we could be, you know, all of our beliefs about,
could be disconnected from the way the world is. that can be kind of a wholesale disconnection between what exists and what we believe about what exists. Which, now, this is based on a traditional metaphysical view, saying that, okay, well, first of all, the world has a kind of a determinate structure, which is as it is quite independently over you know of anything we do or think our you know cognitive activity no except that's already too much that that
kind of modern or Cartesian skeptic is already seeing too much because first of all it you know it assumes that you know first person what is it what is this concept of world come from? In other words, there's a dogmatic residue in this kind of allegedly robust realism. Realism is a claim that they're about a mind independent world, which has a determinate structure. And the world as it exists in itself consists of substance, which might be either one or many and the skeptic is saying you know we believe
that the world contains many different individual substances but maybe there's only one big substance or vice versa you could say that you know what appears that even the substances that we take to be individuals are in fact not individuals at all but kind of there's an assumption here that you know something exists and it has a certain kind of structure and you know so the first video in the point is what do you mean when you talk about a world or when you talk about existence or when you talk about being and these terms are or metaphysically loaded. And if you...
Hegel's point is that the more radical and the more rigorous kind of skepticism will precisely refrain from making any such claims. It suspends judgment about whether or not there is a world. It simply says there are appearances, there are phenomena, which we experience, but since any judgment we make about the substances underlying those phenomena can be contradicted, any claim we make about the substrata underlying appearances,
we have to suspend judgment and simply remain at the level of appearances and simply describe appearances. And that is, you know, a kind of phenomenalism. Or you say that, you know, there are appearances, but, you know, we have no way of, you know, knowing about what may or may not underlie these appearances. The trouble with phenomenalism, however, has a difficulty because, you know, there's a kind of, if you think of a Barclay, you know, immaterialism, so Barclay accepts one side of the story, says yes, he says the inference from, you know, phenomena or ideas to material substances as their causes is always invalid.
so you know they're just and there are minds which you know experience these appearances but then that's also met you know how do you know how do you know the appearances exist in and for minds that's also a metaphysical thing because minds are taken to be substances psychic substances so the radical Pyronian skepticism avoids both you know says both the inference to the reality of material substance is unwarranted but also the inference to the reality of psychic substance is all is unwarranted all there are our appearances but now
things become very difficult because the idea when so now you have a concept of appearance without anything that appears not an appearance of anything and And the claim, I mean, I think the difficulty then is on what, well, the claim is that it's possible to identify, you know, this kind of wholesale suspension of judgment assumes that it's possible to identify a stratum of pure appearance, a layer of experience which is uncontaminated by judgments which doesn't involve any judgment about things being thus and so and can't had already I think successfully undermined
that's a version of skepticism which reappears in Hume by saying that this is based on an atomistic turn of experience it's it assumes that it's possible to to decompose complex ideas into simple ones and then show that there are no kind of necessary relations tying the parts to the holes. But once again, you're smuggling in, it seems that every claim you make about what it is, about the content of experience, or even about the content of appearance, about what it is that experience,
involves a claim that goes beyond what is allegedly just given in the appearance as such. So in other words, there is no vocabulary that is purely descriptive, that describes appearances without smuggling in any other kind of preconception about the contents, the characteristics or the structure of these appearances. This is, you know, I think, the Kantian claim, but it's a claim that was then radicalized by Hegel.
So in other words, so, the robust realist has to say, if he says that, you know, doubt presupposes, you can only doubt something on the basis of certainty about something else, Doubt is a contrastive term. There's only doubt if there's certainty. If there's no certainty, there's no doubt either, which is why the Pyronian skepticism doesn't doubt. The suspension of epoche leads to simply an acceptance of everything as it is, without judgment. When you stop judging, you stop doubting. That is the goal of skepticism, is to relieve yourself of the obligation to justify your beliefs about the world.
And once you've succeeded in that operation, you're released from the anxiety of skepticism because you stop trying to justify it. You simply accept everything. You simply accept appearances on their own terms without judging, which is to say without believing. of course this is the idea that there's such a thing that you can believe without believing to be true is also I think dubious for reasons that you know actually Plato had said before because to believe something is to believe it to be true even no matter how wrong you may be about what you believe otherwise if you believe something but don't believe it to be true then you're not
really you know what it's not actually a belief that you're having so this kind of Pyronian skepticism I think is faces you know can be challenged on its own terms the idea of an absolute suspension of judgment is incoherent that or the idea that you can hold on to some kind of indubitable beliefs and then call all your other beliefs into into doubt well that's a classic that's the you know the move attempted by you know the Cartesian skeptic but the Cartesian skeptic has to say well there's something I cannot doubt and that's that I'm doubting okay
that I am a thinking thing okay but but that inference itself in Descartes you You know, the inference from I'm thinking to there is a thing that thinks, which is identical with me, is completely a priori. It assumes a distinction between substance and attributes, which is not kind of legitimated in Descartes' own discourse. so I think that Hegel is challenging he's challenging the metaphysical realism as a belief that you know what exists is substance that substance is tributively characterized and that substances are either one or many it assumes something about what it means for something to be
and then whether it tries to, you know, whether it casts doubt on the reality of material substance or the reality in the name of psychic substance or vice versa, the very act of skepticism, the very position of the skeptic is anchored in a dogmatic presupposition that he or she cannot justify. So the claim is that skepticism is ultimately incoherent. I think this is Hegel's kind of refutation.
And remember, he's addressing the transcendental skeptic. the issue of the problem of the criterion that we discussed last week well this is really what's introduction to the phenomenology where Hegel is saying that he's not going to begin by proposing a criterion for distinguishing between reality and appearance or truth and falsity but he will show how consciousness learns how consciousness cannot be conscious without such a criterion but can eventually educate itself by experiencing the unsatisfactoriness of each successive criterion that it tries to formulate.
And that's the process of the phenomenology. And in this regard, I think that Hegel is, I mean, I would go so far as to say that he is, successfully vanquished skepticism. He shows that skepticism takes itself to be a kind of a radical kind of critical and interrogative attitude. But in fact, it's not at all. It just says, you know, it helps itself, it's dogmatic about something that it disavows in order to kind of cast doubts upon these other things. So I think this is... So I do think that Hegel is important
because he does expose the incoherence of scepticism, of radical scepticism. And so the question to... If someone doubts knowledge, okay well they have to know so you have to say well what is it you know that allows you to cast doubts on these other things that we think we know okay and invariably you know and the point of Hegel's critique of sense certainty is to show that ultimately skeptics do believe in a kind of sense certainty okay they believe that there is this layer of absolute immediacy where you can kind of just experience stuff you can be conscious of stuff but you know
and this is this you know and you can you can have kind of indubitable kind of knowledge particular sensations or particular experiences and Hegel's wants to show that this is a fiction okay this is just a kind of an illusion so this is why I mean so it's one thing so I mean skepticism about Hegel's own program okay well but if you think Reed takes introduction to the phenomenology seriously then but no part
it seems that you know when he talks about you know substance becoming subject you know he's everything he says in the preface and the introduction says that we are not yet in a position to say what substances or what subjectivity is unless we go through this laborious process of cognition. And it seems to me he's far more scrupulous in this regard, far more exacting in this regard than these self-proclaimed skeptics. and also I think there's a misunderstanding what Hegel claims by absolute knowledge.
I mean the misunderstanding is that what Hegel, absolute knowledge is somehow definitive and irrevocable and it's a point at which knowledge itself becomes, you know, definitive and terminal and accomplished And I actually, you know, we're going to look at this, but I think that that is a complete misunderstanding of what Hegel means by absolute knowledge. What he means by it is something very peculiar, but it's not that at all. So what I'm saying is that we have good, you know, if we read Hegel carefully and intelligently, we can rebut each of these charges laid against them by the skeptic.
and I've yet to hear a skeptic give a plausible answer to these questions. When you ask them, what is it that you think you know, or what data are you invoking in order to kind of, when you say, when you cast doubt upon these other kind of claims. Not to say that kind of, I mean, local skepticism is always perfectly legitimate. legitimate we should be skeptics we should be local skeptics about particular sets of claims but it's just global skepticism that is in coherence and I think that you know Hegel you know kind of once again I think consummates
chance kind of initial refutation of global skepticism by refuting the transcendental skeptic by showing how it's possible to you know to articulate you know it's a kind of to overcome the you know the distinctions between concepts and intuitions reason and understanding and sensibility etc so I think he even overcomes the transcendental skeptic who says all that can't has shown is that this is what experience must be like for creatures like us it's species specific but he hasn't shown that this is what that you know this is what experience must be like for any cognizers for any finite
cognizers which is Kant's claim Kant is not describing his account of conditions of possibility for cognitive experience is not supposed to be species specific it's specific to creatures with sensible intuition okay and that's what he says creatures with sensible as opposed to intellectual intuition when so that intellectual intuition is the hallmark of God and his perhaps his angels but any other kind of sapient life form with sensible intuition no matter how radically different its forms of intuitions even if they were creatures with kind of, you know, that use sonar or electromagnetic radiation as a sensory medium,
they would still, you know, Kant's point is that they would still have to think in this way and have to know the world in this way. So Hegel is, I think, trying to kind of, you know, ratify this already, you know, tentative transcendental universalism and push it even further any kind of lingering doubts about the parochialism of of Kantian critical philosophy the next question the next question is yes this is indeed why he's a speculative This is what speculation means.
And again, the word speculation, one of the things that's really important to understand, it doesn't mean speculation in its contemporary parlance. I mean, it's a technical term for Hegel. Speculation is used in contrast both to empiricism, dogmatism, and critical philosophy. and speculative thinking is a thinking in a way, well it's structured in what Hegel calls a speculative proposition, where the speculative proposition is one in which the subject and the predicates of the proposition exchange places,
such that the subject eventually becomes a predicate and the predicate becomes a subject. And this involves the ability to think in terms of contradiction. And it doesn't just mean thinking beyond the bounds of experience as delimited by Kant. Kant uses the term speculative in the sense that he says speculative is when you use ideas, when you think, you know, ideas which only have a regulative usage are employed, you know, in a constitutive register. You know, that's what Kant calls speculative.
And I think Hegel appropriates the word speculative through his critique of Kant when he shows that being constitutive and regulative breaks down, but it breaks down not to yield knowledge of the super sensible, collapse a distinction between the sensible and the super sensible. Because remember, what is speculative for Kant is knowledge of the super sensible, what lies beyond the bounds of possible experience. And Hegel says that there is nothing beyond the bounds of possible experience. That's one of the things he's doing. He's saying that the distinction between phenomena and noumena is itself a kind of
a metaphysical relic. There is nothing in principle that lies beyond the bounds of experience. it is understood that experience is a conceptual construction through and through. So there's a remark about Moore's paradox here from Shoges West. If you guys who pose the question wants to join the conversation and describe it more, please do so. the sidebar text because of this connection so I can play a very good moderating role right now because I don't know what is the next question but
if any of you who posed the question on the sidebar once just unmute yourself and describe it so we get it a good recording of it too hi yeah this is Kevin earlier I had a question it was a race from for me as well but it seemed Kevin, can you turn your video on? Yeah, sure. So the question was, to me it seemed like, as you were describing it, the concrete universal was basically the notion. Am I right there, or is the notion more than just that? No, no, that is the notion of the concept. What Hegel calls the concept is a concrete universal.
Okay. So it's the notion of the concept, and that is the concrete universal. Yeah, well, notion and concept are equivalent terms. I think, as we mentioned last week, the older translations, you know, Hegel's German word is Begriff, and the older translation, like Miller's translation has notion, because he thought that English word concept was, you know, not quite right. but Terry Pinkard in his new translation of the phenomenology and the science of logic just has concept for big riff. So notion and concept with a kind of, you know, I guess capital C if you want. Right. Yeah. Yeah, but I thought last time we also said that there's a difference between the Kantian concept slash notion and the Hegelian concept slash notion.
And correct me if I'm wrong, the concept with Kant is just basically a predicate appelled to an intuition. But then with Hegel, it's basically, and so that would be the concept, the Kantian concept. With Hegel, the notion would be basically knowledge of the speculative proposition. So it's not just an intuition with a predicate attached to it. it's that reversal in the speculative proposition and so then the notion is just kind of like the speculative property proposition am i right there yes I mean that and it it acquires the determination through the kind of you know this the unfolding of the successive unfolding of the dialectic
through these speculative propositions. So this is why it's not, there's a, you can't say, there's one notion for Hegel that acquires successive determination or like, you know, acquires the term, greater and greater determination. It is increasingly reflected into itself. So ultimately what you have are, you begin abstractly, you have kind of these notional determinations, which then become richer and richer and more and more concrete. And the fully realized concrete universal is the notion, the concept. The concept as the concept that is all other concepts as well.
In other words, the concept of the concept. Yes, it incorporates all these other concepts as well. Okay, great. Thank you. I think I had the next one. Sure. So I had, I asked two questions and I'm going to try to collapse them. One is more technical, but one was kind of interesting when you were talking about the history of Hegel's reception. So, like, you were talking about the pure this, right, that there's no pure this, no pure particular. It's a shadow of the universal. and um in uh uh so in the absolute freedom and terror chapter he talks about how the
like finally there is kind of a pure particular which is the um actual self-consciousness as it stands against the negative of the pure universal um which which amounts to death and um I was so but then but then Mo asked that question about the reception of Hegel and history and you were talking about how at the time there wasn't a horizon of concepts that was wide enough to sort of like instantiate some of the most radical parts of what he means. And I was curious about like contemporary technology,
like the internet and artificial intelligence and data mining and like genome analysis and ways that you think that, that those things are what, that those, those sort of technologies would allow for a wider sense of sort of Hegel's sort of eschatology of the absolute notion yeah that's a very interesting question I mean hey you know I think I mean you know is you know the think you know logical mediation well
lots of the games I say would say emphatically yes because you know the word mediation for Hegel is no medium and mediation you know hey hey go as the thinker of mediation is the thinker of media and a technological media and I think he in in fact be precisely because of what Hegel says about sociality of human you know sociality of movement of the sociality of human cognitive experience then you know I think that the idea that more and more but know the
conceptual creation is unfolds in and through you know obviously these kind of digital these new kind of technological media and these are new registers of mediation these are new registers of mediation and the question is whether there is a logic a new logic of mediation secreted by these new media. I mean, Hegel is sometimes kind of, you know, dismissed as a kind of still very, you know, anthropocentric or humanist philosopher in a kind of, you know, metaphysical sense, in a bad pejorative metaphysical sense.
and although his relationship to humanism, I mean he may well be a humanist, but what he means by humanism is something very complicated and interesting. and it certainly doesn't involve kind of, you know, kind of, it's not a kind of a sentimental or, you know, edifying notion of human autonomy, let's say, or human kind of, human agency is something that has been definitively achieved and realized.
I think that agency for Hegel is something, is a task, is something that has to be struggled for in order to be kind of properly articulated and it involves social and technical mediation so my answer is going to be my answer is very general very vague because you know it's not it's an issue you know I haven't worked on this or read I think there's a very small body of literature on on Hegel and technology but I think the key thing for Hegel is that instruments have you know
can as they kind of they have a they can acquire a relative autonomy and they can function and you know exercise determining constraints upon human activity so that the challenge is to understand the nature of those constraints but also the nature of the new kinds of practical and cognitive possibilities opened up by these these media these these new forms of media
There's nothing... when I was a student, you know, I was much... I mean, Deleuze and particularly Deleuze and Guattari were, you know, presented as thinkers who had successfully vanquished the latent, you know, the kind of the anthropomorphism of... and the kind of, you know, the naive conception of technology that was allegedly at the heart of Hegelianism. And there was a claim that, you know, machinics, you know, having Deleuze and Gattari's transcendental materialism, is a new thinking of the machine, which is somehow vastly superior to kind of Hegelian dialectics.
I think, once again, I think that's, I think the opposite is in fact the case. I think there's a case to be made for its truth. I think that, you know, Hegel has the resources to develop a theory of technological mediation, which is much more challenging to metaphysical prejudice than many of the theories that are on offer today. Metaphysical in all these kinds of different ways. yeah I mean like as like a last comment on it's like it seems like he's
primarily conceiving of representation in terms of representation as a citizen at that high level of sort of abstract the terror absolute freedom and and that that would that just at the basic level like individuals are represented in such in this very detailed way that he probably couldn't have conceived of in terms of our desires and our genes and all this but that but that you can imagine me describing that into this more metaphysical picture yes and look just you know I mean look Hegel is sometimes reduced to you know the
classical liberal reading of Hegel is that you know for Hegel you've got the individual you know that the self-conscious individual as they can be the agent the cognitive and political agent where you have this idea of like you know the autonomy of the human individuals this kind of you know a benchmark for you know I think that that is you know because once again and that is a you know a lot of Hegel's account here well the really interesting question is to try to separate out how much of the particular characterizations that Hegel comes up with were like you know a response to his own time and are determined by his own historical circumstance and the extent of which in
a way the kind of the the guess yeah using this term and I'm going to use the word plasticity but not quite in the sense in which Catherine Malibu uses this term but the plasticity of dialectics allows can be reinscribed in different social social historical context so yes I mean you know it's always easy to find in Hegel things that sound you know fairly you know kind of absurdly you know kind of antiquated or kind of parochial now but you know I think the core of his thinking is incredibly kind
of you know still still very powerful and can be activated in a kind of contemporary context and I don't think he was you know I don't think he's committed to a sleeping of the accounts of individuality or that particular understanding of individuality citizen etc etc that he does not discuss in his political philosophy so yeah I mean Catherine Mollaboo you know her whole book is about you know that Hegel is a thinker of there's a case of plasticity in Hegel which is very kind of consonant with claims about the plasticity of you
know human kind of neurological functioning and the plasticity of the social because of its kind of technological mediation but I think the word plasticity here is not, you know, needs to be used more carefully, more, I think the logic of plasticity, you know, understanding the logic of plasticity, in this sense, would be necessary in order to come up with a really proper articulation, to find out what he has to contribute to thinking technological mediation. But I want to assist because he insists on mediation. Mediation can take an infinite variety of forms and that's what he's interested
and I think his work has the resources to encompass contemporary development in media. Cool, yeah, I'm convinced. Thank you. Okay, the next question is, is it Theodore? Well, there's a question from Kevin. I was just about to mention how this whole thing on skepticism reminded me of Wittgenstein's uncertainty. He starts that off bashing
Muir for refuting skepticism by saying here's a hand. Yes, I mean, Wittgenstein's very Hegelian in this bit and in fact there is a small body of literature comparing Wittgenstein to Hegel although obviously Wittgenstein has an allergy to theory and to conceptualization which Hegel doesn't share so anyway you know one way Wittgenstein recodes Hegelian insights in a kind of a post-modern skeptical register and in a kind of a in the context of a culture which is far less sanguine about the
or conceptual and cognitive capacities so it's a kind of a fragmentation of Hegel but again this claim that Hegel has been refuted by history that it's impossible to share Hegel's confidence in the concept or the powers of the concept because of history is one of the things that you know I think we're going to look at very closely. For instance when we look at you know the criticisms of Hegel made by Adorno. And then there's a question Maria had a question too right?
Yeah, mine's next. It's just basically, I guess, a basic question about if sense certainty is bound by the notion and knowledge, which is like this dialectical movement, does the other side sense itself, like concrete sense? would hegel say that also would develop um diet or dialectically or historically in any way as in like evolution like something uh more material uh you mean the um would what develop um uh sensing like human sensing would that be part of the development or is that bound by is that strictly
bound by the concept and if is the concept like is is there any in Hegel's philosophy any sense of sensing that is like passive without you know pointing or having like a business oh I see I see ah that's that's a very uh interesting question not not to my knowledge I think as far as I know precisely because look because he insists he wants to his critique of chance is to can is the one who insists on the passivity the force to the the activity of no conception and you know
he wants to say that you know our sensation is not passive it's already kind of active it's already action you know, actively conceptualizing, even if this conceptualization is disavowed or, you know, kind of repressed by consciousness. And I think that that is his claim, is that there is no, I mean, I think we have to distinguish between, again, between the the natural and the normative meanings of the term like sensing or sensation so now what you can have a kind of an understanding of sensation in purely kind of neurophysiological terms it's just a kind of a natural phenomenon
and so obviously our sensory capacities we share them with lots of you know our primate cousins and lots of other animals so there's much about the functioning of our sense organs that can be you know scientifically described and explained but then Hegel wants to say that when the role played by sensation in knowledge is something you know has to be kind of characterized on a different dimension which is not he's not saying it's kind of there's anything mysterious
about it but he's saying that you know at the level of our conscious experience even at the level of what he calls natural consciousness then you know what we sense how we sense is already conceptually is active and that's it has developed but the you know the evolution is cultural and not biological so in a way you know I mean Hegel doesn't deny that's he doesn't deny our kind of our biological kind of inheritance but he's just saying that once it becomes culturally over coded, you can't read off, you can't
simply translate biological functioning into cognitive function. There's no shortcut from biological function to cognitive function because all cognitive function is mediated by social historical factors so and it's active because of that it's active so what's going on when we when we sense whether what you know where whether we're seeing or hearing or even tasting or smelling He's saying all of that, all of these, there's a, well, I guess there's a very kind of almost, you know, indiscernible points of articulation.
conceptualization is you know always already in play however I mean what I mean there are there's stuff in contemporary you know cognitive science which describes you know sensation the machinery of sensation where there is a lot already clearly there's a lot that's being determined by, you know, beneath the threshold of sensory consciousness in Hegel's sense. And I think he's perfectly, you know, he would have absolutely no problem with that. He would say, in effect, the more we know
about that the more it will enrich our ability to to understand you know the the different factors that come into play in in our sensory experience but there is evolution there's an evolution of sensation but it's going to be cultural not biological although the cultural evolution is in a way kind of has the biological evolution as a kind of basic platform for the development. So it's not that you can disregard the biological platform, but understanding the workings of the biological platform is not sufficient for understanding the workings of the kind of,
you know, the socio-cultural platform, I think, for him. So, sensing is only dialectical in the latter dimension, but not in the former. There's nothing dialectical about biology for Hegel. And a good Hegelian would insist that, you know, I think he would be very careful about, you know, injecting dialectical developments into the biophysical domain. This is where I think, you know,
although some Hegelians want to do that, but then I think if you do that, you end up in very dangerous neo-Aristotelian territory, which again is a leads leads to the bad or the kind of the objectionable metaphysical reading table yeah that it's a very fascinating area I think if you know any any any names or like authors and thinkers that are that work in that direction besides Aristotle well actually that Robert Brandon mentioned there's a very I haven't
got the reference to you but I'll look at the reference up but there's a it's an Italian primatologist who who's been working you know who was at Pittsburgh and he was doing work at Pittsburgh as a visiting professor and apparently he and Brandon talked a lot and Brandon convinced him of the relevance of Hegel for even for some of his own research and let me see if I can reference I may not be able to find it right now but he's quite a well-known is it Thomas I think his name is it would be great if you can type it to the sidebar so we can
save it in the classroom yes if I find it I'm not gonna be able to find it now but I'll definitely I'll find it and then trying to type it or email us okay and then so then Theodore is next I think so Theodore asked culturally enforced self-consciousness is becoming very mysterious again all of a sudden decision-making agency especially if someone else wants to ask a question too that's fine because I asked a question I have a question can we take five minutes break or but
I can remember if we were taking breaks before or not we sometimes took break when when Ray had to go do something but okay you can definitely take five minute break I mean it's a heavy-duty class and it's just very rational to ask for my coffee true I see more coffee that's absolutely reasonable yeah five minute break but the video will roll just it's gonna be five minute break okay I entertain all right I was just gonna say I'm starting a thread in the classroom on Pippin's reading. And then hopefully if people are interested in that,
they can respond to stuff. I'm especially interested in what Pippin means specifically by idealism, I guess. Well, Hegel says, Pippin says, the primacy, it's the primacy of our perception. He says that Hegel's idealism develops out of Kant's idealism insofar as it insists on the fundamental generative role played by the transcendental unity of our perception. So Hegel's idealism, them and that's this claim that pure perception is the claim that you know
the I think must accompany all my representations which means that any first of all that anything that's is presented to me in experience is taken to me, taken by me in a certain way, is conceptually constituted and the way in which I take that phenomenon is susceptible of justification. So if I say any perceptual claim I make about the world is made on the basis of conceptual understanding you know conceptual understanding is always subject to
further legitimation and that's what he means about self-consciousness so self-consciousness you know you know our perception is self-consciousness not in the sense of being a consciousness of consciousness it's not a two-term relation self-consciousness is not a relation between a first consciousness and a second consciousness. It's a claim that to be conscious of anything, implicit in every consciousness, there is a self-consciousness, which is the ability to justify the claim I make about the world insofar as that claim is conceptually determined. and all the concepts I use must be susceptible to further rationalization.
and so it means that so it means simply that's that there's nothing about there's no dimension of experience so there's no dimension of our relationships with the world that is not somehow conceptually mediated I think that's the kind of the the definition of idealism that Pippin is working with. And he juxtaposes this to a metaphysical idealism, which claims that the world, that what truly exists is mind, or some kind of psychic substance, which somehow finds expression in individual, in particular minds.
minds. So that's the, you know, the kind of the metaphysical reading, the metaphysical understanding of idealism which he thinks Hegel rejects. It's about whether or not you think of mind as a substance or as a kind of reflexive self-relation which cannot be substantialized I think your last comment may have answered that question for me then but I just posted in the sidebar why why wouldn't then material or objective reality or what Hegel calls truth be the like the driving
motivational factor in the revision of concepts instead because it's um do you do you know what I mean well it is but the point would be that any material instance you invoke is going to be conceptually characterized so when he talks about the word concept it's like can'ts claim I think can't is often misunderstood when can says no what is can's kind of it's the claims that you know sensations must be conceptually synthesized in order to yield objects of
experience and you know those objects can be material objects or they can be experiential objects or whatever but the claim is not that the world is made of ideas not that the claims not that experience consists of concepts the claim is that concepts condition experience and concepts and I think it's very important you know he substantializing concepts he's de-refying the concept by reducing it to a function and if one in other words how does it's a
difference between Kant and Descartes Descartes thinks that minds are things you know are immaterial substances and thinking is the activity executed so thinking is what minds do but minds are things there's things that think can't radical break and so it's I think it's the difficulty of this thought is underestimated is that a mind is not a thing and a concept is not a thing either there is nothing in the world that corresponds to a mind or a concept it's a kind of it's a kind of conceptual of course it's a kind of category for for
can't to be the term mind has to be kind of completely dissociated from substance and turned into an activity, an activity whose material substratum could well be, I mean, Kant never denies that the thing that thinks could be either one nervous system or a kind of conglomeration, a multiplicity of nervous systems, and this is something that Sellers takes up in particular. but to look for a kind of a material to try to think that the contrast is between the ideal and
the kind of you know the real or the material is I think that that's kind of a mean that that language that vocabulary was introduced you know after can't but I think it's kind of it's it's misleading it's misleading and very there's another on this topic um he so he sometimes talks about he uses the word willing and that he characterizes the absolute idea or concept as knowing and willing and and and how how does will like the term will relate to the
topic that you're talking about right now as something that's in a way neither concepts nor he gives a definition of will in the critique of practical the reason and if memory serves I think he says that the will is that faculty for I think it's for realizing intention. I meant for Hegel. For Hegel. For Hegel. I was reading the passage on absolute freedom and terror right before this class.
So that's kind of more fresh on my mind. And he keeps talking about the absolute self-consciousness as knowing and willing, that there's this willing epithet, which I was curious about. It may have been unpacked more somewhere in a passage that we didn't read or I haven't read yet. but first of all he begins by saying when self-consciousness emerges self-consciousness is desiring and self-consciousness is desiring like desires a living thing and then it desires recognition this kind of desire for a living thing gets converted into the desire for recognition for mutual recognition by another self-consciousness.
So willing, I don't think he uses, you know, I don't think he gives a kind of a precise definition of willing, but I think all he means by that is that it's the will is the capacity to effectuate one's desire, I think. that would be you know a very straightforward kind of definition but I think that one that Hegel would accept in other words so it's no longer so the willing is not it's not a psychological faculty anymore it's willing is something that a self-consciousness does but it's not to be
explained in terms of a part okay because self-consciousness is not a psychological category and what self-consciousness does is not psychological so you know we all of these terms like you know desiring and willing that are thinking or hoping all these terms that Hegel uses he's not using them in a psychological register now you may say well then why would they still be legitimate? I think because he thinks that this is part of the vocabulary
that self-consciousness uses to understand itself, or in terms of which it comprehends itself is a kind of well it's a normative vocabulary so that means that it's it can't be cashed out empirically it makes the same point when he says to characterize someone as thinking or knowing is not to give an empirical description of them. It's to, you know, place them in the space of reasons, of saying, of putting them in a position where they are responsible for the claims
they make and are capable of justifying anything they say or do. And will is a a kind of in that sense is a is a modification of thinking to you know to will is to desire the realization of an intention and in that sense one can you You know, Hegel will say that we are not necessarily aware of what we want. We discover what we want after the fact.
And by the same token, I think he's going to say that we are not necessarily, we don't already know in advance. We can also be mistaken about what it is that we're actually engaged and willing. and we may only discover what we had will after the fact. Interesting. I was almost tempted to read the passage I'm referring to in something kind of close to Schopenhauer's conception of will as something that's prior to the concept, that in a way it's like both conceptual determination and immediacy of sensible determination
sort of follow in a posterior way that the absolute notion is in a way an absolute will? No, I think that he definitely doesn't use, he never uses the language of will when he's talking about the absolute or the notion. So he thinks, no, he thinks it's, it's self-consciousness wills but the self-consciousness the willing is itself conceptually mediated through and through desire is conceptual will is conceptual belief even sensation is conceptual
through and through so ultimately you know remember when he says it's self-conscious you know consciousness is its own notion what he's saying that to be conscious is they have a kind of conceptual self-relation so that there is no there's nothing natural about anything that self-consciousness does and there's nothing and will in particular would not be some kind of non conceptual or pre-conceptual drive Although as we'll see, you know, with these psychoanalytic readings of Hegel, these Lacanian readings of Hegel, it is possible to, Hegel is not making a claim about the transparency of self-consciousness.
Hegel is not saying that self-conscious, self-consciousness is kind of self-transparent and therefore always fully aware of what it's doing. that's not what he believes so that there is there's room for the unconscious and in fact lots of what self-consciousness does can be understood in an unconscious register where what it is you really will or really intend is precisely what you may be kind of unwilling or repressing or kind of foreclosing at a specific moment.
Yeah, that makes sense. I just typed out one of the passages I was thinking of, but we could also move on to someone else's. I don't mean to hog the bandwidth here. But whatever you do, please turn your camera on. Well that was a very helpful question actually. So I'm just trying to find the next question. Okay so then Theodore has remarks about asking for clarification about whether we're talking about Kant or Hegel, we're talking about Hegel, the Will and Hegel here, I think.
I think Maria's question is next, she says, is Will analogous to intention? Well, analogous in the sense that it's not to be understood in a psychological register, but the difference between will and intention is that it's one thing to have an intention and it's another thing to will its realization, to want to realize it. So I think that's a very commonsensical distinction, but Hegel doesn't shy away from resorting to kind of, he thinks that these commonsensical distinctions have philosophical force,
have philosophical depth to them, if properly recontextualized. So, for instance, so long as you don't, once you don't, basically, if you don't psychologize a normative vocabulary, he thinks that, like, you know, these thinkers like Sauer and Brandom do, that a lot of confusion in philosophy is generated by you know, misunderstanding prescriptive and normative vocabulary in a purely descriptive or empirical sense. So if one understands this the language of well this this kind of the
mentalistic vocabulary that the language of intention will desire belief hope fear as not as descriptive but as a kind of normatively normatively binding, then one gets a better term of superior philosophical traction on these terms. So in that regard, so will, like intention, has a normative salience for Hegel, but it's something different, it's not the same thing.
I think Hunter's next question is from just paragraph 595 I think this is a quote self alienated spirit driven to the extreme of its antithesis in which pure willing and the agents of that pure willing are still distinct reduces the antithesis to a transparent form and therein finds itself okay yes that's when he's talking about the French Revolution yeah pure willing here would be pure willing would be the kind of the desire to realize an intention in abstraction from any you know understanding of who who's that you
know realization come out you know what the agent of realization might be or who the agent of realization might be so it reduces answers to a transparent form and therein finds itself it reduces itself to this pure revolutionary will so in other words it's the will which is yes doesn't ask no longer asks about how the conditions for its realization or fulfillment and therefore disregards any kind of empirical obstacle or constraints and then becomes this kind of is purely
exterminator in the logic okay so that and then and then the will becomes identified with the universal negativity basically he's got the jacobin here where the revolutionary will is simply conditioned, you know, is characterized by its kind of commitment to a set of, you know, abstraction, principles, equality, the abolition of inequality, of unjust entitlement, etc. and then tries to realize these principles in a completely abstract way.
Tries to find this immediate kind of realization for these principles. And the result is terror, Egos thinks. And then what's mysterious to me is then like the the moral spirit like what arises from that contradiction is somehow Moral spirit is what he said like that this part becomes really mysterious to me. I guess we'll probably talk about it more in the next class Yes, she's talking about chance because he thinks it can't Categorical imperative and chance looking of fanaticism is kind of you know they are the idea that you know the categorical
imperative or the moral law must be uncontaminated by any pathological inclinations you know by any kind of desires or interests you know of any sort whatsoever he thinks that this you know in chance moral law there's an analog of revolutionary terror where you know that you know the the Jacobin or Robespierre you know ends up you know sentencing everyone to execution for failing to live up to the ideals of the revolutionary will and is himself false prey is himself inevitably executed in turn so what you have is that the revolutionary will is in a way kind of disincarnated and floats free of any
individual will or any even kind of group of wills and because of this it becomes this abstract universe it becomes a kind of a self-sufficient will which liquidates you know anything or anyone that fails to live up to its unconditional authority and Hegel thinks that this a version of this is going on in Kant and in the moral law because the moral law for Kant is is it's purely foreign has no content it has no interest is completely disinterested so you're supposed to will you know when you will according to the moral law the
maxim of your will is supposed to be that what could be willed by anyone anytime. Hence, that's what... It's just like the categorical imperative is the culmination of Jacobin's terror. Exactly. Yes, that's Hegel's clan. And then spirit goes on to transcend that. Yes. And then he... And then he calls... He's an ability to self-legislate or something like that. Yes, in a community. He thinks that Sittlikite, reject Kantian's kind of Jacobinian kind of moralism, which pits the law against sensible inclination, or centrist inclination, and says that
what is and ethics must be understood in terms of sitlakeite, which is a kind of it has to be it can only be properly or you know realized in a community of self consciousnesses which mutually recognize one another you know I guess collectively determine what is good and what is right okay yeah that that's very helpful actually thanks but but but it's like but but they somehow will it together like like there's this like erasure of the distinction between individual wills and the universal will when they're no longer opposed almost
somehow yes well because they won't be in a way will is me hegel is kind of this is why you need a kind of social institutions realize justice and you need so this is why it's not enough to will it that in fact the whole vocabulary will an intention it's just certain you know to a certain extent and what you need is to kind of you know creates social structures and institutions you know that's there are the concrete embodiment and of these you know kind
of prescriptions okay there you know they're no longer that means that practical activity they're embodied in practical activity that means that there's no longer kind of an opposition between the the purity of the will and the impurity of your concrete social circumstances in fact the circumstances your social existence is such where you can, your all interaction, all human interaction is virtuous, is principled and virtuous, because that antithesis between duty and inclination has been overcome.
once you find satisfaction in doing what is right, and there's no self-abnegation involved, and, you know, I mean, it's difficult to kind of say too much of this, having, you know, gone through the material, actually. Yeah, but yes, so he thinks that Kantian morality is a kind of abstract is analogous to kind of Jacobin kind of terror and it needs to be super it needs to be overcome and and these institutions wouldn't fall into the same area as the Jacobin
institution because there's a higher degree of knowing kind of yes innocent but notoriously in this philosophy of right, you know, this is, again, Hegel notoriously seems to think that the state is, you know, a necessary institution. So he thinks that the institutions of civil society and the state are what you need. So hence the claim, okay, you know, the acquisition made against Hegel is that, you know, at the beginning as a young man, he was, you know, a great admirer of the French Revolution, like every, you know, like his oldest peers, inspired by the revolution and freedom. Revolution being the idea that it's possible beings can slow off every form of servitude and can become properly free. They can achieve their freedom on earth,
not in some realm beyond. And justice is fully compatible with freedom. justice need not entail a curtailing of individual freedom. The idea that inspired his work in the phenomenology, and then the claim is that as he got older, he became more and more conservative, and kind of backtracked away from this, and is no longer, and then seems to end up kind of, you know, his notion of revolutionary freedom to the point where, you know, the state becomes the guarantor of freedom. And state institutions, civil society, and bourgeois
institutions become sufficient embodiments for the requirements of freedom. So this is kind of the traditional reading of Hegel of someone who, you know, starts off as a revolutionary and then ends up as a conservative. Right. more complicated than that and certainly the people who all the second readers when look at they read the story is much more complicated that's a traditional reader but yes he's upset with freedom is it is the term you know in the phenomenology freedom is you know it's a pain through absolute freedom an
absolute reason is the achievement of absolute freedom for Hegel so in any case it would be more interested in sort of his more abstract logic in the 21st century that what he's what he's saying about the state is maybe more like epiphenomenal to his time yes I mean yet and this is a you can read them still there are conservative hegelians who take what he says about the states you know on its own terms and then they're still you know obviously Marxist hegelians who think that no he was he remained he became more cautious more conservatives, that the core of his thinking is still robustly revolutionary in terms of
exposing the idea that justice and freedom are inseparable. and you cannot kind of, their opposition or their juxtaposition is a result of failing to attain self-conscious nationality. So long as you oppose those two things to one another, you haven't yet become fully rational or fully self-conscious. cool thanks just bouncing off what you said hunter there's that passage on um uh 594 or 591 i'm sorry um
where he's talking about the governing body first executing and willing from a single point I think that's sort of getting out where you're talking about right we're we're about the two hour and half mark for the for the seminar right so I'm thinking if if you're if we would like to wrap up maybe maybe just like I know I want to I want to like remind you that like I posted the assignments to the classroom okay a Google Doc you need to be logged into the new center account to be able to
actually click on either the classroom or the document but it's open to anyone with a with a new center email to view and you can read them and make comments on the on the documents or if you want you can make the comments on the Google classroom depends on how you want to do it but you have to read the document on Google Google Docs because it's a it's a multi-page document that has everyone's one's sort of like written text added to it. Okay. Okay. Sorry, I just wanted to also say that now we have next week will be, I guess people will submit their second writing for on one of the, one of the readings based on the last, last week and this week and next week.
Sorry. The reading of this week and next week will constitute the assignment or the writing for the next week. And hopefully they'll post it before next week. So you have one week to write the second one. And then just do the same thing. Just post it to Classroom, and then I'll gather and compile them into one for Ray to Z. Some people are still behind and have not done the first one, but they've all messaged me, and they said that in the process of finishing and adding it to the document. So that's just a note about the assignments. Okay. actually I can go on for a few I mean I basically I can go on for about another 15 minutes if people have more questions but actually I was gonna ask something in terms of like the you know how I do a couple of weeks you know I've been
preparing because I always I realize I'm asking you to read a lot of material you know each week and I've been trying to kind of you know prepare handouts but obviously it's very difficult to get through a handout because there's so much you know because of the way because there's hence there's so much going on in each section that it's very difficult if I you know it means the progress is always quite slow within a session. So would you rather just question and answer for the whole session? I mean, instead of me kind of trying to kind of, you know, summarize or,
you know, present or go through a handout at the beginning of the session and followed by a discussion, like for instance, today, like, you know, there are lots of questions about you know much later stuff which is fine I think we're gonna do my hope was to do the master and slave and then the freedom and terror material next week but would people just prefer if it was more open-ended where you know there's a we read each week there's a signed reading and then it's just the whole two half hours is just a kind of no no I I think that um I find very useful that
there's at least one point that is a orienting us towards the reading okay I think that I mean I actually I think I find the questions extremely confusing most of the time because I I would rather just absolutely stick to like what Hegel is talking about because, you know, I have this problem where when I'm reading Hegel, I feel like I'm reading a smart-ass reading Kant, you know, sort of like explaining like, oh, what Kant means is, ha, this, what a moron, you know, Kant's such an idiot, ha-ha. So I'm trying to turn that off and just like pay attention to what Hegel's saying because his arguments are like these kind of insane summaries of like a huge history of philosophy already. It's
easy to get lost, I think. So yeah, I think I find that as rapid as possible in orientation, I think is quite good. You know, I think you're doing a pretty good job at that. And also, yeah, orienting the questions towards the text as much as possible, I find also very helpful. Okay. Then, you know. More flexible, right? But I also think that these beginning of the class introduction you do are immensely useful, but not just for us, but think of all the people who will be watching these videos in the future. Okay, okay. Yeah, I was just going to hop in.
I found that the handouts that you have are really, really helpful to just hone in on some specific points of each section. and yeah, they're guiding my readings a lot. Okay, well, good. That's what they're intended to do. But I worry because today I didn't even get – I was hoping to be able to get through two handouts today, and we only made it, I think, halfway through the first one. so in which case I mean if you're happy so if I give you the handouts and then you kind of you keep them an inch okay you know should I go through I mean
would you want me to kind of continue with the handouts I prepared next week or would you rather just have them for yourselves and then I move straight on to the next material. This is just a thought, but maybe I would propose, like, say we move on to the next material for the next week, for that specific question, but then also we could, like, plan that there would be about an hour of you sort of, you know, presenting the text, and then we open it up to questions after that. That's a good idea, Hunter. I think it's a you wouldn't be planning on a longer thing and then not be able to get through it it would sort of be like okay plan would be to speak for about it and that's just a thought but
I mean you know following you know Hegel it would seem that um you know we're like getting our methodology after reading it right so I mean I think that whatever course we need to take we should we will have to take it so if we don't cover everything that obviously means that we need to understand something so I don't care if you know we don't even actually read the whole thing or we never get past the first part you know as long as it's you know we're trying to understand what Hegel saying you know I don't know that that that's my particular concern okay I mean yes I mean what I wanted to to do was just you know because what I'm trying I mean the whole conceit of the courses to again focus on these contemporary readings but obviously I
realized I wanted people to have a sense you know to first of all a sense of what is actually going on in Hegel and also to have a sense in which I mean he really is there's always more going on in Hegel than you know you can get from any gloss or kind of summary he's an incredibly thinker there's there's more going on between the lines in his especially in the phonology and the logic and so that's I mean I think that's what I really like about the reading so far as it seems
impermeable to pretense which was this which was the reason why he constructed it the way he did I think I don't know we haven't really talked we haven't gone back to methodology too much yet but I mean I have my main interest in Hegel really is like the the style you know why is he writing it like this and I think it has to do with you know casting off or making it sort of invincible towards a kind of pretense yes though ironically he thought he was accused of obscurances and of chronic obscurances and because of this and of charlatanism and you know famous by you know by Schopenhauer there's some very funny kind of diatribes against Hegel by Schopenhauer and I think the first volume of Parerga and Parallit-Omena but um he is actually
he explains if you understand the speculative proposition um in the in the preface you know we didn't you know we only read a few short excerpts from the preface but if you it's really you know the preface when was written after the phenomenal and is written as his as a summary and encapsulate his entire system and this is quite so difficult but he says in the the latter section there's a very interesting explanation for why he thinks argument is not the appropriate form of philosophical presentation and nor kind of series of deductions from first principles and
ultimately why he thinks that the speculative proposition is the units of philosophical thinking so Hegel's thinking is is extremely you know rigorous of course he rejects the antithesis of you know of methods and content him you know the the method is the content and the content is already kind of methodologically articulated but for him to think philosophically is to think dialectically and to be able to to understand the logic of contradictions
One very very important thing, I think the bad, the vulgarised, is that Hegel says the understanding is the kind of, I think actually Fred Jameson has particularly kind of, although I admire his work. I think when he writes about Hegel he presents a very very unhelpful contrast between what he calls picture thinking, which he thinks the understanding is guilty of, Kantian critical philosophy is guilty of, which is governed by the principle of non-contradiction,
and properly dialectical thinking, which is not constrained by non-contradiction and happily embraces contradiction. And he ends up unwittingly, you know, generating an opposition between understanding and reason, or between contradiction and non-contradiction, which is completely undialect. That's the worst possible way to understand Hegel. Hegel does not think understanding or representation or picture thinking is bad. He thinks that they are necessary, they're indispensable components for thinking philosophically. But he says you must, but they have limitations and what he calls reason happens at the kind of constrained registers of understanding to their limits.
you supersede them through the philosophical grasp of contradiction and determinate negation as something that allows thoughts to progress, to move as the motor of thinking. Hey, Ray, can I ask a question? I have a request. I struggle really, really hard with this concept of negation. I mean, partially maybe because I spent a lot of time in my youth, like, studying. I went to school for a little while for computer programming and, like, mathematics. And I know that Hegel has a – there's a part in the science of logic that is dedicated to calculus. And, you know, like, what is the difference?
I don't really understand, like, is it negative in the sense of, like – I mean, going back to picture thinking, like, right, like a negative film, you know, camera? like is it just simply contrast like i do not really understand what he means by determinate negation i've read this shit so many times and i still don't really get what he means by that like what how is it possible like according to his own system i don't understand how it's possible that there is this there is a negate that could there can be a negation like where would it be happening okay it's a I think it's a absolutely fundamental question and I think it's far from clear exactly what he means or how it's you know it's to be
understood no the problem is that well the examples of you know the examples of negation that he gives for instance in the we just looked at well he's talking about a kind of it's something that looks very much like logical me we're saying it's not this. So it's the negation of an assertion or an affirmation. You can understand this as an assertion. It's a kind of a one-word sentence if you're pointing or indicating something. So, you know, for Kant, negation only applies to judgment.
Only a judgment can be negated. The minimal units of negation is a judgment, okay? When you say that something you know is not the case so the claim that negativity you know obviously that the problem is is hegel saying there's a kind of negation which in a way is not merely a fixed to judgment and that kind of floats free of judgment and has some kind of ontological substantiality and if if this is what he's saying and this sounds met like you know egregiously metaphysical it sounds like the hope well that kind of uh i mean that would just seem to be a kind of an elementary fallacy
it's it's a reification of negation and you know the beliefs that that kind of you know things can be stand in kind of negative relations to each other but you know oh sorry sorry go ahead independently of our assertions about things. But because he's going to say that... Deleuze is a Hegelian. I mean, he's trying to... It's really... It's this problem... I mean, how I understand it is like when he says negation, what I immediately think of is he's pointing out the fact that I can understand something that he's saying. saying, you know, like I can read the text and have a, and like, I'll be like, oh, I
have a new thought now and I understand what he's getting at. Like that, that's what I think of when he's saying negation, but this does not appear to me to be a negation. In fact, it's the, it's, I don't know, I don't think it's weird because I don't think there's like a negative sense. I don't get this negative sense of negation in the sense of like it's minus, you know, or it's just a different positivity, you know, that's, that's how I'm reading it and I'm just wondering if this is the right way to read this because I don't understand how something's being excluded I mean I mean I feel like you can also think of it in terms of like just you know any idea that you have that you try to articulate entirely by the time you get to the point of articulating it entirely you've you've sort of destroyed it and it's not there anymore like there's there's sort of a basic experience of that that I think he's drawing from
right and yeah no I mean you know he's like the one flaw I mean it's really funny because Kant Spinoza I think Plato and maybe Aristotle I mean I don't know if any of them had children right and Hegel has like a bunch of kids I was is you know so that there's like this elementary like you know you need to make a bunch of errors before you understand which is why I think it's also he's constructing this the way it is I just it's it's just it's not that I I mean, I get that part of the dialectic, but it's just I don't, this concept of negation still is, I don't really quite know where to place it. No, it's, it's, look, I mean, it's, you know, what you say is lots of people, you know, the very same way.
Now, there is, I mean, I hadn't, there is a small body of literature. I mean, actually there have been attempts to kind of, you know, to formalize Hegel. Some people, I believe, are competent logicians, have tried to formalize the kinds of, you know, dialectical negations that Hegel, you know, kind of describes. I think that stuff can get, I think that stuff is very illuminating, but I think we must try to come up with a simpler and more direct grasp of what he means by negation and negativity without having to
So maybe to put it simply, it seems to me that negation is an operation and not a property. Yes, exactly. It's an operation and not a property because there's something that is doing the negating. and is doing the negating is consciousness and he thinks it's so already like in his description of
consciousness it's structured around a kind of you know a different distinction which he thinks involves a negation the distinction between what the object between truth and knowledge is he thinks involves a kind of a negation where you have what the object is in itself and what it is for us so you say that means that for instance any claim that you make um which tracks is saying that the object is not how it appears or you know the
appearance or this aspect of the appearance of the object is not in fact a real property of the old we look random has you know an account of negativity he thinks that you can explain this in terms of incompatibility you know incompatibility between assertions so for random you know negation is a logical operator and what logic does is it renders explicit relations amongst assertions and the development of a logical vocabulary allows you to to state things about the relations between assertions can't be
no can't simply be you know they have to be stated on this dimension this dimension of discourse which is distinct from that of you know the the level of discourse in which you are describing, explaining things. So, you could say, so, incompatibility is a kind of, in a way it's a kind of, it's the maximum degree of difference between two assertions. To say that two assertions are incompatible is to say that they cannot be made together.
together that one excludes the other so if incompatibility involves exclusion exclusion is a kind of negation I think this is part of what Hegel is is what is contained in Hegel's concept of negation because it's concepts that negate one another in Hegel and for Hegel concepts are ultimately you know tied to assertions they're deployed in the context of an assertion okay but this would still be
well the controversy then is over whether one kind of domesticates Hegelian negativity by saying that all everything he says about negation can be explained in terms of what someone like Brandon would call incompatibility and ultimately contradiction is nothing but you know incompatibility or the claim that no there's something more to it that there's obviously only assertions are incompatible but there's nothing you know in the world as such a reality in itself that would be incompatible unless you believe that
objects you know that it's true to say that objects have incompatible properties can't have or that certain sets of properties are incompatible and a single object cannot have them and if that is the case you believe that there is some kind of let's say kind of sameness of structure between you know the structure of our assertions about the wall structure of the world for instance if you say that if you know anything that is you know you know something is a mammal it can't be a
crustacean okay you believe that these two properties are incompatible and clearly we do believe that these are really incompatible properties that you crustacean and being a mammal are incompatible and that's an objective facts about the world and in that regard that's I mean that that's a specific kind of a priori judgment correct like an analytic a prayer I'm just thinking about Kant I mean I'm you know I'm more it's like this concept of you know what what Hegel's doing with the idea that there are pure forms of intuition right that you know something like geometry which is why this is why
I'm talking about math sorry I'm like that you know geometry is this like bizarre thing that's not in the world and has these necessary universal properties or you know things about it and you know how that could you know I don't know it's it's how like what what he's doing with that and why he's constructing the absolute the way that he is and how a negation is involved there I think I don't know I think it's very clever what he's doing I guess well the Hegelian challenge is that you cannot think without negation and that Right. You cannot think, and in a way, this goes back to Plato, because the first person who
makes you such, I think, who, you know, Parmenides, you know, in the sophist, you know, you know, which plays with most famous dialogues, you know, the alienatic stranger is, you know, says we must countenance what, you know, we've been told is forbidden, that forbidden by who says that you know that which is is and what is not is not and we must you cannot ever see that what is is not or what is not is however as soon as you distinguish truth from falsity this is exactly what you have to say you have to say that what is when you say something false you're saying that what is not is
okay and when you deny something you're saying you know you're saying that's something that is said to be is not so there is a problem about understanding there's a problem about trying to think without negativity already the claim that conceptualization involves negation because it involves and it involves kind of yes it involves like some minimal kind of specificity and and then so in a way
Hegel is simply developing I think this platonic insights so even the distinction between appearance and reality because when you distinguish the appearance in reality which is Plato's inaugural gesture he says this is precisely what monists cannot do they cannot give a principled account of the distinction between what is and what is not but merely seems this is a problem participation and to make this distinction is also to distinguish the intelligible from the sensible but to claim that sensible becoming is only intelligible in terms of contrariety or contrariety involves a minimal negation
so to think already in the tradition there's a kind of a claim that to think difference in order for in order for for difference to be intelligible it must involve negation of a distinction without negation is well is incoherence But then, once you've, you know, in Plato's gesture, it's precisely by distinguishing between the sensible and the intelligible, or what appears from what truly is, you also, you mix together being and non-being.
You see that, you know, being of the sensible, which is that of, you know, appearance, and there is a non-being of the intelligible. and you know I think that kind of the Plato's you know Plato phones philosophy in terms of this the necessity of thinking negativity in this sense to think is already to negate and the the the the attempt to think without negation is ultimately kind of it's precisely you know in a no way the the pre-socratics tried to do so they tried to think
without negation but they ran aground because they lacked the resource of negation to be able to to distinguish between false appearance and reality and and the intelligible and the sensible. Now you don't have to accept the final couplets in those triad of distinctions to find something compelling about the claim that thinking involves negation. And I take Hegel to be really trying to radicalize this platonic insight in a way
by denying, saying that there's nothing that can't be, you know, there's no term that has to be accepted as absolutely kind of first or you know positive or you know indubitable or self-evident in any kind of in any sense that it's a it's always you you accept something you affirm but then that affirmation is always going to
entail in a retrospective negation so I think look I mean we have to there's a real technical issue you know which you've just raised about you know how do we avoid you know redefining negativity into some mysterious kind of occult force we find a way of our articulating logical negation which is obviously crucial for Hegel with the negativity that he takes to be universal, to change the lifeblood of the universal. And then these kind of diatribes against negation and reactivity, which you
find in kind of Deleuze's polemics against Hegel which are I think unhelpful I mean and it's very I agree yeah I think so in other words for Hegel I mean not to put too funny when Hegel is talking about you know negative you know negation negativity I mean the the ineluctability of of negativity for Hegel has got, it doesn't mean like being sad and weak and reactive. And I think that that's a really unfortunate kind of rhetorical association that's been generated where people think, people link negativity to reactivity and think that it's
impossible affirmative if you kind of you know affirm you make a claim about the indispensability of negativity as hegel does in fact I think that you know on hegel's view is the only way to be truly affirmative because the kind of affirmationism that that attempts to have done with negativity in fact involves well a problem is you end up denying that you deny the problem with trying to think affirmation decoupling affirmation from negation is that involves you possible to kind of to be simply affirmative in this way these affirmation go together tonight so let me let me refine this a little bit more
too so what I'm having a hard time understanding too is that how is how to does speculative philosophy now overcome the argumentative, like an argumentative structure? Or maybe speculative philosophy changes it because the whole point of a determinate negation is saying that, you know, when I say this, I precisely, you have to then say what you're talking about or that it's not something else, right? So to me, that's, I don't understand how that's beyond, or maybe it's a, maybe what you meant when you said earlier that um speculative possibly is not an argumentative structure uh it's just not a particular kind of argumentative structure that begins with principles yes and the key claimant hagel's problem with argumentation he thinks that the you can argue
about it's he thinks that the um philosophy based on argument it takes it kind of you know you conjure up you begin with a kind of uh you know a principle or an axiom or an assertion and then you go you know you argue and then you vanquish your opponent through a kind of reducture or whatever or by showing exposing a fallacy but he's saying that this is a static way of thinking because the content of the assertion is not itself generated by the the dynamic interplay between affirmation and negation so the point of a speculative thinking for Hegel is that the very content of you know what is asserted is itself kind of generated through the movements of you know positive thing and then negation because he thinks
otherwise what you have is a kind of well I mean it's you know you can have a it's all because you can you know there's no kind of because it there is no indubitable first principle that means that you know any any sets of commitments can be defended more or less ably through argumentation which is why it's possible which is why you have Christian analytic philosophers who flourish in that culture of argument or argumentation so there has to be a way of it's not that arguments is its argument is insufficient it's not that it's not you know necessary but it's insufficient and that you need to find a
way to let the very content of your conceptualization be generated through the movements through these kind of identifications of you know points of incompatibility on exclusion by the way that he'll talk to me this it's in the very the closing the last 10 paragraphs of the of the of the preface they're very very interesting was where you know first of all he says why you can't begin from a first principle because the first principle would run some kind of intuition or some some appeal to self evidence which is dogmatic but then you can't simply rely on claims because the set of claims that are kind of that are
identified as the kind of you know the you know the the cutting edge or the kind of for the argumentative gambit will always be more or less arbitrarily you know selected he thinks I'm afraid okay so there's I'll quickly try to a few more questions yes there's a remark here Ray if you don't have time we can deal with them later or in the classroom okay then yes perhaps I'll try to kind of I'll definitely I think it's
the topic of negation negativity will come up especially when we're talking about when we're looking at these you know psychoanalytic readings there's a lot more to say about this so but I'm yeah I'll have to return to it yeah so so I get you know because I I went in and out today because of my internet so many times I will get a theater to post all the discussion in one long thread and then you can maybe then people maybe can go through the threat and rearticulate the question as new posts and then and then Ray will kindly go through that and answer it there because the questions might be buried at the bottom of a very long text so if you care for your question please copy paste it back
and create a new post so then Ray can respond to them that way easier than going through the whole long thing trying to find what question he didn't answer today and all that and then in that case then we can maybe like end the session we are already half an hour over we did we did more than three hours today okay okay so good plan so and again Ray the assignments are all posted as one Google Doc and feel free to Google Doc if you had any problems with it let me know and I help you okay yes I will do a bit of trouble getting logging in with my account so I'll try again and if I have any difficulty all yes so I'll stop the broadcast here thanks everybody it was an amazing