Here's an audio-only lecture by Lawrence Cahoone:
Listen on youtube.
Cahoone here emphasizes very different themes than we talked about on the episode, specifically the theistic themes (he characterizes "Spirit" as "pantheistic" or "panentheistic," both of which have been used to describe Spinoza; the former means everything is God, while the latter means everything is within God, but God can exceed creation as we're aware of it) as well as politics.
Hegel's Phenomenology, according to Cahoone, involves detailing the shapes or forms of Spirit (geist) as they evolve in human history. "God is evolving, and human beings are part of that evolution, by which God comes to full self-consciousness or self-recognition."
He characterizes dialectic: "the manner of transition or development." "We begin with something or other... which given the context in which it operations naturally generates opposition or conflict with something else. This conflict eventually leads to a resolution: a transformation of the opposed elements to form a new unity." Anything finite must undergo the dialectic, i.e. anything except God in his total realization.
From part two: Reason is what gets at the inner movement of things, i.e. doing dialectical analysis just like he's doing in the book. Understanding, which is just what natural science does, just records regularities. This is much like Schopehauer's distinction between the field of objects analyzable using the principle of sufficient reason in its various forms--the objects and forms of experience and concepts extracted from them--and analysis of nature in terms of Will, which Schopenhauer sees as necessary for understanding not only other people, but any other life and really any force at all.
Hegel's theory of truth, according to Cahoone (around 5 minutes into part 2), is not the correspondence of ideas to reality, but the coherence of ideas into the whole. Unlike for the pragmatists, this is not just a matter of the coherence of ideas in my head or with some other set of beliefs held in a community, but coherence with the whole of reality. Now, Schopenhauer, of course, would dismiss this mixing of beliefs with things that are not beliefs as nonsense; this is all in keeping with Hegel's desire (elaborated further in our Heidegger episode, as Heidegger took this theme and ran with it) to remove the hard distinction between ideas locked in peoples heads and the contents of a purely material world. I don't think Cahoone gives this enough time in this particular lecture to make the idea clear.
Listen to part two and part three.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Burl says
April 5, 2011 at 11:45 amMark
I am not trying to be over-reaching or arrogant, here, but the Hegel/Whitehead parallels are just overwhelming. I thought I might paraphrase your current post and draw out some of them.
If you are bothered or feel it’s not appropriate, you may discard it.
ANW’s panentheistic God is goubly immanent: s/he is in the world, and the world is immanent in God who does exceed the world by luring it to optimal novel possibilities (creative advance), and preserving its objective past so as to give meaning to actuality. God’s essence is not fixed – s/he evolves with her body/world in the novelty of creative advance. Interestingly, God is subordinate to Creativity (Plato’s Eros), and God’s lure in each occasion of experience is to provide appetitive aim toward an aesthetic value-ordered harmony of presently felt contrasts. God directs the flux of Creativity, but each occasion of experience is autonomous.
ANW’s panexperentialism, involves detailing the means by which the Many objectified actualities of the past coalesce into a subjective present moment of active experience – become One – and self-entertains its past with its felt potential for adding novelty to the future; the actual occasion of subjective experience decides/synthesizes itself before its subjectivity ceases. This, as the present duration fades and another brute objective fact is added to the Many objective facts of the past and is now included for entertainment in its succeeding present occasion of experience. This process is contemporaneously happening in billions of regions in the space-time Receptacle and this universal present duration is how we feel extension (I think?).
I see a huge parallel of this process of becoming/experiencing with Hegel’s dialectic:
“the manner of transition or development.” “We begin with something or other… which given the context in which it operations naturally generates opposition or conflict [contrast in Whitehead] with something else. This conflict [contrast] eventually leads to a resolution: a transformation of the opposed elements to form a new unity.” Anything finite must undergo the dialectic, i.e. anything except God in his total realization. [ANW’s God is not quite as absolute, as I mentioned above.]”
Calhoone talked about organic ‘notions’ (ideas) which is what I think you are referring to
“Hegel’s theory of truth, according to Cahoone (around 5 minutes into part 2), is not the correspondence of ideas to reality, but the coherence of ideas into the whole. “
It is because reality is a networked experiential organism that you cannot take out (abstract) any part of it and expect to gain truth by analyzing this partial reality. (Mistaking the abstract for the concrete.) This is why ANW says logic presupposes truth in reality, and in abstracting premises from it, logic comes up short of it.
Tom McDonald says
April 5, 2011 at 1:37 pmThis is a great find Mark. Thanks.
Tom McDonald says
April 5, 2011 at 2:18 pmHowever, we risk making Hegel’s contribution to philosophy into a relic of historical interest if we don’t jettison the pantheistic concept of “spirit”. It is enough to identity “spirit” in Hegel’s philosophy as denoting the uncontroversial appearance of human agency, normativity, freedom, and reason-giving in the world. There are a growing number of contemporary analytic philosophers who make clear that Hegel’s reading of Western civilization and the history of philosophy itself can be usefully drawn on to address contemporary problems without the theological language.
Burl says
April 5, 2011 at 4:44 pmSame for process. You might enjoy Nicholas Rescher’s more secularized post-Whiteheadian take on process philosophy (which clearly includes Hegel).
http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=process
Burl says
April 5, 2011 at 5:18 pmBTW, is that YouTube pic Hegel or Fogelberg? http://www.uulyrics.com/music/dan-fogelberg/album-home-free/
Burl says
April 5, 2011 at 5:35 pmBTW2. I have never seen this, but it occurs to me that the oncoming anticipation of a good sneeze is the perfect example of the contrast set up in an intellectual feeling of affirmation-negation — what is but might not be…it gets your undivided conscious awareness.
Tom McDonald says
April 6, 2011 at 11:36 am@ Burl on The Sneeze – nice one.