Episode 134: Hegel on Thought & World (or “Logic”)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 134 is how does thought relate to reality? Or maybe just what is philosophy? And we read the introductory sections to G.W.F. Hegel's Science of Logic from 1812 and his Encyclopedia Logic from 1817. You can join the discussion, get the texts and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with absolute knowing from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan negating himself in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey Dialectically in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:52 Amogh: This is Amogh Sahu with the identity of thought and being in Toronto, Canada.

0:56 Mark: Welcome Amogh. You're a resident. Well, I won't say expert, but you're

1:02 Wes: not our resident, you're our alien expert.

1:07 Amogh: Yeah, I mean I'm into Hegel. I'm somewhat, I wouldn't call myself a Hegelian because there's some seriously weird stuff in there, but I'm definitely psyched about reading the logic.

1:20 Mark: Folks might remember Amogh from some of our after shows that you appeared on. And you run your own podcast on how symptomatic redness with one of our former guests, C. Derick Varn. And what else do we need to know about you?

1:32 Amogh: I'm an undergrad at the University of Toronto.

1:34 Mark: Undergrads that are way into Hegel. That's a, you know, I was, I like the phenomenology fascinated me at the time. But this book I never touched. So we should explain the science of logic is the so called greater logic and it's the hard book, it's the

1:48 Amogh: thick book, 800 pages approximately.

1:52 Mark: Yes. And we just read the parts really just explaining what logic is. According to him, it was released in three volumes. The part we read was released in 1812. Also part of what we read was a second preface which was actually from 1830. It's one of the very last things he wrote. And then the encyclopedic logic, the so called lesser logic was released afterward when Hegel figured out that his undergraduates could not understand his science of logic at all. So he wrote this shorter thing and then also through a couple of additions added to it. So I believe again the last version, the one that we're actually looking at is the 1831.

2:28 Amogh: Right. What's interesting is that the logic is actually published before the sort of three part Encyclopedia Philosophical Sciences, which is like the completed system, the completed Hegelian system. So if you, if you want to work through the encyclopedia logic and the two other books, that's when you get the whole thing.

2:48 Mark: So this is a guy who's ballsy enough to write a set of volumes and call it the Encyclopedia.

2:53 Amogh: The Encyclopedia, yeah. The definite Article.

2:55 Mark: It's not that he contributed articles to, you know, that he was a specialist about sea snakes and he wrote the sea snake article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It's Hegel's Encyclopedia Hegelpedia.

3:09 Dylan: Well, well, he did have some modesty.

3:11 Wes: Welcome to my encyclopedic knowledge, which he did have actually. So from looking at those lecture notes, it's like, wow, this guy is.

3:20 Amogh: I mean, I don't have any kind of science background, so I didn't have the cringes of the 19th century science that's in here. Perhaps to a different reader, some of the encyclopedic knowledge might appear. It's a bit outdated, right? For 2016 readers, yeah.

3:34 Wes: But there's a lot of good stuff going on in the 19th century.

3:37 Amogh: Totally.

3:37 Dylan: One of my colleagues who's a Hegel scholar, her comment about him was that he lived at a time when it was probably still possible to basically read anything worth reading and have read it all.

3:53 Amogh: Right.

3:53 Dylan: And he was the person who did it. That is just functionally impossible now nowadays. Yeah, you know, late 1700s that was still possible.

4:05 Wes: The world spirit has too many little articulations and eddies now we are caught in.

4:11 Dylan: It's no longer a unity of universals with particulars swimming about in them.

4:16 Amogh: He would not be happy with the Hegel literature. It would be too dispersed for him, which is actually not too vast nowadays. There's been a bit of a resurgence in commentary about this book on the logic, but generally this is the book which you run away from if you've been educated in the US or in England.

4:33 Mark: So we have two episodes, really a two episode string on a good chunk of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which was his first book. And I guess he started this book, the early part of it, right after that. It was supposed to be the sequel. Folks might know from other episodes that we've done that phenomenology usually is about describing experience. Can we give sort of an objective take on this is what I'm experiencing? And so then you could look at the same phenomenon and report the same thing. We're not just reporting about the stray thoughts that go through your mind as you look at something.

It's not an Artistic exercise. It's supposed to somehow get at the essences of things. It's supposed to somehow be objective and scientific, even though you're just examining your own experience. Now, Hegel's writing a hundred years before that idea of phenomenology came up with guys like Edmund Husserl. But this is what influenced that. Folks will have to go back to and listen to our phenomenology of spirit episode for, I think, an accurate description of that. But he goes through the different ways that you could describe experience from the simplest.

So it's not examining your experience experience, but it's sort of imagining, like, what the simplest kind of animal would experience. So it starts with sense certainty, and then it gets more and more complex in how we might then attribute, say, forces within things. That's supposed to get, at the end of the story to absolute knowing that he's established somehow this method by which what he thinks of as true science is possible. And how this arises out of the interaction, the natural growth of spirit. And spirit is just kind of like mind, but generalized.

It's not my mind. It's not your mind. In fact, it's great that we just did Aristotle De Anima, because the way he talked about nous.

6:13 Wes: Yeah.

6:14 Mark: Is reflected throughout here.

6:15 Wes: Nous poetica. It's one interpretation of the.

6:18 Mark: Yes. Hegel talks explicitly about the world spirit. We also had a past episode on Hegel's philosophy of history, of history being the action of the world spirit sort of realizing itself and has a very mechanical view of how things progress.

6:30 Wes: In the things we read. He's going to talk about it as an infinite being or as God.

6:35 Amogh: It's important that you define spirit in that way because he often talks about spirituality or the spiritual, which tends to have certain connotations to modern readers, obviously of being a certain kind of, like, theological substance. And that's not quite what he means. As your definition of spirit suggests, it's bound up with theology in some way. Right. He keeps talking about how God will be actualized by the idea and so on. But the spiritual idea is more connected with the notion of mind and thinking about the world.

7:04 Mark: Yes. And the fact that when mind. When it's not a matter of just your mind thinking about the particulars of your life, when it reflects on the deep structures of things, when it reflects on universals, then it is engaging in objective thought. Anybody who is thinking clearly, who is contemplating the same thing, is going to be able to get in touch with these objectives, objective thoughts. And again, think of that like mathematics In a way that you could say mathematics is given in experience. In that, well, okay, I see two books. I see two, whatever.

You can kind of come up with counting. But once you get rid of the particulars of your experience and not books, then you're contemplating universals, you're contemplating these numbers, you're contemplating laws. And this is how he thinks that this science is supposed to work. I just brought up the phenomenology to establish the background that somehow he. And he explicitly says, look, I already proved that this is possible. This kind of knowledge is possible. In the previous book. This book is all about explaining what this kind of knowledge is.

And then after the part that we read, then apparently giving a lot more details on zoology and, I don't know, a lot of stuff that I didn't look at.

8:11 Amogh: Yeah, the rest of the logic goes into detail about pretty much everything, ethical life, art, chemistry, biology. And it's all supposed to connect together in this big broad system.

8:21 Mark: And it's funny that you were going to talk about Wes. Why does he call this the logic?

8:25 Amogh: Right.

8:25 Wes: Yeah. So I think most of us are used to thinking of logic. The kind of logic you're going to be taught in a logic class has to do with the forms of valid arguments. For instance, modus ponens is a logical form. So if it rains, it pours. It rains, therefore it pours. That form tells you whether an argument is going to be valid, which is not to say true, because you could have erroneous premises. And I think I just gave an example of an argument like that. So the conclusion could be valid without being true. The kind of logic Hegel is talking about comes from the philosophical tradition, via Kant and Aristotle, where you're thinking about the fundamental structure of the world.

So you're thinking probably we would call it something more akin to ontology or even in some forms, metaphysics. So, for instance, you're going to hear a lot about categories or allusions to categories by Hegel. In the text we read, categories are something Kant focused on, but he sort of inherited them from Aristotle. For Aristotle, they were all the different ways we could say that something exists or is. They're very general categories of being. So you might have substance or quantity or quality or relation or where or when. So we can say, hey, look at that thing out there, look at that human being.

And that's a substance. It's something that's primary substance that you can predicate things of, but that's not predicated of anything. But you might say there are two Human beings. That's another category of predication and so on. Kant inherits these and he's thinking about them not in terms of the structure of things exactly, but in terms of what it is that's required for experience. Suddenly we've gone from being to experience. Kant is thinking about the grounds for the possibility of experience. And for him, he's going to think, he deduces these logical categories just because they are what's necessary for us to have an experience.

So we have to have substances. Experience has to be causal and it has to be quantitative and a long list of other things in order to count as experience. That's the most immediate. Along with some other idealists, neo Kantian idealists. That conception of logic is what Hegel is responding to here and critiquing and amending.

10:28 Amogh: Right. What's interesting about our modern conception of logic, right, is it very symbolic and talks about various sort of devices like quantifiers and so on and so forth. It's Obviously in the 18th century, they didn't have a lot of that apparatus which came in with people like Frege. What they do talk about, as you mentioned, as Aristotle and Marcus talking about the syllogism is the kind of subject predicate structure of a sentence and stuff like conceptual containment. That is, you know, you got a sentence like all bodies are divisible. This is straight Kant, but it's very important for Hegel, you want to talk about whether the predicate divisibility is contained in the definition of the subject body.

And this is how Kant gets into stuff like analytic judgments or synthetic judgments, judgment which is conducted by this faculty that Kant calls the understanding. I mean, which is connected with the way we think about things. And they typically think this thought is like structured in this propositional sense, which is all bodies are divisible is a nice example. That's more what we're working with when we're talking about logic. Wes mentioned the conditions of possibility for experience. That's what Hegel calls, and Kant calls transcendental logic.

The way our thought interacts with lays the foundation for experience. But they also have. The German idealists also have a sense of logic which is closer to our understanding, which is something like this notion of formal logic, which is just simply the rules for thought, the way concepts are defined and so on and so forth.

11:53 Wes: The focus here for Hegel is what he calls objective logic, which is sort of the inheritor of transcendental logic.

12:00 Amogh: Right, right, right. Sense in which we might think about logic today is something that is Purely concerned with something like the symbolic realm which stands apart from experience. That is a conception he's dealing with. Right. When he talks about, here's this conception of logic that people talk about, but I'm going to reject that.

12:18 Wes: He's going to talk about everyday logic.

12:20 Amogh: Totally. Right.

12:21 Mark: Well, he's going to reject it as not comprehensive enough that it ends up being subsumed by this larger thing that he's dealing with, that what we might consider logic is just dealing sort of with the empty shells, purely with formal aspects.

12:35 Wes: Well, no, he's already at that point. He's already into a critique of transcendental logic. Early on in the second preface, he's going to talk about the use of logic for our own purposes. Right. Sort of the application of logic to everyday affairs to fulfill our own desires. And just logic in a very common sense way. The logic he's going to be concerned with is going to elevate itself above that and even elevate itself above the constraints of Kantian logic, which has this

13:02 Amogh: kind of formal character. I mean, it's difficult, sort of like sustained critique of Kant. I mean, this is throughout the whole text. But you get a sense of what he's going to say across the introduction when he talks about the critical philosophy. That's generally a reference to the Critique of Pure Reason, which is obviously Kant's major work. This notion that thought should stand apart from the world is really what he's denying, this idea that there's a cleavage between the way we think about the world and the way that the world is, which can never be passed. This kind of idea of this fundamental gap between thought and reality is the proposition that the logic wants to challenge. You want to show the identity of thought and reality.

13:43 Wes: Let's say more about what that is in Kant.

13:45 Dylan: Well, it's the distinction between thinking and experience. Right?

13:48 Amogh: Right.

13:48 Wes: Well, it's a distinction that arises between things in themselves and appearances. So for Kant, we get divorced from the world, and we get divorced from the world by treating these logical categories of experience as if they were purely subjective. And this is the difference between absolute idealism and the subjective idealism. Kant's transcendental ideal idealism, which, according to Hegel, is a form of subjective idealism in which what we call things, what we call objects, they're just appearances and they depend upon the human mind. When Hegel is talking about the world as idea or mind, it is not the ideas of any particular human being.

It's not even human cognitive structure as what we're talking about In Kant, it's something that's more basic than that. It's something that ends up being structurally common to both subject and object, and subject and object will fall out of that. We could call it the objective logic of the world. Should we move through the text?

14:47 Dylan: Maybe, yes.

14:48 Wes: Since it's so difficult, I think we should start with the science of logic.

14:52 Dylan: Yes, let's do the science of logic. It's what we said we were going to focus on.

14:54 Wes: Right. So, you know, in the preface, in the first preface, we immediately get this complaint about Kant that the understanding wasn't allowed to soar above experience. The whole thing is sort of a lamentation of the downfall of metaphysics and the neglect of science. Kant is putting a big check on metaphysics. He's saying that these categories of experience are applicable only to empirical experience. They are sort of the handmaiden of the sciences and of everyday experience, and so that you don't get to use them for metaphysics. So, for instance, let's take the category of substance.

It's important in Kant that for anything to be an experience, it has to be accompanied by the representation, I think. But what we don't get to do with Kant is to hypostatize, reify and say that it is a substance, as philosophers did in traditional metaphysics, that it is a substance that in a way is analogous to the kind of tangible stuff of the world that we get to see and touch and that we can rightfully call a substance. For Kant, the. I think is sort of a. It's a condition of the possibility of experience, but it's sort of something that lies at the edge of experience.

It's not within the world of experience. It's sort of a feature of the subject. And so we don't get to say that it's a metaphysical substance existing somewhere in the world. That's the whole idea of what the critique is. You know, critique just means he's going to say we can't talk about these crazy metaphysical objects that philosophers traditionally wanted to talk about. He's going to allow us actually to talk about them. But we can't say that they're objects of knowledge. We can't say that there's some science of these things.

16:28 Amogh: They act as like guides to our practical action.

16:30 Dylan: Right.

16:30 Amogh: Regulative ideas and so on.

16:31 Wes: Yes, exactly. For Hegel, that's the problem. So what's left there, though, is that we can't be solipsists, even though for Kant, there are all these categories that we use to construct the world, including causality and substance and quantity and so on. There's a given, there's some sort of data that's coming in that we are shaping with our minds. And where is that data coming from? Well, we posit this thing in itself outside of us, which is itself completely unknown to us. Right. Because what's known to us are our own representations that we've constructed according to these means. But we sort of need this little appendix.

17:04 Dylan: We need a source. It's not an appendix, it's a source, but it's an unknowable source.

17:10 Wes: Well, Hegel's going to want to cut it out. So that's what I'm using. Even though we can't know it, we need this idea of. Kant sometimes calls it object equals X, this unknown indeterminate thing out there that isn't causing quote unquote, our representations. Because causality actually can't be a relation between us and this thing because causality is just a category.

17:30 Amogh: It just holds for objects of experience.

17:32 Wes: Yeah, and there's an irony here, which is that the whole idea of substance as a logical category in our sort of naive, realistic way we approach the world is to talk about things in themselves. That's what we think we're doing and that's what we think the concept of substance captures. It's an enormous irony in Kant that you can't use substance to talk about things in themselves. You can't use substance to talk about the very thing that in a way, substance naively is meant to capture. So Hegel wants to make metaphysics possible again by shattering this self contradictory view that Kant has put forth.

18:04 Amogh: One important criticism that Hegel has is this faculty he calls the understanding, which is, I mean, you mentioned the I thing. Kant thinks the understanding makes these judgments and I mentioned all bodies are divisible. And he bases the way we cut up the world on the so called categories, which are the kind of ancestral basic concepts you mentioned, cause and substance and so on, which structure the way we basically make the objects of experience possible. Hegel's criticism of that way of looking at things is that this faculty called the understanding kind of separates, I mean, he calls it a one sided way of doing things.

It separates things into these sort of neat conceptual categories and rigidifies the world in a certain way based on this kind of, I think this kind of formal structure which makes judgments about the world. And it always referred back to a certain kind of notion of the I. Right. It's not a single person, but it's this kind of formal Structure. For Hegel, what really matters is the formality of the whole thing. The fact that these structures don't really exist in the world, but kind of exist apart from the world and structure it in some way and the resulting structure of the thing in itself.

Because, you know, given that these concepts structure the world in a certain way, there has to be something that stands outside the way we look at the world. He thinks that equivocation and this whole kind of formal structure of the eye is a bad way of looking at things.

19:26 Wes: Yeah, well, ultimately, logic becomes its own content. It becomes its own thing in itself that we have access to. That's the sort of way out of the maze. I think, actually, maybe we should start

19:37 Mark: with the introduction, General concept of logic, page 23 of the Cambridge translation.

19:44 Wes: He's going to compare this project of logic to other sciences, which usually you're going to establish premises and methods. Right. And he's going to say, that's not what we can do here.

19:54 Mark: Well, it's what we can do, but we can't do it initially. We need to take half the book to do it. The method has to generate itself. The method ends up being a result of doing it somewhere in the encyclopedia, he says something to the effect of, you might think that before we try to do metaphysics, first we have to look at the mind and decide whether metaphysics is even possible. That was Kant's claim. And that just sounds so reasonable. But that's not really how it works. The only way you can test out whether the mind can do what you want it to do is just to go ahead and do it.

20:24 Amogh: Right. He has this famous line about wanting to learn how to swim before one is plunged into the water.

20:31 Mark: Exactly, yeah.

20:32 Amogh: Which is in the encyclopedia, Logic. Let's just go ahead and do it and let's see if we can't get at that thing in itself that you say we can't get to. Right. Something like that.

20:41 Mark: Right.

20:42 Dylan: It makes it sound just like Aristotle again, especially with the concept of something like virtue. Right. You become virtuous by doing virtuous things.

20:51 Amogh: So much of this is Aristotelian.

20:53 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah. This is a return to Aristotle in many senses.

20:56 Amogh: It's saturated with that. I mean, from the fact that we will necessarily. There's a kind of teleology to the way we think about the world and all that kind of stuff. And also the idea that we can divide up all human pursuits and kind of unite them in some way. Logic, ethics, science and so on, so forth.

21:12 Dylan: Do we want to Just kind of march through page by page or whatever.

21:16 Wes: Sure. 23. He's talking about the sense in which logic cannot presuppose any forms of reflection, as opposed to other sciences which you establish a method and you establish certain premises and so on. There's no starting from premises here that should make us curious about how it's going to get started.

21:34 Amogh: Right. I mean, the point is that reflection on method is part of philosophy in a way that it isn't quite in other disciplines. Right. There's a self reflexive structure which is unique to speculative science as opposed to

21:46 Wes: empirical science in the middle paragraph. So these forms of reflection, they are part of its content and they first have to be established within it. So instead of, for instance, starting out with the scientific method and applying that, we are establishing the method as we go. It is the content of this science

22:04 Amogh: is its own method, it's part of it. Yeah, I mean, you can't. Logic, on the contrary, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection, these rules and laws of thinking, for they are part of its content and they first have to be established within it. Both the formal structure of what you're doing and the content of it are combined. Right. There's no, like, here's the methodological treatise and here's me going ahead and doing it. Both of them have to be derived from like the same stem.

22:30 Dylan: Well, let's give an example of the way in which logic normally isn't doing what he wants it to do. On page 24, he is sort of characterizing what the problem of logic is. And he gives several different steps to it. The first one is that he says that to say that logic abstracts from all content, that is that it only teaches the rule of thinking without being able to engage in what is being thought or to take its composition into consideration, this alone is already inadequate. So right there he's honing in on the idea that you would be talking about, well, the examples given at the beginning about syllogisms where the truth value of them didn't matter, right?

It was all about just the structure of them and that was what the logic was about. And here, right from the beginning, he's saying that's not sufficient for logic. The content is imbued in the activity of the logic itself. You see right away that the question of truth value is going to be important and that's going to be the avenue by which you get to absolute truth is because you don't jettison it from the beginning in your logic. You don't have right from the outset this dichotomy between being able to talk about truth and falsity on the one hand, in terms of evaluating statements, but not being able to talk about the truth of anything because you don't know if the premises that you started with were truthful at all.

You just abstract that out from the beginning. Right. And then talk about that as if that were talking about the structure of thought. And Hegel's saying that is an insufficient beginning and you have to retain the content in there.

24:06 Amogh: There's a kind of anti skeptical motivation here as well. I mean, it's a common objection that skeptics have as to, hey, well, you got your fancy little system there and you've derived it using these kind of methodological premises. But if I deny those methodological premises, I can reject your conclusions, right?

24:23 Dylan: Yes.

24:24 Amogh: Hegel wants to kind of demonstrate that no, no, no, you don't have that line of escape. You have to adopt these premises because we're going to kind of derive our methodological structure within the system itself. So there's kind of. You can't point there and say, where does that come from? We're going to show you where it comes from.

24:41 Mark: The next sentence after what Dylan just read sounds like he's going to be talking about psychology. For since thinking and the rules of thinking are supposed to be its subject matter, that is a subject matter, philosophy in these logic already has a content specifically its own in them. It has that second constituent of knowledge, namely a matter whose composition is its concern. So that sounds like, oh, the rules of thinking, what is that? So you might interpret that as we're not just talking about the abstract logical forms, but we're talking about individuals actually thinking of it.

We need to bring in human psychology somewhere. But that is something that he is not. And I think historically this is where, you know, by the time we get to Frege and Russell and sort of the birth of analytic philosophy, they are reacting to British Hegelians. They are reacting to these guys who they characterize as engaging in psychologism, that the problem with these Hegelians is that they need to just go back a little more like what Aristotle was doing and just look at the forms of reasoning rather than contingent facts about how human beings actually reason.

But Hegel himself is very adamant that he thinks that that psychologism stuff is a bunch of baloney too. And in fact, he thinks that the history of logic is such that no real advances had been made since Aristotle until his time. And that for him, current logic Books just took Aristotle and dressed it up with all sorts of irrelevant, contingent matters of psychology that are kind of like what we would think of as the informal fallacies. You know, this slippery slope argument that when you talk about these things, you're kind of talking about, well, these are mistakes that human beings often make that you kind of feel like you have to understand how people reason, at least wrongly, in order to then get at good reasoning.

26:22 Amogh: Right. Another point to make about Kant and his psychologism as well as Hegel is that you're talking about mind in a certain sense, but you're not sort of doing empirical psychology. Right. This kind of investigation of the structures which underlie these contingent facts. And anyway, Hegel kind of denies the distinction we draw between necessary and contingent. Right. Because he's giving this account of how if we look at things in a certain way, the contingent stuff becomes necessary in a sense.

26:50 Mark: That's not a point that's going to make sense thrown in at this point.

26:53 Amogh: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to kind of plug through the whole structure to kind of demonstrate how what do you mean

27:00 Wes: by the contingent becomes necessary. I have a vague idea of the facts of the world flowing from the logos, the logical structure of the world. Yeah.

27:09 Amogh: If you understand the kind of progression of the way concepts and the world link up. Right. Eventually you'll understand that concepts are arranged in a way that things have to be the way they are because they have to be. Right. The kind of conceptual structure with which the world is thought, once it's brought to its full intelligibility, once we work through all of these different historical conceptions, we begin to realize that thought and the world, the way we think about the world and the way the world is and also the way the world could be, kind of collapse into this big one which he calls the idea.

27:42 Wes: So in other words, history. It's like an organic development, say, analogous to development, say, from a seed into a plant. And there's a necessity to it. So contingency, you know, when we talk about contingency, Right. We mean, among other things, the particular facts of history. And these things, for Hegel, are an offshoot of the necessary development of spirit, let's say. So that's the sense in which this distinction, I think, is denied.

28:08 Amogh: There's also this whole stuff about possibility, Right. I mean, we normally think about, hey, well, there's the actual world and there's all this sort of ways the world could be. And in Kant, there's this whole notion of conditions of possibility which is like There's a certain logical structure of the world, like the principle of non contradiction and so on. But there's also certain empirical physical facts. But they didn't have to be this way. They could have been another way. Hegel will kind of deny that whole logical possibility, real possibility distinction. The world is the way it could be.

28:36 Mark: There's a quote from later, from the encyclopedia, Section 6, where he's actually quoting his own preface to the Philosophy of Right. This is one of the later editions, you know, his commentary, it's 29 of the Hackett version, the encyclopedia that we have, it's section six. So he quotes himself that he had said in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. And he says these simple propositions have seemed shocking to many and they have been attacked even by those who are not ready to renounce the possession of philosophy and certainly not that of religion. The explanation of that is that there's a logos like what this science, what this absolute knowing is trying to get at, is that just as Aristotle thought, just as Heraclitus thought that underneath the seeming contingency of everyday events is a law like structure, there's a one.

29:26 Dylan: Yes, right.

29:27 Mark: There is a logos.

29:29 Dylan: Well, and I guess the distinction between it being a one versus a logos would be, is that the logos would allow for there being parts that were identifiable, but they were all related to one another such that they formed a 1. In Heraclitus you have the ratio or the relation. That does not deny the distinction between the two parts of it, but they together themselves form a single relation, but the oneness.

29:54 Mark: And I think we got at this in Aristotle that it's not the oneness of Brahmanism or something where all the particularities actually illusory.

30:02 Dylan: No, that's what I meant, that the particulars are in fact exactly embodied, but they form a 1. So you can't have the ratio without having the. The two things. There's no longer a ratio. It still would be one thing. You have parts, but they are held together in a ratio and the ratio is the one.

30:21 Amogh: The parts sort of display this structure, which means that they have to be understood in the sense of the whole. I mean, we can obviously have all of these people looking at a certain section of the thing. But Hegel thinks once you tie them all together, they'll display this one like structure.

30:36 Dylan: Yeah. And in that way it also provides the means by which you can get to know one and then you get to know the rest of it as well, because there's a logos to the whole that allows you to have access to other parts of the world, from one part of the world to other parts of the world. It's a fundamental notion of connectedness that makes the world intelligible. I mean, to me, it's like saying that it's so obvious because without that principle, the world is simply not intelligible. And that's the strongest evidence that it's true, is that the world is intelligible.

31:11 Amogh: Yeah. I mean, he talks about every philosophy being a kind of. There's a sense in which that can be taken as a platitude. Right. But there's actually a lot of skeptical arguments and what he sees as bad understandings of this one, which allows him to explain why people haven't happened upon this kind of universal structure if it's there. Because there's all sorts of ways people can misapprehend the structure because it's so universal and totalizing and there's so much stuff to run together.

31:39 Mark: Well, yes, it's hard for people to focus on universals. He distinguishes throughout here between getting at a universal, somehow boring in and going toward this absolute knowledge from merely abstracting, which is the way we normally would think, as a good empiricist, is the way you think you get at universals. I used mathematics as an example before. Well, according to Hegel, the way we do mathematics is just by abstracting from the individual things we see. So it actually becomes in some way paler. Right. This is the thing he was objecting to at the beginning, that if you think logic is just about the content, free forms of things, well, that's just abstraction.

And Hegel's adamantly against abstraction. He thinks that real thinking somehow leaps in and engages with the actual sensuous content, but is able to grasp the universal by converting these sensations, these notions into thoughts, into concepts, turning the. What he called the Vorstellungs.

32:40 Wes: The thoughts are out there in the world. There's actually a good quote on it in this introduction here.

32:44 Mark: Take us back.

32:45 Wes: Yes, it's on page 25 or 26. So skipping ahead a little bit, I do want to come back to where we were, but it's the. He's praising traditional metaphysics and lamenting the departure from it.

32:59 Dylan: What's the first line of the paragraph you're on?

33:02 Wes: I'm in my notes.

33:02 Amogh: The older metaphysics. Yes, yes, the older metaphysics had in this respect, a higher concept of thinking. That's the one.

33:09 Wes: Yeah. So this is on page 25 for it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true in them. This made me think, by the way of De Anima, that is what is known in them, not in their immediacy, but as first elevated to the form of thinking, as things of thought. So in other words, I'm thinking of the way Aristotle describes the engagement of nous with the world and its potentiality and its complete openness. And we reach a point in De Anima where basically there is no distinction between the nous that's thinking and the thing that's thought. They are the same thing.

33:48 Dylan: I wrote in the margin of the next sentence, this characterization of Aristotle.

33:53 Wes: Right.

33:54 Dylan: So the rest of the paragraph is this metaphysics thus held, that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but are rather their essence, or that the things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves, that thinking in its imminent determinations and the true nature of things are one and the same content.

34:17 Mark: It's ambiguous in that it. It sounded like you were, in the case of Aristotle, they were numerically the same. They were one and not just of the same type. In other words, they were identical.

34:30 Dylan: They were the same thing, not equal things.

34:32 Mark: Exactly. And maybe that's the case here, the way that I was reading. And he kind of goes on about this at length later on in the parts of the encyclopedia that were sort of in the optional later portion, that is that this distinction between the Vorstellung, which is the representations, which he sometimes called the notion, but it really comes down to this immediacy. So the way that we immediately encounter things, we perceive them, we imagine them, we feel them, all these things that a lot of people. You know, he really rails in the prefaces about the upshot of the Kantian cutting us off from the thing in itself is that people have just become thinking that all there is to philosophy is just what I immediately feel, what my immediate impressions are, I'm doing philosophy look like.

But he wants to get beyond these Vorstellung to actual thought to Denken, which gives us, instead of the notions, to the concept, which is Begriff in German. So that's the big thing that he's going at.

35:31 Wes: And these things are. Yeah, again, not subjective. They are part of the world.

35:36 Amogh: This isn't supposed to depend on any particular person's mind.

35:39 Wes: Right.

35:40 Mark: I guess it is the same thinking further as Aristotle, that you are not just getting. So he talks about these four Stellungs. They're actually kind of metaphors for the actual content, the truth that only thought doing. Philosophy is converting these pre philosophical perceptions and notions, dreams, whatever desires, wills all these things into thought. And thought is the only thing that's really objective, that's really getting at the matter. But it's really this one in the same matter. It's kind of disguised, it's layered in everyday experience. It's a matter of actually making this immediate. And the truth is buried in the immediate somewhere, but it's making it from immediate into mediated, its mind looping around to know itself. That's what thought ends up being.

36:26 Wes: Right?

36:27 Amogh: That's exactly right. My favorite quote, which sort of makes that point very nicely is on 24 of the science of Logic. Presupposed from the start is that the material of knowledge is present in and for itself as a ready made world outside thinking. That thinking is by itself empty. That it comes to this material as a form from outside, fills itself with it and only then gains a content, thereby becoming real knowledge. Right.

36:54 Wes: I was going to read that as well. I love that quote.

36:56 Amogh: There's a certain idea of like engaging with the actual world and thinking. I mean he uses these metaphors of like labor and the phenomenology of spirit. Does all this stuff about violence of like thinking and rethinking to make thought conform to the world in a certain sense. It's not an easy thing. I mean, he's certainly not saying that any halfway house thought that anybody has in the world is sort of all being compressed in itself.

37:18 Wes: This is the view he's rejecting. Right, right. Okay. Just make sure we understand that.

37:24 Amogh: Right. So it's like when Mark was talking about numerical identity. Right. It's thought understood in a certain way is being. It's not simply any thought, any mental act is the world. Is the idea.

37:36 Mark: What I was trying to figure out was is it a matter of. Because it sounds like if you just say the content of the truth is the same content that shows up but in disguised form in everyday experience. Are you talking about numerical identity or just talking about sort of a type type identity? The other side, and I think it might actually be numerical identity. Just like Aristotle said that it's not merely that you decode and you get at oh, okay, I see actually that deep in my daydreams it's talking about the same thing. I mean it's definitely another instance. It's a different mental act.

38:12 Wes: Think of it this way. There's this underlying rational thing, the world. And in the moment where Mark is Thinking of something or comes to understand the essence of something, let's say that's the moment where that structure becomes available to itself. It's thinking itself through you. You understand what I'm saying? So it certainly is numerically identical because it just is that being. And when you think it, it's just that being, being available to itself through you.

38:41 Amogh: Your thoughts themselves are a way that the world is. Yeah.

38:44 Dylan: One thing that's true both for Aristotle and then I think is double down true for Hegel, is that as physical entities, as beings in the world, we are a manifestation of that world. We are part of that world.

38:59 Wes: And.

38:59 Dylan: And thinking is part of that. And that all of that is true. And it provides us with direct contact with the world. And it can't possibly be any other way than that because we exist as a manifestation of that.

39:18 Amogh: What he's denying is that thought has this cordoned off bit of reality where it can kind of step away from the world and kind of engage in these thought experiments about possible worlds and so on, so forth, and still remain above the world without remaining in the world, is the way I like to think of it.

39:35 Dylan: But let's remind ourselves the reasons why people would make that separation. Right.

39:40 Amogh: Right.

39:40 Dylan: It has to do with being wrong about things. What's the mechanism for being wrong? And it also has to do with the distinctions between what we experience in a prima facie way and what we later on understand to have happened. We look out in the world and we see, oh, look, the stick is being bent in the water. But, oh, it's a straight stick.

40:06 Wes: Yeah. But even further, modern science, which is where we get this distinction between primary and secondary qualities, which is the beginning of the collapse into Kantianism. So, for instance, we say, oh, yeah, there's a red thing out there. And then doing science, we say, well, actually it's a spatiotemporal object that sends waves of a certain frequency to a another spatiotemporal object, the eye. And arising through that is this perception of a color. So it's this idea that comes about, I think, through the science of perception that the world is mediated somehow from us.

And that when we scientifically investigate things and we get to the truth of things, we've gotten underneath a perceptual veil. The problem is you can treat, as Kant does, spatiotemporality as just another layer of that veil until you completely strip it away and all you're left with is the bare thing in itself, which I can't say anything about. And everything is a veil.

40:57 Amogh: The one thing to emphasize is that he isn't denying that you can be wrong. I mean, firstly, he makes all kinds of statements that accusing people of being wrong. But also there is a sense in which what's really important to stress is the intelligibility of the world, the fact that it can be made sense of and that our sense making displays this kind of historical structure. It evolves over time and so on.

41:19 Mark: Legitimate philosophy can't be wrong. It could be partial, it could be not something that will be eventually overcome in a more comprehensive philosophy. There's a progression of legitimate philosophies that have come through history just in the way that there have been progression of governments and all the other things that he thinks there have been a progression of. And plenty of philosophers then he's going to say are just really not doing philosophy at all. They're not on the map, they're not on the dialectical trail. Maybe you could give an explanation of how and why they're wrong in terms of his system, but they're not doing philosophy right.

41:52 Amogh: Here are all the possible points of entry and here's the exit. And if you're not there, too bad. This was what we're talking about with respect to necessity, right? It's given that philosophy and the history of the way we've made sense of the world displays this kind of structure. You're either in or you're out on the dialectical road.

42:10 Mark: So we can contrast this to only a year ago or so, less than a year ago we were doing Schopenhauer. And Schopenhauer's main target is Hegel, that he's complaining that actually the world in itself, which is more like Kant than Hegel, says in that it's cut off from everyday experience, but it is not rational. In fact, Schopenhauer thinks we positively can know in an indirect manner that it is chaos itself. It is entirely not the kind of thing that could be made into a science.

42:39 Wes: It's striving in a way it's desired.

42:41 Mark: Yes, yes, that's the way we know it.

42:43 Wes: Which is interesting because there's at the beginning of this introduction, Hegel treats desire as a manifestation of rationality. He says everything flows from this logical

42:53 Amogh: structure and also religious striving, right? As it's a religious affect, religious feeling, he thinks that contains an element of truth in it. One kind of response to this kind of ambitious project is simply to say, hey, it crosses the bounds of human finitude, right? We can only understand a finite amount of Things. And making these kind of grandiose claims about the total nature of human knowledge is just too much. This is a kind of response that occurs to anybody who's read Hegel.

43:20 Mark: I think it's codified also within the last year we talked about hermeneutics, which just explicitly straight up says whenever you do an investigation, you're already coming to it with a bunch of assumptions and blah, blah, blah. There is no way to bootstrap yourself in philosophical method in the way that Hegel is trying to do here. But you were saying Schopenhauer, that's not his strategy. His strategy is not of the one of humility. It is that we can positively know the opposite of what Hegel is saying.

43:48 Amogh: I was actually thinking of Kierkegaard when I was talking about that. This whole notion of human finitude and divine absolute and the fact that we as finite human beings are always cut off from the divine and we shouldn't try to bridge that gap.

44:01 Mark: Yeah, well, yeah, Kierkegaard was also reacting, if not to Hegel, but to. To Hegelians.

44:06 Amogh: Hegelianism. Yeah.

44:08 Mark: And its effect on the popular religious sentiments of his time. And that seems to be the target of Hegel's ire in here as well. It's just funny that that Hegel sounds as grumpy as Schopenhauer often did in some of these prefaces. And, you know, the encyclopedia has three prefaces from different points and then there's two of them in the. The logic here. Yes, he thinks that Kant is wrong in certain ways, but he thinks still, Kant is so right in so much of, you know, he's going to appropriate so much of Kant self consciously and respectfully. He just thinks that he's wrong about the thing itself.

But it's the sociological effects on philosophy of religion in particular, that people who don't understand Kant but just take the point of there are limits to human reason and so faith, there's room for faith. And then religion comes all about feeling. And so we actually did an episode on Schleiermacher. Yeah.

45:00 Wes: Faith can't be a form of knowledge.

45:02 Amogh: Right. Page six on the encyclopedia is interesting on this. From the mistaken view that the inadequacy of finite categories to express truth entails the impossibility of objective cognition. We derive a justification for pronouncing and denouncing according to our feelings and subjective opinions. Assurances present themselves in place of proofs, along with stories about all the scare quotes, facts that are to be found in consciousness. And the more Uncritical they are, the more they count as pure.

45:33 Mark: I'm sure that is not the most grumpy sounding objection to popular religious post Kantian sentiment that he has in there, but it does, it does reflect. Again, once you say we can't know anything about the thing itself, all we can know about is this world of experience, the world of appearances, then that gives rise to, well, what you just were describing there. Amogh. Sounds like phenomenology. Right Way post Hegelian phenomenology, it sounds like intuitionism. Right. We had another episode on ge, Moore and other guys like that being moral intuitionists that somehow we, since we can't know in itself, there's no God's law that we could figure out as far as morality goes. So we have to then just pay attention to our feelings. And the more pure, as you were saying they are, then the more adequate they are. And that's all just stuff that Hegel

46:21 Amogh: has no patience with, no time for at all well.

46:24 Dylan: And he characterizes this in the introduction, just after what we were reading about the characterization of the older metaphysics and sort of articulating the path of failure of philosophy, talking about basically that philosophy has just renounced the understanding of reason at all, he says, turned against reason. This form of understanding behaves in the manner of ordinary common sense, giving credence to the latter's view. View that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, that is that only sense perception gives filling and reality to them.

That reason, insofar as it abides in and for itself, generates only mental figments. In this self renunciation of reason, the concept of truth is lost, is restricted to the knowledge of mere subjective truth, of mere appearances, of only something to which the nature of the fact that does not respond knowledge has lapsed into opinion. And what's interesting about that is that he characterized exactly the kind of criticism of philosophy that people say, well yeah, that's all it is. And he's saying, well, when you do that, you lose truth altogether.

And so you've clearly gone astray.

47:33 Wes: Yeah, so this is another reference obviously to Kant and to this idea that reason is limited in its aspirations and that we can only apply to the categories, to our experience. And so we lose the ability to know God, to know soul or self and to know cosmos. And also we lose the ability to know things in themselves. Later on he's going to talk about sort of the irony of. So you say there's this world of appearances which are not the things in themselves. And you say that truth is the correspondence of judgments to this world of things which aren't real.

It's really a world of error and untruth. So we lose in this curtailment of application of reason to things in themselves and to God and all the rest of it. We lose the concept of truth as it's ordinarily understood. Kant's way of viewing truth is actually really, really weird when you think about it. This idea of truth as a relationship between judgment and appearance, as opposed to judgment and the world in itself.

48:30 Amogh: Right. There's various ways in which I think that's kind of unfair to Kant. There's a way in which he phrases things, which I mean, obviously this sort of. Just because the things are presented to us in a certain way doesn't mean they aren't real. Right?

48:43 Wes: Well, Kant would call them real, but real, empirically real, not transcendentally real. I mean, Hegel is judging this in terms of transcendental aspirations. Yes. If we curtail our aspirations and we're satisfied with empirical reality as Kant defines it, then maybe we can be happy with that definition of truth, but it certainly is not the common sense, a naive, realist notion of truth.

49:06 Mark: So we're nearing the halfway point of

49:08 Dylan: our discussion and we're three pages in.

49:12 Mark: Yes, but, but we're. But we've. We keep jumping to giving a larger picture of Hegel's philosophy, which I think is appropriate and tends to be seemingly what we do. As we're getting to the halfway point of the conversation on a consistent basis, I don't know why this is the

49:27 Amogh: true is the whole.

49:28 Mark: So just to sort of put what. What his problematic is going to be, what Hegel's problematic is going to be is going to be to explain what the relationship between experience and truth ultimately is. He does say it's page 36 of the Encyclopedic Logic. So it's section 12 at the end of this commentary on himself. So again, one of these later editions, he's been talking about the knowing of God and how it relates to empiricism. We can say that philosophy owes its first beginning to experience, that is to what is a posteriori. But that is not saying much.

For thinking is in fact essentially the negation of something immediately given. Just as we owe our eating to food, because without it we could not eat. Well, I'm not sure if Begriff how that relates. Begriff the concept that he wants to get how that relates to essence in the Aristotelian sense. But we've been sort of equating Aristotle and Hegel throughout here. So they're pretty damn close. It's not Hegel's term, I think, but that's what he's talking about in terms of getting at the concepts. Philosophical concepts are not just things you could just stipulate.

There are things that, just like Plato thought, what is the real meaning of truth? What is the real meaning of virtue? That that's where this thought of essences and concepts begrif in Hegel comes from. And somehow we get at that stuff through experience. Of course we do. I mean, we get at everything through experience. But what's the right way of getting from the sensuous particulars to philosophical truth? It isn't just taking out the content and looking at the form abstraction in the way I was saying that we might get mathematical truths, but also not grasping immediately an essence.

It's somehow we make the immediate into mediate knowing. We look at again the immediate aspect, a metaphor for the truth or as a symbol of the truth. And we try to get at what this content is that is somehow behind, but showing through the everyday thing. And all that really means is again, we turn our everyday perceptions and dreams, whatever, into actual thinking. We mull over the stuff of our experience. And that somehow is how we come up with philosophy. But yet that sounds like everybody can think, so we can all philosophize. No, no, there's, there's specific right ways to do it.

You need training. It's very rigorous. It's very hard to, to, to. To think in, in the abstract in the right way.

51:57 Amogh: Speculative thought.

51:58 Mark: Exactly. It's just, it's unfortunate that the term speculation for us means something more like spitballing. Like, yeah, I wonder if God is a giant piece of cheese. Let's speculate about the nature of God. Like, no, that's exactly the kind of arbitrary, whimsical thing that Hegel would reject.

52:17 Amogh: Right.

52:17 Dylan: One way to ground that is. You would, if you thought of theoretical physics and developing a new theory of gravity, what Einstein was doing, you would probably understand that as speculative thinking directly along the lines of what Hegel's talking about, that you would do in philosophy that is just utterly disciplined.

52:38 Amogh: So when he's talking about speculative logic, I mean, there's this kind of developmental structure to it. On page 33 in the hacket, the quote is, hence the relationship of speculative science to the other sciences is simply the speculative science does not leave the empirical content of the other sciences aside, but recognizes and uses it. And in the same way recognizes and employs what is universal in these sciences, the laws, the classifications, etc. For its own content. But it also introduces other categories into these universals and gives them currency.

Speculative logic contains the older logic in metaphysics. It preserves the same forms of thought, laws and objects, but it develops and transforms them with further categories. So there's a sense in which you're borrowing from all these different fields, but you're kind of fusing them into a unity and putting them in this developmental structure. And that entails putting in further categories for Hegel, things like concept and idea and notion, which are not exactly words that people in physics would use.

53:44 Dylan: Hegel is reinvigorating the notion of speculative thought. I mean, one way of characterizing his criticism of Kant is to say that Kant cuts philosophy out at the knees of speculation, that there's no way you can go any further. And from Hegel's perspective, he just kills it. It no longer is getting towards the truth of the world. It's no longer doing what philosophy is supposed to be doing at all, which is enabling us to do this speculative activity. And I think in Hegel's context, in fact, it's actually constraining the activity of thinking itself of the world itself, by stopping where Kant is and not continuing on. And that continuing on is speculating.

54:31 Mark: So to clarify, we're on page 26 of the science of Logic, and we keep just jumping to the encyclopedia Logic, which is the Hackett is what we keep referring to. Just as the need comes up, since it's just Cliff Notes on the Science of Logic, we're just going to continue to do that scattershot treatment of that text, but let's keep going through the Science of Logic.

54:50 Wes: Yeah, so he's talking sort of about the way in which speculation gets curtailed by Kant. Again, he's continuing that conversation. And he sort of talks as if Kant sort of backed down at the last minute. Kant recognized these contradictions. So when we start talking about when we start applying reason and using it metaphysically, we get these antinomies, these contradictions. We can argue that God exists, for instance, or that God doesn't exist. That sort of contradiction is an inherent part of speculation, and it's one of the reasons why Kant backed away.

And he has this phrase, when not carried through. This insight runs into the misconception that reason is the one that contradicts itself. It fails to see that the contradiction is in fact the elevation of reason above the restrictions of the understanding and the dissolution of them. At that point, Instead of making the final step that would take it to the summit. Knowledge flees from the unsatisfactoriness of the determinations of the understanding to sensuous experience, believing that there it will find stability and accord. So that's another way of saying we limit ourselves.

We say knowledge is limited to the empirical and to our sensuous experience of things, and that we can't have knowledge of this metaphysical world, including God and things of themselves and so on.

56:03 Dylan: And in fact, that limitation will give us certainty, which is explicitly part of what Kant was trying to do.

56:10 Amogh: You're right. Does not. The Kant, as some kind of skeptic. Right. Is very much wants to rehabilitate empirical science and so on. And he does want to say that we do understand the world in a certain way and we do have access to knowledge about the world. Right. Which is point of transcendental ideas. But the point is the system finds itself in certain inconsistencies. I mean, he said, interestingly, the word he used was knowledge. Right. Not Kant. Knowledge flees from the. Which again, is pointing at the sort of broader story he's telling about the development of philosophy.

56:42 Wes: The world, though, here, for Kant, though, means something very specific. It means appearances as opposed to things in themselves. So again, that's the worrisome part of that. There are really two elements here. There's the fact that we can't have knowledge of God and soul and other traditional objects of metaphysics. And the other thing is the sort of diluted nature of scientific knowledge. The knowledge of the world is knowledge of appearance and not of things in themselves. I would say both of those are important to Hegel. Ultimately, the logic is going to embrace those contradictions.

Kant is right that there are those contradictions. But for Hegel, ultimately they're going to be a driving force of development. Instead of backing away, you can find a way to subsume those contradictions under a higher something that's higher. You can find a way to reconcile them. I think that's going to be something

57:31 Dylan: we'll find out becoming the relation of being and non being. And going all the way back to this. This tension that we talked about that we see in Heraclitus and Aristotle. Not the tension in the work, but the notion of there being a relationship, that things in relation that also form a whole. This will be a pretty radical set of relations. Right.

57:54 Amogh: The for itself and the in itself is basically what Wes was saying right now about Hegel. Recognizing that there is this sort of cleavage between the way things are for us as human Beings to whom things appear and the way they are in themselves. But Hegel wants to say, okay, there's this for itself, that is appearances the way things are for us, and there's this in itself. But we can, through the activity of reason, transcend these. Right. Which is. That's kind of just clarifying this language of for itself and in itself that appears in Hegel and appears in lots of these people. That's what it's kind of pointing at.

58:30 Mark: Yeah.

58:30 Wes: For Kant, Kant needed to make objects conform to knowledge. So we construct these experiences so that then we can make objective judgments about them. The construction part sets us up for success, let's say. But for Hegel, we're set up for success because that cleavage is a falling out from a primal unity. And that unity is fundamentally self knowing. So there's a logical structure of the world and our logical categories are aligned with it. So Kant sort of jerry rigged that alignment as something subjective as a matter of human cognition. And Hegel's going to jerry rig it as something that has to do with the world as this alignment between the structure of the world and the structure of cognition. So cognition is just another thing in the world that becomes again, a way of the world knowing itself by means of the very structure that the world is constituted from, this logical structure.

59:25 Mark: So just to clarify, it sounded like you were saying that it's the knowing itself that creates the unity, but it's actually the knowing itself that creates the schism, because it's one part, you know, whenever you.

59:38 Wes: You're right. Yeah. Until you get back to absolute knowledge. Yes, that's right.

59:42 Mark: Right. So being an in itself as opposed to a thing in itself. I think we need to clarify a little more. A Kantian thing in itself isn't just an unknowable entity that is somehow the ground of experience, but an in itself is an item that does not reflect upon itself. It is just a unitary entity. But then once it reflects and becomes for itself, then it in a sense becomes two things. Right. Because it is knowing itself. And so there's the knowing part and there's the known part. It's still underlyingly the same entity. But that's really his story of how there's plurality in the universe at all, that it's ultimately God, you know, is this unified thing and comes to know to create these schisms within himself. Why? That's not an appropriate question. Maybe, but.

1:00:35 Wes: And the idea here is that the in itself is like the. An analogy to, you know, an Aristotelian idea. Of the development of a biological being. It's like the seed, it's the potentiality. Yeah. And it actualizes itself by becoming a for itself.

1:00:49 Mark: A tree becomes a for itself.

1:00:52 Wes: No, human beings through consciousness become for itself. That's the actualization of the rational animal.

1:00:58 Mark: Okay. Yes.

1:00:59 Wes: That's your essence that you know that you achieve. It's developmental. And the contradictions reflect the developmental nature of things. The cleavage that we find, these contradictions that we find, they're growing pains.

1:01:11 Mark: I mean, it seems very different to talk about metaphysically. That little picture that I was just giving of a God that splits itself in half, or even a fetus is an in itself, and then it gains self knowledge and becomes a for itself and thereby cleaves itself in a certain way. And even if you had a story about that of there being a unified God and all the. The manifold things of creation kind of spill out through this process of self division, that seems very different. Even though those things could be in conflict with each other and you could kind of in a loose way talk about them contradicting each other.

That's certainly very different from sentences that are contradicting each other. And the kind of example that we usually have when we consider this as an abstract bit of supposed Hegelian logic, that is the kind of things that Kant brings up in the Antinomies, for instance, when he thinks that Kant thought that when you speculate about the beginning of time, you think that, well, on the one hand, you can make a good argument for the world has a beginning. Of course it has a beginning. The chain of causality couldn't just go on forever. But you could make an equally good argument for, well, it can't have a beginning.

How would that work? Because then the beginning, everything is caused. So the beginning would have to be caused by something. So it must go on forever. So those are equally good arguments. Yet they contradict. That's the kind of contradiction that Hegelian logic is supposed to solve. So what's the connection between this allegedly metaphysical picture of contradicting or at least different entities that somehow are different aspects of one entity that then kind of get overcome by thinking about their underlying union, and these contradictions that somehow get overcome through Hegelian dialectic?

1:02:58 Amogh: The way I think about contradiction in Hegel is contradiction is contradiction relative to a certain mode of knowledge, A way of thinking about the world which falls into contradiction because it holds certain premises, it brings things together in a certain way, and it finds that the way that it's brought things together has Led it into error in a certain way, Right? So contradiction is contradiction relative to this kind of purposive structure of the way we make sense about the world. The fact is, the way we make sense about the world is directed in a certain way. And by virtue of these stages that it passes through, each stage contains contradiction within itself. Right? So it's contradiction viewed within this sort of structure of returning to itself and all that stuff we've been talking about.

1:03:40 Mark: I was trying to think of an example of a kind of mode of knowledge which gives rise to a contradiction which then gets overcome. And I think there are many of these things. Picture 212 year olds, they're arguing. One says, this is a very current reference. Motley Crue rules. The other said, no, Motley Crue sucks. They can't make up their mind. They're contradicting each other. And maybe a grown up person will come and say, well, can you look at the underlying principle of why you think they suck? And in fact, that you're even dwelling on Motley Crue itself is a conceptual mistake that you should, you should just get over this and say, there's an explanation for why you are thrilled and you are disgusted.

But neither of those actually amount to a legitimate aesthetic judgment. You then, you know, turn 15 years old and transcend that. And so you have neither opinion. That's not a perfect, but at least it's illustrative.

1:04:27 Wes: Here's a quotation from Phenomenology of Spirit. The idea is, we're trying to talk about logical contradiction in analogy to becoming, or an analogy to the growth of something or development of something. So the bud disappears and the bursting forth of the blossom. And one might say that the former is refuted by the latter. So here we get this application of logic to becoming in nature. Similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant. And the fruit now emerges as the truth of it. Instead, these forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible.

Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other. And this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. And we sort of get the hint of this in the introduction. The way he's going to develop his logic is going to be through this idea of something that's going to inherently develop out of itself like something out of a seed. So he's going to start with being. And then he's going to make derivations from the most general idea of being.

Because things sort of naturally grow or fall out of that. That, of course, is not a temporal process of becoming. It's logical. But we can think about it in terms of this temporal process of becoming. And the thing that holds all the different contradictory things, that sort of the higher standpoint, the motley crew is both good and bad, is the organic unity that reflects the development of the whole, whether it's a temporal development or whether it's the logical development. So when you reach the end point of some sort of logical development, some sort of higher understanding, for instance, and philosophy, which includes all the previous theories in some sense, it's that latest stage which is the true thing, and which of course will develop its own contradiction until you get to the Big Daddy absolute knowledge, the final stage in which there's no further development needed.

1:06:14 Mark: There's just a slow decline.

1:06:16 Dylan: Well, I was just going to ask a question about the description and then also about the relation itself. So I guess I don't know Hegel well enough to understand the Big Daddy absolute knowledge. I guess based upon this and my recollections, I would have thought that even in that stage you have to have a unity that is embodying essentially a contradiction, that is embodying multitudinous relations to them. Even though it is a unity.

1:06:41 Wes: Yeah, it includes the contradictions in its whole. But at previous stages you would get some organic unity that includes the contradictions of what came before. But then it develops a new contradiction outside of itself. And then those two things have to be held underneath a higher unity until you get to the ultimate unity.

1:06:58 Dylan: The one one aspect of this that was particularly confusing is understanding that you have becoming as being, a relationship between being and non being. On the one hand, that makes some sense, that if in transforming from one thing to another thing, there is an aspect in which you must be annihilating the thing that you are to become something else. And so there's that aspect of being and non being there. But it almost feels like there's a third term that's missing out of it. That's not like an adequate account of what transformation is. That becoming another is not simply embracing the not of what you were before. A butterfly is not simply the joining of a not caterpillar with a caterpillar. That's not what a butterfly is. And a man is not simply the joining of a not baby with a baby.

1:07:48 Mark: It's a not not baby.

1:07:49 Wes: Right. So that's where you get the positive, I think, that you have the negation and then you have a positive development out of that negation.

1:07:56 Dylan: And that part's sort of utterly missing from where we are.

1:07:59 Wes: Yeah, we have jumped ahead of anything that we read about. But it's the basic idea of the dialectic that everyone sort of learns in school is, you know, thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis, just because when he's talking about contradictions, it's sort of an allusion to that. So, for instance, on page 27, if our representation of the world is dissolved when we carry over to it the determinations of the infinite and the finite, still more is spirit itself, which contains both determinations within itself, something inwardly self contradictory, self dissolving.

It is not the nature of the material, the subject matter to which they are applied or in which they are found, that can make a difference. For it is only through such determinations and in accordance with them that the subject matter has contradiction within it. So he sort of segued, I think, from a discussion of Kantian antinomies to his notion of contradiction earlier in the paragraph.

1:08:46 Dylan: He's trying to say, well, Kant wants to run away from the thing in itself. And these antinomies can't be determination of the thing in itself just before what you read. If they cannot be determinations of the thing in itself, still less can they be determinations of the understanding to which one ought to concede at least the dignity of a thing. The determinations of finite and infinite run into the same conflict whether they apply to time and space, to the world, or to determinations internal to the spirit, just as black and white yield gray, whether they mixed on a wall or on a pallet.

And then you have the quote that you read, Wes, which I think really sums it up, Hegel saying, look, by running away from this Kant, you're not avoiding the issue at all. And in fact, you're stepping away from actually where the center of it is, which is the very thing you were fearing, which was that the world dissolves into nothingness. You have no certainty that actually happens, but that is the correct thing to happen, if you understand what you should be doing.

1:09:43 Amogh: One kind of example of contradiction, one ready, one that we already have, is this notion of the thing in itself, which, if you sort of outline it and the role it plays in Kantian philosophy, it reveals its absurdity, right? How your judgments are mapping onto unreality. I used to think about this as kind of a reductio. It's not exactly that, but it's like through the articulation of the particular view, it reveals itself to have reached a point which it itself finds unsatisfactory by its own criteria. And in this case, Kant's aim at getting at reality, Kant's aim at wanting to prove the reality of the world contradictory to, you know, people, skeptics like Hume and so on. And he's like, hey, look at this system you've ended up with despite your own aims.

1:10:28 Dylan: Right.

1:10:28 Amogh: That's the pregnant sense of like, contradiction here.

1:10:30 Wes: Yes. One of the sections the Critique of Pure Reason is in is called Refutation of Idealism, which is basically him advocating his own version of idealism, transcendental idealism, as opposed to.

1:10:41 Amogh: Yeah, one way to kind of highlight this notion of contradiction is to talk about this is in the phenomenology. But it come up later. But it's a useful example, this notion of sense certainty, which is this idea that true knowledge is a kind of immediate graduation grasping of sense experience. You know, what's the true. It's this. I'm pointing at it. It's right here. You don't have to think about it. And then the point is, you reveal, as you continue to articulate the view, that when sense certainty articulates its own view, it can only express immediacy with words like this now and here, which, as Hegel elucidates, are the most abstract concepts possible.

Right. They're just words. They don't point at anything in particular because you need concepts to make distinctions and to point to particular objects. They're simply these abstract determinations which refer to everything and nothing. And thus sense certainty, which was aiming to get at the true knowledge by shying away from any kind of abstract conceptual thought whatsoever, ends up entangled in the most abstract universal term. So that's another way to kind of see contradiction. Yeah.

1:11:50 Mark: There was something inadequate about the way that the progression through the phenomenology is supposed to be motivated. That is the action of spirit, that is knowledge trying to give an account of itself or become true knowledge to become more elaborate knowledge. And the way I described it is imagining how an animal, or just a very undeveloped person would describe experience the way that you were just saying with this. A couple more things on this dialectic here. So the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, those are terms that Hegel never actually uses, although they are usually used to characterize him. They were actually invented by Fichte, who is one of the people that Hegel is arguing against. He was a straight up follower of Kant.

1:12:28 Wes: Actually, he doesn't mention Fichte directly in this, but he alludes to him and sort of says yes and no. Fichte is sort of intermediate between Kant and Hegel. So.

1:12:36 Mark: Well, we'll. We'll read some Fichte at some point so we don't have to worry about him now.

1:12:40 Wes: Yeah, Fichte tries to desubjectivize Kant. He's the first step in that direction.

1:12:45 Mark: And the other thing you mentioned, the term sublate, and there's a whole rant in the Hackett version of the Encyclopedia Logic. There's not only a translator's introduction, there's three different translators and there's a translator's introduction. And then there's even a translator's like, minority introduction. In other words, the trans. Two out of the three translators said, this is how we're going to translate this word. And then the third guy has to write his own introduction to argue why that was a bad idea. In certain cases, that's how into the language these folks are.

But in one of these, they're talking about this term that you just talked about as sublate. Aufheben is apparently the German, and it's a normal German word. It's just that it has two senses in German of canceling and preserving. So that's what sublate is, just because there's no good English term. So they. It's just become a convention that people use sublate, which sounds like a weird technical term, but really in German it's just an ordinary thing. But you can see how if the previous terms, the two contradictory terms, are then synthesized into some viewpoint that is superior to both of them, but kind of incorporates the good parts of each, then each of them is cancelled, yet preserved.

The good parts are preserved. So there you go. That's what sublating is.

1:13:53 Amogh: Yeah, I mean, I think the thesis-antithesis-synthesis terminology is actually a bit misleading. I mean, I associate it with. In the Critique of Pure Reason, there's these antinomies where Kant compares different views and. But here it's more useful not to think about it. Not as here's a statement, here's another statement, combine them, right? It's like, here's this mode of knowledge, and in its progression, it's like one thing, it's like one arrow in its progression, it contradicts itself and then sublates itself. That's. I think that's the sort of more helpful way of thinking about this.

1:14:27 Mark: Well, and it just made me think of a new plot for Black Mirror, which is a British TV show about various kinds of dystopias. That there should be a technology of sublation where you can. If you're. If you're not getting along with your spouse, then you just, like, do an electronic scan of them and create the computer version of them. But you can modify it to have the good things, but get rid of the things that irritate you and then just get rid of the original. So you cancel yet preserve them, but

1:14:54 Amogh: you got to keep going. You can't. You can't just. You can't disturb.

1:14:56 Mark: Well, yes, if it's a black mirror thing, then it would show how that ends up as a dystopia, having this technology. That's the way the show works.

1:15:05 Wes: So, speaking of which, speaking of the positive side of things, we're starting to get into that, actually, at the bottom of page 27 with Hegel, he's going to weed into this idea that logic is a content, because that's sort of the solution to things. And then it's talk of absolute knowledge. So at the end of page 27, the emptiness of logical forms lies rather solely in the manner in which they are considered and dealt with. So he's going to say this idea that logical forms are just empty and without content is actually just a artifact of Kant's and other people's poor treatment of them, scattered in fixed determinations and thus not held together in an organic unity.

So our discussion of the need for an overall organic unity to hold the contradictions together is relevant here. They are dead forms, and the spirit, which is their vital concrete unity, does not reside in them. Therefore they lack proper content. So we need the organic unity to get the content, a matter that would in itself be substance. The content which is missed in the logical forms is nothing else than a fixed foundation and a concretion of these abstract determinations. And such a substantial being is usually sought for outside them, which makes me think of God here, actually.

But logical reason is itself the substantial or real factor which within itself holds together all the abstract determinations and constitutes their proper, absolute, concrete unity. So in other words, we don't have to look outside of logic for some foundation to its unity. It has its unity within itself, and that unity is what provides it with content. Is there any way to spell out more what that means?

1:16:40 Amogh: You might think about concepts as containing like internal need to get at what's outside them, but also this notion of determination you want to get from abstract concepts which don't signify anything at all. Like I was talking about this, this is sort of like indexical term to concrete concepts which Allow you to see objects and their particularity. Right. Allow you to pick them out by making distinction. The way he thinks you get from these abstract concepts, which don't have any relationship to anything, to these concrete concepts, is through the process of negation, because that's how you determine a single thing apart from, like, the background in which it's held. Right. It's like you have to pick that out and thus negate the kind of background which it previously formed a part of.

1:17:28 Wes: And that's going to be his method of derivation. Kant calls it his transcendental deduction of the categories. The logic here, it's going to be analogous to that, except that. So here Also on page 28 and 29, he's sort of critiquing Kant for, you know, look, you inherit these categories. His deduction essentially is saying, yep, they're necessary for experience. For Hegel, the deduction is to start with one thing which will end up being. Being, and showing how everything else organically, sort of developmentally flows out of that. That's going to be his version of the deduction in the body of the

1:18:02 Mark: logic which will all be revealed next episode.

1:18:06 Amogh: Yeah, being is kind of like the ultimate demonstration of what, like, an abstract concept is. Right? Like, right.

1:18:12 Wes: The most abstract. He wants to start with the most abstract thing, and then. Yeah, you're all set.

1:18:16 Amogh: Yeah. Determinate being. I mean, it's. When Dylan was talking about becoming, that's what. That's what I want to say about the way I understand what happens after non being comes in is that being becomes determinant. So it's like, you know, once you introduce non being, you don't have to say, oh, everything is one thing. You can begin making these distinctions, which is what Hegel thinks negation does.

1:18:37 Mark: Okay, well, let's not pursue that because we're going to do that next episode with some rigor

1:18:44 Wes: and vigor.

1:18:46 Dylan: In this, the thing that Wes just read, I agree that there's the notion of contradiction that is used to derive it, but just to reread one sentence, he says, scattered in fixed determinations and thus not held together in organic unity, they are dead forms, and the spirit, which is their vital concrete unity, does not reside in them.

1:19:08 Wes: He's talking about the categories there.

1:19:10 Dylan: Yes, and particularly the Kantian categories.

1:19:12 Wes: Right? Yes, yes.

1:19:13 Dylan: And what I want to draw attention to is a. The fixed determinations and them not being held by organic unity. Because in that being the problem, there are going to be two things that will happen or that are missing that the determinations need to be more fluid, and they need to be held together organically, which seem to me to go together with one another. If you're going to be even talking about the notion of becoming and transformation and having that be a kind of unity and that is holding in itself this notion of activity and internal development. And development isn't even the right word, right. Because it's sort of there, but it's really that these relations are dead because they don't allow you to have any development, any becoming in them.

1:20:03 Wes: So can I give the intuitive way to understand this?

1:20:05 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, please.

1:20:06 Wes: Which is just based on my. I remember reading the Transcendental Deduction, and it took me a long time, by the way, to just get the vague idea that he's saying, okay, the transcendental part is just. We assume we have experiences, and if we have experiences, what has to be true? For experience to be an experience, it has to be causal. If we took causality away, it would be a sound and fury signifying nothing. And the same for every other category. But I remember being absolutely baffled. I mean, I knew the categories came from Aristotle, but I would look at the table and I think, where did these come from?

I mean, you're saying you're doing a deduction. You didn't deduct these individual categories. It was utterly baffling to me. Even after I got the general idea, it's like, okay, yeah, historically you picked these up and there is no real concrete deduction of these particular categories. Well, Hegel is going to do that, and he's going to do it step by step. He's going to start with being, and then we're going to unfold from there. So that's the organic unity that you get with his little developmental process. And it's also, I suspect, going to be just.

It's more satisfying in that sense. It's more specific.

1:21:11 Mark: So if we are quick enough in our sequel episode to get through being and becoming, then folks can look forward to us deriving quantity from quality.

1:21:22 Wes: Whoa. Yeah. Maybe that doesn't actually happen, but we'll see. I'm giving Hegel the benefit of the doubt.

1:21:28 Dylan: It's a generous reading.

1:21:30 Wes: It could end up the same feeling that I got from Kant, But I don't know.

1:21:34 Mark: I mean, what do you think of this whole thing as a, you know, we haven't seen the money, we've seen the payoff. We'll explore next time whether. But I can see how one might be inspired to say, wow, yeah, we should be able to actually do metaphysics. And not wuss out like that Kant did. And sort of just as a really extended polemical. Well, maybe it's too calm to be polemical, but an argument for this whole thing, you know, this is all about method. I don't know. Is there something inspiring about the method itself. Without even knowing whether it bears fruit? Or is that just something that's foreign to our American sentiment?

1:22:12 Wes: Well, we haven't even really gotten to the method. We've just gotten through his objections to his motivations for doing this and his.

1:22:21 Mark: We haven't even started. Well, let's get into the method.

1:22:25 Dylan: What we've done is we've done exactly what Hegel does is because we've talked for a very, very long time about, like, four pages. And it turns out to be pretty interesting. But it doesn't get you very far very quickly.

1:22:36 Wes: And actually, we're almost done with this. And I think, you know, we could just say a few more things about the introduction. Because we're about to reach the climax, so to speak, where he talks about absolute knowledge. It's my favorite part. So he talks about the phenomenology of spirit a little bit as an example of his application of logic. You know, the whole point of this is to get to a pure science. So on page 29, the concept of pure science and its deduction is therefore presupposed in the present work insofar as the phenomenology of spirit is nothing other than that deduction.

So the idea of this developmental progress from deficient ways of knowing all the way up to absolute knowledge. And then we're going to get a little blurb on that here. Absolute knowledge is the truth of all modes of consciousness. Because as the course of the phenomenology brought out, it is only an absolute knowledge that the separation of the subject matter from the certainty of itself is completely resolved. Truth has become equal to certainty and this certainty to truth. So I actually, by the way, I was thinking here of certainty of itself as the self, certainty of consciousness, right?

The fact, that sort of old Cartesian idea that what we have available to ourselves is our unconscious. And that's what we can be certain of. And then the whole problem is to get at objects. And that sort of reaches catastrophic proportions in Kant, where what Kant thinks of as the world is sort of within the realm of the self in some sense. And the things in themselves are entirely cut off from. So absolute knowledge resolves that contradiction. Certainty and truth sort of coincide now because we're no longer accepting. And we can show how we can get out of that contradictory bifurcation between knowledge and object.

1:24:18 Dylan: Well, so back where you had. You had quoted on page 29, that paragraph, Objective thinking is thus the content of pure science. And he has a couple sentences at the end sort of summarizing, I think, part of what he's going after. Accordingly, logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.

1:24:54 Wes: So it almost sounds like, yeah, the logical structure of the world is God.

1:24:58 Amogh: There's obvious kind of like Spinozistic influences here. He talks about Spinoza a bit in the encyclopedia, which is interesting. I mean, it's very easy for someone who's sort of interested in Hegel to talk about, at least in a modern context, to kind of leave aside or set aside the kind of theological ambitions. But it's there. No, it's really hard to avoid. The God talk is all over in the preface to the logic. It's absolutely saturated the Protestant resonances of all of the kind of stuff we've been talking about, about, you know, here's this universal God who's incarnated as a particular. Right? The movement is like God and Jesus and so on. And there's tons of this stuff where you can. Which you can find. I mean, it's not. It's. That element is there, and he doesn't shrink from it.

1:25:42 Wes: It's reminiscent of Berkeley's idealism, actually, in which you. So once you're an idealist, you have to figure out how there can be a mind in the Berkeleyan sense, a mind, independent world, right? The world can't be dependent on your mind in particular. And so the world comes to depend on the mind of God. It seems like a very similar solution here.

1:26:01 Amogh: Hegel would be horrified by that.

1:26:03 Wes: I know, because he's not a. What he calls a subjective idealist. And it's not that the world is composed of my particular ideas, which God. The same thing happened in Descartes, right? God came in to supply us with objects because we got cut off in our own little minds. But, yeah, that God becomes the sort of unifying solution here.

1:26:21 Amogh: I mean, it's one way to charitably render this. And this is kind of like skirting over the theological stuff a bit. But it's like the world, when it's finally made intelligible once we get our concepts and categories, ways of thinking about stuff, to align perfectly with it through the logic, it is God, because all of these different contradictions between us and the world have been reconciled. And this kind of completeness that we've achieved is sort of divine in that sense. Right. With the world has fundamental. You've finally spirit has found itself at home in the world and all these kinds of phrases that he uses.

1:26:53 Wes: I think the difference with Spinoza is that Spinoza was sort of identifying God with the natural world and was sort of thinking about things in terms of matter. Am I right about that? Or.

1:27:04 Mark: Well, God, for Spinoza, was not imminent in all of nature. Nature is part of God, but there could be any number of aspects of God that exceed nature. So I do think maybe it's closer to. I think Hegel could agree with Spinoza's conception here that God is the all unifying thing. I mean, we made the point in that episode that the world is both mind and matter, that those are kind of two aspects of the same thing. Which sounds exactly like the kind of way that Hegel is talking about how there could be division with underlying unity.

1:27:35 Wes: Right.

1:27:36 Amogh: But the similarity with Spinozism that I was talking about is this whole kind of like fatalist, determinist strand and Hegel, where, you know, all of this is kind of happening. When you read this, you kind of have the feeling that it's happening over and above individual people. And like, do we really participate in this stuff? Does it just kind of have to play out whether we like it or not? That has a certain kind of similarity to Spinoza's denial of free will.

1:27:59 Mark: And he explicitly connects it. I think this is in one of the prefaces to the encyclopedia, which we were not supposed to read, but I accidentally was reading, and they were the most kind of angry part of all this, a lot of it is criticizing religious objections to his system. And one of was these people that are so patronizing toward philosophy of like, oh, those abstract thinkers, you know, people like Hegel, they don't think through, like, what the actual moral implications of their system would be. And so it's exactly what you're describing, that you might think that the moral implications of a determinist system is some sort of moral nihilism.

And Hegel at that point explicitly pulls out Spinoza like, hey, look, Spinoza had this view and look how sensitive his actual ethics is, are. And how the most austere Christian would probably embrace the high ideals that Spinoza is putting forward in that. And that's what actually follows from being a determinist.

1:28:51 Amogh: It's interesting. That's kind of supposed to be like a showing your hand thing in German idealism, where people kind of accuse Kant of being a Spinozist, where he's undermined your need to believe in God. And Spinozism is identified with this kind of like, dangerous atheism. And Hegel is just like bringing Spinoza out to, you know. Yeah, there you go.

1:29:10 Wes: This is a.

1:29:10 Mark: If people want a popular version of what we've been talking about here, the book that we just released, an episode on, this Erich Fromm, he has a section in that book on traditional logic versus paradoxical logic, which. Well, he's drawing a little more on Buddhism and Daoism and the koans and that kind of stuff. But the way he describes it is exactly like what we've been talking about here, that there are things that seem to be contradictions and that you then go to some. A higher level of understanding in which the contradictions are resolved and that there's this ultimate oneness.

And not coincidentally, his take on the development in culture of different conceptions of God was to get more and more sophisticated ones. Until you get to, basically, Spinoza's version where God is equivalent to the good. Just orienting yourself toward the good is what belief in God is about. It's actually not belief in. In an otherworldly entity at all. And so maybe Hegel, ultimately, he gives a whole lectures on philosophy of religion. But Amogh, you had pointed us to a lecture that we'll point folks to on YouTube about, is Hegel an idealist or to what extent he's an idealist and talking about Kant's idealism and how he's criticizing that.

And that guy even says, look, I'm going to talk about Hegel's lectures on religion from late in his career. But despite all those lectures explicitly about religion, it's still very hard to say what Hegel's religious views are. Yeah. So even though he says things in here that make it sound like, yeah, he's the Protestant of his time, and certainly Hegelianism was taken up as being this kind of, well, the kind of Protestantism that Kierkegaard, as you were saying, ended up basing his whole career in reaction to, basically, it's still unclear. Maybe Hegel is a Spinozist.

1:30:57 Amogh: There's stuff you can say about it, but all of this is, like, way outside the boundary of what we're supposed to read. It's obviously relevant.

1:31:04 Mark: He finds it Relevant. He brings it up in, especially in these subsequent commentary parts that he. It's just so hard to get a handle on what this logic is.

1:31:13 Wes: It turns out to be about God.

1:31:16 Amogh: Yes.

1:31:17 Mark: You know, as funny as that sounds, because Hegel's big criticism in terms of method is as soon as you start to try to give an understandable explanation of anything, the way you're doing that is you're bringing in matters from everyday life, from common sense, and those end up being extrinsic, irrelevant, only contingently connected to what you're actually trying to talk about. So I think at one point he says, look, just to make this clear, I'm gonna give an intro here, but it's gonna be a non philosophical intro because philosophy, as we were saying, has to determine its own method.

And he spends a lot of time then toward the end of part of the science of logic that we read, just talking about what could possibly be a beginning for philosophy? What could be the first thing, that which we've already given away? The answer, it's being, being the most abstract, highest thing. He spends a lot of time, like, ruling out anything else, that anything else ends up being extrinsic, ends up being too common. So if you try to get a handle on Hegel by coming at it from like, well, where does he fit? Is, is he a Protestant? Or like, no, that's all actually kind of foreign to his system.

Even when he brings it in himself. The only way you could really understand his view of God is to follow either the phenomenology, which I guess ends with God, or this book all the way through and read it off there. And even the scholars who do that don't really understand.

1:32:36 Amogh: We did kind of get close to it. I mean, it's not that he would completely disagree with what like me and Wes were knocking about here. It's clear that God is connecting in some way to this unity. And he thinks religion is sort of an important guide to this absolute and so on and so forth, like synthesizing that into what that exactly means in terms of what kind of entity he thinks like God is, or something like that. You're right, that's complicated.

1:32:59 Wes: So should we say just a little bit about the method before we begins on page 32? For the dead bones of logic to be quickened by spirit and become substance and content, its method must be the one which alone can make it fit to be pure science. Sorry, I'm just reading that because I like the dead bones of logic. I guess page 33 is where we really begin to get into it, I think.

1:33:19 Mark: Isn't it just like they have the cadaver of John Stuart Mill or something still in one of the British universities propped up somewhere, or his head, something like that. There's, I believe, the bones of logic. There's a pit where they put Frege and Russell and they just have a little place where all the bones of logic go.

1:33:38 Wes: Wow, that's a really long, long setup. To get back to the bones of logic. It's a circle, it's a snake fucking itself. To talk about method. He's going to do what we've been doing, a lot of which is refer back to the phenomenology of spirit. So this is on page 33 in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I have presented an example of this method with respect to a concrete object, namely consciousness. It's interesting to hear that called concrete. It's very concrete, yep. So at issue are shapes of consciousness, each of which dissolves itself in being realized, has its own negation for result, and thereby has gone over to a higher shape. It gives you another good idea of what we're already talking about in terms of becoming. And negation is related to that.

1:34:23 Dylan: Well, I think you should read the next sentence because I think it's a very concise statement of what we were talking about earlier.

1:34:29 Wes: The recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally positive, or that what is self contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content. Or that such a negation is not just negation, but is the negation of the determined fact which is resolved and is therefore determinant negation, that in the result there is therefore contained in essence that from which the result derives a tautology. Indeed, since the result would otherwise be something immediate and not a result, because the result, the negation, is a determinant negation, it has content, it is a new concept, but one higher and richer than the preceding. Richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it. And it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite.

1:35:19 Mark: I know it seems like after all this talking around it, that you just reading it straight through is very elucidating. I think that's only because we've already been steeped into this that the listener stopped listening after the first two sentences. So let's unpack that

1:35:34 Dylan: just in reading it again. I still find it a little bit bizarre, but what he's saying is that the Big fish eats the smaller fish and that because the big fish holds a smaller fish in it, it's sublated. Yeah, it has progressed. That's the word. So I used a crappy analogy to describe something that was impossible to understand. What I would like to have some more clarity on is the. Because the result of the negation is a determinant negation. So up until that point you have being and non being. You have things that something self contradictory and that contradiction results in a determinant negation.

It therefore has content. And because it has content and it holds in it the previous negations, it therefore amounts to progress. So those are like the poles of the argument. And the one that I find the most confusing is the notion of the determinant negation. Once you have something that's determinant, I suppose it has content in the sense that it's determined something. And then to the extent that in its content it holds within it previous knowledge, it's in that way larger and amounts to some kind of progress. But how it results in a determinant negation is the part that I find.

I don't know what it means.

1:36:47 Amogh: Yeah, I mean, one way to think about this is to think about determinacy. That is, you know, making something sharp, particular, understandable, intelligible in its particular features.

1:36:59 Dylan: Doesn't it mean it could only be that way?

1:37:02 Amogh: Yeah, that as well. Yeah, no, that's right. What determinacy contains within itself is this sort of element of exclusion by virtue of having these particular features which it has to have. It doesn't have all these other kinds of features. Right. Which is relates to what you were saying about being and non being. Right. So if you're talking about something like being, what you're picking out is everything there is. There's no determinacy there because it's this sort of abstract holding everything within it kind of work.

1:37:30 Wes: One of the reasons why there's no determinacy is because it's not like it's a thing. You can compare another thing, because what provides determinacy, Right. Is to have a higher sort of category. So for instance, I'm thinking of the sophist and this sort of hierarchy of classification. So you might have an angler and tuna fisherman, those two could be subsumed under fishermen. And the idea is that determinacy involves being able to make this relation to another thing under the umbrella of another universal. And being, because it's the most universal, you can never do that. So it's indeterminate in that Sense it can't be determined over and against some other thing where there is a higher thing that subsumes them both.

1:38:13 Amogh: And so anyway, and once you've got comparison this thing over and against that thing, there's a negation. This thing is not that thing. We've made a distinction and now we have something like determinate being. We can pick out individual things, not just say everything is. This new concept is richer and higher than the previous just being.

1:38:32 Dylan: Well, so this thing is not that thing. The problem with that is that it's not not that thing. So if I have two things and they're distinct in number, this is not that. It's not the case that if I negate that negation, that I get back what I had before. Because if I pick that one particularity and say, I can pick anything else, any other thing in the whole world and say it's not that thing. Right. I don't see where that negation is a proper negation.

1:39:05 Mark: This whole determinant negation was making me think of how little kids. I know I had this sentiment myself and I talked about when my kids were little. Once they start thinking about opposites day and night, they start thinking that everything is an opposite. And they start, what's the opposite of a grape? And imagine that the thing that you're starting with is sort of indeterminate being. It's an object, but you haven't specified what it is. And you say, well, what is the opposite of that? Well, let's imagine it is something. It's a grape. But even calling it a grape kind of is cheating because we're already labeling it, but it's an unlabeled thing.

You could even think of it being labeled as a grape or being labeled as a fruit or whatever. If you say the opposite of a grape is a cherry or something like. Then you're picking out some specific thing about, well, it's round, but it has this kind of flavor, whereas a cherry has a more sour flavor, whatever the distinction you're making. Or the opposite of a grape is a vegetable of something. Because, you know, fruit and vegetable. You're actually picking out qua fruit. Or is it, you know, the opposite of a grape is a stone. So that's the way that it becomes a determinant, a determinant negation.

Now you're saying that if you then negate that negation. Well, clearly you could pivot any which way, the same way you could pivot off the original grape. Whatever the thing you've come up as Is negation is you could pivot any which way. It's just that the difference is that Hegel thinks that once you make the first move of negation, then there's going to be some logically determined way that you would then sublate both of them and come up with the synthesis.

1:40:32 Wes: Let me give you another example of determinant negation. Suppose you have a red canvas and you want to make sense of the idea that there's a. I'm going to put a red spot on that canvas. Well, there is no such thing as a red spot if the whole canvas is red, right? There's no way to distinguish it from the background. You need negation. You need a different color there as a background in order to see the red spot. And then those two things become subsumed under color. There is no such thing as red if all the world is red. And then I say, oh, there's a red thing. No, it's not red. It's just. We're back to being, which is red is another word for being, but it becomes a determinant thing in comparison to something else. And then those two things are subsumed under.

1:41:14 Dylan: So what we're talking about here means that negation and contradiction are different things. Or maybe I just have a constrained notion of contradiction because I'm interpreting contradiction as being opposite. But negation is going to allow for something more than just contradiction. It's going to allow for all the different knots that are there, which would be broader than my kind of simple minded notion of the double not being the same thing as not doing anything at all. As it being fully contradictory.

1:41:45 Amogh: Negation is closer to something like distinction. I mean, that's the way I think about it.

1:41:50 Wes: I mean, if there's a contradictory part, I think it's okay to mention this again when you start with being and you say okay, it's this most general term and it's so general that it's not determinant and it's featureless. And so I can't distinguish that from nothing. That's the first step. Nothingness grows out of being for Hegel. And so it seems like you get an opposite. The opposite sort of springs out. The nothing springs out of being in this sense. And then you get the organic unity of those two things, which is becoming, I think, which is just the kind of thing we would call a determinate being.

You know, the things in the world that we call beings. Or you could call it a being. You know, this union of being and nothing into a becoming is where we can start talking about beings. Ultimately, the reason why all this is important is because he's telling us what his method is going to be. This is going to be his method of derivation or deduction as opposed to what Kant did. So on page 34 he says what propels the concept onward is the already mentioned negative which it possesses in itself. So being, for instance, possessing nothing in itself.

It is this that constitutes the truly dialectical factor. So what Hegel is saying here is all I have to do is start with being and water that plant a little and I can just watch it grow and I get everything else that I need.

1:43:09 Mark: Water it bringing in extrinsic water.

1:43:11 Wes: I don't have to do anything. It's self watering. Sorry, it's self watering.

1:43:15 Mark: It's like the magic of chia seeds.

1:43:18 Wes: If anyone could out Kant, Kant. Kant thought he was doing a transcendental deduction, which means I need very little extraneous information. All I need to do is assume that there is such a thing as experience. Well, Hegel's saying, well I can one up you on that. I'm just going to start with being and then everything else, I don't even need to do any. Well, yeah, he has to do some fancy legwork, but not the kind that Kant does. So anyway, and everything else comes out of that.

1:43:44 Mark: So if Hegel is negating Kant in certain ways, then who is the synthesis that takes up both into a more Kantian whole?

1:43:51 Wes: Actually Hegel is both the negation and the synthesis.

1:43:55 Mark: Oh, okay. What a hard hog hogging all the roles in the dialectic.

1:44:00 Amogh: Well, I mean, actually you could say Kant himself is a son negation.

1:44:04 Mark: Yeah, well, for one thing that Heidegger. Oh, nobody thinks about the meaning of being. Nobody contemplates. Hegel right here is contemplating the meaning of being. Says how hard it is for people to think about the is in an everyday sentence, how these.

1:44:20 Amogh: To be fair, Heidegger is talking about exactly that when he says that, that people condemn being to be the most simple indeterminate concept. But I mean, there is a sense in which he's trying to do the same. I mean Heidegger is no time for this thinking stuff that we've been talking about a highfalutin concepts and not investigating everyday being in the world.

1:44:41 Mark: It actually brought to mind that Heidegger has a whole essay called what is Thinking? Just that whole like treating it as problematic. Well, Hegel is also treating it as problematic that thinking ends up not being what you do every day when you muse about when you sexually fantasize about the person next to you or something, that's not thinking. Thinking as a specific technical thing whereby these notions are converted into knowledge, into concepts.

1:45:06 Amogh: But also you were, when you were initially describing the relationship between thought and world, there was a lot of stuff there about needing to take the world, needing to take into account the fact that thought is fundamentally a way that the world is and is situated in the world and so on. And I think Dylan even mentioned being in the world.

1:45:22 Mark: Yes, Dasein is determinate being. Well, we'll get to that next time. It's the slightly more specific version of being. It's not actually determinate in terms of it's a grape, but it is something.

1:45:35 Dylan: It's a something, it's a thing rather than being.

1:45:38 Amogh: The point I was trying to make was just that it is a certain kind of phenomenology, if you understand by phenomenology, a certain kind of conceptually guided fine graining of our own experience in that loose sense. I think it's a similar kind of thing.

1:45:52 Mark: So unfortunately it's not just you take acid and the experience that you have of being the one. No, that's Emerson phenomenology. That's not Hegel.

1:46:01 Amogh: Yeah, but also there are certain similarities. That's what I was trying to point

1:46:05 Dylan: between Hegel and taking lsd.

1:46:08 Amogh: That too.

1:46:09 Mark: Is it the slowing of time? Is that what it's the seeing of music?

1:46:14 Amogh: Well, there's the whole idea that thought has to be understood as embody. I mean, that's partly why you go through these. Right? It's like this is more in the phenomenology than here. The idea that you can't simply take a position out of the world and sort of fantasize without regard to the world and just come up with your own abstract system. You have to take into account the fact that the true and the false. I mean this is all phenomenology stuff, but it's played out here. So the true and the false, different modes of knowledge are competing in this way, which is why you have to do this. You want to show people who might have these skeptical doubts that this is the only way to go about this. And the reason you have to do it is because there's lots of different people saying lots of different things. And you got to make sense of that.

1:46:56 Mark: So let's make a pledge for part two, that we will not talk about the phenomenology of spirit, we'll only talk about logic. But as a way of giving my closing for part one one here, I was kind of pleased that this was as connected to the phenomenology as it was because I was raised in my Hegel schooling to believe that the phenomenology was the young, vibrant Hegel and the logic was the old, crusty Hegel. But it's really not the logic that's the old, crusty Hegel. It's the history and the philosophy of. Right. That's the old crusty Hegel. This is in between. This is written right after the phenomenology. I guess I'd never put those two together. And so it's really. The parts that we would object to in here are in the latter parts of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It's just those are the parts that I never get around to reading about the Absolute in all that, especially going

1:47:42 Dylan: through the Science of logic. Our reading the second time, it was a lot easier, and I shouldn't be surprised. This happens all the time with interesting good books, is that when you read it the second time, you just should never read it the first time. You should only ever read it the second time. That's just the way it is.

1:47:58 Wes: You know, I had that experience of reading it and thinking, yeah, this is gibberish, until I started really getting to some secondary readings, which I really didn't have time to do. And then I just went back and was more patient and because I had already given it once over and slept on it, you know, returning to familiar territory. Yeah, it was really quite enjoyable, actually, and interesting.

1:48:19 Amogh: Did you find the Kant helpful?

1:48:21 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I have a strong background in Kant, which is enormously helpful

1:48:25 Dylan: for this, though, I have to say. Maybe you can correct this understanding, Wes, but I don't find any characterization of Hegel Kant to be wrong or misguided. It's not like he's providing a thorough reading of the Critique, but his characterizations don't seem to be off.

1:48:42 Amogh: The reason I was kind of hedging was because there's ways for, like, Kantians to duck and weave and weasel their way out of pretty much everything he says here, although I find it convincing.

1:48:51 Wes: However sympathetic you are to Kant, I don't see how you escape the problem of the thing in itself. Maybe there's ways for Kantians to do that, but I'm not familiar with Open, Sir.

1:49:00 Mark: Well, I think I would have been happy with our reading selection if we had just not assigned the second preface to the Science of Logic, which is the 1830 thing, because I'm reading the first preface, which is very short and like, oh, this is fine. I mean, it's not saying, then get to the second preface. I'm like, what is he talking about? And it pretty much just ruined everything. And I didn't get a second go through of the Science of Logic. It was redeemed for me finally when I got around to the encyclopedia and, like, actually took good notes on that and that was understandable. And the fact that it has that structure of commenting on his own stuff and these lecture notes that you were saying Wes were inserted from his students or something, makes it a lot more fun. And it does.

1:49:43 Wes: Yeah, you're right.

1:49:44 Mark: But even in the Science of Logic, once I got through that horrible second preface to the actual introduction, which is what we've been talking about here today, are like, oh, this is fine. This is. By comparison.

1:49:54 Wes: Yeah, is wonderful.

1:49:56 Mark: So my earlier prejudice of early Hegel, good, late Hegel, horrible, confirmed.

1:50:04 Wes: The prefaces are indeterminate being.

1:50:08 Dylan: Well, maybe one negates the other and you get the determinate being that comes. Sorry.

1:50:14 Amogh: I really enjoyed this book, which is partly why interested in talking about it and the kind of moves in here which we really mapped out quite nicely.

1:50:22 Wes: You've read the whole thing?

1:50:24 Amogh: I've looked through the whole encyclopedia and I'm 75% through the science of Logic. But as to whether it pays off, I don't know. It probably doesn't. I can't claim to have fully comprehended the system, but the kind of heavenly promises that we've been going through, I don't know that they're ever fulfilled.

1:50:41 Mark: I remember talking to you long ago, and I think that probably the effect of reading the whole of this book is that when you started, you had a straight up normal Canadian accent. Now you sound like that.

1:50:52 Amogh: Really? Okay.

1:50:53 Mark: Amazing.

1:50:54 Amogh: Oh.

1:50:57 Mark: So I think the one lesson I get out of this is it makes me want to go find a small child and ask them, what's the opposite of day? And they say night, and you say, wrong. The opposite of day is Armageddon, where there are no more days. That's logic for you. So for next time, as we said, we're going to do more of this book, more Hegel's logic, but in particular the encyclopedia logic. The easier of the two works, the one we talked about less. In this episode, we're going to do sections 79 to 99, which is a little more about what this project is.

The good kinds of abstraction versus the bad kinds of abstraction. And then we actually see this applied to the most general categories, which are undifferentiated being and nothingness and becoming and quality and quantity. I have no doubt after listening to this discussion and that discussion, you will still have questions. Maybe you'll want to try your hand at talking about this yourself. So we are scheduling another after show that's going to happen on Sunday, March 27 at 6pm Eastern Time. Per usual, you just have to go to partialexaminedlife.com Become a Pel Citizen look in the Not School study groups.

In the list of groups you'll see one for this after show. Merely join that group and that will signal that you want to be included in that conversation and you will receive an email with a link to join just before it happens. I also want to remind you about our newly relaunched Introductory Readings in Philosophy Group. Instructor Brian Wilson will be leading a discussion on the Crito on Sunday, March 20th at 5pm Eastern Time. Again, just sign up for Not School. Join the group. That's all you got to do. It's the same $5 that will get you admission to both things and let you hear lots of bonus audio and all that stuff.

We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make your contribution. Big donors since last time have included Thomas Craigel, Philip Czerny, Kevin Beard, Clement Cole, Logan Blank, Lauren Josephson, Eduardo Rodriguez, Lorenzo Jack Martin, Alan Callister, Uriel Hernandez, Chris Larson, Eric Bellotis, Bing Zhao, Linda Pullman, Jonathan Hussain, Adam Bibby, Ilco De Vries, Richard Pierce, Michael Mitry, Keith Morrison, Jared Frizzell, David Norbury, Rachel Feldman, Ian Kerr, Steve Grathwell, David Winfeld, Gayor Gwent, Kam Yuremko, Susan Ryan Volmar, Bill Riordan, James McDermott, Hakon Engin, Nicholas Biddle, Roger Cranby, Eve Southwood, Owen Elnacouri, Scott Vargas, Kyle Sorensen, Bonnie Descolio, Jeannie Carey, David Stanton, John Bouter, and Julia Quagliarello.

Thank you to all of you as well as to the people that bought stuff from our store or our smaller donors or became the $5 a month partially Diamond Life citizens. You guys are awesome as is Amogh. Thanks for having some things, some sensible things to say.

1:53:49 Wes: Thanks for coming on because otherwise it

1:53:51 Mark: would have just been Wes by himself.

1:53:53 Amogh: My pleasure

1:53:57 Mark: Folks should go and comment on this episode on the blog partselexaminedlife.com you could sign up and get our regular emails of brilliant blog content there. You should go subscribe to my other podcast, Nakedly Examined Music, which is where the sucks rules Dichotomy is transcended to the next level of artistic appreciation. There you go, Callback. And while I'm on that topic, the episode of Nakedly Examined Music that just released features my old friend Steve Petrinko, whose music I have featured a couple times on this podcast from the time when he and I played in a band together in college.

And the song you're about to hear at the end of this episode is another one of those. It's called Procrastination, which I chose because for this episode I procrastinated Reed and Hegel more than perhaps anything else that we've yet read. Please go listen to the interview with him. I think you'll find it entertaining. And follow us on Twitter and all that stuff. So good night everybody.

1:54:51 Wes: Good night, Good night.

1:54:52 Amogh: Good night.

1:55:14 Mark: The planets they read us together. If only I believe how pumped I am now that I prop life Will this drop last forever? I should not be waiting so

1:55:43 Dylan: long

1:55:45 Mark: I should not wait so

1:55:51 Amogh: long.

1:55:57 Wes: Each line of your face

1:56:01 Mark: the stars as the dark test pass There will come a day when I will not know you I should not wait so long I should not wait it Sam. In my dark browning light there's a sense and in my eyes. Life. I should not wa.