Episode 135: Hegel on the Logic of Basic Metaphysical Concepts

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 135 is something like how are our basic metaphysical concepts like being, nothingness, becoming quality and quantity related? And we are continuing last episode's discussion by reading more of GWF Hegel's Logic, in this case the Encyclopedia Logic or Lesser Logic sections 79 to 99. That's from 1817. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer being here in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:45 Wes: This is Wes Alwan penetrating deeper and deeper into the excitation that underlies the false surface common being in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:55 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey transitioning to determinate being as such in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:00 Amok: This is Amogh Sahu Being for Self in Toronto, Canada.

1:04 Mark: Wonderful. All right. We tried to dive in to see if this actually works. So the beginning of the sections that we read, we're really pointing out the difference between the right kind of abstraction and the wrong kind of abstraction. It seems like logic is super abstract, but he talks about the difference really between the understanding and reason, taken more or less in Kant sense, as two different faculties. Where if you're simply thinking about something in the abstract, like I'm just thinking about its shape and not thinking about anything else, and then you mistakenly think that you can draw grand conclusions from that, then that's an abuse of the understanding. You're not really doing philosophy, that even an abstraction like a number can't just be considered like abstracting from a particular instance of, you know, where are you?

1:51 Wes: What are you talking about?

1:53 Mark: I'm just trying to give an introduction and as usual it's spilling out, so I won't even try to keep going. Anyway, there's a good way and a bad way. And then the second part of what we read had to do with actually getting going on the logic, which starts with being and analyzes being in terms of, if you look closely that being is the same thing as nothing. And then being and nothing are both sublated into becoming. And we continue a few more stages along that through determinant being, which is quality, and then to quantity. And that's where we stopped. So that was my high level summary.

2:25 Wes: We could remind the listeners what's motivating all this. When we talk about logic here, we're talking about something closer to what we would call ontology and Hegel's version of a derivation of what in Kant and Aristotle are called categories. So these are sort of logical categories, but really they're basic different ways things can be. So that includes things like quantity and also things like quality, which we'll discuss what that means. The last time we saw that. He has some pretty typical objections to Kant. One of them is that the Kantian system by divorcing logical form and the content of things, right?

So Kant has these categories applied by the understanding, but the data that comes in to be shaped by those categories comes from some sort of outside, and we don't know where it is. And then the form is sort of cookie cutter impressed on that. And in the end we're left with this thing in itself that's outside of experience that we're out of contact with. So Hegel is going to give us a derivation of the categories that isn't so hostile to things in themselves and will put us back in touch with reality, so to speak, and truth.

3:33 Dylan: Right. So that you won't have the distinction between the way in which we think of his conventional logic, what he would call conventional logic, as providing you the rules for thinking, but which you sort of throw up your hands at whether or not it's actually true or not, because that all depends upon the truth of the predicates.

3:53 Amok: Two notions of truth seem to be operating here, actually. I mean, one notion of truth is the one we get from formal logic, which is, here's a proposition, is it true or false? And that sense of truth is something Hegel talks about a bit. But there's another sense of truth which is grasping the world in a certain sense, right, where the categories of thought match up with the categories of being. That is, we have a perfectly intelligible account of all that is that's the sense of truth that I think is really important.

4:20 Dylan: He basically spits on the first one. Even if he acknowledges that it exists, he just thinks it's just such a low bar that at the very best you would say that was part of the past progress of philosophical thought. We should graduate from that.

4:39 Mark: You could have a sentence that's true, but it's not the whole truth.

4:41 Amok: Right. It's incomplete would be the right way to say it.

4:44 Dylan: The level of disdain he has for that level of incompleteness is profound.

4:49 Wes: The two senses of truth, as far as I can tell, are the Kantian sense truth, which has to do with appearances, and then the truth of what we would call things in themselves.

4:59 Dylan: How would you match that up with the distinction between the truth of a syllogism in its form versus real truth? Or do you think that that's just another aspect of the same distinction?

5:10 Wes: You seem to be talking about the difference between what we typically think of as logical form and the way in which we get valid inferences. I'm not sure about that.

5:19 Dylan: Well, he talked about that at the beginning in our first reading, quite a bit about that, and tracing it back to Aristotle and Plato and the entire history of philosophy, and tied it in fact to coming to a head in some ways in someone like Kant. I would buy the argument that they're peas in a pod of the same problem.

5:37 Amok: At the end of page 287 on the Hackett, there is actually just a contrast of these two notions of truth. In this little aside, truth is understood first to mean that I know how something is. But this is truth only in relation to consciousness. It is formal truth, mere correctness. In contrast with this, truth in the deeper sense means that objectivity is identical with the concept. It is this deeper sense of truth which is at issue when we speak, for instance, of a true state or a true work of art. These objects are true when they are what they ought to be, when their reality corresponds to their concept.

6:15 Mark: Right. So we're trying to get at, just like back in Plato, that he would say, no, don't just tell me examples of justice. I want to know what justice is that metaphysical truths are getting at the concept with a capital C. Right.

6:27 Amok: There's various ways to render this not exactly clear. What it is, my kind of working idea is our intelligible understanding of things, something like that. Once our intelligible understanding of things gets into touch with the things themselves, that kind of illumination is, I think, the what truth and the real truth that we're talking about means.

6:48 Mark: Yes, and the way you put that makes clear as we go, and this is again mostly reviewing last time it would have been much clearer to me why in Frege's paper, the thought that we had to think why. But a thought for Frege isn't something in somebody's head. It's. It's something objective, it's something in the world. Well, he was using that usage that. I don't know if it was invented by Hegel, but it's all over here that when you're talking about these deeper metaphysical truths and talking them about as intelligibility, it's all about these objectively existing truths, thoughts.

It's not just a state of the affairs of things in the world. It's more abstract than that. That in fact we're talking here about being abstractly is where we start the whole investigation. And if you think about that as, oh, well, this chair has being. No, you're not thinking abstractly anymore. You're thinking about the concrete chair. We're trying to get at the logical truth, the conceptual truth of being. That is a thought. And it is a thought whether or not you are thinking it or I am thinking it. It is something that is objective about the world, not about the physical world.

It's more abstract than that. But it's objectively about the world. It is available to all times and cultures. Anybody that's smart enough to figure it out, to do real philosophy.

8:02 Wes: The thought in question here is not a thought that's in someone's head necessarily. It is the underlying thought structure of the world in itself.

8:11 Amok: Hegel talks about these things, like shapes of consciousness, which are not like individual things. They're like worldviews, like sense, certainty and perception and so on. Same thing with being here. It's not like a single concept like dog. It's like a way of viewing the whole world. Everything is. That may illuminate to some extent what concept capital C is a bit like.

8:34 Wes: So concept with a capital C. I associate that as well with God. Am I right to do that?

8:39 Amok: Or. I suppose when the concept's been brought to completion in the idea, then it becomes God at the end of the

8:45 Mark: logic, we'll have to see. He brings up God throughout this. And I know I said in the last episode that, well, you can't really tell, despite him bringing all this, what his theological views are. I kind of changed my mind going through the lecture note part of this. So this is again the encyclopedia, which is the dumbed down version. And what's more, it's the dumbed down version of the logic. But it has these insertions of. Apparently lecture notes about these points. Plus for almost every section in here, there's places where it says addition, where something was added in the later edition of the text and there were at least two additions. It's basically commentary upon commentary to further try to clarify these points.

9:23 Amok: Right.

9:23 Wes: For concept and idea, what's the difference

9:25 Amok: in the German concept, I think is. I mean, again, referring to the phenomenology. A bit notion is what people read back there. Begriff.

9:33 Mark: Yeah, well, the notion is the Vorstellung. The notion is not as good.

9:36 Amok: Oh, right. There's a similar usage. It's not really important for our understanding here. But the idea in Kant is something like the ideas of reason, like God, right. Capital I ideas.

9:47 Mark: And what is the German though for that? Is it just ideal?

9:50 Amok: Yes, I think so. So it's not like one misleading use of the term idea, something like Lockean ideas, which. Like individual thoughts, the mind, things. That's not what this is at all. It's something like the ideal. Ideal conveys some of the sense of perfection and completion which seems to be implied here.

10:08 Wes: Okay, so shall we.

10:09 Mark: Yeah, let's dive in. We got a lot right at the beginning here, section 79, about what the dialectic actually is. And we tried to that in the second half of our last discussion, section 79. With regard to its form, the logical has three sides. First, the side of abstraction or of the understanding, second, the dialectical or negatively rational side, and third, the speculative or positively rational one. So that's the closest he comes to thesis, antithesis, synthesis and talks about while. About what you start with, which is an abstraction of the understanding. Which I was saying is. There's something bad about that. Well, it's bad in that it's incomplete.

10:50 Wes: Yeah, let's talk about what the understanding does. And he's going to talk a lot about the sense in which it gives us what he calls fixed determinacies. So that's in section 80A. It stops short at the fixed determinacy, which Mark, as you mentioned, is a defect in a way, but it's also. It's the talent of the understanding. It's the good thing about. So what does it mean to have a fixed determinacy?

11:12 Amok: The way I understand it is very much like a single rigid conceptual form which you impose on an object and you made a determinate. Right. You've given it a certain content. You've called all these impressions dog. But it acts like a sort of delimiting cage where it has certain conditions of application and you put it in certain propositions, like this is a dog, dogs are whatever. But it's inert in a certain sense because. Because it's this name which rigidly applies to certain things and it doesn't change in any way.

11:44 Wes: We can think here of what Kant called the manifold, or just this sort of buzzing confusion before it's been shaped by the concepts of the understanding. The strange thing about this is that

11:54 Mark: in order to the notions of the understanding, which is

11:59 Wes: sure, what we would call concepts, small C. Right. So the interesting thing here is that in order to have an experience, even of a particular thing, like a dog. I don't think that's a bad example. We have to have this universalizing moment we have to be able to subsume that particular under a universal. And until we've done that, it can't even be this particular thing that we're having an experience of. So the positive side of that is just that it does what he says, it determines things. It actually makes it not just this big mass of gobbledygook, but these specific things. But on the other hand, it abstracts, it sort of carries some of the defect of what it's trying to solve forward.

12:41 Dylan: Is it both those steps, is it that you break the world up into? This is. And that's. And also some of the this is. Are like those thats so that you would not just have distinction. So you pick out individual objects, but you would also in addition at this stage say that's a tree and that's also a tree. And that's also a tree. And that's a dog. And that's also a dog. At that point you use the character of likeness to establish. I don't know if it's a concept or a notion.

13:15 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. Even for the tree to sort of emerge from the landscape, even for it to be a distinct thing and not buried within the forest. Let's say we have to have made those comparisons, like you said, there has to be a point of comparison to other things before it even becomes articulated out of its background.

13:33 Dylan: There wouldn't be prior to that. Just the mere making of distinctions without the thought of what they were like yet.

13:41 Mark: There is, but he's just talking in general about what the understanding as a faculty does. And the understanding would not be satisfied with just this. Isn't that right?

13:49 Dylan: The understanding is doing both those things because being has no distinction. Right.

13:55 Mark: Being is the kind of thing that the understanding can't get a handle on because it is too high level, it is too general.

14:00 Dylan: Yes.

14:00 Mark: The understanding is. Is always only one step removed from concrete particular. I guess.

14:05 Dylan: So with understanding we have the world broken into pieces and in fact a kind of manifold on top of it.

14:12 Wes: Well, it organizes the manifold. Yeah.

14:14 Dylan: Right. Now we've immediately walked into embeddedness. Right. I mean, that's the way we talk about it now. We would say the only way you have understanding right out from the gate is that you have a manifold that you lay on top of the world. It doesn't emerge out of the world at all. You characterize dogs and cats and trees and stuff like that. And even if it's through the activity of likeness, it's not emerging out of the world at best, it's emerging out of You.

14:41 Mark: I just think this is going way beyond what his description of the understanding is here.

14:46 Dylan: I'm just trying to understand his understanding.

14:48 Mark: So let's read some more quotes here. This is in part of 81 of the first edition. The activity of the understanding consists generally in the bestowing of the form of universality on its content. And the universal posited by the understanding is of course an abstract one which is held onto in firm opposition to the particular. But as a result it is itself determined also as a particular again. So I'm thinking of the way that people that are new to philosophy, they'll say, before we start, we have to define our terms. In other words, we have to fix all of the universals in a very static way.

And you might even think that's the whole goal of philosophy if you're Ayn Rand, you think, you know, she thinks she's just being Aristotle. But that's the whole goal, is just to come up with adequate definitions for everything. And they're static and they will enable you to do practical reasoning and determine what can be determined about the theoretical. Hegel wants to argue that this is misguided, is incomplete, is not philosophy well,

15:45 Wes: but it's the basis of everyday experience and to some extent science and, and

15:50 Amok: practical reason and everything like that. But the phrase used in like contemporary metaphysical talk is like carving the world up is something that we think about. The point is that carving the world up involves doing all the things that you guys have been talking about in terms of putting things into classes, talking about matters and kinds and so on, so forth. But also the temptation is to kind of close your conceptual system that you've constructed there, to say that all of these kinds or types hang together in some way by the systematic unity of reason. I think it's the Kant phase, and his point is that the understanding naturally has this tendency to cut things up in this way. And through the cutting up frees the world where your way of cutting things up is fixed and unchangeable because you've made things, you close the world in a certain sense.

16:37 Wes: What Mark is trying to point out is the. So if you look at the next paragraph, the common complaint against the understanding or thinking is that it, well, he says, quote unquote, leads to ruinous and destructive results, which is, by cutting up the whole, a world which is, at bottom, a whole has to get cut up. And it's inadequate, as Kant pointed out, it's inadequate to grasping things in themselves. And let's see, the objects of metaphysics and God and soul and all those sorts of things. But here, right out Hegel's going to say, well, not to rational thinking, but only to understanding.

Are those things inaccessible. And his whole departure from Kant is, for Kant, you couldn't know those things. You might think about them. They might be objects of reason in a sense, but for Hegel, rational thinking is actually going to be faculty of knowledge and not just understanding. So he's going to let us out

17:27 Mark: of that cage just to give an idea of one of these ruinous consequences. Just a point that he makes right at the end of the reading that we did was basically against scientism, which is you could abstract from the things we observe to quantity and say quantity is where it's all at. And then kind of equate knowledge with quantity and. And anything that can't be quantified, you can't have firm knowledge about. And that leads to emphasis on physics as being the ideal science and neglect of things like politics or anything else that's more fuzzy.

18:00 Amok: The passages about pointing out the metaphysics in physics I particularly liked. It's very relevant.

18:06 Wes: The paragraph after, when I just read, because I just want to get at this tension that we already brought out is that, hey, there are benefits to the understanding. It's not just all bad without the understanding. There is no fixity or determinacy in the domains either of theory or of practice, and so on and so forth.

18:22 Mark: It's the starting point for the dialectic, for sure. It's the first stage.

18:27 Wes: He has his big philosophical goal in daily life. It has its applications in science, it has its applications. So, for instance, thus in consideration of nature, for example, distinctions are drawn between matters, forces, consciousness, signs, et cetera. And they are marked off, each on its own account, in isolation from one another. And doing all this thinking functions as understanding. And its principle here is identity, simple self relation. I sort of segue this into another topic there. It has its utility, you know, when you want to mark things off from each other.

In many cases we do. That's what the understanding is for. You couldn't have what we call experiences without the understanding. I think he agrees with Kant on that. And then this reference to identity and simple self relation is this idea that the impetus behind all of this is this sort of drive in us that compares everything or causally connects everything. This drive to unify everything, which is sort of, for Kant, is the basis of the application of these categories. The categories are simply articulations of that unifying drive.

19:28 Amok: Right? There's a wonderful Passage here about the use of understanding in practical reason. Understanding allows us. We have to focus in a certain sense and not drag ourselves off in all different directions.

19:38 Wes: Yeah, he repeatedly harps on that. Actually, I noticed that there are two places in here where he uses the idea of not spreading yourself too thin. But, yeah, go ahead and point out this first one because I think these are great.

19:49 Amok: Understanding is just as indispensable in the practical sphere as it is in that of theory. Character is an essential factor in conduct, and a man of character is a man of understanding who for that reason has definite purposes in mind and pursues them with firm intent. As Goethe says, someone who wants to do great things must know how to restrict himself. In contrast, someone who wants to do everything really wants to do nothing and brings nothing off. I really like that.

20:17 Wes: Let's see, later on, he says, human beings who want to be actual must be there, and to this end they must limit themselves. So it's a more indirect statement of the same thing. So there's at least two examples in our reading, and I'm sure there's more in his corpus, that it's a sort of a preoccupation, which is ironic, given the fact that he's such a polymath himself.

20:38 Mark: It's very proto existentialist.

20:41 Wes: Yes. In the necessity of finitude and having boundaries. And, you know, we could speak to that in psychology as well, across a whole bunch of different domains.

20:49 Mark: You would only have to say that because it's sort of an ontological option for us at all time to not do this, to dive into nothingness, to follow, to eschew the directions of the understanding and get spread out in this way.

21:03 Wes: To be the dilettante.

21:05 Amok: Right. It's profound advice to an undergraduate or

21:09 Wes: to someone my age.

21:12 Amok: Right. Right. As well, I'm told this problem recurs.

21:16 Mark: So keeping, I thought this still in the same section, another sort of practical application. The understanding must be. Be regarded as corresponding to what people call the goodness of God, where this is understood to mean that finite things are. That they subsist. For instance, we recognize the goodness of God in nature by the fact that the various kinds and classes of both animal and plants are provided with everything they need in order to preserve themselves and prosper. In other words, the understanding picks up on these teleological patterns.

And so it's a perfectly adequate application of the understanding to pick up the banana and say, look how well the banana is shaped for us to eat it. It's like it has a handle that kind of horrible but it's only when you take that again, when you take that actually that you're making a metaphysical claim. You have to realize that these abstractions of the understanding are just that, are very one sided abstractions and they don't actually convey metaphysical truth in themselves.

22:09 Wes: Well, remember Kant in the Critique of Judgment? One of the basic characterizations of understanding, in a sense that it's a faculty of judgment, is is this finding out that things seem to be arranged as if they are suited to the understanding, that is suited to the project of being understood. So that's the broader level, but there's this more specific teleology as well, where we notice that things have final ends, basically.

22:36 Mark: So this is his only place. Since you're bringing up the third critique, there are aesthetic stuff. Hegel actually talks about art here, just in the next paragraph. In art, for example, the understanding manifests itself in the fact that the forms of the beautiful, which are conceptually diverse, are maintained in their conceptual distinctness and are presented distinctly. That's not very informative.

22:56 Wes: There's a difference between just slopping a whole bunch of paint on the canvas and having articulated forms. Right. You can't have aesthetics unless you have these distinct articulated forms. Otherwise it's just all.

23:07 Mark: Yeah. He elaborates this a little more is a feature of beauty and perfection of a dramatic work. Therefore, that the characters and the various persons should be sustained in their purity and determinacy. And similarly, that the various purposes and interests that are involved should be presented clearly and decisively. Which I think we saw that, yes, in both Kant and Schopenhauer in their takes on art, that they would not be down with Impressionism.

23:28 Wes: Well now, I mean, he's talking, I think, about literature. Yeah, Dramatic work. That applies specifically to dramatic work.

23:33 Mark: That idea of, well, Impressionism or its equivalent in the various. You want distinct forms in all types of art.

23:41 Wes: That could be a nicely painted seen by Vermeer, very precise. Or it could be, let's say a Dickensian delving into character, where you get something that's really well articulated as opposed to a stereotype or a cardboard cutout, that sort of difference.

23:56 Amok: He also does this with religion.

23:58 Mark: So how does he do it with religion?

23:59 Amok: Yeah, determinacy is again a virtue. As to what follows next, the domain of religion, the superiority of Greek over Nordic mythology, for instance, essentially consists, apart from any further diversity of content and interpretation. In the former, each figure of the gods is developed into a sculptural determinacy, whilst in the latter they flow into one another in A fog of murky indeterminacy. So the idea that, like, some mythologies are richer than others seems right.

24:29 Wes: There's a much more precise division of labor in Greek mythology than in Norse

24:34 Mark: mythology, because they all just fight in Norse mythology, except for Loki the trickster. Everybody else is just fighting.

24:41 Wes: Yeah.

24:41 Mark: I was a big fan of mythology in my youth and read things in both those and did not note that in particular, it seemed that the visions of Baldr and Odin and Thor were plenty clear.

24:53 Wes: He's wrong.

24:54 Amok: Men. Yeah. You didn't see the innate superiority of determinacy of Greek.

25:01 Dylan: Yes.

25:01 Mark: I was not looking for archetypes corresponding to natural functions or something, whatever.

25:06 Dylan: Well, that's just a sign that it wasn't true.

25:08 Mark: Yeah. I suppose that Odin and Thor have something to do with the weather, not just one of them has something to

25:13 Amok: do with the weather.

25:14 Dylan: It's hard for me not to think about the criticisms of the thing in itself. Just the inability to know the world, which is, you know, all variations of Kant. And here Hegel is just utterly insisting that the world is plain in a certain way, even if it's complicated. It just makes me wonder about again, the whole issue with error and being wrong. And is it so easy to get past this manifold that we put on the world to absolute knowing except by fiat? Right. There's a way in which, even from the beginning it feels like the answer that he's saying is that, well, we just can. That's just the character of thought. It's not clear to me where the response to even Kant's insistence that it's not possible is there, other than by saying that it is.

26:08 Amok: I suppose it's not necessarily insistent that the world is comprehensible. I mean, a humble reading of Hegel would be to say that you can't, before the thing has got going, insist that a certain realm is closed to us a priori. But that's, I think, the way in which he wants to talk about it.

26:23 Mark: I think his insistence on the absolute, that seems like that's by fiat. But throughout here I take him as presenting the aspectualist option as opposed to the phenomena versus noumena. In other words, aspectualism is just that we see an aspect of reality. So what the understanding is doing here, insofar as it is identifying truths, it is identifying truths that are not the whole truth, but they're still truths. So as long as you're really thinking clearly, then you're getting at things in themselves. It's just, what. What do you want you're not getting at them in their totality. And you wouldn't expect to on first blush.

26:58 Wes: This section in particular that we just discussed. So at the top of 127, before we got into this whole goodness of God thing, what's motivating this is this idea. So our early explanation showed that logical thinking in general must not be interpreted merely in terms of a subjective activity, but rather as what is strictly universal and hence objective. At the same time, the subjective activity would be the understanding applies its concepts to use Kant's term, to the experience and then makes objective, quote unquote judgments about the appearances.

So that to Hegel, none of that is really true in Hegel's sense. And he wants to give some examples where the understanding in fact is involved in objectivity. That's where he starts talking about the goodness of God and teleology, art, religion and philosophy. And then he comes back to that at the end where he says that the drawbacks of the understanding at the very last paragraph of section 80. But again, it is usually said also the understanding must not go too far. And that's. He's giving a recapitulation there of Kant's Critique of the understanding, which is that the understanding is finite.

And more precisely, it is such that when it is pushed to an extreme, it overturns into its opposite. I get intimations that he thinks the understanding has some role in grasping of things in themselves, and that's why we got talk of art and religion, for instance. But he's still holding on to the idea that it will find its way into these contradictions because of its abstracting behavior.

28:23 Mark: Why, you've moved to the second section, section 81, the dialectical moment. We started what was the name of the first moment? Thinking as the side of abstraction or the understanding, and then the dialectical or negatively rational side. So now he's considering the dialectical moment, the moment of self sublation of these four finite determinations on their own part, and they're passing into their opposite. That's hard to talk about, but he immediately clarifies that he's going to talk about skepticism here, that when you take any of these claims like hey look, the banana demonstrates the goodness of God and you look at it too closely, he actually thinks that none of these

28:59 Wes: things hold up or any challenge to your naive realism, right? So you're walking along, you know, the world is as it seems, and so on and so forth. And then Sextus Empiricus comes and says, well, what about the oar? And the water. And that's the distorting effect, you know, all of that skeptical stuff, that's the negation. Here we have the fixed determinacies and everything seems great. They perform their functions and then it doesn't take much to take us to start seeing that there's a lot of problems with that whole picture of the world.

29:27 Amok: Right. One way of seeing how the skeptic is brought into making these sort of one sided and abstract determination is to think about the sort of traditional idea that thought and being are separate. Which I think goes back to the Greek skeptic, which is that, hey, we may think a certain way, we may have certain ideas, we may have certain cognitive capacities, but there's something out there which always escapes that. Hegel's point is you're insisting on a rigid separation of these categories, thought, what we think, and being, what there is. The point is you have to demonstrate how categories pass into each other in this way, which he's going to do throughout the logic.

30:00 Wes: Yeah, that'll be the solution. And that's really. Yes. The whole driving force of this dialectic is this underlying assumption of this schism between thought and being, which is obviously present in the skeptics as well. The skeptics are trying to tell us things are not as they seem.

30:14 Amok: Hegel thinks he can bridge the chasm.

30:16 Mark: Yeah, well, but. And the way that he does it is a little. I mean, we'll get into his specific quotes, but we've already anticipated it is if you say that thought is not something in an individual's head, but it's something objectively out there. And then you say that at least some of these kind of thoughts, the most authentically philosophical thoughts, are not about concrete things, but are about these categories themselves, then it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between a thought about being and being itself.

30:44 Amok: Right, right.

30:45 Wes: Thinking is a being. It's kind of a weird way of looking at the world. Say with Kant, where you have this, you're talking about subjectivity, but you can't really locate the subject in the world of things in themselves. You can't locate it anywhere because it can't be located in its own field of experience. Right. It's the conditions for the possibility of that field. And you can't locate it in the worlds of things in themselves, because that's all off limits. So Hegel's going to say, yes, we can locate that. That subjectivity is a being. Well, I mean, ultimately it's an aspect of the uber subject. Let's say who is United with the object.

31:20 Mark: What else about this skepticism stuff?

31:22 Amok: Here he talks about Socrates, the dialectic not being a new thing in philosophy. Dialectic is the direct translation, simply argument in time or something like that passage is interesting. It's 129. Besides, the dialectic is not a new thing in philosophy. Among the ancients, Plato is called the inventor of the dialectic. That is quite correct in that it is in the Platonic philosophy, the dialectic first occurs in a form which is freely scientific and hence also objective. With Socrates, dialectical thinking still has a predominantly subjective shape, consistent with the general character of his philosophizing, namely that of irony. That's really interesting because Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation may not be the right word on the concept of irony in Socrates, the enemy of Hegel, as he is sort of christened all the time. You see, the dividing lines come up already.

32:10 Wes: So from what I understand of dialectic and Plato and with Socrates, the way it shows up in Socrates method is that you sort of question an interlocutor. They're filled with contradictions, you know, with all these opinions that they think are consistent, but they're inherently contradictory. You drive them towards a new conclusion, find a contradiction, then they're driven towards a certain conclusion. And then that's only the beginning because Socrates is going to then show that that one doesn't work, and then so on and so forth. That's what I see as the dialectical method in Socrates. I understand the element of irony, but what does he mean specifically by it here?

32:45 Mark: Is it subjective just in that he's dealing with the particular interlocutor and that person's sort of issues and. And just mostly trying to shake them of their. Whereas he's distinguishing that from Plato, who actually gets down to what is justice and tries to take from wherever the interlocutor starts to take it through an objective dialectical back and forth of, you know, is justice the will of the strong? No. Is it the blah blah to get to the objectively correct answer?

33:14 Amok: I think that's it. I mean, he talks about Socrates being accustomed to pretend in his conversations that he wanted to be instructed more precisely about the matter under discussion.

33:23 Wes: Right. That's the pretense.

33:24 Amok: Yeah, right. The idea is, hey, help me out. And Hegel's point is that that kind of Socratic destruction of people's point of view doesn't really seem to get you anywhere. Right. It's. And it's subjective in the sense that it's just the other side of this fixity of determinations. It's just demonstrating that we carve the world up. You're never going to get to how the world really is.

33:45 Dylan: Like, I mean, he characterizes Plato saying, Plato employs the dialectic method to show the finitude of all hard and fast terms of understanding. So the dialectical method in Plato's hands is slicing and dicing and rendering all terms of the understanding as finite. And that's going to in the end be the bane of Hegel. Right? Because it's all going to have to ultimately transition into the unity of finitude and infinity. But at the end of the section that was not part of the notes, he says, by dialectic is meant the indwelling tendency outwards by which the one sidedness and limitations of the predicates of understanding is seen in its true light and shown to be the negation of them.

For anything to be finite is just to suppress itself and put itself aside. Thus understood, the dialectical principle constitutes the life and soul of scientific progress. The dynamic which alone gives imminent connection and necessity to the body of science, and in a word is seen to constitute the real and true as opposed to the external exaltation above the finite. And so I think the reason he wants to say that the dialectic is the source, life and soul of scientific progress. And later on it's said that dialectic is the soul of all knowledge, is this rendering of elements of knowledge into finite boundaries, bits.

And that's going to have to be transcended. But that's both its power and its limitation.

35:13 Wes: Yeah, you get to see their inadequacy because they're finite, they're inevitably inadequate. One scientific explanation will be superseded by another eventually.

35:22 Dylan: And so the activity of the dialectic, just in the way you said it, Wes, you see immediately how it's an engine for scientific thinking. But when you start turning it out to its natural conclusion, you run into all kinds of absurdities or things that don't make any sense. And now I'm just sort of extrapolating from Hegel, but Hegel to me would say, well, that's just a sign that it's not the end of the road. Dialectic isn't going to get you the answer. It's not the full articulation of thinking in the world because you end up with these absurdities which need to be transcendent.

35:55 Mark: If you just take dialectic as negative, then you don't appreciate that it's not just a saying. What you said is wrong. You started the argument by making using the understanding to Pick out a generalization. And the second step of the dialectic comes along and doesn't just say, no, no, it has. It's a determinant negative. It's not an empty, abstract nothing but the negation of certain determinations which are contained in a result precisely because it is not an immediate nothing but a result.

36:22 Amok: Right. You're not at the same place that you were at the beginning.

36:25 Mark: Yeah. So it's kind of like, what did you learn by the fact that we were able to overcome? You thought that justice was the will of the strong, and I showed you that that didn't make any sense. Where does that push you next? What is your new view of justice? So the third step of the dialectic is the speculative or positively rational, which apprehends the unity of the determinations and their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and in their transition.

36:50 Amok: This is the spookiest bit of the three. I think it's. Yeah, I mean, that's spooky is generally like a term of abuse in analytic philosophy whenever you don't like something. Generally, the idea of transcendence is less grounded almost by definition than the other stuff. But, I mean, it follows from the way he set it out. Right. It's like you have this conceptual system. You've criticized it in this way, but the criticism is not really from. I mean, we often think of criticisms as from outside. The criticism is actually the internal logic of the conceptual system, in its attempt to grasp reality, realizes its inadequacy. And through the way it realizes inadequacy, it realizes the next step to which it has to make. And thus it transcends. You can see, even though thesis, antithesis, synthesis, I don't think are the right words to use. I'm already using this word.

37:43 Wes: He does use the word antithesis a lot, but. Yeah, but the other is.

37:46 Amok: Right. I mean, the point is, it's a single thing. It was what I was trying to say. It's not like one person, another person. Third person is the way, you know, you think about it. One thing, another thing, third person. Yeah. So it's like. So it's like you realize your own inadequacy. And then from that, and we're talking about in the abstract, we'll see it in action later on. Hopefully it'll give some content to this bare form that we're laying out.

38:07 Mark: Well, but I think we. I think we can give some everyday examples. You know, I tried to give ones from aesthetics last time. I won't repeat that. But just Think about, you start as a kid believing that people are good, people basically tell the truth. And then somebody comes along and really disappoints you, just lies to you, hurts you, and then you might just, oh, everybody sucks. But then you kind of get over that and you realize, okay, well, no, people are basically good, but they have flaws. Or you gain. It's not even just some people are good and some people are bad. You gain some insight into why people lie in particular situations. So the synthesis, the speculative, the positively rational, it's still sort of a use of the understanding, you might say, but it's more developed.

38:48 Amok: Right. I just wanted to ask you what you meant by use of the understanding. Because it's.

38:53 Wes: Yeah, the rational, I think might be different than the. It'll be its own faculty.

38:57 Mark: I was using the understanding as just picking out patterns in the world. But if we say that the way that he's set up the understanding is immediate. In other words, like I look at dog and I say dog, I don't have to think about it, I don't have to reason it. It's that I come to this. But again, these things are relative.

39:14 Wes: The rational is actually the intuitive. Here it is rational intuition. That is the speculative step. You now have something concrete in what was abstract, right? Hence in part two above, although something thought and something abstract is at the same time something concrete, because it is not simple formal unity, but a unity of distinct determinations.

39:35 Mark: But just in terms of the understanding and its connection to immediacy, it seems like that reason is where the mediate, where something is mediated. And it's just, you could see then how it's a sliding scale that before you knew what a dog was, you might have some sort of immediate reaction to fluffy thing or whatever. And then you gain some wrong headed notion of what kind of thing that is. And then, well, you see a cat and that blows your mind and like it. But then the synthesis of that is dog. So dog was a product of some initial reasoning process.

But then it becomes the immediate way that you identify this thing going forward in the same way that this complexity of people's goodness or badness that then becomes your new way of understanding. Immediately the world after you've gone through this period of transitioning to this more sophisticated way of thinking. Still the understanding, if it's an immediate,

40:26 Wes: what's still the understanding? The speculative moment. I think he wants to mark off the rational from the understanding.

40:31 Mark: Okay, so the rational is how you get to the new conceptual scheme, right? The understanding is what you Use day to day, minute to minute in pattern recognition. So the, the example I gave before, variation of what he said about seeing the goodness of God in things, about seeing the banana, you know, that is an argument that people explicitly make. They're using reason. But once you get that, and this was Plantinga's point a few episodes back, then that becomes sort of the immediate default way that you apply the faculty of the understanding to make sense of the world around you. As you look there, ah, look, there's a flower. It's the, the goodness of God. And Hegel's actually recommending this as a perfectly legitimate way.

41:10 Wes: I think the rational is, you know, we have spatiotemporal intuition. The rational is intuitive and it's analogous in that sense. It intuits, you know, where understanding grasps, thinks discursively through universals, reason can intuit its objects and it can know things, for instance, like God, as he points out in the addition. So we know about the rational above all because we know God, we know about God and we know him as the one who is utterly self determined. And that's part of the other point here, is that through the rational we can have knowledge of things which are self determined in the sense what they are is not dependent on their relation to other things.

Right, which is. We'll see some of how this works coming up. They are these self subsisting entities and they can't be known through those relations. God can't be known as the sum of all perfect predicates, for instance, but has to be known as the whole. And reason is what will help us do that. That's the speculative moment, right?

42:05 Amok: Immediacy as a word is really important here. It's a sort of blueprint for how there's this jagged path to absolute knowing, where hey, you think you got somewhere by realizing mediation, making your concept clearer, but then you grasp immediately again, then you realize negate that mediate again, and so on and so on and so forth. This three part structure is basically the roadmap for the rest of the logic. It'll happen again and again and again. It doesn't make it that much easier to understand and piece apart, but it's certainly a big help.

42:35 Wes: So one other thing here, just trying to get at with this what he means by speculation. Again, reading on 132, the term speculation tends to be used in ordinary life in a very vague and at the same time secondary sense. As for instance when people talk about a matrimonial or commercial speculation, which is funny, like speculating on the market or speculating on the right mate. All that is taken to mean here is that on the one hand, what is immediately present must be transcended, and on the other, that whatever the content of these speculations may be, although it is initially only something subjective, it ought not to remain so, but is to be realized or translated into objectivity.

So initially something subjective. That means initially into something in the thoughts and mind of a particular person, right? So those that's content the way we think of it in the Kantian sense, as part of someone's experience. But he's worried here about the idea that we get at something that's not merely subjective and that speculation gets us, that we get contents which are not in any subjective, in the sense of in any particular person's head. We get the things in themselves through this, right?

43:40 Amok: By demonstrating how our conceptual systems are finite, we also demonstrate that, no, it's not just a single mind thinking capturing the world in its head in a certain way. You also demonstrate there's something outside a conceptual system that it's reacting to and trying to grasp.

43:56 Wes: The other thing here is that these sort of skeptical antitheses, right, between being and reality, which seem to sever the subject from the object, they are incorporated into the objective. They become the ingredients of the objective. So farther down on 132, the speculative is neither provisionally nor in the end itself, something merely subjective. Instead, it expressly contains the very antitheses at which the understand understanding stops short, including therefore, that of the subjective and objective too sublated within itself. And precisely for this reason, it proves to be concrete and a totality.

So what he's trying to say here is that these antitheses which we normally think of, showing that things are not as they seem, are actually these two poles that give us the content of things themselves. So they are both in that content. They don't sever the subject from the object. They are actually objective tensions. They're not tensions between us and the world that we can't know their objective tensions in the things themselves, right? And that's where their concreteness comes from, actually.

44:54 Mark: Can we try to give an example here? Because I don't want to just give the example of being that we're going to get to in the second half of this discussion. But so when speculation grasps it, it doesn't just grasp it as it is in itself, but it grasps it in sort of the contradictions that are buried within it. So the implicit, the going beyond the thing, so say the understanding has no problem helping you pick out a light source. This is light. But then when you think more about it, and you might think, oh, light is good, light is wonderful. I just wish there was only light.

You might naively think that, but then somebody will jump up and point out to you, how would you even know what light is unless you knew what darkness is? And the speculation would come along and say, well, actually, the light contains darkness as its opposition right there. When I'm grasping the concept light, the only way that I can grasp that is to know that it means, among other things, not dark. Is that correct? Is that what the speculation is doing is it's transcending light to its opposite as well.

45:52 Wes: Except those are sublated, those become moments, and those are no longer exactly as you described them.

45:57 Amok: I can't quite think of the third term. What light? Dark and mildly lit.

46:01 Wes: I suppose, first of all, we need a mediating term. And then light and dark have to get sublated. They have to get sort of dark dissolved into the soup of the unifying term.

46:10 Mark: Well, it might just be that you gain a more sophisticated understanding of how vision works and how the physics of light works. And so it's not like there's just these forces of light and darkness in the world, but there's light waves that travel around, and you could be in the way of them and catch some of them with your eyes and you could not. Like, that's a whole point of view that does sublate light and darkness. That those. Those are no longer primal, elemental forces that a child might think of them as.

46:35 Wes: Yeah, the speculative is of metaphysical objects. Right. Even if we come up with these examples where we're not talking about metaphysics, the rational and the speculative are directed towards things like God and soul and cosmos.

46:47 Dylan: I thought that Marx example was good in this respect. And even when you say metaphysical objects, Wes, in that Marx example, light is a kind of thing. And what you're trying to sort out there is what kind of thing is it? And the speculative activity would be going down that road, right? I mean, like, what about an atom? Like, we start thinking about what is the world made of, and you go down the road of breaking it down into elements. And there are atoms or not atoms.

47:12 Wes: Yeah, he does talk about atomism, but metaphysical atomism, which is distinct from scientific atomism.

47:18 Dylan: Why. Why is that distinct at all? I mean, that concept of an atom would be the same kind of thing.

47:22 Wes: Because metaphysical atomism is the idea of these partless points at the bottom of things, which are metaphysical atoms, entities, and Perhaps have souls. And in the end he identifies the speculative with the mystical. Let's read to that on 133. It should be mentioned here that the meaning of the speculative is also to be understood as being the same as what was used in earlier times to be called mystical, especially with regard to the religious consciousness and its content. And then he goes on to say the way we speak of it nowadays is the mystical applies to what is mysterious and incomprehensible.

And that's not what he's talking about. So, you know, we must remark first that the mystical is certainly something mysterious, but only for the understanding, and then only because abstracted entity is the principle of the understanding. But when it is regarded as synonymous with the speculative, the mystical is the concrete unity of just those determinations that count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition. So the understanding can only grasp things in their separation and opposition, and the speculative combines them.

I think what he's suggesting here ultimately is that we can know God, we can have knowledge of God, as opposed to what Kant was saying. We can actually, through this speculative moment, know God and other metaphysical entities.

48:33 Amok: I'm going to take Dylan and Wes and sublate them by saying that what Dylan was saying is right and what Mark was saying is right with respect to concepts of light and dark. He has a philosophy of nature which is part two of the three part encyclopedia of which what we're reading is part part one, where he does something very much like that and he does something like that with ethical life. But Wes is right for the logic where what he's doing now is very much showing the interconnections between things like being, becoming nothing, these metaphysical concepts. But he extends this to other things as well, like ethical life and so on.

49:07 Wes: Yeah, okay, right.

49:09 Mark: Well, he says not too far down here that the dialectic as we described it is the motivating force and. Right, everything. So you jump to an idea like, okay, well, what about biological life? Is it really that the father is the thesis and the mother says, you ain't all that. And somehow then the child, it seems like he would have to use or want to use, and I'm putting words in his mouth. Maybe Amogh can tell me from his other reading of Hegel whether he does get this silly. But does he think that the offspring somehow is the sublating of the parents?

49:40 Amok: I don't think so. There's sort of silly stuff in Hegel that uncharitable Hegel readers have pulled out off the kind of thing that you're

49:48 Mark: talking about is Hegel post Darwin? No. What about earlier pre Darwinian forms of evolution where they might have thought that, yes, there's evolution, but it's not survival of the fittest. It's a gradual progression toward perfection. Like that seems exactly the kind of thing that Hegel would be picking up on.

50:05 Amok: There was Lamarck. I don't know how many much Hegel read him. Yeah. Yes.

50:08 Mark: When is Lamarck?

50:09 Amok: I think in the late 18th century. Yeah, okay.

50:12 Wes: Yeah. From Lamarck is, you know, the. I think it's the whole. Giraffes get long necks because they're stretching for the food, and then that gets genetically transferred. Is that right? You can have traits that you developed,

50:23 Dylan: but Lamarck wouldn't have called it genetically.

50:25 Amok: Right.

50:25 Dylan: But the idea would be that giraffes, generation from generation, get long necks.

50:29 Wes: Well, he understood there were inherited properties. Yeah. He wouldn't call it genetics specifically.

50:33 Mark: Right. So Lamarck is 1744-1829. So there you go. Yeah.

50:38 Wes: But anyway, you know, I think. Yeah, Mark, as you brought up, the dialectic is manifested everywhere. We skipped that at the end of 81, where he says as becoming, everything around us is a manifestation of dialectic. And then he calls dialectic God's might as opposed to, you know, we're understanding. We call that God's goodness. Dialectic is God's might. It's interesting, this idea that becoming what we think of as change and generation and decay and all that. There's a logical underpinning to that. That's a kind of amazing idea. This idea that, you know, the underlying logic of the world is the grounding for that.

51:13 Dylan: And that's the way in which it can't be that there's this distinction between metaphysical categories and other kinds of ways of thinking. Because this part here is like, this is the way thinking happens. And so all the ways in which we break up the world are going to come down to these distinctions that he's making here. And even if there's a way of applying it in some respect to ethics or to science or something, they're all going to trace directly back to this kind of thing.

51:39 Mark: Well, all the legitimate kinds of thinking, again, a lot of what people consider thinking is just bring in something completely external to the matter at hand and sort of judge it that way. That's not legitimate thinking. Thinking is really focusing on the topic at hand and seeing and analyzing it, analyzing the contradictions within it.

51:58 Dylan: And that's what ties it back to. And makes it seem like, well, this Actually is about logic.

52:02 Amok: Right.

52:03 Dylan: Because you would.

52:03 Mark: About normative logic.

52:05 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. There's this in the middle of 82, it says the logic of mere understanding is involved in speculative logic and can. It will be elicited from it by the simple process of omitting the dialectical and reasonable element. When that is done, it becomes what the common logic is. A descriptive collection of sundry thought forms and rules which, finite though they are, are taken to be something infinite. So when I read that, and I think it's consistent with, especially the first sentence with what we've been talking about, that the understanding lies within speculative logic, it did make me think that somehow you could derive common logic out of Hegel's logic.

52:45 Mark: Yes, explicitly. So it is one of the things that he discusses later. And when he means by common logic, it's Aristotelian logic. But I've, you know, some of the secondary stuff I was reading was. No, you actually could apply this. Don't just say, oh well, that's because Aristotelian logic was backwards. And Frege and Russell or folks like that over. No, whatever kind of system of straight up logic you have, it would still be slotted into that space. In Hegel's system, it is about forms and not content.

53:14 Dylan: Yeah. And so in this way it just made me think of other expansions that would be expansions of thought like quantum mechanics. One exercise that you would say that to show that you actually really understood what was going on is you say, okay, if quantum mechanics really is an expansion of the sphere of applicability of something like Newtonian mechanics, then I should be able to simplify quantum mechanics under the correct set of simplifying assumptions, it will become Newtonian mechanics. And there was a lot of effort put into that saying that that's exactly what happens in the limiting case when things get big enough. Da da da da da, that quantum mechanics really just turns into Newtonian mechanics.

53:54 Mark: It's been sublated. All right, so let's move to section 84, first subdivision of the logic, the doctrine of being.

54:02 Wes: We're going to skip 83.

54:04 Amok: I don't know that we're skipping it. We certainly talked about what the content is a bit the doctrine of being.

54:10 Mark: But okay, if you have something from the tail end of the previous section of the logic, it just looks like an outline of what the rest of the encyclopedia logic is going to be.

54:17 Wes: Only the concept is what is true, and more precisely, it is the truth of being and of essence. So each of these is, if they are clung to in their isolation or by themselves must be considered at the same time as untrue being, because it is still only what is immediate and essence, because it is still only what is mediated. I'm reading that because I don't fully understand it. Maybe we'll understand it as we go on. And then just this whole idea in philosophy proving amounts to exhibiting how the object makes itself what it is through and of itself. So it's an interesting way of. Again, he's going to be deducing these different categories, but he's doing that in this sort of developmental, dialectical way. And it's not him doing it exactly, it's the object exhibiting itself, which is an interesting way of putting it. Even in the process of discovery, there's something non subjective.

55:05 Amok: There's also the whole theological component to it at the end of 83, where the same relationship of the three stages of the logical idea is exhibited in a more real and concrete shape in the fact that we achieve cognition of God, who is truth, obviously in this, his truth as absolute spirit, only when we recognize that the world created by him, nature and finite spirit, is not true in its distinction from God. So when we get a complete understanding at the end of this process of dialectic and sublation of the world, we kind of grasp God, because the world as a whole is essentially God.

55:42 Mark: Yeah, I should say the little outline that I just gave of. We're going to start with being and we're going to show how nothingness is its antithesis and how those are both overcome, sublated in becoming. That once you realize that being and nothingness are actually the same, that realization is to say that these are becoming. That is understanding what being is as it is understanding itself as it is connected back to itself, how the object makes itself what it is through and of itself. So that's what being is through and of itself is becoming.

56:14 Wes: When we begin with. And we should talk about why we begin with being, but that's the seed and then that's going to grow. And so that's the self exhibiting nature of things. So yeah, it's an interesting way of proving, sort of has similarities to Kant's notion of a transcendental argument, right? Where you just say, well, let's assume we have experiences, let's assume we know at least something, then what's required for that? And it turns out to be a lot of things. But it includes the categories, the I think and all that stuff. Here he seems to be saying, well, let's assume being to start with and later in this, I actually say, well, we could even assume the concept of a beginning.

That could have been our start. In a way it sounds like assuming the least, sort of like the Cartesian project, this sort of minimal set of assumptions. We have to start somewhere. We are at the beginning of this whole project. And we could assume, like he says, okay, let's take the concept of a beginning. We're at the beginning. Let's take the concept of a beginning and then let it unfold. And he says we would get the same result. I think he gives reasons for. For choosing being.

57:11 Mark: Well, yeah, in our reading for last time, he goes on and on and on and on about it, how there's nothing else that it could possibly be that you might think that you just start from experience. Like the way you were just describing Kant is like, oh, well, I have an experience of this tree. What makes that possible? Even to start with that is way too concrete. You end up smuggling in a lot of assumptions by saying, well, something must be causing, must be behind, must be underneath this experience of a tree, there must be a subject that is seeing the tree or something like, well, you're

57:43 Wes: already limiting yourself to the domain of the subjective. Right?

57:46 Mark: Yes.

57:46 Wes: You're saying, what grounds this subjectivity? And you've already cordoned off the object.

57:51 Mark: Right. You don't want to prejudge any question.

57:54 Wes: Yeah, including the subject object relation. We go to something that is beyond even that. We saw a lot in some of the preamble. Whatever Kant has to say about the categories, he's talking about things in themselves. Is he really going to deny being the category of being to them or to any of the other things he's talking about? So whatever you want to say about the specific categories of quantity and quality and all that, unobjectionably we have to say any of the stuff we're talking about belongs to the category of being in general, in the most general sense, being.

58:24 Amok: The way I understand it, he calls it the concept only in itself. It's just the state of something, of the form, of everything is, or everything has being in this very sort of pure, stripped down way. In this state, it's indeterminate and inadequate because you can't really fix anything which has being because all you've identified is this sort of underlying commonality that everything is.

58:51 Mark: Yeah, you've taken us into section 84, which is appropriate. But just to give the quick preview of the rest of the discussion tonight, besides this being nothingness, becoming is. Well, when you look closely at becoming, you realize that it is what he calls determinant being or design. In other words, it's not just being generically like you were just describing it, Amogh. It's the being of a.

59:15 Wes: This.

59:15 Mark: Of something specific, not something so specific that it's a tree, but just in that it is barely specific. And that is what he describes as quality, that it is something. So it has a quality. In the course of how you go from determinant being to quality, we end up getting first, since we are talking about God and we're talking about, you know, once you have determinate being, it identifies itself as finite, you get finitude. And so you might think that, well, that implies it's opposite the infinite. But that puts the finite and the infinite sort of on equal terms.

And he doesn't like that. He says this is the false infinite. And in fact, it kind of ends up creating an endless cycle of back and forth of finite infinite. And then, well. Well, let's transcend both of those. But then that ends up being a finite thing and you transcend it with another infinite. So in opposition to that whole cycle, you get the actual infinite that he thinks is where you really would get a handle on God. So even though coming up with the infinite, coming up with God is not one of these exact steps that we're going through in terms of just getting from being to becoming to quality, to quantity, it ends up being a byproduct of something that is introduced conceptually.

As we're going through this, we are

1:00:32 Wes: building the world which as a whole, I think is God. Right.

1:00:37 Mark: Any other sort of summarial thoughts as we're getting into this? Because this is our first chance to see does this work?

1:00:44 Dylan: I still found myself at the end asking, how does this really matter? To be perfectly honest.

1:00:50 Wes: Okay.

1:00:51 Dylan: Because it wasn't clear to me that it was doing the work that it was claiming to do.

1:00:56 Wes: Amogh. You brought us to 84. And the idea that being is the concept only in itself, its determinations simply are.

1:01:03 Mark: Can I just correct your emphasis?

1:01:04 Amok: It's.

1:01:05 Mark: You're saying being is the concept only in itself. No, being is the concept only in itself. In other words, the concept is what philosophy is, what we're going for. So somehow concept in itself, not considered in relation to anything, not multiple concepts, is being. So sort of being is the heart of philosophy in some way?

1:01:27 Amok: Yeah.

1:01:27 Dylan: My translation says being is the notion implicit only.

1:01:31 Wes: Well, what does that mean? What does that mean?

1:01:33 Mark: I thought notion was the opposite of concept. That's.

1:01:35 Dylan: Well, it might be my translation that he's using.

1:01:38 Wes: That's why I asked Amogh for the Germans, so we could have set terms for all of this.

1:01:42 Amok: Begriff apparently, according to the glossary, is translated by this guy Miller, who does the standard translation as notion. So that's very confusing. Let's just stick with concept for now, I think. I mean, as much as you can.

1:01:55 Mark: Right. In this Hackett version they use concept for Begriff.

1:01:59 Amok: Right?

1:01:59 Mark: Yep.

1:02:00 Amok: So the idea here seems to be if we part sentences, being is the concept only in itself. The in itself. I mean again, if Kant seems to be our constant point of reference, things in themselves, things out there, which are self subsistent, you know, persist over time, are sufficient unto themselves in some way. What being is doing is sort of capturing this conceptualization of everything outside. Well, not outside us, because we haven't got us yet. But everything is just this plenum of like positivity, just this like big thing called being. That's the sort of primitive description that we've got to. It's like everything is.

1:02:37 Wes: Well, the contrast is with the for itself, right. What actually develop into.

1:02:43 Mark: Well, and I like that Dylan pointed out that his translation in itself is implicit. That for it to be for itself is to actually spell it out. To have the words in front of it and reflect on itself, to have a thought. Being does not have a thought. Or maybe it is thought, it is the concept. But only in itself. Yeah, only implicitly.

1:03:05 Amok: So just fundamentally the idea is a complete description of the world or grasping of the essence of the world. All it takes to do that is just to say everything is. There you go. Very, very primitive idea.

1:03:16 Mark: I don't even think you could do that much. That's already making a subject predicate distinction. There are no things.

1:03:21 Amok: Right, Right. Of course.

1:03:23 Wes: By the way, the implicitly gets at the sense in which the in itself is a lot like potentiality, where we're developing towards the for itself. So the end stage, the perfection, the telos is the for itself. And so we start out with this denuded, you could call it a seed, you know, that's going to develop into something more. So it's only at this point in itself and it will become for itself.

1:03:45 Dylan: So when I asked the question what is it? The is part of that is the being.

1:03:50 Amok: Right?

1:03:51 Dylan: Not the it part.

1:03:52 Amok: Right.

1:03:53 Wes: Whatever.

1:03:54 Dylan: All the it's have so that I can speak of them or ask the question of what is it? That's the part that I'm referring to. I'm speaking about being sure.

1:04:04 Mark: As long as we understand that that includes numbers, you know, that's not just physical objects. It's way less specific than any type of being in particular.

1:04:12 Dylan: Yeah, but I would use it to refer to any of those things. Right.

1:04:15 Wes: We don't get particulars.

1:04:17 Mark: Yeah.

1:04:17 Wes: Until later.

1:04:18 Mark: What is there about that? Yeah, it's the word is as used in all those circumstances. You were right.

1:04:26 Dylan: Maybe it's a quibble, but it doesn't refer to particulars necessarily. If you're going to be so strict as to say it refers to individuals and not concepts, then. I don't know. I mean, it is.

1:04:37 Mark: Let's just be Heideggerian and say the is is ising.

1:04:40 Amok: One way to answer Dylan's question is simply to say, what is it? Being would say it is. I mean, it's this kind of quasi tautological statement. Right.

1:04:50 Wes: Are we talking about it and the. In itself?

1:04:52 Amok: Yeah.

1:04:53 Wes: Maybe it'll help to say more about what the concept is. As sort of. Mark was getting at that. As sort of the. I don't know if you would call it the stage of philosophical development or what would you say about this?

1:05:02 Mark: Read another sentence here. The process of further determination, like of being, of the concept, is both a setting forth and thus an unfolding of the concept that is in itself. And at the same time the going into itself of being, its own deepening into itself. The explication of the concept in the sphere of being becomes the totality of being, just as the immediacy of being, or the form of being as such is sublated by it. So the first stage is just the form of being.

1:05:29 Wes: What is the concept?

1:05:31 Amok: The concept, I mean, actually, I just remembered I read this definition from Bob Solomon. So it's like the concept is the most adequate conception of the world as a whole. So when I've been talking about being would say, that's what I mean. It's a kind of conception. This is the primitive sense we've got of getting at things.

1:05:47 Wes: Yeah. So take our conception of the world at a given stage of scientific or philosophical development.

1:05:53 Amok: Right.

1:05:54 Mark: Well, is a partial gesture toward the concept. Right.

1:05:59 Wes: If we're thinking of the concept as the end of that development, isn't the

1:06:03 Dylan: reason he has to start with being is because he wants a whole.

1:06:06 Amok: Right, Right.

1:06:07 Dylan: And being is going to be the whole of everything. It's the absolute. In fact.

1:06:11 Amok: Right.

1:06:12 Dylan: In 85, he just jumps right to that. To me, you know, when you read it, you feel like, well, God, you're going to go right straight to God right now. But it's because of where he's starting at. Starting with being. He's starting with. I don't know, it's almost like I want to call it the material of everything, but that's not the right word. But it is what all partakes of.

1:06:34 Amok: Right.

1:06:35 Dylan: And so he has to start there because it's the only way in which he'll maintain having a whole at all. He starts with the absolute everything, out of which there's no distinction. It's what was there before God created anything. That's what it is.

1:06:51 Wes: That's a really interesting. It is sort of a recapitulation of the creation myth. But I think it makes sense if we keep in mind what his objective is, which is a derivation of categories, right?

1:07:02 Dylan: Yes.

1:07:02 Wes: Equality and quantity and categories just are these different determinations of being or these different ways in which we can say something is. And the whole point of it is to get at the underlying logical, you know, the broad sense of logical structure of the world, to give ourselves ontology, to say, what the world is at bottom. So it's logical to start with the most general thing we can, the most general existential we can. And then we want to derive all these more specific senses of being from that. So Kant started with experience, and we've already talked about why that's deficient. We don't want to bias ourselves towards the subjective, so we instead we start with being.

1:07:43 Amok: Although we're not there yet.

1:07:44 Wes: We're not.

1:07:45 Amok: We're not quite there yet. Yeah.

1:07:46 Mark: Can I just read from the University of London Hegel glossary the entry for concept Begriff Just to show why getting a glossary like this is not that helpful. The way we're doing and trying to figure it out from the context is probably better. Let me just read. It's only two paragraphs here, but it gives you the sense of the complexity of even this concept. Begriff, also translated by Miller as notion. The verb begreifen incorporates greifen to seize. For Hegel, a concept is not, as it is for Kant, a representation of what several things have in common.

Per Inwood, concepts are, for Hegel, not sharply distinct from the eye or from objects, nor from one another. When Hegel speaks of the concept, he sometimes just means concepts in general, but he also uses it to mean, per Solomon, the most adequate conception of the world as a whole. Per Geraets et al. The concept refers to the movement of logical thinking in its self comprehension. Solomon suggests that for Hegel, the concept, sometimes the force of our conception of concepts and that it may also refer to the process of conceptual change, since for Hegel, the identity of concepts is bound up with the dialectical movement.

Inwood suggests that Hegel sometimes assimilates the concept to God. Keynes glosses the concept as a grasping together of opposites. So there you go.

1:09:03 Amok: Yeah, just got a little sneak peek into the secret world of Hegel scholarship.

1:09:07 Mark: I'm closing the Hegel glossary, never to look at it again, this discussion.

1:09:11 Amok: I mean, the truth is, the reason I talk about concept as a kind of. This is what you kind of need to get through. This is the sort of workaday notion is very much because he uses words, inconsistency. This is just a thing. You can point this out all over the place. And you have to do very much what Mark says you have to do.

1:09:28 Mark: But isn't it that he uses them inconsistently because he doesn't want. Because concepts are not static. That's his whole damn thing that it sort of depends on the context in which you're reading exactly how. If the concept sort of refers generally to the sort of concepts, small C that he uses in building up his philosophy, then big C concept could mean the absolute, the. The one at the end. Or it could be the whole process of getting there, or almost anything about his philosophical method. That's what I got out of that dictionary entry there.

1:10:02 Amok: That's all true. The point was just to say that in some ways what we're doing here in terms of trying to decipher this text and figure out a way to make it make sense to us is in some way the fixed kind of active understanding in terms of these are what these terms mean, and so on, fitting them together. So for the purposes of hermeneutics, you have to gather the context. You got to do a bit of work.

1:10:25 Dylan: We're going to get to the next couple of things, quality and quantity. And I think that the reason why he's starting with being is almost exactly what Wes said about Kant. You're going to derive the categories, you're going to hang quality and quantity about something. And for Hegel it's being. And for Kant it was experienced. So it amounts to when we talk about what things are in the world such that they can be broken into categories of qualities and quantities and stuff like that. Those characteristics, those categories are of something. And so for Hegel, being is that something. And the reason it has to be being is because that's going to be the way in which you can make it about the world and things in themselves. And Kant gives that up right at the beginning. He just tosses that out the window and it starts with experience.

1:11:21 Wes: Well, another helpful point of comparison, because where Kant inherited that is from Descartes. Right. So this is. You can compare the start of Hegel's logic here, you know, the proper part of the derivation with the beginning of the Cartesian Meditations where you're trying to do a transcendental argument, trying to make a very minimal assumption, and then pull the entire world almost out of nothingness. That's why I think of it as the creation myth. Right. You're trying to almost say, okay, there's nothing, and now the whole world falls out of that.

I can just derive everything without assuming anything. So for Descartes it's just, oh yeah, everything could be an illusion. I'm here only with the, I think the cogito and my own thoughts. And then he ends up deriving, you know, he uses God to get back the world of objects and so on and so forth. And with Kant it's the same thing. It's just a more sophisticated, sophisticated version of Descartes where you say, okay, I'm going to assume experience because that's the certain thing. Hegel talks a lot about the conflict between certainty and grasping uncertain being.

Anyway, so you start with experience and then you make your derivation here you get this again, it's a neutral beginning point. I think that's the most important part here. Hegel thinks this is neutral. It doesn't bias us towards these previous

1:12:32 Dylan: subjective approaches and it preserves our ability to get at the world the way it is.

1:12:38 Wes: Yeah, it's conceivable we could lose that. Right. So I think he thinks he's unbiased in the sense, you know, if things went wrong, we could collapse back into the subjective. I don't think he thinks he's jerry rigging it. He's going to show how we actually do have that grasp of the world.

1:12:52 Dylan: Yeah, I agree, but I think that he isn't closing the door from the beginning. He's preserving the possibility of knowing the world.

1:12:59 Amok: 137 actually states quite nicely the little addition there, what Dylan was saying. When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its pure lack of determination. For determination requires both one and another. But at the beginning we have as yet no other. That which lacks determination as we have it here is the immediate. Not a mediated lack of determination, not the sublation of all determinacy, but the lack of all determination in its immediate. And so he goes on for a bit but this is what we call being. Being cannot be felt, it cannot be directly perceived, nor can it be represented. Instead, it is pure thought, and as such it constitutes the starting point.

1:13:40 Mark: Again, that's funny that it's pure thought. That's the point I was making about Frege's use of thought as objective. However, I also can kind of read this as being Berkeleyan, as the fact that you're thinking about it means it's a thought. So that everything we're doing here in logic is we're thinking about things. And even if we're thinking about a world before human beings existed, or that it's much more general than any particulars, any human minds, it's still something we're thinking about. Therefore it is a thought.

1:14:10 Wes: Let me make sure I understand you, Mark, because this is the sense I had too. Where with beginning of 86, pure being makes the beginning because it is pure thought as well as the undetermined, et cetera, et cetera. So in other words, like Descartes, we could just say, okay, let's start with thinking in its most undefined sense, just thinking per se. And then you say, well, that is a being, that thinking is a type of being. Is that what you were getting at?

1:14:35 Mark: I was saying that idealism is written in here right from the start. And he says this a few times, you know, idealism is the only respectable kind of philosophy or something, but that he's just baking it in in a way that looks kind of objectionably to me. Like the way Berkeley does it, that Berkeley actually at least spells out the argument, hey, I'm thinking of it, therefore it's a thought. But here, why is he setting it up like this? Is it just because of he's made that fregian move that anything objective I'm just going to call a thought by fiat. That seems a little arbitrary. No, he must have as his reason for that.

1:15:08 Wes: Sorry, where does he do that?

1:15:09 Mark: I think this is something that he's already laid out way earlier in this reading.

1:15:13 Wes: You mean the being cannot be felt? It is pure thought?

1:15:17 Mark: Pure being is pure thought. Just where that comes from. He's just stating it out right here. Is it pure being as a concept is pure thought?

1:15:24 Wes: Yes, if you're talking about pure being. And those two things coincide. And I'm wondering here if the implication in 86 is that we could start again, like Descartes, we could say, okay, all we have is thought or pure thought. You know, this abstract thing. In other words, you don't foreclose on that the way the Kant does, and not treat that as a being. Thought is a being. There's no distinction in the beginning instead of prejudicing it. There is no distinction at this point,

1:15:52 Amok: I suppose the way I think about it is like one, he's thinking about the most primitive structure of thought, which is this kind of isness which you can't get away from, which seems to be at the bottom of thought. So that's one thing he's doing. Another thing he's doing is to talk about this very abstract primitive level, this kind of is ness, where you sort of try to grasp the world in terms of everything just being in some abstract sense. That's true, but it's poor, so you're not really saying anything. So in that sense there is like a primitive coincidence of thought and being where you are capturing the world, but you're capturing it only in the most abstract sense. I don't know that he's saying like the world is an idea, as in material things are not really material things, they're just ideas in the mind, a la Berkeley.

1:16:39 Wes: Yeah, I didn't see that either.

1:16:41 Mark: Okay, so it could just be that. Of course we're doing logic, so we're talking about things that we can think about. So we're talking about thoughts. If it's a thing we can think about, it is a thought, just semantically. And this is the most abstract one that there is.

1:16:56 Amok: Right. But also the most primitive.

1:16:58 Mark: So it's pure. Well, but it's not, is it? It's not primitive genetically. In fact, it's the kind of thing that's so abstract that regular people don't ever think it at all. They don't have the discipline.

1:17:09 Amok: Right, I meant primitive in that sense.

1:17:11 Mark: Exactly, yeah, yeah, right.

1:17:13 Dylan: But there's a coincidence between these two things, right? Between the part that is the world and what we're referring to in our logic. The most primitive term of that is of pure thought, which is coincident with being.

1:17:30 Amok: Exactly, yeah.

1:17:32 Mark: If we again take it as a spectral. So yes, this pure being is an aspect of the world. But if we say something like what things really are is just pure being and all these distinctions are really illusory, like. No, no, no, that's wrong. In fact, very concrete things are quite real and. And much more developed. And a God that understands itself is not going to think of itself as pure being. That's just one of the many aspects and the most empty and piss poor of them.

1:17:59 Amok: In fact, it's like saying the Absolute as being as he puts it on 137 is almost, is almost tautological. If you think about the absolute as being, basically being, saying that it has being is not really saying very much at all.

1:18:13 Wes: Yeah, being can be determined as I equals I exactly as absolute indifference or identity and so on.

1:18:20 Amok: The equivalence of Frege, the way I think about it is Kant says something like, when he's talking about the ontological argument is existence is not a proper property. And Frege says something like existence is a second order property. And generally I think in first order, like predicate, logic and stuff to say if something that it exists to predicate that is completely uninformative. I think it's the same thought.

1:18:41 Wes: He also gives us one of his rationale again for beginning here, where there's a need to begin either with something strictly certain, that is with the certainty of oneself. This I think is reminiscent of Descartes, or with a definition or intuition of what is absolutely true. That would be clear and distinct ideas. These and other similar forms can be looked upon as the ones that must come first. So there's a level of certainty to this in the sense of its immediacy.

1:19:06 Amok: I guess you've got the absolute, but not really. I mean, the graph is the worst possible grasp.

1:19:12 Dylan: Shall we move on to nothing?

1:19:13 Mark: I was just trying to determine if there's anything in these additions to 86 that's worth us reading. I mean, they're talking about philosophies refuting each other. It seems like this is pretty essential. We find the various stages of the logical idea in the history of philosophy in the shape of a succession of emerging philosophical systems. This is one of his commentaries on being is pure abstraction. Just as the unfolding of the logical idea proves to be an advance from the abstract to the concrete, so the earliest systems in the history of philosophy are the most abstract, therefore at the same time the poorest.

So this is following up, he's just said before, that this whole idea that being is not just the piss poorest abstraction, but being is really all there is, all that's real, that that is what the Eleatics, as he said, Parmenides. So we're actually going to do a Parmenides episode. We will. We've planned it for a long time. I think he equates that with some Eastern religions, or we got it in Emerson that we're all one, everything is one. You might think that that is the richest, most wonderful religious thing you could figure out. And Hegel is going to say, well, no, it's true, but it's really uninformative and it is not the thing that would bring you to enlightenment at all.

They're abstract and poor, these Parmenides and their ilk.

1:20:29 Wes: Yeah, he says something like they, these philosophers surely went too far because they recognized only being is what is true and denied truth to every other object of our consciousness. So, for instance, to becoming, to appearances, becoming becomes the big illusion under this view. And we see that influence continues with Plato. I think that's the drawback here for the eleatics. So he goes on to say, it's silly to treat the further content of our consciousness as discoverable somewhere beside and outside being or something that is given.

1:20:59 Amok: Also, on the contrary, the true situation is that being as such is not firm and ultimately, but rather something that overturns dialectically into its opposite, which taken in the same immediate way, is nothing.

1:21:12 Mark: All right, so let's just jump and get at that argument. Here's the first argument. It said in section 87, this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely negative, which when taken immediately, is equally nothing. And he spells this out as an argument quite clearly that he says, think about the difference between the idea that everything, that's Emerson view, everything is one, all is one, and the Buddhist idea of the void, everything is nothing. He says there is no difference in content between those two beliefs. How do you make things differ?

I mean, if you say red and green are different, that's because they both are colors. There's some concept that is over and above them that lets you contrast them. But we already said being. There's no determinacy about it at all. There's no concept above it. So if you want to say what defines it is its complete lack of determination, well, what would define nothingness? Nothingness also is defined by complete lack of determination. Therefore, there is no way to characterize any difference between absolute undivided being and absolute undivided nothingness.

They have to be one and the same thing.

1:22:21 Amok: Right?

1:22:23 Wes: I think you've put that rather convincingly.

1:22:26 Mark: On the other hand, they're obviously completely different. That's the contradiction.

1:22:31 Amok: Even when we've been talking about being, it's like we were imagining some kind of positive plenum. But even describing it in these bare terms isn't exactly right because it's predicate less. That's how you get at the argument.

1:22:43 Mark: That much of the argument makes sense to me. That, yeah, okay, the difference between, if you want to say Brahmanism or, you know, the Vedic tradition is everything is One everything is being, or the Parmenidean religion, whatever, and Buddhism is everything is nothing. That insofar as that is a correct description of those things, then there is no difference between that piece of their metaphysical belief. I buy that so far. But the next step of his argument is that then when you're thinking of these, one kind of in your mind slips back and forth from one to the other.

And so the way of overcoming that is becoming. That becoming is. This is the proper synthesis of these two things which where you realize that my denial of being is not simply just a denial into nothingness, it is a determinate denial for being to be something concrete, to distinguish itself from nothing, it has to be something. It can't just be abstract being, it has to be something, right? And so something, the becoming something out of nothing. Whenever you think of something, you think that it is finite, that there is, if there's something, there must be something, something else, there must be something beyond it.

Something is limited in a way that absolute undefined being was not. So thereby thinking about something being limited. Thinking about a something which is thinking about a limit means you are thinking about becoming. You are thinking about a thing that comes into existence and that goes out of existence. I'm not sure I buy that much. Do we want to read his quotes,

1:24:11 Wes: how he actually says that we're talking about Section 88.

1:24:15 Amok: It's Section 88, top of 143 on the hacket. I'll read a couple of sentences before so that we get some context. But if non comprehension only means that one cannot represent the unity of being and nothing we're talking about now, the positive and the negative thing that we've been discussing combined in some sense. This is really so far from being the case that on the contrary, everyone has an infinite supply of notions of this unity, the notions being and nothing. Saying that one has none can only mean that one does not recognize the present concept in any of these notions and one does not know them to be examples of it.

1:24:50 Mark: I just have to point out here that notion here is notion with a small n. And it's not Begriff, it is Vorstellung. It is the sort of everyday kind of thinking, not the philosophical thinking that is Begriff.

1:25:01 Amok: Yeah, One does not know them to be an example of it. The readiest example of it is becoming. Everyone has a notion of becoming. And we also admit moreover that it is one notion, one being capitalized and further, that if it is analyzed, the determination of being, but also that of nothing the stark other of being is found to be contained in it. Further, that these two determinations are undivided in this one notion. Hence the becoming is the unity of being and nothing. So then he talks about beginning, which Wes mentioned a lot earlier.

1:25:33 Wes: The intuitive idea, right, is that becoming is the coming into being of something, the growth of something. It was an acorn, now it's an oak. There was no oak there before and now it's become an oak.

1:25:45 Dylan: So it's the unity of being and nothing.

1:25:47 Wes: And then you can apply that to each different stage. Right. As the form progresses, it leaves behind the previous form, the sapling, let's say. So each temporally, as things change, the previous form is essentially eradicated.

1:26:04 Mark: I just don't think that's so helpful with this example. But go ahead.

1:26:07 Wes: Why is that not helpful? The idea that becoming combined being and

1:26:12 Mark: nothing, but it doesn't seem to. That the whole point of being and then also thinking how it's equivalent to nothing is that it's static. You could say that's the problem with it. But there's nothing to my mind in reflecting on, oh well, I could describe complete static state as being or as nothing.

1:26:31 Wes: But it's supposed to be non static. It's supposed to be that being sort of goes over into nothing. That's the whole non static part of it, which is supposed to be.

1:26:40 Dylan: Yeah, becoming isn't static.

1:26:42 Wes: The being going into nothing is supposed to be the driving force of the becoming. Right. So for Hegel, it's not just some sort of accident of the physical world that things become becoming that we see in the world. It's an evidence of the logical necessity of being. Turning over into nothing that drives transformation

1:27:01 Dylan: is the evidence of.

1:27:02 Wes: Right, yeah.

1:27:04 Mark: I'm trying to push my Unhegelian intuitions about this onto the idea that. Yes, okay, when he says being sort of flips into nothing. Well, that's a description of when I think about being, when I get a notion small n of it, when I try to represent to it in my mind, then that could flip to this equally content, less notion of nothingness and that could then flip back to being. Well, that's a description of my thinking. That's something subjective about me.

1:27:38 Wes: Well, you're biasing the whole thing back towards the subjective. We're not supposed to be doing that.

1:27:42 Mark: I am, but it sounds like that's how he's trying to convince us that being and nothingness are sublated and bring us dialectically into becoming is because we reflect on how we actually think. About this and then say, well, but that's not just the way I would think about that. That's the way anybody of any culture who contemplates this will think about it. It's actually objective. Even though, of course, my thinking right now, I'm thinking about it subjectively. It's my mind. But we're doing logic.

1:28:12 Wes: If we were doing regular logic and you were deriving something from a set of axioms and you thought they followed, you wouldn't be thinking, this is just something that's in my mind. Just because this involves us thinking of being and seeing it going over into nothing. The claim isn't that it's our thoughts that do that. The claim is that conceptually, that's what happens. Those two concepts are necessarily related in the same way that a theorem would be a necessary product of axioms.

1:28:38 Mark: So you think that's two. I would say they are the same. Two different designations for the same concept. The concept being really undifferentiation. That. That static thing. Somehow the fact that there are two different descriptions of it that work equally well, being and nothingness. That. That gives rise objectively, logically, to the notion of becoming, to finitude, to all the stuff that he's trying to say.

1:29:02 Wes: Yeah. He's going to claim that the movement becoming just is that movement from being to nothing.

1:29:07 Amok: Right.

1:29:08 Mark: Do you think that. I know he's saying, do you follow him in this? I do not. I think it's broken.

1:29:17 Wes: Well, it's so difficult that I'm really. I'm not at the mode of trying to evaluate Mark, when you're asking the

1:29:23 Dylan: question, do you follow it? Are you asking the question, does his argument make sense based upon the way he's talking about being and nothing? Or are you asking whether you buy that that's what the nature of becoming is like an evaluative judgment.

1:29:38 Wes: Yeah. So in other words, I see the intuitive appeal of this. I'm not at the point of being able to evaluate it. But if you're asking whether it's understandable on its own terms, I think it is. The way he's laid it out. I mean, you have to think of it as a little story.

1:29:53 Dylan: To me, it's actually pretty darn clever. Right. Because he already is juxtaposed. In the history of philosophy, you have the one and the many. You have being and becoming at some level juxtaposed, that is the static and the active. And what he's done is he's turned the active as being born out of the static with Its static alter ego being and nothing. That it's that internal tension that is the engine of becoming. And so he makes the one the source of the many. And he makes the static the source of the active in that way.

1:30:36 Wes: And to make becoming a sort of case. Yes, of logical. A certain kind of logical implication is. I mean, it's ingenious. Let's just. Whatever we think of it, in the end it's.

1:30:47 Amok: The example here is heraclitus right on 144 is the everything flows that in becoming is pronounced to be the basic determination of everything that is there, the eleatics to being rigid, being without process, to be what is uniquely true. So that's the kind of. If we're following the story philosophically.

1:31:08 Mark: So he says a little more that yeah, okay, of course Heraclitus says the opposite of what Parmenides says. We understand that. But he's trying to say that Heraclitus correctly surmised that if you take Parmenides seriously, if you take him at his own game, then it actually gives you Heraclitus view that Parmenides did not realize this in connection with the principle of the Eleatics. In other words, Parmenides and his friends. Heraclitus says further, being is no more than not being. What this expresses is precisely the negativity of abstract being and the identity posited in becoming between it and nothing, which in its abstraction is equally unstable.

1:31:48 Amok: Right.

1:31:48 Mark: We have here too a genuine example of the genuine refutation of one philosophical system by another. The refutation consists precisely in the the fact that the principle of the refuted philosophy is exhibited in its dialectic and reduced to an ideal moment of a higher concrete form of the idea.

1:32:04 Amok: Right.

1:32:05 Mark: I just want to make sure we got that whole refutation, this whole idea of the progress of philosophy, how he sees this as legitimate philosophies don't just prove each other wrong. They take the previous philosophy and kind of tweak is sublated. It is not rejected.

1:32:22 Dylan: Yeah, and the end of this paragraph is really interesting because he joins it up with life. Even becoming, however, taken at its best on its own ground, is an extremely poor term. It needs to grow in depth and weight of meaning. Such deepened force we find, for example, in life. Life is a becoming, but that is not enough to exhaust the notion of life. A still higher form is found in mind here too is becoming, but richer and more intensive than mere logical becoming. The elements whose unity constitutes mind are not the bare abstracts of being and not but the system of the logical idea and of nature.

1:32:59 Amok: Mind is translated as spirit. Yeah, yeah.

1:33:02 Mark: Mind and spirit being the same thing here.

1:33:04 Amok: So that's the progress of this whole kind of story unfolding. Right. The system that he's been laying out, that's the becoming as well.

1:33:12 Mark: All right, so let's pretend that this works. The next section is being there. 89. In Becoming, the title of your chapter

1:33:18 Dylan: is called Being There.

1:33:19 Amok: Being There.

1:33:20 Mark: Yeah, yeah. It's a translation of design. But what is.

1:33:23 Wes: What is being determinate or determinate being.

1:33:25 Mark: Sorry, Determinate Being.

1:33:26 Dylan: Okay, well, it says being determinate.

1:33:28 Wes: Yeah. Some translations will have it as determinate being.

1:33:31 Mark: So the German is dasein, which literally just means their being. That is the literal translation. It is being, but is not undifferentiated, is somehow a specification of being in becoming. Being as one with nothing and nothing as one with being are only vanishing terms because of its contradiction. Becoming collapses inwardly into the unity within which both are sublated. In this way, its result is being there. It's the very first paragraph. I'm just reading 89. This is okay. And it's really unhelpful. But I guess that's why he has commentary on it for another page. So let's try to explain what that means. What is this being there? I already said that it is as opposed to the undifferentiated being, that you couldn't even say it was different than nothingness because there were so many undifferentiated. This is a something.

1:34:15 Amok: Yeah. Rather than now you having that sort of flux of becoming, now you've got being nothing in a particular determinate thing with qualities which distinguish it from something else. So being and nothing are working in that very idea of the determinate thing by virtue of its being determinate, it having certain qualities, it distinguishes itself from that which doesn't have its qualities. Right. Wes gave the example of this sort of pure red screen. Once you've got a green dot on it, it's now different. It's green while everything else is red. Things aren't just being anymore. Now you've got the idea of determinant being, where things have qualities and stand out in this way.

1:34:52 Wes: They need some nothing in them to do that.

1:34:54 Amok: Exactly.

1:34:55 Wes: They need to be, not red.

1:34:56 Mark: So in all this talk of being in nothingness, we have to talk about Sartre for at least a second, since that's the whole point, that he actually interprets this straight up phenomenologically, as when I am waiting for my friend Pierre, I experience the absence of Pierre. I experience the nothingness of Pierre that I look at the empty chair, it has being, it has chairness, but it also has a nothingness. It has all the things that it is not. It does not have Pierre in it. It does not have blah, blah, blah. And for Sartre, of course, it's very subjective. It's the fact that I'm expecting Pierre. That's why the chair has a not Pierre quality and it doesn't have a not Ted Koppel quality. I'm not expecting Ted Koppel, but I think it's.

1:35:35 Amok: Yeah, it's different.

1:35:36 Wes: If it's a red chair, that's not meaningful unless there are other colors. In order for it to be red, it has to be not those other things. There have to be things that make it discriminate.

1:35:47 Dylan: But let me ask about that. It wouldn't be that in being a red chair. It's not just that. It's not other different colored chairs. Right. It's not all the other things in the world too. It's not a door, it's not a dog's paw, it's not an ass. Do you see what I mean? This is where it's not clear to me why being and nothing are exactly antitheses in the way he's describing. Because it seems like on the face of it, nothing would be way bigger than being.

1:36:18 Mark: Certainly with the being determinant, straight up nothingness, Buddhist void. Nothingness is no longer the opposite of determinate being. It's the determinant nothingness. It's that it is this and not that.

1:36:28 Dylan: Yeah, but that not that is way

1:36:30 Mark: bigger than any this or not not this. Okay, how about that? So it's really determinate.

1:36:37 Wes: All the ways in which it's a being are. The sense in which it's not. The background stands out from that.

1:36:43 Amok: You rendered Hegel beautifully there, Dylan. But I'm not quite sure that I get your doubt about nothing being bigger than being. I mean, in some sense there's a lot more nothings out there and sense that you're pointing to this thing's not that, not that, not that, not that. But I don't know what the significance of that is exactly.

1:37:00 Dylan: It may be simply that I'm thinking more about determinant being than being. The negation, any way I think about it just seems way bigger than the positive aspect. Except right at the boundary, the very border of the it you're talking about or the determinant being you're talking about. Or maybe even in the more abstract case, being versus nothing. I'm not sure about that there. It seems to be constrained. The field is so big, once you get past that border, the way Hegel talks about it, they feel more like they are somehow opposites in a kind of yin yang kind of way.

1:37:39 Mark: I see your concern reflected in his own talk. Once we get determinate being again, we get the finite. Sure.

1:37:45 Amok: Right.

1:37:45 Mark: Once you get a something and he says our natural thing is then to say, well, the opposite of finite is infinite. And then we hold those up like option A, Green is finite, Mark, and red is infinite. And he says, no, that is not how we get infinity. He's sensitive to this kind of thing that you're voicing, but other than what I've already said, I'm not sure how to actually answer what you're saying.

1:38:07 Amok: Yeah, I mean, we've described determinant being as well as I think we're going to. One way to speak to Dylan's concern is to talk about this idea of determinant negation where he says the basis of all determinacy is negation, where indeterminate being, this sort of primacy of nothing. That would follow. Right. Because nothing is the basic.

1:38:28 Wes: So quality is in general the determinacy that is immediate identical with being as distinct from quantity. Something is what it is by virtue of its quality, and it loses its quality. It ceases to be what it is. So we can think of the properties of things and the contrast to quantity is clear. Right. Well, I don't know. I haven't thought about it enough to.

1:38:47 Mark: Well, I think what you're pointing out is that I was being imprecise in characterizing being there as a something. Because a something is ambiguous. Red is a something. And that's actually what he's talking about, is just pure quality, that if it became green, it would no longer be that something. Whereas a chair is not just, you know, an instance of red. A red dot. Like there could be another red dot, a different red dot, but that's early. That's not determinate. Being is just as far as quality. Quantity is the next stage after that where you could have numerical difference between things.

1:39:20 Wes: Yeah, quantity abstracts from quality. What makes a thing real, I think is important and what makes things what they are. If they lose their quality, they lose their properties. They can cease to be what they are, but you could change their quantity and they could could be the same.

1:39:34 Mark: So what's the negation of quality? Is it like Dylan was worried about something that's much vaster than it? Well, according to 91, a determinacy that simply is vis a vis the negation which it contains but which is distinct from it. Quality is reality. The negation is no longer abstract, nothing but a being there. And as something, it is only a form of the something. It is as otherness. Since this otherness is quality's only determination, though at first distinct from it. Quality is being for another, an expanse of something. The being of quality as such vis a vis this relation to another is being in itself.

God damn it, that's a mouthful. There's a lot packed in that little bit. I was just trying to get at its otherness. If you picked out red, then its negation is not red. But he points out the only reason you would have red versus not red is is because somebody is looking at it. Being in itself is not going to be red in particular, it has to be being for another. Quality is being for another. It's some observer that picks it out, you know, abstractly, not necessarily a person, but abstractly a point of view has to be.

1:40:39 Dylan: It's the way it shows itself.

1:40:41 Mark: So that is funny that you get. Being for another is more abstract than people, right? There's no people yet.

1:40:47 Amok: But we're beginning to see the transition that Wes talked about a lot earlier in terms of terms of the movement from this thing in itself to the for itself, which is closer to this aspectual thing. But we'll. That's a bit later on, right?

1:41:00 Mark: The intermediate being being for another. It's not for itself yet. It's not red contemplating itself. It's red existing. Because there is a potential observer. There is a potential point of view, a God's eye view, whatever, that would pick out red being for another.

1:41:13 Amok: So I think what that's supposed to suggest is that negation, as sort of like determinate negation, is otherness in the sense of distinction. Being is as distinct from something else. Determinacy and distinction are kind of linked together in this way. And getting from distinction to otherness, that's not a huge leap. I think we've kind of got the salient aspects of determinant being. And some of these phrases are just like Hegel's way of explicating ideas in the same way.

1:41:41 Wes: So with 92, then we'll do get the sense in which we'll get finitude and limitation out of all of this.

1:41:47 Mark: The being that is kept firmly distinct from the determinacy. Being in itself would only be the empty abstraction of being in being. There. The determinate being, the determinacy is one with being is at the same time posited as negation. This determinacy is limit restriction. Thus, otherness is not something indifferent outside it, but its own moment in virtue of its quality. Something is first finite and secondly alterable. So that the finitude. And alterable is it finitude or finitude?

1:42:15 Wes: I would say, let's say finitude.

1:42:18 Dylan: Finitude.

1:42:19 Mark: So that the finitude and alterability belong to its being. Now, that's another thing that sort of looks like a logical leap to me, that just talking about a something. You would think in everyday language you could talk about God as a something. It's just a really big thing. But no, no. Once you talk about something as a something at all, it is finite and it is alterable. It will die.

1:42:39 Amok: In this case, I suppose you can see this in this sort of like, point of view of qualities that we've been talking about this whole time, where a thing realizes that it's distinct from something by virtue of its qualities, but it also realizes were it to have different qualities, it would be that thing, it would be the other. Finitude and alterability were one, you realize your being is delimited by virtue of not being that. But also you realize that what distinguishes you from something else is your determinant qualities, which could change or which could have been different in some way.

1:43:11 Mark: There's not that much more to go. And what we wanted to go. It's the introducing bad infinity versus good infinity.

1:43:16 Amok: Yeah, that's super important.

1:43:16 Mark: And getting to quantity. Those are the two things that were left on our plate. And we're at section 92 is what we were just reading. We read through section 99. So this good infinity and bad infinity is, I guess, 93, 94, and maybe 95. Here, 93. Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a something, so it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum. The other is itself a something, so it likewise becomes an other.94. This infinity is spurious or negative infinity, since it is nothing but the negation of the finite. But the finite arises again in the same way, so that it is no more sublated than not.

In other words, this infinity expresses only the requirement that the finite ought to be sublated. This progress ad infinitum does not go beyond the expression of the contradiction which the finite contains. That is, that it is just as much something as its other. And this progress is the perpetual continuation of the alternation between these determinations, each bringing the other one.

1:44:08 Amok: So if we keep the concrete image of an object with qualities in mind, Or a determinate thing, the negative infinity, the way I read it is it has moments of something and other, which we've already described, but we then realize that the other is something because of alterability, right? It's change in qualities. And then there's a sense in which you say, oh, right, if you descend the properties from something, it could be something else. He puts this as reflection takes itself to a variety or something very elevated indeed, the most elevated truth of all.

So the infinite progression here, which is what the real edition of this chapter is, is the sense in which, hey, here are all these things. This isn't that, this isn't that, this isn't that, this isn't that. Once you sort of have that basic apparatus of determinate things with qualities, you begin to say, this isn't that, this isn't that, this isn't that, and so on and so forth. That said, the role it plays in this little bit here in terms of determinant being and the role the notion of negative infinity plays in Hegel's philosophy as a whole is quite different.

As we sort of discuss this, we'll find this out because on 150 he talks a bit more about what infinity means in his philosophy as a whole. But what infinity means here, I don't find it too important.

1:45:22 Mark: I've criticized this before. I mean, if you look at Descartes cosmological argument, it comes down to something like we have notions of gradation, we have notions something is better than something else, or something is more real than something else. And so there must be a most perfect, there must be a most real, and that's God. And my criticism is that it's exactly what he's saying here is that, no, no, no, what you're getting is just a negative notion of infinity. You're saying there's a difference between this and that, and therefore we could still keep applying that difference without limit.

But that's not a positive notion of infinity. That would not prove the existence of the infinite. And he says something more is needed. And he says what that is is in section 95. What is indeed given is that something becomes another and the other becomes another. Quite generally, in this relationship to another, something is already an other itself vis a vis the latter. And therefore, since what it passes into is entirely the same as what passes into it, neither having any further determination than this identical one of being and other in its passage into another, something only comes together with itself, and this relationship to itself is the passing, and in the other is genuine infinity.

So somehow this going beyond itself. So again, think, oh, I took a step, I could take another step, I could keep taking steps. That doesn't actually show that an infinity of steps is possible or something like that. But somehow when you then reflect on the fact that, well, you know, I'm just doing this iterative thing with steps and the passing to another, something comes together with itself. So this step and that step and these steps, you start to consider them all together. And this relationship to itself in the passing and in the other is genuine infinity.

Or if we look at it negatively, what is changed is the other. It becomes the other of the other. In this way, being is re established. But as negation of the negation. It is now being for itself.

1:47:19 Amok: So the for itself. You use the word reflection. That's where the for itself comes in, right? Once you start doing. I don't want to say you, but like, you know, just as a placeholder for now. Once you start doing that kind of thinking over what Hegel called thinking over the being for itself is the kind of real infinite. You've got at the kind of dimension of thought. Reflective thought is important for Hegel in the sense that it can get at this genuine infinite. Because if you think about dialectics and what you're doing in terms of criticizing these conceptual systems, this reflective aspect is key to the whole enterprise, right?

Because all we're doing in terms of looking at a particular system, thinking about it and so on and so forth, that all of that is intimately bound up with reflection. But what it means here specifically is that this new thing called being for itself is this thing where the aspectuality of the whole thing becomes more central. Where you realize that all of these determinate things hinge on your own thought in some way. The other of the other, right? Alterability.

1:48:23 Mark: So real infinity is a circle. And actually my attempted analogy with taking one step and then taking another step and bringing all the steps, that doesn't really work. The only example that works is the one that he gives, which is the other of the other. That that becomes a reflection back on self. What do you folks think about that? Just in terms of. That's genuine infinity. Whereas the supposed infinity of space and time as well. You could take another step and another step. That those don't work. That's the kind of thing that you would just develop antinomies about in the same way Kant said. But if you think of infinity as self reflection, then somehow that does the job. That actually gets the God as infinite being is because he infinitely knows himself. That's what we're doing with this whole thing.

1:49:06 Dylan: Infinity has to be that way for what Hegel's doing to work. What I don't get is why the other is a false infinity as opposed to a kind of infinity that would be subsumed into the circle.

1:49:18 Mark: I think what you're saying is right. Why does he say it's false as opposed to just.

1:49:23 Amok: It's a moment to kind of concretize this a bit more is the step between, I mean, we were just 15 minutes ago talking about things with properties. How we got to here is that, hey, there are actually many things with properties and they could change. And then talking about Mark's step metaphor, you begin looking at all these things, right? And saying, well, there's that and there's that and there's that and there's that. Space and time is the thing to kind of bring in here and to say Descartes. Descartes actually works quite nicely for this, where all of these things aggregated together. If you just keep looking at them, you're getting at infinity in some way, right? It's like you're looking at all these determinacies and their otherness to each other, and you're there, but that's not really infinity, Right? And then what Marx said, basically, I

1:50:05 Mark: mean, I'm not sure why you would just say, again, it's an aspect of infinity. It's certainly limitless, but it's not going to get you God necessarily, just seeing all the physical objects and all the distances or whatever. But, you know, that's. That's just part and parcel with aspectualism itself that, you know, just like in number theory, we have degrees of infinity, we have orders of infinity so that the counting numbers are an infinite scale series and they're really properly an infinite series, but yet they're not the most encompassing infinite series.

The real numbers encompass them are a higher order of infinity. So the infinite set of orders of infinity maybe is the proper infinity. But even that is not Hegel's solution, because that doesn't involve recursion, I think, in the way he's talking about. I don't know, maybe somebody's written a paper on with a Cantorian view of Hegel's infinity. I don't know.

1:50:58 Amok: There actually is a paper on that.

1:51:03 Mark: Okay, well, I find that now we've gotten to that step that I don't necessarily feel the need to go through 96 through 99. Let's get some closings then out there. What do people think There are some

1:51:16 Amok: pretty cool moves in here. I think that's been a sentiment that's been expressed by I think all three of you. some point, whether the whole thing fits together or whether it's convincing is like one a question that we probably can't answer.

1:51:30 Mark: Well, I think we can definitively answer it. That, yes, they're cool, but they're not objective in the way that he wants them.

1:51:35 Amok: No, I mean, that's true.

1:51:37 Mark: Of course they're not. That's just silly.

1:51:39 Amok: I agree with you. I mean, I suppose I was more saying that in order to sort of fully appreciate the thing you would actually have to do. What he says all the time that you have to do isn't go through all this stuff which not too many people have time to anymore.

1:51:52 Mark: No, you don't. You don't have to do that.

1:51:54 Amok: Well, I don't think it's silly in the sense that there's a lot in there, even if you don't buy the absolute. Fred Beiser, who's one of the top historians of German philosophy out there, mentioned that this notion of the absolute is really key to Hegel's philosophy and its sort of embeddedness in Christianity and the worldview. All of that is really key to internalizing the motivation of that. And people don't really believe in absolutes anymore. So that significance has kind of been lost.

1:52:22 Dylan: I'm not sure you have to buy the absolute in that Christian way to make the turn that if the world is intelligible, then there is a whole with respect to which you understand its parts. And the alternative is that there are parts of the world that are simply unintelligible. That by itself would be an interesting conversation. So what is meant by that? That part of Hegel I find really pretty interesting. And then the way of resolving becoming out of being, I guess I find it ingenious. And I haven't read enough of it to make a judgment about it.

If I'm skeptical or. The question I find myself asking is whether his notion of becoming really lines up with transformation. His formulation insists on becoming, as always being from one pole to another pole. Which maybe in the end, he doesn't mean it quite that way because our earlier reading indicated that he was really pointing to this universe that was sort of constantly active and in a very Heraclitean, you know, constant state of flux, which it's not clear to me that a constant state of flux involves moving from different poles of being all the time, as opposed to the flow being something itself rather than being A activity of the rubbing of being against nothing.

1:53:57 Mark: All this rubbing and going back and forth between the poles. It's the Heraclitus. This is what is coming to mind. I'm sorry. And with that.

1:54:06 Dylan: Thank you, Mark, I appreciate that.

1:54:08 Mark: Amogh, thank you so much for helping us through this once again. No problem.

1:54:12 Amok: It was a pleasure.

1:54:13 Mark: Just the difference between this reading and last time where we were only reading one work and it had a logical flow from section to section and not trying to go back and forth between the science and logic and this, this was an infinitely better experience for me this time than last time. And I actually felt like I had a handle on what he was going for. And yeah, some of the interesting stuff in here is the religious stuff, but we should just read something by him or by somebody like him, maybe by Whitehead or whatever on religion if we really want to engage this stuff and not just kind of, oh well, he's just smuggling it in and throwing it in as illustrative examples like well, we can't really evaluate very well anything.

1:54:50 Amok: I was just pointing out when I was talking about about relationship with projects of religion. It's not, as you said, just some sort of supplementary example. The very sort of imagery of like binding unity and things will fit together in this way and we'll get at harmony. Right. That does not have purely philosophical origin. That comes from somewhere. And I was one of the origins that sort of historians, Hegel scholars have traced and it's sort of pretty apparent if you look at the text is the sort of Protestant Christianity of his day. I mean that motivated him in a certain way and it doesn't us. Right. Quite in the same way.

1:55:22 Mark: Thanks much. We already gave the pitch for donations last time. People, you should be enlivened by this. The natural reaction to this is to want to participate in a discussion about this crazy stuff. And you could do so by attending the after show which will take place at 6pm Eastern Time on Sunday, March 27 via Google Hangout, which you sign up for that by becoming a partially examined life citizen and joining the group that has been created for this after show. So we hope to see a lot of you there and folks that don't want to become a citizen or don't want to participate in this, you can still watch it or potentially listen to it after the fact. And you could also just jump on the Facebook group, you could jump on the blog, you could jump any number of places. Just jump in your own home.

1:56:08 Wes: Hey everybody, Brian Wilson here to talk a little bit about what's going on with the Partially Examined Life's Not School program? We've expanded our offerings in the Intro Readings and Philosophy group, which I'll be leading. We've got Plato's Crito coming up on March 20th at 5pm Eastern Time. We'll be following this up with three more readings that are scheduled once a month of Aristotle's Ethics, Descartes, Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, Michel de Montaigne's Of Cannibals, and of the Education of Children. Check out the Not School program's Intro, Readings and Philosophy section for more info.

Also on the Not School forums Nietzsche is so hot right now. Justin Madra has a group forming to take a stab at Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Michael Murray is hammering down dates to tackle Nietzsche's Death of God. Keegan Venzemeran will be leading a seminar on Thomas Hobbes Leviathan on March 19th as well. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me. Ryan B R I a n@priallyexaminelife.com Thanks a lot and hope to see you soon.

1:57:11 Mark: Hey, I just want to say something about the music you're about to hear. This was actually a guitar instrumental by Gary Lucas, virtuoso, Grammy nominee songwriter. He appeared on my other podcast, Nakedly Examined Music, and I urge you to go look@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com for the interview with him and he was looking for a vocalist to give an interpretation to put lyrics and a melody over it and I took the challenge and he thought it was gorgeous. So thanks to Gary. Hope you like it. All right, good night everybody.

1:57:37 Dylan: Good night.

1:57:38 Amok: Good night.

1:57:52 Mark: Your rage exhausted flame. You you need flame and even if I'm wrong this shouldn't take too long Reasons have to have the force of weakness to kill to the front and flow. Say say this and pray pray that you'll be you'll be the opposite number of what what she you believed when you cursed first then breathed out Losing all your self conflicted end only lead leaves you self aware

1:59:08 Amok: you

1:59:10 Mark: you need. Say this again say this to me say just one word and I'm definite Unless I'm washed in some torrent I'll be here but not home. Losing all I felt but didn't care. I

2:00:09 Amok: found.