Ep. 277: Hegel on Our Understanding of Physics (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 277 is still something like what is the relationship of our ideas to the world? We read chapter three, Force and the Understanding under the heading Consciousness of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from 1807. For more information, please visit. Partially Examine this is Mark Linsenmayer, both solicited and soliciting in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, violently sublated by his wife, his child and two dogs in Austin, Texas.

0:46 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, the self-same being, repelling myself from myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:53 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, distinguishing myself from myself while being directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is not different from me in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:04 Seth: Oh my.

1:06 Mark: I think these intros give people an idea of what you're in store for today.

1:12 Wes: Yeah, you can skip to the next episode now.

1:16 Mark: This is our third full episode this time around on this book, and our last for the moment, even though there's plenty of good stuff after here. But I think this caps off at least the epistemological story. Folks can go back to our old, old episodes on this book, hear the next chapters on self consciousness and starting on sort of political philosophy. So here we have to somehow get from the end, we're talking about perception and why certain accounts of perception are inadequate and somehow get by the end of this to the fact that you have to consider self consciousness in order to give, you know, we're not even really directly even talking about knowledge anymore.

We need to sort of finish the epistemic story, I would say even our relationship to basic metaphysical categories. We finish off during here somewhere here and there's some philosophy of science what's called force and the understanding, the faculty of the understanding, dealing with universals, concepts, et cetera. But then force being a key thing in philosophy of science. So those are at least some hints.

2:19 Wes: We're on our way to finding out that knowledge of the absolute, of the thing in itself is really just self knowledge. It's self consciousness. And we'll get there by the end of this section. The segue from perception is just that the way things ended was that we couldn't resolve certain paradoxes of perception except by saying that the essence of a perceptual object was its being. For another, it sort of collapsed into the sum of its relations with other things. And now the concept of force gives us a way to think about those relations in a satisfyingly real, quote unquote way as something in the world. So force and interaction will be our way of getting at the sense in which the essence of objects depends on otherness. And then it's going to, of course, take off from there and all kinds of crazy stuff.

3:16 Dylan: And the key word there is interaction or relation, which is why force is coming to play and so important here. Right. Because force is always going to involve two things, at least two, and has to do with their interaction or their relationship between one another.

3:32 Mark: Yeah. And we're going to see here by the end, we're talking about self consciousness. And I think this gets us to the point we were arguing with Schelling or that was sort of the. At least this seems the closest Hegel comes to his version of what we were talking about with Fichte and Schelling, that if you think that ultimately, to resolve metaphysical problems about objects in the world, we have to say when we're exploring objects in the world, we're actually exploring a part of ourself. Like that was explicitly Schelling's project to say that actually the self, if you delve deep enough into the self, you end up having to give an account of all of natural science and social science and everything else.

But we're also dealing, as you just said, with not only our relation to the objects, that's the conclusion. But most of this in talking about force, is talking about relationships between the objects. And how are doing a little philosophy of science, how we explain what it is we're seeing. And I think these things also work together. I was making the connection before, since we gave a similar treatment of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding close to a year ago now, we kind of, at this point, after we'd gotten through basic impressions and making concepts out of them and talking about primary secondary qualities, we got to talking about powers.

So this is sort of the equivalent stage of that, where for Locke, it was very directly how we conceive of things affecting each other through powers. And this came very naturally out of epistemology because it came out of a causal theory that whatever impressions we have in our mind, there must be something out in the world that caused, that exerted a power upon us. So Hegel doesn't want to be, as, you know, Hegel, I don't think talks about causality here exactly. And in fact, some of what the conclusion here is going to be kind of like a very.

I want to say modern. But I guess it kind of comes out of just out of Hume Account of some of what we think we're saying when we talk about powers in the world is actually just talking about patterns in our mind. Right. Hume's famous account of causality, that we think this is things exerting powers on each other. But no, the conclusion actually is going to be it's our minds synthesizing. It's our minds putting these together. So what? A scientific description or scientific law, as we get into it, is going to be a sort of redescription of the world.

It's not actually going to be a metaphysical statement about things that are going

5:43 Dylan: on in the world.

5:44 Mark: It's a way of organizing the world in our minds.

5:46 Dylan: Before you said that last bit, I wanted to tweak it in the sense of the difference between powers that a thing has versus the interactions themselves as being the entities or the sort of fundamental entities. And that's the kind of thing that Hegel is. I think he's being pretty explicit about it, that it's really no longer a world of things, but a world of interactions. The interactions are. They're not things, but they are the entities of interest, and they are the way in which we form the world.

6:16 Mark: Yeah. Surprised at how much metaphysics there is in this, that it is the nature of a thing to negate itself. Because a thing, you know, we talk about distinguishing this from that.

6:28 Seth: Right.

6:29 Mark: How is it we carve up the world into things? Well, it is the character of a thing to be opposed and in fact only defined by its opposition to other things. And so you might think that something is a whole, is a. An in itself. It has a nature. But actually the whole point of being an in itself, you know, is that it is with reaction to us as perceivers and with reaction to the other things around it. It is for them. You know, I think that that was part of how we were ending the perception section. Wes, do you want to kind of catch us up on the conclusion of the perception section and launch us into this?

7:02 Wes: Yeah. The conclusion was that we had had all these problems. You know, one of the things you're trying to reconcile in perception was the independence of the object and its unitary nature with its determinateness, and the fact that in determining it, you give it all these properties which seem to take on a life of their own and to be a many, and to undermine the individuality of the perceptual object. And then ultimately the determinations will come to depend on relations to other things anyway. So the way Hegel thinks about determination is in a very spinozan way, which is that they are always negations.

They are always to say what something is, you have to be able to say what it is not. You have to be able to distinguish it from everything else. And that in a way gives him a way out. And it really is the lead in to force because he's able to say, okay, we're going to temporarily resolve this paradox between oneness. The other way of describing the paradox is between oneness and manyness is we're going to say that the oneness and the manyness of the thing kind of coincide because the thing turns out to just be what it is in terms of its relations to everything else.

And the relations there kind of replace the properties so that the relations don't seem as damaging to the unity of the object as a multiplicity of properties. And that's really the segue into force, because force just is a way of conceiving of that relationality and the way in which a thing might be the product of its relations. Really, when we start off here, we are starting off with the object has been in the previous sections for sense certainty. It was sort of a immediate bare particular. And then perception, it was the perceptual object with properties.

Now we get something called the unconditioned universal. And it's supposed to be unconditioned just in the sense it's not dependent on its determinations for something perceptual outside of it.

9:13 Mark: Let's say some more about this because that's, I think, one of the hardest concepts in this whole thing. I did some more of the Sadler half hour Hegel, and he was emphasizing the difference between the sensuous universal. So in other words, like a piece of chalk, it's whiteness, the fact that it is chalk. All these are universals, but they are conditioned by the fact that they are sensuous. They're identified as being opposed to something else. This chalk is white because it is not black, and it is colored because I'm not referring to the shape. There's all these distinctions that make it a sensuous universal. So what is it? And if we say those are all conditions that are placed on the universal, what is a truly unconditioned universal? That is, we need the understanding for it. It's not a matter of something that we could perceive.

9:58 Wes: I mean, the unconditioned universal is force. Right? We should just say that up front. That's the segue into the concept of force. The way he ends that section on perception where he says the being for Self of something becomes identical to its being for another, that that's how it becomes unconditioned. It gets sort of dissolved into its relations with other things. And then where you get forces, you say, okay, let's take this idea of relation seriously. And the way we start out is, the way we started out the previous sections is that we reify it and we treat it as if it were real in the sense of being a kind of thing like object, which is going to lead to new problems. And so we're going to have to elaborate the concept of force to overcome some of those contradictions.

10:47 Dylan: It's unconditioned by sensuous experience.

10:50 Mark: So I was just trying to figure out, given that, can we give an actual example like I gave chalk and its whiteness and things? Again, that's from Sadler. I don't even know if this is a good interpretation of what a sensuous universal amounts to.

11:01 Seth: Properties are sensuous universals. That I think has been pretty well established.

11:05 Dylan: Yeah, Force is not, because it's not a perception. Force is a. In the way he's using it is a concept.

11:13 Mark: Yes. So I'm just trying to put the pieces together between, you know, we've got chalk with its sensuous properties and now we're saying we're going to reinterpret the chalk so that we don't have the problem of the coexistence. You know, is it an also that its shape and its color and things hang around in it, or is it a one? Yeah, no, we're saying that it is. We're going to call all of its properties extrinsic, relational, that it is a thing. This, I think this is what Wes was just saying. A thing that is then identified by its opposition, its being for other things. So the fact that I'm holding the chalk up, it's a thing in space. I don't even know if I can say in space. But like we can schematize its relations to the various things around it by the forces they're exerting on one another.

12:00 Wes: The unconditioned universality is supposed to have broken free of the sensory. And now we're trying to make sense of that. This is very speculative on my part. So. But if we think about, say a Platonic form and you say, how is it determined to be what it is? And someone might want to say, well, you take all the particulars in the world and you see it as an abstraction from that, that would be conditioned on sensuous things. But if you said, I'm going to do a sophist type thing and I'm going to map out all the conceptual relations between, say, the form of Courage and every other concept, every other form.

Don't want to call them concepts. Then you are. When you define that form purely in terms of its. I still want to say conceptual relations, but let's say relations to other forms, then it's unconditioned in the sense of no longer being dependent on any applications to any sensory particulars. That's kind of the way I think about this. You could also think about it in terms of structuralism. Right. We saw with our Saussure episode where the meaning of any given term is just the sum of all its differences from every other term in the language. And it reminds me of functionalism.

Right. We're trying to generate semantics out of syntax, essentially out of structure. We're trying to get meaning out of structure instead of meaning out of some acquaintance with sensory particulars.

13:16 Seth: I like that analogy. I mean, I felt at the beginning of this conversation, Mark was trying to push on the organic aspect of the development, and Wes was coming at it from more of a structural point. But now we've kind of come back and converged. Mark, do you have an answer to what an unconditioned universal is at this point or no?

13:36 Mark: If we're talking about universals that are not sensory, so the various forces, and I think a lot of the complexity in this section, a lot of the twists and turns come about when we try to figure out, like, well, what constitutes an individual force, what constitutes its manifestation? Is there just like one force that's like Schopenhauer's will, the whole of nature, whatever the hell is going on and causing the various things. So there's still a lot of picking this from that, that we have to figure out how to talk about this new world. But if I'm saying how does the talk about our chalk transform? Well, you're not talking about chalk anymore. You're talking about a more general concept. So, like, the concept of gravity would be an unconditioned universal in that it is maybe an abstraction from things that we sense, but it's not an abstraction in the same way that red is, I'm pretty sure.

14:29 Wes: Let me just say one more thing about this to give a few more comparisons. So we're trying to get at the sense in which the unconditioned universal is unconditioned because it's not dependent on any perceptual given. Right. There's no given Here, later on, as we move forward, we'll see that he says that content will be a product of form. So, again, that whole structuralism point, and that should kind of perk our ears up, because this is the problem that Fichte was dealing with as well. Right. The whole idea is that this is no longer a Kantian picture where the understanding supplies the form, the categories, and we have some sort of given some sort of data that comes in from the outside.

So if you want to think of the unconditioned universal, you can think of it as the rejection of that idea of there being a external data being pushed into the system. The data is going to. Actually going to emerge out of the structure.

15:22 Dylan: Yeah. It's no longer a machine, a category machine that is processing information that's flowing into it.

15:29 Wes: Yeah.

15:29 Dylan: And then turning that into understanding.

15:31 Wes: Yeah.

15:32 Mark: Does my comparison to Locke and his powers, is that really appropriate here? You know, if I want to sort of insist on let's stay with the piece of white chalk or something, and we could stop talking about the it as a sensory thing, but it as an unknown out there, and we're going to start, you know, very soon talking about things in themselves and how they might cause our perceptions, their appearances, but something out there that is exerting a power that results in thought of white chalk or whatever. But we're no longer talking about that as a perceptual thing. We're talking about it as an unknown, a power, a force. Is that even relevant anymore? Talking about how a force then, is related to giving us knowledge? Because that sounds like that's bringing back. It's pushing data into us. It sounds like it's bringing something back that Wes didn't like.

16:20 Wes: Yeah. I mean, in Hegel's picture. Right. That's going to be verboten. There's not going to be any Lockean powers affecting our consciousness. We're going to get a different. And similarly, he's going to reject Kant, which is just super Locke in that respect.

16:34 Dylan: Right.

16:34 Wes: The thing in itself being the ultimate power.

16:37 Seth: Mark, I think the analogy to Locke fails in exactly the way that Wes just pointed out. But to use the metaphor of ladder, there's kind of a structure that's being built here where, for Hegel, in the same way for Locke, forces the natural next step off of what we've been using the term property or sensuous, universal or conditioned universal. Those three things are equivalent. So just to kind of rewind a second and talk about the organic development, and by the way, I want to Remind the listeners that we're in the middle of a stage here. So Wes rightly pointed out that what Hegel's trying to describe is a process whereby the understanding takes something as its object that it believes is going to give it truth.

It's given, and it's given in this pure form. Immediately what happens is the understanding realizes. So wait a second, this thing is not immediately given like I thought, and it transforms into this other thing and transforms it. So we're in the middle of that dynamic right now. The dialectic.

17:40 Mark: Yes. In fact, we're going to find out that understanding can't even do the job.

17:43 Seth: No.

17:44 Mark: Which is why we have to move to self consciousness and ultimately.

17:46 Seth: Exactly. So the way I characterize this to myself, and mind you, I'm taking so much sinus medication this week, I could very well be high and not realize what I'm feeling. It might help, but you had the sense certainty, the undifferentiated this, which we then differentiated into things with properties. We said, okay, well, that middle doesn't hold the sense certainty because we have the concept of the thing, which is this unity and diversity all in the same thing. Wow, that's interesting. And the transition from thing with properties to things and force to me is about.

We use the term relation, but it's really about the movement from a static picture of the world to an active picture of the world. So it's recognizing that your picture of the world that breaks it apart into unities that have diversity, things that have properties is not sufficient. And it's not sufficient because you can paint a picture of black book, white chalk, extended, this whatever, but it doesn't explain what's actually happening with the interactions between them. It doesn't explain sort of the vita activa. Right. The motive force of life.

And so to me, this transition from sensuous universal to unconditioned universal, or from property to force is really him just acknowledging that relationality is not simply a relation in space that's static. So force represents relationality between things. Not simply to say, to the left of, although that's part of it, but really more about how is it possible that things actually have any kind of influence or impact or interact in any way with any other thing. That's the stage of this evolution. That's how I interpreted it.

19:41 Dylan: This is where you realize Hegel's read Heraclitus.

19:44 Mark: Yeah, there's a lot of Heraclitean stuff in here. And there's a similar ambiguity that I'm going to call the Humean Ambiguity between, as you were just saying, Seth, things actually acting on each other, exerting forces on each other, and things merely. Just as we were talking about the previous stage, force as yet just another way to distinguish one thing from another thing. And I think about this in Heraclitus, that if you talk about, well, he doesn't use Yin Yang, but like, Yin Yang is sort of the common. The yin only exists because of its opposition to the Yang and the Yang only exists because of its opposition to the yin.

And those are forces that they're somehow pushing against each other. What Heraclitus actually does use this, the taut bow, as his. The taut bow, yeah, exactly. As his image. But again, when Hegel makes that deflationary turn and says, well, actually, it's not that there are really forces out there in the world, it's in our mind, it's our way of relating things to one another that makes us think that he's just using force as another way to conceptually distinguish between various apparently different things. That if we see that they only exist out of their opposition to each other, then we can make that dialectical move to, well, the real thing is the system that includes both of those.

So we go away from a. It becomes very Heraclitean. There is no thing, ontology. There's just occurrences, relations, patterns.

21:05 Dylan: I really want to make a comment and get your guys input on just a kind of observation about the experience of reading Hegel and his language on these things versus sort of the way we've been talking about it. I read a couple secondary sources and just listening to all of us and the way we're articulating it, it's really resonant. I think we're getting it right. But Hegel, from my experience, is much less clear on these things in that he uses language like the thing is defined by its opposite. Okay? And I found myself really tripped up on this because what he means by that is he means that the.

This is defined by all of the. Not this. Okay, but if I think of a thing and talk about its opposite, what I think about immediately is an absolute reflection of it as opposed to everything else besides that. That, you know, if I take a cup, the whole world and everything else in the world is not opposite that cup. It's not that cup, but it's not opposite it. But his language is to talk about it being opposite. The other piece of language that is very challenging is the manifestation of this dialectic where, like in my opening statement where I talked about learning that myself is the Same thing as myself, distinguished not from myself, is that kind of recursiveness is extraordinarily challenging.

Part of that's an extraordinary, challenging idea. But he maintains that recursiveness in the way he writes, so that it becomes very hard to understand what he's actually distinguishing, because he'll say things like, well, the thing is no longer the thing, I am no longer me. And you start to get it after a while. But it is very difficult, I found.

22:58 Mark: I guess I thought you were referring to three different related but distinct points. Which is the one that we ended the last section with, which is that being in itself is being for another, which is to say the cup is only the cup because it is contrasted to all the things. But that's different. Then the point about opposites, which is going to be as soon as you're talking about a force and how it manifests, then I was at least interpreting what he was saying as he. Soon the force divides into two forces. And I think that's because whenever you see a force manifest, you see sort of the equal and opposite reaction, or you see something.

So in other words, you're talking about something falling, and you're talking about this being a manifestation of gravity. Well, there's also the thing that stops it. There's the earth, there's the air resistance. There's something about. It's always. A force is always an interaction between two things. And those are the things that I think we can talk about as being two forces, two opposite forces, which then that opposition gets dispelled. So there's not really two forces anymore before the end of the section. And the me and not me thing is at the very end of this section.

And I was not interpreting that as exactly the same as either of those.

24:04 Dylan: Let me just say that I was referring more to the struggle that I had regarding. I'll call it just the general recursiveness of his language, which I think is manifest in all three of those things, though I admit that those are different things.

24:16 Seth: I get your point, Dylan. I think to try and respond to it, the recursiveness of the language makes it extremely difficult to read and is very painful. If what you're expecting from the text and from him is assertions, declarative statements, and an argument. I think if you think of it more like a journey, and the only thing I can do is read the secondary sources to help me. But don't commit, certainly at this stage in the text, I don't know when you do commit, if ever to this Being the assertion of finality or absolute truth or whatever. But just when he says something and then seems to contradict it in the next moment, the way I read that is him saying, this is the movement of, in this case, the understanding or consciousness that you think it's one thing, but looked at from a different perspective or a little further along developmentally, historically, it looks like it's opposite.

And then you get confused, like, why is this two different things at the same time? And then you realize that's actually critical to understanding what it might actually be. And then you take that and you say, okay, let's talk about the fact that this thing seems to be in opposition. That's what helped me. But I also think you're talking about the cup versus the rest of existence, you know, and then being opposites, that's more like maybe the term negation is more abstruse, less directed.

25:37 Dylan: And the way Mark was just talking about it reminded me of something when he was talking about force and the idea that there's really two forces and stuff. There's a big piece here which Hegel is managing, getting unity by always having sort of the absolute as the whole. And the whole is always getting divided up, but it's still a whole. And so whenever there's a distinction to be made in order to maintain it, tied to truth is it's always grounded in that whole. So the idea of equal and opposite forces or something, it's a perfect example where you would say, well, look, the term that I would use, and I would have loved to have had Hegel around to really reflect on energy versus force.

But for a moment I'll just conflate them and just say, look, energy is conserved. Whatever I mean by energy is conserved. That is, if I come to the point where I say it's not conservative, I'm going to find the other thing that is energy, that is also at play. And that's how I'm going to break up and rationalize the world. I'm going to have certain things in which when I add them up, they make the whole. That's the way I, in fact, have rationality. I have a relation between the parts in the whole, such that you get the whole out of it, not the sum of it, but that the relation constitutes the whole.

And that's how I ground it as truth. That's how I anchor it.

27:02 Mark: I guess I want to ask about truth there, because I got this question. I just did this Hegel seminar we're talking about the preface with about 20 listeners a couple days ago, and one was just asking me, well, what is truth for Hegel? And I was trying to just sort of reflect on that. It seemed to me that truth, capital T, would be the absolute right, is whatever it's supposed to be is by definition the thing that philosophy is supposed to be aiming at. But actual claims of truth are made within particular theories, within particular contexts. So to say, it's less about, like, what is the truth of force?

The truth of force, as in, what does this conceptual activity, this mental activity that is positing force to be there? What does it consider the truth of force to be? And you end up with these. Well, force is, on the one hand, a way of just describing an activity. You know, we see something falling, you see gravity. On the other hand, we sort of have this distinction between. Well, no, no, the force is the thing that caused that to happen. So sort of this distinction between kinetic and potential energy, I think that is just the most helpful.

And if you don't remember your physics, just go look up those terms. But the idea that as I just raise the object in the air and I'm about to drop it, it's just so much potential energy is building up in it. And once I drop it, oh, that L converts to kinetic energy. And those two moments of force as being, are they one thing, are they opposites? These are conceptual pieces. Which one is the truth of force? Well, we end up. It's something that sublates both of those, and then the concept of force itself, it gets transcended as well. All that was just the roundabout ways you used truth in your description, Dylan.

And I felt like I had to quibble with that because this is such a central and difficult thing in Hegel. But, Wes, did you have a better take on that?

29:00 Wes: I don't want to go down that rabbit hole with the word truth, okay. Because it's a term of art in many ways for Hegel.

29:08 Mark: I guess what I'm hoping in the remainder of part one left is that we can characterize the stages in here, right? In sense certainty, there was pretty much just one stage, like. And it took a while to talk about. And then in our perception chapter, well, there were a couple stages we threw in the middle of it that sort of the also of the properties versus the one of the object. And that was sort of a thing that disrupted the mere. Well, here there are several intermediate steps that we. Even though we haven't talked about how matters are described as force, I think we've given a good enough introduction of how we start talking about force after we were talking about just the objects of perception.

We're talking about this now insensible thing. And, you know, we've brought up a number of things, how force divides into two forces. But very soon here we're going to then talk about the Kantian noumena coming out of this. I don't know. Wes, did you have a good. Like just point by point summary of here Are the five things that it goes through in here, or is it even possible to break it down that

30:09 Wes: simply for you, we're going to get a dialectical movement from force to law to explanation. So we know that that's the overarching structure of this whole section. And that's the typical dialectical motion that Hegel always goes through, where we treat the truth as the object. The truth to start with, right? So force begins with us objectifying and reifying the unconditioned universal. And then in the next stage, we will treat the stage of law. We'll think of truth as something inner, as this kind of supersensible beyond. And then we get this realm of explanation in the end that tries to sort of mediate and connect the world of appearances and the supersensible beyond.

I mean, ultimately, Hegel tells us where we're going in the beginning of this. You know, in the very first few sections, he'll tell us in 132 that we've kind of have this problematic conception of the unconditioned universal. And so that some of these same problems we've seen are going to arise. And that's because, despite the fact that we've made progress, this is 133. Ultimately, where we're going is that understanding must see the truth of the things in the concept. Right. Or in self consciousness, in consciousness itself, and not just treat itself as a passive observer in everything.

So the whole method that he describes is that we are going, as phenomenological observers move into. He uses this weird phrase like we're going to be the concept as it unfolds dialectically in this section. So he's doing something a little different than he's done in the other sections. We as phenomenological observers, in a way, take a more active role here. But the next sections, I think, you know, we should probably start with 136 and get into talking about force specifically.

31:54 Mark: I'm fine descending to that level. I mean, I liked your 3 points. I guess there were a few more that I thought needed to be inserted in there. And just what kinds of Stuff we're going to get to talking about law, force being this distinction, the main dialectic between, as I was saying, the force manifest and the force latent, right? The potential and the kinetic energy. We eventually gather these together, sublate them by talking about, well, it's actually the physical law that we just like. Well, everything always falls down, that captures the two things together.

But then once we start talking about that, then we face the issue of how many laws are there and what is the relationship between them. Like, the term law itself becomes problematic. And as we talk about particular forces, like the laws of electromagnetism, then we start wondering about, like, the elements within those, the positive and negative charge. And he has some weird things to say about how necessary or not necessary having a positive and negative charge involved is to electricity. Like, I would think that's the essence of electricity.

But he actually claims no, at least according to some particular stage of this analysis, there's just electricity. It's just a unified phenomenon, and it's just sort of an accident. It's just something that science has found that there happens to be plus and minus within there. And then somewhere shortly after that, the weirdest thing toward the end, we're now talking about the world of laws as a potential for the noumena, right? The world as it really is. It's a Platonic, simple, eternal laws that apply everywhere, as opposed to all the messy stuff that is in phenomena.

And we should talk a lot more about how he deals with Kant here. But the last stage of that is this very wacky thing that's supposed to, I think, undermine the whole idea of there being a noumenal world, the way things really are, as opposed to the Heraclitean mess that is appearance, which is considering the inverted world that maybe actually the noumena is instead of like the perfect calmed form of the phenomena, maybe it's exactly the opposite of that. And I remember when we read Schopenhauer, he was saying things like, well, because there's causality in the perceived world, there can't be causality.

Not that we just don't know what's in the noumena, but there actively has to be the opposite. And I just thought this was really bizarre. But this, at least to me, set up like what this inverted world might be. And so then, as a sort of final step, I think, in considering how we can't decide between these two models of what the noumena are, then we throw away the whole thing and say it's all in our head. And that's when we move to self consciousness. So that was my attempt at a little step by step summary that was only one level more detailed than what Wes just gave.

Are there any more summarial comments about the procedure here before we completely just disappear into this and start going by section by section? Because once we do that, we will never come out.

34:47 Dylan: You just have to feel the force.

34:49 Mark: All right, I will surrender. Please proceed.

34:53 Dylan: 136. That's where he brings up force. That's where to go.

34:56 Wes: So I think one of the things is that force will help us understand all those contradictions, right, between the one and the many, the properties and the medium versus the one by making it dynamic so that what we get is this kind of unity passing into an expression of different properties and then passing back into unity again. So here we start with. In136 is going to tell us that we can explain this mutual dependence of unity and diversity as force. What we previously thought of as a contradiction between one and many will take objective form in this alternation of these vanishing moments between what he calls force proper or force driven back, which he's associating with unity and which we might associate with the push or whatever we like normally intuitively think of as force.

And then the expression of force, whatever. The phenomena are governed by force, right? So the movement of something in a gravitational field, the properties expressed by something that we could think of as being a function of some kind of internal force, that sort of thing. We get these two moments in force that are related to each other. One is hidden, right? It's the force force, the force proper. And then the other is what expresses itself or what is subject to force, which will turn out to be part of force.

36:26 Dylan: You get a little bit of this confusion, I think, when you even first encounter doing classical mechanics, kinematics, Newtonian force stuff, because you get the two examples where Newton's law, force equals mass times acceleration, where the fact that something is accelerating is an indication that a force is acting on it. But then you also get, I'll call it just static forces that nothing's moving but there's tremendous force, like pushing against a wall or the fact that the wall is holding up the ceiling. Nothing's moving, but there are tremendous forces at play.

And so you get that subtlety and that challenge, that there's a aspect of force that is expressly dynamic, that you see it manifest in the motion of things. But you also have that force is not expressly dynamic but sort of hidden in the structure itself, in what is holding things together and keeping things apart. But there is no manifest motion. And what you said, Wes, I thought when articulating, he has both those things. I'm expressing it in a very physics 101 way. But do you have that exact same challenge and just thinking about what the heck do you mean by force in a.

To me, a kind of clear way that he has here expressly dynamic as well as the internal structure that force

37:47 Wes: is expressing us, we're already thinking in terms of something invisible and then in terms of phenomena, right? So if we think of holding the ball, we're going to drop it, but there's force there, right? And there's certainly potential energy and potential movement before I drop the ball. But we think that the earth and ball are acting on each other in some way, that they are at work on each other in some way, even if it's not manifested yet in movement in motion, on the unfolded matters, as Hegel would call it, or in properties. So that's the unity, that's the one that's force proper or force driven back into itself.

And then once we let the ball go, the force expresses itself in the movement of the ball towards the earth. And the earth actually moves a little bit towards the ball too, tiny bit. But so they act on each other, as we'll see, that'll be very important. So that's the expression of force and the unfolding of the properties due to force. And in the beginning, what Hegel wants to sort of emphasize in 136 is that initially we treat these as kind of two substantive separate moments, two different thing like entities almost. And he wants us to dereify.

He wants to do that by talking about how these moments are extremely dependent on each other. And in a way, conceptually they can't be disentangled. We'll see that as we go forward and talk about reciprocity and soliciting. And we can talk about some examples that illustrate that very well. Like pushing on a wall, for instance, to use Kalkavage's example, I want to

39:22 Dylan: make one quick comment reminding us all, a la Seth, that it is in the middle of a dialectic. And so there's this circular pattern we're going through in this sort of metaphysical and understanding the world and how the birth of self consciousness and stuff like that. But it's also the case that there's a kind of habit of convenience that happens. And I think you saw this already in sensuousness and then perception, where there is a way in which you can stop there There is a way in which you can say, well, I have things in the world and it's upon reflecting on them that you realize, well, that's not the whole story.

I'm not going to be able to get everything out of it. And the same thing is true here. Let's take the example of Wes pointed out quite rightly that when you drop the ball, of course the earth moves a little closer to the ball a little bit. And that when you start thinking about the whole system, you really need to keep that in mind. That said, there is this not to jump 130 years ahead, but there's a kind of bracketing that you can do where you take things on their own terms and you have to sort of just keep in the back of your head, well, that's not the whole story.

This is to me, part of the dialectic that's working. There's part of it that's allowing you to really work in place. And then there's the process of going to another stage or another concept or reminding yourself of the whole. That also has to happen as part of generating the understanding. And there's a kind of, for lack of a better terms, levels of understanding that you're going to have. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're obliterating the quote, unquote, lower level of understanding. When you proceed to a higher level of understanding.

I think there might even be something to be said that you need to sit at certain levels of understanding. I don't know that Hegel would say that, but you need to sit at certain levels of understanding that are appropriate for them.

41:13 Wes: If we looked at it as just the ball moving towards the earth and the earth not moving at all, we get an idea of one thing is forced and the other as forcing. And of course that is the picture that we are going to figure out is not the case. Force turns out to be something between two things, but we can't say which one is the forcer and which one is the force. They're both and each one solicits both and each one is conceptually necessary to the other. So this is what he's getting to in 137. So for instance, if you put your hand on the wall and push, you could say, well, the wall is hard and it has this kind of force of resistance in it.

But that's meaningless until it comes into contact with something else that's hard, that has a force of resistance in it. And those two things have to move together. And the coming together of Those two things elicits the hardness in each of those things. It elicits their force and it elicits their expression. Right. So it could elicit expression in the sense of damage to my hand or damage to the wall, or if it were two billiard balls coming together, they would affect each other in ways they would slightly compress and then they would recoil, come back out, bounce back out.

So we get the concepts of the one or the force proper, and then the expression, each side of the equation has both of those things, each force and are forced. And we can't even think of force without that reciprocity.

42:46 Dylan: Yes.

42:47 Wes: Which of course is a reciprocity we'll see in the next section. With consciousness. Right. The reciprocity of two consciousnesses having a force like effect on each other and that self consciousness being a product of those moments.

43:02 Mark: So I wonder if this reciprocity is not in fact, for Hegel, baked in to his introduction of force. So in 136, 136 is a pretty long section, but just within that first paragraph, maybe 15 lines down, I don't know. In other words, the matters posited as independent. In other words, the properties. I think properties is matters. Right. For some reason he puts the term matters in quotes. Like he uses all these weird terms, never puts them in quotes. Matters is in quotes.

43:31 Wes: It was something, some part of the metaphysical conversation of his time or the scientific conversation of his time. But I think it's meant to convey the idea that the properties can be kind of free floating entities.

43:42 Mark: Yeah. So the matters posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity. And this once again reduces itself to unity. So this is all just review from the perception section. But this movement is what is called force. One of its moments, the dispersal of independent matters in their immediate being is the expression of force. But force, taken as that in which they have disappeared, is force proper force, which has been driven back into itself from its expression. So that's the kinetic potential thing.

Sometimes force is exerting something. There's movement involved. Sometimes it's like the house that you're talking about, Dylan. That distinction, you know, seems very basic, but it doesn't in any obvious way to me flow out of the distinction between the chalk having redness and it having shape and it having texture. And the independence of those properties, or matters as he is calling them, has a dialectical movement in our conception of the piece of chalk that we're considering it as one and then as Many and then as one. And it's actually that movement from the one to the many, the one.

Let's call that force. This is like a very substantial explanation, a background for where we get this idea. Somehow that seems like a basic thing in physics that has nothing to do with the diversity properties. Is that uncharitable, or do you actually see the logic here?

45:02 Wes: It's related to the concept of unity and diversity in the sense that a force, right, is a unified and even invisible. So unified, it's invisible center that organizes a lot of different phenomena around itself, right? And ultimately it becomes law. It becomes something very simple, right? We can create an equation of. For the falling of an object to the Earth or for the gravitational pull between two objects. And that's a single static equation. That's unity. That's oneness in a diversity of expression, right? The diversity of expression being all the phenomena that behave in that way and according to that law, or in specific circumstances, according to the forces that are doing the work.

So the unfolding of the matters of the properties in this case, does that make sense? You give yourself a way of thinking about this relationship between unity and the diversity properties, which is not simply medieval substance ontology or whatever, right? The relation is not one of properties and hearing in a substrate or however you want to think of it. It is something dynamic, involving force. In this case, maybe you could read it as a weird conflation between those two things, between this kind of logical conception and then the physics conception.

Because what he's trying to get at is the sense in which we can see the two moments, the unity and the diversity, vanishing back and forth into each other. Because as we'll see, the expression of force will call upon force itself.

46:35 Mark: I certainly never, unless I'm reading the phenomenology or doing similar epistemological analyses, don't actually have this phenomenological experience of, oh, is the thing an also, but now it's a one, and now it's an also, and now it's a one. So if he wants to make an analogy between that switching back and forth between those two conceptions of an object and what you were just talking about, and switching back and forth between the conceptions of a force as potential and as expressed, and that that also, as you were saying, expresses something about unity and diversity, that's a fine analogy as far as I'm concerned. I don't know. Did you feel, as a point to maybe end part one on here, like Dylan, while you were reading this, did you feel like this is either a revolutionary and cruel or a just simply wrongheaded account of the conceptual or physical origins of force.

47:22 Wes: Can I say one more thing though?

47:23 Mark: Yeah.

47:24 Wes: Just relating the whole ontology, metaphysics stuff to science. One important connection, right, is that we will come to see properties as emergent upon scientific essences, right? And we can think of this in terms of secondary qualities or just in terms of ontological emergence. But we say, why is water clear and have the consistency that it does? Well, it's because of a certain underlying set of forces which we talk about as the interaction of molecules and atoms and so on. So the matters, the properties of things are a product ultimately of force. Whether we want to think about that as emergence on top of the atomic structure of things, or whether we want to think about it as the interaction between things in themselves and our psyches. Those are two different ways of thinking about it, but they both involve force.

48:13 Dylan: I do think that he is thinking more about what the content of the term force has to mean, even in the context of a straight up, I'll call it straight up physical explanation and expressing it. And I think that he means something more than an analogy. I think that he means it as specific as the kind of emergence that Wes is talking about. And it may be that it becomes more analogical when you're talking about abstract properties. That's where I hear you're wondering if you're being uncharitable and asking the question about his use of the term and the development of it as an analogy.

Maybe for solving the metaphysical problems about the chalk and the white and the properties there. Why would you call that force at all? I guess I'd want to think a little bit more about whether it's purely analogical. I suspect he doesn't mean it as purely analogical. I suspect he means it that if you understand what force has to mean about interaction and the thing that we're referring to when we're talking about interaction, then it's not analogical that requires more explanation.

49:22 Mark: Yes, well, and eventually I think we have to get to a Schelling like account of science that yes, we want to be able to do physical science. We're going to talk in this chapter about explanations. Explanations are just self consciousness dealing with itself. That's a very Schelling like thing to say. And it was bizarre when we did it in Schelling. And until we like read his whole philosophy of science book or some representative sample of it, I don't know that I will really be able to make sense of it. But at least I'm seeing something more concrete in Hegel about maybe the relationship between descriptive ontology as it shows up in our experience that ultimately ends up being navel gazing, self conscious experience and traditional scientific explanation that we assume before reading Hegel has to be set on a dogmatic, materialist, philosophical foundation.

But really it turns out that the practical doings of science and experimenting and giving explanations and things can be put in any variety of ontological, metaphysical, wider pictures, right? You could still be a Berkeleyan and think everything is ideas in the mind of God, and you could still do science exactly the way that you were doing it before. You know, in a way Bacon would be happy with. So we're just getting some more detail here of yeah, okay, well what this means in this section of this book is that the description of what you might have taken to be a power in a thing, right, a force, is in the same way again that Hume says it's ultimately in the mind.

Well, it is something that is taking place in the mind that is very much related to the mental operation of how we attach properties to substances, et cetera, which likewise substances are not going to be things that are objective out in the world. They're all going to be mental furniture being rearranged in various ways, at least at this stage. And if you want to hear more, well, I'm sure we'll actually do some philosophy of science in one of these episodes coming up. We've discussed that so we can return to this topic if you want to hear more about this text, Force and the Understanding we're going to have to listen to Part two so supporters, that will be the next thing in your feed if you just subscribed via the new Apple subscription service, and you're not going to see that showing up in there until next week.

Supposedly those 10 minute previews just magically transform into the nearly hour long full Part two. If you're not seeing that, maybe just quit out of the app and refresh it or something like that. There are still, I think, working some bugs out, but in any case go check it out.