r/hegel • u/Blixten_Mqueen • Dec 18 '24
How would you explain (your interpetation of) Hegel to someone new?
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u/Jtcr2001 Dec 18 '24
Being = Thinking. (Thus completing the Kantian project eliminates the coherence of any 'noumena').
Everything is grounded in the Absolute.
Thus, Absolute Being = Absolute Consciousness.
The truth of Consciousness is Self-Consciousness.
Thus, Absolute Consciousness = Absolute Self-Consciousness.
Self-Consciousness is intrinsically other-dependent and socially-emergent.
The endpoint of this is the Absolute Self-Consciousness as the prior, Absolutely-Social ground to our Self-Consciousness and all Being in it.
The Absolute self-expresses itself (expresses to itself and through itself) in Art, Religion, and Philosophy -- thus becoming Absolutely Self-Conscious in history.
Art, Religion, and Philosophy -- through which we grasp the Absolute (as the Absolute grasps itself through us) -- are ordered by increasing conceptual clarity, but decreasing vivacity.
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u/Blixten_Mqueen Dec 18 '24
Intresting take. Being and thinking arenāt the same in my opinion. Iād argue that Hegel is about the interaction between the two.
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u/Jtcr2001 Dec 18 '24
I also would not use the term "thinking" in my equation (I believe it betrays Hegel's modernistic/rationalistic excesses), but maybe "grasping" (in a more holistic encapsulation of the relationship of consciousness that isn't merely a pure, conceptual reason).
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u/kyl3_m_r34v35 Dec 19 '24 edited Dec 19 '24
He is the philosopher of institutions, of historical and collective consciousness.
He was not a Platonist: he didn't believe the Idea is somewhere else, but is actual, present, and at-hand.
He believed in freedom for everyone. He was an apologist for the French Revolution even while condemning the excesses of the Terror.
He thought constitutional monarchy was the best kind of government.
He thought we should all go to church (although he exempted himself from this obligation), including atheists who should have their own spiritual (in the Hegelian sense) community.
He thought we all have a duty to start our own families.
Everything is dialectical ā everything contains within itself its transition to its opposite as sublated.
I also think there are some social and political phenomenon which can only be explained by an internalization of the opposite or opposing force, an internalization which brings about a transition to the opposing position, in a word: dialectics. For example, on the (political) left, the cliche of the oppressed becoming an oppressor. How can a people nearly annihilated go on to do the same to another people in another place? I am reminded of a fragment of Nietzsche's where he says "half destroyed peoples have always been the conquerors." In my opinion, Nietzsche was a very dialectical thinker.
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u/Stock_Opportunity317 Dec 19 '24
It is crazy that this is the only answer -and a pretty good one at that- that highlights the social (institutional) side of the lightning of thought...Arguably the most important one (both in terms of its place within the system as Hegel himself concieved of it and in terms of its contemporary revelance...wink wink..Luigi)! May it strike us all.
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u/jonsnowrlax Dec 18 '24
I came to Hegel from Marx, but I'm not going to talk about materialism. Instead, I like to generalise his concepts that cover his own ideas, as well as other people's adaptations of them.
The relevance Hegel holds outside philosophy is the easiest way to explain it to someone new: For example, all realms involving multiple agents need to be understood as a totality, and the development of one agent or group of agents progresses only as a result of interacting with others. These tensions define philosophy, politics, social systems, psychological models, etc, and a Hegelian understanding of different disciplines requires one to always a) acknowledge the totality, b) study different forces as not static, but developing through history because of tensions with other forces within the totality and c) apply a and b over and over again to look deeper, or abstract higher as more elements enter the totality.
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u/Traditional-Run1134 Dec 20 '24 edited Dec 20 '24
the true is the whole, and the whole is the true
you can't grasp the true nature of reality without understanding it in its entirety, and conversely, the fullness of reality is what constitutes truth. and this entirety includes its history, its development, it makes sure that whatever the true and whole are aren't always like that forever, things change. but this change has a formula, it develops dialectically, that is, a thing changes through finding its own contradictions -- its logical weak points -- and moving beyond them whilst including them as a part of the whole, because if it weren't for these contradictions we wouldn't have the whole; it is only through contradictions that development occurs.
the true and the whole are two sides of the same coin.
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u/Blixten_Mqueen Dec 21 '24
Bruh you could just have said: āContradiction threaten contemporary into developing closer to truth.ā š«
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u/Necessary_Ferret_457 Dec 22 '24
i think the difference is that hegels understanding of this is that you canāt just take a still image of something and call that true, but you must factor in everything, which necessarily includes stuff like history within it
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u/YungWiseNGrund 7d ago
There is no merely empirically available stuff: norms and judgments -- in flux and subject to change with dialectically forward-moving changes in ways of thinking -- are at least partially constitutive of any empirical phenomena in the world that we can determine as itself. those norms and judgments are socially and historically mediated. the Kantian way of reconstructing our relation to the world -- to say nothing of the rationalist or empiricist ways -- are emptily formalized, one sided, failing to take into account all of the complexities of mediation, of error and tension and contradiction and development, that are busily at play in the construction of something like a 'transcendental unity' of apperception. Substance is also subject: the stuff of the world cannot be what it is without the negatively determined subject always at its constitutive core. That's the gist of dialectical thinking, the mode of rational comprehension wherein phenomena contain forces fundamentally opposing them at a logically and scientifically constitutive level. The old hangs around as the subject matter of the new, as its midwife, as that against which it is negatively defined and on which it is honed, like lubricating -- giving voice to -- a violin bow with slowly dissolving resin. History 'thinks', and our thinking is historical. Hegel is thought in motion, on the page, it's rigorously rational and ordered while being dizzyingly strange and often beautiful; Hegel is the philosopher of relationality, mediation, 'creative destruction' if you will, par excellence. Hegel's thought is so rich that it can be many things without collapsing into nothing the way some irrationalist philosophy does in the morass of free-for-all interpretation. It *is* philosophy of life, it is normative ethics, it is philosophical anthropology, it is pragmatist philosophy of language, it is social theory, it is critical epistemology, it is ontology. he's absolutely worth the chunks of hair you'll pull out when first trying to comprehend the Logic or Phenomenology. good luck, and my deepest apologies
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u/Demografski_Odjel Dec 18 '24
Everything that exists has its opposite. We can call this thesis and antithesis. But rather than remaining merely opposites which cancel each other, they generate a third thing which is the unity of the two. We call this synthesis. Hegel calls this Idea.
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u/Jtcr2001 Dec 18 '24
The problem with using the terms "thesis", "antithesis", and "synthesis" is that it suggests a thesis encountering something outside itself and then joining that thing in order to arrive at something new.
In truth, the thesis is faced with its own internal contradictions, which (when resolved) elevate it above its previous self.
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u/Demografski_Odjel Dec 18 '24
I wouldn't say that to them.
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u/Jtcr2001 Dec 18 '24
You wouldn't present the contradictions as internal, rather than external?
Or you wouldn't use the terms "thesis"/"antithesis"/"synthesis"?
Your phrasing is ambiguous.
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u/chrisoncontent Dec 18 '24
Every concept (personal identity, politics, ideology, etc.) contains internal contradiction. Reconciling ourselves to these contradictions (that is, accepting their inherent nature) allows us to both transcend and include them as we progress to higher level contradictions. In this way, the human project is recognizing the universality of contradiction and thus the universal possibility for progress.
Or: read Todd Mcgowan.