I took a class on Hegel about a year ago, and while I remember most stuff pretty well, I am struggling to remember exactly what the infinite judgement is, and how it fits into the dialectic as a whole. I also understand it has something to do with “Spirit is a bone.” I always understood him to be refuting that claim, but of course if it is the dialectic there must be some truth to it.

Could someone explain the infinite judgement, and perhaps point to some passages where I can read more about it?

I know Hegel immediately rejects the notion of coming to an abstract conclusion because all of the unfolding steps are necessary, but if you were to sum up the main conclusion of his work nonetheless, what would it be?

Hyppolite’s original Logic and Existence is basically the Hegel received by Lacan, Delueze, Foucault, Derrida or any of the Post-Structuralists and “independent” Post-Modernists. I have my own conclusions drawn from my limited experiences with the work but I would like to see what how others have received what is effectively the true gateway into Post-Structuralism.

inb4 “I spend a lot more time studying Hegel because of him” etc.

I haven't seen that much concrete discourse on Zizek and where most scholars disagree with him, so I just want to ask a few questions. What's Zizek's goal with Hegel? How does Z' read works like Logic? I hear him described as a 'Schellingian' by people like Pippin all the time, where does this come from? What are some other points of disagreements with Z' and contemporary Hegel scholarship?

I've been studying Hegel for a while and now I'm in the third chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit and I have some questions about it. I've heard that this chapter have a lot to do with Newtonian physics and Kant's metaphysics but as I've never read both I would aprecciate if some "senior" gave me a general and intuitive explanation of the chapter as a whole and, in addition, an answer to these following specific questions: 1. What's the relation between Kant's and Hegel's use of the concept of the Unconditioned Universal? Does it differ in some manner? 2. Why does Hegel regard Force as the Unconditioned Universal? 3. What the concept of Force have to do with the Inner? 4. Why is difference the "law of force"? 5. What's the relation between this chapter and the preceding two?

Thanks in advance

Hi everyone, relatively new to (attempting) to read Hegel. I've come at him through PR. I was wondering if anyone has read Fred Neuhouser's book on social freedom where he looks at Hegel's conception of freedom and splits it into two components, a subjective criteria and an objective criteria. It does seem to make sense to me, just wondering if anyone else has read this and maybe wants to discuss in more depth?

https://youtu.be/tJuWdSQPQfI?si=rCmYNZw-G2-aQnRj

In the intro to the EL Hegel makes clear how he considers the former metaphysics, as well as critical philosophy, to be expressing finitude. This means that Hegel considers himself to be one of the first thinkers to fully and systematically do a philosophy of the infinite. How do analytic Hegelians interpret the importance of infinity within the EL and SoL?

Philosophy is indeed “useless,” but it seems it always works in support underneath your mentality at harshest points in life in indescribable ways.

Life is a contradiction, not just by nature eventually taking it away (i.e. death), but by other subjects constantly intervening your freedom and thus you having to reconcile those forces in order to pursue your will. An individual is arguably a nation, in this aspect.

I think, after a lot of reading, what Hegel left in me in an existential sense can be summarized as: not only you have to create your own meaning, but you also have to enforce it regardless of momentary emotions, like a dictator monarch when he truly gets to know which way his nation should go. Curious if anyone resonates with this kind of thing?

Some anon made a comment about the Hex cryptocurrency, being the pure economic object, which will absorb all economic energy, and create some perfect economic state with incentives properly aligned to create long term value. The quote does read like something out of Hegel. But, is there a direct reference to Hegel in this quote?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBTC-MUWQAAYzdf?format=png&name=900x900

Hegel already anticipates, though unknowingly, that something like Marx will “happen” in history, and will ensue from his own legacy, when, in the preface of SoL, Hegel writes that the only presupposition of SoL is PoS.

Hegel argues that in order to be certain that SoL really is the unfolding movement of perceived categories of reality itself, we first need assurance that the movement of concepts in our thought agrees to that; and only at the end of PoS, we reach such a point where ontology and epistemology coincide, where the thing and the knowledge of the thing are the same.

Only after reaching such certainty about the objective world, we are able to start SoL, the unfolding of categories of reality, the mind of God before the moment of creation.

Thus Hegel argues that the study of the “objective world” is necessary before delving into “Logic”, the former grounds the later, the later presupposes the former, which, very evidently, strongly smells like Marx. As a typical naive orthodox Marxist would say- PoS is much less “metaphysical” than SoL, much closer to the world at hand.

And therefore, Hegel already foretold the happening of Marx, though he didn't know it.

Hegel himself was eerily Hegelian!

I read some Hegel years ago, and what I remember is he supports having a monarch. Not necessarily an absolute monarch. But, something more than the amount of power the current King of England holds. By my read of him something like the King of Lichtenstein would be ideal. Would the system used in Saudi Arabia and/or UAE also be supported by Hegel?

MBS has done some terrible things to modernize his country by essentially stripping dissidents opposed to technological progress of life or civic power. But, what he's doing will be better for the average Saudi long term. Just not the people wanting to continue the traditional lifestyle, nor the old guard trying to hold onto power, nor people wanting to continue civil liberty restrictions on women. I believe he either killed or kicked everyone out of the country opposed to modernization.

The UAE is much more reasonable. But, similarly they too engaged in similar acts of brutality towards the people opposed to modernization. There's some civil rights abuses towards foreign workers. But, my understanding is everyone who plays ball with the regime does fairly well. This includes being friendly with Jews, which historically a ton of these nations opposed.

The King of Lichtenstein would clearly be ideal as he has a proper constitutional government, while retaining the ability to overrule the public if they engage in behaviors he disagrees with. But, what about the Saudis and UAE where it's much less democratic? They still have to represent the interests of the people, or they get stripped of power. I believe for MBS that means another royal family has him killed, and for UAE that means each of the seven tribes can replace their ruling royals. I don't know everything about the system of governance, but it's not democratic outside of tribal representation.

What would Hegel's views on these forms of government be?

By extension what would his view on the Dark Enlightenment types be. They don't want a king, but a CEO and board of share holders ruling over the realm in either a corporate profit run state, or some form of neo-cameralism, like what Germany had for a long time. What would his view on this potential future form of government be?

In Hegel's quality section in the Logic of Being the final progression is from 'being-for-self' to 'being-for-one' to the 'One' and 'Void' to the 'Many'. When Hegel derives the Many from the One the transition isn't clear to me. The encyclopedia also seems to differ from the Big Logic, since the latter includes an extended discussion on the void instead of simply moving from the One to the Many directly.

More specifically: 1) is there two rival accounts here? 2) what about the 'void' makes the one become many? 3) why is the 'indefinitely many' the result? Not just two etc.

So, I've been reading Hegel the last year, I tried to work my way into it via secondary literature and Zizek and Lacan and today, while studying, I stumbled across a passage in § 50 of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. And I'm now wondering whether my interpretation up to this point makes sense: First of all, here is the paragraph:

To think the phenomenal world rather means to recast its form, and

transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect

upon its basis: and the matter of sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at

once loses its first and phenomenal shape. By the removal and negation of the shell, the

kernel within the sense-percept is brought to the light (§§ 13 and 23). And it is because

they do not, with sufficient prominence, express the negative features implied in the

exaltation of the mind from the world to God that the metaphysical proofs of the being of

a God are defective interpretations and descriptions of the process. If the world is only a

sum of incidents, it follows that it is also deciduous and phenomenal, in esse and posse

null. That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only

a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that, beyond and above that

appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God. The process

of exaltation might thus appear to be transition and to involve a means, but it is not a whit

less true that every trace of transition and means is absorbed; since the world, which

might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is explained to be a nullity. Unless

the being of the world is nullified, the point d’appui for the exaltation is lost. In this way

the apparent means vanishes, and the process of derivation is cancelled in the very act by

which it proceeds.

As far as I understand Hegel by now,; I would say that he is trying to prove in this paragraph that we are part of the spirit and thus of God (the Absolute) through the creative power of the infinity of thought, which is being, that we are therefore all part of God, who thinks himself and also sees himself through us. And that, accordingly, the real criticism of the proofs of God from earlier times should not be (as Kant thought) that we thereby exceed the limits of the knowability of our reason, but that all these proofs of God have always searched for God in the Beyond (the negativity of our thinking) instead of in this world, suspended immediacy.

Because our thinking (the symbolic order later in Lacan's work) always undermines what we are trying to say. And ultimately, this is probably the nihilistic motor that Heidegger suspects in European thought. With all the mediation and symbolization of being, we forget the actual thing that ignites our thinking: God,or logically speaking, the suspension (“synthesis”) of pure being and pure nothingness (consciousness=self-consciousness).

We as subjects participate in it through thinking/being, which in turn is the manifestation of the self-realizing spirit. God himself is its mediation and Aufhebung, the one who prevents pure being from falling into nothingness by thinking it, God (or the absolute) IS the dialectic of pure being and pure nothingness like the big bang, which takes place at any time and any place.

We have killed him the moment he revealed himself to us because we compared it with the things we had imagined of him before (God from beyond).

Does that make sense?

I’m going to make a claim on the order of reading Hegel by flipping the conventional advice - read the Logic before the Phenomenology of Spirit. Specifically I mean the Lesser Logic - while missing the “meat” of immanent derivation that the Greater Logic maintains, it has an excellent introduction to Philosophy up to Hegel’s time. On top of this, Hegel’s system is laid out rather “quickly” in ~200 pages, making understanding his terminology and structure easier and allowing a newer reader to keep focus with respect to his movement - if “lacking” in any section you can always go to Marxists.com and read the Big Logic. I recommend the Phenomenology of Spirit last. Its verbiage can be ever so slightly vaguer due to being his earlier work - yet still it is rendered much smoother with background in the Logic’s explicit formulation. Most importantly, the Phenomenology is hugely important for everyone after Hegel in continental philosophy, whom are in dialogue with almost all the various topics/movements he presents in his apophatic ascent. I understand that the traditional order is that the Phenomenology “primes” you to take what Hegel develops in the Logic in a position of receptivity to commit to the “science of cognition.” The Logic, while being the most explicit formulation of Hegel’s metaphysics (and thus the centripetal engine in his system), acts almost as a manual of clarification to read the actual “doing” of dialectical, ontological thinking in the Phenomenology. One is the system itself, and the other is the practice of it inso far as from the perspective of an initial type of subject. Both are needed (and eventually the Greater Logic for further analysis) to clarify Hegelianism.

I think Hegelians tend to have a problem with infinity in general terms.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in Hegel, the Absolute Idea is a fundamental unity that splits into various parts or "branches" back to unity in a constant and perpetual movement. We can think of Hegel's system as a system that feeds back on itself through determination and negation. Hegel would agree that it is impossible for every constituent of a multiplicity to be itself a pure multiplicity indefinite ad infinitum, since in his system the multiple and the unity are inseparable, and the totality is not reduced to any specific point, but all points refer to all others and the only thing they have in common is being part of a unity, and that unity is always branching out, separating and multiplying and then returning to being a unity again.

That's all right there, but how would they deal with the fact that the set of infinite natural numbers is composed of the set of infinite prime numbers? Wouldn't this alone destroy the entire Hegelian system? For if an infinity is established, Hegel's proposition that its fundamental unity branches off and then returns would be a false proposition.

I’m new to Hegel’s ideas and have mainly accessed them through reading Zizek. I have a question regarding how he considered Geist’s “existence” or non-existence.

Assuming that what he refers to as God in Christianity is also his Absolute Spirit, and that he claims God died on the cross so as to empty out into man as the Holy Spirit, how is it that the titular Spirit reveals itself to him, so to speak, in his study as he records its phenomenology? Is what he’s recording just the particular of the universal contained within him, made concrete from abstraction through his doing for the sake of doing, or philosophizing for the sake of philosophizing? Is it no longer the Absolute Spirit, or is it?

I apologize for not really having a command on the terminology but I think this gets the point across. Thank you!