Status Updates From Hegel's Ladder (Vol 1 & 2)

Wow this is actually making me grasp the "Force and Understanding" section. Its a miracle. This might be the best commentary in english.

For several years, [Hegel] expounded religion philosophically as the highest mode of human experience because he regarded the intuitive leap to the awareness of living, moving, and having one’s being in God as the sine qua non of all speculative insight.

...embodied in Diotima; and when she restores Hyperion’s sense of natural harmony at one point, he says to her: “I am become thy equal and divinity plays with divinity now, as children play with one another.”

Hölderlin’s Hyperion portrays the “seriousness, suffering and labor” of the human negative. But it falls short of true “patience,” and it can easily be read (or misread) as beginning from an ideal union with God (or Nature) in which there is no suffering and returning to a union in which the suffering and labor is drowned and forgotten. The ideal union is represented and...

...But the result does seem to be negative. Like Locke clearing the ground for Newton’s methods, the Phenomenology makes a clean slate for a new science of logic. But that is not all that it does. It is a science in its own right; and the critical part of the Preface, which now follows, shows us (in an empirical way) why it is necessary.

...Why can we not say goodbye to all that and embark joyfully on a new life in the speculative kingdom of absolute truth? From Hegel’s earlier comments about the Preface itself, and about how the “result” must not be sundered from its total process of development, we can readily supply our own answer. Our survey of the thematic content of the science has already shown that it is by no means merely a negative...

As a critical introduction to “Science,” the Phenomenology appears to the naïve reader simply as a great spring-cleaning operation. To make ironic use of a famous phrase of Locke’s, Hegel is engaged in “clearing away rubbish” (quite prominently the rubbish of John Locke and his “incomparable Mr. Newton”). But why can we not follow the precept of Jesus and let the dead bury their dead? Why can we not say...

Every human being that comes into the world is “lighted by the true light.” But to say that this is “God’s light” is only to say that it is the identical light that makes all of us human, and makes all of our experience human experience—that is, potentially rational experience, the experience that can express itself in human words.

...but now the thinking self must recognize itself as the motion of the world as “Spirit”—the total motion within which both the world (as Nature) and the self (as self-conscious thinking) are defined.

...He presents it here (as later in the logical introduction for the Encyclopedia of 1827) as the need to abandon the claim that the thinking self is a separate substance. The self must lose its status as a fixed point and recognize itself as a moment. Fichte changed the almighty “fulguration” of the Leibnizian God into the free self ’s philosophically conscious awareness of being a self-fixing point;..

To bring life and fluidity back into the eternal fixity of the realm of the Ego as the moral Understanding (the intelligible or supersensible world of speculation from Descartes to Fichte) is the function of Hegel’s dialectic. Thus, the description of “how thoughts become fluid” here is Hegel’s first logical definition of the dialectic in the Phenomenology....

...Then we shall arrive in the sphere of the Gedanken that are truly Begriffe.

...virtually all other Lockean ideas, except the very simplest and most completely determinate ones, such as “this precise shade of red,” must do the same. The contradictory character which attaches to the Gedanke as a Vorstellung will be overcome only when we realize that pure thoughts are not to be conceived as representative sign-functions at all. Then we shall...

Hegel uses Vorstellung for any and every piece of mental furniture that is conceived in the Lockean representative way. But any representation that has to serve in a dialectical (or internally contradictory) way is also a Gedanke proper, by virtue of its dialectical range of reference. Locke’s “abstract ideas” are Gedanken because they are explicitly supposed to embrace a range of “distincts”...

...”intellectual intuition,” and how to display the “biography of God” in the history of human religious experience. In the Phenomenology—after the birth of Spirit proper through the initial transition from sense to intellect—these two problems coincide. The “biography of God” is the content, and the logical transition is the form that works itself out “behind the back” of the evolving religious consciousness.

It is clear that Hegel was troubled by the problem of introducing the Absolute from 1801 onwards, and this was the problem of his new “logic” from the first (as distinct from the “metaphysics” of the Identity Philosophy). The Phenomenology is the final outcome of a long struggle with the two problems (originally quite distinct) of how to make the transition from Kant’s “critical logic” to...

...(For the origins of Hegel’s philosophical concept of the whole in the Parmenides of Plato see F. Chiereghin, 1984.)

...But the elementary facts are that every Concept is a “whole” that “returns to itself ” out of its division into a Judgment—a unity of opposites—and that every “presentation” of the System (the Phenomenology itself being one of two or, more properly, three such) is a circle of these conceptual circles that closes upon itself....

...It ought to be obvious from the lowly position and elementary treatment of “whole and parts” in the logic of Essence that this dictum refers to a different kind of “wholeness.” The best treatment of the highly complex sense in which Hegel’s system is a whole is that of L. B. Puntel (1973—usefully reviewed by M. Westphal, 1983)....

...The astonishing fact that it is not in any English-language dictionary of quotations testifies to the philosophical illiteracy of Anglophone literary scholars. It is often cited as “The Truth is the Whole,”—which facilitates the weaving of neo-Platonic fantasies and the spinning of “absolute coherence” webs. It ought to be obvious from the lowly position and elementary treatment of “whole and parts” in the...

“The true is the whole, the self-actualization of the essence.”
Hegel

The [above] sentence...is perhaps the most famous sentence in Hegel—although, like other tags that have become too familiar, it is often misquoted. It is even more frequently misused or misunderstood. Much of the ink spilled on it has gone to waste....

What is claimed in terms of logic...is that a self-thinking substance must necessarily be a community of rational equals within the natural order who recognize themselves in one another as a spiritual community that transcends that order. This is Hegel’s concept of “Spirit.”

...We should take careful note that the Preface is here instructing us to study the Phenomenology itself as a circle.

Neither Fichte’s self-positing Ego nor the Absolute Identity of Schelling properly satisfies Hegel’s definition of das Wahre here. The circular progress that removes the presupposed character of its beginning by returning to it as the final goal, the philosophy that is in this sense “presuppositionless,” is his own systematic thought. We should take careful note that the Preface is here instructing...