Half Hour Hegel: The Complete Phenomenology of Spirit (Introduction, sec. 84-86)
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- Опубликовано: 19 сен 2024
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In this thirty-seventh video in the new series on G.W.F. Hegel's great early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, I read and comment on the eighty-fourth, eighty-fifth, and eighty-sixth paragraphs of the text, continuing our study of the Introduction.
In these three paragraphs, Hegel plays out a dialectic that turns out to occur within consciousness, without consciousness at first being aware of this -- elaborating his idealistic standpoint. What was supposedly in-itself, i.e. outside of consciousness is actually an in-itself for-consciousness, i.e. within the scope of consciousness.
It is possible for us to approach either side of the dialectical relationship between Notion and Object -- using one as the standard for the other, and then switching to the alternative viewpoint.
Hegel draws out the implications of this interplay within consciousness. We do not need to make a contribution of our own at this point. In fact to do so would be deleterious. Rather, we ought to observe, to look on and watch the long developing process unfold itself. We are engaged in the study of the Experience of consciousness, a historical process that antedates us as individuals in the present.
In this video series, I will be working through the entire Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph -- for each one, first reading the paragraph, and then commenting on what Hegel is doing, referencing, discussing, etc. in that paragraph.
This series is designed to provide an innovative digital resource that will assist students, lifelong learners, professionals, and even other philosophers in studying this classic work by Hegel for generations to come. If you'd like to support this project -- and also receive some rewards for your support -- please contribute! - / drgbsadler
I'll be using and referencing the A.V. Miller English-language translation of the Phenomenology, which is available here: amzn.to/1jDUI6w
The introductory music for the video is: Johann Sebastian Bach, Partita in D minor for solo violin, is available in the public domain, and can be found at musopen.org.
#Hegel #Phenomenology #Philosophy #Idealism #German #Dialectic #Spirit #Absolute #Knowledge #History
To see someone work with the text with as much depth and detail as you have over the course of several years is so encouraging to someone who's reading it for the first time. Appreciate these videos immensely.
Glad to read it. No end in sight for these. . at least for several more years. . .
Genuinely mind-expanding.
I am studying the Phenomenology on my own and I had so much trouble understanding these sections, even after going through reading guides. Now, after watching your lesson, all three sections are so much clearer! I knew something important was happening in these paragraphs and thanks to you I can now appreciate them. I treasure your work, Dr. Sadler!
Glad the videos are helpful for you!
Who needs drugs when you have Hegel?
why not bth
The second-to-last video installation for the Introduction. . . one more to go! (fortunately, I'd uploaded this before the crash)
thank you
Gregory B. Sadler
Whooah! It's a good thing it makes sense when you re-wind it. Might take a few more re-winds to properly sink in but it's really good stuff.
Thank you!
Thank you so much for the wonderful series! At the risk of babbling nonsense, I just wanted to comment with some resonances I'm seeing with my favorite author, Hermann Melville.
All this talk of objects, knowledge, and the in-itself, reminds me of a wonderful quote from Moby Dick (spoken by Ahab): "Hark ye yet again-the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?" Ahab seems to be taking the wrong approach to finding truth, according to Hegel (and according to the result Ahab attains!). I guess Hegel would say that the distinction Ahab makes is actually within consciousness, and that no "thrusting" is needed and we should instead simply observe (which, coincidentally, is how Ishmael approaches life).
Another fun Hegelian-ish quote from Melville's correspondence: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself". Because of this quote, I often use the verb "unfolding" to describe how I feel in moments of growth and learning, so I immediately felt in tune with this dynamical aspect of Hegel's approach. I feel that I'm unfolding again thanks to this series, so one last time: Thank you!
Thank you so much for this! These videos have been immeasurably helpful, and I know I'm not alone in saying these videos are a real, genuine help. Keep it up! I'm excited every week.
Glad they've been useful for you. You're welcome!
that was a beautiful lecture and a hot plot twist
You're just getting started. Many more ahead
Elegant explanations, truly.
Thanks!
I know it's important to read Hegel as Hegel, to see what HE is actually saying, but I am really struck by the kind of continuity at work here. At first this seems totally mind blowing, but then I remember statements from those like Augustine in Book 10 of confessions, who talks about how God is WITHIN him, within his memory, and his process of "remembering God" unveils the truth about what God really is.
Well, if Hegel is right about Spirit, reading Hegel as Hegel means trying to see how he is articulating something much larger than just his own consciousness
Dr. Sadler, I wish that there were more illustrations for the first object of in-itself and the second object of the being for the consciousness of the in-itself.
In Hegel’s text of #84, it seems that the first object will inevitably become the second object. I think of two possible illustrations though they derive from your lectures:
1) our initial understanding of philosophical texts would be found inadequate or wrong if we continue studying. In this case, we arrive at the second object as we become aware of some misunderstanding on our part, but it also entails that we have formed a certain new knowledge and criterion by which we judge the falsity of our past understanding.
2) when we know a person at first sight, she is in itself a first object. But after getting along for some time, we acquire some in-depth knowledge of her without fully grasping her in totality. In Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the climax comes when DiCaprio tells his late wife in his bottom consciousness that he knows that she is, after all, a product of his imagination. However she resembles his conception of her, she is just not her.
DiCaprio’s consciousness (deeper than the bottom?) seems to discover the distinction between the in-itself and the being for consciousness. Which moment comes first? If we follow Hegel, then we would say that he realize his limitedness in the consciousness before applying that knowledge (negativity) to his wife. The epiphany then does not come from the consciousness’ recognition of alien quality outside of it. But still, what makes one realize his limitedness in the first place? And can we arrive at a final knowledge of anything given that the time never stops and things change?
You might be expecting a bit too much out of a few paragraphs. There's about 800 or so in this work, so you might see a few more examples
Some of these videos seem unnecessarily lengthy. For example, the previous video spent (what I felt was) too much time providing examples for what "criterion" is, when that concept isn't too difficult.
That being said, this video absolutely nails it. I feel like these sections are, in a way, the 'heart' of Hegel, really the first time he gets to that main point of everything being under consciousness. And you're illustrations cleared up all my confusions. So bravo and such.
+Michael Chikos Glad you enjoyed the video after all . . .
+Gregory B. Sadler
I have to apologize for my last comment, that was a really back-handed compliment. What I meant to get across was, after the previous video, I was losing faith in the video series, then this one was really really really good. That still sounds like a back handed compliment.
Thank you for taking the time to make these and keep up the good work.
Like this is definitely a moment of hiding behind internet anonymity to play the role of critic or something. Which is insulting to you because I've been depending on these videos the past couple of weeks, you've been putting a lot of effort into these, and you're still engaging with them/making the vids.
It's quite all right
re:sec 86. so the first in-itself object is the determinate nothingness upon which the second object for us emerges; or, (to put it in other words)the first object is negated in the positive Hegailan sense of sublated.
When I was reading Kant's Critique I was very much bothered by his distinction between a priori and a posteriori and I was glad to see you expound upon the strange distinction between abstract thought and experience- I think thought is an experience! All the examples of a prioris given are always requiring some level of experience in order to have those thoughts!
Yes, there's quite a few thinkers that point out that thinking is an experience, and indeed a kind of action as well
Kant himself acknowledges the necessity of experience for thought, as that which starts the engine, basically. His basic argument is that that does not entail that every thought deal with empirical content.
for kant, priori knowledge such as math does not need experience because we already have an apparatus for that knowledge to be possible at all. For him geometry requires space, and space, again for him, is an inuition; it is what makes experience possible at all. You know space not by experience but know it because it is what makes experience possible at all for the "I"
It seems to me that Hegel is saying that the in-itself vs for-another distinction is a consequence of how consciousness itself functions. This is because consciousness is "consciousness of the object" AND "consciousness of itself" as knowledge of the object. This split (which is a formal consequence of consciousness) then gets misattributed to the object itself (the Kantian thing-in-itself for example) - but Hegel is saying no, it's because of our human form of consciousness (it's negativity). Therefore, the true 'in-itself' is not some object totally independent of our consciousness, but rather the object itself within the dialectical movement of consciousness ("what experience has made of it"). Am I reading this correctly?
I'm sorry, it remains unclear to me why we have two objects in paragraph 86. How is the first object, the in-itself, not already the second object, the in-itself-for-consciousness? How can there be an in-itself at all that is not for consciousness already? From paragraph 85: "But the distinction between the in-itself and knowledge is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all."
If it’s really puzzling you, think about it as two modes, both for consciousness, one explicitly so, and one implicitly so, but explicitly as if not for consciousness
The discussion of Maßstab in Kants Theory of Aesthetics in The Critique of Judgement comes in mind. The depth of the underlying discussion taking place here..I cant really grasp it yet.
It takes time and reflection, that's for certain
I just need a bit of clarification on why the in-itself lies within consciousness.. If im understanding correctly the in-itself lies within consciousness because we are aware that there are aspects of our object that we do not have knowledgeable of, and this knowledge of knowing we dont know exists within consciousness.
The very fact of there being an in-itself - if there is consciousness already there - means that it is (at least potentially) an in-itself for consciousness. This is a point on which I think some people are going to want to disagree with Hegel
alright thank you, appreciate the explanation
Could anyone explain a bit more about why the development of experience towards the object being in its-self for consciousness introduces negativity into consciousness?
Each time we get on this subject, of the object in itself vs for consciousness, I think of subatomic particles. When observe them as a wave, they cease to be particles for consciousness, and seen as a particle they cease to be waves for consciousness. Hegel could not have foreseen the advent of quantum mechanics, but it seems like to a certain extent he grasped something in the nature of consciousness which is the source of that quantum uncertainty.
Or maybe later on in the book he'll totally contradict this, and it'll turn out he only flirted with that ambiguity.
What I'm thinking of is this is a precursor to Edmund Husserl's phenomenology?
No, Husserl's and Hegel's approaches are very different
if you watch this at .5 speed its like Sadler showed up to class drunk
I’d have to be drunk to show up to a class where there are no students
Isin't the in it'self and the in it'self for consciousness the same old noumenal vs phenomenal idea
No, it's not that simple. Keep reading. . .
"In itself for consciousness" - it sounds like a double-slit experiment in physics.
How so?
An object, for example a laser beam, travels through the double-slit and behaves its own way, this is "in itself". And then the observer, the consciousness, comes along, and the object changes its behavior, acting like "in itself for consciousness".
I'm not sure whether this is what Hegel meant, but this is what sprung to my mind by listening to this lecture.
Mat Majer - Angielski z pewnością Well, Hegel is certainly willing to view objects (which in the end are always object for consciousness in one way or another) as having multiple aspects, and existing within structures of relations with each other. So, there's plenty of room for that sort of "observer influences/changes the observed" sort of thing.
The experiment you're referencing, of course, comes later.
It seems that what we experience as "I", or what we call an individual spirit soul, might be the unconscious part of the Absolute. What we call the spiritual development might then be seen as the process of the Absolute discovering itself.
In other words, what if the Absolute is not fully conscious? Should we presuppose that it is? The former premise might explain our free will, whereas the latter doesn't seem to incorporate it.
Well, as to the first, if what you mean to say is that an "I" or individual isn't really such, but ONLY an unconscious part of the Absolute, that isn't Hegel's position. If you want to say that it is ALSO that, then, yes, I think that is what Hegel is saying.
I'm not sure why having an unconscious absolute should lead to free will, though - but of course, that term "free will" can mean a lot of things, so you probably want to clarify what you mean by it
Just this thought that the Absolute might have any unconscious part is already freaking me out, so to say. In other words, God is not necessary what I always thought it was.
If the Absolute is partially unconscious of 'me', then my free will looks really 'free'. If the Absolute is fully conscious of 'me', then I can't find the place for free will in such a situation. Something like, the Absolute, partially unconscious of me, is really not aware of what decision of action I'm taking at a given moment. I think I'm just playing with words now, really. But I feel like a new perspective has opened in my mind, which is thrilling.
Mat Majer - Angielski z pewnością Well, there's plenty of great Christian thinkers for whom there is an Absolute (God) who is entirely conscious, but who still argue for human free will.
I'd check out Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm for some classic treatments of the issue
holy shittt