Explicates its moments, which are therefore characterized by this opposition

[koganbot]

Meme from catsgomiaow

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.

• Turn to page 56.
• Find the fifth line.
• Post that line AS YOUR SUBJECT LINE. AND POST these instructions in a cut-tag to this status....
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST book...
[EDIT: I cut and pasted these instructions (obv., since I'd have taken care to tell you not to dig for the most ludicrous title); I have no idea what the phrase "to this status" means.]

It's from Hegel: Texts and Commentary translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. I am also wearing a T-shirt, given to me by my friend John Wójtowicz, that says, "It's a Hegelian thing. You wouldn't understand." (OK, that's a fib, but John did once state his intention of creating such a T-shirt.)

I haven't actually gotten to page 56.

But while we're on the subject (so to speak), you would do me a favor by explaining this passage to me:

The living substance is, further, that being which is in truth subject or - to say the same thing in other words - which is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself, or the mediation between a self and its development into something different. As subject, it is pure, simple negativity and thus bifurcation of the simple, that which produces its own double and opposition, a process that again negates this indifferent diversity and its opposite: only this sameness which reconstitutes itself, or the reflection into itself in being different - not an original unity as such, or an immediate unity as such - is the true. The true is its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its aim and thus has it for its beginning - that which is actual only through its execution and end.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Since he rather notoriously uses words to mean what HE needs them to, here's a link to Hegel Glossary: to give at least some sense of this.

The first sentence I take to be arguing or claiming that to be alive is to possess subjectivity, which is defined as "the mediation between a self and its development into something different": in other words (mine) there's what you feel you are and what you feel you could be, and subjectivity is what goes on to attempt to wrangle one into the other.

The second sentence I see is translated slightly differently elsewhere viz: "This substance is, as subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the ...simple" -- which is therefore (I take it) making a distinction between "living substance" (presumably the whole being including body and whatever) and "substance as subject", which would be the awareness: which Hegel is arguing is "pure, simple negativity"; again, think this is definitional... he's saying (something like) awareness is always the act of making distinctions between what something is and what it's not (the "something" often being the self; the latter sometimes including what it's becoming)... so he's saying that awareness (my word) IS negativity, and vice versa. The capacity to distinguish is a bifurcation; distinguishing as a process encompasses -- by positing a thing and its opposite* as in a significant relationship -- a second act of judgment (which is to say "negation"). This sequence of negations brings us towards a true understanding: the fact of the distinction, combined with an understanding of the importance of linkage between what something is and what it isn't. "The true" -- meaning true understanding -- thus encompasses a grasp of process of judgement, the map of distinctions as it were, as well as the fact of the distinctions: thus all mistakes and false paths along the way -- along with why they happened and how they were overcome and reabsorbed -- also belong to "the true"... In the glossary, you'll see Hegel also insists that "The whole is the true": this (I think) is another way of saying the same thing; that everything -- including all possible errors along the way and how they happened -- must be contained in the True Understanding. Which can only be reached by setting out for it; and only grasped by undertaking the full journey.

*its opposite

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I rather suspect that Hegel's commitment to thinking in absolutes and opposites will really get your goat: I'm inclined to say you should treat it as a forensic methodology rather than a description of the situation he's faced with at any given time.

Re: *its opposite

[koganbot]

Well, I've got Kaufmann's explication on a facing page - otherwise I'd probably really be at sea - but one thing I take to be going on here (other than Hegel being a corrective to various German guys whose names begin with Sch) is the dismantling of mind vs. matter, dismantling the model that has the mind (Subject) either trying to get matter (Substance) right or trying to get itself right. So for Hegel, Substance isn't just sitting out there in its fullness as an expression of the Absolute, since Substance had a past and has a future, moves from here to there, has directions and purposes, all of these things that one (if one is a German philosopher in Hegel's time) would attribute to Subjects not to Substances, so - possibly - Hegel has moved the Subject inside the Substance. (If that's what he's doing it's a neat trick, reversing Kant, who'd for practical purposes moved Substance inside of Subject [if I've got my Kant right, and I wouldn't bet the farm on that].)

I think I'm reading this the way you do (though since we've read some of the same post-Hegels we might be misled in a similar direction): I think "methodology" is the right word, since if we jettison the concept "Absolute" we haven't lost much; we can just make the Absolute "everything and its opposite and whatever disputes it, grasped as a whole, should it ever be able to grasp itself as a whole, and this whole of course includes the entire process of how we got here, i.e., the history of the universe including necessarily all errors and corrections in our understanding (since our judgments are part of the universe), including future errors, and obviously "here" isn't the mere here and now since the whole has to encompass everything to come as well, which actually takes us into the possibly infinite future." So Hegel is destroying the Absolute in order to save it from mysticism and intuition, that is from the idea that the Absolute is sitting right in front of us, the world being its expression, and we can grasp it straight up through intuition, without getting down among the grubby mundane of events and things and shit, and changes in events and things and shit, or actually understanding them bit by bit, stuff and its changes, or applying our mind in detailed ways, all of which is just what Hegel insists we do have to do. The historical motion of stuff through time (stuff including creatures with minds and purposes, i.e. subjects) proceeds by negation, encompasses not only what something is but what it is not, what it could turn into, what it could have been but isn't, what it forestalls, etc. - later generations would call this "difference." Or maybe I'm projecting a whole bunch of ideas onto Hegel. I'm assuming that later generations would dispense with any kind of ultimate negation of the negation, hence of the Absolute.

None of which I'd have grasped (if indeed I have grasped it) without having read post-Hegels and commentaries and facing pages and such.

Re: *its opposite

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think i largely agree with this: the only bit i'm uncertain about is " later generations would call this 'difference'" -- you may be right, it depends which generations when i guess, and what exactly the "this" is they're calling difference

Re: *its opposite

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i suspect hegel imagines he needs the concept of god -- or the "world soul" -- because he wants awareness ultimately to permeate all of substance as a totality of self-knowledge, which the entire collected self-knowledge of mortals might not add up to: hegelians like marx did indeed dispense with this for all practical purposes

dewey was also a hegelian to start with: and in fact there's a particular hegelian reading of marx which reminds me a lot of pragmatism, though it's not one that has much sway in actually existing marxist political movements...

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

You do this for fun?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

mere ordinary fun = not reading hegel
reading hegel then STOPPING = a higher fun by far

[koganbot]

It's no harder than figuring out size 10, if by "figuring out size 10" we don't just mean "What Chris actually said to Rihanna about size 10" or something of the sort, but also "understanding the roles that size 10s play in the world, and could play, and how this came to be, and what future worlds could develop from the activity of those people down with shoe and dress sizes and those in opposition to sizes, etc., and what lives we could lead." A lot of it wrestling with Hegel involves trying to understand whom he was arguing with and what he and his disputants thought was at stake and how they were using words. Then it becomes clearer, at least I hope it will.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but at least when I try to figure out size 10, I get to listen to music.

Actually, in all seriousness, the reason I've never understood reading Hegel, etc. is because so much of the conversation seems to revolve around trying to figure out what these terrible writers were saying and why -- the conversation is about the conversation, and it never touches the real world. I remember arguing with a professor about Russell's "the king of France is bald" thing, and saying, "But that's not the way it works in language." And he said, "But that's the way it works in logic," and I said, "But that's not the way it works in language," and he said, "But logic doesn't care." And I thought, well, shouldn't it? If you're having a discussion about the logic of language, then shouldn't you actually care about the actual properties and uses of language? If the only way you can make your argument is by disregarding all the ways the real world doesn't agree with it, then it's not a very strong argument. I mean, is there something I'm missing?

It just seems like all that finance stuff where there's no actual money, or mathematical physics that doesn't take into account the actual world. Yes, the emperor's clothes are very beautiful, etc. Pardon me while I buy a pair of pants that actually exist.

[koganbot]

Well, when the world disagrees with our logic and our math, we have to change our underlying assumptions, which is what e.g. Wittgenstein was willing to do and Russell wasn't. (You would like the later Wittgenstein, and he could write like the dickens.)

[koganbot]

E.g.,here Wittgenstein is demanding that one's assumptions about language match up with how language is really used, for instance where he goes

Consider for example the proceedings we call "games." I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? - Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'" - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!

[koganbot]

By the way - seriously - Hegel is bathroom reading, i.e., someone I pick up and throw my mind at in brief bursts, between doing other stuff.

Shoes

[koganbot]

I wear size 9½W, by the way. Never have I ever been a size 10 in my whole life.

not safe for girlboymusic

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

longish crooked timber discussion of whether heidegger is a romantic or not, which -- among other things, inc.wittgenstein and what constitutes rationality -- touches a lot on the issue of "talking past one another" (or perhaps just acts it out): and ends -- currently -- with an invocation of adorno's essay "how to read hegel"

Re: not safe for girlboymusic

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

some of adorno on hegel here: as usual googlebooks skips pages, possibly quite a lot...