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

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...