#g. w. hegel

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«Toda filosofía, precisamente por ser la exposición de una fase especial de evolución, forma parte de su tiempo y se halla prisionera de las limitaciones propias de éste. El individuo es hijo de su pueblo, de su mundo, y se limita a manifestar en su forma la sustancia contenida en él: por mucho que el individuo quiera estirarse, jamás podrá salirse verdaderamente de su tiempo, como no puede salirse de su piel; se halla encuadrado necesariamente dentro del espíritu universal, que es su sustancia y su propia esencia. ¿Cómo podría salirse de ella? La filosofía capta, con el pensamiento, este mismo espíritu universal; la filosofía es, para él, el pensamiento de sí mismo y, por tanto, su contenido sustancial determinado. Toda filosofía es la filosofía de su tiempo, un eslabón en la gran cadena de la evolución espiritual; de donde se desprende que sólo puede dar satisfacción a los intereses propios de su tiempo.»

G. W. Hegel: Lecciones sobre la historia de la filosofía, I. FCE, pág. 48. México, 1955.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

[socialismo-en-un-solo-blog]

[madnessbypoetry]

Desire

Every human action is a product of some sort of Desire, for we first need to "want" to then actualize that into an action. We could align the root of every Desire to a yearning for reconciliation with that which we stem from, the Womb. The womb is the only place in the entirety of our existence into which Desire is not present, because each and every thing we could want is (god hopes) given to us without the need of our yearning for them beforehand. In the womb the whole and the baby are into perfect harmony, but in this world we, as humans, are never in harmony with the whole We will call that whole the Absolute. Could perhaps every Human Desire stem from a yearning for harmony with the Absolute? If yes then it would mean life is but the inability to properly encounter the truth of the whole, and by proxy to be in a constant influx of Desires because we fail to find harmony with the Absolute. To Desire something that is never attainable can only mean existence is a constant of lying to yourself about having found harmony with the Absolute or suffering from the lack of such harmony. I do not like this answer, but it seems to be the logical result of my recent studies on Hegel, which could have been clouded by my also recent readings of Dostoyevsky but i do not wish to think about that at the moment. If the answer to the question if "Does every Desire stem from a yearning for harmony with the Absolute?" is no, then what could we as rational creatures desire besides wanting to unite with the whole? It seems both answers lead to the exact same result in regards to what is the end result of man searching for a higher state of consciousness The answer is Madness For man inevitably will end up mad because he thinks he has united with the Absolute or is mad for not wanting to do it at all. Either way, Fuck it we ball

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Hegel on the Journey of Spirit to Self-Understanding

Tuesday 27 August 2024 is the 254th anniversary of the birth of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831), who was born in Stuttgart on this date in 1770.

It is unlikely that anyone would call Hegel’s philosophy of history an Enlightenment philosophy of history, but there is a sense in which Hegel is the culmination of an especially fertile period in the philosophy of history that preceded him. Hegel transcended these Enlightenment philosophies of history in a supremely abstract way of understanding history and the developments it unfolds. 

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

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Video:              https://youtu.be/kPIcS2x51tE

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[tuhafgoru]

İlk olarak Sanatın bilimsel olarak irdeleme açısından değeri söz konusu olduğunda durum hiç kuşkusuz Sanatın eğlenceye ve oyalanmaya hizmet eden, çevremizi süsle yen, yaşamın dışsal koşullarına hoşluk veren ve süsleme yoluyla başka nesneleri öne çıkaran yitici bir oyun olarak kullanılabileceği biçimindedir. Bu yolda Sanat gerçekte bağımsız olmayan, özgür olmayan, ama hizmet eden Sa nattır. Ama irdelemeyi istediğimiz şey amacında olduğu gibi aracında da âzg-ürolan Sanattır. Sanatın genel olarak başka ereklere de hizmet edebilmesi ve sonra salt bir oyalanma olabilmesi olgusu onun benzer olarak düşünce ile de ortak olduğu bir yanıdır. Çünkü bir yandan bilim hiç kuşkusuz sonlu erekler için hizmet eden bir düşünce olarak ve olumsal araç olarak kullanılabilir ve o zaman belirlenimini kendisinden değil ama başka nesnelerden ve ilişkilerden kazanır; ama öte yandan kendini bu hiz metten ayırarak gerçekliğin bağımsızlığına yükseltebilir ve onda bağımsız olarak yalnızca kendi erekleri ile uyum içinde olabilir.

[culturevulturette]

True, as we're witnessing now.

[estherax]

Generating plasm and stacking matchboxes: how to build a better future through collective consciousness.

Alternatively - Steban and Ulixes were building Tatlin's Tower so I have to talk about the symbolism or I will explode!!

While completing the communist vision quest you get an opportunity to build a model of "The Tower of History", depicted on the last page of "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism": a leaning tower wrapped in a dramatic helix. The scale model you make is a mirror image of Tatlin's Tower - a design for a grand monumental building to the Third International: the government organization advocating for world communism.

The main idea of the monument was to produce a new type of structure, uniting a purely creative form with a utilitarian form. Meaning it would function as an office building while also serving as a symbol of cultural significance. And let me tell you, this bad boy can fit so much symbolism in it.

Tatlin was commissioned to develop a design in 1919, after the 1917 February Revolution - a parallel to Disco Elysium's Insulinde we're witnessing post-Antecentennial Revolution.

Tatlin's work was inspired by high revolutionary goals, which are evident in the visual direction of the tower as well, expressing the ideological strive for achieving something that has never been done before, overcoming the odds. The structure "oscillates like a steel snake, constrained and organized by the one general movement of all the parts, to raise itself above the earth. The form wants to overcome the material and the force of gravity..."

The tower has meaning packed even in the materials. For example, the glass structures (marked A, B, C on the architectural rendering) were meant to serve legislative, executive and informative initiatives while rotating around their axes at different speeds. The material signified the purity of initiatives, their liberation from material constraints and their ideal qualities.

But here's the best part. The spirals.

"The spiral is the movement of liberated humanity. The spiral is the ideal expression of liberation: with its base set in the earth, it flees from the ground and becomes a symbol of the suspension of all (...) earthy interests." They are "the most elastic and rapid lines which the world knows" that represent movement and aspiration, continuing the themes of progress and freedom, but they also refer to something else.

In the process of building the matchbox model Rhetoric points out: "It's almost exactly as Nilsen's sketch imagined, a physical manifestation of the dialectical spiral of history."

The shape of the tower is a representation of dialectical development of history, first visualized as a spiral by G. W. F. Hegel. He pictured transformational change as "both linear and circular in order to be short-term responsive, i.e. possibly negating itself, and long-term strategic, i.e. a process of development."

Hegel's dialectics would later be reinterpreted through the prism of materialism by Marx and Engels to create dialectical materialism - the basis for historical materialism.

"Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels’ philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis, (...) a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; (...) the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws - these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one."

The tower embodies progress in materialist understanding of history while also indicating the connection to ideological plasm, a manifestation of "the proletariat's embrace of historical materialism", necessary to create a better future.

According to Nilsen, the proletariat of a revolutionary state can generate enough plasm to create extra-physical architecture that "disregards the laws of 'bourgeois physics' and instead relies on the revolutionary faith of the people for structural integrity."

This function of plasm implies that The Tower of History can be created only under revolutionary circumstances - without a sufficient amount of plasm even the matchbox model didn't stay up. The exact same sentiment is expressed about Tatlin's Tower: "We maintain that only the full power of the multimillion strong proletarian consciousness could bring into the world the idea of this monument and its forms. The monument must be realized by the muscles of this power, because we have an ideal, living and classical expression the pure and creative form of the international union of the workers of the whole world."

Nilsen called it "the highest expression of Communist principles, a society whose literal foundation is the faith of its people."

Tatlin's Tower was a symbol of faith in the revolutionary future, the global triumph of Marxist socialism. A monument "made of iron, glass and revolution."

It was never built in real life, and neither was The Tower of History in the world of Elysium.

But you can try to see if there's enough plasm between the three of you. And the matchbox tower stays up for a long moment, quivering with an improbable energy. You believe it can say up - and it does.

So you have to believe; whether it's for collective action or generating ideological plasm. Then, together, maybe you'll be able to build as much as 0.0002% of communism.

[howieabel]

“Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.” ― Hegel, G. W. H.

[capeofseaweed]

But the life of the spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as if it had not seen it; but rather something negative, grasping itself, turning around in itself. The life of Spirit is not the life that is scared of death and spares itself destruction, but rather that life which endures it and maintains itself in it.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«Lo verdadero es el todo. Pero el todo es solamente la esencia que se completa mediante su desarrollo. De lo absoluto hay que decir que es esencialmente resultado, que solo al final es lo que es en verdad, y en ello precisamente estriba su naturaleza, que es la de ser real, sujeto o devenir de sí mismo».

 G. W. Hegel: Fenomenología del espíritu. FCE, pág. 16. México, 1981.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

@dies-irae-1

[metamatar]

In English translations of the early nineteenth-century writings of German idealist G. W. F. Hegel, Aufhebung is sometimes translated as “positive supersession,�� and intriguingly, this rather stiff bit of jargon unites the ideas of lifting up, destroying, preserving, and radically transforming, all at once. These four components can be illustrated with reference to slavery, the earliest example of a radical cause calling itself “abolitionist” in history. The successful global fight for the abolition of slavery meant that the noble ideal of humanism, trumpeted in the French Revolution, was simultaneously lifted up (vindicated), destroyed (exposed as white), preserved (made tenable for the future) and transformed beyond recognition (forced to incorporate those it had originally excluded). Slavery was overturned in law and eventually more or less done away with in practice. What we must understand, however, is that our very capacity to understand these events was generated by them. In the “before” times, the ideals that governed slave-trading societies really were human rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The world manifested those ideas as they existed then, until, at the end of an enslaved person’s rifle, the self-styled inventors of “freedom” in these societies learned at last what real freedom (a more real freedom, for the time being) looked like. Humanism: negated, remade, born, buried, prolonged. By winning the struggle against slavers, abolition gave the lie to those societies, and supplied those brave ideals with their first-ever shot at becoming more than words.

Sophie Lewis in Abolish the Family

[humanperson105]

Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality, is the most fearful thing of all, and to keep and hold fast to what is dead requires only the greatest force. Powerless beauty detests the understanding because the understanding expects of her what she cannot do. However, the life of spirit is not a life that is fearing death and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains itself. Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption. Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing, or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it [tarrying with the negative]. This lingering is the magical power that converts it into being. – This power is the same as what in the preceding was called the subject, which, by giving existence to determinateness in its own element, sublates abstract immediacy, or, is only existing immediacy, and, as a result, is itself the true substance, is being, or, is the immediacy which does not have mediation external to itself but is itself this mediation.

G. W. F. Hegel - Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit - pg. 20 - 21. (Emphasis mine)

[courtingwonder]

"Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth." -G. W. F. Hegel (German philosopher, 1770 - 1831)

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Napoleon and Revolutionary Imperialism     

Thursday 15 August 2024 is the 255th anniversary of the birth of Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone di Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 05 May 1821), who was born in the city of Ajaccio on the island of Corsica on this date in 1769.

Napoleon was one of the most consequential men of Western history. As such, he has served as a symbol and as an historical ideal, in Huizinga’s sense. But Napoleon meant many things to many men, so his use as a symbol is always ambiguous, and the many meanings that have been associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire have never converged on a single vision of history.  

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

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[innabesedina]

"IN HISTORY, WE ARE CONCERNED WITH WHAT HAS BEEN AND WHAT IS; IN PHILOSOPHY, HOWEVER, WE ARE CONCERNED NOT WITH WHAT BELONGS EXCLUSIVELY TO THE PAST OR TO THE FUTURE, BUT WITH THAT WHICH IS, BOTH NOW AND ETERNALLY — IN SHORT, WITH REASON." 

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL 

 GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL WAS A GERMAN PHILOSOPHER.

[nicklloydnow]

“But intellectual life is flourishing in the cafés, institutes and academies, as refugees forge community in exile. And at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, one of France’s most prestigious research universities, Alexandre Kojève has taken over Alexandre Koyré’s seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G W F Hegel. Between 1933 and 1939, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Gaston Fessard, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Queneau, Emmanuel Levinas all come to hear his lectures. A collection of the most renowned thinkers of the day, who would come to lay the intellectual foundations for 20th-century philosophy, political thought, literature, criticism, psychology and history. It is said that Kojève’s lectures were so intricate, so deft, that Arendt accused him of plagiarising. Bataille fell asleep. Sartre couldn’t even remember being there.

(…)

The short answer is that Kojève made Hegel accessible by bringing to the surface one of the essential elements of his work: desire. Kojève did not deny he was providing a reading of Hegel that transformed the text. His interpretation has been described as ‘creative’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘violent’. The question Kojève placed at the centre of his lectures was: ‘What is the Hegelian person?’ And he answered this question through a discussion of human desire by centring a brief section in the Phenomenology titled ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’, which is popularly rendered as ‘the master/slave dialectic’. And by centring this nine-page section of a 640-page work, Kojève offered readers a way to grasp an otherwise elusive text.

Poetic in its opacity, perplexing in its terminology, Hegel’s work offers an understanding of the evolution of human consciousness where the finite mind can become a vehicle for the Absolute. But what does that mean? Kojève took the lofty prose of Hegel down from the heavens and placed it in human hands, offering a translation: this is a book about human desire and self-consciousness. Or, as the philosopher Robert Pippin writes:

Kojève, who basically inflates this chapter to a free-standing, full-blown philosophical anthropology, made this point by claiming that for Hegel the distinctness of human desire is that it can take as its object something no other animal desire does: another’s desire.

What was Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic?

In Kojève’s reading, human beings are defined by their desire for recognition, and it is a desire that can be satisfied only by another person who is one’s equal. On this reading, Kojève unfolds a multi-step process: two people meet, there is a death-match, a contest of the wills between them, and whoever is willing to risk their life triumphs over the other, they become the master, the other becomes a slave, but the master is unable to satisfy his desire, because they’re recognised only by a slave, someone who is not their equal. And through the slave’s work to satisfy the master’s needs, coupled with the recognition of the master, ultimately the slave gains power.

What is essential for Kojève is that one risk their life for something that is not essential. The one who shrinks before the other in fear of death becomes the slave. The one willing to die – to face the inevitability of their own non-existence – becomes the master. In other words, desire is an exertion of the will over an other’s desire. Or, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would come to say: ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’s desire.’ It is not an attempt to possess the other person physically, but to force the other person in that moment of contest to make the other give, to bend their will, in order to achieve superiority. And in this moment, Kojève writes: ‘Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire.’ In order to gain recognition in this sense, one must be willing to risk everything – including their life. It is a struggle for mastery of the self.

Instead of Hegel’s roundabout of self-consciousness that exists in itself and for itself but always and only in relation to another, Kojève gives us: self-consciousness is the I that desires, and desire implies and presupposes a self-consciousness. Thinking about the relation between the finite mind and Absolute knowledge is opaque, but desire is human. People know what it feels like to desire, to want, to crave to be seen, to feel understood. Desire is the hunger one feels to fill the absence inside themselves. Or, as Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence.’

(…)

Perhaps most importantly, what Kojève understood was the extent to which we humans desire to exercise some control over how other people see us differently from the ways in which we see ourselves. However tenuous or certain our sense of self-identity may seem, it is our very sense of self that we must risk when we appear in the world before others – our identity, desire, fear and shame. There is no guarantee that we will be seen in the way we want to be seen, and feeling misrecognised hurts when it happens, because it wounds our sense of self. But this risk is vital – it is part of what makes us human, it is part of our humanity. And whereas Kojève’s reading drives toward an ideal of social equality that affirms one’s preexisting sense of self when confronted by an other, for Hegel, one must take the other’s perception of the self – whatever it may be – back into their own self-consciousness. In other words, whereas for Hegel freedom rested upon the ability to preserve difference, for Kojève it rested upon the ability to preserve one’s own identity at the expense of difference.

In bringing the lofty language of Hegel down from the heavens, Kojève offered readers a secular understanding of human action, which requires each and every individual to reckon with the inevitability of their own death, their own undoing. And in doing so he shifted the focus toward the individual as the locus of social change, where history unfolds toward an aristocratic society of equals, where all difference is destroyed. Influenced by Karl Marx’s account of class struggle as the engine of history, and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-death, Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic presents another form of contest between oppressor and oppressed, where mastery over another in order to master oneself becomes the means to equality, and ultimately justice within society. Kojève adopted the master/slave dialectic in order to develop what Michael Roth called ‘a schema for organising change over time’, to think about the movement of history. And the master/slave dialectic unfolds at the level of the individual and the level of society, where the self gains recognition as a desiring subject through the endless battle for recognition that is appearing in the world with others, and the level of society where all past historical movements will be judged within a framework of right, which is the end of history.

This has been in part the legacy of Kojève. Influenced by Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic, Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1943) that man’s freedom is found in negation. In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir turned to Kojève to think about women’s oppression in relation to man and the need for intersubjective recognition. Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’ follows Kojève’s reading of Hegel to understand the role of desire as a lack in the formation of human subjectivity. Bataille turned to Kojève to argue that one could experience full self-sovereignty only in a moment of pure negation. For Foucault, it led to the belief that there is no desire free from power-relations – his central theme. And for Fukuyama, this historical contest of wills evolving along a linear temporal plane toward an equal and just society has become the much-mocked ‘end of history’ thesis – the idea that Western liberal democracy has evolved as the final form of human government in the postwar world. The postwar world Kojève himself helped to shape, before his untimely death in 1968. Ultimately, Fukuyama’s thesis captures the difference between Hegel and Kojève’s Hegel: for Kojève, the ideal of universal equality won through an endless battle for recognition was always an individualist notion that required domination when confronted by otherness. But for Hegel, human freedom could be won only through collectivity by embracing the opacity of otherness that we are constantly confronted with in ourselves, and in the world with others. It is an acceptance of that fact that self-mastery will always remain an illusion.”