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Felt cocky, so i tried reading Hegel (hexbear.net)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/philosophy@hexbear.net
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And boy howdy does my head hurt.

I'm almost through the preface, and i have NO clue what he's talking about.

So far, the only thing I've gotten is something about how a result is determined by the path that lead to it, and that a negation is not a destruction of something but just a further step forward.

But I have no fucking clue about his other concepts like Notion, Subjective/Objective, what he means by Science or how to piece it all together.

It really feels like walking in, mid conversation, in a foreign language.

Is the rest of the book easier to read, or should I just call it quits here?

I just wanted to better understand dialectics lmao

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[–] 14 points 8 months ago (10 children)

What's your background in philosophy? Hegel is notoriously difficult to parse. What's your current understanding of dialectics?

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    I'm just a layman, I'm afraid. I've been expanding my understanding of literature and I frequently come across various references to philosophy, so I've taken some detours over the years and read baudrillard, nietzsche, plato, some marx, zichec or however you spell his name, fanon, etc. Almost every one of them refer to Hegel, so I thought I'd check him out.

    As for my current understanding of dialectics. Iirc, everything is connected in an infininite Web of ever changing contradictions that negate or solve each other, giving rise to new contradictions to be solved and so on.

    Probably wrong, but I'd like to get a better understanding.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    You're better versed in broader philosophy than me, so no worries! Essentially, dialectics is characterized as the following:

    1. Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
    2. Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
    3. Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
    4. Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.

    You've got the gist of it, for Hegel turn the Marxist dialectic back on its head and assume all change is in the advancement of a grand, supernatural Absolute Idea.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    That Idea of course being a united German Protestant Monarchy.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Oh of course, can't forget that!

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Aside from the idea that every moment destroys our consciousness and then it reforms slightly changed only to instantly be destroyed again (and that is how we are able to consciously perceive time passing and change), I think that part is my favorite, because there is so much build up to it, only for it to fall flat on it's ass.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Yea, I'll admit I only read some minor works and excerpt of Hegel so I'm unfamiliar with the explanation for perceiving time passing, but that sounds entirely up Hegel's alley.

    hegel-kraken

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I had to read half of 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' for my Metaphysics II class. And I read the other half on a combo of Adderall and Acid.

    And other people interprete that section differently, I am only going off of what the class consensus was about what the fuck he was talking about.

    It's basically a retread of the old Ship of Thesius problem. If your mind can change, and ideas can change, are you still really you? And by what mechanism can these ideas of self change, when you are dealing with a paradigm of Platonic ideals? After all, previously Kant proved that even if they do exist, we can only have limited access to them through logic, but if we assume they do exist in a platonic form, then how do they appear to change?

    Marx just turns the whole thing upside down and says, this is silly, ideas clearly change over time and do not exist in some platonic vacuum somewhere, and they change because they are directly influenced by the material conditions that we, as the makers and keepers of ideas, experience. It is extremely refreshing to read Marx after Hegel, because he is extremely clear-cut in comparison.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Yep, I've only read Hegel through small Red Sails articles, so reading the Phenomenology of Spirit is way above my philosophical weight class. Marx is far more accessible, and that's because, as he says, the point is to understand the world so as to change it.

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