Question last time: whether phenomenoloy is the same for Hegel and Husserl?
Alphonse de Waelhens, Belgian philosopher after WWII.
In the corner of the Vlamingenstraat, there is a white house with a blue fence, which is where prof. De Valence lived.
Held a conference about the phenomenologies of both.
Says that they are appearingly not the same, but in reality reach the same.
Vorrede (foreward)
Schelling lecture:
Negative philosophy = Critical philosophy
Positive philosophy = Traditional philosophy, that knows things
negative is about the conditions of knowledge, whilst the positive philosophy focuses too much on the phenomena themselves.
Schelling & Fichte are often referred to, the translator references one part as being an allusion to Fichte, but Hegel was actually referencing Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling in more or less all of his metaphors.
(there are quite a lot of different ”Schellings”, the early Schelling, Fichte’s student, the one Hegel critiques, and the late Schelling whom mainly held seminars which are quite interesting.)
Hegel published a short article before this comparing Fichte and Schelling, the differenzschrift.
Bamberg has a special kind of beer which should be tried. This is the city wherein Hegel published the phenomenology.
The publisher wanted a preface, and so Hegel just threw one at him.
The preface is an independent writing, which was made to provide a summary of his major work. And also a summary to his own conception of the method of philosophy. It is probably his most accessible writing.
But also, very polemical.
He is probably writing to find his own voice in a context of other philosophers.
Hegel probably did not dislike Schelling at all. They were good friends, and Hegel is just critiquing what he thinks is rightly wrong.
Schelling thought that someone who douses is a person who breaches the spirit and the material.
Schelling devoted himself to strange esotericism which Hegel thought was problematic.
(Some people died under Schelling’s care as a physician, which made him start working as a philosopher instead). Hegel critiques this too in the text lol.
Philosophy moves essentially within the element of universality, which includes within itself the particular:
This alludes to Kant. Two kinds of judgements, determining judgement, and reflective judgement.
Determining judgement: subsume a particular under a universal category.
Reflective Judgement: There are no categories, you see a particular, and you have to figure out what there is beyond the particularity, the scope or the finality, of the thing. You have to construct a universality which remains a kind of working universality which has to be improved upon.
Hegel says here that these two judgements are not two.
Any Judgement has both of these two elements.
In any judgement, we always subsume the particular under the universal category, and then we have to see whether a particular has a teleology that allows me to conclude the universal category.
This is best read together with 63.
One common complaint against philosophy is that you do not understand it. But this difficulty should be avoided by being clear about subject and predicate. In spekulativ thinking, you distinguish the subject and the object, but you immediately realise that this formalisation is not calcified, but is changing. If you think about this, then you understand the universality at the beginning.
Scientific is defined quite counterinuitively. You usually make a terminology which is specific, but Hegel argues against this, saying that the truely scientific terminology does not look at things in a lifeless and stillborn schema, but as a result that progresses with further results.
He says ”philosophy should not evade the real issue” die Sache selbst. For Hegel, philosophical thinking gives us access to how something truly is. When Husserl was asked to formulate in one motto of phenomenology: zu den Sachen selbst (back to the things themselves).
-
Hegel used the term Bildung (translated as Culture), Culture and its laborious substantial life. Formation is a laborious emergence from…
-
Fichte: philosophy means love of knowing, but the aim of philosophy is to overcome love in order to be knowing itself.
Wissenschaft: when using this word on something, you are excluding all other sciences to be really legitimate sciences.
7 – 16. Hegel explains how the position of contemporary philosophy does not live up to the requirement of Science.
Fichte: Thinks that Science is a sort of ”I”, which opposes itself to what is not-I. The task of knowledge is the conquest of the I at the expense of the not-I.
(Schoppenhauer attended the courses of Fichte, and made fun of him by alluding to the winter outside and the lack of light, making fun of Fichte’s frequent use of the metaphor of light)
Notion (Begriff) is the result with all the process that brings to the result eventually.
You have to think clearly, step by step, if you want to expand your knowledge however, you cannot get excited by the intuitions like Fichte seems to imply with his allusions to light and ecstacy.
What are the signs that we are in a moment of transition to a new age?
Heidegger dedicates houndreds of pages to develop this insight that Hegel develops in §11, an important concept for Heidegger is boredom, much like Hegel.
For Hegel, Boredom and Frivolity are signs that we are approaching a new age.
We share in this urgency of time of change, and we need a thought that lives up to this for we cannot repeat a philosophy that was for another age, and this comes to be only through a complicated and strenous journey and endeavour. Hegel uses the vocabulary of labour in order to talk about this.
Things become easy once you get the right perspective, but until then it’s really difficult.
Pascal: ”Oh father, please accept this long letter, for I have no leisure to make it short”. Something that Hegel clearly was under the influence of.
From §13 on, Hegel enters a polemical tone.
§16, Hegel critiques Schelling’s mathematical thinking, that A=A is somehow an original insight. The most basic principle.
This principle however, is either some kind of intuition, at which point it cannot be clearly analysed.
If we take the formula however as a proper formula in PL, it is not at all simple. The principle of identity comes from the principle of contradiction. Which is not an immediate insight for Schelling.
Schelling’s cognition reduces all forms into the One, where nothing is able to be distinguished, there is purely confusion.
Philosophy cannot be solved ”from the shot of a pistol”
Hegel references medical practice and chastises Schelling on an actual personal note. He seems to impress those who say on thing is another thing which itself is entirely something else ad infinitum.
The merit of Schelling is to have seen the unity as the value of truth. But this unity is posited without giving account to the negotiation that leads there.
The whole however, is a whole, but it does not account for all the essential elements of it.
The history of philosophy is knowing the whole as a unity, and we have to see how one position at one time refers to the whole in its particularity.
The problem with the history of philosophy is that it often becomes a history of accidents, that does not look at the internal.
If the revolution took place in Paris instead of Berlin, that certainly is interesting, but this has nothing to do with the thoughts that led to that development. The whole has to do with the necessity of cold development. There is a kind of inner logic to things.
Another point:
The notion of alienation at §36
Here alienation is neither positive or negative. Alienation isolated however is negative, because you are put out of yourself. The authority of a norm of conduct is the alienation of the subjective freedom. We are free, so we have a spontaneous drive to do whatever we like. But in this process, we meet with norms that limit severly what we can and cannot do. This is the alienation of the subjective freedom, and as such can be viewed as a negativity. If it is seen in the whole process however, it is positive. It is a necessary mediation that in the end actually works to protect all individual freedoms in a more smooth way.
Alienation in its whole process is unavoidable, that brings an increase via its own negation.
The substance shows itself to be subject.
Any substance has to be subject, because when I know something, that something becomes part of me. A pen is an object, a substance. But a substance that implies a lot of work within it. This work is objectivised as the Objective spririt. If I know the Objective Spirit and all the progress and the work that went into a thing, then I know it. The distance between subject and object is no more; the border is made fluid; there is an exchange between the object and a subject; they become similar.
The phenomenology of the spirit is complete as it reaches absolute knowing, true knowing.
Self-knowledge and other-knowledge stops being seperated at absolute knowledge.
The use of falseness. To understand the truth, is inseperable for falseness. Therefore I should capitalise on the force of falseness. As soon as you can say that something is false, is because we are in the truth. Falsity exists as something truly false.
The whole of truth, truely gives account of the falsity in it. The final affirmation cannot entirely dispell its negation.
Hegel’s critique of mathematics (Just arrived back from Jena where he was teaching Greek and Mathematics.) is actually a kind of position that is very common at the time, eg. Fichte, Schelling, Novalis.
He says that certainly math can be useful knowledge, but it doesn’t give any kind of true knowing.
Precisely because of Hegel’s ideas, we will need to talk about the text from an outside perspective and not only it itself.
Hegel talks of Logic in §48, which for Hegel means metaphysics.
All of the methods of formalised logic are a bygone method of doing philosophy.
Truth is its own self-movement that goes on infinitely.
Truth is not something that you can seperate from the method used to find it. This is the thought of those that thinks that truth is a question of correspondence etc.
Truth requires a starting point that you have to constantly correct, in which you recognise its limits and falsity.
You could call this method, metodus – the way.
The beginning, the way, and the destination, cannot be seperated in Truth.
All of these places are all on the way to truth, even if the one you are on right now is entirely wrong.
What is interesting is that the romantic philosophers understood and criticised the traditional way of doing philosophy, but their problem was that they substituted the method they critcised with absolute non-method. Method and Truth however cannot be analysed apart.
Hegel thinks that we cannot go back, but must go further towards the truth.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Metode. Gadamer argues in the beginning that you cannot seperate the method from the truth.
Hegel is trying to show how to come to a completer grasp of Truth through the use of commonplace terms. The knowledge of philosophy, is the knowledge that gives life spirit and truth.
Common sense cannot be the final labour of the Begriff, but rather can only be the outset.
This labour brings a fully developed cognition.
This labour happens slowly, and in this labour of the spirit there is the necessity of a long and arduous journey.
Hegel published later re-edits of the phenomenology, and so continued to consider it central to his ouevre.
For Hegel, there is an intentionality of thought, thought is always thinking-of. It is always an opening towards what we have seen as the Sache selbst.
This opening, is always in the middle of a process. We are thrown into a process that is basically in the society and which comes before us. We are not an empty spot. Everything we think about has a lot of baggage hanging behind it. This is not something we would normally think however, because it seems we can understand concepts (Begriffe) as themselves. But in reality this is an illusion. You can never have a pure sight of the thing in front of you. You cannot get rid of the entirety of the baggage of a concept, because there are likely to be those that we are not aware of.
Hegel thinks that knowing without precondition is an illusion.
There are conditions to knowledge.
He denies that we can be purified of these, but he also denies what Kant thought, that we have a kind of prejudice that are the structure of our knowledge (for Kant we project the structure which is fixed and already there unto knowledge). For Hegel, this structure is not fixed, because we can clearly change perspectives and so on. However, the fact that prejudices are ammendable, does not mean that they are capable of being wholly gotten rid of. We can remove some, using other. For Hegel prejudices are somehow positive, because without them it is not possible to have an object (Gegenstand, what stands against) at the outset.
Without a prior position, there is nothing that which stands against.
The very fact of an object presupposes a subject that which it stands in opposition to.
In this sense, prejudice are the ground for a knowledge in a period of time, in a language, etc. etc.
Now, in knowing, when I learn something new, or I forgot (in Plato’s terminology), in meeting with the Object which I approach in new knowledge, it changes both myself and the Object that which I approach.
We fundamentally change with the world as my perspective is made to be different.
In relation to the object, the object teaches me when it is really different from me.
This distinguishes from Fichte and Schelling, wherein knowledge is assimilation, you make everything like you. You confirm your bias, without acknowledging that the object makes you an Other from yourself. If you want to know what the object is, I have to leave myself and venture out to the Object. I need to understand it in its pure difference. Therefore we have alienation. The subject has to distance itself from itself because it cannot see itself. And in the relation with the self and the object, there is allowed a further degree of awareness.
If you look at things like this, there is a diffeence from the perspective of Husserl.
Husserl thought that you could, via Epoche, neutralise all of your presuppositions and have a sort of naive, newborn, self which see the thing as itself. Hegel anticipates Heidegger on this, and says that you always have conditions.
For Hegel, you have to have an absolute beginning, but this beginning in and of itself is not really a beginning, as it is also the result. In the result is the beginning, and the beginning contains already the result. This is the essence of the spekulativ philosophy.
The starting point is necessary, but we are yet to know what it is (a sort of Epoche, in the end).
The realisation of truth is via the manifestation of eros (wtf).
Each time I am aware, it is from a different level.
The biggest failure of human history is when philosophy goes back (YES FUCK HEIDEGGER).
eg. France seemingly going back to the Ancienne Regime under Napoleon.
Compared to eg. Fichte, Hegel is a sober author, but the spirits of the epoche certainly prevails in Hegel.
There are certain points at which Spirit is not as convincing as others.
However, it is a very self-aware text generally.
Heidegger and Husserl was to write for the British Encyclopedia on Hegel, but could not in the end publish because they could not agree on Hegel’s point of intentionality.
Heidegger thinks that it is true that knowledge is always knowledge of, but this opening is made possible thanks to the prejudice that characterises our position, whilst Husserl (who was very sharp and intelligent, but is so absorbed in their thinking they appear stupid) could not even begin to fathom this point.
Husserl of the Crisis seems to be a bit closer to Hegel.
The Epoche for Husserl is transparent to culture and time, whilst Heidegger says that this does not exist.