In a message dated 10/25/12 10:04:38 AM, [email protected] writes:
> I'm
> still trying to read Hegel.
>
If at some stage you're inclined to throw up your hands and throw out
Hegel, it won't be your fault. It's Hegel's.
He lived (from 1770 to 1831) at a dismal time and place philosophy. His
cerebration was crushed by his total unawaredness of how his own language was
misleading him (philosophy of language as we know it was not invented until
sixty years after his death), and by his consequent devotion to accepted but
insufficiently examined abstractions that he unflaggingly reified (see his
"beauty"). Here is a typical sample of a current day Hegel scholar talking:
In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism
against reductive or eliminative programs like those of materialism and
empiricism. Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant
pursues the mind's ability to question its felt inclinations or appetites and
to come up with a standard of "duty" (or, in Plato's case, "good") which
transcends bodily restrictiveness. Hegel preserves this essential Platonic and
Kantian concern in the form of infinity going beyond the finite (a process
that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought"[19]), the universal
going beyond the particular (in the Concept), and Spirit going beyond Nature.
And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately) his argument
in the "Quality" chapter of the "Science of Logic." The finite has to
become infinite in order to achieve reality. The idea of the absolute excludes
multiplicity so the subjective and objective must achieve synthesis to become
whole. This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept
of "reality",[20] what determines itselfbrather than depending on its
relations to other things for its essential characterbis more fully "real"
(following the Latin etymology of "real": more "thing-like") than what does
not.
Finite things don't determine themselves, because, as "finite" things, their
essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other
finite things. So, in order to become "real", they must go beyond their
finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself"[21]).
The result of this argument is that finite and infiniteband, by extension,
particular and universal, nature and freedombdon't face one another as two
independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case) is the
self-transcending of the former.[22] Rather than stress the distinct
singularity of
each factor that complements and conflicts with othersbwithout
explanationb
the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal,
and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible as a progressively developing
and self-perfecting whole.
And here is a very incomplete list of other philosophers since Hegel who
have opposed him: (Schopenhauer, Herbart, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Stirner,
Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Popper, Russell, Heidegger, Deleuze.
