Dialectical Thinking (Part 3): The Real In-Itself, Hegel's System, and its Final Frontier

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This video is the third part in a three part series on dialectical thinking. We start this video with an examination of what we have already covered: the idea that the real for-us is structured by invariant contradictions of reason as a consequence of subjective action. This real ultimately forces us to transcend both the historical conceptual structures of science and religion. However, this leaves us with the question of the real in-itself. The real for-us is rational contradictions, but the real in-itself is an absence. This absence is identified by the field of philosophy in the distinction between something and nothing; the field of psychoanalysis in the distinction between eros and thanatos; and the field of existentialism in the distinction between life and death. This real absence for-us structures dialectical motion of oppositional contradictory forms of the new and the old. New forms are both in-themselves and for the old; old forms are both in-themselves and for the new. This real absence in-itself is a self-repelling negativity that is both impossible and unavoidable; the cause of both our sufferings of the absence of love and desires for love. Hegel's system approaches this real by mobilising self-repelling negativity in the nature and motion of abstractions. Abstractions deploy their potential in self-positing, they become entangled as rational contradictions experienced as a negativity due to their failure, and then, finally, concretely disintegrate after they have exhausted their potentiality, which stimulates another circle of abstract positings. This triadic motion can be understood as one phenomenal spiritual process, which rationally divides in-itself into an opposition, and then finally reaches the level of categorical understanding in disintegration of the opposition. Such a dialectical motion can be used to explain the emergence, deployment and ultimately the disintegration of abstract phenomena like religion and capital. In this view abstract phenomena like religion and capital are a consequence of the subject's own impossibility to be infinite and immortal in world actuality. In our present scientific ideology, abstract phenomena like religion and capital are not well explained. Thus, Hegelianism as a notion has to be differentiated from what we can call "evolutionism" (i.e. the dominant scientific meta-paradigm today). Hegelianism is synchronic (describing the present moment of a symbolic totality) over diachronic (describing the history of a symbolic totality); Hegelianism is focused on the way the past is for the present over focused on the fantasy of the past in-itself; and finally, Hegelianism approaches the nature of phenomena which are always-already closed-necessary-whole in-themselves as an actuality, as opposed to open-contingent-processual in-themselves as a genesis. However, there is a beyond of Hegelianism identified by much post-Hegelian philosophy. This post-Hegelian philosophy criticizes Hegelian sublation and can be understood to identify its beyond in sublimation. Hegelian sublation idealizes a totality, reifies identity, and embeds goal-oriented survival; whereas post-Hegelian sublimation identifies a post-ideal repetition, transforms identity in difference, and embeds a freedom in death of identity.

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[peachy]

wow i feel like iv struck gold with this channel
really good little series, crystallised a lot of the chaos in my head, around these existential questions i wasn't able to articulate
also i love the memes on the side haha

[mikaelnoone]

Bringing into discussion the impossibility of closing the gap, I was immediately reminded of Alain Badiou's characterization of the experience of ethical consistency in his essay Ethics. It is something akin to 'confirmation of a point', where one is suddenly seized by one's fidelity to the real. This fidelity, of course, does not pertain to the level of subjective representation, the consistency of one's representation with ones's subjective idea of oneself, but rather that of the unspeakable, impossible truth that resists all partially constructed accounts from a subjective, lonely point of consciousness. We always try to articulate the one and the same point, but it always eludes our grasp, and, as lovers of truth, we have to keep on failing on and again with this. And we are lucky. An opening, an opportunity for articulation of the thing in itself as the substance of life. I'm thinking that Hegelian dialectics could be said to be the ultimate Swiss knife set: always at hand, whenever one wants to use it, the apparatus that can be attained and then brought to discussion at time of need, the ultimate tool in the sense of even applying to its own conditions. Where the concrete, material apparatus of Swiss knife set fails, due to its material limitations, the ultimate Swiss knife, when applying even to itself, has no material constraints whatsoever. I'm thinking this might be just Aristotelian rationalism brought to its extreme, but then again it can account for something more strange as well...

[billhoward]

Hi - can you please make a video comparing & contrasting metaphysical-idealism versus dialectical-materialism? - thanks!

[conforzo]

I keep thinking up examples, but I guess that's where it begins to break down... The joke "Do you serve coffee without cream" "No, we serve coffee without milk" kinda tries to contextualize how the coffee is not what defines the coffee but instead everything that negates the coffee. Or am I just stupid?

[AB-okhu]

In Lacanian psychoanalysis the Real is considered as mathematical. This is why Lacan used Frege's theory of numbers to explain the subject as "creatio ex-nihilo" (created out of nothing).

This happens because numbers precede concepts and empirical experience, because the number 0 cannot be extracted from experience (you cannot point out 0 bannanas).

Also, Lacanian view of the subject exists in a two dimensional space (torus or moebius band), but Buddhist ontology of sunyata belongs to a zero dimensional topological space (nothing and everything at the same time). So, there is actually a way to "close the gap" or "hole" in Buddhism, which consists in bringing a two dimensional space back to a zero dimensional space.

[africanhistory]

I am sorry but can you do a simplistic version of this. Talk about LOST! It might as well be in Japanese. The first part was easier but this chapter was Too much.

[Endymion]

I appreciate the attempt; watched the previous 2 videos, but I still don't get it. I can usually grasp complex concepts but Hagel and pointers in C+ are beyond me.

[dr.hakanakkoz]

Hii. Could you practise the dialect to your life? If you can do, how can you practise to your daily life? Thanks for your respond.