Half Hour Hegel: The Complete Phenomenology of Spirit (Preface, sec 64-66)

In this twenty-eighth video in the new series on G.W.F. Hegel's great early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, I read and comment on the sixty-fourth, sixty-fifth, and sixty-sixth paragraphs of the text, from the Preface.

In these paragraphs, Hegel discusses some of the issues involved with speculative philosophy and language. Speculative philosophy involves a different use and approach to language, one which cannot be grasped adequately from the perspective of the argumentative/ratiocinative mode.

At the same time, he affirms that non-speculative uses of language have their scope of legitimacy, and he points out that even speculative philosophy is stuck using the same language as all other modes of thought and expression. He then gives us an interesting example of a subject not to begin with: "God."

In this video series, I will be working through the entire Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph -- for each one, first reading the paragraph, and then commenting on what Hegel is doing, referencing, discussing, etc. in that paragraph.

This series is designed to provide an innovative digital resource that will assist students, lifelong learners, professionals, and even other philosophers in studying this classic work by Hegel for generations to come.

The introductory music for the video is: Solo Violin - BWV 1004 - Partita for Violin No. 2 - Recorded in Brooklyn June 26, 2011 specifically to be dedicated to the Public Domain

My videos are used by students, lifelong learners, other professors, and professionals to learn more about topics, texts, and thinkers in philosophy, religious studies, literature, social-political theory, critical thinking, and communications. These include college and university classes, British A-levels preparation, and Indian civil service (IAS) examination preparation

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#Hegel #Phenomenology #Philosophy #Idealism #German #Dialectic #Spirit #Absolute #Knowledge #History

[caesaraugustus]

Your comment about watching this video years from now is quite apt :)

[GregoryBSadler]

new Half Hour Hegel installation -- examining some of the problems imposed by the fact that speculative philosophy really does have to keep using the same language as other forms of thought

[lyndonbailey]

The Phenomenology is written in an extremely difficult language, for sure, but the most intimidating (and exciting) thing about it is how 'rangey' it is, how he could be talking about you or I, or history, or multiple cultures, or male and female or..take your pick in any given pithy paragraph.

I think its the most 'expansive' in the sense of lending itself to analogical exploration of work that I have come across.

[pooialalbakhsh]

you connect different parts of this topic together in an awesome way !!!! really interesting, everything make sense, thanks for these fabulous lectures.

[dantheman]

Chalk, by becoming what it was designed to do, slowly becomes what it was not. The static entity that is the stick of chalk becomes a representational tool by slowly grinding its original form away and becoming consumed by its purpose. Woah, Dr. Sadler you have me thinking!

[mortimermacmanus]

It’s ironic you should mention “Life is Short” as an appeal. I found myself considering the same approach, but in the obverse fashion.
I read Hegel’s Preface up until block 60, and I gleaned quite little from it; when I watched your Videos, I got a lot more out of them, though not what other Hegel scholars had to offer. There were parts I spaced on, meriting review, but mainly since it was about the fourth time that I either read or heard the text, and the mind tends to wander when confronted with redundancy, which Hegel himself seems to battle with in confronting the redundancies of his contemporaries. (This explains to me, as well, why such a Preface seems to leap so gaily from one finalizing judgement to another, unlike, say, the carefully constructed worldviews of a MacIntyre, Heidegger, Camus or even Jung.)
Part of the advantage to these Videos is that I get to hear the words aloud instead of reading them, and since my eyesight is quite poor and I am prone to migraines, lacking also access to a copy of the text in printed form, (a luxury during this Global Quarantine) I was quite tempted to keep listening to your analyses without my having ventured further into reading it. All of that being said, however, I agree with you that all too often people narcissistically dismiss that which they do not understand, especially if it is difficult and dense, requires labour to unriddle, makes broad claims and comes with the disturbing threat of being Proven Wrong.
However, I maintain that narrowing the manner of the Learning Process does it a disservice. If we are to “live” what Hegel has to say, as Shestov says we should, we must confront the spectrum of appeals against it. Whether it’s a Jungian interpretation of the Intuition, a Foucaultian attack, a Zizekian interpretation, a Kierkegaardian denunciation, or simply the experience of listening to Music and finding that Hegel’s premises don’t hold water in that peculiar domain of phenomenology, actual Lived Philosophy can’t simply “buckle down” and mire itself in the details of the text alone, for while few people read Hegel his Influence endures, and the immediate World we must confront must place him in opposition to those who followed him, for whom he could not possibly have accounted at the time of Publication.
To use another example: I never had the chance to read Deleuze and Guattari’s _Towards a Minor Literature, _ though perhaps that has changed by now, but if I had to go up against them in Debate, I’d at least be able to hold my own, contented with my own readings of Kafka, Deleuze’s Interviews and Lectures, especially on Kafka, and what I read of his far more developed later work _Capitalism and Schizophrenia, _ as well as discussions I held with students and professors of the man and subject matter. While all of this reflection on my part is admittedly partisan and anecdotal, perhaps even suggestive of another kind of narcissism, it is obvious that Deleuze just as well ignored many of his contemporaries and that many of his most pious, subconscious followers ignore HIM to an exceeding extent. In a postmodern, rhizomatic world devoid of Absolutes, wherein things are at best “true enough”, it seems sufficient sometimes for arguments to be “qualified enough”, and, if Hegel is labouring to resist any sort of dogmatism which imposes and indoctrinates without consideration for the Human Subject and Lived Experience, and if his students can be said to have made any headway on this project, then we must adapt our methods for conveying his wisdom just as much as we must adapt ourselves to who he was in his late thirties, at a time fraught with entirely different limitations*.
All that being said, I must thank and commend you for counterbalancing an extreme; obviously, nothing beats pen and paper when it comes to the Great Classics. I’ll look into getting myself a physical copy. Sorry for getting so defensive; I did not intend disruption.

*[({M.M.)}]*

*These Videos do that, too.

[songsmithy]

Regarding the idea that "other" languages are able to adequately express ideas without use of the subject/predicate form... that's just peachy if you are discussing such ideas only in those "other" languages. As a speaker of English, I appreciate the mastery of language that is applied by Hegel toward the dialectic.

Also, regarding something you said in previous videos about having to do the work, to actually read the book and submit to the book... I am finding that listening to your half hour lectures, going section by section in this systematic way, is making the material far more accessible to me than I suspect it would be if I simply read it - and I want to thank you for that. In a sense, I suppose you are doing a great deal of the work for me - but I rather think of it that you have mapped out territory that I would have otherwise been wandering aimlessly through.

[bodywithoutorgans]

Two things:  

1) Speaking (passable) Russian, I can tell you that you can convey sentences in a single word which would take several in English.  It's all done with shifting the ending of the word.  You could (correctly, by and large) argue that this subject/predicate form exists there, but I'm wary of shoehorning language into a set of pure logical forms.  Some of this is like early vs late Wittgenstein, where in the Tractatus it's all about finding a sort of pure logic underlying language, but in the Philosophical Investigations the relationship is more or less reversed.  I side with the latter ideas.

2) Badiou addresses some of these issues in Being and Event.  When he talks about the void, (empty set from set theory), the only coherent thing which can be said about it is to give it a name.  That is all that can be done.  His attempts to use set theory as a form of ontology, to me at least, represent some of the most important philosophical work of the last decade or two.

[asgilb]

Speaking of commentary... What do you think of HS Harris's book, Hegel's Ladder? I've been dipping into it here and there to help clarify some passages and I've found it very helpful and quite thorough. For me, sometimes watching or reading someone explain the text is the only way to comprehend it. Especially if I go back and read that part of Hegel again afterwards.
Which I admittedly don't always do.

[mandys]

In Lacanian psychoanalysis which i think is based on Hegel's dialectic process, it is stated that, the "truth" is not something waiting for you there, to be found. But that "truth" is something you make, while doing the process of the Dialectic.

[theamici]

The more I'm learning about "the speculative", the more I can't help but think that it somehow relates to the process by which the mind can be "creative". And not just relates, it seems to encircle creativity even, though at the same time not being exactly the same... interesting comparison.

[SequinBrain]

I noticed that the chalk decided to sing as you wrote its name on the board. It was not only revealing its voice, but either agreeing with its identity or happy that you knew its name and were giving it expression to the universe by deciding to discuss it..

[dwroberts]

Hi Greg

If language directs attention in meaningful ways then equally, meaningfully directed attention can achieve the same thing in silence (meditation).  That is probably potentially how Hegel came up with his original  ideas in the first place - even if he's a genius and we may we are not.I guess the point I am making is only a subtle one.  Which is although it is fair to require philosophy to be exoterically specified.    And it is a great check of our philosophical musings, ensuring they are not just laxed or errant intuitions (self movements).  And further it is particularly great that it provides an appropriate orderliness for us when it comes to the consumption of great works.  All that said, still the process is not necessarily one that won't or doesn't proceed in silence once the necessary experiences have been had.

Having said that a different way of looking at language all together might be that the meaningful movement of the mind has a rhythym and form.  And that the very nature of words in their vibratory form as opposed to their literal meaning can influence the "silence of the mind" (or in real physical terms brain waves) as might happen say in chanting.

I bring these up not as superior routes to progress in order to escape reading Hegel's texts, and not just digression for digression sake.  But because perhaps they are very much part of the process Hegel describes though not explicitly.  He does allude to such a thing perhaps in the metaphors he uses and how he describes the movement of the notion back into it's own subject.  I don't think Hegel necessarily says this movement must take place in words (or some equivalent) even if he quite rightly hasn't given up on them to help in the process leading toward the very movement of consciousness. And although he indicates the necessity for an active subject.  I don't think that necessarily means a forced effort but often times it may be effective to be a vigilant witness as the subject "unfolds itself".  That is the activity is in the subject which is being observed and in a sense mirrored internally within the witness.I am not suggesting that all one need do is sit in "silence" or "chant a mantra".  Nor am I suggesting that there aren't many things which can have similar effects such as music in stimulating creativity.  But I think it's worth mentioning to ensure "all the doors are kept open".  It's not that the work won't still need to be done but you can create an environment in which it can come more easily.

Do you know if Hegel had any belief as to the relation of the physical constitution or the "physical form of words" and their effect in conscious cognition?

I realize I am probably trying to get ahead of myself here, which is a strategy I have found rarely (if ever) works in these matters.  But I would be interested if you necessarily had a counter-view to any of these comments.

[theamici]

btw, it might just be me, but the audio-quality of this particular video seems to be lower than the regular sound. I play it on max-quality.

Recently changed audio input device?

[lyndonbailey]

I thought it was funny that you did not want to 'give away the ending' considering that as I recall it, the beginning of the preface is a caution to not 'give away the beginning' when writing a meta book on philosophy :D

[Giannetta]

On the point that non-Indo-European languages would make the world appear, would cause us to apprehend it, in a radically different way than, for example, the English language would, I want to point out the view and the studies of the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini. Developing from the heideggerian notion that metaphysics was "invented" by the Greeks, prof. Sini argues that it is from the structure of the Greek alphabet that the very mode of being that philosophy is could have happened, could have come into existence at all. According to this view therefore the western thinkers do not need to defend, compare, or justify the ways of western philosophy versus the ways non-indoeuropean speakers see and speak of the world: this because philosophy is a phenomenon peculiar to the western cultures in so far as they are heirs of the Greek thinking developped from its peculiar alphabet structure—there cannot be "philosophy" in China.

Another comment: yes, in your lectures the content "happens" more than it would in a textbook. Thank you for your beautiful intelligent lectures.

[TheRowanmoses]

Have you come across Catherine Malabou's work titled "Plasticity at the Dusk of writing"?