Philosophy: just for fun explanation?

For the original post with Hegel Quote and comments, see here. (disclaimer: I only slept for about 3 hours last night – writing a big paper, preping for Kant class today, etc., so I may ramble more than usual)

Responses to all, in order, at last: (beginning with Zen’s first post after my last post… got it?)

Zen – “How could God be other than an abstraction AND mere difference in the Christian world?”

um… I think the Christian God could be quite substantial/active, as in Job and later in the transubstantiation (eucharist) Catholicism. If you question is to suggest that abstraction necessitates mere difference, I think you may be right.

Zen – “I still don’t really understand what you quoted. Can you deconstructed it for zen unsound and me and cheesy chips and your other readers?”

The original quote was:

“Neither the one nor the other has truth; the truth is just their movement in which simple sameness is an abstraction and hence absolute difference, but this, the difference in itself, is distinguished from itself and is therefore selfsameness” (§780, pp.472-3, The Phenomenology of Spirit).

Deconstructed:

Neither our concept of a separate divine being nor ourselves as totally isolated autonomous agents is true. Truth is in the process in which our label (simple sameness) is placed on each of these. The label, being static, is absolutely different from both the ‘divine’ and ‘us’ – both of which are in movement. The label (the difference in itself), is not the thing to which it is applied and is therefore empty, really applicable only to itself, not really useful for understanding what it is labeling…

So, anyhow… We have this idea of a God ‘up there’ or whatnot. We also have the idea of ourselves having a ‘soul’. Both of these we think to be eternal, unchanging in some way. But Hegel says, ‘no, both ideas are false. What is true though is that we come up with the ideas as part of our spiritual development’ (for him it was Spirit in the big-‘S’ way- socio-cultural, not individual). So, great, the Spirit has advanced beyond God as an agent in the world, good for Spirit. In historical terms, Hegel has just praised Protestantism for bringing a more rational understanding of God. Now he’s showing how we need to or will move beyond Protestantism to simply living reasonably.

The greater reason of Protestantism is the extent to which they isolated God, getting Him out of world, where He was confusing (is it God mad at us, or just a tornado? How can I trust science if God/angels/the devil can come muck up experiments whenever they want?). So Protestantism (specifically German Lutheranism, not the Jerry Fallwell types) brought reason to bear on the very concept of God, whiddling God down to nothing more than a mere abstractness, just a label and some meaningless qualities.

Finally Hegel is pointing out that the labels are just labels – the only thing they represent IN TRUTH is themselves. They are perfectly empty, totally detached from reality, which is in flux.

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Brittany – “It’s all relative…. the only truth is an abstract undefinable that some would define one way or another. But this game of defining, contrasting and claiming truth is in it’s rawest stripped form a dance… we’re all partners in the same dance…. and that abstract movement of difference in the same dance is the truth.”

– you nailed it, I think. The movement itself is not relative though, that is what is true and real.

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Nacho (I’ll take some selected bits) – “I think Hegel was off his rocker.”

Yes. But in a good way.

“He is talking about God ultimately, but we can say that about Hegel easily. After all for him, God is all, the root of all, and not a stranger to “itself.” What exists, if created by God, is a manifestation of God. And the notion God is an abstraction, so as you note simple sameness.”

Yup. Sort of. My professor was fairly adament that Hegel was an atheist. He uses the term Geist or Spirit, not ‘God’ except to refer to the mere label we use (I think, it’s been a while for me too now – a whole year). Geist or Spirit is the movement or unfolding of history and humanity’s self-understanding therein.

“It is simple identity — which points to a difference, but cannot point to essence. Yet the difference that is established in that identity move (saying “God”) immediately points to what “isn’t” – to that which is excluded in the differential relation, — but it is altogether pointing to the same relation because that excluded is a ‘constitutive outside.'”

Yes – I think. You’re starting to write like Hegel, or someone like him. This bit perhaps could be clarified, for me at least.

That move of identity is reflective, and would always be changing because it is a moving target at any time it is invoked and yet “same” in the sense of that reflection which considers itself.

Yea, this makes sense. “The move of identity” here is what I call labelling, right? We can only label things reflectively, after the experience is ‘processed’ by our concepts (in our head). And yea, I think the ‘same’ is as you say, it is a reflection on past reflections on, say, God. So we’ve moved up from God as immediate actor in nature and the reflections we may have on that to a meta-level – reflecting on our reflections, categorizing them, making them rational. We thus get twice removed from reality.. Bummer.

It seems to me that for Hegel to label something God is to engage in simple abstraction because it is to rely on a positivity of terms.

What’s a ‘positivity of terms?’

It is not a negation that carves out space precisely to give boundedness to essence otherwise undefinable. Well, I’m off my rocker too, but this dialectic for Hegel is between identity and difference, between self and other, and they recognize each other in each other, there is a mutual acknowledgement because to assert self-identity is to assert an other (a constitutive outside) against which I define my-self.

Ok, I’ve lost you…. I think you’ve reached Hegelhood.

Does that make any sense Justin?

Yes professor, crystal clear.

and Nacho part 2: Just realized I did not make something clear.

Yea, that part between “Hey Justin!” and “Does that make any sense Justin?”

What I think he is trying to outline is that God is the only entity that knows itself qua itself, not in the sense of encountering otherness because there is no otherness to God —

Hm… Again I’ll go with the ‘atheistic Hegel’ version of things and say he’s just talking about the Spirit of history, and here from a religious perspective. Certainly there is no otherness to the Spirit of history – it is the totality of all human consciousness through time, and Hegel is trying to get a feel for it and describe it in its progress.

Well, just my muddleheaded attempt at parsing Hegel. Thanks Justin.

And thank you. Due to my lack of sleep I’m a bit muddled myself 🙂 But I appreciate your contribution.

And just for fun, again – here’s what Hegel says soon after the passage above:

“The difficulty that is found in these Notions stems solely from clinging to the ‘is’ and forgetting the thinking of the Notions in which the moments just as much are as they are not—are only the movement which is Spirit” (ibid., p.473)

I think that clarifies everything, don’t you?