Email and Hegel

Since I figure that most people whom I email read this blog, my new email will be michael [dot] anderson [at] marquette [dot] edu.

I've been continuing my reading in Hegel, though I've been procrastinating working through it enough to put it on the blog. In the meantime, though, here are some things that I've been noticing:

• Hegel's peculiar logic. The textbook categorization of this has been "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis," which is wrong. That's Kant, and it describes Kant's system quite well, actually. Hegel, however, cannot be captured by such a formal logical maneuver; he works from within the contingent and half-correct views which we put forward, and shows how they negate and then supercede themselves. One way to think of this is through the pattern "Concrete - Abstract - Unity," in which he starts with something as it is in itself in concrete reality (such as immediate sense experience), then shows how this negates itself and becomes and abstract thought-object (sense experience reveals itself to be only meaningful as a universal), and then shows a unity (the original "this" in sense experience is regained, but as one instantiation of a universal). It is not any negation or any unity, however, but the specific ones resulting from the tensions in the object, resulting from it being both in-itself and for-another. "Negation" may not even be the best word, but perhaps even "limitation"; the view of sense experience shows a limitation, which is overcome by the notion of the universal, which in turn shows a limitation which is overcome by bringing back in the particular "this."
• Hegel's system is highly symmetrical, in a hall of mirrors sort of way. The movement seen in Sense Certainty is repeated in the next two sections, only at a higher level and with submovements (fractals come to mind).
• Another way of looking at his logic seems to be that of a dual movement: one is going back and forth, transcending the limitations of each view, and the other is an upward movement which encompasses more and more, leading to an overall movement like an upward spiral.