Hegel: the ultimate Badass of all Badasses

Fixed Cross wrote:

Id like to address this passage.

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438. Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. The coming-to-be of Spirit was indicated in the immediately preceding movement in which the object of consciousness, the pure category, rose to be the Notion of Reason. In Reason as observer, this pure unity of the I and being, of being for itself and being in itself, is determined as the in-itself or as being, and the consciousness of Reason finds itself.

Here he describes simply thought becoming aware of itself, the ontic as it rises from the transcendent as a definite inner nature. He stands at the precipice of solipsism and is about to make his way through, or around it...  the Thinker in his embryonic stage.

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But the truth of observation is rather that it leaves behind it this immediate instinct which merely finds Reason, this unconscious existence of Reason. The intuited category, the found Thing, enters consciousness as the being-for-self of the 'I', which is now aware of itself as the self in objective being.

Erroneously so - it took a while longer for philosophy to develop that idea into a proper logic, rather than 'self', which does not exist, 'self-valuing'.

That Hegel still figured a 'self', a discrete phenomenon to itself, is the ground of the destructive powers he unleashes.

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But this determination of the category, of being-for-self opposed to being-in-itself, is equally one-sided and is a moment that supersedes itself. The category is therefore determined for consciousness as it is in its universal truth, as a being that is in and for itself. This still abstract determination which constitutes the 'matter in hand' itself is at first only spiritual essence,

here he goes into the mist.
This is substance dualism.
At no point can two identifications/forms/modi of being be categorically separated like this without breaking the integrity of the epistemic path.

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and its consciousness [only] a formal knowing of it, which busies itself with all kinds of content of the essence. This consciousness, as a particular individual, is still in fact distinct from substance, and either makes arbitrary laws or fancies that in simply knowing laws it possesses them in their own absolute nature. Or, looked at from the side of substance, this is spiritual essence that is in and for itself, but which is not yet consciousness of itself. But essence that is in and for itself, and which is at the same time actual as consciousness and aware of itself, this is Spirit.

If it is not yet conscious of itself, it doesnt yet exist.
The logic here presented is the trap into which all the New Age tracticers fall - the belief that one can reach this inner self, from a point that isnt yet completely it.

The self-valuing integrity of consciousness, after which Hegel chased for a good whole without fulling losing sight, can not be built from parts of another, lesser thing - the consciousness of it is whole, that is its essence. How it overtakes a mind? Well that is the riddle we've been addressing the past 5 years.

Thanks for this reply. Let me think about this and see what comes up.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Id like to address this passage.

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438. Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. The coming-to-be of Spirit was indicated in the immediately preceding movement in which the object of consciousness, the pure category, rose to be the Notion of Reason. In Reason as observer, this pure unity of the I and being, of being for itself and being in itself, is determined as the in-itself or as being, and the consciousness of Reason finds itself.

Here he describes simply thought becoming aware of itself, the ontic as it rises from the transcendent as a definite inner nature. He stands at the precipice of solipsism and is about to make his way through, or around it...  the Thinker in his embryonic stage.

Thought becoming aware of itself, yes this makes sense. But how does thought become aware like this? The "Notion of Reason" is like the very idea of reason as such, it is reason as such in so far as reason can somewhat be called that idea which it has about itself, and which it applies as idea whenever reason is exercised consciously. I suspect that in non-human animals the Notion of Reason would simply be the empty image of the contents of reason in the moment; whereas in humans this becomes a pure category as "the object" qua object, qua objectification as such. So this is about not only the fact that we can think something, but that we can think the "thinking something" too. We can think about thinking, and this movement of self-reference (which is itself based on difference) becomes the proper "notion" of reason at all.

The emphasis on finding itself seems important, because consciousness is not naturally "Notionally Rational" in this way described, nor is reason naturally conscious of the pure category of the object as such of the conscious; this is a game of searching and finding. But the next sections are really important to connect this passage to the broader idea, I think.

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But the truth of observation is rather that it leaves behind it this immediate instinct which merely finds Reason, this unconscious existence of Reason. The intuited category, the found Thing, enters consciousness as the being-for-self of the 'I', which is now aware of itself as the self in objective being.

Erroneously so - it took a while longer for philosophy to develop that idea into a proper logic, rather than 'self', which does not exist, 'self-valuing'.

That Hegel still figured a 'self', a discrete phenomenon to itself, is the ground of the destructive powers he unleashes.

I see "self" is more like something that is posited theoretically because of how being for itself and being in itself are made to align, through the creation of the difference which is found as noted above. On that difference is founded the possible eventual equation of consciousness and reason. I don't see Hegel here advocating any kind of discrete phenomenon of the self. In fact here he isn't even elaborating on the nature, structure or logic of the self, all he is saying is that as soon as the equation of the difference appears (as already noted above) this fact becomes "irrelevant" in so far as it is left behind. The "intuited category" which is simply the initial moment of the difference (of consciousness as object of consciousness from reason) made equation (made into a sameness) is therefore immediately buried and becomes the "being for itself" on which self-awareness in "objective being" is constituted.

Being for itself is like an orientation toward something, like a self-valuing turned perpetually inward and funneling all experiences inward to its 'core', whereas being in itself is like this being but without that kind of orientation-funneling. Being in itself is "what it is", being for itself is "how it acts (to self-value toward itself)", as far as I can tell. So when Hegel says that the intuited category enters consciousness as the being for itself, I think he is saying that this "intuition" is made into a kind of center of gravity toward which everything now points or refers ultimately.

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But this determination of the category, of being-for-self opposed to being-in-itself, is equally one-sided and is a moment that supersedes itself. The category is therefore determined for consciousness as it is in its universal truth, as a being that is in and for itself. This still abstract determination which constitutes the 'matter in hand' itself is at first only spiritual essence,

here he goes into the mist.
This is substance dualism.
At no point can two identifications/forms/modi of being be categorically separated like this without breaking the integrity of the epistemic path.

I am not sure what you mean here specifically. One thing you may have noticed about me is that I almost never use these academic terms like 'substance dualism', I find these kinda of terms obfuscating and near useless. But in general I think "dualism" is definitely the case, as to the logic of being. The only way something could ever equate to itself would be through a kind of circling back around to itself through an exterior or an other; the negation creates the possibility for an affirmative Return to/as the 'same'.

I think we need the next section to fully make sense of this one here.

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and its consciousness [only] a formal knowing of it, which busies itself with all kinds of content of the essence. This consciousness, as a particular individual, is still in fact distinct from substance, and either makes arbitrary laws or fancies that in simply knowing laws it possesses them in their own absolute nature. Or, looked at from the side of substance, this is spiritual essence that is in and for itself, but which is not yet consciousness of itself. But essence that is in and for itself, and which is at the same time actual as consciousness and aware of itself, this is Spirit.

If it is not yet conscious of itself, it doesnt yet exist.

If it is not yet conscious of itself then it does not yet exist in the same way as if it had been conscious, but it still does or may exist; to exist in a different way.

From the side of 'substance', the individual who busies himself with contents (most people who don't particularly engage philosophically) has not yet aligned himself qua individual to those contents and in the formal sense of the universality of those contents in so far as they are contents of this individual qua individuality as such, as category. This is a person or being who is constantly searching and looking everywhere for itself, even as it does not know this is what it is doing. Most people are like this to a large degree. They try to make themselves real through the experiences they have, e.g. "consumerism", "commodity fetishism", etc.. Not saying there is anything "wrong" with that, it is just one way of existing/making oneself real.

Of course from the side of 'the individual itself', this is impossible to see, and the experiences are equivalent to "reality" directly (or rather, they are taken to be equivalent in this way, with no remainder).

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The logic here presented is the trap into which all the New Age tracticers fall - the belief that one can reach this inner self, from a point that isnt yet completely it.

I don't think this is a trap at all. I think this is quite correct that the "reaching" of the "inner self" is not at all a given thing, not at all a default state. Rather the New Age stuff tends to posit the opposite, that we are somehow "always already this inner self" and we just need to somehow get out of our own way to realize it-- no, I disagree with that view. This "inner self" is something that must be created.

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The self-valuing integrity of consciousness, after which Hegel chased for a good whole without fulling losing sight, can not be built from parts of another, lesser thing - the consciousness of it is whole, that is its essence. How it overtakes a mind? Well that is the riddle we've been addressing the past 5 years.

But this consciousness is already build from parts, that is precisely what constitutes the contents of consciousness. If you take all the contents of consciousness and removed them, there would be nothing left to be conscious of. Hegel's point is that the supposed "pure awareness of consciousness itself, void of contents" is something that is only possible because it has been created always already by virtue of the fact of that consciousness's own contents, namely those contents are summed and universalized in such a way that they posit toward a "one self". We both are this summed positing beyond the contents as well as are those contents themselves as 'discrete sum'. I think "being" is very much dual, simply because identity and sameness make no sense at all unless allowed to come into existence at the behest of a 'lower', more primary duality/difference/negation.

Sameness is precisely the affirmation that is made possible because there already exists some kind of more fundamental divide/difference that, in negating in this way, must be affirmed. What would affirmation be if there were no difference or negation in terms of which the affirmation was affirmation, an affirming of something? To simply say A=A is not to say anything at all, unless this structure is supported by underlying differences for which the equation A=A actually is made to mean something that it did not mean before.

In terms of the "new age" angle, I find this especially interesting. Zizek makes the great point that a spiritual experience can also be ugly, and I would add, could also be immoral, or simply utterly meaningless. There is nothing inherent to a "spiritual experience" that somehow makes it beautiful, moral, poetic, etc. The new age view is sort of like: you are already "god" by default and you just need to realize this to get out of your own way. This is sort of Buddhistic; life and thought are just pain and illusion, we should abandon everything, purely negate, in order to reach the "pure affirmation" at the heart of things all along.

We can deconstruct this view somewhat, and probably should. I happen to think that this kind of new age buddhistic stuff is just a self-narcoticizing denial-need, sort of like how you once described prayer: we project ourselves into the Void, in order to momentarily free ourselves from the burden of our own existence. I would also add that I have written in one of my books that pain has no real meaning in the sense that pain is not philosophical at all, and neither are the ideas of life or death. These experiences/ideas are like purely non-philosophical substances on which true meaning can be written, like words on a page. The page is the "blank" "non-written" onto which something alien is forced: words, which are alien to the page itself. But the page is needed for the words to exist at all.

Also speaking on this issue, I recently realized a key part of what makes human able to speak, or made us originally able to evolve true language whereas the other animals seem unable to form concrete repeatable morphemes to develop into letters and words: we humans have the ability to know, a fraction of a second before hand, what position all the mouth parts are going to be in when we make a vocal utterance. Where the tongue will be and how it will move, the shape of the mouth, the air flow and how that feels, this is not something we realize that we know, but we do know it, we do it unconsciously all the time; I had this realization recently and it was very shocking, because this "second level of understanding" is like a pre-figuring of the positions of all the mouth parts an instant before we say what we say. For a human, the moment BEFORE we say something and the moment we SAY it are two distinct moments, whereas I would assume in other animals these are both part of the same indivisible moment.

The reason this is significant is because it allowed us to learn how to structure repeatable and very precise, complex arrangements of the mouth parts in order to push some consciousness into the vocalized utterances; in order to really "make" those utterances as something beyond the mere immediate expression in the moment of the biologically collapsed instinctuality, immanent sensory experience, etc. I think that because the human brain was able to model in advance an instant before hand which arrangement of the mouth parts would produce which sounds, it became possible to truly "mechanize" these utterances and form a sphere of possible clearly distinct kinda of sounds that could be perfectly repeated over time, and not only repeated (other animals obviously repeat their own utterances) but predicted and planned for in advance, namely modulated a fraction of a second before they appear. Modulated by the intrusions of "reason" or "more consciousness", new moments and new motives, into the act. I think that if other animals had this capacity to divide the moment of the utterance into just-before and the act itself, then any other animal could probably learn to speak just as we can.

Anyway here is where Zizek elaborates on that aspect of the spiritual, in this talk (which incidentally I find to be one of his more coherent talks):

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Anna Akhmatova encountered a similar problem when, in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, she tried to depict the atmosphere of the Stalinist terror. In her memoirs she describes what happened when, at the height of the Stalinist purges, she was waiting in a long queue outside the Leningrad prison to learn the fate of her arrested son Lev:

One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a young woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had of course never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there), "Can you describe this?" And I said, "I can:' Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

What kind of description is intended here? Surely it is not a realistic description of the situation, but a description which extracts from the confused reality its own inner form, in the same way that, in his atonal music, Schoenberg extracted the inner form of totalitarian terror. At this level, truth is no longer something that depends on the faithful reproduction of facts. One should introduce here the difference between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what makes a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, confusion, inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her pain and humiliating experience in a clear way, with all the data arranged into a consistent order of exposition, this very quality would make us suspicious. The same holds for the unreliability of the verbal reports given by Holocaust survi­vors: a witness who was able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would thereby disqualify himself. In a Hegelian way, the problem is here part of the solution: the very deficiencies ofthe traumatized subject's report on the facts bear witness to the truthfulness of his report, since they signal that the reported content has contaminated the very form in which it is reported.

What we are dealing with here is, of course, the gap between the enunci­ated content and the subjective position of enunciation. G. K. Chesterton wrote apropos of Nietzsche that he "denied egoism simply by preaching it": "To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practice altruism:'4 The medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use-the universal intersubjectivity of language-undermines the message. It is not only that we should, therefore, denounce the particular position of enunciation that sustains the universal enunciated content--the white, wealthy   ale subject who proclaims the uni­ versality of human rights, for example. It is far lnore important to unearth the universality that sustains, and potentially undermines, his particular claim. The supreme case here, as noted by Bertrand Russell, is that of the solipsist trying to convince others that he alone really exists. Could one extend this argument to the problem of tolerance or intolerance? Perhaps not altogether, although there is a similar catch involved in preaching tolerance: it (presup)poses its presupposition-that is, the subject deeply "bothered" by the Neighbor-and thus only reasserts it. Did Paul Claude! not get it right in his  mous reply to jules Renard: "Mais la tolerance?" "II y a des  aisons pour ,a!" (une  aison de tolerance is one French expression for a brothel)? And did not Chesterton, as was so o en the case, also get it right with his famous quip, "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions"?

The aesthetic lesson of this paradox is clear. The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself. What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion. Perhaps a refedence to Wittgenstein's Tractatus can again be of some help here. According to the Tractatus, language depicts reality by virtue of sharing a logical form in common with it.

4.121 Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What  nds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in lan­guage, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it.

--Zizek, Less Than Nothing

Yes; and the philosopher's answer of course is: we must create a new language, a language of language itself. This is what true philosophy is and does. But it is still barely a fledgling thing, except here in Parodites' writings and my own, and in Fixed's value-ontological explorations and writings from within that framework and vantage. We can read Nietzsche and especially his Zarathustra as this very attempt at true philosophy, but I don't think Nietzsche fully grasped this consciously. Now that we can make more fully conscious the method of true philosophy toward which the history of philosophy and up to contemporary philosophy only enacts pre-consciously, ...the future is literally endless, an infinite open space into which humanity will climb pure truths finally into life's increasing perfection.