'Hegel's Epistemology' & 'Metaphysics'

[AdroseAkise]

I found these books very insightful:

[kever]

I've been interested in Hegel too since I heard Zizek talk about him. Especially when it comes to how he thought society evolves (thesis, antithesis and synthesis) and how/if it relates to spiral dynamics or Marx. But I haven't gotten to actually research any possible agreement between them.

Anyways what were the insights you've got from the books?

[DocWatts]

To anyone interested in Hegel, I'd suggest that instead of trying to work your way through his dense and impenetrable prose (Hegel being a famously terrible writer), you'd be far better off picking up The Accessible Hegel as a starting point. Like it's name suggests, it makes Hegel's work accessible without dumbing it down. Or trying to reduce it to a Materialist philosophy (ala Marx and Zizek).

Edited January 4, 2022 by DocWatts

[DocWatts]

Hard to give the basic gist of a philosopher as complex as Hegel, but here's my best shot:

The basic gist of Hegel is that he's a process philosopher, concerned with questions of becoming. 

Central to Hegel's philosophy is the notion of dialectics, in which ideas shape and are shaped by a dynamic interplay of shifting equilibriums.

This can be metaphorically thought of in some ways as physical forces interacting and pressing upon each other generating tension, and that these tensions must get resolved in one way or another.

The notion that all ideas contain within them thier own negation, and out of this negation new ideas are synthesized, is what for Hegel gives thought its character as evolving and self correcting. 

Hegel sees thought as an expression of an embodied universal consciousness that's the ontological substrate underlying all of Reality, and is in the process of discovering it's own nature through the dialectical process he describes. Important to note that objective Reality does exist for Hegel, just that it's fundamentally Mental rather than Material.

His philosophy can be thought of as a systematic way of explaining how the dynamic interplay between paradigms makes development possible, and in that aspect Hegel can be said to be somewhat of a precursor to thinkers like Ken Wilber and dialectical models such as Spiral Dynamics.

Of course, people who are only familiar with Hegel on a very surface level tend to reduce this philosophy down to a simple Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis model, which is a caricature of Hegel rather than an accurate distillation of his philosophy.

Edited January 4, 2022 by DocWatts

[Bernardo Carleial]

"Significant for such a project is Hegel’s discussion of the relation between death and the “becoming subject.” Hegel’s account of death centers on a bipartite concept of negativity.
First, the human negates nature (a negation exteriorized in the human’s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs); and second, he or she transforms the negated element through work and struggle. In transforming nature, the human being creates a world; but in the process, he or she also is exposed to his or her own negativity.
Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary. It is the result of risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the “animal” that constitutes the human subject’s natural being is defeated."

 

I've read this in an article about Necropolitics

Edited January 10, 2022 by Bernardo Carleial

[Bernardo Carleial]