Hegel

Of all the philosophers we have ‘seen’ so far, it wouldn’t be a bald statement to say that Georg Hegel is by far the most complex one to understand…after reading some of his work such as Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of the Spirit) I can only wonder if he understood himself.

I don’t disregard any of the work I have read, I admit I find it extremely interesting and intriguing… however while going through every sentence I feel like my mind is being twisted by force by a huge hand of alternative interpretation and my own lack of understanding…. Basically, ‘I know what he is saying but I don’t know what he is trying to say’ When I actually do understand what he is trying to say, I start to think if my own interpretation makes sense of his ideas, proves them right or wrong or figure something out to contribute to his perspectives. Sometimes I fail miserably.

The language is very interesting, as with many other philosophers in our encounters we can see certain langue that is common among the ‘philosophical vocabulary’ but not among ours. I wonder what some other colleagues in the seminars think of the idea of ‘consciousness’ of ‘self-evidence’ ‘pure-thought’ ‘empirical analysis’ etc. I wonder how one can achieve any contemplative understanding of the concepts we see, without having a certain reference to the language. Of which I am sure it some of us are absolutely alien to.

Let’s look at some of his main ideas;

The principal concepts evolve around the consciousness and the awareness, examining with a pure eyes, or a look of purity to see reality. (This is already quite a complex matter and it’s only the preface)

The ideas of pure thought, clarity of vision, transparency are commonly sought among many of the philosophers we have studied, and more contemporary thinkers too. This Hegelian pursuit is not very different of that of the current Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso who often speaks of clarity of vision and eyes unclouded, where one philosopher would say ignorance, another would say confusion, in the Dalai Lama’s case is hatred but the point remains.

I agree with Hegel when he criticises René Descartes and his ideas of knowledge before establishing how it is he knows anything. Hegel takes us back to more Greek ideas such as the awareness that we do not know anything for sure (Socrates) but with more elaborate metaphysics and perhaps a language that is more understandable even if he remains misunderstood, it is better not to be understood than understood and regarded as lunatic like Aristotle or perhaps even Plato.

So Hegel’s phenomenology (deriving from the Greek phenom, to appear, to occur) contradicts the Cartesian understanding which he considers it to be illogical due to the impossibility of an infinite regress. The idea explains that we can’t know without first knowing the ‘Absolute’ the entire universal scheme that explains it all. You can’t know how an entire apple looks like if you have only seen half-eaten apples, therefore you can only aware of what you’re looking for but you don’t know how it looks like or what is because you haven’t experienced it, which inherently is self-contradictory because if you don’t know how the entire apple looks like or what it is how can you be sure that it exists? Or how will you know when you’ve found it? This contradiction is what Hegel was so fond of and tried to explain beyond the realm of logics and sought in the realm of antagonists (which our beloved Bertrand Russell despises so much), metaphysics. 

He tries to explain this paradox through the division of consciousness, which is quite interesting and confusing at the same time. The energy of consciousness is the key to the contradiction between knowledge and the idea of knowledge because it allows one to be aware, without before knowing what the absolute is, to seek the absolute, almost like inherent blueprints of the house we have to build and how it looks like.

The idea of consciousness in this form goes against the principal idea of the ‘origin of ideas’ by John Locke such as Tabula Rasa which claims that we are born pure, without any conditions in mind, without any previous ideas other than those we develop ourselves. Hegel says that the condition we are born with is the consciousness, the guide to the Absolute.

All I can contribute to this idea is that we can only elaborate more ideas which we cannot claim are truthful, simply theories based on other ideas and other theories that seem ‘logical’ thus pursuit this idea with contempt. Observation without interpretation is also a key pursuit in this dilemma that goes beyond Hegel, Kant, Locke or Descartes.

But what contribution can I make to any of Hegel’s ideas?

….

There are those who contribute by simply attacking the superficiality and differences of the text itself such as the 20th Century thinking Walter Kaufmann who said

“Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology will not find it. What one does find on looking at the table of contents is a very decided preference for triadic arrangements. ... But these many triads are not presented or deduced by Hegel as so many theses, antitheses, and syntheses. It is not by means of any dialectic of that sort that his thought moves up the ladder to absolute knowledge.”

But I beg to differ, I am sure there is some sort of valuable knowledge that we can obtain from the introspective look of Hegel’s work.

A quick but interesting reference to Hegel can be found in Chris Horie's video. Here's the link:

The Social Contract

The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This is an interesting piece of mid-18th century ‘progressive-politics’ work. As a politics student I find in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s texts intriguing amount of information (subject of the following analysis) which is quite enjoyable.
We have to see Rousseau as an architect, as well as other 18th century philosophers and those previous to him he envisioned a certain protocol of government to people’s doctrine in his own fashion that will fulfil man’s needs at best. The Social Contract is the blueprint of this vision.

It has mild controversy, and very little of it can be linked to Rousseau’s thinking without linking it to the time and place he belonged to. This will come later.
The fundamental ideas are quite cohesive, after all he is seeking a ‘political right’ and as such it is only normal that from ideas like his sprung new ideas that helped flourish the French Revolution and the American Revolution… with some discrepancies of course.

First, it is important to identify that Rousseau creates a division in man himself. The division between the individual and the group he belongs to, the people, the ‘sovereign’. An idea similar to that of Karl Marx in a near century in regards to the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’ however, within man, this means in private one behaves and express his ideas in a certain way but when one identifies himself as one more person in a governed society then his self-portrait is communal (another idea of identification later developed by Karl Marx). There is the ‘me’ in myself and ‘me’ in my country. There is a behaviour focused on servitude for the greater good and a mental behaviour that must be kept intimate and distant to others.

Rousseau was loyal to the idea of the people being governed through the consent of the population and not by force, particularly by aristocracy or a monarchy which relays in a more stable and traditional hegemony unlike nowadays with fluctuating candidacies every 4 years etc. It may seem less democratic but more stable. This idea was clearly not taken in consideration by the fathers of the United States of America.

The social contract involves discipline of acceptance, tolerance and cooperation. People accept the responsibility of the government in protecting them thus the submission into the rights they swore not to break, a very legitimate, righteous and sustainable form of regime however Rousseau believed in capital punishment given the case where one person breaks this sacred covenant.
I reason this idea with no incredulous beliefs towards Rousseau because I know like everyone else we have studied that he is a victim of his own time and condition thus capital punishment was standardised, however there are more resolute and dignifying ways of ‘re adaptation’ into society instead of such harsh punishment that one can not revoke.

Here is where I differ with Rousseau and quite frankly with our own social contract too, where we punish wrong doers and exclude them from our society in jail for the rest of their life time (if not kill them depending in which country or state within the country they have been prosecuted). What we must understand is that this form of legal punishment doesn’t develop a person’s understanding, doesn’t re insert them adequately into our society or helps them interact with us again in a healthy way; it excludes them, confines them and resents them. Apart from the fact that we might also kill an innocent person.

However this is Scandinavia’s work to do (given their superiority in human rights) and not diseased mid-18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I find quite satisfactory and idealistically inspiring those concepts where he claims that the government is as strong as the people, where one part of the government should be ruled by the whole people… it really does create a unified self-esteem of its own, the morality of the PEOPLE.

The specific political clauses are not extremely relevant but there are interesting points of view that we can apply today. This social contract raises questions regarding how the government conditions us, his most famous quote “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” opens a notorious debate regarding the society one is born into.
We didn’t choose any of the laws we live in, we vote but we don’t choose anything… most of the most important decisions that are made every day have no link to us other than the social, financial or religious repercussions our governments decides to channel through us.

Man’s conditioning, nonetheless is experienced way beyond the political into the natural where we find ourselves born into chains not of bureaucracy but genetics, social class, financial situation, etc. and thus we can only reflect such paradigm into our society and its system. We were born with chains of many kinds.
If we look at India’s casting system, and the principles of the Code of Manu we can see how the chains man is born into are of a political essence that sprung five thousand years ago and only remnants of genetic material have notion of. As well as those they commonly share in the society they live in.

Regardless of how truthful Rousseau’s interpretation of man’s political antithesis of tabula rasa may be, our conditions go much further than those imposed by the government we may have accepted, for they are vessels of the same essence as us.