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: