I'm a PhD candidate who actually understands Hegel and has a grasp the broad history/development of left wing thought from Rousseau to Zizek. I'm sick today and remembered this place existed. If you are trying to get a better handle on theory of any kind and have questions on how to go about understanding something, go ahead. I imagine this makes me sound like an ass, but I promise that I'm being totally sincere
Why is my left nut slightly bigger than my right one? What‘s Zizek‘s take on this?
>>2548710This is actually a really fun one to think about. I imagine he'd talk about the necessary imbalance or unequal nature of the pair: it is not that they are precisely identical, the balls, but are nonetheless joined together as though they were the same in the signifier. That one ball must stand out from the other, yet must depend upon it for its own identity, is a cut and dry dialectical case study.
is sorel a leftist
1. If Hegelian dialectics doesn't function as that simplified three-stage model, how does it actually work?
2. Does reality itself operate in a dialectical manner, or is it merely a tool we use to try to interpret a world that moves in some other way?
3. Is dialectics itself subject to dialectical changes over time?
>>2548759sorry for any delay, again I've been sick.
>1. If Hegelian dialectics doesn't function as that simplified three-stage model, how does it actually work?This common misunderstanding (I'm assuming you mean the conflation of Dialectics with the "Thesis->Antithesis->Synthesis" model, which is from Fichte and does not appear in Hegel) actually, at this point, needs its own dedicated history book.
The most basic short-hand way to understand dialectics is to understand it as a continuous, deepening contradiction; to think dialectically is to think contradiction itself. In a bizarre twist of history, Christoph Waltz actually provided an extremely concise explanation of it (pic related). It is not a question of "how does it work" than it is a description of what it is that you, as a subject, are already necessarily doing and thinking.
>2. Does reality itself operate in a dialectical manner, or is it merely a tool we use to try to interpret a world that moves in some other way?This is the Kantian question. For Hegel, it is necessarily the former inasmuch as reality is not graspable separate from subjectivity itself; i.e. subjectivity is itself which constitutes reality (or, Substance, which he is taking from Spinoza), which, in turn, cannot be grasped without a subject to grasp it. The necessary co-constitution of reality by its observer, and the observation by the observed, is at the heart of dialectics. To try and think outside of this, for Hegel, is an absurdity–which is to say that it is literally impossible to accurately think. I myself am pretty convinced by Hegel on this because for him human subjectivity is not definitive; the door is open for other subjectivity (although, for us, being human beings, we will necessarily never have access to that kind of being here).
>3. Is dialectics itself subject to dialectical changes over time?My personal feeling is yes. Walter Benjamin, who basically didn't even read much Hegel, was attempting to articulate exactly this in the Arcades Project
>>2548740the more important question is to ask yourself what's at stake by asking this
>>2548827im just curious. answer the question or you are a HACK
>>2548855I don't mean to be flippant about it, it's really just a question of what one thinks "left" meaningfully signifies or not. For me? I would have a difficult time imagining Sorel to be a leftist since his philosophy necessarily involves the forced unfreedom of others in a systematized, structural way; it's not that he even seems to believe in the necessity of, say, a temporary period of revolution or violence prior to any future utopian sustainable condition of mutual freedom, but rather one in which subservience to myth, and the legitimate continued use of violence, are necessary. But again, I don't think the question itself is really that meaningful.
>>2548861its not meaningful, I was just curious what your answer would be. thank you for responding
>>2548707Why is zizek considered a leftist when he didnt suporrt socialist yugoslavia and joined a libertarian capitalist party as soon as it collapsed?
>>2548707How do you feel about this map of the Science of Logic on Github?
https://autio.github.io/projects/scienceoflogic/ I have to finish up an essay today, so I might be late in responding to future questions. I'll do the tripfag thing for a bit to make things easier. But I'm happy to help: academia is bullshit these days, and the breadtuber or whatever world doesn't make any of this stuff any easier to comprehend.
>>2548881I need to revisit Difference & Repetition, so I don't want to overstate any takes about the man. I will say that his work–particularly with Guattari–needs to be thoroughly contextualized within the postwar French moment. People who act as though his work can be easily transposed onto the contemporary scene really deeply misunderstand him. This user's take, however, seems completely, deeply accurate to me–although it's worth noting that Deleuze himself likely would have disagreed with it himself (to say nothing of Foucault).
>>2548889I actually cannot help you with the diagram–I've never been a visual thinker, so I've always found that these kinds of diagrams mystify more than clarify the topic. What I will say is that the diagram, in the first place, assumes too much of a stabilization of movement, which is to say it appears, retroactively of course, teleological, which dialectics in the first place does not allow for and indeed completely negates.
The second quote is not entirely inaccurate: the Bolshevik/Soviet tradition of Dialectical Materialism, particularly from Stalin and Trotsky onwards, was not at all very well versed in Hegel or proper dialectical thought; the tradition of Lukacs (Frankfurt School and onwards) dealt far less with this burden, but they were essentially also pompous assholes who refused to explain themselves like normal people (you can read Martin Jay's "The Dialectical Imagination" to confirm this for yourself, and to be clear: I think extremely highly of Adorno).
>Is it correct to say that just because something is " amoving contradiction" doesn't mean it will be short lived? Contradictions can be stable over long periods of time, like orbits, right?This is a very interesting question. I would hasten to say it depends. Since the notion of a contradiction depends upon the grasping of it by the subject itself, there is no definite or necessary timeline for how long or short such a grasping may take or extend itself for. Hegel's dialectics is entirely historical and non-teleological, so there's no rule to this. Since all grasping of thought is necessarily retroactive (or what Freud called "Nachträglichkeit"), the relative "stability" of a situation can only ever be grasped after that situation has concluded. Otherwise, it would not be capable of being grasped in the first place–one would be too within the moment to articulate it (alienation for Hegel is the necessary condition to grasp all thought).
>>2548901Again, like in my response to the Sorel question, it's really a question of what one thinks is at stake by identifying Zizek with the signifier of "The Left" or vice-versa. As for the guy himself, one has to appreciate what was going on in Yugoslavia and its collapse to make sense of his actions. Like he said in an interview with Todd McGowan, capitalist money is an unfreedom, but it is an unfreedom that the Socialist subject was not free to freely decline.
>>2548909I like him. He helped me a lot to understand the "Force & Understanding" section of the Phenomenology.
>>2548915See my above comment: I don't particularly find diagrams all that useful to understanding these concepts. One has to go through the entire process of misunderstanding in order to understand—which is to say, there's unfortunately no real replacement to really sitting down and reading it for oneself. That's not to discourage using secondary literature as much as possible though! I think Todd McGowan & Ryan Engley's podcast "Why Theory" remains the most accessible and easiest entryway into dialectical thinking
What authors post-Lenin do you recommend on Marxist/Marxian IR?
So do you cum when you mentally masturbate?
>>2548901because western 'leftism' is mostly captured by trotskyist anti-communists, those few leftist orgs that were not hostile to the USSR being stamped out (mccarthyism, etc.)
>>2548943Venezuela is trotskyite though
>>2548933Why does dialectics not allow teleology? Why does dialectics completely negate teleology?
Would you consider Marx a Hegelian? And an somewhat odd question just because I'm curious: What do you think about Fukuyama (the nothing ever happens guy), is this dude actually relevant in academia?
>>2548936My main focus is on sociology and culture, so I'm not the person to ask this unfortunately. I think you would do well to become more familiar with Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein though, even if the latter isn't really "Marxist". You shouldn't limit yourself to categories and traditions just because you wish to stay ethical and, well, in reality. If you're a thorough and careful enough reader, you will be able to pick up any analysis and gain meaning, perspectives, and information from it.
>>2548950As I hinted at earlier, dialectical thinking is by necessity a retroactive activity. It proposes that something can only be grasped once it has been alienated enough from immediate thought and experience that it could be identified as being separate from ourselves. Another way of saying this is that in order to identify something, that thing must in the first place stand out and be separate from its environment or situation; this appearance of separation or alienation however should not be misinterpreted as a really existing separation, it's really instead our own recognition of this separation. Now, what does teleology have to do with this? We will *always* be tempted to say that the recognition of this false separation or alienation was inevitable, but this is not at all the case. This is why Hegel's system of thought (and Marx's by extension) is by nature thoroughly historical: mis- and nonrecognition is inevitable and occasioned/contingent to the particular circumstances of the time. For Hegel (and Zizek by extension), all we can do is articulate how it was that we got to the present recognition: to me, this is the central tension and philosophical conflict between Hegel and Marx. Marx wanted (and rightly so) to be able to implement Hegel's thought into an actionable system of political and economic organization. If Marx made any mistake–and to put my own cards on the table, I do think he did make a mistake here–it was by reasonably thinking that the full application of, then, modern empirical science and sociology onto political economy would be enough to override this necessary limit to thought. This is why the LeftComs (at least traditionally, I don't know where they're at these days) are fundamentally insistent on spontaneity. Zizek, and Todd McGowan by extension, have spent basically their careers trying to figure out how to embrace Hegel's radical anti-teleological thought while remaining, well, practical and actionable; they clearly have not had much, if any, real success in this.
>>2548978See my above response. I think Marx was very much Hegelian but, reasonably, became frustrated with the implications of Hegel's thought. He additionally had to contend with the Young Hegelians of his time who basically didn't take "real life" seriously whatsoever. This was the whole reason why Marx began his "Materialist Dialects" in the first place, although what he articulates in Capital and earlier isn't incompatible with Hegel whatsoever.
As for Fukuyama? I honestly have a soft spot for the guy. It was understandable why he wrote what he wrote when he did, and he frankly got a whole lot more correct in his analysis than people want to admit or give him credit for. I think his issue was he didn't understand what "The End of History" actually meant for Hegel (and, to his defense, very few still understand it). My impression is that while he's explicitly cited less and less, the influence of his intervention can be seen everywhere (Mark Fisher basically helped do this, and, imo, he was correct to).
>>2548707Deleuze had quoted once, "Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche's work at its cutting edge", will you elaborate why he said that? How Nietzsche counters Hegel? and How can I understand Hegel is there any methodology?
>>2549881Not OP, and very drunk, but isn't it obvious that the difference between Hegel and Nietzsche is that of collectivism and individualism? Hegel's entire thesis of zeitgeist is dependent upon an collective understanding of history and his predicitive modes and analisis of the world is larger than the individual. Nietzsche's work is completely lacking context of the world a person lives in and spouts individualism as the most radical good someone can live by. Even Striner thought there should be unions, but the Zsche was all about what is best for the best. Do you not read books? Or does your brain not make connections like that? Or am I completely off base and am drunk?
>>2548707First of all prove you're not a booklet LARPer wasting my time, and give me your best impression of Hegel's interpretation of the myth of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit
If that's too difficult, what's your interpretation of Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" (aka "delectatio morosa" in the Summa)?
If that's too specific, you mention starting your understanding of philosophy starting with the French Revolution, but Hegel's most notable philosophical influence is actually a pre-revolutionary rationalist Philosopher, who is it?
>>2549923Lets go to bed, Grandpa
>>2548707What's your opinion on whether or not philosophical Pragmatism is compatible with Marxist thought, and what is your reasoning for thinking so?
My question is inspired by the works of the young Sidney Hook: after studying under John Dewey in the 1920s (his favorite student, in fact), he wrote an influential book released in 1933 called
Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. In it John Dewey is not mentioned once, but it was quickly pointed out by reviewers that Hook's reading of Marx was heavily inspired by Dewey's pragmatist epistemology.
The thing is, despite some vituperative attacks on the book over the years (clumsy guilt by association attacks by the CPUSA at launch, and more sophisticated critiques by Trotskyists in the 60s and 70s), when I read the book I saw almost nothing that contradicted how I already understood Marx and Engels. The only thing that
might be be in conflict is on the "inevitability" of socialism: Hook merely maintains that capitalism makes socialism
possible by allowing for mass education etc., with socialism merely being an ethically desirable state of affairs; the critics allege that Marx thought socialism was "inevitable", either through the economic collapse of the capitalist system or through a mechanistic desire for socialism arising in the course of proletarianization. I think both theories of inevitability seem pretty disproven now in $current_year.
If you want to get an idea of Hook's thought, read Chapter 9 of TUKM (attached), which I thought was the most brilliant chapter. Were Marx and Engels Pragmatists?
>>2548999>If Marx made any mistake–and to put my own cards on the table, I do think he did make a mistake here–it was by reasonably thinking that the full application of, then, modern empirical science and sociology onto political economy would be enough to override this necessary limit to thoughtCan you explain why you think it's necessary, if I'm understanding you, to view dialectics only in hindsight? By saying it's necessary then you must also think that there is no information to gain from an ongoing dialectic, right? But we can examine the characteristics of this thing we identify and examine the current and past interactions of it with its contradictions and can predict certain things about the necessary traits of the resolution of that dialectic, even if we can't know the specifics. For example, with the contradiction of socialized production with private ownership, we can predict by the nature of this contradiction that a necessary resolution will involve social ownership of socialized production in some form. How exactly the production ownership will be organized won't be clear until after it's already taken place. But that specific detail of removing private ownership can be predicted. We cannot predict, on the other hand, that production will no longer be socialized because socialized production is inherently more efficient than petty bourgeois individual production and capitalism will always tend towards using that more efficient method.
What am I missing?
I'll respond to everything as I can; I'm still very sick lmao
>>2549881I'm going to hazard to guess that this is from his Nietzsche book, which for the record I haven't read. As I hinted at before, I'm not much of a Deleuze guy; I'm more familiar with his middle to late period with Guittari onwards. But this is almost certainly in reference to Nietzsche's anti-historical drive. For Hegel, dialectics are necessarily steeped within–and Marx and Nietzsche alike would claim overdetermined by–the historical "spiritual" conditions (Geist) of the moment of its thought and recognition. Perhaps the core of Neitzsche's philosophical program is to explode the notion that a thinker need to rely on or respect or respond to the past whatsoever (The Gemology of Morals and The Twilight of the Idols are ostensibly arguing and doing exactly this). The Hegelian critique is this would be essentially to show that this very move by Nietzsche is itself intractable from the spirit of his moment in history; Deleuze thinks that this move is (I recall he once uses this phrase) a parlor trick.
OP, bro, do you still here? I want to know how one can get into continental philosophy? Any good reading guide to it?
>>2550310he got filtered by my basic factual questions and cowered in shame
>>2550084The Antigone discussion would require too much tracing of the development of individuality in Hegel; which–and you can take this as me backing out if you wish–I'm just too sick to do at the moment. Unhappy Consciousness is easier to extract on its own. In a short-hand summary, Unhappy Consciousness refers to the point at which the subject, aware of its own internal contradictions within itself (the recognition of its own internal division as consciousness) as much as its extrinsic contradictions in respect to "external reality", remains alienated from or is irreconcilable to the fact that the situation of, ostensibly, being alive as an individual human being in the world, is unchangeable. Another way of short-handing it is that Unhappy Consciousness is Hegel's term for entirely summarizing the path of French Existentialism: it is the point at which the subject can recognize itself as being an essential part of the world, and yet continues to identify itself with the unessential (pure thinking) rather than the whole (the recognition of itself as being co-constitutive with the whole of being or spirit). This, again, is all my shortest-hand way of describing a moment in Hegel which, as the dialectical method necessarily needs, would require starting all the way back from square one to properly communicate.
>>2550310I actually commented last night on a thread on /edu/ about this question (
>>25347 ), so I'll just repost a slightly edited version here:
Continental philosophy is just philosophy, whereas analytic philosophy more generally refers to a methodological approach and system of logic which, by its own constraints, can only describe a specific portion of consciousness and reality. It's unfair and generally incorrect to think of the divide as being incompatible (see: Wittgenstein). As for where to start, it really depends on what you're interested in. I think everything still basically begins and ends with Plato, but if you're interested in aesthetics (which I think the "Continental tradition" is unquestionably better equipped to detail), reading Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty would be fun for you. In terms of critique, there's still no replacement for Hegel and Adorno, although I think Heidegger's essays (Age of the World Picture, Question Concerning Technology) are also essential texts. Kierkegaard is a very fun entry-point as well. The answer really depends on what you're interested in.
>>2550312Gimme some grace bud. I'm sick; I was in the ER less than 48 hours ago. Furthermore, I'm not interested here in asserting myself as any authority, I just want to be a resource. This stuff is, to me, very important, and there's a lot of unnecessary and artificial barriers preventing people from, well, knowledge and understanding. I'm not invested in "proving people wrong or right" as much as just helping some anons out who, clearly, want to be better versed in philosophy.
>>2550364mental masturbation is still masturbation
people do what feels good to them
>>2550270That's what I basically said but drunk!
>>2548707im a silly woke woman and a midwit, every intellectual interest i have leads to Hegel and its a big wall
how do i learn him? pick up his books? maybe books by others explaining him? maybe i just give up and learn philosophy by start to finish? please tips im miserable and knowledge fills me im willing to invest anything to learn
>>2550437Just gimme the practical Marxist equivalent of the unhappy consciousness the same way delectatio morosa is for Catholic theology, here is a clear-cut implication as described in the introduction to the philosophy of right (highlight by me)
I'm not purity-testing here, just making sure you've got at least the basics right, because you should be well aware that Hegel has been parodied by a whole generation of willful ignorants, including the so-called French Theory you just mentioned
>>2550151This is really really interesting! I might have to disappoint you here and admit that I'd have to really sit down and read all of this to give a proper thought.
One thing I would note however, quickly looking at the chapter in question you pointed out:
>[Hegel attempted] to prove that all of existence was rational, therefore, necessary, and, therefore, good, he failed to make the existence of any particular thing intelligible. (74)Is a misled (although historically commonplace) understanding of Hegel. When Hegel uses the word "necessary", it is often taken as a moral or teleological justification, whereas for him the use of the term is entirely, utterly descriptive. This touches upon the question posed by:
>>2550218The question of "inevitability" and the notion of any development being "necessary" touch upon the same thing: the question at stake here, it seems to me, is whether human history is being "driven" or "directed" by anything at all. The interpretation of Marx which has gained the most currency (basically, due to Lenin–and this is not at all a diss; I think Lenin was probably about the smartest man in the world at the time he was alive next to WEB DuBois) is that human history can be understood as the unfolding of contradictions. In Marx, the contradictions are instantiated by the organization (or "division") of labor of a specific society. Based upon this recognition, one can claim to "predict" what will or at least ought occur next (Scientific Communist Socialism). Of course, this did not occur. The reason as to why this did not occur is–well–here we still are debating it. What Hegel provides, however, is the total rejection of any notion of inevitability whatsoever: it is all a matter of whether or not the individual human being (and the social-historical conditions which co-instantiate him) is capable of recognizing their own individual freedom–freedom within thought, within a certain degree of action, within recognition itself. The resistance to Hegel by much of the contemporary (as well as historical) left has been that this thought does not provide very much of a roadmap; but, at the same time, if we are interested in the capital-T "Truth", and organizing society as to be as ethical and sustainable as possible, we must confront this fact.
The question with regards to pragmatism would be whether or not it is possible to consciously know one is being, well, "pragmatic", or if the working vision of the world pragmatism would inevitably become reified and recognized as being reality itself–if that makes any sense? (Again, I'm feverish)
>Hook merely maintains that capitalism makes socialism possible by allowing for mass education etc., with socialism merely being an ethically desirable state of affairsThis seems to me exactly what Marx himself says.
>>2550450Yes! I missed your post. I think your summary is accurate; I think what needs to be done now is to recognize how the individualism of Nietzsche (and the hardcore Egoism of Stirner) are already present within or are not at all contradictory to Hegel.
>>2550364>the new vegas memeWell, you should try to basically forget that notion of Hegel entirely; I'd wipe it from your memory, if possible. Because it's not what he's doing at all.
The point of understanding Hegel would depend on what you yourself want out of life and philosophy more broadly. For me? I'm the kind of person who must know The Truth as best as I can get my hands around it; otherwise I fall apart. Some people are perfectly capable of being able to not worry about how it is that life unfolds–and I massively respect them, to be clear–but I'm just not built that way, unfortunately. If you are interested in the "practical usage" of Hegel–well, that again would be up to you. For me, I've found that reading Hegel has made me feel much more, well, alive and in reality (at times perhaps too much so); a proper grasping of Hegel allows one to read, understand, and integrate virtually anything: his approach to thought represents to me true intellectual and psychic freedom. It's really a question of whether or not that's valuable to you, and it may sincerely not be. It all depends on what you're after bud.
>>2550473The only Hard Requirements for reading Hegel are:
>Passing knowledge of Plato and Socrates>Familiarity with Descartes' intervention in philosophy>Spinoza's Ethics (and, even then, just Part 1 ("Of God"); Deleuze's book on Spinoza is pretty helpful, but Spinoza is an easy read, as far as philosophy goes)I also highly highly highly recommend Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley's podcast "Why Theory". Their Hegel episodes are accessible, concise, and approachable; they're also old film buffs which I adore.
>>2549923>Nietzsche's work is completely lacking context of the world a person lives inI don't think you have read Nietzsche(not necessary though but still), Nietzsche primarily questions the values of values and finds it origin in the contingent flow of history.
>>2550218Wanted to give this a more thorough response than before:
All thought is necessarily backwards looking. In a way, this is apparently obvious, but really only Hegel took this fact seriously. We can only know what it is that has occurred–and even then, what we are able to recognize as having occurred is contingent to our specific moment in the progress of time. Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" from the Theses is articulating exactly this, but in the context of Historiography. Basically: There is absolutely no such thing as prediction, and to imagine that there is is impossible.
Now, does that mean we can't ""reasonably"" know what is going to happen next? Well of course not, and Hegel isn't interested in saying we can't either. We, by necessity, are always already acting as though we "know" the future (Henri Bergson became famous explaining this, but it's all already contained within Hegel), but that practical knowledge of daily expectation and planning is something fundamentally different from absolute knowing. What capitalism has done–and Marx, I think, reasonably thought he could basically think his way out of capitalism–is that it has thoroughly conflated these two positions: reasonably expecting and actually knowing. The necessary predictability of markets (I don't even mean stock or abstract capital, I just mean the most basic level of capitalist business exchange imaginable) has in turn given the false but overwhelmingly convincing impression that existence is itself predictable–which is to really say, that existence is determined, not free, unambiguous, "knowable"–even though it plainly is not. Marx himself, it seems to me, wanted to correct this, but in turn he perhaps underestimated the degree to which he (and all of us, myself most certainly included) have fallen prey to this false impression. All of the Frankfurt School and French Theory can be seen as basically attempts to, again, think our way out of this situation; clearly it hasn't been the most effective. In large part, this is because both the Frankfurts and Postwar French simply misread Hegel–and how it was that they were able to do this is still pretty unclear. It took until Zizek, Gillian Rose, and Robert Pippin to correct this–and basically nobody still reads them despite their notoriety lmao.
>>2550218>gimme the practical Marxist equivalent of the unhappy consciousnessWell if you've intended to call my bluff as to be a Hegel Scholar, I'll concede to you that! I'm not a Hegel scholar and never claimed to be, I'm simply a Hegelian who grasps the logic of his thought (which, to me, is the practical essence of it) and wants to help others grasp the dialectical method if they're so interested. I'm actually much much more interested now in what your interpretation of this question would be! I've never thought of this application before.
>Hegel has been parodied by a whole generation of willful ignorants, including the so-called French Theory you just mentionedHere we absolutely agree; it's maddening to see how much, basically, the near entire 20th century of philosophy got Hegel wrong. He's a philosopher of contradiction and negation, not "synthesis"!
>>2550591These are just practical enactment of the abstract universal as "freedom of the void", specifically here he's referring to the French terror
Marx would later call this "ideology" and the partial blindness that results from (material not ideal) contradiction, hence why the Marxist concept of alienation is purely legal and not some sort of psychological "ethical" (theological: see Summa) distress as it's often misused
pictured is my favorite (relevant) PoS quote, see the very last sentence
>>2548889the second one sorta correct as anon says. the last sentence is also correct but its not trivial. undialectical is often a synonym for ahistorical, removing things from their concrete conditions and treating them as disparate static entities, or saying that something social is an unchanging law about nature
how does it feel knowing you wasted all those years studying this useless shit
>>2550657Yes! That was the very part that I realized I was reading something fundamentally life alerting.
>hence why the Marxist concept of alienation is purely legal and not some sort of psychological "ethical"It's really unfortunate that English doesn't have a better word for it. I do think that alienation in the sense you're critiquing is very real and useful, but it shouldn't at all be conflated with the estrangement of labor that Marx discusses. The 1844 manuscripts have not helped this problem, as I do believe that he was, then, talking much more about alienation in the "spiritual" sense that Hegel discusses; not that believe in Althusser's epistemological break argument at all, I just think Marx clarified what we was concerned with identifying as he got older, and there just really isn't a better word to describe it.
>>2550836The honest answer is that I wouldn't have been satisfied doing anything else, frankly. I myself often wish it were different, but nothing else scratches the itch or gives me the same meaning. I wouldn't in a million years claim that studying this stuff is the singlemost important thing, it's just important to me personally/politically/ethically. That's just me though
>>2552288literally me
that being said, I think it's so dope that this is part of New Vegas. Greatest game ever..
>>2552299it's not actually in the game lol. it's just a meme made by a voice actor on youtube
>>2548707already a theorycel myself so this isn't so much a theory question but I am really curious what your experience has been going for a PhD. even notwithstanding how difficult it's gotten to turn being a humanities scholar into a career without having the right connections, kiss the right people's asses, publish stuff that is trendy in academia, and have a degree from a prestigious university, I've always looked at academia in the 21st century as being a place where all interesting theory that is actually relevant to the world today outside the ivory tower (and especially anything radical) goes to die. it seems like the era of radical intellectuals is mostly a thing of the past these days, at least in the anglosphere.
>>2552334Your impression is entirely, entirely correct. The unfortunate thing is that for my particular field (sociocultural history and historiography), I actually couldn't do my research outside of an academic setting: there remain resources and archives that only scholars can access. If someone's explicit interest is in pursuing radical thought though, I would not suggest pursuing anything higher than a Master's (or you could do the other normal thing which is to get accepted into a PhD and then drop out once you've found a different path/become established). Depending on where you live, there are typically much more affordable "Para-Academic" programs (Brooklyn Institute of Social Research in New York, The New Centre, even The European Graduate School), which are focused entirely on education rather than certification and careerist climbing. If your interest is in learning, thinking, and networking with people who care about learning and thinking rather than a tenure track (which don't exist anymore anyway), you should look into those. Lecture events and reading clubs organized by the (imo absolutely obnoxious) intellectual magazines like e-flux, n+1, and others are also a good and free route as well. But unfortunately, you generally have to live in either New York or LA to do that (at least in the US).
The biggest tragedy for me though isn't even that academia is where thoughts go to die, but that the entire system has been structured in such a way as to basically discourage everyone from caring about actually teaching—which, to me, is the whole point of it. I'd be much happier if I were allowed to focus on teaching undergrads and doing my research for the long term without the pressure of publishing basically useless short-sighted nonsense.
>>2548707>PhD candidateOn philosophy? Couldnt care less about your word games.
I DONT WANNA READ HEGAL, HES TOO CONVULATED AND WORDY
>>2552334>>2552795I also wanted to add that this is really just the case in American and British academia though. Academia is Western Europe remains pretty stable (France and Switzerland probably still being the best place to pursue radical thought). Germany though, especially now with the Gaza crackdown, is going the route of the US, if not substantially worse (it's easier to get a job, but you have to play the game 100x harder). My own prediction is that Western radical thought will largely start to be based out of Ireland within the next decade or so, especially now that they're attempting to bring back social welfare for artists. But yeah, it's a grim grim situation, and every professor will tell you in private that the situation is Fucked Up Beyond Repair.
>>2548707idk how much economics you've studied but in /political economy/ we have an unironic liberal who dunks on Marx and who upholds Adam Smith and liberals as the TRVE torch-bearers of socialism, and in particular he complains that Marx is basically Adam Smith minus "British Common Sense" plus "German mysticism" which I understand is him referring to the Hegelian influence on Marx. What do you make of such a character from your background?
see
>>2548414 for what I am referring to
>>2552849
>e.g. to speak merely of A is to say nothing of A, since A must relate to non-A to be self-defined
was Kanye West (lol) being Hegelian when he said "Everything I'm not made me everything I am"?
are catastrophes dialectical?
>>2548759The toaster represents a minor but illustrative instance of domestic productive apparatus under late capitalism. Its operation embodies a dialectical relation between human intention and mechanized process: the subject initiates the toasting, but the outcome is determined by pre-set parameters beyond direct labor control. This reflects the alienation of everyday praxis, where the user’s agency is mediated by standardized technological design. The accumulation of crumbs is not incidental, it signifies the sedimentation of past labor, material evidence of repetitive consumption cycles characteristic of advanced commodity society.
>>2552853well, hegel sees that being must still be posited, not simply negated. to begin with negation and end with positivity is more of a socratic dialectic.
>>2552844rate my perspective on hegel below:
>>2548759hegel's dialectic can be defined:
(1) abstraction (identity; being in-itself)
(2) negation (non-identity; being-for-another)
(3) concretisation (unity; being-in-and-for-itself)
the movement of identity to non-identity is by the fact that identity (A=A) is in fact a non-identity (e.g. A≠A; to speak merely of A is to say nothing of A, since A must relate to non-A to be self-defined). an example hegel uses is God. if we speak of "God" alone, we say nothing (i.e. "being-in-itself"; God is God…), but if we say "God is good", then (A) becomes defined by (non-A). this mutual negation of identity by self-relating terms: (A = non-A/non-A = A) is being-for-another (i.e. identity is only defined by mutual difference; self is defined by other). hegel resolves this by seeing that for identity to return to itself it must at once incur a "negation of negation" (e.g. a "double-negative") to return to itself. so then, being-for-another turns to being in-and-for-itself when conceived as the unity of identity and difference (when "substance is subject"). the self-positing concept can be formulated likewise:
[A ≠ A, = not-A, = not-not-A, = A]
and so we begin with mere abstraction and end with its concrete identity, as a unity of internal contradiction.
an example in marx's economic writings is how value begins as self-positing substance (e.g. "labour"), and then abstracts into exchange-value (mutual negation), finally to be unified in its internal contradiction by money (concrete appearance of value). another way of understanding is the movement of use-value (quality) moving to exchange-value (quantity) and both being reconciled in money (measure). this triad consists in hegel's "doctrine of being". the "substance of value" becomes "subject" to the form of value in society. concrete labour only becomes "labour" (value) by abstraction (exchange), etc.
>>2552844The specifics of political economy are decidedly *not* my forte, so I'm unqualified to make any informed take on this. However, your summary of what he's claiming appears to me correct. What I would say is that, in the first place, to understand Hegel (or German Idealism as a whole) to be "mystical" would be to mistake metaphysics for theology. The Left-Hegelians were basically all atheists if not Spinozists; a base materialism which cannot account for metaphysics is, in my opinion, doomed to fall into some vulgar materialism which capitalism and capitalist liberalism expressly reinforces. His general defense of Liberalism, however, is certainly beginning to pick up speed within broader academic discourse as it increasingly seems to people that the out-right rejection of Social Democracy, Left-Liberalism, and French Utopian Socialism was perhaps an over-correction (this is what Walter Benjamin himself was arguing in the Arcades Project, and he presents one of the most damning critiques of Social Democracy ever); the claim that these movements (and ones similar to it) necessarily bring about or reinforce capitalism is a claim that is at the moment beginning to be seriously re-challenged. People like Adam Tooze seem to be rather essential in this moment. In my opinion though, it's probably good to reject "British Common Sense" whenever possible, because their approach seems to me to inevitably lead to the reification of categories (see my earlier comments on Pragmatism). My understanding of Hegel and Marx is, basically, that we should almost never trust common sense.
>>2552850Yes. That there hasn't been any serious recent studies into the deep similarities between Hegelian Dialectics, Taoism, and the Zen Buddhism of Dogen is actually shocking. At one point I considered dedicating my dissertation to this topic, but then I realized that basically nobody would care lmao. If you're interested in pursuing this further however, I would recommend picking up Zhuangzi, Kaplan's "Three Pillars of Zen", and a compilation of Dogen (attached)! If one is looking for a "philosophy of life," you could do a whole lot worse than going the Hegel-Freud-Zen route, if not additionally because you won't have to believe in the soul or in God in order to follow it.
>>2552860This seems to me an excellent summary! Well done! You've grasped that Hegel is a philosopher of negation and contradiction, rather than "synthesis"; Adorno's Negative Dialectics, in retrospect, appears to be an unnecessary rehashing of what you've exactly expressed (although he wishes to take it even further). I also agree with your gloss of Marx; another way of articulating it is that Labor could not exist without its necessary alienation by capitalism itself. It is because of this necessary alienation that the notion of Socialism/Communism becomes possible to articulate.
>>2552856Say more! I'm unsure what you're asking. You may wish to read "Dreamworld and Catastrophe" by the great Susan Buck-Morss though (heaven knows who's gonna replace her when she dies, she's one of the last real dialecticians left in America).
Have you ever read any Bataille? I recently started reading him and am really enjoying it, however discussion online (from what I can find) feels sparse, especially when talking about his more Marxist inclinations.
>>2552890>The specifics of political economy are decidedly *not* my forte, so I'm unqualified to make any informed take on this. However, your summary of what he's claiming appears to me correct. What I would say is that, in the first place, to understand Hegel (or German Idealism as a whole) to be "mystical" would be to mistake metaphysics for theology. The Left-Hegelians were basically all atheists if not Spinozists; a base materialism which cannot account for metaphysics is, in my opinion, doomed to fall into some vulgar materialism which capitalism and capitalist liberalism expressly reinforces. His general defense of Liberalism, however, is certainly beginning to pick up speed within broader academic discourse as it increasingly seems to people that the out-right rejection of Social Democracy, Left-Liberalism, and French Utopian Socialism was perhaps an over-correction (this is what Walter Benjamin himself was arguing in the Arcades Project, and he presents one of the most damning critiques of Social Democracy ever); the claim that these movements (and ones similar to it) necessarily bring about or reinforce capitalism is a claim that is at the moment beginning to be seriously re-challenged. People like Adam Tooze seem to be rather essential in this moment. In my opinion though, it's probably good to reject "British Common Sense" whenever possible, because their approach seems to me to inevitably lead to the reification of categories (see my earlier comments on Pragmatism). My understanding of Hegel and Marx is, basically, that we should almost never trust common sense.Thanks for this, OP!
>>2552898I used to be more interested in him, but these days I just don't find his thought relevant to me personally outside of an intellectual history perspective. The Deleuzian-Marxist theory sphere (the Acid Horizon (who are psueds imo) and Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour guys) eats him up though, you should check out their episodes on him if you're interested. Bataille is certainly essential if you wish to follow the full Stirner -> Nietzsche -> Bataille -> Deleuze & Guattari -> Lyotard -> Baudrillard -> Nick Land route, but you might end up a schizophrenic reactionary as a result. Story of the Eye is a great novel though. And I have to pay him my respects for saving Benjamin's Arcades Project by stashing it away in the Sorbonne during the war.
>>2552905Happy to help.
>>2552890>The specifics of political economy are decidedly *not* my forte, so I'm unqualified to make any informed take on this.Lmao so its just blabber about ideas.
>>2552890>doomed to fall into some vulgar materialismSo you really think these ideas are outside of our physical universe?
every time someone tries to explain dialectics to me by giving examples, I an find an analogous "analytical" or "layman" description of the same relation
so I've never been able to grasp what's so unique about dialectics
it just seems like a system for describe abstract dynamic systems, which is I guess pretty impressive that someone managed to do purely philosophically
>>2552971is that what those words mean?
For Hegelbro:
How much does Hegel’s Philosophy of Right debunk anarchism?
>>2552989Vulgar materialism often refers to physicalism.
>>2553023>How much does Hegel’s Philosophy of Right debunk anarchism?If you suck enough dicks some day your dick will be sucked too.
>>2552959I'm not sure what you think the analysis of political economy is other than "a blabber of ideas". The analysis of political economy in Marx is literally the attempted application of Hegel onto the socioeconomic makeup of society. Admitting that it's not my main area of research is just intellectual honesty lmao.
>>2552971Ideas are what constitute our notion of "the physical universe". They are not "outside" but literally right here; or as Plotonius says, "Everything Yonder is also Here." This is why Hegel says that every philosopher must be a Spinozist first: he completely flattens the understanding of any hierarchical or distanced ontology.
>>2553023That would depend entirely on what means by anarchism. But in short Hegel thinks that the disappearance of the state, or its subsuming by civil society, is impossible to think of. At the same time, he wouldn't say it's historically impossible. But in general, for Hegel the existence of the state is a necessary condition in the constitution of modern civil society as a whole (and vice versa); it's by this same logic that Marx will praise the bourgeois revolutions (Hegel, for the record, was both a major supporter of both the French and Haitian revolutions).
>>2553044To make things clearer, what is often mistaken with Hegel is that he's claiming that physical reality (and the laws of physics) doesn't exist or matter; this is not at all the case (the hardest section of Phenomenology of Spirit, Force & Understanding, is all about this). What Hegel is indicating is that the notion of the physical as it appears to us is simply inextricable from the subjectivity which apprehends it; thus to believe that we could possess an objective "outsider view" of things from above, Apollonian like, is for him a logical absurdity. Thus his system is not in any way incompatible with the sense certainty of ordinary physics and causation, but instead deeply qualifies them as to say that those notions lay within subjectivity itself—what makes this entirely different from solipsism is because, for Hegel, the constitution of the subject is necessitated by reality (substance) itself: the two are inextricable. The Phenomenology of Spirit is ostensibly the long unfolding of the basic claim that "Substance is also Subject" as far as possible.
>>2552976I think the difference is at the level of ontology and method. Even when analytical descriptions can seem similar not the same because they conceive of objects as static and isolated. So when they describe a relation its between two disparate objects(A=A, B=B), as viewed from a hypothetical view-from-nowhere, where dialectics is talking about
different moments of the same object that includes the subjective observer, because it recognizes that the view-from-nowhere is impossible. So analytics can describe the same object, but only after the fact, and only as an unchanging list of facts. Then something new happens and you get a new list of facts unrelated to the old list, where dialectics fundamentally and comprehensively relates the subject to the object and to the whole.
>>2552850they call shit like the yin-yang "naive dialectics" lol, i discovered this by playing dark souls
>>2552976>every time someone tries to explain dialectics to me by giving examples, I an find an analogous "analytical" or "layman" description of the same relation so I've never been able to grasp what's so unique about dialecticsThis is because you have been poisoned with anti-dialectical bourgeois mystification of dialectics.
>it just seems like a system for describe abstract dynamic systems, Dialectics is not descriptive. Dialectics are the material laws of motion of matter. Dialectics determine all things.
>which is I guess pretty impressive that someone managed to do purely philosophically Material dialectics are the only true dialectics. Dialectics were not created philosophically. Dialectics was created by materialist analysis of nature, history, and society.
>>2553061Despite that, it's actually much more accurate to Hegel's dialectical method than that produced by, basically, the tradition of Engels onwards. What
>>2553063 says is an ideological understanding of the Dialectical method which is incapable of grasping the logic of the thought itself.
>>2553052yeah i read that post as defending physicalism which is why i want them to explain why they think avoiding being doomed to vulgar materialism means ideas are outside of our physical universe since that conclusion does not follow. theres a new thing now where mechanical materialism and rejection of dialectics is seen as a positive correction of marx
>>2553078any more detail? Im particularly interested in the angle of people saying theres a tension between trying to derive capitalism from the dialectical tension between use/exchange value etc in a Hegelian fashion vs the actual historical origins of capitalism which are messy and contingent i.e. primitive accumulation and not even the same in europe as other parts of the world, even developed parts like north america
>>2548707Genuinely, why is it that some left wing people completely deny the existence of race? Do you believe in race? Is this movement aiming to eradicate race as a construct merely to reduce racial tensions between the masses? I could agree with this, although I can’t stand their constant contradictions when talking of specific racial issues.
>>2552795>>2552830thanks anon, fortunately I'm a philosophy and literature person so being a paracademic isn't very difficult for me to do since my "research" is just reading books that I can download from libgen. I think every so often about going back to academia because it feels like I'm wasting my potential working part-time when I can and publishing stuff on the internet instead of doing this as a real job that I dedicate all my time to, and I also miss the environment of being around a bunch of other theorycel nerds who are really passionate about discussing and debating the same sorts of esoteric texts, but it makes me feel less worried that my impressions of academia are correct and that I'm probably doing the best I can with this shitty reactionary philistine period of history we're living through. I have thought before about trying to go to grad school abroad because I know France at least has still kept the radical intellectual thing alive but I've always been under the impression that I would need to read and speak French (or the language of wherever else I'd go in Europe) fluently in order to even get accepted into a program, much less be able survive it. maybe I'll look into some of the paracademic programs you mentioned or studying in Ireland. being able to leave the US in general would be a huge plus right now anyways.
>>2553076Well as the other user said, the claim that ontological monism is false or unscientific is just like, an outright lie? It would need to be very thoroughly shown and even then, it seems to me that, by definition, ontological monism is unverifiable; Hegel's very intervention in Spinoza and Kant is to show how we do know despite not being able to know (i.e., The Dialectic). Deeply misinformed post.
>>2552856Your mother+me instering my penis inside her her is dialectical. Youre the synthesis.
>>2553070>says is an ideological understanding of the Dialectical method Here we have one such philosophizer and mystifier of dialectics. In service of the bourgeoisie, they speak, failing to grasp that all understandings are ideological. They point out the most obvious as if dealing a fatal blow but fell only themselves. Their critique is hollow shell, revealing their own allegiance to the bourgeois myth of "pure," non-ideological thought.
>which is incapable of grasping the logic of the thought itself.Behold the bourgeois mysticism of dialectics that the founders of scientific socialism slew long ago. True idealists, these sorts fetishize the "logic of thought itself" as if this has any material meaning. They have severed thought from the concrete, material reality it reflects—the very essence of bourgeois alienation. The mystificator hides behind a veil of superiority, yet they provide no concrete explanations or refutations. All form, no content; all accusation, no analysis; a hopeless effort not to win the ideological struggle, but to end conversation. These sorts are living monument to intellectual bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, which can not argue in good faith, or at all, but only sneer from ruins of its own philosophy.
>>2553090I do not believe in race inasmuch as one wishes to claim that race possesses physical, natural, genetic reality: this is something that science, without the intervention of any left-wing ideology, has shown for nearly a century now anyway. Now, the typical reaction to this is to show that there are biological differences between people–which is plainly true–but this fact in itself is not equivalent to the notion that race itself actually exists within nature. Race is an idea, a category, which is utilized to group types of people together according to further categories (namely, impressions of similarities and dissimilarities, which, again, are categories of thought used by the subject to organize reality); reality in itself does not posit the groupings or associations or divides between human people, it is our notions and historical habits that do (the two of which, obviously, are somewhat inseparable from one another). Obviously people are different: but the categories (to say nothing of the values we ascribe to those categories) are fictions. They're real fictions that have an impact on real life, to be sure, but fictions nevertheless. Book related is an excellent, excellent tour of this explanation—even if I find their particular terminology a little cringe.
>>2553091Yeah it all depends on where ya live and what kind of future you really want for yourself. If you go into a program with a large variety of back-up or exit plans? I'd say why not, so long as you don't go into debt over it, who cares.
>>2553113C'mon pal, why do you write like this.
>They have severed thought from the concrete, material reality it reflectsYou've missed the point that thought and reality are co-constitutive; material reality *is* the notion; in your tradition of thought, it has reached the point of presuming one actually has direct access to that material reality, as though it were not itself instantiated by the notion one were attempting to "move past" or "see through"!
>>2553128An imperfect but accessible explanation I often use with students is the following–I apologize if it seems overly childish (but you have to remember what gen-z and alpha are like in undergrad these days):
Imagine we have an old-fashioned mechanical clock, like a grandfather clock or an old alarm clock or a wristwatch or what have you: Let's say we want to know what a clock really is. On the one hand, it's perfectly clear what a clock is: a clock is a clock (A equals A)! It seems to announce exactly what it is without our having to much investigate it. But, then we realize, in order to know what a clock is, we have to know how it works: so we have to take the clock apart.
Now imagine we've taken the clock apart, piece by piece, and all of the gears and mechanisms are perfectly laid out as to indicate how it all fits together. Now here's the most important question: Is this *still* a clock? Well, obviously yes–it isn't anything else; all of the parts are the parts of a clock. But, we realize, these mechanisms and gears clearly are *not* what a clock is—it's the parts of a clock.
So, we put the clock back together. There's the clock again! But is this *the same* clock as before? On the one hand, it obviously is and couldn't not be. But, on the other hand, it clearly is not: because we have gone through the entire process of understanding what a clock is by taking it apart and putting back together. The clock we have now is, to us, a fundamentally different kind of clock than before.
This process I've just outlined is, in an admittedly simplified way, the dialectical process: We have recognized that identity necessarily begets/contains/*is* its own contradiction, both internally (within the Clock itself) as much as externally: We know what a clock is not only by what it is, but also by what it is *not*: a clock is not a chair, or a bed, or a feeling. To think dialectically, therefore, is to be able to grasp an idea's intrinsic as much as extrinsic contradictions. Hegel takes this insight much radically further by extending this to subjectivity, material/ontological existence, and the logic of thought itself, not just individual ideas.
As to its relevance to Communists—well, that depends what you're interested in. A union organizer probably does not need to understand Hegel; a communist who wishes to understand the critique of Marxian political economy, and to extend that thought into 21st century conditions, absolutely must.
>>2553053but how can I relate the subject to the object when I myself am a subject and therefore can't "go outside myself" to conceive of a subject as such
>>2553118>thought and reality are co-constitutive; Hegelian nonsense. This is the logic of the priest who says God and the world are co-eternal. To claim reality is "co-constitutive" with thought is to grant the bourgeoisie's consciousness a divine, creative power over the world it merely reflects. This hegelian nonsense is but the arrogance of the class that produces nothing.
>material reality *is* the notion;Material reality is objective and the "notion" is merely its subjective relfection within the human brain. To claim the map is the land or the photo is the person is but the consequences of Hegelian brainrot.
>presuming one actually has direct access to that material reality, as though it were not itself instantiated by the notion one were attempting to "move past" or "see through"!Despite what they just stated, this Hegelian says man cannot grasp the material world, yet mankind's "direct access" to material reality is proven continiously when as he acts and subbordinates this reality to his will.
>>2553168>>2553148ive always kinda viewed the ship of thesesus as the concept of the thing lives on but the original dies
>>2553172>yet mankind's "direct access" to material reality is proven continiously when as he acts and subbordinates this reality to his will.counterpoint: mankind can't subordinate a computer program to determine whether an arbitrary computer program will halt
>>2553093<Well as the other user said, the claim that ontological monism is false or unscientific is just like, an outright lie? Well, at the very least, it's not materialist; materialism is the view that only matter and physical processes are real. All phenomena, including consciousness, thoughts, and emotions, are the result of material interactions and can be explained through physical means, rejecting the existence of non-physical entities like souls or spirits. So yes, it's philosophical monism, but the difference is that materialism/physicalism is like a type or substance monism, which says all stuff is one kind of stuff, and that's not the same as eastern mysticism, which says all stuff is literally one thing, OR emanated from it like neoplatonism's "the one". That's clearly idealism and possibly even religious.
Classical atomism is the earliest fully developed form of materialism in the Western tradition, basically the ontology of having reduced reality to a fundamental unit (or collection of units) which can be subdivided no further. A sort of ontological reductionism is built in and sort of has to be.
All differences in quality, experience, or being are differences in the arrangement and motion of those same basic units. That’s what makes it systematically materialist: no appeal to form, spirit, teleology, or mind as independent realities.
Hegel's dialectical derivations amount to conceptual overreach, or, in computational terms, that he’s trying to extract more semantic information from a system than it formally contains. From a modern computational or information-theoretic standpoint, that looks like violating conservation of information. Hegel’s claim that thought develops itself into all categories of being is like claiming a finite formal system can generate its own expansion indefinitely. But according to mathematical logic, such self-grounding is impossible if you’re treating reasoning as formal, rule-bound, and finitely axiomatized. Therefore, Hegel's procedure either smuggles in extra information or abandons formal rigor and becomes rhetoric or mysticism.
There's a reason Hegel's method hasn't been formalized after all these years. Hegel cannot be both right and immune to formal scrutiny. The reason he seems immune is not because he transcends formalism, but because his method depends on concealing informal, semantic imports that would become visible (and falsifiable) if translated into a formal system.
If you think of reasoning systems as having information conservation, then Hegel’s "self-generation of categories" looks impossible in principle. When he moves from Being to Nothing to Becoming, and onward through the Logic, he treats each new concept as necessitated by contradiction in the preceding one. A formalized version of that process would have to define the initial axioms precisely, define valid inferential rules, and then show that "Becoming" is derivable from them. But you can’t actually do that. The transitions depend on semantic intuition ("the concept of pure Being, when thought, is indistinguishable from Nothing"), i.e., on human interpretation, not rule-governed inference. The moment you make the rules explicit, you see they don’t entail the next step. Hence, Hegel’s system needs to live in an informal, discursive space to maintain the illusion of necessity.
The parallel is that Hilbert’s program, the attempt to ground mathematics as a self-contained logical deduction from axioms, looked a lot like Hegel’s dream of reason self-grounding itself. But Godel and later Turing and Chaitin showed that no sufficiently rich formal system can capture all truths about itself. Any system complex enough to represent arithmetic will have true statements it cannot prove. And, as Chaitin framed it, you can’t get more algorithmic information out than you put in. So if you interpret Hegel’s "self-developing Logic" as an attempt to found all conceptual truth on the dialectical unfolding of pure thought, then it’s structurally the same ambition Hilbert had, and refuted by the same logic.
This isn't just analytic pedantry; it's a profound epistemological point. If Hegel's dialectic were really necessary in the sense he claims, it should be mechanically reconstructible because logical necessity is rule-bound. If it’s not rule-bound, then what he's calling necessity is actually rhetorical or phenomenological persuasion. That doesn’t make it worthless; it can still capture insights about conceptual evolution, but it ceases to be a logically "self-grounding science." So saying "Hegel is fine; he’s just informal" doesn't save him. Hegel's informality is exactly what lets him pretend his derivations are necessary when, under any formalization, they would fail to be so.
In modern information theory, randomness is one of the only recognized ways to get “new information” into a system. Randomness is epistemic novelty from outside the formal closure. Hegel, of course, denies that the real dialectic has an outside. The "negative," contradiction itself, is supposed to generate novelty immanently, without external input. That novelty could arise from purely self-contained rational contradiction, without external contingency. But that’s the very thing that is impossible.
From the computational standpoint, contradiction =/= randomness. Contradiction is syntactic conflict inside a rule set, not the arrival of new, unencoded information. Unless you relax the closure of the system, contradictions just produce inconsistency, not genuine novelty. So if you model Hegel's dialectic as a formal process, contradiction doesn’t add information; it destroys consistency. If you model it as a semantic process, then novelty only appears because we interpret the contradiction creatively, which is exactly the "smuggling" problem critics accuse him of.
That's what makes Althusser's aleatory materialism so appealing. Althusser's late philosophy rejects this closure altogether. His materialisme aleatoire is an ontology of contingent encounters, modeled explicitly on Epicurus’ atomic swerve; atoms falling in the void that randomly collide and stick together, forming worlds without any teleology or preordained order. In this view, there is no pre-existing essence or goal (no telos). Structure and order arise from chance collisions that happen to "take hold." Once such an encounter "takes," it reproduces itself, but this reproduction follows, rather than precedes, the contingent event. This view allows novelty without appeal to randomness as pure chaos: randomness here is structured, it’s contingency that takes form. That’s how Althusser sidesteps the logical impossibility of deriving novelty from a closed dialectic: he opens the system ontologically to chance.
Althusser’s aleatory materialism prefigures the probabilistic worldview of modern science, particularly Boltzmann's statistical mechanics and quantum theory: Boltzmann grounded thermodynamics in randomness and probability, deriving entropy (the "arrow of time") from statistical distributions of particles. This replaced deterministic necessity with stochastic order (exactly what Althusser wanted in social theory). Quantum mechanics later radicalized this: randomness was no longer epistemic but ontological. The world's structure itself is probabilistic, not the result of a preordained logic. Althusser’s aleatory materialism naturalizes randomness as the true ground of material processes, not as a failure of knowledge, but as the generative condition of reality. So where Hegel's dialectic "conjures" new determinations through contradiction, Althusser’s stochastic materialism produces new structures through random encounters, later stabilized by reproduction (like atoms forming a molecule, or social relations forming a mode of production).
Althusser’s materialism of the encounter is a philosophical answer to the problem of ontological reduction and informational closure. It solves the problem of generating novelty without collapsing into Hegelian idealism or mechanical determinism by grounding all structure in real randomness (stochasticity) rather than in logical necessity.
>>2553173well you're a ship of theseus, right? You have none of the same skin cells for example as when you were a kid.
>>2553168Yes, but the difference is that rather than posing it as an aporetic question, Hegel goes to show that the process of negation is the essence of all human thought and subjectivity. My quick and dirty demonstration can be applied infinitely upwards and downwards, which is basically what Hegel does. The next step in the process is to recognize how the process of recognition is historically contingent.
>>2553177 those are skin cells. Neurons however seem to last a life time. And in my view, neurons (aka) the brain is pretty much you
>>2553182yeah this is why you shouldnt do contact sports like boxing or do things like drinking too much alcohol. It will give you permeant brain damage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Xj5tJ_JEc >>2553187>permeantpermanent
>>2553180>. And in my view, neurons (aka) the brain is pretty much youYou're more than your brain though; and just normal contemporary biology will tell you that, don't even need to be a Friend
>>2553176I don't disagree with your gloss here, but this is also precisely why Zizek continually claims (and I agree with him) that Hegelian Idealism presents a fundamentally truer and deeper Materialism than the physicalist and post-Engels Marxian tradition. Some facts worth keeping in mind here is that Hegel did not appear to believe in the soul, or certainly not a soul that is readily recognizable from the Abrahamic tradition. He did not believe in God God, and he most certainly did not believe in the afterlife (very early on in the Preface to the Phenomenology, he says explicitly that death is unthinkable, an empty abstraction, which signifies and represents total Unthinkability/Nothingness). Whether or not one wishes to call this "spiritual" or "religious" would, it appears to me, have to be argued more seriously. To me, this is about as secular as it gets, since it ostensibly claims that existence is founded upon or is a total void, which came from nothing, and has no predefined path or progression: and it is precisely because of this understanding that there is room for meaningful human free will. If one pays close attention to the materialist, physicalist, and computational theories of existence, one quickly discovers that such models necessarily imply either the total determination of all existence, or quietly slip in what is actually far more theological or inexplicable than what Hegel proposes (this was Walter Benjamin's first critique in the Theses of History as well). And if one does not believe in free will, I personally feel that they have no business being on the left at all.
>>2553196> To me, this is about as secular as it gets, since it ostensibly claims that existence is founded upon or is a total void, which came from nothing, and has no predefined path or progression:well that makes sense since
Everything is temporary and in flux and
Nothing (in and of itself) is permanent
>>2553196>And if one does not believe in free will, I personally feel that they have no business being on the left at all.This is the boldest thing you've said so far. I'm agnostic on free will, and mostly I feel the question is meaningless. We feel like we're making choices in the now, but those choices are predetermined by so many variables beyond our control. Maybe it's a sliding scale. The zygote is totally a product of their environment with no freedom, the adult has taken control of a small slice of the universe through their "free will" (or whatever you want to call it) and the senile elderly person, like the toddler is mostly at the mercy of society, with a small amount of "free will" that barely counts.
>>2553196>and just normal contemporary biology will tell you that, don't even need to be a Friendautocorrect, my bad. means to read "You don't even need to be a Hegelian to think that." Recent scientific research about the degree to which spinal neurons determine daily consciousness is extremely fascinating in this regard (and can go the full postmodern schizo route with Thomas Moynihan if they're interested—personally, it doesn't interest/concern me that much, but it's fascinating).
>>2553151Exactly! You've grasped the next moment in the dialectical progression: the subject posits for itself its own outside position, only to recognize that the outside position is necessarily within the subject; therefore, the positing of that position is necessitated by the Subject's being Substance, which is its own self-alienation. Phenomenology of Spirit is, basically, the thorough, step by step by step by step process of grasping the implications of this.
>>2553173The original lives by its own necessary death (this is what hegel means by aufheben; the negation of the negation; the retaining through disavowal)
>>2553175Yeah! Or to take it a step further: you can *only* tell what's missing from that picture by the fact of its external background. That would be the full next dialectical step.
>>2553204Yep; what appears to be permanent is only the logic of grasping of how nothing is permanent—the dialectic.
>>2553209I privately actually agree with you; for me, whether or not there is a free will is necessarily unanswerable, but the fact remains that reality as it occurs necessarily appears to us as being free (and we within it). What's nice about Hegel, to me, is that he's able to account for free will without God (or at least "God" in any spiritually or religiously meaningful sense–there's a reason why Spinoza's excommunication has never been revoked). >and just normal contemporary biology will tell you that, don't even need to be a Friend
>>2553172You gotta stop typing like Ignatius J Reilly dude.
>To claim reality is "co-constitutive" with thought is to grant the bourgeoisie's consciousness a divine, creative power over the world it merely reflects.You have the logic backwards; it in fact simply relegates the bourgeoisie to a historical moment in time. Marx's claim that all reigning thought is that of the reigning class of a time should not be taken so far as to say that therefore all thought possible is necessarily determined by the powers that be. Hegel's system is actually what accounts for this degree of freedom of recognition, not vulgar materialism. To presume that material reality is objective external to the subject which grasps that material reality is itself, in this case, to be actually taking sides with the bourgeoisie—because, (and again, this is your own logic here)—that is precisely what it is that capitalist ideology demands and almost unconsciously reaffirms constantly of the subject. It's unclear, to me, what the real hang-up is here. What is being expressed thus far is in no way incompatible with Marxian analysis of political economy—if anything, it clarifies it and allows the structure of that same analysis to go further, deeper, all while sitting on an intelligible ontological groundwork.
>subbordinates this reality to his willI'm not aware of any real Marxist willing or desiring to talk like this about reality. Is the task here to "subordinate" reality to will (whatever such a thing might mean in the first place)? The will *is part of reality*; man is inseparable from reality! It seemed to me that in the first place the whole problem of capitalism was precisely that in the pursuit of attempting to "subordinate" reality to man that man ended up subordinating men to other men, with ruthless exploitation. Your position and complaints appear extremely minor and somewhat incomprehensible to me.
>>2553196well then, is being "on the left" a worthy value at all if we force ourselves to believe in an idea like free will, regardless of reality itself? the current scientific evidence does seem to show that soft determinism is a fairly well backed up conclusion
>>2553242>if we force ourselves to believe in an idea like free willI think what Hegel's critique represents here is the opposite ("should we not be skeptical of the skepticism?" as he says) : it's not at all that one has to "force" themselves to believe in free will—free will is clearly apparent in immediate experience. It is a highly, highly conditioned and contingent freedom to be sure (Adorno spent his late career basically trying to determine its definite boundaries), but freedom nonetheless. If being on the left means attempting to get others to recognize the basic underlying equality of dignity and being alive, and to try and organize social structures to defend and cultivate that truth, then one must believe that people have the freedom to think and to act. Otherwise, I mean, the whole thing's meaningless, no?
>>2553251it's undeniable that there is a freedom (or i think of it as more an autonomy) in the sense that you can choose between actions but you aren't a free agent, the whole idea without really believing in free will would be that you do it to fight for the ability to become truly free, freer than the current day at least
>>2553262Yeah I agree; this conversation becomes even more complicated once you introduce Freud and Lacan into the equation. Thus Adorno's end-life obsession with its definition. As for Hegel, and I'm not certain how much I myself actually agree with this–although it's not necessarily essential, in my understanding, to the science of logic (the dialectic) itself–all of existence can be understood as the unfolding contradiction of the grasping of freedom; which is to say that all of human history is the attempt to become free. There's a poetic niceness to this, but I myself am not really convinced by the directionality of it whatsoever; Zizek's contribution to philosophy (and it is, people forget, a serious contribution) was to identify that the logics of Freud/Lacan and Hegel were actually identical. In logic of the unconscious, there's an opposite drive *away* from freedom, the death drive, or what Freud calls the primary masochism, which determines much (if not all) of human activity. Psychoanalysis and vulgar materialism shared the problem of determinism—to me (and Zizek), Hegel solves this by reminding us that all consciousness, all being, is necessarily contradictory.
I've been trying to wrap my head around dialectics, but I'm a bit of a brainlet. Are there any good basic resources you'd recommend to help me understand?
>>2553320The podcast Why Theory, hosted by academics Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley. Their episodes on Hegel and dialectics in general are, imo, the easiest, and most accessible way into it. If you're not interested in dedicating your life to understanding this stuff (and fair enough!), they provide a really great entrypoint/overview.
>>2553340My pleasure, really! Their episodes on "Negation", "Contradiction" and "Retroactivity" are probably good places to start (besides their explicit episodes on Hegel).
The only trick I would say in trying to understand this stuff is that Hegel isn't proposing a system or program of thought, but instead that his entire project is to describe what it is that we are already doing (and, in all likelihood, probably must do) in regard to thought and experience. Best of luck, and don't go crazy.
>>2553331Love that podcast, Todd McGowan is a total darling of a person, the chillest philosophy podcast
>>2553320Dialectics is the answer to the chicken and egg problem
>>2553176>This isn't just analytic pedantry—it's a profound epistemological point.ftfy
>>2553209I'd call it patently ridiculous rather than bold.
And that's all there is to say about this ideological construct and its constitutive parts. Too bad, so sad.
>>2552890>>Say more! I'm unsure what you're asking. You may wish to read "Dreamworld and Catastrophe" by the great Susan Buck-Morss though (heaven knows who's gonna replace her when she dies, she's one of the last real dialecticians left in America).Just a vulgar "things have to get worse, to get better" to get better type of thing. The book seems interresting thank you
>>2553631>>2553635The kernel of truth within the statement is that circumstances must change, and we must become alienated from the immediate situation, in order to recognize it and grasp what had occurred in thought, but that means that things simply have to be different at all, not necessarily get better or worse. What that means is that instead of attempting to "intensify" or "accelerate" the situation, one simply needs to alter it, alienate it, like Brecht did in his theater.
Mao's theory of contradiction advanced dialectics past Hegel, there is no reason to read Hegel any more unless you are interested in liberal philosphy.
the clock and the ship to me arent great examples of dialectics because most people conceive of a thing as a sum of its parts. so if you take a clock apart and put it back together you are just reassembling the same thing. if you have a ship and you replace the mast its the ship with a new mast. to say we have gone through the entire process of understanding what a clock is by taking it apart and putting back together is better but its a change and a development in the concept of the clock, not in the clock itself, because for the naive person who has never seen the inside of a clock, their conception of it is now changed. A seed growing into a tree or other living things is a much better example. But for the clock itself, it is also not the same, but not just abstractly, the screws now have tool marks, there is a little scratch on the face, there is oxidation on the brass. for the ship without any parts replaced is it the same ship it was ten years ago? now it has barnacles and the outer layers of wood are rotting and their is salt in the sails. is the algae embedded in the wood a part of the ship now? a mast is a thing for a ship but the algae is a thing for itself, or is it? its both. you have an apple, you take a bite of the apple, is it the same apple? You can smell its appleness, this means there are physical parts of the apple inside your olfactory glands, is the apple in your nose? Where do you begin and the apple ends? And the same for the ship and the algae. But this is just a list of facts, what the facts point to is a continuity of identity as these forms of matter repeat across time with slight differences, and as they do we first recognize these forms into concepts, and as they reappear we look at them with recognition. And for the oxidation and the watch, it part of it now, it gives it character. This is my old watch. There is extra oxidation on the left side because that is where I rub my thumb when I check the time. I am a part of the watch and the watch is a part of me. When I interact with the world I am part of it and not separate. And when I claim there is a thing that is the world I am only naming a part of myself, or is that me as the world naming a part of itself as I? When I say this is an apple I am naming a temporarily stable fold in the flow of matter that I am also a part of, that is determined by its history and development in constant flux as it appears from out of matter and then goes back into it. Are you the same you who has not yet smelt an apple? Now you are part apple, you already took a bite and its proteins are becoming part of you. You are becoming apple. Things are not things at all, they are only matter, and appear to us as things because of our conscious thought, and thought itself the rationality of self organizing matter. You can grasp reason not because you are an unbiased and distant observe looking down on things, but because you are things rationally self organized into thinking matter. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is that as a part of the world you have the capacity to change it through your conscious action.
>>2553176>he’s trying to extract more semantic information from a system than it formally contains. From a modern computational or information-theoretic standpoint, that looks like violating conservation of information.>a closed dialecticDo fractals generate more semantic information then what is contained in their definition? Does that violate conservation of information?
Is an object with a finite area and infinite perimeter closed or open? Closed or open with respect to what? No smuggled assumptions please.
>>2553997>the clock and the ship to me arent great examples of dialectics because most people conceive of a thing as a sum of its parts.Yeah it's why I'm not in love with the example myself, but it's just for introductory purposes anyway. What's difficult is that while people get extrinsic identity pretty easily (A is equally defined by Not-A), it's hard to get people to grasp *internal* contradiction as well. So what's nice about the clock parts is how it shows that no identity is a Simple identity, but necessarily takes itself apart; that's the contradiction that can be difficult to get. Transcending theYing Yang antinomies I think most people can understand pretty quickly tho
You get any recommendation about the mathy formal stuff or is that out of your scope? Have you ever encountered anyone who claims that Cantor's diagonal argument is bullshit; or more dramatic yet, that the very concept of infinity in math is bullshit?
>>2554599Yeah ain't my field of philosophy. More of a question for
>>2553176 (who I still need to give a real response to)
I also wonder what he thinks of pic related. Haven't read it yet myself (getting extremely mixed reviews–from high praise to total rejection).
>>2553354>>2553418>>2553340I've been listening to that podcast, has helped me quite a bit to understand, even just to form a basic understanding. As an aside, have listened to the guys discuss Marxism a little bit as well and heard McGowan express an idea I found interesting but don't know enough about to form a proper opinion. Do you agree with him, or rather, is it common for Hegelians to agree, that Marxism represents a rightward political shift from German Idealism?
>>2557526*Sorry, from the left-wing political principles derived from Hegel. I think McGowan says in an episode on Zizek that Marx, in asserting that capitalism is the final contradiction, to be solved by communism, is aligning more closely with right wing politics which wants to ignore contradiction, rather than what he feels the more left-wing project is, which is to acknowledge and work within contradiction.
>>2557526i dont think so. he and zizek are (very)good for learning hegel or at least dialectics as a method of analysis but terrible at politics really uninformed and basically support populist liberalism. if its the case that as anon says that lacan and freud mirror hegel that doesn't mean psychology overcomes politics but they kinda imply that it does, that issues arent really about class rule but about personal resentment and you should instead accept your station and recognize that there will always be a lack and you dont want what you think you want etc which is very convenient for a comfortable academic to say
>>2557531>in asserting that capitalism is the final contradictioni dont think this is an accurate representation of marx either
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