One has to grow up, and become independent. So we arrive at Freudian territory. — unenlightened

There is that connection to individual development. The logic of the text can be found in Lacan's Mirror Stage. But Hegel is saying that the 'duplication' also takes place between isolated persons. The dynamic unfolds through the logic of fear and service. Freud does not close that circle.

But Hegel is saying that the 'duplication' also takes place between isolated persons. — Paine

What is an isolated person in the context of child development? One has to be raised by someone surely - wolves at the least?

I guess the common ground for the psychology of the child and the dynamic Hegel is describing is that the awareness of isolation comes through recognizing the other. In a theory like Lacan's, however, the doubling is an unavoidable part of development that needs to be distinguished from the results of good or bad parenting as discussed by Winnicott, etcetera.
But laying out those differences look different according to what model of personal autonomy one is building. So there is large gap between how Freud imagines the personal and psychologists like Vygotsky do.

I there is another gap between these developmental models and what Hegel is attempting. I have not been engaging with these writers you point to who follow this line of thought. I will look at the Ecosia article and see if it helps my thinking upon this.

014 Freedom.

Our man is a bit confused about this. That's my impression, anyway. Because the story Hegel is telling seems to make freedom exclusively human, or that's my impression so far, but then it is also a property of geist as 'world-spirit' and hence talk of panpsychism. and then matter has no freedom, but quantum particles do. It's not just hand-wavy, it's a contradictory muddle. I'm going to try and make some sense of it, by departing from the podcast a bit.

Suppose we start with a many worlds, non-collapsing universe that evolves physically but remains probabilistic. Now intuitively, my suggestion would be that Schrödinger's cat has enough geist to collapse its own wave function, and will obviously collapse it to the state in which it is alive (because it can't see itself dead). So the form of geist's freedom is in the first instance the necessary choice of freedom itself, that is, the choice of life. Thus natural selection selects for freedom to select.

How say ye?

I gave it a relisten, and I think you're right to say he's confused: I think he presents something of a rationalization for Hegel, but one I wouldn't be tempted to make.The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807, and The Origin of the Species in 1859, and the theories of the universe he's reconciling with Hegel come even after that.

But I also can understand the desire to provide this reconciliation on a podcast -- it's not just introducing basic concepts of Hegel, but is pointing out how Hegel can relate to our day (and so be worth studying, in spite of the difficulty).

I just have a different motivation than him so it's OK that I disagree with the rationalization.

Suppose we start with a many worlds, non-collapsing universe that evolves physically but remains probabilistic. Now intuitively, my suggestion would be that Schrödinger's cat has enough geist to collapse its own wave function, and will obviously collapse it to the state in which it is alive (because it can't see itself dead). So the form of geist's freedom is in the first instance the necessary choice of freedom itself, that is, the choice of life. Thus natural selection selects for freedom to select.

How say ye? — unenlightened

I think that works. Just supposing that consciousness emerged in some kind of event that likely is the birth of religion then, supposing natural selection to be true and reconcilable with Hegel, that would be a good guess for reconciliation -- in the beginning there was no consciousness, only the atoms and void which somehow formed creatures which, in these many-worlds, we happen to be in the branches in which we're alive because while there are branches in which we're not, we obviously wouldn't be a part of those branches. We only get to experience the branches where we do come out alive, so even if it's a fluke that happens only once in a universe we just happen to live in that universe where it happened.


A problem for many-worlds though: it exacerbates the binding problem in that there's no cause or reason for why I continue to inhabit the branch that I do if my choices make a branch in the universe. Do consciousnessness multiply with every choice that we make, and along with that universes? Why on earth am I in this branch, and not the one where something else happened?

It would seem to me that that's where the coin-toss has to come in: you had a 50/50 chance, or whatever the odds were, to go along for the ride in this branch. Maybe someone else went along for a ride in the other branch. But if that's the case then we're back to a random universe we experience, stochastic and not freely chosen.

I think of The Phenomenology of Spirit as a story about the birth of Humanity. There's a rational beginning to this story, but the conceptual structures don't necessarily fit in with the historical timeline allusions throughout the text. It skips forwards and backwards, at least by my memory, to make connections. It's as if Geist has always been moving and the Phenomenologist can step out of the phenomena and describe them, as a scientist would, but then coming to realize that this is itself an act of Geist, or experiencing Geist and that all the worlds philosophies are expressions of this structure. So even if the historical timeline as we'd normally construct it is linear, I'd say Hegel's time is not linear because he's still talking about conceptual structures that are the basis of reality. So at the Birth of Humanity, or the beginning of consciousness, we'd have access to all the structures which are described through the history of philosophy, they just wouldn't necessarily be articulated yet, or would need development from the concepts that were expressable at the time -- while Geist lays the foundation.

For Hegel he just lives in a moment where enough has been accumulated by philosophers that he can begin to build a body of knowledge with it, contra the Kantian impulse to limit knowledge to the natural world.


Or, well, that's how I'd put it right now. Though I'm rusty.

A thought --

In comparing the Block Universe to Hegel, and using McTaggart:

The Block Universe as ontology posits that the A-series is an illusion.

I think Hegelian time does the opposite -- the B-series is an abstraction built from the A-series (which is not composed as McTaggart describes time for the A-series, though I think the analogy works to get a sense across)

I think the article sides with Freud a bit :D -- I don't think there are gaps for Hegel. I'd reconcile them by saying that Philosophy is a higher kind of knowledge than Psychology, and so the very explication of the unconscious makes us conscious of the unconscious, but that this is already a stepping-across a barrier such that we can engage with the unconscious by making it explicit, and finding its rational core. In a way Freud could be read as completing Hegel instead of in conflict, if we prioritized Hegel instead. (which is kind of the omni-move of Hegel -- every philosophy has a time and a place...)

******
https://www.coppelia.io/graphing-the-history-of-philosophy

And to see the whole graph at once, though it can be hard to read:

https://dailynous.com/2014/04/21/graphing-the-history-of-philosophical-influences/

Interesting to note that the graphing technique separated out Freud from Hegel, though unfortunately for what that article highlights it looks like he gets lumped in with philosophy by it.

I'm considering following his instructions because I'd like to play with the graph.

EDIT: Oh, and the significance is that it's an analogy for Hegelian "time" -- if we let the philosophers' names stand in for their ideas, then we have a kind of "mapping" between concepts which can serve as a visual picture of how Hegel's concepts might relate -- and perhaps "Geist" is a kind of movement along these relationships (or, better -- they even change relationships over time and move about)

I gave up after ep. 08. I do not think I enjoy anything Hegel has to say 0 but ill still read Phenomenology and Logic.

:D

It's frustrating, but I find it fascinating too. The influence cannot be denied, so there's the part of me that likes the history of philosophy and charting the lineages of ideas.

But then the strangeness of it all is part of its fascination, and trying to wrap my head around the strange is something I find rewarding in philosophy. It shows me another way of looking at the world.

The influence cannot be denied, so there's the part of me that likes the history of philosophy and charting the lineages of ideas. — Moliere

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely want to know about Hegel and his influence (and his actual, rather htan interpreted, response to Kant).

It just always feels too mystical, despite Greg's protestations in the episode in whcih is protests the Mystic label.

The Ecosia article is very interesting. The difference between the unconscious not being able to negate the way the 'rational' processes work is food for thought.

When I responded earlier, I was thinking in terms of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents as the point of contrast; Frustrated individuals living in a world they never made, to quote Howard the Duck. A dimension Ecosia is not taking on directly.

I will have to mull the ontological versus the psychological assumptions made by Ecosia against Hegel talking about historical development.

point of order. Ecosia is my greenwashed google substitute. Get it today, folks, and plant some trees while you search Think e-flux is the publisher.

I don't think there are gaps for Hegel. — Moliere

Geist is gap; freedom is gaps in the block; being and gap are indistinguishable. What I like most about Hegel so far is his starting place. He starts with phenomena appearing to an empty mind. This neatly cuts out all that interminable talk of internal and external and their disconnection. It's like Descartes without the ego-god-thinking thing bollocks. And that might eventually become a physical science with mind and freedom accounted for. Or maybe not...

the whole graph — Moliere

Bah, humbug! I don't know what you get from all that. It would help a bit if the display took account of time because "influence" tends to be a bit one way - the living not having much influence on their ancestors and such.

016 Time.

"There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief."

I'm just not having Einstein's block time. He was never reconciled to quantum mechanics, and nor, still, is his theory. Get a haircut, man! Never was and never will be And Hegel clearly makes time emerge from the causal feedback that also produces life and real infinity. And it emerges dialectically from the overflow of being and nothing that is becoming. You are nothing, and the creator! Creation means something new and therefore time. Riddle me this: if time is an illusion, what is the speed of light?

I'm actually pissed off with clever people telling me my life is an illusion as if they know what is real.

017

This episode discusses how the Hegelian dialectic is a reflection of reality itself rather than a unique philosophical method used to understand reality.  It will show how common left-brain understanding (verstand) fails in comprehending dialectics by breaking it into three separate moments, rather than holistically seeing three inseparable sides of "every notion and truth whatever."   As Friedrich Engels points out, the dialectical process of the reality of the being is "the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy." 

That first sentence is a fine double knot.

LET: "The Hegelian dialectic" = "a reflection of reality itself "
LET: "Not the Hegelian dialectic = "a unique a unique philosophical method used to understand reality"

THEN: A a unique philosophical method used to understand reality is not a reflection of reality itself.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who the fuck makes sense at all?
Mirror, mirror on the wall, mirrors can't reflect it all.

Back to Zeno, back to real infinity, back to the process of becoming as the resolution of paradoxes. There is no resting place in the flight of the arrow, it never is, but always is becoming, so equally the Hegelian dialectic never is but is always happening.

"Being is, and nothing happens."

If you read this one way, it describes the block universe, but read it another way, and time is how being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being. It's all matter of whether one looks from inside or outside the universe. Personally, I'm looking from inside.

I might add that when looking at the universe from the outside, one necessarily brings the process of looking out with one, and this is what enables one to see the universe as static and at the same time also conceptually creates a second dimension of time.

018

Geist is gap; freedom is gaps in the block; being and gap are indistinguishable. — unenlightened

I can make sense of that. All I really mean is to point out that for Hegel there's no limit to knowledge, at least as I understand it. That's the big difference between Kant and Hegel: for Kant the barriers to knowing are established until someone can come up with a better argument for how a priori synthetic knowledge is possible. For Hegel he believes these barriers are temporary, and through the dialectic can be overcome.

So the picture that Freud pointed to in the opening of the article:

[Philosophy] departs from [science] by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent […]. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological value of our logical operations […]. And it often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen / Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus. [With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.]”

I think in this sense, too, Hegel would deny gaps -- that is, he provides a picture of the universe that is without gaps, and at least rational (coherency some would probably deny)

But in terms of the block universe, yes I can see Geist being gap, freedom putting gaps in the block, and also the unity of being and gap in that being and nothing are everywhere intermixed.  

What I like most about Hegel so far is his starting place. He starts with phenomena appearing to an empty mind. This neatly cuts out all that interminable talk of internal and external and their disconnection. It's like Descartes without the ego-god-thinking thing bollocks. And that might eventually become a physical science with mind and freedom accounted for.

Yes!

For all of my protestations, there really are good parts in Hegel. My favorite passage comes later when he's reflecting upon art. His various theological notions are also ones that make a good deal of sense to me, even though I prefer a more civic and earthly interpretation of such things.

016

Glad to have these distinctions. In talking about different kinds of time I fear that it's too queer or abstract to be worth exploring, but I also come to these distinctions because of texts like Hegel's, and realizing different theories of history express time differently than the natural sciences do, too.

I think I'd tack on something like an Epicurean notion of time, as competition to the cyclic, etc. -- though I can understand how a Hegelian wouldn't want the universe to be merely stochastic.

019 020

This is hard for me to write about and I have been putting it off.

First, there is a problem with finitude in that it is defined negatively. 'Fin' is end, and the finite ends. This seems to show up in physics in various ways, substance dissolves into waves, finite particles are not particularly anything, but probably... So there is the same relation between finite and infinite as there is between being and nothing, which is one of instability; each becomes the other.

Now I'm going to quote myself from elsewhere when this was in the back of my mind and I was thinking about something else:—

Well I think I understand a distinction between physical, biological, and social determination, roughly like this.
Physics decrees that everything falls towards the ground with a terminal velocity dependent on size and density such that it cannot move further from its place of origin further than the average horizontal wind speed at the time takes it.

Biology overcomes or rather exploits physics in the Dandelion by producing a seed with long 'fingers that trap a large volume of air producing a seed with a terminal velocity due to gravity so slight that the mildest turbulence in a gentle zephyr will propel it upwards to such an extent that it can travel the whole globe. Just one of many ways that biology attains heavier than air flight. Spiders manage the same thing by spinning a kite-string of silk into the breeze until it is long enough to pull them into the air.

Intelligence evolved as a way of speeding up adaptation to an unstable world by the preservation of social learning, such that if one monkey learns to fish for ants with a stick, or crack open an oyster with a rock, the tribe will copy them without biological evolution occurring, and the behaviour will be preserved as long as it benefits the tribe. And thus the limits of biological determination are likewise circumvented.

Biology does not break the laws of physics, and intelligence does not break the laws of of biology. Nevertheless much different shit goes down in the city from what goes down in the wilderness., and what goes down in sterile conditions. Humans are biologically flightless, but have learned to fly round the world. — unenlightened

Now I feel as if this triad of my own, that also defines a direction towards complexity and freedom rather close to Hegel's but in modern terms, through the exploitation of feedback that creates fractal complexity down to the quantum level, and thereby can exploit the fundamental freedom from finitude inherent in the physics and direct it.

The evolution of the universe to a state that allows life, and the evolution of life that allows intelligence dives a direction towards meaning that in Hegel becomes the moral imperative. And the hippies, who never read Hegel except through the distorting lens of Marx, nevertheless caught the essence of the thing. How could all this ever have been about the silly little thing that is a human individual? But the struggle of the whole of humanity to get off the slaughter bench of history and be free to create - that is something! "All I want is all the life in me to be free." Free love and peace, man!

020

This episode traces the increase in human freedom from the totem ritual of the prehistoric primitive horde through the male genetic bottleneck in the agrarian revolution to the Hegelian “knot” in liberal democracies. This knot, which needs to be worked out, is more prominent today than ever. It is when individual and identity group demands come in conflict with principles that uphold the state.  — episode blurb

"DNA analysis has shown that 8,000 yrs ago 17 women reproduced for every man.
Male parentage began to decline at the beginning of the agrarian revolution. " Novak 020 (my rough extract.)

My own take on this is rather different from Novak's. He starts from a typical primate society of males competing for dominance, and seeks to explain the genetic bottleneck thereby. This I do not think works because it does not explain what changed or why. Not Freud, but Marx has the better explanation here. The agrarian revolution produced surplus. It produced settlement and accumulation, land must be cleared and improved to become productive and the labour produces an asset as property.

This gives an importance to inheritance to intelligence as distinct from its importance to biology. The 'natural' inheritance system would be matrilineal, because there is no question who the mother of an infant is. And it is this natural system which would have to be overturned in order for male dominance as between men to become dominance over women and specifically the control of female sexuality.

The patrilineal system of inheritance is what demands the control of women's sexual partners and this motives the dominant males to impose sexual exclusivity. Property motivates, and also provides the means for a male to continue to dominate well past his prime, when nature would have him deposed by youth.

021
Not much Hegel, but quite a lot of McLuhan. And an interesting light shed on this discussion: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14989/how-to-do-nothing-with-words/p1

... amongst other stuff.

022

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1981 book "After Virtue," argues that moral discourse since the Enlightenment is not rational and therefore empty. He believes the reason for this is that the morals of the Enlightenment lack purpose - teleology. The scientific revolution, armed with Darwinism, brought an end to "purpose." One was left to define morality on their own terms. This led to the moral relativism of the individual.  

But now a new tribalism has returned, with the left-brain, visually oriented individualism of the Enlightenment giving way to the right-brain, auditory tribalism of the Global Village.  And with it a return to moralistic thinking.  

 Hegel believed that morals consisted of group ethics that progressed over time, centered in one's family, one's socials spheres and communities, and the state itself. Perhaps the Hegel Renaissance seen over the last few decades is a result of the correspondence of his teachings to this new reality.    — Blurb

As you might imagine, I am quite onboard with blaming the Enlightenment for everything; the relativising emotivising and downgrading of morals, and the overemphasis on the individual.

However, the "right-brain, auditory tribalism of the Global Village" does not, I fear signal a return to social values. Rather, it is rampant individualism with an additional private army. Novak has allowed his genial progressive positivity to get the better of him. We are heading for the slaughter bench of history.

If the purpose of life is to transcend the limits of physics, and the purpose of intelligence is to transcend the limits of biology, then the purpose of existence is freedom - the nothing that 'directs' everything.
The will to freedom is a better formulation that the will to power, because power is always only relative - a big fish in a small pond would only be a small fish in a big pond.

But freedom is the left hand of responsibility; this is how ethics is sublated from the direction of history. Thus the measure of freedom as progress is kindness. As Margret Mead relates, the first sign of civilisation is a healed fractured femur, because without the sustained care of the community, one with a fractured femur could not survive. Political correctness, however, knits no bones.

Yup.

Just finishing up episode 20, but I empathize with your:

Novak has allowed his genial progressive positivity to get the better of him. — unenlightened

A bit Panglossian at times -- not that it's bad to hear, but I have my doubts.

Slightly out of order, but here is a McGilchrist talk - 30 mins overview of his stuff in case anyone is unfamiliar.