Hegel, Part 5a
Extracts about Being,
Essence and Notion
This is the halfway point in
our course on Hegel. Our mission is to thoroughly study and understand the
whole of Hegel’s Logic. How are we getting on?
Thanks to Andy Blunden’s
lecture we got an overview of Hegel’s Logic in the previous post. In his next
two lectures, Andy returns to the sequence Being-Essence-Notion in more detail.
What have we been doing so
far? We have not been reading whole books of Hegel. We are not at the stage
where we can, as Tony Buzan would have it, skip over the difficult bits and
come back later to fill in the gaps. We are still in the situation where, when
reading Hegel, we find that most of it is incomprehensible, and only
intelligible in spots, here and there. So we are making a virtue of that, and:
·
We are taking
mostly relatively short spots of Hegel, learning how to handle them, locate
them, begin to absorb them, and become familiar with them.
·
We are also
looking for any kind of overview material, including contents pages, as well as
material like Andy Blunden’s summarising lecture on Being, Essence and Notion.
The overviews will give us clues as to where to locate the small pieces that we
are picking up.
·
We are not
forgetting, also, that this is the Communist University, and that what we do
here is to set things up for live dialogue between real people. We have done so,
and we will continue to do it. It remains for the recipients of these posts to
organise their Freirean dialogues around the material.
Today’s main item consists of
eleven short extracts from various works of Hegel that are given by Andy
Blunden in broad support of his lecture on Being, Essence and Notion. They are
from the Shorter Logic, the Philosophy of Right, the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic and the History of Philosophy.
Perhaps this is an
appropriate time to make some provisional general remarks.
Hegel describes a movement
through history that does not discard the past but treats it as a component
part of the present and of the future.
Further: “[Hegel]’s supreme merit, as far as ethics and social and political
philosophy are concerned, is that the concrete universal explicates affirmative
intersubjective relations and makes possible an account of social institutions
that is a third alternative to abstract atomic individualism and collectivist
communitarianism.” [Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, p. 112, Williams 1997]
If all this is so, then Hegel
has given us a way of seeing life that was not available before, and is better
than what was before.
Hegel does not lean on any “a priori”, presupposition, or Prime
Mover. Hegel shows how creation of something from nothing is a daily occurrence.
It is commonplace. Nothing is lost, and accumulated quantity will, at a
measurable moment, generate qualitative change.
This new vision clarifies
things that Euclidean geometry and its logical cousins cannot clarify, or even
see at all.
Hegel talks of Spirit, was
classified as an Idealist, and was followed by noisy “materialists” such as
Feuerbach. These and other things, not
least of them the shear difficulty of reading Hegel directly, have led people
to misunderstand Hegel, who does not oppose the material against the spiritual.
On the contrary, Hegel solves the contradiction between the material and the spiritual.
In Hegel, the human is both the
creator, and the created. Subject becomes Object, and vice versa.
“Materialists” think that
they have solved the dichotomy of mind and matter by awarding priority to
matter. But all this does is to replace a divine creator with an inanimate one,
thus perpetuating a “Big Bang” type of theory and continuing to fail to explain
creation as a constant, continuing and necessary presence.
In this way “materialists”
become a version of what they thought they had overthrown. They continue to
lack a strong theory of development, progress, or revolution.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Excerpts from Hegel on Being, Essence
and Notion.
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