examining processes.

During the last class, one of the major topics of discussion was that of Hegel’s “processes”. Just for a slight recap, Hegel says the truth of a things existence is the “process” that that completes that thing, or makes that thing what it is. For example, the truth of a tree, would be the process that occurred from the time that an acorn hit the ground till the time that it grew into a tree, and then for whatever reason the tree ceased to exist.

Now the question I posed during this discussion was about how accidents and potentiality apply to this system. Accidents would be those things that intervene in the natural course of processes for the subject, in this example a tree. For example, if the acorn were to fall on hard ground and not be able to start the process of rooting itself, or if an animal ate it, these would be just two examples of the great many accidents that could befall the natural course for this tree, and hinder it. Potentiality is what the tree is all of the possible outcomes that the tree as in being itself, as well as what the tree could have become if accident had not befallen it, basically the fact that, had not the squirrel eaten the acorn, it would have become a mighty oak, or that if it had gotten more light it could have grown taller, so on and so forth.

The response to this question from Dr.J was that all of the accidents, and all of the potentialities that did, or could have befallen the natural process of the tree are the “truth” of what the tree was. Therefore, the tree was an acorn that was eaten by the squirrel but also could have been an oak. These things are both true about the tree, and yet it never became an Oak as proof that it could be, so it is in a sense false.

My new inquiry into this question is this: is the truth of the tree also not the past that existed before it? Is it not also true then that the acorn was attributed to a tree that then is attributed to many potentials, and accidents, leading back to another tree, and on infinitum into an infinite regress? It seemed at first to me to be easily dismissible, but after some thinking about it, is not the “truth” of the tree that part of the process of it coming into being the tree that it as an acorn fell from? It seems to me that the lines between processes are not very clear at all, at least when history is involved.

PERSONAL PROBLEMS

Hegel uses some pretty condescending and dismissive language to refute the ideas with which he doesn’t agree. For example, he not only refutes the view of cognition as an instrument or medium, he asserts that this view is not worth “troubling ourselves with such useless ideas and locutions.” In the same breath he dismisses alternative views as “excuses which create the incapacity of Science by assuming relationships of this kind in order to be exempt from the hard work of Science.” Hegel’s certainly not pulling any punches but he seems to be doing more attacking than supporting the attacks he makes. I get that he has to make these refutations, especially the one in the preface against Epistomology, in which he questions the worth of an entire branch of philosophy to deal with the problem of infinite regression he encounters. Furthermore, he even goes so far as to suggest that refuting other arguments is unnecessary, claiming that “instead of bothering to refute all these ideas, we could reject them out of hand as adventurous and arbitrary, and all the words associated with them like absolute, cognition, objective, and subjective, and countless others whose meaning is assumed to be generally familiar, could even be regarded as so much deception.” Hegel just seems to have a lot of personal problems. Which makes sense, because I have a lot of personal problems with Hegel.

Hegel's Heroic Endeavor

In his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty appears to make a move that is reminiscent of G.W.F. Hegel in order to rid philosophy of its problems with mind/body duality. Although Rorty will not agree with Hegel in affirming Kantian values, it is interesting that even in the 21st century, philosophers are still struggling with Kantian notions of conditions for experience and what necessary conceptions we must hold in order to validate experience. I believe that Rorty echoes what Hegel sees as a flaw in trying to articulate what the mind must be capable of in order to understand experience: it creates the problem of an infinite regress of faculties. The regress occurs because one could presume that he has the faculty to judge what his mind does and does not process, and how well it does that. At the same time, one could also justifiably say/ or create other faculties that could judge how well the previous faculty assesses the other faculty, and so forth and so on. While Rorty will largely condemn longings to solve epistemic questions as a way to keep philosophers in “business,” I still have interest in the literature involving epistemic acquisition, and hope to find some comfort in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel himself calls the exercise “therapeutic,” so I am hoping that solace is found by examining consciousness, and how it could possibly overcome its deficiencies to see the world as rational. While working through the Mirror of Nature, as discouraging as it might be, it so far has only affirmed to me the significance of epistemology and how it continues to baffle philosophers even to this day. Hegel’s endeavor is ambitious, but taking a stab at truth is much more heroic than dismissing it altogether like Rorty, so I am rooting for Hegel to prove something in his scientific philosophy.

I find it interesting, and refreshing that Hegel seeks to just dive right what we experience and leave out pre-existing conditions for the ability to do such. The idea of consciousness’s constant renewal and despair is intriguing, especially how the language has influenced existential philosophers that borrowed Hegel’s language of subjects and objects (as well as despair in general). I would particular like to see if Hegel will delve into ethical considerations in the PS, as it can be thorny creating an ethical system that suggests the world itself as the ultimate rationality, like utilitarians (which I do not side with).

A Brief Comparison of Kantian Consciousness to Hegelian Consciousness

A Brief Comparison of Kantian Consciousness to Hegelian Consciousness

After reading the Introduction to Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”, I must admit that Hegel’s bold accusation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy was a little off-setting (perhaps because I find myself, in many ways, partial to Kant’s philosophy). Essentially, Hegel’s accusation against Kant stems from what Hegel finds to be a fallacy of infinite regression inherent in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Although Hegel employs Kant’s early notion of consciousness, his ultimate goal is to develop his own system of consciousness from Kant’s alleged shortcomings. Seeing as Hegel makes such an accusation about Kant, I find it important to review the differences thus far between both philosophers’ conception of consciousness; despite our early entry into Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”.

Let’s begin with Kant’s epistemology. Kant argues that knowledge is only possible from experience by means of the mind’s faculties. Such faculties include the mind’s consciousness and its capacity of apprehension. Kant’s condition for experience is the conjunction of two salient features: the “unity of consciousness” with “the unity of apprehension”. For Kant, experience is both possible and complete only upon the conjunction of consciousness and apprehension. In order to gain knowledge by means of experience, one’s consciousness must apply concepts with their intuitions as they appear to the mind. In short, because the mind is capable of grasping space and time, it is also passively conscious of the particulars which come from space and time. Such particulars Kant denotes as intuitions. This is where Kant begins to employ his notion of apprehension.

One of the example’s Kant uses to re-enforce his notion of apprehension come the cause-and-effect relationship between a rock and a window. When a rock is thrown at a window causing the window to break, the mind is conscious of the rock breaking the window, but the mind can only apprehend what appears to it by applying the intuition of a rock breaking a window, with its concept as a cause-and-effect relationship (causation). Thus “the unity of consciousness” with “the unity of apprehension”, completes experience and ultimately makes knowledge possible.

Hegel’s dispute with Kant’s epistemology comes from Kant’s understanding of consciousness as faculty of the mind. If consciousness is assumed to be a faculty of the mind, then it would require examining it’s own faculty an so forth, which then leads to an infinite regression. Instead, Hegel argues that consciousness is a naturally progressive and in itself a phenomenon. Thus Hegel notes that since consciousness moves itself, “all that is left for us is to simply look on” (54). Despite Hegel’s scientific interpretation of consciousness, I have trouble seeing how Kant’s epistemology fails. For me, Kant’s epistemology is slightly more assuring because he applies what is inherent to the mind (i.e. the minds faculties of apprehension and consciousness) to reality, instead of applying an abstract system that appears incomplete and never-ending.

Tip: write your blog posts in Word or something like that

Ok kids, I already wrote this post long in the past. You might even say, hours ago (which it was). So why write it again? Well you see, I am a sucka and I forgot to save and also accidentally closed the tab containing the contents of my post on my browser (whooopsies).

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. I have had classes that require blogs and have done this multiple times on blogger and also with papers, emails, facebook comments, etc. Each time it becomes apparent that I have made a damning and frustrating mistake, and I feel pretty dumb and downright annoyed with myself. I wasted time and here I am doing it all again. But it will necessarily be a new endeavor somehow. I may sit down in the same spot and listen to the same music while I type but even if I am doing it all over again and I am doing it differently. According to Hegel, through experience we learn that "we meant something other than what we meant to mean." The task of philosophy, and the scientific way of doing philosophy, concerns itself with the reexamination and reanalysis of ideas as we continually test the proposition against itself in a newly separate context. Hegel identifies the dialectical process as one that is ever-evolving towards absolute truth and thinking about the way I ordinarily orient myself in the world this seems true. I am concerned with examining my past behaviors and situations and the possibilities that may follow accordingly. It seems that the retrospective nature of human consciousness still exists presently and even later we can continually reflect on the experience reflecting (whoa). And so I write this blog again, in a new moment and that is very much like the last. The basic concerns I have are still the same and the same questions still seems to puzzle me, but the doing this a second time definitely seems clearer (kind of).

It seems to me that Hegel's approach to philosophy as a science necessitates a kind of personal and emotional removal from experience. Additionally, it appears that we must acknowledge an inherent incorrectness to personal experiences, as they can only become more truthful once a contradictory account is proposed. An antithesis, colloquially, is something that is directly opposed to something else. While this is not exactly the Hegelian terminology, it seems to point to a kind of conflict of diametrically opposed positions in which each side must compromise rather than a nuanced building of consciousness that logically proceeds from one step to the next.

How much information is compromised in the dialectical process? As I write this blog post for the second time, it appears to be more sophisticated to me, but damn I wish I had that other one back so I could know for sure. The information is lost. So next time, I'll make sure write in a word processor rather than directly into blogger, or I'll at least remember to save frequently. But the experience of having to do this twice was actually not so bad once I removed got over my feelings of loss and embraced what I had retained in the process.

Clueless and the Individual's Role in Hegel's History

While Hegel's conception of history wasn't at the center of our readings, I think a grasp on it is important to understanding his concept of Spirit, or "Geist." The ideas are certainly entwined; Spirit, "our shared recognition of our mutual interdependence and ultimate collective identity," can only be realized in context of the whole of human history, as Hegel's idea of the Absolute is one that incorporates rather than excludes [quote from our first article on Hegel - I'm missing the author's name, page 61]. As we outlined in class, Hegel considers each cycle of thesis/antithesis/synthesis to be annexed as a whole into realization of "truth," thus necessitating a larger conception of the whole that retains its nuanced differences rather than a unified view of history as a repetition of the same efforts and results. His history is one that progresses to a final comprehension and recognition of the whole, and "in the Phenomenology, this all-embracing identity is Spirit [from page 62 of the same article].

My intrigue in the connectivity of Spirit and history reminded me of a film that ties them explicitly together: Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995) features a history teacher named Miss Geist. I'm going to assume a general knowledge of the idea of the film - a campy early 90s remake of Jane Austen's Emma - but underline an aspect of it that's not often discussed. Its own conception of history is explored in Dierdre Lynch's "Clueless: About History," which complicates its appearance as a simple postmodern adaptation and credits Heckerling with a Hegelian sense of historical interdependence.

Lynch responds extensively to charges that postmodern thought disregards history by pointing out Heckerling's immersion in and distancing from that assumption. Cher, the film's main character, is, on many levels, clueless, decontextualizing everything from her home's neoclassical architecture ("Isn't my house classic? The columns date all the way back to 1972.") to her own obsession with fashion, dismissing outfit after outfit as "so last season." While Cher's level of consciousness plays into the idea that postmodernism has forgotten history, Heckerling underscores those ignorances with layered reference. The soundtrack is full of 90s covers of 70s songs, the characters are often archetypes (Christian = James Dean). Lynch suggests that Heckerling's 1990s LA both points out that historical interdependence and embodies a critique that can be made of Hegel's system - the loss of the role of the individual. In Miss Geist's history classroom is a poster that reads "HISTORY AND YOU," which is representative of the struggle the film exacerbates. Miss Geist constantly appeals to her students to pay attention to current and past events and leave their isolated social realms, but remains an isolated figure herself until Cher gives her a much-needed makeover and sets her up with another teacher. Both teachers are more fulfilled on an individual level, and their students are more willing to grasp their lessons. At the end of the movie, Cher enlists members of her clique in a charity fundraiser run by Miss Geist. Lynch cites this back-and-forth as representative of "the difficulty of coordinating “History” with “You”—of getting from everyday, personal ways of marking time to the objective time of event-full history and back again," (81) - the difficulty of interacting on an individual level with a Hegelian "big picture" sense of history.


Halley

[Lynch's essay can be found in the book Jane Austen and Co. (SUNY Press, 2003).]

Why give up the question?

After a senior seminar session this past week, someone mentioned an interesting point that they felt was mirrored in Hegel’s work. Rorty, in his attempt to dismantle philosophy “as it has been done the past couple hundred years” first dives into philosophy of mind and then epistemology. After discussing Kant and other thinkers, he posits the idea that we should not think of transcendental experiences, or indeed epistemology itself, as necessary but only as a possible answer to a question (that philosophers themselves created….but that’s another blog post.) He ends up saying it’s optional and wondering if we should even waste our time studying it. Hegel offers a similar, yet different, approach to the question. Why should we get bogged down with trying to answer questions of foundations of knowledge, especially in light of a possible infinite regression of agency?

I’m honestly undecided on this. In a way I agree with them both, that our energy could be better spent in, once having a theory, moving from there instead of becoming mesmerized by the question of “how do we know, and how better to know what we know?” But at the same time, it seems as though understanding those foundations are important. Maybe Rorty would argue that practically it’s not really important. With Kant’s work, scientist finally were able to get around the issues that Hume proposed…but then, we don’t see scientists knocking on the door of epistemologists thanking them for their work. But just because people don’t consider it necessary for interacting with the world, does that mean we can’t pursue this is as ultimately important? It doesn’t necessarily have to be the number one priority of everything we do, but for me it does seem important.

Having studied some of Hegel in Aesthetics, his idea of Spirit and its presence and coming awareness in history does seem very interesting, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he develops it, as well as the dialectic. But I think simply dismissing a question that seems a bit foundational to me isn’t necessarily the best course of action, even if it needs to have a slightly lower priority to what “really” matters in our day to day lives.