Re: what YOU THINK is Hegel's "mediation"?
makc.th...@gmail.com
myself, I am now up to examine
what does Hegel say about mediation in his "Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences".
so, I assume I've got "being" and "other" right, and their "identity"
(which is more like "alikeness"
to me), and other stuff like that. it would be hopeless without this
basic dictionary, right?
[1] "determination is in relation to the other" (Logic)
(or, as Spinoza puts it, "something is determined by what it is not"...
or, again, per Hegel,
"positive by itself has no sense; it is wholly in reference to the
negative. And it is the same with the negative")
it's all clear so far.
[2] "The fact that I am in Berlin, my immediate presence here, is
mediated by my having made the journey hither."
1. supposed to be "simple" example, but it's not :( I need more stuff
like that.
[3] "It is the passage from the subjective Idea to being which forms
the main concern of the doctrine of
immediate knowledge. A primary and self-evident interconnection is
declared to exist between our Idea and
being. Yet precisely this central point of transition, utterly
irrespective of any connections which show in
experience, clearly involves a mediation... For, what this theory
asserts is that truth lies neither in the Idea
as a merely subjective thought, nor in mere being on its own account...
The maxim of immediate knowledge rejects an indefinite empty
immediacy... and affirms in its stead
the unity of the Idea with being... But it is stupid not to see that
the unity of
distinct terms or modes is not merely a purely immediate unity, i.e.
unity empty and indeterminate, but that
-- with equal emphasis -- the one term [terms: being and Idea] is shown
to have truth only
as mediated through the other -- or, if the phrase be preferred, that
either term is only mediated with truth through the other."
1. immediacy implies indeterminacy (and, therefore, determinacy implies
mediacy).
2. smth is mediated "with" (or "by" - [2]) smth.
[4] "Thirdly and lastly, the immediate consciousness of God goes no
further than to tell us that he is: to tell us
what he is would be an act of cognition, involving mediation."
1. this lines up with my current understanding of "being" - here, a
"being" of idea of "God"
is in that "God" is "being" there, but no more.
2. this lines up, again, with that mediation is something involved in
turning "being" into
"essence"
1 and 2 is what I've read from Hibben.
[5] "...the consciousness and self-consciousness which spirit implies
are impossible without
a distinguishing of it from itself and from something else, i.e.
without mediation."
1. omitting "from itself" part (for the time being), once again we have
reference
to determination, that and [3].1.
[6] "When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its
merest indeterminate: for we cannot
determine unless there is both one and another: and yet in the
beginning there is yet no other. The
indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with... And this we
call Being."
1. = [4].1, but now I've read that from Hegel :)
[7] "The ordinary consciousness conceives things as being, and studies
them in quality, quantity, and
measure. These immediate characteristics, however, soon show themselves
to be not fixed but transient;
and Essence is the result of their dialectic."
1. great, now I know what am I - an "ordinary consciousness". fu(k.
[8] "Essence
-- which is Being coming into mediation with itself through the
negativity of itself -- is self-relatedness,
only in so far as it is relation to an Other -- this Other however
coming to view at first not as something
which is, but as postulated and hypothesised."
1. I suppose "an Other" here refers to an other of "Essence", and the
other of "Being"
was called "negativity". right?
2. now we 're said that mediation goes also "through" smth (one's other
here).
with [3].2, this gives us following picture:
- two terms (A and B) are subject to mediation (is that what "with"
means?)
- mediation is done "by" smth (C)
- mediation is done "through" smth (D); just noted "trough the other"
in [3]
now, if we remember [3].1, it looks like (C) is relation to (D), by
which determination is done.
but this would mean smth is always determined, if mediated... which is
somewhat stronger than [3].1.
one option would be that (D) is not necessary the other/negativity, and
so (C) does not
determines our being (either A or B) by definition [1].
other option would be that I misunderstand whole issue, and (C) = (D),
simply.
what do you all think?
I can no longer think myself, I need to sleep.
> goes to
> alt.philosophy.debate,talk.philosophy.misc,alt.christnet.philosophy,
> fa.analytic-philosophy, alt.philosophy.kant
BuddhaThu
This is a brief interpretation.
Mediation is that which comes in between and conditions your
experience. In Kant, certain conditions must be posited before
experience is possible, i.e. space and time.
In Hegel, mediation can carry a secondary form of expression as in law.
In law, mediation is to unite opposites into peaceful concordance or to
arbitrate a dispute.
This goes quite well with his logic and dialectic of mediation between
the opposites of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis or being, nothing
and becoming.
Normally, mediation of the spirit comes to mind when we talk about
Hegel's use of mediation.
Spirit to Hegel was not a religious concept, but more the sign of the
times, i.e. "the spirit of a revolution" or "spirit of the
game." They represent not subjective forms of existence, but forms of
existence that are carried out within the historical community.
"Spirit" as cultural ideas of a community mediates to community the
idea of itself. The community must posit certain ideas for itself in
order to exist, but it can also deny them and reform to a new
synthesis. You have two types of mediation of both positing and
reuniting.
Spirit is not Newton's spirit, although the two historical concepts
are similar. Newton used it to unite the opposites of an equation in
algebraic form. It caused and mediates objects to fall and define the
unity of the sciences. It is the causal explanatory role of gravity.
These two are equally metaphysical, but Hegel's spirit is more ***a
unity law*** of history mediated within the dialectic.
Newton's is more in terms of **a unity law** of the physical
sciences.
Both laws are to mediate disputes about opposites.
I have to go. I usually do livelier interpretations of Hegel's
language, but I see you are new. :-)
Tron
Hi,
As I said, I'm no certified Hegelinarian but having sent you on a tame goose
chase, I feel I can't not do some homework, too. Take it in the spirit of
shared suffering.
Wonderful display of gumption to challenge the List with explaining Hegel to
children; and really mortifying, because it should be possible. I'm really
glad I started out saying I didn't know too much about him.
I know your ROE expressly forbade quotes, but there seems to be no way
around them.
Oh, and pay no heed to the group's in-house Arch-Cut'n-Paster; if he still
believes Hegel's dialectic has anything to do with Schelling's triade of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis, he needs to upgrade his World Wide Web.
Program: A little German detour. Some Hegel references. Small talk.
I. German
The german detour is included because a lot of GE-EN translation is bad. It
is dictionary based substitution, and results in overly technical or even
mystifying terms.
"Immediate" (unmittelbar) and "mediate" (vermitteln), "mediated"
(vermittelt) are German words in common use. Etymologically, the key element
is "Mitte", the middle. As the litteral "piece in the middle", it has
developed into "Mittel", a means to something: the part that transfers the
original impetus to the end receiver.
In a further development, it is used for any kind of relay (messages),
conduite, go-between or brokerage ("Vermitteln" is used about e.g employment
agencies ("Arbeitsvermittlung"). So ..."unmittelbar" is used for things like
"reichsunmittelbar", for cities that paid dues do the Emperor directly, and
not via some baron; that is, there was no administrative layer between the
city and the Emperor; they were contiguous, so to speak. One would use the
word to describe an immediate reaction: "Unmittelbar sollte man annehmen
..." - "At first sight it would appear that ..."; it can also be used in the
same way as "direct", "directly". So something which is unmittelbar seems to
be something which is, exists or counts thanks to itself, or thanks to it
simply being there, so to speak. Going Hegel: When we speak about truth,
there is a complication, since truth is a relation. Immediate truth, like
sensory evidence, is such that when we see something, we know somthing.
Seeing is knowing, or at least believing. There is no agency or instance
between seeing and believing, and so sensory evidence is immediate evidence.
The mediation thread in philosophy is old, originating with Nick of Cusa,
treated by Leibniz and also occuring in Kant. In KdRV Kant establishes the
"schematism of the concepts of pure reason" as that which bridges the gap
between those concepts and the objects we apply them to; the gap being that
concepts and real, existing things are sao different that they have nothing
in common, and we need some kind of go-between to carry from side to side.
In Hegel, too, vermittlung is nothing more complicated than some function X
wedged in between two other functions Z and Y which enables the two latter
to interact.
Examples:
From the above description, examples should be legio. Any kind of
"translator" (phrase book, interpreter), relay station, power transmitting
axel, shaft or rod is a "mediator" in the plainest sense of the word.
All this is of course not very interesting, since it is Hegel's use of these
terms, much more than their mundane meaning, which is what one needs to
grasp. And it is true as many a commentary states, that one can't grasp it
without seeing it at work.
Application
Warning: here I slide into "my take" mode.
The difficulty, as I see it, is in Hegel's ontology. Hegel does not see the
world as an ensemble of discrete side by side "things".Hegel begins with a
"whole", but just like it is not very useful to say "zoology = all the
animals" - or you can't dial "the telephone book" - an indiscriminate
Everything is just a word. It is all the content that is interesting. And
the content, too, does not dissolve into discreet side by side things, but
consists more in the "connecting lines" than in the "dots".
So how de we get at Hegelian content?
"Hegel's dialectic"
His method, is what he calls speculation or reflection. And it is, as you
have observed, closely connected to negation. The Spinoza quote that
everyone drags out is, IIRC, "omne determinatio est negatio": all
determination is negation. Frege used this in his definition of concepts.
Starting with the most general sentence C(x) you say nothing, since you say
everything: Anyhow(anything). To be able to say something, we must limit the
extension of C, of x or of both. So determination is to "shrink" a concept
from the original "everything" to some specific something; the remainder of
"everything minus concept X" forms the complement of concept X and can be
expressed as "not-x"; and everything with a "not-" prefix is a negation.
II .Hegel references
Mediation
Luckily, I managed to locate the place where Hegel defines and discusses
what Vermittlund is all about. And that is in the first chapter of the PhG.
I'd reccomend reading the first . I'd reccomend reading the first section
(On sensory Certainty, IIRC) and also the first 6 - 7 paragraphs of the
second section (On sensory Certainty, IIRC):
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm
(Good selection of Hegel online at
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/hegel310.htm).
Negation
"All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress . . . is the
recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much
positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a
nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation
of its particular content . . . . Because the result, the negation, is a
specific negation it has a content." Introduction, Science of Logic 54.
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlintro.htm#HL1_43,
§ 62)
In the Phenomenology of Mind I have expounded an example of this method in
application to a more concrete object, namely to consciousness. Here we are
dealing with forms of consciousness each of which in realising itself at the
same time resolves itself, has for its result its own negation - and so
passes into a higher form . All that is necessary to achieve scientific
progress - and it is essential to strive to gain this quite simple insight -
is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as
much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself
into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the
negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is
not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter
which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and
therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results; which
strictly speaking is a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediacy,
not a result. Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation, it
has content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its
predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter,
therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself
and its opposite. It is in this way that the system of Notions as such has
to be formed - and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in
which nothing extraneous is introduced.
(The key here seems to be that A and not-A do not simply cancel each other
out, as they (as contradictions) would in "language" logic, but form two
pieces of a third, greater "unit".)
Small Talk
Yin + Yang = ...?
Another aspect of this is the "mutual interpenetration of opposites".
According to (me and) Hegel, the two complementary parts of something are
not (only) isolated, but (also) form parts of a whole. And just like in some
versions of the yin-yang symbol, there is a speck of white in the black and
a speck of black in the white.
One example _might_ be Fuzzy Logic. 0 = Nothing, 1 = Being, and 0.001 to
0.999 are the degrees of being or nothingness between these two endpoints.
I think my late-nite point is that I suspect that according to Hegel, there
is something IN the A that determines something IN the B and vice versa; the
simplest case being that out of which arises the limits to being A. There
must be something in that limiting principle which also affects B, just like
the nature of the border between France and Germany determined some things
for Germany and some other things for France (and Belgium, and ...).
The only example for this I can come up with at very short notice are
airplanes. A plane is an "anti-gravity" device, for flying.
The airplane is "not gravity" in three senses: it isn't made out of gravity
(sorry, but it had to be in there), there is no gravity on board it (no
thing on board you can point at and say "that's (our) gravity, there), and
if it is a functional airplane, it actually does overcome gravity and fly.
On the other hand, everything in a plane is designed to assist in overcoming
gravity, and so gravity concerns will show up in every design feature in the
plane (in that sense, gravity is everywhere). Gravity, of course, operates
on the plane, and also on the internal parts (like passengers, such that
they sit in their seats and not fly about inside the fuselage). And gravity
assists in flying the plane as intended - if gravity ceased, the plane would
simply fly off into space.
Well,there used to be another one. Take a western society and its
traditional system of monogamy. This divided the population into
"marriagables" and "non-marriageables". The "marriagables" divide into two
major categories with two subgroups: the married and the unmarried, and men
and women.
Disregarding the unmarriagables and the married, there once was the large
group of unmarried marriageables. Now, most the rules about this were the
rules concerning marriage. There were few explicit rules, like formal laws,
for the unmarried. Yet their whole existence was determined by their status
in this system. These people were e.g. cut off from sex until they were
married, couldn't have children, etc. etc. etc.. I think the way of thinking
that underlies the constructionof this kind of analysis is an example of
demonstrating the mutual interpenetration of opposites, and how things on
the "inside" of A can determine things on the "inside" of B.
And this action of interpenetration I take to be central to how "mediation"
between concepts actually works.
G'nite.
T
makc.th...@gmail.com
Tron wrote:
> Wonderful display of gumption to challenge the List with explaining Hegel to
> children; and really mortifying, because it should be possible.
and yes, I'm still dissatisfied with quality of replies on the List.
dunno, may be it has to do with my background (computer science) -
acceptable abstract (as in Hegel) definitions to me are only those,
which I can use as "templates" to genrate valid examples of concept "in
action"; being able to tell a difference between "immediate" and
"mediated" is not enough to me, but it seem to be enough for most of
"philosophers".
> a lot of GE-EN translation is bad.
Yeah, well, I've decided that learning german would be little overhead
here. But my situation is even worse, my primary language is russian.
> "Immediate" (unmittelbar) and "mediate" (vermitteln), "mediated"
> (vermittelt) are German words in common use. Etymologically, the key element
> is "Mitte", the middle. As the litteral "piece in the middle"...
> ...[immediate] can also be used in the same way as "direct", "directly".
yep, it's understood. but what I'm after is more like exact, almost
mathematical meaning... though I can't be sure in anything yet.
> In KdRV Kant establishes the
> "schematism of the concepts of pure reason" as that which bridges the gap
> between those concepts and the objects we apply them to...
> ...we need some kind of go-between to carry from side to side.
and this "go-between" is...? is done by...? what, how? questions,
questions.
> In Hegel, too, vermittlung is nothing more complicated than some function X
> wedged in between two other functions Z and Y which enables the two latter
> to interact.
interesting view, which renders "mediation", however, almost
meaningless. don't you think?
> Luckily, I managed to locate the place where Hegel defines and discusses
> what Vermittlund is all about. And that is in the first chapter of the PhG.
> I'd reccomend reading the first . I'd reccomend reading the first section
> (On sensory Certainty, IIRC) and also the first 6 - 7 paragraphs of the
> second section (On sensory Certainty, IIRC):
>
> http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm
...and so I have to leave the rest of your post unanswered, for a time
being.
makc.th...@gmail.com
some quick looks at section A of "Phenomenology of Mind",
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm (as
per Tron's suggestion):
Hegel uses those terms right away, like we should know them already. It
doesn't define anything. Take this quote:
"...neither the I nor the thing has here the meaning of a manifold
relation with a variety of other things, of mediation in a variety of
ways"
and then this one:
"...the certainty 'of' something, is an immediate pure relation"
we see, that mediation has smth to do with "a manifold relation with a
variety of other things", on one hand, but there can perfectly be such
a thing as "immediate relation", on the other hand. that is, we do not
see anything :(
or this:
"The other, however, is put forward as the non-essential, as mediated,
something which is not per se in the certainty, but there through
something else..."
again, we are supposed to already know what "mediated through" means.
perhaps, the key thing to understand this wordplay is to define how
"middle term" is used. no matter how "general" this concept
("mediation") is, I don't buy it was to mean every possible
relationship between three terms, as so many seem to imply by their
answers. as Hegel would put it, I bet, there is "mediation", but there
also is "not mediation", as well.
Tron
<makc.th...@gmail.com> skrev i melding
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Tron wrote:
> Wonderful display of gumption to challenge the List with explaining Hegel
> to
> children; and really mortifying, because it should be possible.
so, you're on [hegel-intro] list. because I didn't said it here, did I?
- I lurk there (but very actively). I daren't post my amateur musings in
such a select forum, but I almost bit my fingers laughing at your wonderful
challenge.
and yes, I'm still dissatisfied with quality of replies on the List.
dunno, may be it has to do with my background (computer science) -
- And the guys on the list, who are "inside" Hegel, and so do not
"translate".
acceptable abstract (as in Hegel) definitions to me are only those,
which I can use as "templates" to genrate valid examples of concept "in
action"; being able to tell a difference between "immediate" and
"mediated" is not enough to me, but it seem to be enough for most of
"philosophers".
- But "mediate" etc. are _not_ abstract terms in German, that was the point
of my attempts at clarifying the language issue. It is only in translation
to English that this acquires its academic halo.
> a lot of GE-EN translation is bad.
Yeah, well, I've decided that learning german would be little overhead
here. But my situation is even worse, my primary language is russian.
- Well, ever since the glorius Vladimir Illitch Ulyanovsk wrote his "On
Reading Hegel"*, I thought this Grand-Father of Scientific DiaMat was a
subject of much study in Russia. There must be a lot of books explaining him
to, well, workers and peasants .... or not?
*(I have that on my shelf; but this one is not very informative.)
Support for "immediate": Mentioning Lenin brought up that Marx, too, wrote
some articles on Hegel. In the final chapter of the
"Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte" he talks about this, and here is the
phrase "... durch ihr Dasein sich selbst beweisende", i.e. "that which
proves itself by its own existence" as a description of that which is
posited by being sensually evident. I see this as confirmation that we are
dealing with something that proves a "correspondence truth" by simply
appearing or existing, like conscious phenomena, qualia (pain, colour ...).
Pain is pain and you know it is there as soon as it is there. There is no
way to be mistaken about it, we cannot make any epistemological errors
regarding pain. So the opposite, that which is mediated, must ... need
something else to prove it? Be prone to epistemological errors? Be proven by
something else than itself?
> "Immediate" (unmittelbar) and "mediate" (vermitteln), "mediated"
> (vermittelt) are German words in common use. Etymologically, the key
> element
> is "Mitte", the middle. As the litteral "piece in the middle"...
> ...[immediate] can also be used in the same way as "direct", "directly".
yep, it's understood. but what I'm after is more like exact, almost
mathematical meaning... though I can't be sure in anything yet.
- That is a bit like seeking a mathematical meaning for "doing" or "making"
....
> In KdRV Kant establishes the
> "schematism of the concepts of pure reason" as that which bridges the gap
> between those concepts and the objects we apply them to...
> ...we need some kind of go-between to carry from side to side.
and this "go-between" is...? is done by...? what, how? questions,
questions.
...is the "schematism", as I said. Kant is not relevant to Hegel's Logic of
Being;
I only mentioned it to illustrate that Kant used the word without special
explanation, and that
this "mediation" in Kant is neither remarkable nor even seen as an issue in
his philosophy.
So the word itself, I think, is not going to be very helpful to you.
> In Hegel, too, vermittlung is nothing more complicated than some function
> X
> wedged in between two other functions Z and Y which enables the two latter
> to interact.
interesting view, which renders "mediation", however, almost
meaningless. don't you think?
- No. It isn't any less meaningful than telephone wire is to the telephone
engineer,
or any "intermediate" layer of (computer) langugae between a user
application and the 000110001000111110101100111010001100110 of machine
language. Assemblers and compilers and DOS'es and .... programming languages
and graphical user interfaces "mediate" between the hardware and LUser on
"Word for Windows". And I guess the various layers "interact" (and so
"determine") by triggering operations within each other, changing the
"state".
But yes; this is trivial, really. At least in the sense that I, as a
computer primitive, am satisfied (and happy) to merely know that these
layers are there. A computer scientist will find no knowledge in that at
all, but will seek it in the configuration of the respective layers, and the
rules of operations that govern their interactions and their results.
AFAICS this is what Hegel attempts to do to terms like "Being" etc. Kant had
assembled and ordered some of these "concepts of pure reason", but Hegel
criticized him for having gone about it as a naive butterfly collector,
merely netting them in his own consciousness and "sorting them by colour".
He wanted to systematize them according to their internal structures.
So in order to understand how mediation works, you really need to say what
he says about being, and about Nothing, and about how they mutually
determine and cancel out, but how this cancelling out leaves a residuum,
which he calls Change ("Becoming").
I repeat my dictum that it is here that Hegel imports movement (or time)
into static logic,
and after this he can use development, change, dynamics as a perspective on
anything and everything.
I also repeat my thingy about how Hegel uses words differently. Normally,
when we look at a term like "Being", and we assume that a concept like
"being" is a normal predicate, we would look for "being" as a predicate of
all things that are. Of all existing things, being is the predicate we would
give them to state that they in fact do exist.
But because of Hegel's ontology, that concepts are "real", i.e. that the
World is ordered conceptually, there is a breakdown of the insulation
between language and metalanguage. Whatever we say about any concept qua
concept we can also retrieve in the real world as the property of all things
that fall under that concept. So Hegel determines aspects of being by
investigating aspects of the concept "being".
It is a bit like saying that since "being" has five letters, all existing
things will also have five letters. Again, this is not true as written here,
since the example pertains the linguistic expression only. Jokes aside, he
says that the objective world is organized along the same lines as our
subjective consciousness (like our own Hawking, who says something like: we
can understand the Universe because we are of the same matter as the
universe; in Hegel's case, it was God, of course).
Good luck all the while.
T
makc.th...@gmail.com
Tron wrote:
> ever since the glorius Vladimir Illitch Ulyanovsk wrote his "On
> Reading Hegel"*, I thought this Grand-Father of Scientific DiaMat was a
> subject of much study in Russia. There must be a lot of books explaining him
> to, well, workers and peasants .... or not?
the problem is in the way things were organized in USSR, and partially
still are. in particular, in scientific sphere. the whole system
encouraged crappy publications, composed from re-arranged quotes from
multiple sources, with its only purpose to sustain Marx/Lenin cult...
it was like Holy Bible for cristians, where perhaps 1% have an idea of
what it sais in there, and even less of what it means... so, for most
of ex-USSR citizens over last - what - 50 years, "soviet marxist
thought" and "some crap noone understands - correction - some crap even
not supposed to mean anything" were like synonyms. Lenin himself was
more like politician, interested in political implications of Marx
ideas, so we shall not count him in, at all, shall we?
whatever, my interest in Hegel is driven by absolutely unrelated
stimuli, so let's just say I couldn't find russian source good enough.
Tron
<makc.th...@gmail.com> skrev i melding
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>
> perhaps, the key thing to understand this wordplay is to define how
> "middle term" is used. no matter how "general" this concept
> ("mediation") is, I don't buy it was to mean every possible
> relationship between three terms, as so many seem to imply by their
> answers. as Hegel would put it, I bet, there is "mediation", but there
> also is "not mediation", as well.
Isn't that where "overlap" comes in?
Three terms must share something, of not, there is no mediation.
And for Hegel, mutually exclusive complements overlap, too;
if not in extension, then in their properties qua concept.
So pure bing is empty, and Nothing is empty, and thus they share ...?
T
Tron
<makc.th...@gmail.com> skrev i melding
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>
> Tron wrote:
>> ever since the glorius Vladimir Illitch Ulyanovsk wrote his "On
>> Reading Hegel"*, I thought this Grand-Father of Scientific DiaMat was a
>> subject of much study in Russia. There must be a lot of books explaining
>> him
>> to, well, workers and peasants .... or not?
Far be it from me to have any kind of reasoned opinion on circumstances in
Russia, but ...
> the problem is in the way things were organized in USSR, and partially
> still are. in particular, in scientific sphere. the whole system
> encouraged crappy publications, composed from re-arranged quotes from
> multiple sources, with its only purpose to sustain Marx/Lenin cult...
> it was like Holy Bible for cristians, where perhaps 1% have an idea of
> what it sais in there, and even less of what it means... so, for most
> of ex-USSR citizens over last - what - 50 years, "soviet marxist
> thought" and "some crap noone understands - correction - some crap even
> not supposed to mean anything" were like synonyms. Lenin himself was
> more like politician, interested in political implications of Marx
> ideas, so we shall not count him in, at all, shall we?
Agreed.
I was thinking more "Old Guard", i.e. when the whole thing was in the
making, up to 1917/1924, from, say 1905 or even earlier - AFAIR there was a
lot of writing and discussing at the time. Plekhanov, Bukharin, Axelrod,
Kamenev, Martov, Rakovsky, Zasulich, Zinoviev .... Kautsky and Korsch ...
> whatever, my interest in Hegel is driven by absolutely unrelated
> stimuli, so let's just say I couldn't find russian source good enough.
Yes, well, I don't mean to step on your circles. Just trying out an idea for
a source "closer to home", as it were. If you say it is a blind alley, then
so it is.
It would be interesting to see a line or two on the aim you pursue (unless
you have to kill us all if you told us).
FWIW, I've found that the way of thinking expressed in the Tao Te King
captures some of that inexpressibility of Hegelian Dialectics. Another
litterary source for examples are the remaining fragments of Heraclitus;
IIRC he explains "unity of opposition" with the image of the drawn bow, a
"parallellogram of forces", so to speak; it remains static, but obviously
harbours potential for change.
In that spirit, the ontology of Aristotle, with the division of dunamis and
energeia, everything being capable of opposite possibilities etc. may also
be relevant (and perhaps more accessible).
How does the division betwen dunamis and energeia arise in the first place?
What creates dunamis, what triggers energeia? etc.
T
makc.th...@gmail.com
Tron wrote:
> It would be interesting to see a line or two on the aim you pursue (unless
> you have to kill us all if you told us).
> ...inexpressibility of Hegelian Dialectics.
in Russia we have this saying: the dog understands it all, it just
can't speak. so, come on, I mean we are people here, we're supposed to
do so much better than dogs, ain't we?
back to reasoning behind approaching Hegel, it was triggered by number
of small things. 1st, the fact that noone I know of was able to
understand Hegel. to quote that movie, "the only way to get smarter is
to play a smarter opponent". 2nd, that Spinoza quote that you 've said
everybody pulls out, it takes some moments to think about it and see
for yourself how true it is, isn't it? so, it was my assumption, that
Hegel developed it to the furthest point so far. 3rd, I was reading
Nietzcshe once, and his negative attitude against Hegel, and than that
phrase of Schopenhauer ("mazes of words, such as had been only
previously known in madhouses", see at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegel), and I mean, isn't it just wrong to
accept the point of view of somebody who doesn't understand a shit in
this - but N. did it :(
to skip more blah blah, I think there's a bit more behind Hegel, than
everybody see, and I want to see it all (at very least, in part which
applies to thinking, specifically).
Immortalist
Alternatively, the thing that something is linked to may be called a
mediation. That is, if A is related to B and B to C, then B is a
mediation between A and C. In the internal relations point of view,
something is constituted (partly or fully) by the totality of its
mediations.
Hegel Glossary
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/phil/hegelgls.htm
Hegel argued that nothing is just simply and immediately present, that
nothing is simply given as a firm basis for something else. (Hegel
1969, 68 and 829) Everything in thought and reality becomes what it is
through mediations, which are not the same as relations. A relation
connects two already established things (this city is larger than that
city; Chicago is north of New Orleans). Mediations, on the other hand,
are connections within the processes that establish things. (For
instance, Hegel argues that the totality of the state and the developed
individuality of its citizens are each made actual through the other).
For him, a mediated whole is something more than a set of static
relations; mediated wholes exist in the tensions of the processes of
their own becoming.
http://www.dkolb.org/sprawlingplaces/gateway/kantoutl/hegelonm.html
The early modern thinkers posed the issue that if there is an objective
world, there is a problem of my subjectivity's being able to get access
to it and verify it. This modern partitioning of subject from object
was quickly denounced. What had the philosophers done to take our world
or our unity with the world away from us? Epistemology--the inquiry as
to how one proposed to verify all the grandiose objectivities posited
by consensus reality--was denounced as objectionable in principle.
The most serious attempt to blunt the effect of epistemology was made
by Hegel with his doctrine of the mediation of the immediate.
But this is a doctrine of legitimation, plausible only to those who
rely on social sanctions to place the consensus reality beyond dispute.
The doctrine cannot test or verify posited objectivities which don't
have the weight of conformism to support them. "Everybody knows" that
the individual's subjectivity is mediated by his or her upbringing. But
is it mediated by quarks? By Higgs forces? By penguin operators? Does
ultimate objective reality consist in physical nature, as the classical
materialists held? Then what happens when the frontier of research into
physical nature becomes utterly whimsical and fad-determined? Hegel's
mediation of the immediate is worthless as a criterion for accepting
new knowledge. Physical science, the most resolute effort to acquire
new knowledge about objective reality, has finally obliterated the
distinction between a real objectivity and a fictitious objectivity.
http://www.henryflynt.org/person_world/personhd3.html
...the sixth classic form of the dialectic: the unity of opposites, the
unity of Being and Essence. The life-process of Hegel's Notion is
mediation...
The Process of Thought: Mediation and Negation.
In criticism of Hegel's position that the science of Philosophy can
adequately express the nature of the ultimately real, Mr. McTaggart
says: "Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor
feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel's account of it to induce us
to change the meaning of the word in this respect."58 I quote this
criticism because it contains an assumption which I wish to challenge,
and thus sets the problem for the present chapter. The assumption is
that philosophical thought, as Hegel defines it, is bare cognition to
which the other aspects of the mental life bear only an external
relation, that it is simply one among other elements coordinate with
it, and that, consequently, it can at most be only a mediating activity
among these other elements of experience which forever lie beyond and
external to it. It is the justice of this assumption which the
following pages will call in question. We have already seen, in the
preceding chapter, that such a position is foreign to Hegel's system,
and that philosophy for him is action and feeling as well as cognition.
But it may be well to emphasize the fact from another point of view. So
we now address ourselves to the task of establishing the thesis that
Hegel's account of philosophy does force us to give to the word a
meaning essentially different from that which the above criticism
attaches to it. We shall support this thesis with an exposition of the
process of philosophical knowledge as it is presented in Hegel's
doctrine of mediation and negation.
http://www.gwfhegel.org/Books/TR3.html
B. Individual, Universal and Particular
It is one of the peculiar things about the "human condition", that we
exist only as individuals. There is no consciousness other than
individual consciousness, but absolutely everything about us which is
human is a collective, social, historical product - our language, our
culture, our work. Our thoughts are all universals - we know nothing,
see nothing and can do nothing other than as part of universals which
are social and historical products; we are in fact individuals only to
the extent that we are socialised; an individual knows only by means of
universals; we live in a human world, produced not by our personal
thoughts, but by the community, and we live and think and labour only
as part of that community.
But again, these "universals" are mysterious things. We tend to think
of them as having some ephemeral existence, much like the laws
legislated by our "parliament in the sky", quite distinct from the
particular and individual things in the world around us. Thanks to our
ability to think, we have universals as well as particulars and
individuals in our heads. But if we ask ourselves how we come to
acquire universals, then we have to confess that it is only through our
relationships with other people, and by internalising these relations,
that we get to know about universals. The only way we get to know
Universals, the only way we get to be part of a universal, is through
particulars - people, groups, relations we have with other people,
activity we get involved in.
~ It is this contradiction between the
~ individual and the universal, mediated
~ by the particular, which lies at the
~ very root of the human condition, of
~ our particular way of being part of it,
~ changing it, producing it, producing
~ ourselves.
It is this condition which is what the dialectic is about. Hegel
referred to this relation as the
"Syllogism".
Hegel used this term because
these are the same concepts
we use when we are engaged in
elementary logic:
"All dogs are quadrupeds; Fido is a dog; Fido is a quadruped", and so
on and so forth. In this relation "Fido" is the Individual; "Quadruped"
is the Universal, and Fido participates in this Universal because he is
a dog, a particular kind of quadruped, because Fido cannot just be a
quadruped, he has to be some particular kind of quadruped.
It's just the same with a universal like "unionism". I'm a unionist,
but I can't be a unionist except by being a member of a particular
union. I belong to the NTEU, so I'm a unionist. Unionism cannot exist
other than through particular unions to which individuals belong - no
unions, no unionism.
Of course, unionism existed before the first union was founded, and if
all the unions that exist today were smashed, unionism would keep
going, because unionism is a movement, and people conceived of it
before it actually existed, before it was actualised, and will not let
go of it very easily. Universals can have an ideal existence, but there
has to be a material basis for it. And the Universal is not just "the
general idea" of the particular. That is to say, not only does unionism
require particular unions and actual living individual union members to
exist, it has to have a material existence in its own right too. That's
why we have the ACTU. But like particulars, also Universals, don't come
into existence finished and complete. They're a process, but they're a
material process. But that's not what I'm talking about just now. We'll
come to that later.
The point is that us individuals cannot know about logic, health,
socialism, science, evil, electricity, carbohydrates, multiplication,
... as if these universals existed in some kind of ether accessible
only to the Mind. We know them only through participating in definite
relations with other people as part of a whole, interconnected, social
and historical process of human development. We internalise them in the
process of working with them. It is in this sense then that we say that
universals - abstractions if you like - are just aspects of social
relations, they are social relations.
In this context we can understand Hegel's meaning in the following
passage from the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right:
"Thought regards this development of the idea and of the peculiar
activity of the reason of the idea as only subjective, but is on its
side unable to make any addition. To consider anything rationally is
not to bring reason to it from the outside, and work it up in this way,
but to count it as itself reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom,
the summit of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and
produces itself as the existing world. The business of science is
simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing,
to consciousness."
So Universals are not manufactured by subjective thought either by
means of a "rational faculty" or by means of gathering up facts and
stacking them up in the form of empirical evidence, but are the
products of social development, and theoretical thought just needs to
be able to recognise them as such.
To say that principles are social-historical constructs does not
contradict the fact that these concepts have a basis in Nature. Social
relations are constrained by a world which exists outside of us and
which provides us with the basis for living. But our knowledge of that
world of Nature is uniquely and wholly human. Einstein may have proved
that the speed of light is constant, but he did it only by clarifying
the various human actions that make up the meaning of "the speed of
light".
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/iup.htm
...a long debate about Hegel's criticism of the laws of classical logic
and above all the law of excluded middle.
These debates took place in Germany and Denmark in the 1830s and 40s.
While the German debates were concerned primarily with the import of
Hegelian mediation for the field of logic, the Danish debates were
mostly exercised by the question of mediation in theology. Key dogmas
such as the Incarnation and the Trinity, it was claimed, depended on
this Hegelian concept...
http://www.sk.ku.dk/GoldenAgeTexts/volume5.html.html
Fun Googling this post Kantian fellow; Hegel.
makc.th...@gmail.com
Tron wrote:
> "Immediate" (unmittelbar) and "mediate" (vermitteln), "mediated"
> (vermittelt) are German words in common use.
Now, I'm back to this idea, and the fact that
BW> Unlike Nothing, Something, etc., mediation and
BW> immediacy are not terms that Hegel arrives at "logically"; they're
BW> meta-level terms with which he describes his logical developments,
BW> and he never directly defines or develops them.
lines up with that very much... however, this would render Hegel system
quite meaningless, because "common use" words are pretty much like gaps
to be filled...
:(
Tron
<makc.th...@gmail.com> skrev i melding
news:1130325942.8...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> to skip more blah blah, I think there's a bit more behind Hegel, than
> everybody see, and I want to see it all (at very least, in part which
> applies to thinking, specifically).
Agreed. I started dabbling in Hegel after having read - and don't take this
the wrong way - a considerable amount of Marx. On account of your
background, perhaps first of all I should emphasize that I am not a marxist.
Read scientifically (keep the good parts, drop the bad), Marx has that in
common with a lot of rebel thinkers that although his suggestions for
improvement can be, shall we say, debatable, his analyses of contemporary
problems were acute, energetic and thorough. And since he listed Hegel as
the guy who taught him method, I wanted to take a peek at his training
manual. But Hegel is very "alien" - one needs to read a lot of him, and one
needs to think very, very un-empirically .... and so far I am afraid that he
has eluded me.
However.
I lurched up to the university library and looked up "vermittlung" in
several philosophical dictionaries. Silly me didn't bring anything to take
notes, but the following is what stuck in memory.
First of all, mediation is and is not an ancient concept. The ancient Greeks
and the Scholastics had the term (old version), and they used it most in
Theology, discussing how something as divine as God could have commerce with
someone as human as humanity. Boetious, Duns Scotus Eriugena and Nic von
Kues all wrote about this.
Around the time of Kant, the term "mediation" acquired renewed importance on
account of a romantic streak in Philosophy (Jacobi ...?) that declared
Unmittelbarkeit - directness or immediateness - to be an imprtant guarantor
(for whatever, it seems). It was said that there could be no higher
criterion of truth than the certainty that one's concepts corresponded
directly to reality. Limiting the application to epistemology, everybody
agrees that immediacy is a fine guarantor wrt. empirical evidence. We see,
we believe. It is hard to see what could be added to "believeing after
seeing" to improve upon this.
But how does immediacy do on other fields? Actually it seems to have been
one of Hegel's major aims to banish immediacy from the field. He pointed out
that feeling certain about the correspondence between concept and reality is
merely a feeling, and anybody can claim it with equal right, and so
contradictions may ensue.
So Hegel highlights the role of Vermittlung, and by now mediation has
acquired its new, special meaning. As you suspected, the merely being
interposed between two other, non-adjacent elemetns does not suffice. In
that sense, the mere "communicator" (telephone wire) role I wrote about, is
too simplistic.
Following the use of "mediation" in late mediaeval and early modern writings
on law and the philosophy of (international) law, the "mediator" was
conceived as any authority that could broker peace between two warring
nations. The selection of this term did depend on connotations of "radical
difference" which the term was used along with in Theology; and so the term
eventually came to mean "to unite two opposite or contrary or mutually
exclusive parties or positions".
Vermittlung, then, is needed wherever you have two things that can not or
will not cooperate, communicate or otherwise be brought into unity. I chop
down my neighbours tree, he kills my cat, we are at a "state of war" and so
we end up in court. The court "mediates" by imposing this fine on me and
that fine on my neighbour, and peace and law and order reign again.
And this uniting of contraries is exactly how Kant uses "Vermittlung" in the
example I gave earlier. (I repeat that example because it is a clearer
exposition of the "simplest case" application of Vermittlung than I have
been able to find in Hegel.)
On the one hand we have concepts of pure reason, like Quality, or Quantity,
and on the other hand you have a basket of apples. Now, apples and concepts
of pure reason are so different that one can't just apply the one to the
other. There has to be something that brings them together.
Kant's solution for this is, as far as I managed to grasp on a cursory
glance in KdrV today, that the "inner sense of time" operates by "filling
our conscious moments with sensation - the succession of sensations /or
mental content/ is how we perceive time", i.e. sensation after sensation is
what time is for us. And since it (hopefully) is I who have my sensations,
it is the "I" that enables me to apply the concepts of pure reason to any
aggregate of apples. We cannot do this arbitrarily, so there are rules (and
there we have the court metaphor) for how we apply these concepts to
phenomena, ensuring that apples will always be apples. And so the "I"
mediates between concepts of pure reason and phenomena by applying the
concepts to phenomena according to certain rules. And these rules is what
Kant calls "the Schemata of the pure concepts of reason".
AFAICS, this simplest case of mediation implies little other than mapping
rules. There are two lists, and then there is some principle or rule or
"list" that specifies an ordering or pairing of items on list A in relation
to items on list B. Perhaps like the rule that helps people who write the
telephone book to find out which telephone number to list with any given
name in the telephone book ("for any telephone number, list the name of the
person who pays the telephone bills", or something.)
The special addendum for German Idealism is that the two "lists", A and B,
must be such that they contain this basic condition of incompatibility,
which the mediator overcomes. The example from Theology is, if not very
illustrating, perhaps, at least easy to describe, since it is Jesus; being
both Man and God he mediates between the ontologically very different Jehova
and Mankind.
Perhaps the role of law in human afairs can give further metaphors. The
general notion of law is something everybody wants, while at the same time
no one particularly likes having law applied to themselves in specific
instances; Law enables our being free by limiting our freedom, and other
paradoxes. Courts also have rules for which rules to apply to any particular
legal conflict: laws on murder for murder cases, laws on theft for theft
cases, etc. These are meta-laws which are themselves encoded in law.
Hegel, it seems, takes the mastery of this concept as a given, Kantian that
he was, and makes extensive use of it without explaining it much. Again I
must repeat myself: my impression is that Hegel operates far inside the
border of meta-language. He speaks of immediacy-1 as being mediated-1, and
that it is this mediation-1 that cancels out the mediated-1 aspect of
immediacy-1, thus making immediacy-1 a mediated-2 immediacy-2 .... and this
is usually where I drop off, because I can't get my head around _why_ we
want to know e.g. that Unity unites both unity and non-unity, why only
mediated immediacy is immediate, etc. etc. It comes dangerously close to
word salad. (But then there is Marx, and so I try again ...)
Perhaps the way forward is to investigate associated concepts such as
"negation" and "negation of negation", trying to find precise logical
expressions for them.
I suspect that "negation of negation" is the way that "mediation" actually
operates.
The key element would be to grasp and express how "negation of negation" is
not merely a cancelling out, but a process that leaves either "a rest" or "a
higher order unit" (please adjust this according to my success rate at
guessing on Hegel so far ...).
If this results in paradoxes (like "freedom is to accept necessity", or the
law examples), they may turn out to be "non-malign" in human affairs, since
we live our lives "in Time", and are not limited to the lock-down effect of
momentary contradiction. It might be more difficult to design a "dialectic
machine", though.
Good luck.
T
Jos Horikx
wrote:
[on Marx]
>And since he listed Hegel as the guy who taught him method,
Yes and no.
>I wanted to take a peek at his training manual.
There us a letter from him (as a young student) to his father,
there he speaks about Hegels philosophy: "I had read fragments of
Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not
appeal to me." He got physically sick. For a reference see:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/letters/37_11_10.htm
or, in the original language:
http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me40/me40_003.htm
What he did think of Hegel was dictated by his place and his time:
Hegel was more or less the Philosopher of State. Outside the boun-
dary conditions of Hegelian philosophy there was no future for an
academic educated person. Marx had no other choice than to pro-
nounce his own thoughts within some kind of Hegelian framework.
(That must have been the reason for him to "turn it upside down")
The nowadays Hegelians (& their absolute idealism) are less far
away today, they are the residents of the White House.
JH