Monday, September 10, 2007
The Office and the eternal return
If I were teaching Nietzsche and looking for an example of the eternal return, I would show episodes of The Office (the American version--it is interesting how the British version does not really engage in this structure). What the characters strive for is a way of repeating that is genuine, that could withstand the test of eternity in the sense that a repetition would be so significant and final there would need to be no more repetition. In other words, they struggle to live according to the eternal return: they struggle to will something into reality such that it could only repeat itself if the universe recurred eternally--and especially Jim and Pam. But besides them, there is also Michael, who falls back into dating Jan. We recognize this as a bad event for Michael because it means falling back into a structure of repetition that does not will eternal recurrance. I had many more examples but, as I have to run soon, I can only list those two. But just think of the last moments of the season finale in season 3: Pam is busy saying that she would will a relationship into reality with Jim except that he and she always seem to time things wrong. It is with this reference to time that Jim walks in and she does will that into reality. The reference to time is so significant here in showing how deep this Nieztschian idea structures the show: towards the end of the episode, as various moments like Pam and Jim talking at the end of "Beach Day" (significantly cut out of that episode and placed in this last one) come before us and before Jim, as the show becomes more and more repetitive in its form, it mirrors the struggle of the characters to find a way of repeating that is willing repetition never, willing a type of repetition that only occurs under the condition that everything recurs eternally, at the end of time. In other words, as the show condenses and becomes more invested in memory, it is at that moment, and significantly with a reference to time, that Pam immediately siezes the moment as well as Jim and repeats in that authentic sense, throwing us into the future. I could explain this all better, but I hope its somewhat clear! Regardless, its an awesome show!
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
The Big Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach post, part 3
...Feuerbach gave these thinkers a significant thrust in the desired direction—indeed, Engels gives some sense of Feuerbach’s impact when he describes it thus: “the spell was broken; the [Hegelian] ‘system’ was cast aside… One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect of [Feuerbach’s work] to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all [that is, the Left Hegelians] became at once Feuerbachians” (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [1886]). Feuerbach did this by relentlessly tackling the question of “nature” in Hegel, trying to preserve the Hegelian system and yet open it up to the empirical truths of science. His attack of Hegel was masterful, and revolves around the point we noted earlier would be important: for Hegel, meaningful or real actions have to be actions that have occurred; actions cannot be guaranteed to mean. Feuerbach’s innovation simply consists in saying that, for Hegel, actions or events are guaranteed to mean anyway, and they are guaranteed precisely by the nature of the beings Hegel says act and mean. In short, Feuerbach says that Hegel essentially relies upon the fact that the nature of beings is to mean; beings are structured to be meaningful or Spiritual. This structure, therefore, is not Spiritual itself, but natural, empirical, material. A whole realm of meaning suddenly opens up beside the Spiritual realm Hegel specified, a realm where science is at home.
The way Feuerbach went about proving this in his Essence of Christianity was by analyzing Spirit as a religious phenomenon. In other words, he analyzed Spirit from one of the perspectives that Hegel definitely was invested in employing in his analysis of reality, the Christian religious perspective: the reason Hegel was so concerned with having meaning be within the world and not outside of it as Kant or the Christian scholars asserted was because he wanted very much to have that Christian God within the world. Spirit, for Hegel, was essentially just another word for God; God was precisely what was named by the term Absolute Spirit, or Spirit (the history of meaningful actions) that was fully developed or complete. Indeed, the accumulation of meaningful acts throughout history is, for Hegel, nothing other than the development of these acts or Spirit towards a state of completion—in other words, towards God. History, then, is the history of God developing himself or coming to be. And since God or Spirit had a beginning, since there was one first meaningful act that resided at the bottom layer of history or before all the others, then this development of Spirit or meaning is nothing other than a development that proceeds out of itself. In other words, if we simply view the series of meaningful events from the perspective of the events themselves and how they follow or layer themselves upon each other—i.e. from the perspective of how they both exist as well as relate to themselves, excluding all other actions—then the meaningful acts will form a definite, complete structure and this structure, because it is piling only itself (meaningful actions or events) on top of itself, therefore can be said to develop out of itself, or develop only in relation to itself. In this sense, then, the history of these meaningful events is God not merely developing himself, but developing out of himself—and, it should be noted, this precise process is what is named by the word “dialectic.” Thus all worldly action brings about all worldly action, to the point where God, the Absolute is brought about. But what do we mean by Absolute with reference to Spirit? What does “the Absolute” mean translated into the terms of Spirit? That precisely is the question for Feuerbach. In order to address this question, then, he situates himself squarely within this dialectical avenue and thrust of Hegel’s work and refers to Spirit as God, attempting to cull out of the Hegelian idea of Christianity—which is, to sum it up, literally enacting God through bringing about or participating in (what Hegel determined as) meaningful events, events that are nothing other than events following from a meaningful beginning and moving towards a meaningful, complete end, developing out of or only in relation to themselves—to cull out of all this the real essence of Christianity...
The way Feuerbach went about proving this in his Essence of Christianity was by analyzing Spirit as a religious phenomenon. In other words, he analyzed Spirit from one of the perspectives that Hegel definitely was invested in employing in his analysis of reality, the Christian religious perspective: the reason Hegel was so concerned with having meaning be within the world and not outside of it as Kant or the Christian scholars asserted was because he wanted very much to have that Christian God within the world. Spirit, for Hegel, was essentially just another word for God; God was precisely what was named by the term Absolute Spirit, or Spirit (the history of meaningful actions) that was fully developed or complete. Indeed, the accumulation of meaningful acts throughout history is, for Hegel, nothing other than the development of these acts or Spirit towards a state of completion—in other words, towards God. History, then, is the history of God developing himself or coming to be. And since God or Spirit had a beginning, since there was one first meaningful act that resided at the bottom layer of history or before all the others, then this development of Spirit or meaning is nothing other than a development that proceeds out of itself. In other words, if we simply view the series of meaningful events from the perspective of the events themselves and how they follow or layer themselves upon each other—i.e. from the perspective of how they both exist as well as relate to themselves, excluding all other actions—then the meaningful acts will form a definite, complete structure and this structure, because it is piling only itself (meaningful actions or events) on top of itself, therefore can be said to develop out of itself, or develop only in relation to itself. In this sense, then, the history of these meaningful events is God not merely developing himself, but developing out of himself—and, it should be noted, this precise process is what is named by the word “dialectic.” Thus all worldly action brings about all worldly action, to the point where God, the Absolute is brought about. But what do we mean by Absolute with reference to Spirit? What does “the Absolute” mean translated into the terms of Spirit? That precisely is the question for Feuerbach. In order to address this question, then, he situates himself squarely within this dialectical avenue and thrust of Hegel’s work and refers to Spirit as God, attempting to cull out of the Hegelian idea of Christianity—which is, to sum it up, literally enacting God through bringing about or participating in (what Hegel determined as) meaningful events, events that are nothing other than events following from a meaningful beginning and moving towards a meaningful, complete end, developing out of or only in relation to themselves—to cull out of all this the real essence of Christianity...
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Hegel's Science of Logic
When we encounter a sentence from the main exposition of logic in Hegel’s Science of Logic, what exactly are we encountering? In order to understand anything about the work, and much of Hegel’s philosophical endeavor more generally, we must ask this question. Committing an error in answering this question—which inevitably will happen if, first and foremost, the work is just simply read and this question remains unasked—committing an error in answering this is fatal for knowledge of anything in this work, and much of Hegel becomes closed off. Attesting to the treachery of dealing in any way with this work’s subject matter—let alone the quest to define the essence of its content—is the admission by Hegel himself that logic is “the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness” (58). So we should proceed carefully, first by looking deeper into our question.
In the first chapter of the first book of the Science of Logic, entitled simply “Being,” we read: “A. BEING: Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself” (82). Our question comes before us: of what is all this asserted? What is “being” here asserted to be? What are we talking about here? It is obvious that being is here something “indeterminate,” “immediate,” and “equal only to itself” (whatever these terms mean), but we do not know what element is being determined in rendering itself this way. This is the fundamental question we will answer—that needs to be answered. To put it in perhaps its best form, we must answer the question as to what is the matter of thinking within the Science of Logic? What is getting thought?
This answer seems quite simple at first. Heidegger, who believed the Science of Logic to be the best and most crucial of Hegel’s works, put it this way whenever our question came up in his seminars, lectures or texts: “For Hegel, the matter of thinking is: thinking as such” (“The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, 42). In other words, what is getting thought in the Science of Logic is thinking as such. Preliminarily, we may assert of the passage on being we cited, then, that the being that is said to be indeterminate, immediate, etc. when it is in its purity is the being of thought. In other words, what gets defined through the exposition of being in this portion of the Science of Logic is the being of thought.
And Heidegger is not deviating from what Hegel says in asserting this. In his introduction to the work, Hegel himself says the following: “the subject matter of logic [is] … thinking” (43). But by phrasing it this way, Hegel has already stolen away from us the simplicity of our answer. For here Hegel qualifies thinking by situating it under the title of his book: thinking is a definition or clarification for the real matter of what a book entitled Science of Logic should contain, namely, logic. The matter of the Science of Logic, then, might be said to be logic and (therefore) thinking. But what does this mean? How is thinking logical? According to traditional definitions of logic, logic is only a type of thinking. Here logic and thinking seem to be identical, such that the matter of thinking in the Science of Logic can be both logic and thinking; be logical insofar as it is thought, and vice versa. How can this be? If we return to how we have preliminarily interpreted the passage on being, can we still say that what gets defined in this portion of the text is the being of thought? Could it not be just as easily the being of logic? And what does that mean?
It was said we normally think of logic as a type or species of thought. Let us elaborate this conception, because Hegel himself addresses it and sees his conception of logic as related to it, even if it might not look like this is so. Now, the “normal” conception of logic Hegel was addressing was essentially that which Aristotle outlined. For Aristotle, logic is a language or a set of rules for the production of truth, given a content to which the rules can be applied. In other words, logic is set of rules that are indifferent for the most part to the content upon which logic as this set of rules applies. The main problem for this logic, then, is to devise a system of articulating rules that can represent every conceivable content and apply rules to them successfully. Hegel puts it this way: “hitherto, the conception of logic has rested on the separation… of the content… and its form” (44).
Now, when we say that Hegel himself addresses this view of logic, what do we mean? Fundamentally, as we have already seen, he addresses this view of logic by conceiving it as identical to thought. This, then, would mean that thought would be what is specified by the content and (especially) by the form of this rule-based conception of logic. The set of rules that constitute logic would be, in their essence or make-up, thought: specifying them would be specifying what thought is.
But this makes no sense. Of course, insofar as the logical form is constituted, it is considered by Aristotelian logic as, indeed, thought. When we say of something that it is a part of a logical construct like a syllogism, i.e. when we represent it as a part of a syllogism, we are representing it essentially (Aristotle would say) as in thought. A logical sentence in a syllogism is a thought: tracing out its coherence within the syllogism--i.e. by seeing whether, in the syllogism, it as a premise produces truth or not--is a tracing out of the coherence of a thought. There is no problem there. But where Hegel does not seem to make any sense is in asserting that the logical content addressed by this sentence, insofar as it too makes up logic, is also thought.
Let’s make this clear According to Aristotelian logic, if I represent a person as part of a syllogism by saying, for example, that “This person is the teacher of Plato,” Socrates (i.e. the person) is obviously not a thought. He is something other than thought, namely, an object of thought, a content on which a logical rule or form is applied. It is only as an object of thought, as a thing, that Socrates can have thought in the form of a logical statement applied to him. But Hegel disagrees with this Aristotelian view. Thus, we must ask, how would the content of a logical statement like Socrates in this example be thought for Hegel just as much as the rule or form?
(To be continued in another post...)
In the first chapter of the first book of the Science of Logic, entitled simply “Being,” we read: “A. BEING: Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself” (82). Our question comes before us: of what is all this asserted? What is “being” here asserted to be? What are we talking about here? It is obvious that being is here something “indeterminate,” “immediate,” and “equal only to itself” (whatever these terms mean), but we do not know what element is being determined in rendering itself this way. This is the fundamental question we will answer—that needs to be answered. To put it in perhaps its best form, we must answer the question as to what is the matter of thinking within the Science of Logic? What is getting thought?
This answer seems quite simple at first. Heidegger, who believed the Science of Logic to be the best and most crucial of Hegel’s works, put it this way whenever our question came up in his seminars, lectures or texts: “For Hegel, the matter of thinking is: thinking as such” (“The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, 42). In other words, what is getting thought in the Science of Logic is thinking as such. Preliminarily, we may assert of the passage on being we cited, then, that the being that is said to be indeterminate, immediate, etc. when it is in its purity is the being of thought. In other words, what gets defined through the exposition of being in this portion of the Science of Logic is the being of thought.
And Heidegger is not deviating from what Hegel says in asserting this. In his introduction to the work, Hegel himself says the following: “the subject matter of logic [is] … thinking” (43). But by phrasing it this way, Hegel has already stolen away from us the simplicity of our answer. For here Hegel qualifies thinking by situating it under the title of his book: thinking is a definition or clarification for the real matter of what a book entitled Science of Logic should contain, namely, logic. The matter of the Science of Logic, then, might be said to be logic and (therefore) thinking. But what does this mean? How is thinking logical? According to traditional definitions of logic, logic is only a type of thinking. Here logic and thinking seem to be identical, such that the matter of thinking in the Science of Logic can be both logic and thinking; be logical insofar as it is thought, and vice versa. How can this be? If we return to how we have preliminarily interpreted the passage on being, can we still say that what gets defined in this portion of the text is the being of thought? Could it not be just as easily the being of logic? And what does that mean?
It was said we normally think of logic as a type or species of thought. Let us elaborate this conception, because Hegel himself addresses it and sees his conception of logic as related to it, even if it might not look like this is so. Now, the “normal” conception of logic Hegel was addressing was essentially that which Aristotle outlined. For Aristotle, logic is a language or a set of rules for the production of truth, given a content to which the rules can be applied. In other words, logic is set of rules that are indifferent for the most part to the content upon which logic as this set of rules applies. The main problem for this logic, then, is to devise a system of articulating rules that can represent every conceivable content and apply rules to them successfully. Hegel puts it this way: “hitherto, the conception of logic has rested on the separation… of the content… and its form” (44).
Now, when we say that Hegel himself addresses this view of logic, what do we mean? Fundamentally, as we have already seen, he addresses this view of logic by conceiving it as identical to thought. This, then, would mean that thought would be what is specified by the content and (especially) by the form of this rule-based conception of logic. The set of rules that constitute logic would be, in their essence or make-up, thought: specifying them would be specifying what thought is.
But this makes no sense. Of course, insofar as the logical form is constituted, it is considered by Aristotelian logic as, indeed, thought. When we say of something that it is a part of a logical construct like a syllogism, i.e. when we represent it as a part of a syllogism, we are representing it essentially (Aristotle would say) as in thought. A logical sentence in a syllogism is a thought: tracing out its coherence within the syllogism--i.e. by seeing whether, in the syllogism, it as a premise produces truth or not--is a tracing out of the coherence of a thought. There is no problem there. But where Hegel does not seem to make any sense is in asserting that the logical content addressed by this sentence, insofar as it too makes up logic, is also thought.
Let’s make this clear According to Aristotelian logic, if I represent a person as part of a syllogism by saying, for example, that “This person is the teacher of Plato,” Socrates (i.e. the person) is obviously not a thought. He is something other than thought, namely, an object of thought, a content on which a logical rule or form is applied. It is only as an object of thought, as a thing, that Socrates can have thought in the form of a logical statement applied to him. But Hegel disagrees with this Aristotelian view. Thus, we must ask, how would the content of a logical statement like Socrates in this example be thought for Hegel just as much as the rule or form?
(To be continued in another post...)
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