An unintended irony in that title, I think. Inspired by a combination of factors - NP and Mikhail’s posts, a bit of boredom and restlessness, and a bit of sleeplessness - I read the first preface to Hegel’s Science of Logic. I’m not sure I’ll make it the whole way through. Actually, I’m pretty sure I won’t. I was in a reading group for a year on the shorter logic in Chicago. We met once a week with very few interruptions. I read the whole book, and damned if I knew what I’d read at the end. *sigh*
In any case - a few scattered comments.
One, I like Hegel’s association of metaphysics with religion. I like that as a way to hassle folk I like with their attention to ontology and all that Deleuzian stuff. I also like the rhetoric this allows - Hegel saw metaphysics going away in his era, why resurrect it? you want to be a throwback?!
Two, I expect that Hegel is not a fan or uncritically a fan of the liquidating impulse which he sees in his era. In paragraph four he writes “That one learns from logic how to think (the usefulness of logic and hence its purpose, were held to consist in this — just as if one could only learn how to digest and move about by studying anatomy and physiology) this prejudice has long since vanished, and the spirit of practicality certainly did not intend for logic a better fate than was suffered by the sister science.”
I like this spirit of practicality with its hacking and burning and salting the earth across culture - deflate, deflate, that is Moses and the prophets. (This reminds me, I never have finished Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and I should. Despite not having finished it, I associate a certain sensibility with Wittgenstein here, I think from having read Rorty on Wittgenstein, along the lines of this “spirit of practicality” - philosophy is a sign of something breaking down, of getting entangled someplace; the positive work to be done philosophically is therapeautic - to free oneself from the need for philosophy.) I expect Hegel doesn’t like it so much. We shall see.
I also like his point in this paragraph that logic does not teach one to think. After all, if that were the case, how would anyone learn logic in the first place? Learning logic requires thought, even if logic teaches one to think better (I imagine Hegel would agree on this?). Just as anatomy and physiology presume the capacities for digestion and motion (or the things that make those possible). I’m under the impression that part of Hegel’s project is a presuppositionless and self-grounding philosophy. I wonder how these outside/prior elements will fit within that project (or perhaps I’m wrong to characterize the project that way).
It would be good to have you reading along with us, if you have the time. My hope with asking people to blog about bits as we go is that we might be more likely to get to the end, with a bit less WTF?, if we can pool reactions to the text as we go
I’ll put up another post tonight on the things written so far - including this one, if that’s okay? Your points here echo, in some ways, Mikhail’s comments on Hegel’s relationship to religion, from his first post on the Intro. I’ll try to find time to pick up on some of what both of you say, later in the week (trying at the moment to write a chapter on Marx’s relationship to Hegel, so I’m a bit distracted…)
Not wrong at all on the presuppositionless philosophy front (there’s a bit of a discussion about that issue going on with Tom at RoughTheory, actually, in one of the Phenomenology threads).
Comment by N Pepperell — January 7, 2008 @ 4:04 am
i think the point about studying logic to learn to think and Hegel’s comparison with digestion is a great one when it comes to all the attempts to teach students “critical thinking” - just as i wrote about it in my comments on the Intro i was asked to teach “Critical Thinking” to an honors class and i had to decline primarily due to my full schedule already, but it was a bit ironic - how do you teach students to think critically if in the process of your telling them how to think critically you expect them to accept your recommendations absolutely uncritically? and if we take “critical” to mean “Kantian critical” then wasn’t it Hegel’s greatest issue with Kant - how can you claim to say all these things about things-in-themselves, i.e. to think about them, and then declare (not without some pathos) that we can know nothing about them? i know this is very sketchy but it’s morning and i’m having my coffee and thinking aloud… i would rejoin N. and say that it would be great to see your comments on SL, having read Hegel for many years now, i have experienced both WTF? moments and a number of “i had no idea books can do that!” moments, so i think that if more people participate in the reading, more comments are made, the more i personally will be compelled to stick with it.
Comment by Mikhail Emelianov — January 7, 2008 @ 11:09 am
hi Mikhail, NP,
Thanks y’all. I’ll read at least for a while. I had a fantastic class on Hegel when I was living in England, I remember feeling either completely lost or completely enthralled.
Mikhail, I like your point about the ironies of the idea of teaching folk to think etc. I met a logician at the radical philosophy association conference the one year I went, I don’t remember all the details but I remember him saying that he thought it was ironic that his student made logical arguments because he made them as much as because they felt there was some good in doing so. On a somewhat related note, I’ve gotten into arguments with my wife and with a good friend about versions of the principle of sufficient reason - I always want to ask how the principle applies to itself, and to demand a clear explanation of that from folk before allowing them to say the principle has to be held to by others. (My turn to think out loud, I haven’t had any coffee yet today.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 7, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
I think you’re right, hegel wants a presuppositionless philosophy… a circular one
Seriously though the idea that logic teaches you to think is a strawman. Deductive logic merely demonstrates what you are entitled to infer based on given premises. It is the rules or deontology of inference.
I contest you’re associating hegel with deflationism though, the fool started the most inflationary trend in the history of philosophy. His deflationary claims (end of metaphysics) come out of his totally arbitrary and poetic ideas about dialectics. His stuff on self-consciousness reads like bad free jazz or something
Comment by todd — January 7, 2008 @ 11:56 pm
Hey todd - not sure if I’m intervening in an internal discussion - apologies if this is intrusive or unwelcome. I perhaps heard Nate to be saying something different: that he suspected that Hegel would have a dispute with deflationary moves?
In any event, Hegel is difficult to read, and I wouldn’t make any claims for his success in doing what he sets out to do.
But the idea of a presuppositionless philosophy would be that the starting point of the philosophical system is not an arbitrary beginning (however much it might look like one at the outset), but is instead something that can be demonstrated to generated by the world whose characteristics are inferred from that starting point.
Marx uses a similar argumentative strategy to a more secular end in Capital: the commodity is initially tossed out as if an arbitrary a priori - you have no idea, at the beginning, why this particular starting point seems appropriate. If this form of theory is done successfully (and I’m not making any claims here that either Marx or Hegel succeeds in doing this), then you end up showing that it is only with reference to this particular starting point that you can make sense of the world you are trying to grasp - and that this world itself revolves around that starting point and generates this starting point (which at the outset of the theory looked like some kind of immediate thing) as a product or result.
The implementation may or may not work, and I agree that, from my point of view, many of Hegel’s moves seem arbitrary. Both Mikhail and Nate have picked up on the ways in which Hegel seems to trying to salvage a form of religious sensibility in philosophical form. Still, there is a sense in which the basic concept of how to erect a theory that Hegel puts forward, has certain deflationary potentials, spun in a more secular and less totalising way.
Comment by N Pepperell — January 8, 2008 @ 12:51 am
hey Todd, NP
) in a way that I don’t think Hegel is.
Todd, I love it when you’re faux snarky about philosophy, it’s really fun. It especially makes me smile cuz I know you have your share of crazy stuff you’re into (like Nietsche!) NP got my intent though - I wasn’t associating Hegel with deflation. I think Hegel’d object to my deflationary impulses, to at least some of the sorts of philosophy I’m excited about. Todd, I can’t remember if I’ve asked you this before - have you read Andrew Bowie’s book on Schelling? It’s been a long time since I read it, but I really dug it. It moves across early 19th century German philosophy and contemporary philosophy on both sides of the English Channel, while still being lucid and readable (Bowie’s argument is in part that the German stuff provides resources for both continental and analytic arguments and a meeting place for folk in both camps).
NP, I’m interested to see how much we end up parting ways re: Hegel. I’m really pretty happy with arbitraryness (as long as it’s mine
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 8, 2008 @ 1:08 am
Hey Nate - I actually suspect we’re fairly similar on the arbitrariness issue (in relation to Hegel, at least). What I see Marx as doing, is sort of saying that Hegel is the philosopher of capital, so that the sort of theory Hegel proposes might be required - if you want to capture certain aspects of the reproduction of capital, which Marx seems to think has certain qualitative characteristics that Hegel’s philosophy expresses fairly well (in the chapter of Capital where Marx introduces the category of capital, he describes it using the same terms Hegel uses to describe the Geist - there are other clues that suggest Marx thinks such things of Hegel, but this is the strongest).
From this perspective, then, I would take Marx to be saying that the sort of “necessity” and intrinsic interconnectedness that Hegel looks for from a philosophical system, might be plausible enough, given certain aspects of capitalism. But this interconnectedness is only as “necessary” as capital itself is. In other words, I take Marx to be making an argument about the… non-necessity of necessity… ;-P While also making an argument that a “Hegelian” notion of theory might still be appropriate for describing aspects of the standpoint from which a certain form of necessity comes to be reproduced…
So the theory is bound to its object, and wouldn’t survive that object’s transformation. Also, since Marx takes the object to be generating the resources for its own transformation, and thus pointing beyond itself, he’s sort of talking about the development of potentials for arbitrariness - and asking us to overcome necessity in their name…
But Hegel, I think, is definitely not happy with the arbitrary
Although there’s a meta-level complexity to this, which I haven’t come close to work through, but that comes out when Hegel discusses material nature - which he does seem to see as a realm of intrinsic irrationality. In a sense, the issue of the status of this irrationality within Hegel’s philosophy, is somewhat similar to the issues that were coming up in the Habermas-Brandom debate LM and I were writing about. And, for different reasons, I don’t really feel a have a good handle on how either Hegel or Brandom understands the issue…
But I’m supposed to be writing a chapter on this, rather than blogging
(But blogging is much more fun than writing a chapter… ;-P) Gotta get back to work…
Comment by N Pepperell — January 8, 2008 @ 1:42 am
Science of Logic Reading Group: Beginnings
Just another quick update on the Science of Logic reading group. The first in-person group meeting takes place in Melbourne on Thursday, discussing (or beginning to discuss) the Prefaces, Intro, and the section on “With What Must the Science Beg…
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