Every new observation and imaginationincreases the complexity of the experience and understanding of the human world. Of course I am not denying that the young are inducted into this human world in part at least by symbolic language. — Janus

Right. And I'm saying that part of that is an expanding vocabulary. I can make more and more distinctions, more and more combinations.

To be clear, I think music and animation are both great and 'meaningful.' So this is not about the worship of conceptuality but only about (actually) the limits of its precision, in the context of a structuralist semantics.

My point was only that it is possible to think without symbolic language but in images, and that such thinking is not a "shapeless and indistinct mass". — Janus

I don't think Saussure would deny those kind of images, but I do think it's worth only a footnote in the actual context of his course. He's a linguist battling against the prejudices of his generation and his students. No one can say it all and address every possible objection. If someone is too neurotic, too careful, they become unreadable. The point is to grasp the insight, perhaps indeed presented hyperbolically to cut through the noise, and then refine one's possession of it.

Maybe we should get it out of the way that philosophers can make up any kind of crazy talk they like. They can give 'see' a context-specific and even cult- or movement-specific meaning. From this perspective, it's hard to call a view wrong -- or, just for that reason, interesting.

To me some of the confusion here is related to an unclarified concept of the self which is supposed to see. One approach to this self is as a locus of responsibly for its claims and the relationships between them. The unity of the self is the expected and even demanded coherence of its claims. (We can make some kind of sense of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde as sharing the same body by keeping track of who is responsible for what (including who should remember what.) I suggest that we don't think of the self as either a brain or a body or a screen. It's its own kind of entity in the lifeworld which is the true cradle or foundation of all talk about it (being-in-the-world-with-others-in-norms-and-language.)

If I can go meta for a second, we are presumably debating the proper way to describe our seeing of the world. I hope and trust we are actually talking about the world and not our individual 'images' of the world. The grammar of 'image' (or 'appearance') is (roughly) that about which I 'cannot' be wrong.
We could talk forever about this, so I'll close by suggesting 'perspective' as a less confusing metaphor than 'image' or 'screen' or 'representation' of the world. We don't see a representation of the world. We see the world from the perspective of this or that software-loaded body within that same world.

I…didn’t understand a word of it. — Darkneos

That's OK. It's a compression of Wittgenstein and Heidegger and various other difficult philosophers. But it's the mainstream 20th century jailbreak from the Cartesian cage.

It’s devastated my ability to interact with people as I’m always holding back from caring all the way. I can’t just let go and feel, there’s always this wall between me an life and I desperately want to break through. — Darkneos

Life is terrifying. Love is a great act of courage. Solipsism might even be tempting as an escapist fantasy. You mentioned playing video games. Is there an analogy between video games and solipsism ? Is solipsism the fantasy that nothing is real so there's no love to win or lose, no actual danger ?

When I was younger, I had some great friends with whom I could talk about just about anything. This was my substitute for therapy. But I'm under the impression that these days young men are lonelier than ever. The culture has changed. More people are living lives of quiet desperation, which fucking blows. So (as someone else mentioned) maybe think of this as essentially a social issue. Maybe seek counseling, expand or create a friend network. I wish you well. And we can talk more about the philosophical issue too, if you want.

Though philosophy doesn't offer mathematical theorems which can be checked by a computer, solipsism has basically been proven wrong (or absurd or confused.) Here's are few dialogues that
may or may not help.

***
--It doesn't make sense for us to doubt whether there is something for us to be right or wrong about in the first place.

--Is there a world outside me I can be wrong about ? I don't know. I better be careful and not assume too much. I wouldn't want to get this wrong. Wait a minute ! <enlightenment>

***

--It doesn't make sense for us to use logic and concepts to a argue against the bindingness or publicness or force of logic and concepts.

--But how can you make such a bold claim ? Prove it ! Wait a minute! <enlightenment>

***

Everything is up for debate except that there is something that we can be wrong about. To be debate this is to assume it. The minimum epistemic situation that makes sense is a [at least virtual] plurality of persons subject to the same logic/language and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about. Being-together-in-a-world-with-others-in-a-language cannot be sensibly challenged. Any challenge only makes senes in just that minimal situation. The plurality is virtual because you can be the last man alive, while still experiencing the 'force' of logic and the meaning of words as self-transcending. The solipsistic nightmare is an ego trip which deludes itself that it assumes nothing precisely as it assumes unwitting an obsolete historically contingent metaphysics. In other words, it's some weird stuff that went in like poison through the ear. Why is this self so taken for granted? As if one knows what one even means by 'self'?

it’s the things we are seeing, not representations thereof. — Jamal

:up:

There's no reason to imagine seeing as radically simple.

I have never been able to fanthom the "direct realism" argument. — prothero

What indirect realism gets right is that an individual human's beliefs are a function not only of the world apart from that individual but also of that individual's spatial and cultural position within that world. But all of our beliefs must refer to the same (life-)world in order to be intelligible and subject to epistemological and semantic norms. The naked world ( imagined paradoxically as a substrate 'beneath' language) is like an impossible point at infinity, an idea in the Kantian sense.

We can't get outside of our mind and see the world stripped off of names, reference, and qualities. — L'éléphant

True, but the idea of such a naked world is itself a object within our system of references. It's within our space of reasons, even as it helplessly and hopelessly tries to gesture beyond that space. This is not to say that the world is in the mind. The brain and the tree and the dream are all in the same world, in the same space of reasons. Else we could not make sense of their relationships to one another.

In my view, there's a confusing tendency around this issue to put objects beneath and not within the space of reasons, which is almost tautologically implausible, for claims must have meaning and philosophical claims must be justified.

Meanwhile, the cost for training successors of comparable complexity have dropped orders of magnitudes from several million dollars to just a few thousands. — Pierre-Normand

This itself is huge. There are also tales of much smaller models, which can be privately owned by curious or mischievous individuals, with similar power. Obviously this is hugely threatening as well as promising. I suspect that we won't be able to trust screens in the near future. We be swarmed with disinformation and advertising bots...a Blade Runner situation where it'll be a challenge to sort the real from the digital.

A great one, with so much to choose from. I can't think of any show that's better. The doctor's prayer for the minister's death still gives me chills. "Mommy!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruSR6mB6L0Q

One of the reasons the character Al fascinates me is that he's a philosopher with bloody hands, like Hamlet, and unlike Socrates and Jesus, who are therefore institutionally safe icons. To me this is also part of the power of Macbeth. He's an antihero to which we can nevertheless relate. As Bloom put it, he's an actor who keeps missing his cues. Instead of slowing down, he decides that his error is pausing to think. "The very firstlings of my heart shall be/ The firstlings of my hand."

That we are... literally! — Eugen

These chat bots might be telling us things about ourselves that we don't want to hear. At the moment, I think the real thing is superior in terms of quality over quantity, but we are at the beginning of something revolutionary. Evolution had millions of years with the brain. Humans have only been at it for a few decades, and we are just recently getting serious about it.

Perhaps — 180 Proof

I like to think that I care about truth, but in the light of the theory of evolution, I speculate (fear? pretend to fear?) that I might only tolerate truth or wave its flag to the degree that it helps my genes leap to next stone.

Hi. I don't think you are grasping my point. Definition is a blurry-go-round. Look up a word in the dictionary and all you get is more words, which are themselves defined in terms of yet more words. There is nothing that staples this system of references to something outside it. I'm not saying that we can't intend the spoon in the bowl but I am saying that explaining this intending is itself caught up in the same blurry-go-round, a matter of offering yet more signs.

The system of signs that can only mean their differences from one another floats rootless above an abyss. So saying something like 'being is countable' or 'being is time' is just leaping from stone to stone. If I say that being is the light that discloses beings, then I'm offering poetry which at least has the virtue of being obviously poetry, as opposed to a more typical and tempting 'white mythology' (Derrida) --- which pretends to a divine / transcendent literality offers finally the otherwise secret name of God.

Everyone on this forum is a bullshit generator. At least chatGPT is comprehensible bullshit written in clear measured prose — bert1

Perhaps we are all bullshit generators, certain slant of light winter afternoons. But maybe it's bad to be too comprehensible. Shouldn't interpretation be frustrating at times ? I mean we should expect that to be the case. Of course sometimes what we are interpreting isn't worth the strain in retrospect (or we just lose patience and shit-talk the grapes.)

Eerie. I've studied stochastic gradient descent and backprop, and I know it's 'just' (basically) curve-fitting in a "billion dimensional space," but I'm seeing quantity become quality. Presumably this little bot is a toy compared to what will be out in 10 years. The movie Her will be more fact than fiction. I haven't looked into it, but it stands to reason that generated faces and voices can and will be added to the best chatbots. If the use of the internet for porn is an indicator, soft robots will probably supplement all of this, for cuddles perhaps as much or even than as sex, given the loneliness in certain segments I've been hearing about. Speilberg's A I comes to mind. Artificial children for bereaved parents, brothel bots, sentry androids, digital dogs...

I also bumped into this AI video for a Pink Floyd song : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGLo8tl5sxs . If this existed in 1985, it would have been considered the best thing ever. I imagine that we'll all be able to make its equivalent on an iPad soon enough. It's all quite promising in many ways, but it looks likely to suddenly devalue all kinds of human skills

I see you appreciate Deadwood too. Great stuff.

Some bits and pieces from Wiki:

Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 essay Humour (Der Humor), puts forth the following theory of black comedy: "The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."

At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?"

***

Pieces from Stirner's mostly unreadable book:

This higher thought might be enunciated as that of the movement or process of thinking itself, i.e. as the thought of thinking or of criticism, for example.
...
Freedom of thinking has in fact become complete hereby...There is nothing left but the — dogma of free thinking or of criticism.
...
Criticism, and criticism alone, is “up to date.” From the standpoint of thought there is no power capable of being an overmatch for criticism’s, and it is a pleasure to see how easily and sportively this dragon swallows all other serpents of thought. Each serpent twists, to be sure, but criticism crushes it in all its “turns.”
...
Criticism is the possessed man’s fight against possession as such, against all possession: a fight which is founded in the consciousness that everywhere possession, or, as the critic calls it, a religious and theological attitude, is extant. He knows that people stand in a religious or believing attitude not only toward God, but toward other ideas as well, like right, the State, law; i.e. he recognizes possession in all places. So he wants to break up thoughts by thinking; but I say, only thoughtlessness really saves me from thoughts. It is not thinking, but my thoughtlessness, or I the unthinkable, incomprehensible, that frees me from possession.
...
Against me, the unnameable, the realm of thoughts, thinking, and mind is shattered.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-ego-and-his-own#toc10

The "fight against possession" should maybe be conceived as ecstatic expansion of a system always trying to represent itself from the outside or to climb out of itself. Criticism can toss any "finite" or determinate identification into the fire. But what is "Criticism" but a kind of restless transcendence of the given ? the transformation of necessity into contingency ? Criticism is empty, nothingness, the void itself.

To me the connection is that Stirner enjoys himself as the end of history, outside of language even, and Macbeth is out of lucky charms, facing the end without hope or attachment.

It seems to me that the default view, which hides in the background, has to be dragged into the light in order to be recognized as a functioning and hobbling prejudice. Derrida's criticism of phonocentrism can be use more generally to criticize a certain conception of signs and words in general.

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself.

I take these to be 'godgiven' concepts, glowing identically from a single eternity for a inner eye that makes the human truly human. Softer versions of this might acknowledge that it takes time for the soul to remember its inheritance, with the help of a semantic midwife perhaps.

In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense...

Is the voice truly so central here ? Or is it the interactive physical presence of the teacher ? How about an adept and a novice who only use sign language ? Compared to an autodidact who only uses sound recordings ? The temptation is to create a triangle of speech, writing, idea. Both speech and writing are thought of as clothing or husk. To be fair, there is still something seemingly immaterial even in equivalence classes. Or is there?

...absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning.We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with...the meaning of being in general as presence...

To me this gets us back to the difficulty of talking about being and ideality and consciousness by means of a structural organ. Maybe we dodge this embarrassing situation by taking on faith or as an axiom what's being dragged into the light here. "Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all..." The sign is understood to be like a coin, with a conventional public face, conventionally established, and a profoundly private and yet necessarily shared internal face. "As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God."

Wittgenstein once wrote something like this. How can I know what you are thinking when I only have access to the signs in your talk? Here comes the answer put as another question: How can I know what I'm thinking since I too only have access to my signs or words? And in Zettel, § 140: "Ever and again comes the thought that what we see of a sign is only the outside of something within, in which the real operations of sense and meaning go on". But there is no outside hiding something. There are no meaningbodies – "Bedeutungskörper" – parallelling our expressions or signs.

One different kind of parallel does come to mind. Equivalence classes of expressions that have approximately the same function might serve to explain translation. "Find Y in language B that serves (basically, close enough) the same purpose as X in language A." Even in the same language, one can be asked to "translate" a philosophical thought, for instance. So "what do you mean?" is like "can you say that (the 'same' thing) in a different way?"

It quickly gets really complicated. — Joshs

Sounds like it. I was looking more into Husserl lately, and I got the impression that his massive output is tangled indeed. There are lots of concepts that I have grasped from it and find valuable. Then some of the later lifeworld stuff seems Heidegger-influenced or an attempt to cover the same ground in a more Husserlian way.

Your talk of blues reminds me of a great Cornel West interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfD3X3f5C_w

Blind Willy's 'Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWb4XcVwIeI

Philosophy proper may play a secondary role when it comes to 'existential issues' (or, equivalently, a similar, poetic role, despite a sometimes relatively abstract ontological presentation.)

Maybe you're making too much out of someone saying "fuck this." It's a guy kind of thing. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just fuck it. It's one of the good things and one of the bad things about men. No need to make it mythological. — T Clark

Thanks for joining the thread. It seems to me that 'no need to make it mythological' is itself tangled up in the 'minimalism' I'm sketching.

If this is a man thing, is it not likely to involve being trained up into manhood ? Maybe we don't need Shakespeare, but is there at least the image of the father or action hero involved?

I think it might also be important to distinguish between traditional male virtue (which is 'for' something) and the extreme version symbolized by the Macbeth or the atheist/absurdist hyperindividual. What does a thoroughly alienated/transcendent (anti-)hero stick around for ? The world as spectacle ? The self taking the world as spectacle as spectacle ?

--It's vulgar to trumpet one's motif, to wave one's sigil, to speak one's secret name.
--Silence neither needs nor tolerates an advocate.

The latter is a vague (aka "proto") placeholder for the former conceptual placeholder. — 180 Proof

:up:

Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. — Joshs

There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place to draw the line.

Within these structures there appear various possibilities or directions which we can try to decide to follow. — waarala

:up:

FWIW, I agree that there's some kind of thinking without language.

But is this the ideal response to the invocation of structuralism ? Roy Harris wrote a book about how Wittgenstein and Saussure complement one another, both speaking against the default notion that words are merely labels for pre-given independent immaterial concepts common to all humans. I'd say that 'of course' Saussure exaggerates here or simplifies there, but need it really be said that such is the fate of all theory ? The original context of the invocation of structuralism was the discussion of what meaning, if any, could be given to what it means to be or exist. If structuralism is largely correct, then there is something like a limit to the reduction of ambiguity, because we are not selecting this or that shard from the chandelier of the divine and eternal logos.

My own experience of thinking seems to show me that thought without language is not a shapeless and indistinct mass. Could I be wrong about that? — Janus

I think the way to understand Saussure is not to compare thinking-without-speaking to speaking now that you already have the sign system. Instead you should imagine a baby assimilating a sign system, expanding its vocabulary. (Not much can be said or proven, I agree, about "in my head" stuff, and that itself is "structuralist." The role of a certain kind of mentalistic language is inferential in just this way (as the kind of thing that 'only I can see.')

Does a baby understand the concept of a hermeneutic circle and merely need to learn the convention sign attached to this unmediated biologically hardwired or telepathically accessed Form ? Or does the world indeed become more conceptually complex and differentiated as it learns how to use more and more signs ? Does the entire tribe become more sophisticated as it extends its vocabulary to include more and more metacognitive terms ?

What does this mean? — frank

I'm suggesting (exploring the thesis) that our lifeworld and our semantics is inferentially articulated, and that our language ("an organ of perception") is unified, which is to say a system of differences ("without positive terms") with inferential relationships. It's like a game of chess with arbitrary but established names for roles rather than Platonic forms. A bishop by any other names, moves diagonally all the same.


"If I discover that all the boxes in the attic I am charged with cleaning out have been labeled with red, yellow, or green stickers, all I learn is that those labeled with the same color share some property. To learn what they mean is to learn, for instance, that the owner put a red label on boxes to be discarded, green on those to be retained, and yellow on those that needed further sorting and decision. Once I know what follows from affixing one rather than another label, I can understand them not as mere labels, but as descriptions of the boxes to which they are applied.

Description is classification with consequences, either immediately practical (“to be discarded / examined / kept”) or for further classifications. Michael Dummett argues generally that to be understood as conceptually contentful, expressions must have not only circumstances of appropriate application, but also appropriate consequences of application.

That is, one must look not only upstream, to the circumstances (inferential and non-inferential) in which it is appropriate to apply the expression, but also downstream to the consequences (inferential and non-inferential) of doing so, in order to grasp the content it expresses."

..The world you take to be real is a collage of representations.

Is this view self undermining? — frank

I think so. The brain which is supposed to generate the picture is part of the picture. All arguments for the brain throwing up a picture depend on features of the very picture which is 'derealized' and not be trusted. Brains become the creations of brains. Sense organs become the creation of the very same sense organs, themselves. Note that the dreamer is part of the dream. It doesn't make sense. It eats itself.

There is and can be only one 'inferential-causal nexus.'

As in, individuation is the process by which people choose or create groups? — Ø implies everything

Yes. What is a self ? Persona, mask, costume, avatar. It looks to me like (among other things) a quilt of identifications, of belongings-to-groups. Even the genius, who has adopted a familiar enough role of self-creation, is creating pieces of selves for assimilation by consumers. So Nirvana (the band) sold 'grunge,' an attitude or pose that could be adopted by fans. Politics, religion, etc. The same idea. Piece together a 'self' in fear and trembling and ecstasy and restlessness and irony.

It’s something derivative and emerges out of a more basic human state, the ready-to-hand — the realm of habit, skill, automaticity, “second nature” actions, etc. — Mikie

:up:

I'm interested in why we are tempted toward persisting presence ? Is it an evolutionary advantage ( genetic or memetic) to find and value patterns that are always exploitable ? That which persists allows for investment. Imagine a guaranteed-by-the-gods 10% annual return on savings. Along these lines, do we want to identify with a divine-timeless structure and find an vicarious immortality in it ?

I apologize and withdraw the theme if this is too much of a digression.

I don't know which 'ism' fits this approach best, but I suggest that the perspective metaphor is useful here. We don't see a picture of the tree. We see the tree 'with' or 'through' our nervous systems 'from' this or that bodily-linguistic perspective. Personality is mediation, but mediation need not and seemingly ought not be understood to cast up a second image of the tree.

Brains and trees need to be kept in the same world of inferential-causal 'plane,' else (seems to me) nonsense ensues, though it's not obvious nonsense.

In case it helps understands where I'm coming from, anyway, here are some de Saussure quotes:
****************
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

It's hard to reply to your individual questions when for me the issue (not yours but ours as humans) is semantic. One might be tempted to say that the imaginary money lacks a being which is 'physical.' One might claim that to 'really' exist is to 'physically' exist. But for me this strategy remains unwittingly semantically challenged.

Before I talk about Saussure's structuralism, here's the mathematical version, which might especially speak to you:

"Benacerraf argues, in particular, that the natural numbers should not be identified with any set-theoretic objects; in fact, they should not be taken to be objects at all. Instead, numbers should be treated as “positions in structures”, e.g., in “the natural number structure”, “the real number structure”, etc. All that matters about such positions are their structural properties, i.e., those “stem[ming] from the relations they bear to one another in virtue of being arranged in a progression” (1965: 70), as opposed to further set-theoretic properties of the von Neumann ordinals, Dedekind cuts, etc. What we study and try to characterize in modern mathematics, along such lines, are the corresponding “abstract structures”. It is in this sense that Benacerraf suggests a structuralist position concerning mathematics." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structuralism-mathematics/

In other words, '2' doesn't refer to anything, unless it be a role in a system of relationships. In non-math context, I'm interested in the structural(-ist) limitations on the reduction of ambiguity. I think Saussure is basically right that our language is a system of differences without positive terms. 'Physical' is not some label on an immediately available concept which is given to each human soul directly, as if every human had an 'inner eye' that gazed on the same gleaming eternal Form. It's different from 'non-physical.' We don't know exactly what we mean by either term, but we know that you use one or the other, not both (it's like 1 bit of resolution or information or distinction and that's all, though this metaphor has its limits.)

Here's Aristotle: "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images." http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.html

Wittgenstein's 'beetle in the box' example demonstrates the confusion in this otherwise appealing and familiar conception of our situation. Although wrong, it's so 'obvious' that no case is made for the assumption.

So that's some background thats meant to gesture at the difficultly of knowing what we are talking about. A second approach is a metaphor. Being is the light that makes beings visible. That's not my invention. It's that things are rather than how they are. Tautological ? Maybe. Is the point to feel the terror and wonder of a tautology ? There are passages in Wittgenstein that suggest this sort of thing. If one tries to say it, it's as if one is saying nothing, merely uttering a whimper or a sigh.

I don't mean narcissism pejoratively but neutrally. There are many pleasures, among which there is the sweet sense of being at or near the center or on the peak. In short, distinction and difference and distance.

This sounds like more of a traditional notion of power than a Nierzschean one. — Joshs

Perhaps. But I'm digging for the biological roots of this theological power talk. The king who must expand is a metaphor for a dialectic that must neutralize and absorb its critics as mere stages along the way to the birth of the god (or of the god's self-recognition.) In other words, Hegel must ingest (or convince himself and others that he can ingest) Schlegelian irony. A system is a crystal castle. It's perhaps a avatar of the self that hopes to survive the fate of all meat. [These days, the 'single philosopher' or culture system faces the heat death as the closing of this partial escape hatch -- and perhaps as a relief in terms of a welcome lightness of being.]

"...on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

One can imagine an ironical-mystical-joking artist creating Hegel as a character in a play, but one can imagine the reverse, too.

It might be helpful to think of individuation as selective and creative assimilation.