"The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative." — Toby Determined

Can you clarify any of the terms used in that passage?
How does love disport with anything, let alone itself. It sounds like disembodied onanism, which is really hard to picture.
And idea may be explained or taught, but how does it "fall" into edification?
They can certainly be insipid, but how does an idea start in one state and then "sink" into another?
Who/what is the "negative", and what causes it to suffer, what is it patient about, and what it it working so hard at?
What does that sentence mean?

I had a thought while reading this. Which is that perhaps Hegel's approach is to overcome opposition without losing the vitality of opposition. It would be contrary to the critical method to allow oppositions to stand without being overcome but the life of Hegel's system comes from the power of the negative so some element of opposition must remain. — Toby Determined

Speaking as someone who has only read Hegel’s Philosophy of History and a bunch of Hegelian thinkers like Marx, Zizek, and Adorno (and not much of the latter two), I don’t have the authority to answer this. However, what you say looks right. Overcoming is not just a dissolution of the contradiction but its preservation. I believe this is what Hegel calls sublation.

We don’t have many Hegel experts here, but @Tobias might be able to help.

"The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative." — Toby Determined

Right. It has to be able to forget itself completely to make it a game worth playing. (No peeking now!)

Right. It has to be able to forget itself completely to make it a game worth playing. (No peeking now!) — Wayfarer

:up: How did you know? Superb!

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The OP is quite clear on what the Triad means. Two classical and one Hegel(ian). I don't think Hegel's formulation helps in clarifying the matter (for me). He further muddles it in fact, unless he's coming at it from a very different and unique, heretofore unknown, angle.

Thanks for your response Vera. I'm interested in what your interpretation of the passage would be. Maybe it's so unclear that you can't even imagine? Then take a wild guess! No wrong answers.



I have a similar background. I started with Marx but now I've pivoted more into the religious side. I go to Quakers and their method of worship is silent prayer. So I guess I'm more directed towards the immediate nowadays.

It starts by introducing the idea that philosophy deals with opposites and then resolves those oppositions in various ways. Monism collapses the opposites into one another, dualism maintains them. Hegel's method is one of triads. — Toby Determined

Yes, maybe. Triads in the sense that a waltz moves in triads, the last step is never final, but part of the same movement. (Hegel talks of the movement of the concept). It is not as much thesis - antithesis - synthesis as it is often described. More like position, negation and then negation of the negation. This movement can be seen in many things, including religious experience. In Christianity, God was negated when he became men, he showed himself as non-god, but by rising from the dead he negated this non-god and became God, but now not ineffable, paving the way for a human god. (And then perhaps also its demise as the dance progresses further).


[quote="Toby Determined;d14036"I had a thought while reading this. Which is that perhaps Hegel's approach is to overcome opposition without losing the vitality of opposition. It would be contrary to the critical method to allow oppositions to stand without being overcome but the life of Hegel's system comes from the power of the negative so some element of opposition must remain.[/quote]

Yes it does. Concepts evolve and unfold into more complex (and concrete!) ones. They are never stable though. Even the concreter ones, such as 'here' and 'now' obtain their meaning from context. Concepts take their meaning from a web of concepts, which themselves keep engendering oppositions so they keep unfolding and changing. Most controversial I think, is that I do believe Hegel considered this movement to have a certain direction, namely towards freedom and self understanding, but I could be wrong.

Compare with the quote from the Phenomenology "The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative." — Toby Determined

As it stands I cannot make heads or tails of it. Would you mind providing the section from which it is taken? I can then look it up, read the context and read the German, which for me might be more understandable than the English.

I'll take a stab at the paragraph about "love disporting with itself".

The line is from parapgraph 19 of the Preface to the Phenomenology as it appears on Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm

Hegel thinks philosophy should be "science". So a view of philosophy that sinks into "mere edification" is falling short of what philosophy should be.

He might be rebutting a certain current of opinion.

I'll try to interpret the idea of "love disporting with itself". Aristotle has a view that the highest experience was "theoria" which means "contemplation".

To Aristotle, God is eternally contemplating Godself. This divine navel gazing played a role in his system and partly explained the motion of heavenly bodies.

So "love disporting with itself" sounds to me like a reinterpretation of that Aristotelian idea.

But I think what Hegel is saying is that in order to avoid sinking to the level of "mere edification" this has to incorporate the "negative".

Thanks for your response Vera. I'm interested in what your interpretation of the passage would be. — Toby Determined

I think it's a deepity. Way too many words to convey nothing intelligible. But they sound good. Not only I can't imagine what it means; I can't even imagine wanting to try. If he had something real to say, he should have said it plainly.

I'll take a stab at the paragraph about "love disporting with itself". — Toby Determined

Thanks for trying. I already knew Aristotle had some silly ideas about a reality that's so much realer than mere reality. Divine navel-gazing is just a more polite term for my first guess.. But what's it to do with love, or even Love?

sinking to the level of "mere edification" — Toby Determined

So, edifying (assuming philosophy can do that, if people are allowed to understand the words) is a lower, a despised function of philosophy, whereas delicately-balanced indecisiveness is a higher calling, which would then make it a science that nobody can understand.

I can't even imagine wanting to try. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure why you think anyone is interested in the fact that you are not interested in Hegel, in a discussion specifically about Hegel. There are other discussions that you might find more edifying.

There are other discussions that you might find more edifying. — Jamal

Absolutely true. I didn't open it for Hegel; I thought the Triads in the title might be interesting. But I was struck by that impenetrable paragraph and curious whether the quoter could translate it. That done, I shall trouble you no more.

Some years back there was a reading group on the preface to the Phenomenology. We went paragraph by paragraph. Here are a couple of my posts relating to love and the divine. It consists of quotes from the text followed by comments.

I am dividing in two separate posts to make it easier to read.

19. The life of God and divine cognition might thus be expressed as a game love plays with itself.

“Thus” indicates that the life of God and divine cognition follow from what has been said. God and the divine are not separate from but within the circle. A game love plays with itself, the game of uniting two as one, but to play the game one must first become two, dividing and uniting itself with itself. Divine life and divine cognition are being and knowing.

Hegel immediately adds that this idea must be thought with due seriousness, that it was won through the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative. The reference is to the life and death of Christ and the themes of suffering and sacrifice, death of the body and life of the spirit. Whatever Hegel’s own beliefs were on such matters, they are an important part of the history of spirit, if not in terms of actual events then in terms of the shaping of consciousness.

Precisely because the form is as essential to the essence as the essence is to itself, the essence must not be grasped and expressed as mere essence, which is to say, as immediate substance or as the pure self-intuition of the divine. Rather, it must likewise be grasped as form in the entire richness of the developed form, and only thereby is it grasped and expressed as the actual.

What does the pure self-intuition of the divine mean? First, this intuition is the subject’s intuition. As immediate substance it takes the divine to be other than itself. To be grasped and expressed as form requires that it be articulated both as self-forming and formed, as both the development of form and the entire richness of the developed form. It is only from this stage of its development, when it has become actual, that it can know itself.

This is summed up in #20:

20: The true is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth.

He goes on to express this:

The beginning, the principle, or, the absolute as it is at first, or, as it is immediately expressed, is only the universal. But just as my saying “all animals” can hardly count as an expression of zoology, it is likewise obvious that the words, “absolute,” “divine,” “eternal,” and so on, do not express what is contained in them; – and it is only such words which in fact express intuition as the immediate.

Zoology is not adequately expressed by the universal “all animals”, for in the universal the particular is negated or not expressed. All animals tells us nothing about any particular animal. In the same way, “absolute,” “divine,” “eternal,” tell us nothing about the particulars within the universal.

Whatever is more than such a word, even the mere transition to a proposition, is a becoming-other which must be redeemed, or, it is a mediation.

Hegel goes on to explain mediation:

21: ... mediation is nothing but self-moving self-equality, or, it is a reflective turn into itself, the moment of the I existing-for-itself, pure negativity, or, simple coming-to-be.

The transition from a word to a proposition is mediation for it must be thought and expressed. So too the absolute, the divine, eternal, must be mediated, that is, thought and expressed, given shape and content. But they are mediated by, the I. Existing-for-itself, the I is other than the subject or object of thought. At the same time it negates this otherness by making it one’s own by the understanding. What is thought, the universal, comes to be the subject matter, which is to say, the subject’s matter.

The I, or, coming-to-be, this mediating, is, on account of its simplicity, immediacy in the very process of coming-to-be and is the immediate itself. – Hence, reason is misunderstood if reflection is excluded from the truth and is not taken to be a positive moment of the absolute.

Reason is not unmediated intuition. It is not the understanding. It is positive in that it reflects on what is taken up in the understanding as immediacy without reflection on the process of unity. It is, in other words, reflection on a central problem of philosophy at least since it was first expressed by Parmenides: thinking and being are the same.

The movement in consciousness is from the immediacy of objects in consciousness, to their difference or negativity as objects of rather than from consciousness, to the immediacy of objects of consciousness, their sameness or positivity as objects from consciousness.

Reflection is what makes truth into the result, but it is likewise what sublates the opposition between the result and its coming-to-be. This is so because this coming-to-be is just as simple and hence not different from the form of the true, which itself proves itself to be simple in its result. Coming-to-be is instead this very return into simplicity.

Hegel expresses the same idea in yet another way, this time making explicit that it is not just something that occurs in the consciousness of the individual:

However much the embryo is indeed in itself a person, it is still not a person for itself; the embryo is a person for itself only as a culturally formed and educated rationality which has made itself into what it is in itself.

It is not the capacity for rationality but the culturally formed and educated rationality that allows the person to become for herself what she is in herself. While the importance of culture was recognized by the Greeks, it was to a large degree atemporal. The importance of history as self-moving and self-development was not a factor. The truth was regarded as unchanging. Today both views are represented and defended.

23:

The need to represent the absolute as subject has helped itself to such propositions as “God is the eternal,” or “God is the moral order of the world,” or “God is love,” etc.

Does Hegel intend for us to draw a connection between “God is love”, “The life of God and divine cognition ... as a game love plays with itself” (19),and the goal of philosophy as moving “nearer to the goal where it can lay aside the title of love of knowing and be actual knowing (5)?

In such propositions, the true is directly posited as subject, but it is not presented as the movement of reflection taking-an-inward-turn.

That is, such propositions only reflect the negative movement, the movement away from itself, its otherness, which has not yet reached the moment of the movement when reflection turns back to itself. So, what’s love got to do with it? Love is the desire for unity. In religious terms it is the unity of man and God. In philosophical terms the unity of man and knowledge. In knowledge the desire for unity with God is overcome, for the movement has returned back to the self from the otherness of God.

One proposition of that sort begins with the word “God.” On its own, this is a meaningless sound, a mere name. It is only the predicate that says what the name is and is its fulfillment and its meaning. The empty beginning becomes actual knowledge only at the end of the proposition. To that extent, one cannot simply pass over in silence the reason why one cannot speak solely of the eternal, the moral order of the world, etc., or, as the ancients did, of pure concepts, of being, of the one, etc., or, of what the meaning is, without appending the meaningless sound as well.

Instead of saying: “God is the eternal” or “God is the moral order”, etc., why can’t we just say the eternal or the moral order without appending the meaningless sound God? The answer is provided in the next sentence:

However, the use of this word only indicates that it is neither a being nor an essence nor a universal per se which is posited; what is posited is what is reflected into itself, a subject.

We should keep in mind that Hegel says the subject is self-positing (18).In other words, the positing of God is the self-positing of the subject. But:

... at the same time, this is something only anticipated. The subject is accepted as a fixed point on which the predicates are attached for their support through a movement belonging to what it is that can be said to know this subject and which itself is also not to be viewed as belonging to the point itself, but it is solely through this movement that the content would be portrayed as the subject.

The positing of God is at that moment the positing of something fixed and unchanging, something wholly and completely other. But:

... not only is the former anticipation that the absolute is subject not the actuality of this concept, but it even makes that actuality impossible, for it posits the concept as a point wholly at rest, whereas the concept is self-movement.

The problem is that the subject, God, is thought of as being at rest and unchanging. As the theologians have argued, God is perfect and thus unchanging, for change implies imperfection.

Hi Toby Determined,

Nice name btw,

The quote below has been alluded to by Hegel in the preface, which I’ve quoted below it.

Compare with the quote from the Phenomenology "The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative." — Toby Determined

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognise in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.

I think that encapsulates and clarifies your Hegel quote a little bit better.

But I was struck by that impenetrable paragraph and curious whether the quoter could translate it. That done, I shall trouble you no more. — Vera Mont

@Vera Mont
Does the above quote from the analogy of the blossom help you at all regarding the negation of edification ?