"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
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
"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!) — Wayfarer
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
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
Thanks for your response Vera. I'm interested in what your interpretation of the passage would be. — Toby Determined
I'll take a stab at the paragraph about "love disporting with itself". — 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.sinking to the level of "mere edification" — Toby Determined
There are other discussions that you might find more edifying. — Jamal
19. The life of God and divine cognition might thus be expressed as a game love plays with itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
In such propositions, the true is directly posited as subject, but it is not presented as the movement of reflection taking-an-inward-turn.
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.
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.
... 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.
... 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.
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.
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
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