In any case the origin of the mystical tradition in Western philosophy is (neo)Platonism and its successors, whose doctrines were fused into early Christianity by the Greek-speaking theologians, including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and later Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena. The intuition of 'the One' which is the ground/source of all being through the domain of the forms/ideas is central to that tradition. Although it should be said the marriage of Hebrew prophetic religion with Greek rationalism was often a rather fraught one, and that (in my view) the mystical elements became almost completely subordinated to the literalistic tendencies in Protestantism. But there's a huge amount of study involved in all of those issues, and I've only skimmed the surface. But I think it is possible to identify aspects the Hegelian 'absolute' with both the 'first mover' of Aristotle, and also with the One of neo-platonism (feasibly a kind of 'world soul'). — Wayfarer

Your description is helpful. I would only throw a few curve balls into the mix.

The emphasis in Lutheran thought that what is happening for each individual is the Incarnation is mystical in itself.

As a matter of struggling with the idea of the "unconditioned" as a means of orientation to establish a starting place, Leibniz and Spinoza did that sort of thing while Kant declined to provide that in his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics because he said we could never prove it.

Very well said.
I consider your question of dinosaur versus current player the one that is most interesting to me and shapes the tenor of many reactions to Hegel's text.
But I will respond more thoughtfully after a little bit.
I am being chased by a Velociraptor.

I said this:

Well, the logic of both the stuff in time combined with the idea of a dialectic as producing results through a process suggests that "exclusion" is a very important activity in what Hegel has in mind.
The inclusion part only gets recognition after the conflict is over.

Or put another way, there is factor in play that Kant was not able to locate. And Hegel tried to. — Valentinus

tim wood said this:

Any chance of adding light here in not too many sentences?

1) Taking the process as a black box that produces a result (or like a recipe that produces a cake), I'm thinking that in the result are all the components that were input to the black box. For this present purpose I'm not looking inside the black box, wherein indeed there may be a sorting process as part of the process.

2) What factor? — tim wood

I will try to answer in reverse order. The factor Kant is leaving out of his analysis is a motive to go forward. The briefest account I can find comes from Hegel's Logic, translated by William Wallace:

This thought, which is proposed as the instrument of philosophic knowledge, itself calls for further explanation. We must understand in what way it possesses necessity or cogency: and when it claims to be equal to the task of apprehending the absolute objects (God, Spirit, Freedom), that claim must be substantiated. Such an explanation, however, is itself a lesson in philosophy, and properly falls within the scope of the science itself. A preliminary attempt to make matters plain would only be unphilosophical, and consist of a tissue of assumptions, assertions, and inferential pros and cons, i.e. of dogmatism without cogency, as against which there would be an equal right of counter-dogmatism.

A main line of argument in the Critical Philosophy bids us pause before proceeding to inquire into God or into the true being of things, and tells us first of all to examine the faculty of cognition and see whether it is equal to such an effort. We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has won for it general assent and admiration; the result of which has been to withdraw cognition from an interest in its objects and absorption in the study of them, and to direct it back upon itself; and so turn it to a question of form. Unless we wish to be deceived by words, it is easy to see what this amounts to. In the case of other instruments, we can try and criticize them in other ways than by setting about the special work for which they are destined. But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim. Reinhold saw the confusion with which this style of commencement is chargeable, and tried to get out of the difficulty by starting with a hypothetical and problematical stage of philosophizing. In this way he supposed that it would be possible, nobody can tell how, to get along, until we found ourselves, further on, arrived at the primary truth of truths. His method, when closely looked into, will be seen to be identical with a very common practice. It starts from a substratum of experiential fact, or from a provisional assumption which has been brought into a definition; and then proceeds to analyse this starting-point.

We can detect in Reinhold’s argument a perception of the truth, that the usual course which proceeds by assumptions and anticipations is no better than a hypothetical and problematical mode of procedure. But his perceiving this does not alter the character of this method; it only makes clear its imperfections. — Hegel, Logic, paragragh 10

So, negation is important because there is no motion forward without it. The Notion is not an explanation but an activity. It is not "automatic" as a process. If it was, then it would already be appropriated like a Category of Reason. The previous discussion of necessity in Logic is focused upon this point. If we knew what we know, why bother with any further discussion?

I will try but I will be slow in responding. I need to review some other parts of Hegel that is influencing my perspective.

Well, the logic of both the stuff in time combined with the idea of a dialectic as producing results through a process suggests that "exclusion" is a very important activity in what Hegel has in mind.
The inclusion part only gets recognition after the conflict is over.

Or put another way, there is factor in play that Kant was not able to locate. And Hegel tried to.

Kant's "knowledge," then, is based in perception. Hegel places it in reason; he seems to take perception uncritically and for granted. That is, there is what we know and how we know it - which for Hegel seems to happen after perception, while for Kant it's all in one batter, baked together. — tim wood

Good observation.
I am not sure how to read that against the background of negation and exclusion being the default position and something other than that being an advance or at least something different.

Then the difference between Kant and Hegel is about how this stuff is happening in time or not.
Kant describes time as a component of individual experience.
If this "Spirit" is the shape of history, then Kant is wrong.

With these paragraphs, Hegel draws in sharp relief the comparison of individual experience to what makes that possible. This "universal self" is central to what is being presented but is very hard for me to understand.

Perhaps Kierkegaard and Nietzsche set off an epistemological firestorm but both of them are peculiarly similar in the way that they did not see that circumstance as an impediment to finding out what was the case and reporting on their findings.
They both argued for a simplicity of observation that many of their descendants denied to themselves.

Good point.
In regard to Nietzsche, he didn't ask that the "objectivity" be demonstrated in various perspectives but did refer to the natural as being what it was whether one paid attention to it or not.
He called for the pursuit of science but did not seem compelled to depict how it worked.

I actually reject objective truth altogether, but haven't quite hashed this all out well enough to deliver a decent argument. — thewonder

The people you are reading don't necessarily care about your problem. It is not germane to what they are struggling with.

One of the themes that Kierkegaard approached from many different angles was the importance to understand behavior and conditions "psychologically" while also positing a limit to such explanations as either a narrative that included everything in the world or what is happening in or for a person.

So, yeah, he would not consider making the subjective and objective an absolute difference an advance to our understanding.

One element to consider is that Bushido calls for accepting one's death to the degree that one no longer makes decisions to avoid it for its own sake. This is a kind of freedom.
It certainly encourages the observation of duty but the way it is accepted becomes the important thing.

Yes it does. Sarcasm too. Especially when there are difficulties in communicating ideas from one brain to another in writing. And through the lens of bias. — Amity

I meant no offense. The irony applies to my own efforts to criticize Hegel.

I had a teacher who once asked me how I could separate using tools made by others from one's I forged myself. I used to think the question was about authenticity versus imitation. An Hegelian point of view says to me that the new is both.

If I use something made before for my purposes, that is a new "determination." If I organize elements in a way that gets other people to start talking in a new way, that too, is a kind of new "determination."

The "Concept" beyond the boundaries of an individual are developed by both kinds of change. It introduces a Z axis where previously there was only X and Y.

It is this almost religious sense of the importance of Western, European or German philosophy in our historical development or culture that I take exception to. So very narrow...and it is not available to all, even if it were so desired. — Amity

Your statement has been articulated in many ways. Hegel, himself, said many things that compared his "culture" in a better light than others.

But, as a matter of intellectual inheritance, his work paved the way for you to express your objection.

Irony abounds.

I agree with Stewart that Hegel and Kierkegaard collide in many places but that the differences are not a simple matter of thesis versus antithesis.

I brought up Kierkegaard since he emphasized the centrality of the Single Individual. In the passage I quoted by Hegel, I wonder if the statement can be be seen as a shared point of departure, a moment of agreement before struggling with each other.

Stewart depicts faith as something like the Romantic's criticism of reason as insufficient. Kierkegaard is better understood as a follower of Pascal who recognized that Christianity was absurd in a fundamental way but who also argued that it is a better model of the human condition than others.

So, in addition to the specific arguments made in regards to what must exist, there has been introduced a psychological register where some models fit better than others. The "long path" reference in Hegel's text is an acknowledgment that experience is not a simple thing given to anybody.

Science may be in its own self what it will, but in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness, it presents itself as an inversion of the latter, or, because immediate self-consciousness is the principle of actuality, by immediate self-consciousness existing for itself outside of science, science takes the form of non-actuality. — Hegel/Pinkard

This observation strikes in many directions. I will throw out two.

It recasts the argument between Hume and Kant regarding causality. If Hume's skepticism is a "natural" development in the advance of "science", Kant's rejection of that argument is another one.

Arguments about free will versus various expressions of necessity tend to misrepresent why the proposal of a system that ties them together would be rejected out of hand. At the very least, Hegel is asking for the problem to be approached from a different direction.

The individual’s right is based on his absolute self-sufficiency, which he knows he possesses in every shape of his knowing, for in every shape, whether recognized by science or not, and no matter what the content might be, the individual is at the same time the absolute form, or, he has immediate self-certainty; and, if one were to prefer this expression, he thereby has an unconditioned being. — Hegel/Pinkard

If I had the opportunity to cross the river and pour some of my blood into Kierkegaard's bowl in Hades, I would ask him about this passage.

That is, there is a scale appropriate to the actions and motivations of individuals, and that scale not-so-much appropriate for understanding movements on a larger scale. — tim wood

I think the matter of scale you describe is important to what Hegel is presenting. The "unconditioned" is present in all the instances of determination. But how that is so is not some kind of phenomena without conditions. Self-awareness has to happen in many ways for it to happen in one.

I asked about the reversibility of terms because the logic that seems to be operating here does not seem to be focused on corresponding necessity to event in the way other ideas of causality are often discussed.

As a contrasting parallel to Foolso4's remarks involving Spinoza, it is interesting how Spinoza complained how certain thinkers were sure what was possible for the "Absolute" without being in a favorable spot to observe such things. That sort of thing reminds me of:

Thus, 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." — tim wood

The limits of observation sounds like a good place to start a Phenomenology.

comment removed

Well, what is the reverse of a condition made only possible through development?

I think Rockmore speaks too generally when he says: "The relation of inequality remains, although its terms reverse themselves". The master's dependency on the servant develops over time and when the relationship is superseded by a new one. The ground is not the same as at the beginning.

This touches on what Tim Wood is saying about the process of understanding being prior to the description of a knowing agent and what is known. Reading backwards from paragraph 190 to the initial discussion of perception, the process is not separated into different agents with different objects.

In the Pinkard translation, it can be found in Section B, Self Consciousness, starting with Chapter A, titled: Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness;Mastery and Servitude.

The paragraphs 179 to 181 specifically involve "sublating" the other.

Note that the meaning of negation changes according to how or where it is applied. — Amity

Some of the difference between Kant and Hegel is that the individual is not the only theater in town. Hegel relates the negation of person-hood as happens between Master and Slave as part of the process of becoming aware of the "other." Reason, with a capital R, is not possible without lots of awful experience.

I also noticed that when I make an opinion, and state it as a claim, on the works of some classic philosopher, then people will ask me "where did he state that / can you quote an exact page number and book where he said that, so I can look it up, etc. — god must be atheist

What is the alternative? The entire project of reading stuff and talking about it with other people is either working out what was actually said or disagreeing with the words after having done the first part.
That is it.
If you have an alternative project, then present it.

As projections go, putting stuff on the other is not a sure thing. It is always going to be tried, like sticking a fork into grilling meat, but one's results may vary.
So people may say whatever they say to themselves but there is this period of checking to see if they are actually supported.
Some of the people care less than others about the result.

I don't feel obliged to explain the gap between debilitating self criticism and misplaced certainty in certain things being the case. I am too far up a certain creek to start selling my paddle.

I am not sure how this works out in the Preface but Hegel discusses the immediacy of knowing in the early chapters of the book itself. He takes away the platform Kant gave himself. Or one gives oneself.

You are right. The topic requires its own discussion.
I am not sure how Hegel understood what happened in regards to the topic.
I really like the observation that there is no Platonic dialogue called Heraclitus.

I currently feel that I have nothing useful to add, but I'm following this discussion with great enjoyment. — WerMaat

On the contrary, your take of how German text sounds to a German reader is very helpful. It is the sort of information that is typically added in footnotes to translation as a back up argument for why a phrase appears as it does. Responding as a reader is a different thing.
Keep going, please.

*Of course, it should not be overlooked that Plato himself rejected this. In the dialogue Parmenides, the Forms, as presented by a young Socrates, are shown to be incoherent by Parmenides. The Forms are Plato's poetry, designed to replace the theology of the poets. I have written about this elsewhere on the forum. Plato was, after all, both a master dialectician and rhetorician. — Fooloso4

I agree that Parmenides, the Dialogue, is important to this discussion of what is an "absolute" and what not so absolute elements might have to do with it.

But, while the dialogue brings up many problems to the notion of "participating in the eidos", I don't read it as kicking it to the curb. Parmenides and Zeno, in so far as they spoke for themselves (in pre-Socractic texts) presented a unity that did not permit a way to understand change. This view has often been contrasted to Heraclitus who made it difficult to understand what continues to exist after accepting the complex world of change as the primary state. The introduction of the idea of forms was, in some part, to bridge the gap between the two.

So, in one way, this dialogue, written later in Plato's life, was not a disavowal of an idea but the gift of a problem to future generations.

In this inchoate condition, "science" is owned and understood only by the few. But in its logic and the working out of that logic it becomes an offering of participation to all, because as Being itself, it is necessarily accessible to all beings. — tim wood

The book, beyond the Preface, builds on how other people take things away from us when they appear before us. The new thing being proposed is to live without doing that. And it is an empty idea unless a different sort of life happens. To that extent, the esoteric relies upon what is determined by the "exoteric." It has to work for everybody or at least enough of us to not be stuck in a previous level of development.

Well, if you created humans and were not sure what would happen, then the purported Creator is in a spot of bother. Letting things happen without control.
But not without limits.

Another element in rejecting Romanticism is that one of the main goals of the book is to show how individual experience is interwoven with developments of ideas that unfold over time.
At the same time, the developments are changes in what is possible for the individual to experience.

The fragments can only be more interesting than a single plane of reflection if the pattern reflects something that happened to it. A structure of deconstruction.

Reading all this I am constantly reminded of Plato who is perhaps a primary target here. — Fooloso4

It may be helpful to consider the Lutheran tradition where the democracy of conscience is opposed by "explanations" to contain it. Hegel and Kierkegaard held contempt for many of the same kinds of self righteousness that hid itself in "mysteries."

That is not to say Hegel did not describe Plato's work as part of keeping "substance" apart. But Hegel tends to describe that element in a kind of "ontogeny recapitulates ontology" fashion. He leveled more specific criticisms toward the Neo-Platonists. I think Hegel did not view Plato as making a system. In any case, Hegel just went through great pains to say he was not talking about setting various ideas against each other directly. In terms of his exposition of how these ideas appeared, everything has a place.

Whoops. That was opinion and speculation. I will return to my desk.

Your way of framing the question is interesting. If Wittgenstein is right that a certain use of language is misleading, how did that start?

It is a very different approach from those who tell you where and when things went south.

Thanks.
I have the printed Miller version and if I quote from it, I will type it in as such.
This reading project is interesting.

The way I see it philosophical debates are not about 'how things are' in any absolute sense, but about what it is reasonable to say — Janus

Where do we get this criteria of what is "reasonable to say"?

How is that approach better than others?
I presume you will need to refer to this "other thing" to go forward.