Everything he says and does is only for the sake of himself. If the economy goes well, he will claim credit (he did it yesterday, even though he's not in office) but when it goes badly, it's never his responsibility. — Wayfarer

You make him sound almost like a politician!

The golden rule? "Those that have the gold make the rules."

018

teachers who embrace patriotic values support our way of life and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children" — Olympia Sonnier and Ben Kamisar

Teachers of double think are twice as good as ordinary teachers and will raise a whole generation of very stable geniiasses.

017

This episode discusses how the Hegelian dialectic is a reflection of reality itself rather than a unique philosophical method used to understand reality.  It will show how common left-brain understanding (verstand) fails in comprehending dialectics by breaking it into three separate moments, rather than holistically seeing three inseparable sides of "every notion and truth whatever."   As Friedrich Engels points out, the dialectical process of the reality of the being is "the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy." 

That first sentence is a fine double knot.

LET: "The Hegelian dialectic" = "a reflection of reality itself "
LET: "Not the Hegelian dialectic = "a unique a unique philosophical method used to understand reality"

THEN: A a unique philosophical method used to understand reality is not a reflection of reality itself.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who the fuck makes sense at all?
Mirror, mirror on the wall, mirrors can't reflect it all.

Back to Zeno, back to real infinity, back to the process of becoming as the resolution of paradoxes. There is no resting place in the flight of the arrow, it never is, but always is becoming, so equally the Hegelian dialectic never is but is always happening.

"Being is, and nothing happens."

If you read this one way, it describes the block universe, but read it another way, and time is how being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being. It's all matter of whether one looks from inside or outside the universe. Personally, I'm looking from inside.

I might add that when looking at the universe from the outside, one necessarily brings the process of looking out with one, and this is what enables one to see the universe as static and at the same time also conceptually creates a second dimension of time.

016 Time.

"There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief."

I'm just not having Einstein's block time. He was never reconciled to quantum mechanics, and nor, still, is his theory. Get a haircut, man! Never was and never will be And Hegel clearly makes time emerge from the causal feedback that also produces life and real infinity. And it emerges dialectically from the overflow of being and nothing that is becoming. You are nothing, and the creator! Creation means something new and therefore time. Riddle me this: if time is an illusion, what is the speed of light?

I'm actually pissed off with clever people telling me my life is an illusion as if they know what is real.

point of order. Ecosia is my greenwashed google substitute. Get it today, folks, and plant some trees while you search Think e-flux is the publisher.

I don't think there are gaps for Hegel. — Moliere

Geist is gap; freedom is gaps in the block; being and gap are indistinguishable. What I like most about Hegel so far is his starting place. He starts with phenomena appearing to an empty mind. This neatly cuts out all that interminable talk of internal and external and their disconnection. It's like Descartes without the ego-god-thinking thing bollocks. And that might eventually become a physical science with mind and freedom accounted for. Or maybe not...

the whole graph — Moliere

Bah, humbug! I don't know what you get from all that. It would help a bit if the display took account of time because "influence" tends to be a bit one way - the living not having much influence on their ancestors and such.

014 Freedom.

Our man is a bit confused about this. That's my impression, anyway. Because the story Hegel is telling seems to make freedom exclusively human, or that's my impression so far, but then it is also a property of geist as 'world-spirit' and hence talk of panpsychism. and then matter has no freedom, but quantum particles do. It's not just hand-wavy, it's a contradictory muddle. I'm going to try and make some sense of it, by departing from the podcast a bit.

Suppose we start with a many worlds, non-collapsing universe that evolves physically but remains probabilistic. Now intuitively, my suggestion would be that Schrödinger's cat has enough geist to collapse its own wave function, and will obviously collapse it to the state in which it is alive (because it can't see itself dead). So the form of geist's freedom is in the first instance the necessary choice of freedom itself, that is, the choice of life. Thus natural selection selects for freedom to select.

How say ye?

But Hegel is saying that the 'duplication' also takes place between isolated persons. — Paine

What is an isolated person in the context of child development? One has to be raised by someone surely - wolves at the least?

Ecosia showed me this, which reassured me I am not entirely alone:

To put it in a nutshell, to follow Freud’s image, the unconscious is a gap, and meaning is the stopgap. Meaning provides a narrative, which begins already in the work of “the unconscious philosopher”; the work of meaning is a counterpart to the workings of the unconscious. The unconscious and the philosopher are a couple in an odd division of labor: one makes the holes, the other fills them in. If there is a diagnosis of the philosophical endeavor as such at stake, then this business of philosophy starts already in the unconscious—the philosopher has an accomplice in the unconscious, which starts stopping the gaps even before philosophy starts filling them in. The unconscious is effaced at the same time that it is produced, and the one who effaces it is the unconscious philosopher struggling to make sense and provide a narrative account free of gaps. The philosophical illusion is structural, it has its basis in the unconscious itself as effacement.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/34/68360/hegel-and-freud/

One commonality is that both made claims to "science" that ring somewhat false in terms of current usage. But then Science at the time did have ambitions that it has since relinquished. But I am not going to go very far into that rather peculiar stuff about death, so reminiscent of Freud's 'death wish'.that then leads to the Lordship and Bondsman relation, which I take to be a "normal" result of childhood trauma that permeates the human world as the everyday insanity of government and social organisation. I'll leave it at that for now, but I might have more to say when I know Hegel a bit more.

013. Master and Slave dialectic.
I listened to this twice and really struggled. Reading the text, (in contradiction to my title) the penny dropped, or at least I made my own sense of it, that you can tell me is wrong and stupid.

... this other is for itself only when it cancels itself as existing for itself , and has self-existence only in the self-existence of the other. Each is the mediating term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself; and each is to itself and to the other an immediate self-existing reality, which, at the same time, exists thus for itself only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. — Hegel-184

This describes what happens when a mother first looks at her newborn, that confirms the sociality of human consciousness. If there is not that mutual recognition, then one or the other is dead. And it is different from the birth scene of sheep or cows or chickens which recognise each other separately, and thus more as objects than subjects.

Hegel is talking from the pov. of the infant primarily. Birth is the physical separation, and the look is the mutual recognition, but self-consciousness proper has yet to develop, because ...

... its truth would be merely that its own individual existence for itself would be shown to it to be an independent object, or, which is the same thing, that the object would be exhibited as this pure certainty of itself. By the notion of recognition, however, this is not possible, except in the form that as the other is for it, so it is for the other; each in its self through its own action and again through the action of the other achieves this pure abstraction of existence for self. — 186

One has to grow up, and become independent. So we arrive at Freudian territory.

End of part 1. (more to follow)

Hansens position seems to be a minority position among Climate scientists, — ChatteringMonkey

Yes. Climate scientists who get too pessimistic argue themselves out of a job, one way or another.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/01/12/should-climate-scientists-stop-doing-research-three-experts-say-yes/?sh=63980d187242

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/opinion/scientist-fired-climate-change-activism.html

https://lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

Cheers. Another voice, another perspective.

011 The Hegelian Dialectic

Here is a paper on Marxist dialectic as the result of his "inversion" of Hegel.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2022.2054000

Looks like a total misunderstanding to me from my ignorance.

So my point about the poor/inverted translation above is made at the end of this episode in a quote from David Bohm no less, who I have read before and so I wonder if I already heard this before and forgot it. Or maybe I'm just smart.

I'm trying to get a sense of what is going on here, and I'm taking a cue from the title of the first book, and 'phenomenology' seems to relate to Kant's term but Hegel applies it inwardly rather than outwardly , and so he begins with logos and psyche in the first instance - ie geist. So his phenomena are being and nothing and they are interdependent because a phenomenon has to be a a Batesonian 'difference that makes a difference'. and that is the phenomenon which is to be understood and reasoned and developed into - for example - 'subject and experience' as one might understand things. Materiality, for Marx, or the Noumenon for Kant have to be derived from geist, and cannot be fundamental.

I find it to be 'intelligent'! Adam and Eve ate the apple, marking The Beginning of Sin. Does intelligence cause inequality?
— YiRu Li

It's an allegorical or fictional story about obeying god and the consequences of not doing so. — Tom Storm

Have you heard the one about Schrodinger's cat? Ridiculous! how anyone can be scientist after that is beyond me.

I would say it is not that intelligence causes inequality, because even in the Garden of Eden everything had to eat something, but inequality becomes an issue for intelligent beings.

There is some subtlety to the story: they eat of the tree of knowledge, and the first thing that happens is "they saw that they were naked, and were ashamed." They didn't need God to be pointing and laughing at their genitals. We know that animals can have memory and learn, and form complex social relations in hierarchies, and so on. And the story pinpoints a crucial difference that only happens in humans that scientists have still not quite seen the importance of, because they want to emphasise language and reason, which are in fact common to many species.

Part of learning is to replay events in the mind - of a hunt for example, and see where things went wrong and how to perform better. Now at a certain level of complexity of such mental re-enactments, one has to imagine, not only oneself and others acting out the scene, but also to imagine their thoughts and feelings and one's own thoughts and feelings. And in this way one starts to have an idea of how one appears to another. I see you looking at my sex, and I imagine what you are thinking. And that's when inequality starts to become an issue, and one that perhaps 'ought to be other than it is'. That is to say, humans uniquely model their own minds and the minds of others in their imagination, and it is this mindfulness of mindedness that takes us out of the natural world so that we live in our own imagination of the imagination of others, more fully than we do in the real world. And that is why our place in society, our status in the minds of others is the most important thing about us, and inequality is the most vital issue.

Authentic Chinese civilization lacks a religious concept or word. — YiRu Li

There is such a lot to understand here that is very unfamiliar to Westerners. But this one phrase stands out as explaining much about what you have been saying that others have not understood. In the West there is a conflict between science and religion because people have fought over which religion is true, and who is in charge of what a religion says. So one cannot, or people do not, take the best of what Buddha says, and what Jesus says, and what Mohammed says and what Lao Tsu says and and put it together with what physicists and astronomers say. No, one must be right, and all the others wrong and false and evil.

Which must make the West look rather foolish to you.

005 - 009

There's plenty of interesting stuff here but I'm not learning anything much about Hegel, so if anyone wants to comment feel free, but I'm going to move on to

010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary

The first thing I want to say is that to my mind there has been a mistranslation, whereby the distinction Hegel makes between understanding and reason has become inverted to the normal meaning of the terms in English, such that 'reason' in Hegel refers to an intuitive grasp of significance, whereas 'understanding' is a narrow definitional approach. It surely ought to be the other way round?

Apart from that, and the mystery of the origin of the story of The Master and his Emissary, (which sounds Chinese to me, or possibly Middle eastern), Gilchrist channeling Hegel seems to work quite well and make good sense. I remember reading split brain studies back in the day and being fascinated and revolted in equal measure.

Then we get to sublation, where the left brain precision focused Emissary reports back to the right brain master and its findings are integrated into a world view.
Or else, if one is suffering from an excess of modernity and left brain dominance, which results in a rigidity of thought, where the emissary has taken over, and become dictatorial, the integration is not complete and the mind remains divided and in conflict - and thus 'unhappy', or un-at-oned.

004 True infinity.

Very abstract. Dasein is determinate being, which is being, limited by not being what it isn't.

Then, by negation again, what it isn't is other, from Dasein - a becoming unbecoming {can be seen as} Etwas, a something that implies an other.

And then with a quick "go and read Hegel or a commentary" and a bit of hand waving, we arrive at a being that is self defining and self creating, and by 'going beyond it's own limits, produces true infinity. And this is a move that is very reminiscent of the Laws of Form, where a function is inserted into itself, that feedback also producing an infinite, and eventually producing time also.

In fact it's starting to look like the Laws of Form is pretty much a Hegelian calculus:
Make a distinction between being and nothing. Call it the first distinction...

And I'm also hearing echoes of Bateson here, but I need to think a bit more about that.

But if I think about this as verbal mathematics constructing an abstract system, the arguments are only important to avoid contradiction, and what is more significant is definition and construction. Looked it in this light, there is as much woo here as there is in set theory.

People also swear by blessing a cup of dogs blood in the shadow of a virgin or whatver. — AmadeusD

I can't say I've met one. Are you sure these people are not made of straw?

Did Westerners experience a similar history?
-> Technology introduces inequality to society (Iron, Colony, Industrial Revolution)
-> Moral system collapse (War Time)
-> Extreme legal systems that end war but cause severe destruction (Communist Party, Cultural Revolution)
-> Attempts to use legal means to maintain order (UN, Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
-> But still faces challenges? — YiRu Li

I am most interested in comparisons of this sort between our cultures. New technology is always going to be disruptive, and early adopters will tend to be winners and late adopters losers economically.

I don't have a formula for moral collapse; but the West is currently suffering it. Certainly the disruption of new technology is a part of it, as stability of peoples lives is lost, but there is much deeper stuff there as well.

I think part of the cause in the West currently is the result of an ongoing conflict between science and religion whereby the success of science in material knowledge has been so overwhelming that social, political, and moral considerations, and especially any spiritual or religious concerns have been dismissed as fantasy, and nonsense. The roots are in the enlightenment, but the modern attitude is well exemplified by this insightful book about how to exploit the information age and the collapse of democracy that is predicted to happen therefrom:— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sovereign_Individual
This is not a reading recommendation from me, except as one might seek to understand the thinking of one's enemy or any antisocial person.

From the loss of any foundation for a moral consensus comes the need for law, and rules and authority and punishment, which you have from Lao Tsu of course.

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion. — Tao Te Ching 38.

Now something less clear, but close to this can be found in Christianity, but these things are not amenable to measurement, experiment, or demonstration, by science, and therefore they are ignored and dismissed by many in this culture. An attitude which is illustrated by the some of the responses you are getting to your comments on Chinese Traditional medicine. To the modern Western mind, tradition is the enemy to be overcome by modernity.

Yeah, that sounds like bullshit to me too. One of the interesting things about the podcast is that it aims to relate Hegel to modern stuff in physics, psychology, etc. Things have moved on already, and in some ways may have contradicted some of Hegel's thought. but in other ways they may confirm or extend it. I'm looking forward to some stuff on brain hemispheres...

Well if you don't have 50 hours or so spare to listen to the podcast, I'll try and give you a shout if I hear anything that might sound like a bit of an answer. But a quick scan of the first couple of pages of that thread confirms for me the wisdom of letting someone else do the hard work while I sit in my armchair and nod. But you do have me about right, in that I am looking for a philosophy that will sustain a view of psyche and consciousness and personal identity that at least leans somewhat in the direction of geist, because the individualism of today feels immiserating and false.

I have not listened to the podcast, but based on what is said here, rather than putting the question of mind into question it sounds as if the question has been answered in favor of a universal mind with its own purposes. — Fooloso4

Well that is my understanding of where we are heading in broad terms, but for sure Hegel doesn't answer on page one, but arrives there, and I am listening to what is a tertiary source not reading the original, so if you want to argue, I am not your man. I am looking to understand what is being proposed and that is all. Please don't critique Hegel on the basis of my student beginner's crib-sheet.

002

Quite a lot of placating of science-botherers here to counterbalance the woo of the introduction. Speaking of which, I have decided that A Course in Miracles is too steeped in Christian language and symbolism to be combined here, and the metaphysics is very different anyway. I might try to do something with it at some stage, but not here.

so we get the first classificatory system logic, nature, and geist, more or less titles of books or book sections, but the suggestion here already is that geist is in a sense the working out, or the interaction, of logic and nature. And this triadic form looks like it's going to be thematic, and the introduction of time as a way to resolve inherent contradictions.

003 This is the beginning of the logic.

Presuppositionless Being, is the same as Nothing. "If something has no attributes or properties at all, it is in fact nothing." So being and nothing cannot be distinguished and being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being. So there is the third term again, 'becoming'.

And from there we go into a discussion of time and flow, and becoming of course encompasses unbecoming, which you may or may not have heard of elsewhere. It is mentioned here that time is not in the logic as such, but as it is the 'science' of logic it immediately plunges into being and seems to imply time even though time is not a dimension of logic as such.

Hopefully that will become clearer as we go on, or someone here will clarify it for me?

I'm uncertain if 'stipulated' moral guidelines inherently possess genuine hearts."? — YiRu Li

This is a stipulation:-

Without genuine hearts, morality becomes hypocritical. — YiRu Li

And one I agree with. When I say 'stipulation' I mean such a defining or contextualising statement. So, I assume Confucius had a genuine heart when he said this, but it is the person who acts or speaks that does so wholeheartedly or hypocritically - for example, one can honour one's parents genuinely, or one can pretend to honour them to gain some favour from them. Statements themselves have no heart, but are mere rocks in the stream.

Thank you very much for that little lesson in written Chinese; I know nothing of it, but it is a very different system, and I strongly suspect that it results in a slightly different way of thinking, that is - I'm guessing - more immediate and holistic.

Isn't it the false promises of neoliberal capitalists on the right side of politics who promised these people the garden of eden; only to flush it with factory chemicals, doubt, fear and rage? — Christoffer

Well yes it is. I'm not going to disagree with the story, but I am disagreeing with the moral of the story.

The great and the good are responsible for the man in the street, and they are responsible for the man in the street's education. A society that produces a mass of people who can be led astray by false promises of a few bad men has FAILED. This is the bottom line of a democracy, that it has to produce people that value democracy otherwise it will become an autocracy.

So it behooves "decent Americans" to look to their own failings and the failings of the whole society, because their stewardship has led to neoliberal capitalists and deplorables and Trump.

Not all. — wonderer1

Yes I was generalising about the overall effect of US society as a whole, which has produced trump supporters in millions. I accept there are decent people, but the democratic government and the society as a whole has produced Trump and his acolytes by the million, not a few exceptional odd-balls.

The implication of the existence of millions of deplorables in a society is that there is something deplorable about the society as a whole.

One thing cannot be denied though, that the culture that produced such a bunch of ...

downright utterly stupid people who basically joined a massive cult — Christoffer

... is Western liberal democracy as practiced in the US. All the clever sensible people who wouldn't ever join a cult surely neglected their responsibility to educate their fellow citizens rather better than they have done, because clearly those people are not capable of educating themselves. That their cruel and imprudent behaviour to their brothers is now having undesirable consequences should have been predictable and should have been avoided, so perhaps they are not quite as clever and sensible as they think.

No, but I doubt they would admit it.

Supratrochelar. — javi2541997

What a nerve!

What good is a goodneness that is weak? — baker

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
— Lao Tzu

A moral equality is stipulated.
— unenlightened

Authentic Chinese civilization has never stipulated the concept of equality or morality; it is referred to as 'Tao.'
'Tao' could be translated as 'The Way', 'Science', 'Key Point', '20/80 Principle', or 'Enlightenment Thinking'. or even 'Holy spirit'. — YiRu Li

I have read Chuang Tzŭ a long time ago, and have an outsider's understanding of Tao. I think morality as understood in the West is more in tune with Confucius' thought. A matter of duty in a social world. Confucius is more secular, and Taoism more spiritual. Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish (don't over do it.) It's a great government that can take that sort of advice!

The problem is that you (plural) don't know whom you're up against and you don't even care to find out what it would take to win against them.
— baker

What would it take to win against them?
— Fooloso4
I'm not sure, but playing the good boy/good girl and expecting them to play good boys/good girls certainly isn't working. They just laugh it off. — baker

Here is a frame of good versus evil. Within this frame there is no possible answer. How can a fair player win against a cheater? They cannot, they will always lose to the aces up the sleeve. And the conclusion then is that the good guys have to cheat like the bad guys do. The old gold of "They go low, we go high" does not work, it is fool's gold.

Therefore the first step towards a solution must be to reject the comfortable fantasy that "we" are the good guys, and "they" are the problem. Because clearly, for a large minority of America, it is the other way about. Clearly, for these people the game is already rigged so they always lose and they don't want to play by "our" rules any more.

And that is the plain truth, that the game has been rigged from the beginning, to favour the few, the establishment. This has been somewhat hidden because with strong growth in the economy few have to be losing even in a rigged game. As long as the deplorables get their bread and circuses, they won't notice anything.

There's no shortage of circuses, but the bread is running short. That is the problem.

As a humorous aside, Trump's statement is incoherent. — EricH

It's a lesson learned from advertisers, that incoherent statements cannot be shown to be false. or inciting, or threatening, or irresponsible - because they say nothing. It happens a lot, and it's deliberate, learned and practiced, and every time you hear it from a politician, you can be sure they are a crook, because no serious politician is inarticulate or linguistically incompetent.

more than an insignificant fringe — jorndoe

Those that can might like a listen to The Coming Storm podcast. A review here.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/08/the-coming-storm-review-gabriel-gatehouse-bbc-qanon-conspiracy-movement-now-where-were-we-podcast-barry-cryer-bob-gemma-cairney-gets-classical

Mcarthyism deserves dishonourable mention in this context.

• Fascism is the revolution of the entitled.
  
  
• Declining powers are vulnerable, because we have been taught that growth is normal and decline is a crisis.
  
  
• There is no special virtue in the American psyche, that would make them immune.

Not just California - I'm not French.


Meanwhile here's a cheery site that aggregates greenhouse gasses into a CO2 equivalent measure, and finds that when all the gases are accounted for it is equivalent to 500 ppm currently. Or rather, a while ago.

https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/

Fortunately no one understands or cares about that either.

I remember having an epileptic fit from overheating many years ago in a vineyard in the South of France. It was ever thus, but now more-so, and it's only just begun.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31122023/california-farmworkers-dying-in-the-heat

[quoteTao Te Ching]Heaven and earth are ruthless;
They see the ten thousand things as dummies.
The wise are ruthless;
They see the people as dummies.

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.[/quote]

Dummies caught between heaven and earth are not entitled to make universal judgements. The cunning of Geist is to use your suffering and your despair to hold you to its purpose. One fantasy fights another.

The EU has a principle called "Subsidiarity", which is that decisions should be made at the most local level possible. A Global issue such as climate change needs a global agenda to be agreed, and then local implementation. Likewise, we need global pollution limits, and local control and inspection.

The path for US government will be bi-directional according to this principle, a devolving of power to state and on to local government on the one hand, and and submission to, and support of, global organisation - the UN, court of Human rights, and other multi national bodies on the other.

Edit: another principle should also be to set a limit to the number of governing bodies having jurisdiction over anyone to - say - 5: global, (sub?)continental, state, county, and parish for example. [One more or less might be arguable.]