Pinkard #16

#s 17 and 18 seem to go along with this, but combined are too long for one entry. No law against looking ahead at them.

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"16. In so doing, this formalism asserts that this monotony and abstract universality is the absolute, and it assures us that any dissatisfaction with such universality is only an incapacity to master the absolute standpoint and keep a firm grip on it.

However much there was once a time when the empty possibility of imagining things differently was sufficient to refute a view, and however much the general thought, the same mere possibility, had also at that time the entirely positive value of actual cognition, nonetheless nowadays we see the universal Idea in this form of non-actuality get all value attributed to it, and we see that what counts as the speculative way of considering things turns out to be the dissolution of the distinct and the determinate, or, instead turns out to be simply the casting of what is distinct and determinate into the abyss of the void, an act lacking all development or having no justification in its own self at all.

In that mode, to examine any existence in the way in which it is in the absolute consists in nothing more than saying it is in fact being spoken of as, say, a “something,” whereas in the absolute, in the A = A, there is no such “something,” for in the absolute, everything is one.

To oppose this one bit of knowledge, namely, that in the absolute everything is the same, to the knowing which makes distinctions and which has been either fulfilled or is seeking and demanding to be fulfilled – that is, to pass off its absolute as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black – is an utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition.

– The formalism which has been indicted and scorned by the philosophy of recent times and which has been generated again in it will not disappear from science even though its inadequacy is well known and felt. It will not disappear until the knowing of absolute actuality has become completely clear about its own nature. – Taking into consideration that working out any general idea is made easier by first having it right before us, it is worth indicating here at least very roughly what those ideas are. At the same time, we should also take this opportunity to rid ourselves of a few forms which are only impediments to philosophical cognition.

Pinkard #s 12, 13

"12. Yet this newness is no more completely actual than is the newborn child, and it is essential to bear this in mind. Its immediacy, or its concept, is the first to come on the scene. However, just as little of a building is finished when its foundation has been laid, so too reaching the concept of the whole is equally as little as the whole itself. When we wish to see an oak with its powerful trunk, its spreading branches, and its mass of foliage, we are not satisfied if instead we are shown an acorn. In the same way, science,
the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not completed in its initial stages.

The beginning of a new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in the diversity of forms of cultural formation; it is both the prize at the end of a winding path just as it is the prize won through much struggle and effort. It is the whole which has returned into itself from out of its succession and extension and has come to be the simple concept of itself. The actuality of this simple whole consists in those embodiments which, having become moments of the whole, again develop themselves anew and give themselves a figuration, but this time in their new element, in the new meaning which itself has come to be.

13. On the one hand, while the initial appearance of the new world is just the whole enshrouded in its simplicity, or its universal ground, still, on the other hand, the wealth of its bygone existence is in recollection still current for consciousness. In that newly appearing shape, consciousness misses both the dispersal and the particularization of content, but it misses even more the development of the form as a result of which the differences are securely determined and are put into the order of their fixed relationships. Without this development, science has no general intelligibility,and it seems to be the esoteric possession of only a few individuals – an esoteric possession, because at first science is only available in its concept, or in what is internal to it, and it is the possession of a few individuals, since its appearance in this not-yet fully unfurled form makes its existence into something wholly singular.

Only what is completely determinate is at the same time exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and possessed by everybody. The intelligible form of science is the path offered to everyone and equally available for all. To achieve rational knowledge through our own intellect is the rightful demand of a consciousness which is approaching the status of science. This is so because the understanding is thinking, the pure I as such, and because what is intelligible is what is already familiar and common both to science and to the unscientific consciousness alike, and it is that through which unscientific consciousness is immediately enabled to enter into science."

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Developing and describing through metaphor his system of thinking as science. The acorn to the tree to its crown. The infant to the mature person. Hegel, however, is taking it beyond the teleology of the individual. The new matures to the final simplicity of itself - which might be the end - but Hegel identifies this as just the occasion for a new new. Perhaps in the sense of a spiral rather than a circle. except such images imply a static architecture of process - an idea that Hegel is at pains to deconstruct.

A line from Dylan Thomas (a century-and-a-half later): "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower...". The poet grasps the central image - "The force" - although incompletely and in personal terms. For Thomas this "force... is my destroyer." Thomas ends with,
"And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm."

Hegel, however, transcends even this image of life as force and beginning and death as end. For Hegel, realization into full actuality as the simplicity of itself understood as itself, is at once and the same time a "gray" death and the ground of a new beginning. In this context, another qoute from Hegel make more sense:

"When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in" (Philosophy of Right).

The tree again, seed, seedling, sapling, mature tree, finally fallen tree. But the source for a whole new beginning, that future grounded in the rotting tree, but itself not determined by its ground

And the past is archive of the new, being its ground and providing reference points, and without which the "child" both feels and is insecure, lacking the structure and bounds of the old, and not yet establishing its own.

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.

And Hegel is going to work out just what that logic is.

Correction/refinement welcome!

Pinkard #s 10, 11

Again, two paragraphs that seem to work together.

"10. Even to a lesser extent must this kind of science-renouncing self-satisfaction claim that such enthusiasm and obscurantism is itself a bit higher than science. This prophetic prattle imagines that it resides at the center of things, indeed that it is profundity itself, and, viewing determinateness (the horos) with contempt, it intentionally stands aloof from both the concept and from necessity, which it holds to be a type of reflection at home in mere finitude. However, in the way that there is an empty breadth, there is also an empty depth, just as likewise there is an extension of substance which spills over into finite diversity without having the power to keep that diversity together – this is an intensity without content, which, although it makes out as if it were a sheer force without dispersion, is in fact
no more than superficiality itself.

The force of spirit is only as great as its expression, and its depth goes only as deep as it trusts itself to disperse itself and to lose itself in its explication of itself. – At the same time, if this substantial knowing, itself so totally devoid of the concept, pretends to have immersed the very ownness of the self in the essence and to philosophize in all holiness and truth, then what it is really doing is just concealing from itself the fact that instead of devoting itself to God, it has, by spurning all moderation and determinateness, instead simply given itself free rein within itself to the contingency of that content and then, within that content, given free rein to its own arbitrariness. – While abandoning themselves to the unbounded fermentation of the substance, the proponents of that view suppose that, by throwing a blanket over self-consciousness and by surrendering all understanding, they are God’s very own, that they are those to whom God imparts wisdom in their sleep. What they in fact receive and what they give birth to in their sleep are, for that reason also only dreams.

11. Besides, it is not difficult to see that our own epoch is a time of birth and a transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence and its ways of thinking; it is now of a mind to let them recede into the past and to immerse itself in its own work at reshaping itself. To be sure, spirit is never to be conceived as being at rest but rather as ever advancing. However, just as with a child, who after a long silent period of nourishment draws his first breath and shatters the gradualness of only quantitative growth – it makes a qualitative leap and is born – so too, in bringing itself to cultural maturity, spirit ripens slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world,
whose tottering condition is only intimated by its individual symptoms. The kind of frivolity and boredom which chips away at the established order and the indeterminate presentiment of what is yet unknown are all harbingers of imminent change. This gradual process of dissolution, which has not altered the physiognomy of the whole, is interrupted by the break of day, which in a flash and at a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world."

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It is some work to read these, but the rewards are there! I think these paragraphs are best savoured for their style. Readers of Kant, and here Hegel, et al, will have noted a from time-to-time genteel but crushing brutality of rhetoric and invective directed against their critics and enemies that sometimes animates their pages. .

And imo, it's worth keeping in mind the forces in play during and before Hegel's writing. Folks then had not radio nor TV nor professional sports; instead they had a new awakening of philosophy that in its topics concerned the very fabric of their lives, from tyranny, however benign, to their own lives and purposes, to freedom - and the French Revolution to Napoleon's wars, brutal in themselves, that were rearranging everything about European life and that from devastation promised new possibility. The Enlightenment had irrupted into common life, and common life, apparently, had grasped it with a firm hold and were talking and writing about it, and weighing every nuance on finely tuned scales.

1

Yes, but since contradictions cannot be instantiated, (by the ontological principle of contradiction) they are not possible. So, the formulations mean the same thing. — Dfpolis

2

What is contradictory is outside the scope of being and so not a limit on being. — Dfpolis

3

The laws of nature, for example, act throughout the cosmos, but have no parts outside of parts. — Dfpolis

4

and an Infinite Being can do any possible act. — Dfpolis

5

Infinite being can act in all possible ways in all pos­sible places at all possible times. — Dfpolis

6

Nor is the universe God because it is constrained by the laws of nature, which are more restrictive than what is logically pos­sible. — Dfpolis

7

Thinking something does not make it exist. — Dfpolis

8

So, we can only prove God's existence if knowledge of it is implicit in experience. People with good intuition can see it directly, but may not be able to articulate it for others. — Dfpolis

9

If a being exists, its explanation must exist. — Dfpolis

10

If something exists, its existence is explained either by itself or by another. — Dfpolis

1) What does contradiction inhere in? Let's set aside once and for all apparent contradiction. Now, your #7 in mind, we have to ask if contradiction is merely something thought, an artifact of reason arising out of a cognitive juxtaposing of conceivable circumstances, that in juxtaposing them informs reason that the reality of the juxtaposition cannot be? The trouble with this is it's just a mental construct, a thought thing. By your #7, then, a something that does not exist by being thought.

Time for you to define existence and being, or to save you some trouble, to correct mine. Allow me to make a division into two classes: mental reality and extra-mental reality. Seven, for example, is a mental reality and not an extra-mental reality, as are all numbers, truth, justice, love, and the American way. I hold God to be a mental reality. A brick, on the other hand, possesses the quality of extra-mental reality. To know this extra-mental reality requires the application of practical knowledge - and it would be beyond tedious in this thread, although perhaps exciting in other contexts - to lay out how we can know anything about extra-mental reality if all we've got is mental reality. Practical knowledge, for present purpose, shall be the sword that cuts that particular Gordian knot.

So we have a real world and a world of thought, and we can mostly, and in theory always, tell the two apart. Contradiction, then, being of thought, is not reified by being thought. But that only tells us about our own thought and our own limitations on our own thoughts. Our suppositions about contradictions, then, remain exactly - merely - and only that. As such, this thinking must be silent on the capabilities of God.

That is the account of contradiction as a creature of reason, as such irrelevant to God. Or, contradiction is more than just a creature of reason - and God is, or is not, subject to constraint by that contradiction. That is, in the extra-mental world we inhabit, there are, plain and simple, things that cannot be and events that cannot happen. In which cases, God can either be and do them, thus doing contradictory things, or, God cannot, and thus God is neither fundamental nor primordial, but derives from a more basic set of rules that are not God.

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I would leave this at one item, for practical reasons, and resume with others in other posts. But perhaps a possibility of resolution lies in your response to this question.

Your #s 9 and 10. I read these as a variation on Leibiz's "Nothing is without reason." And following your distinctions about "explanation," I take both reason and explanation to be in themselves reasoned verbal references to the facts that themselves account for the thing being explained. That is, references to extra-mental realities. It's easy to think in terms of cause, here, but "cause" is a very tricky word.

It seems to me that the extra-mental reality referenced by the explanation must be coterminous with the thing explained in both space and time. I do not mean this in any complicated way, only that for an explanation to be the explanation, there can be no other intermediate explanation. Rather the explanation must be im-mediate. E.g., my lighting the fuse is not the explanation of why the dynamite explodes.

This says that if one thing exists (extra-mentally), then other things must exist (extra-mentally) as explanation. But this "argument" is a mental construct - not necessarily conclusive with respect to extra-mental reality. The notorious and fatal infinite regress is thus a product of the argument and not necessarily a feature of extra-mental reality.

Thus reason seems limited by itself and its own limitations. And to make this very brief, but not so brief that you will miss the point, God would seem to stand entirely outside of what reason can know or itself reason in terms of extra-mental realities. What reason knows cannot be God. God, then, can only stand as a mutable mental reality/construct that in terms of extra-mental reality can only stand as the unreasoned answer to questions not yet answered, or that may be unanswerable. But that implies that God, as answer, cannot be knowable except in speculation or in terms of efficacy as an answer, in neither case as an extra-mental reality; as real, as being a being, but only as an idea - the power and efficacy of ideas being a whole other topic.

Too bad we don't have post #s here, but can you give me at least a small text string that I can identify the post by? That way I can quickly search for it.

A-theism plays against theism for (its) meaning. The privative a- establishes that. Two possibilities: 1) atheism is an independent word/idea in its own right without reference to theism. What might it mean? #s 2 (implying as you say #1), and 3 above seem about right; that is, not a rejection of any particular, but rather an entire genus of belief. We might call this a positive sense of atheism. Oddly though, we define it in negative terms. Positively, I suppose it the expression of confidence in the eventual answerability of all answerable questions in natural terms aka science, in terms of natural processes, however obscure or difficult to establish (the point being to distinguish between kinds of answers, e.g,, scientific and theological). .

Or 2) it's against theism, which means that theism must first be defined and that a-theism will be no better defined than the concept it opposes, being defined in terms of that concept.

Atheism in this positive sense seems respectable and thought-out. And for this sense, theism is a tar-baby that atheists had best not grasp, because their own understanding of atheism passes right by theism. A-theism, on the other hand, seems problematic at best, and a mire that non-critical thinkers are caught in and waste other people's time with, to their discredit, if they but knew it.

Sense? Disagreement?