'Journey of the companions'
by Josef von Ratschky, (1757 - 1810)
A higher state of knowledge
You are now approaching,
Wandering firmly on your path,
Knowing that it is the path of wisdom.
Only the serene man
May approach the source of light.
Take, o Pilgrim, as an escort
Your brother's blessing.
Let caution be always on your side,
And curiosity guide your steps!
Constantly test yourself and never become
Dependent on the insanity of lazy blindness.
The journey of life is certainly rough,
But sweet is also its reward,
Which the wanderer does await, wisely knowing
That his journey will increase it.
Happy is he who can say:
There is a light upon my life's road!
'Lied zur Gesellenreise'
Die ihr einem neuen Grade
Der Erkenntnis nun euch naht,
Wandert fest auf eurem Pfade,
Wißt, es ist der Weisheit Pfad.
Nur der unverdroßne Mann
Mag dem Quell des Lichts sich nah'n.
Nehmt, o Pilger, zum Geleite
Eurer Brüder Segen mit!
Vorsicht sei euch stets zur Seite;
Wißgier leite euren Schritt!
Prüft und werdet nie dem Wahn
Träger Blindheit untertan!
Rauh ist zwar des Lebens Reise,
Aber süß ist auch der Preis,
Der des Wand'rers harrt, der weise
Seine Fahrt zu nützen weiß.
Glücklich, wer einst sagen kann:
Es ist Licht auf meiner Bahn!
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'Psyché et Proserpine', 1735, Charles-Joseph Natoire
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 - 1831). 'The Science of Logic'.
I ended the previous article with a hole in the Whole that the Understanding tries to fill, this hole being none other than being-within-self and this ends up being a negativity that motivates the never ending circular process of the logic. It is the silent fourth that disturbs the unity of Absolute Idea, guaranteeing that the process never comes to rest but this is to look ahead - or perhaps behind for if pure Being is incomplete Absolute Idea contains its necessary supplement. Absolute Idea has something that pure Being does not - an otherness now seen as indistinguishable from selfhood. In fact, every otherness nature included is Absolute Idea's own self. As Hegel puts it earlier as this relation, Idea is the process of sundering itself into individuality and its inorganic nature, and again of bringing this inorganic nature under the power of the subject and returning to the first simple universality.
'But since the result now is that the idea is the unity of the concept and objectivity, the true, we must not regard it as just a goal which is to be approximated but itself remains always a kind of beyond; we must rather regard everything as being actual only to the extent that it has the idea in it and expresses it. It is not just that the subject matter, the objective and the subjective world, ought to be in principle congruent with the idea; the two are themselves rather the congruence of concept and reality; a reality that does not correspond to the concept is mere appearance, something subjective, accidental, arbitrary, something which is not the truth. When it is said that there is no subject matter to be found in experience which is perfectly congruent with the idea, the latter is opposed to the actual as a subjective standard; but there is no saying what anything actual might possibly be in truth, if its concept is not in it and its objectivity does not measure up to this concept; it would then be a nothing. Indeed, the mechanical and the chemical object, like a subject devoid of spirit and a spirit conscious only of finitude and not of its essence, do not, according to their various natures, have their concept concretely existing in them in its own free form. But they can be something at all true only in so far as they are the union of their concept and reality, of their soul and their body. Wholes like the state and the church cease to exist in concreto when the unity of their concept and their reality is dissolved; the human being, the living thing, is dead when soul and body are parted in it; dead nature, the mechanical and the chemical world – that is, when 'the dead' is taken to mean the inorganic world, for the expression would otherwise have no positive meaning at all – this dead nature, then, if it is separated into its concept and its reality, is nothing but the subjective abstraction of a thought form and a formless matter. Spirit that were not idea, not the unity of the concept with itself, not the concept that has the concept itself as its reality, would be dead spirit, spiritless spirit, a material object'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
'That which is other than thought will not remain impervious to it. For intelligence has already discovered that these limiting characteristics dissolve into a more inclusive perspective', explains John W. Burbidge. Its selfhood therefore comprehends all Mediation. The significance of Mediation is that Absolute Idea is revealed to be an active, dialectic thinker c that thinks itself a. As such, it has personality. Something Hegel declared to be missing in Spinozist substance. According to Clark Butler, the reference to personality invokes the French revolution. 'In. early nineteenth-century German philosophy no one could invoke a principle of personality without consciously referring to the Kantian notion of the person as a rational end in itself'.
The highest, most concentrated point is the pure personality which, solely through the absolute dialectic which is its nature, no less embraces and holds everything within itself because it makes itself the supremely free - the simplicity which is the first immediacy and Universality.
'This expansion may be regarded as the moment of content, and in the whole as the first premise; the universal is communicated to the wealth of content, is immediately received in it. But the relation has also a second, negative or dialectical side. The enrichment proceeds in the necessity of the concept, it is contained by it, and every determination is a reflection into itself. Each new stage of exteriorization, that is, of further determination, is also a withdrawing into itself, and the greater the extension, just as dense is the intensity. The richest is therefore the most concrete and the most subjective, and that which retreats to the simplest depth is the mightiest and the most all-encompassing. The highest and most intense point is the pure personality that, solely by virtue of the absolute dialectic which is its nature, equally embraces and holds everything within itself, for it makes itself into the supremely free – the simplicity which is the first immediacy and universality'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
Absolute Knowing (Method)
Personality implies that a is Life and c is Cognition of Life. Accordingly, Absolute Idea is the return to Life but also the sublation of it. Life is immediate Idea - impenetrable atomic subjectivity.
'The absolute idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical idea, each of which, of itself still one-sided, possesses the idea only as a sought-for beyond and unattained goal; each is therefore a synthesis of striving, each possessing as well as not possessing the idea within it, passing over from one thought to the other without bringing the two together but remaining fixed in the contradiction of the two. The absolute idea, as the rational concept that in its reality only rejoins itself, is by virtue of this immediacy of its objective identity, on the one hand, a turning back to life; on the other hand, it has equally sublated this form of its immediacy and harbours the most extreme opposition within. The concept is not only soul, but free subjective concept that exists for itself and therefore has personality – the practical objective concept that is determined in and for itself and is as person impenetrable, atomic subjectivity – but which is not, just the same, exclusive singularity; it is rather explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other has its own objectivity for its subject matter. All the rest is error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, and transitoriness; the absolute idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
But Life ended up standing for self-sacrifice, so that Absolute Knowing is the sacrifice of self-sacrifice. Cognition, in contrast, is mediated Idea. It cognizes itself as Life and so it too sacrifices itself. And, in the very last step of the Logic, Absolute Idea returns to immediacy in its final act of self-manifestation. Absolute Knowing is therefore the unity of doing (or thinking) and being - the original unity from which these two oppositions emerge. Speculative Reason has the last word. Absolute Knowing is equally immediacy and mediation. It is not a quiescent third, but. is self-mediating movement and activity. As that with which we began was the universal, so the result is the individual, the concrete, the subject.
'Now, on closer examination, the third is the immediate, but the immediate through sublation of mediation, the simple through the sublating of difference, the positive through the sublating of the negative; it is the concept that has realized itself through its otherness, and through the sublating of this reality has rejoined itself and has restored its absolute reality, its simple self-reference. This result is therefore the truth. It is just as much immediacy as mediation – though these forms of judgments, that the third is immediacy and mediation, or that it is the unity of the two, are not capable of grasping it, for it is not a dormant third but, exactly like this unity, self-mediating movement and activity. – Just as that with which we began was the universal, so the result is the singular, the concrete, the subject; what the former is in itself, the latter is now equally for itself: the universal is posited in the subject. The two first moments of triplicity are abstract, untrue moments that are dialectical for that very reason, and through this their negativity make themselves into the subject. For us at first, the concept itself is both the universal that exists in itself and the negative that exists for itself, and also the third term that exists in and for itself, the universal that runs through all the moments of the syllogism; but this third is the conclusion in which the concept mediates itself with itself through its negativity and is thereby posited for itself as the universal and the identity of its moments'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
Absolute Knowing knows itself as a living Individual that must manifest itself in otherness. Absolute Knowing is spirit's own manifestation in the world - and spirit's knowledge of its own act. It is a unity of being and doing. In Absolute Knowing, rational Notion in its reality meets only with itself.
'It is the sole subject matter and content of philosophy. Since it contains all determinateness within it, and its essence consists in returning through its self-determination and particularization back to itself, it has various shapes, and the business of philosophy is to recognize it in these. Nature and spirit are in general different modes of exhibiting its existence, art and religion its different modes of apprehending itself and giving itself appropriate existence. Philosophy has the same content and the same purpose as art and religion, but it is the highest mode of apprehending the absolute idea, because its mode, that of the concept, is the highest. Hence it seizes those shapes of real and ideal finitude, as well of infinity and holiness, and comprehends them and itself. The derivation and cognition of these particular modes are now the further business of the particular philosophical sciences. Also the logicality of the absolute idea can be called a mode of it; but mode signifies a particular kind, a determinateness of form, whereas the logicality of the idea is the universal mode in which all particular modes are sublated and enveloped. The logical idea is the idea itself in its pure essence, the idea which is enclosed in simple identity within its concept and in reflective shining has as yet to step into a form determinateness. The Logic thus exhibits the self-movement of the absolute idea only as the original word, a word which is an utterance, but one that in being externally uttered has immediately vanished again. The idea is, therefore, only in this self-determination of apprehending itself; it is in pure thought, where difference is not yet otherness, but is and remains perfectly transparent to itself. – The logical idea thus has itself, as the infinite form, for its content – form that constitutes the opposite of content inasmuch as the latter is the form determination that has withdrawn into itself and has been so sublated in identity that this concrete identity stands over against the identity developed as form; the content has the shape of an other and of something given as against the form that as such stands simply in reference, and whose determinateness is posited at the same time as reflective shine. – More exactly, the absolute idea itself has only this for its content, namely that the form determination is its own completed totality, the pure content. Now the determinateness of the idea and the entire course traversed by this determinateness has constituted the subject matter of the science of logic, and out of this course the absolute idea has come forth for itself; thus to be for itself, however, has shown itself to amount to this, namely that determinateness does not have the shape of a content, but that it is simply as form, and that accordingly the idea is the absolutely universal idea. What is left to be considered here, therefore, is thus not a content as such, but the universal character of its form – that is, method'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
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'Self knowledge'
by Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931)
Your hearts know in silence
the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound
of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words
which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers
the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
Your soul must needs rise
and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths
be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge
with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, 'I have found the truth', but rather,
'I have found a truth'.
Say not, 'I have found the path of the soul'.
Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path'.
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'Persephone, 2nd Century AD, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Holding a torch lighting her way and a sheaf of grain symbolizing abundance.
__________________________
Because it creates the world by sending forth the Understanding in its abstraction in order to begin the Logic, Absolute Knowing is 'the original unity between subjectivity and objectivity' and 'motility is also acknowledged thereby as a fundamental character of Being' as Herbert Marcuse explains. Method is Absolute Form's other name. It represents the stage at which there is no transcendental beyond to which self-negating Idea can withdraw. Hegel is keen to emphasize that Method is not simply given. As such, it would be external to Logic and hence subjective. Method 'is the opposite of instrumental knowledge or of external reflection, which would be merely subjective' says Jean Hyppolite. Rather, Method has built up itself from itself, and its theme from the beginning has been dissolution of form. Its entire course, in which all possible shapes of a given content and of objects came up for consideration, has demonstrated their transition and untruth.
'Method may appear at first to be just the manner in which cognition proceeds, and this is in fact its nature. But as method this manner of proceeding is not only a modality of being determined in and for itself; it is a modality of cognition, and as such is posited as determined by the concept and as form, since form is the soul of all objectivity and all otherwise determined content has its truth in form alone. If the content is again assumed as given to the method and of a nature of its own, then method, so understood, is just like the logical realm in general a merely external form. But against this assumption appeal can be made, not only to the fundamental concept of what constitutes logic, but to the entire logical course in which all the shapes of a given content and of objects came up for consideration. This course has shown the transitoriness and the untruth of all such shapes; also that no given object is capable of being the foundation to which the absolute form would relate as only an external and accidental determination; that, on the contrary, it is the absolute form that has proved itself to be the absolute foundation and the ultimate truth. For this course the method has resulted as the absolutely self-knowing concept, as the concept that has the absolute, both as subjective and objective, as its subject matter, and consequently as the pure correspondence of the concept and its reality, a concrete existence that is the concept itself'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
Method was the movement by which all forms erased themselves. Now, at the close, Method itself is isolated as the core of all there is. It is soul and substance, and anything whatever is comprehended and known in its truth only when it is completely subjugated to the method.
'Accordingly, what is to be considered as method here is only the movement of the concept itself. We already know the nature of this movement, but it now has, first, the added significance that the concept is all, and that its movement is the universal absolute activity, the self-determining and self-realizing movement. The method is therefore to be acknowledged as the universal, internal and external mode, free of restrictions, and as the absolutely infinite force to which no object that may present itself as something external, removed from reason and independent of it, could offer resistance, or be of a particular nature opposite to it, and could not be penetrated by it. It is therefore soul and substance, and nothing is conceived and known in its truth unless completely subjugated to the method; it is the method proper to each and every fact because its activity is the concept. This is also the truer meaning of its universality; according to the universality of reflection, it is taken only as the method for all things; but according to the universality of the idea, it is both the manner of cognition, of the concept subjectively aware of itself, and the objective manner, or rather the substantiality of things – that is, of concepts as they first appear as others to representation and reflection. It is therefore not only the highest force of reason, or rather its sole and absolute force, but also reason’s highest and sole impulse to find and recognize itself through itself in all things. – Second, here we also have the distinction of the method from the concept as such, the particularization of the method. As the concept was considered for itself, it appeared in its immediacy; the reflection, or the concept considering it, fell on the side of our knowledge. The method is this knowledge itself, for which the concept is not only as subject matter but is as its own subjective act, the instrument and the means of cognitive activity, distinct from this activity and yet the activity’s own essentiality. In cognition as enquiry, the method likewise occupies the position of an instrument, as a means that stands on the side of the subject, connecting it with the object. The subject in this syllogism is one extreme, the object is the other, and in conclusion the subject unites through its method with the object without however uniting with itself there. The extremes remain diverse, because And since Method is self-erasure, finite thoughts are only truly subject, method, and object are not posited as the one identical concept; the syllogism is therefore always the formal syllogism; the premise in which the subject posits the form on its side as its method is an immediate determination and contains therefore the determinations of the form – as we have seen, of definition, division, and so forth – as matters of fact found ready-made in the subject. In true cognition, on the contrary, method is not only an aggregate of certain determinations, but the determinateness in-and-for-itself of the concept, and the concept is the middle term only because it equally has the significance of the objective; in the conclusion, therefore, the objective does not attain only an external determinateness by virtue of the method, but is posited rather in its identity with the subjective concept'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
And since Method is self-erasure, finite thoughts are only truly known when they pass away. Hegel is thus the modern Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, of whom Hegel said, 'there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic'.
'If we put aside the Ionics, who did not understand the Absolute as Thought, and the Pythagoreans likewise, we have the pure Being of the Eleatics, and the dialectic which denies all finite relationships. Thought to the latter is the process of such manifestations; the world in itself is the apparent, and pure Being alone the true. The dialectic of Zeno thus lays hold of the determinations which rest in the content itself, but it may, in so far, also be called subjective dialectic, inasmuch as it rests in the contemplative subject, and the one, without this movement of the dialectic, is abstract identity. The next step from the existence of the dialectic as movement in the subject, is that it must necessarily itself become objective. If Aristotle blames Thales for doing away with motion, because change cannot be understood from Being, and likewise misses the actual in the Pythagorean numbers and Platonic Ideas, taken as the substances of the things which participate in them, Heraclitus at least understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic. The dialectic is thus thre-fold: ( α ) the external dialectic, a reasoning which goes over and over again without ever reaching the soul of the thing; ( β ) immanent dialectic of the object, but falling within the contemplation of the subject; ( γ ) the objectivity of Heraclitus which takes the dialectic itself as principle. The advance requisite and made by Heraclitus is the progression from Being as the first immediate thought, to the category of Becoming as the second. This is the first concrete, the Absolute, as in it the unity of opposites. Thus with Heraclitus the philosophic Idea is to be met with in its speculative form; the reasoning of Parmenides and Zeno is abstract understanding. Heraclitus was thus universally esteemed a deep philosopher and even was decried as such. Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic'.
- 'Lectures on the History of Philosophy'
Method is to be recognized as the absolutely infinite force, to which no object, presenting itself as something external, remote from and independent of reason, could offer resistance. In other words, Method requires that the finite must by its own logic pass away; resistance is futile as the Borg would say ('Star Trek' reference there for the uninitiated).
The silent fourth. Recall Slavoj Zizek's suggestion that there is a silent fourth - an external reflection that witnesses the triadic steps of the Logic unfold. There is a passage in the final chapter in which Hegel counts four steps in method - the usual three and perhaps the silent fourth. The usual three are immediacy, its negation, and the negation of the negation. The negation of the negation, however, can also be reckoned as fourth. There is added to the traditional three terms an absolute negativity or the second negative. That is to say, the first negative is Negation in Quality and Negation. The second negative is the silent fourth. It is Cognition, which also erases itself in favour of Absolute Idea. Consistent with this, Hegel suggests that, for finite cognition, Method is not End but Means. To invoke the syllogism of the subject-object distinction, Method (thought in general) is the middle term of subject and object. Through Method, the subject uses thought to comprehend objects. Yet thought also divides the subject from the object. The extremes of the merely formal syllogism remain diverse. Diverse things, however, self-erase. Self-erasure of the extremes, in turn, is precisely what True Cognition is. In True Cognition, the extremes of the syllogism erase themselves and remove themselves to the middle term, which is Method - Notion determined in and for itself. In Method, the silent fourth is dissolved. But it will emerge again in the beginning as the perspective able to discern the difference between what Pure Being was supposed to be and what it was (not) actually.
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'Who loves not Knowledge?'
by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS (1809 – 1892)
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.
But on her forehead sits a fire:
She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.
Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain --
She cannot fight the fear of death.
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain
Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst
All barriers in her onward race
For power. Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.
A higher hand must make her mild,
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child:
For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.
O, friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind,
I would the great world grew like thee,
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.
Liza Lehmann (1862 - 1918), 'Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail', 1899, stanzas 1-4 [ voice and piano ], from 'In Memoriam', no. 12:
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'The Return of Persephone', c. 1906, George Hitchcock
_________________________
Logic and nature. The Logic concludes with some observations that purport to position Logic vis-ä-vis nature and mind. Absolute Idea, Hegel tells us, is the sole subject matter and content of philosophy. All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavoor, caprice and transitoriness. Nuzzo holds this passage to be the key to the last chapter. Method is what all prior steps have in common. To the extent anything is added to this, it is an external reflection - a diversity which must erase itself. Method is the only thing left standing, and for this reason the logic can legitimately end with its derivation. All things dissolve themselves into Absolute Idea. Absolute Idea, however, likewise negates itself - differentiates itself from itself - thereby producing nature. As mentioned in a previous article according to John W. Burbidge, 'The move from the science of logic to the philosophy of nature has been one of the most difficult aspects of Hegel's whole philosophy. His early colleague, Friedrich Schelling, was to call it an illegitimate leap into another genus'. Yet, if the Logic includes its own gap or aporia, why can't we name this very gap nature? As it happens what is overlooked, and I may go into this if I do a series on Hegel's philosophy of Nature (I bet you can't wait) is that Hegel in the philosophy of Nature is still talking about concepts just as he is in the Logic.
Nature yields mind (Geist), which in turn yields Absolute Idea. Mind stands for history, the negation of nature explains John F. Hoffmeyer. In this fashion Hegel previews his Encyclopaedia, which consists of the so-called Lesser Logic, the 'Philosophy of Nature' and the 'Philosophy of Mind', in that order. These individual sciences are links in this chain each of which has an antecedent and a successor- or, expressed more accurately, has only the antecedent and indicates its successor in its conclusion.
'By virtue of the nature of the method just indicated, the science presents itself as a circle that winds around itself, where the mediation winds the end back to the beginning which is the simple ground; the circle is thus a circle of circles, for each single member ensouled by the method is reflected into itself so that, in returning to the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of a new member. Fragments of this chain are the single sciences, each of which has a before and an after – or, more accurately said, has in possession only the before and in its conclusion points to its after'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
Michael Inwood our resident grouch proclaims transition beyond method to be incomprehensible:
'It is clear... that something special is supposed to happen at the end of the Logic, something of a kind which has not happened within the Logic. The fact that logic is a totality, and a circular totality at that, explains why it spills over into another totality, nature. But how does it do that? There is, on the face of it, no reason to suppose that a self-generating, interlocking system of one kind will necessarily "freely release itself into other such systems. One might be tempted to conclude that Hegel is using the word 'totality' ambiguously to mean, firstly, an interlocking, self-contained system and, secondly, an all-embracing system, and that he is wrongly assuming that if the logical idea is a totality in the first sense, then it is a totality in the second sense too'.
- M.J. Inwood, 'Hegel'
In fact, if the totality is incomplete, then a supplement is necessarily required. Hegel's insight is that the supplement is not something external to method but is method itself. In this passage, Inwood shows an inability to grasp the True Infinite, which becomes something different and stays what it is. For this reason, the totality can be self-contained and embrace otherness, because the other is its own self. Logic, nature and spirit are modes (forms) of Absolute Idea's existence. Art, religion and philosophy are modes of its self-comprehension. But Logic is the universal mode in which all particular modes are sublated and enfolded. Here Hegel affirms that the Logic is indeed the centrepiece of his entire philosophy. As the prius, Logic is the original word, which is an outwardizing or utterance but an utterance that in being has immediately vanished again as something outer.
'Accordingly, what constitutes the method are the determinations of the concept itself and their connections, and these we must now examine in the significance that they have as determinations of the method. – In this, we must begin from the beginning. We spoke of this beginning at the very beginning of the Logic, and also in connection with subjective cognition, and we showed that, when not performed arbitrarily and in the absence of categorial sensitivity, though it may seem to present many difficulties, it is nevertheless of an extremely simple nature. Because it is the beginning, its content is an immediate, but one that has the meaning and the form of abstract universality. Or be it a content of being, or of essence or of the concept, inasmuch as it is something immediate, it is assumed, found in advance, assertoric. But first of all it is not an immediate of sense-intuition or of representation, but of thought, which because of its immediacy can also be called a super-sensuous, inner intuiting. The immediate of sense-intuition is a manifold and a singular. Cognition, on the contrary, is a thinking that conceptualizes; its beginning, therefore, is also only in the element of thought, a simple and a universal. –We spoke of this form earlier, in connection with definition. At the beginning of finite cognition universality is likewise recognized as an essential determination, but only as thought – and concept determination in opposition to being. In fact this first universality is an immediate universality, and for that reason it has equally the significance of being, for being is precisely this abstract self-reference. Being has no need of further derivation, as if it came to the abstract element of definition only because taken from the intuition of the senses or elsewhere, and in so far as it can be pointed at. This pointing and deriving involve a mediation that is more than a mere beginning, and is a mediation of a kind that does not belong to the comprehension of thought, but is rather the elevation of representation, of empirical and ratiocinative consciousness, to the standpoint of thinking. According to the currently accepted opposition of thought, or concept, and being, it passes as a very important truth that no being belongs as yet to thought as thought, and that being has a ground of its own independent of thought. But the simple determination of being is in itself so poor that, if for that reason alone, not much fuss ought to be made about it; the universal is immediately itself this immediate because, as abstract, it is also the abstract self-reference which is being. In fact, the demand that being should be exhibited has a further, inner meaning in which more is at issue than just this abstract determination; implied in it is the demand for the realization of the concept, a realization that is missing at the beginning itself but is rather the goal and the business of the entire subsequent development of cognition. Further, inasmuch as the content of the beginning is to be justified and authenticated as something true or correct by being exhibited in inner or outer perception, it is no longer the form of universality as such that is meant, but its determinateness, about which more in a moment. The authentication of the determinate content with which the beginning is made seems to lie behind it, but is in fact to be regarded as an advance, in so far as it is a matter of conceptual cognition'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
Hegel 'is saying at the end of the Logic that, of necessity, God creates the world ex nihilo' according to Errol E. Harris. Hyppolite discourages causal claims. Rather, logic requires nature and vice versa. This mutual dependence is underwritten by Hegel's idea that the Universal - the moment of the Logic - already contains the Particular - the moment of Nature. And each of these contains the moment of Geist.
This outer word, however, is not yet otherness, but is and remains perfectly transparent to itself. 'It is as Hegel says ideally transparent, because it is nothing but thought of thought whereas all the other sciences are thought of some particular matter, which has cognition and not totally transparent content to it' says Charles Taylor. And with such observations the Logic draws to a close all that remains is an assessment as to its truth.
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'Persephone Reborn'
by André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 – 1951)
Eumolpus:
And so, Homer tells,
Did Demophoon
Return Persephone to her mother
And to earth her spring.
On the hill, meanwhile,
Which governs
Time present and future
The Greeks have built a temple
For Demeter who looks on
As a happy people hasten there.
At her side is Triptolemus,
Gleaming sickle in hand,
And close behind, a choir of nymphs, Faithful as ever.
Chorus:
Come to us, ye children of men.
Children
Receive us,
ye daughters of the gods.
Both Choruses
We bring offerings,
Garlands of lilies, saffrons, croci, cornflowers, Buttercups, anemones...
Posies for Perséphone,
For Demeter corn
The wheat is still green,
The rye already golden.
Children:
Demeter, summer’s Queen,
Imbue us with your serenity.
Both Choruses:
O come back to us, Persephone,
Shatter the gates of your tomb!
The Archangel of death rekindles your torch.
Demeter awaits.
Triptolemus removes the mantle of mourning
She still wears and scatters
Flowers on the coffin’s
surround.
Open, ye deadly gates.
Fireless torches, dying embers,
Rekindle your flame. It is time.
It is time for you to leave at last
The depths of night,
O Spring.
Chorus:
Still half asleep,
And full of wonder,
From your sinister parvis
You step, and as if drunk
On night you doubt you live,
Yet live you do.
Children:
The Shadow still surrounds you,
Faltering Persephone.
You step, as if ensnared.
But everywhere you go
There blossoms a rose
And bird song is heard.
Every movement is a release
Your dancing a language
That spreads happiness, Freedom, confidence,
And the ray unites with
The flower’s petal.
All Nature shines with joy, Drinking in the light.
You, you rush to the light.
But why so serious,
And why do you, unheeding,
Ignore love’s call?
Perséphone - Melodrame en Trois Tableaux: III. Perséphone renaissante:
Chorus:
Speak, Persephone, tell us
What the winters conceal.
What secret do you bring
From the gaping chasm’s depths?
What did you see in the Underworld?
Persephone:
Mother, your Persephone has heeded your wish.
Your gown of mourning which made winter night
Has renewed its flowers and its splendor regained.
And you, my sister Nymphs,
Your unremitting troop
Treads the young turf in
the green of the grove.
O my earthly spouse, Triptolemus the ploughman!
Demophoon, already the wheat you have sown
Is sprouting, thriving and rejoicing at the richness of its crops.
You shall not halt the seasons’ course.
Night succeeds day and winter autumn.
I am yours.
Take me, I am your Persphone,
But I am also the wife of the funereal Pluto.
No matter how tight your embrace,
Nothing, O gallant Demophoon,
Can prevent me from escaping your clasp,
To fulfill my destiny,
Despite my love and broken heart.
I shall go to the world of the Shades
Do you believe a heart drunk with love
Could gaze on the wretched Hadean chasm
And still emerge unscathed?
I have seen what happens,
What is concealed from the light
And cannot forget the terrible truth.
Mercury you may take me, I consent,
I do not need orders,
I go of my own free will.
It is not law, but love, that is my guide
And step by step I descend the flight
That leads to the very pit of human distress.
As a golden harvest in years to come.
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'The Return of Persephone', c. 1890/91, Frederic, Lord Leighton
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Some further thoughts on the Absolute.
The German absolut is an adjective or adverb, used in much the same ways as the English absolute(ly'. It derives from the Latin absolutus (loosened, detached, complete), the past participle of absolvere (to loosen [from], detach, complete), and thus means: not dependent on, conditional on, relative to or restricted by anything else; self-contained, perfect, complete. It first occurs as a noun in Nicholas of Cusa, who, in his 'De docta ignorantia' (On Learned Ignorance, 1440), used absolutum to refer to God, as the being which is not conditioned by, limited by or comparable to anything else, and German philosophers after Kant regularly use das Absolute to refer to the ultimate, unconditioned reality. This may, but need not, have the features (personhood, etc.) traditionally associated with God. The account of the absolute that most concerned Hegel was that of Schelling, who, though an early adherent of Fichte's idealism, soon abandoned it in favour of the view that the absolute is a neutral identity that underlies both the subject (or mind) and the object (or nature) a view that owed as much to Spinoza as to Kant and Fichte.
Hegel's response to Schelling (and Spinoza) is not to deny that the absolute exists: he was committed to granting that there is an absolute both by his belief that not everything is dependent on something else, and by his belief in God, for whom, on his view, 'the absolute' is the philosophical expression, shorn of its anthropomorphic presuppositions. The question is rather what the absolute (or for that matter God) is; unless we answer this question the claim that the absolute exists is empty. (In the Preface to the Phenomenology, Schelling's absolute is described as the 'night in which all cows are black'.) His own view is this: A theory of the absolute postulates three types of entity: (1) the absolute; (2) the phenomenal world (rocks, trees, animals, etc.); (3) human knowledge of (1), of (2), and of the relationship between them. But this schema invites several criticisms:
1. Neither Spinoza nor Schelling gives an adequate account of how or why the absolute generates the phenomenal world. They implicitly appeal to an outside observer to whom the absolute appears in various guises, an observer who is inconsistently treated both as responsible for the absolute's manifestation of itself and as merely one of the absolute's manifestations. 2. The absolute alone, (1), cannot be the absolute, if it does not manifest itself in the form of (2) and (3). It is only the manifestation of the absolute that makes it the absolute (as it is only the development, ceteris paribus, of a tadpole into a frog that entitles us to classify it as a tadpole). So the absolute, (1), depends on its manifestations, as much as they depend on it. Thus (1) alone, since it depends on (2) and (3), is not the absolute; the absolute is rather (1), (2) and (3) together.
3. The true nature of an entity is that entity's fully developed rather than its embryonic state (the frog rather than the tadpole): hence the true absolute is (1) as developed into (2) and (3) rather than (1) alone. 4. The absolute, (1), is not epistemically absolute or unconditioned: our knowledge of it is not (as Schelling's theory of intellectual intuition implies) immediate and unconditioned; it involves a long process of inquiry, both for the individual and for humanity as a whole. The absolute cannot remain simple and static, but must mirror the development of our knowledge of it, (3), since this knowledge is (by 3 above) not distinct from the absolute, but its highest phase.
5. The absolute in its original sense, (1), is superfluous: a proposition such as 'The absolute is (a/the) substance' (unlike 'The chef is angry') does not have a subject-term that is intelligible apart from the concept we apply to it. So we may as well omit it altogether and concentrate only on such concepts as substance, concepts which we apply to the phenomenal world, (2), and to ourselves, (3), and which constitute the essence of these realms, since neither we nor the phenomenal world could exist unless such concepts were applicable to them. Hegel concludes that the absolute is not something underlying the phenomenal world, but the conceptual system embedded in it. Since this conceptual system is not static, but develops, manifesting itself both at successively higher levels of nature and in the advance of human knowledge over history, the absolute is not static, but developing, and reaches its final stage in Hegel's own philosophy.
6. What is absolute is not exclusively immediate or unconditioned, but has conditions and mediations which it sublates into immediacy. For example, philosophy, the highest phase of the absolute and itself 'absolute knowledge', depends on a certain natural and cultural environment. But it frees itself of this environment by, say, doubting its existence, by focusing on pure, non-empirical concepts, or by conceptualizing this environment. Similarly, human beings in general sublate the natural environment on which they depend by their cognitive and practical activities (Spirit). Both for this reason, and because the conceptual system that structures nature and history forms the core of the human MIND, the absolute is spirit.
Hegel also uses 'absolute' as an adjective. The Phenomenology culminates in absolute knowledge in contrast to reason, spirit and religion; the Logic concludes with the absolute idea in contrast to life and the idea of cognition; and the climax of the whole system, in the Encyclopaedia, is absolute spirit in contrast to subjective spirit and objective spirit. The Logic also refers to absolute difference in contrast to diversity and opposition; to the absolute ground in contrast to the determinate ground and the condition; to the absolute unconditioned in contrast to the relative unconditioned; to the absolute relation in contrast to the essential relation, the absolute, and actuality; and to absolute necessity in contrast to formal and relative necessity.
Usually, the item characterized as absolute comes at the end of a series of items: absolute spirit comes after, and is in some sense higher than, subjective and objective spirits. But this is not invariably so: absolute difference comes before diversity and opposition, and the absolute ground comes before the determinate ground and the condition suggesting that what is 'absolute' is in some sense inferior to what succeeds it. This difference corresponds to a difference between two senses of absolute: in one sense to be absolute is to exclude mediation and conditions, while in another sense it is to have sublated mediation and conditions. An uneducated child is absolute in the first sense, while an educated adult who sublates his education (perhaps by linguistic or scientific innovation) is absolute in the second sense.
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Dedicated to my beautiful One for whom I am always California dreaming ... 🙂 🌹 as opposed to those actually living there who can't wait to get out 😁 Well, it is paradise garden because it has its First Lady, its Eve ....
'Long I thought that knowledge would suffice me'
by Walter Whitman (1819 –1892)
Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me --
O if I could but obtain knowledge!
The my lands engrossed me -- Lands of the prairies, Ohio's land,
the southern savannas, engrossed me -- For them I would live --
I would be their orator;
Then I met the examples of old and new heroes -- I heard of warriors,
sailors, and all dauntless persons --
And it seemed to me that I too had it in me to be as dauntless as any
-- and would be so;
And then, to enclose all, it came to me to strike up the songs of the New World
-- And then I believed my life must be spent in singing;
But now take notice, land of the prairies, land of the south savannas, Ohio's land,
Take notice, you Kanuck woods -- and you Lake Huron --
and all that with you roll toward Niagara -- and you Niagara also,
And you, Californian mountains -- That you each and all find somebody else
to be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer -- One who loves me is jealous of me,
and withdraws me from all but love,
With the rest I dispense -- I sever from what I thought would suffice me,
for it does not -- it is now empty and tasteless to me,
I heed knowledge, and the grandeur of The States, and the example of heroes, no more,
I am indifferent to my own songs -- I will go with him I love,
It is to be enough for us that we are together -- We will never separate again.
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All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)
And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray)
I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk)
On a winter's day (on a winter's day)
I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm)
If I was in L.A. (if I was in L.A.)
California dreamin' (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day
Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
Well, I got down on my knees (got down on my knees)
And I pretend to pray (I pretend to pray)
You know the preacher like the cold (preacher like the cold)
He knows I'm gonna stay (knows I'm gonna stay)
California dreamin' (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day
All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)
And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray)
I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk)
On a winter's day (on a winter's day)
If I didn't tell her (if I didn't tell her)
I could leave today (I could leave today)
California dreamin' (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day
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Coming up next:
The conclusion (yes truly!)
To be continued ....