... "perception", a word in latin-english, can be translated as "true-taking" in anglo-saxon-english;

It is "true" = wahr and has got the "Nehmung"= the taking. And there is the thing an deception.

Best regards - Jürgen H.

 

To ensure that less careful readers don't go off about my use of the term phenomenology in the abstract, I repeat, I was using it in relation to Hegel's project -- the study of Spirit as Phenomenon, as the science of (i.e., a systematic examination through) the experience of consciousness.

On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 7:29 AM R Srivatsan <r.srivats@...> wrote:

I will accept that the term phenomenology must not be used anachronistically.  That I was in danger of doing that, but perhaps not quite doing so.

The reason for my saying this is that in general Hegel is extremely careful about how he uses his words, often developing full expositions to found them.  In the case of Phenomenology, though he doesn't define the term or have an exposition of what it means, and though as you very carefully put it, readers his contemporary may not have understood it as more than art (have they understood the text itself as much more than a bildungsroman?), he would have given very careful thought to his title.  

As Crites describes it there has been comment about the a to-ing and fro-ing between the Science of the experience of consciousness and Phenomenology of Spirit -- seeing this oscillation as a shift in the fundamental project .  Crites suggests that the move from the science of the experience of consciousness (the history of the progress of consciousness through its stages) to the phenomenology of spirit (the study of spirit as phenomenon) is not a change of project, but is in fact an emerging recognition that if consciousness and spirit are two sides of the coin, it is necessary to put both in the title (Dialectic and Gospel...  p 358-360).  

I was suggesting the term phenomen-o-logy as simply a study of phenomena, as a take off from Kant's usage of the term phenomenon (following tradition) and an amalgamation with 'logy' which is a 'study of'.  This was a kind of suggestion for my own undestanding too.  I was aware of the twentieth century name and its difference (in more vague terms than you have pointed out).

I do take your stress on the emergence of Absolute Knowledge.

Srivats

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 11:00 AM 'Alan Ponikvar' ponikvaraj@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Phenomenology is an investigation into the essential components of our cognitive relationship to the world. It is primarily a 20^th Century movement with Husserl and the prodigal Heidegger as its most well-known practitioners.

 

On this understanding, Kant was not a phenomenologist. Neither was Hegel.

 

Hegel picked up the term “phenomenology” that had been recently introduced and used it to tag his exposition of knowledge as it appears.

 

I doubt that anyone who read Hegel in his day thought “phenomenology” to be anything more than a term of art.  Certainly, Kant had not used the term.

 

To answer your two questions, a phenomenology of spirit means to be an exposition of how knowledge understood as spiritual or absolute in the peculiar way that Hegel understands spiritual knowledge or absolute knowing makes its appearance.

 

This is Hegel’s Bildungsroman or story of the formative education of his readers into the cultural heritage of Modern Europe with the twist that the story of this appearance is to be a scientific presentation.

 

More precisely, the appearance of spiritual knowledge or absolute knowing as a science takes the form of a science of the experience of consciousness.

 

Now, absolute knowing does not so much go beyond the bounds of what Kant says we are able to know as it introduces a way of knowing that is original to Hegel.

 

The purpose of Hegel’s exposition is to reveal the unique way that absolute knowing makes its appearance. Unlike ordinary phenomenal knowledge, absolute knowing appears twice, first as what we might call a regional truth having to do with natural knowing and then for a second time when the prior regional truth is reduced to a moment of a more comprehensive truth composed of such moments.

 

It is the peculiarity of spirit as a phenomenon that is the topic of The Phenomenology of Spirit.

 

Now, it should be noted that the PhS is not a metaphysics. Those who believe that Hegel is offering a metaphysics believe that this begins with the Logic.

 

In my view those who refer to Hegel’s metaphysics - Pippin being the latest to do so in his new book on the Logic - demonstrate a poor understanding of what is happening in Hegel’s speculative expositions.

 

I do not so much mind the designation. What I mind is that it just is not very informative, or it is informative in an unintended way.

 

It informs me that the scholar insisting that Hegel is offering a metaphysics is himself offering a pinched reading of Hegel.

 

Maybe someday some scholar will use the term in a way that makes Hegel more understandable. I am still waiting for that day.

 

• Alan

 

 

 

From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 9:28 PM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perception

 

 

This is something that has puzzled me as a student of Hegel for a while -- puzzled/illuminated perhaps?

 

Kant's qualification of the limits of pure reason exclude the metaphysical -- i.e., reason must be applied satisfactorily only to phenomena which we acquire through the manifold of sense perception, or to conceptualizations that build on these phenomena -- Concepts without intuition are blind and intuitions without concepts are empty.  One cannot apply logic correctly to something that is not based on a phenomenon.

 

The term phenomenology is the study of phenomena (I don't know if Kant used this term, but it takes on a specific meaning after him certainly).

 

So what does Hegel mean when he titles his work Phenomenology of Spirit?  And then prefaces his book (at the end of his writing it) as a Science of Cognition?

 

There seems to be a specific, instantly polemical, incisiveness to the Kantian oxymoron of Hegel's title..  If one has to do a phenomenology of spirit, one has to study spirit as phenomenon, through methods and constraints that obey and go beyond the regulatory limitations set by Kant.  In so doing, it becomes a science of cognition.  Thus, the title is not an empty oxymoron.  It names a project that goes beyond the Kantian boundary of validity as set in the CPR (at least as far as I can see it).  In this sense it takes the incorrectness of the antinomy and of the dialectic and demonstrates how these failures are in fact the way spirit moves forward as examinable in a phenomenology.

 

To that extent, the Phenomenology is a metaphysics transformed in such a way that it is able to challenge the Kantian understanding of reason, while accepting the Kantian critique of traditional metaphysics and his strictures on a reason that was applied to a naive notion of metaphysics.

 

Rather than establish a normative regulation of what thought should be like if it is to be reasonable, as Kant did, the Science of Cognition examines how thought functions in actuality.  Kant understood thought-in-itself as he set forth a regulatory apparatus using it all the time.  Hegel seek to comprehend thought-for-itself as the process through which it is Spirit that determines everything including the Kantian project.

 

Srivats

 

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 5:43 AM 'Alan Ponikvar' ponikvaraj@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

True enough.

 

But to the extent that a tradition congealed around topics that were called metaphysical, these topics tended to be seen as referring to a realm beyond and for the most part above the physical.  

 

• Alan

 

From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 6:21 PM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perception

 

 

Need I remind us that the "meta-", a title used by a later editor of the Peripatetic school, meant the book "after" the physics, not any realm above, beyond or below.

 

Will

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Trejo petrejo@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Dec 13, 2018 3:34 pm
Subject: Re: [hegel] perception

 

Stephen T.,

 

Aristotle's definition of Metaphysics as "the science of Being qua Being," immediately demands clarification..

Some scholars regard 'Being qua Being" as a single topic.  Others make a finer distinction, saying that Aristotle will study "Being," indeed, yet "in the special manner of Being."   Many find it unclear. 

 

Metaphysics is not like the Natural Sciences, which also study beings in a world of Physics.  How is studying Being "in the manner of" Being, different?   Aristotle helps by defining Metaphysics in slightly different ways, i.e. as First Philosophy, and Wisdom and Theology. 

 

In Metaphysics Book Α, he says, “all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the First Causes and the Principles of things.”   This is helpful..  We get more clues from Book Β, where Aristotle lists some puzzles that he will tackle in his Metaphysics.   

 

  1.  Are sense-data Substances the only ones that exist?

  2.  Are kinds or individuals the most basic principles of beings? 

  3.  If kinds, is it the most generic or the most specific kinds?

  4.  Is there any Cause apart from matter? 

  5.  Is there anything apart from compounds of matter? 

  6.  Are Principles limited in number or in kind? 

  7.  Are Principles perishable? 

  8.  Are Principles universal or particular?

  9..  Are Principles potential or actual? 

10.  Are mathematical objects Substances (as Pythagoras held)? 

11.  If so, are they always associated with sense-data objects? 

12.  Are Unity and Being the Substance of things, or mere attributes?

 

This is not Physics.  Nor do these questions belong to Natural Science.   Nor do they belong to formal

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