On Friday, August 30, 2019, 02:42:25 PM CDT, Mary Malo reading_for_meaning@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

The first supersensible world for understanding still sees distinction as external to itself. The second supersensible world is an inversion of the first where now distinction is in-itself and therefore Infinity. Hegel shows that the first remains chained to the sensible world through this externalizing of distinctions. I agree with Srivats in suggesting inversion is significant for his method. Even with what is arguably a simpler version of this, his philosophy of religion, he continues claiming that the sensible and understanding both have distinctions "outside one another and indifferently self-contained." Whereas in the idea, the "truly supersensible realm", distinctions aren't posited "as exclusive of each other; rather they are found only in this mutual inclusion with the other." This has tremendous import for all his work as well as our own. Hegel admits learning to think this way is difficult. For religion he calls this a mystery for understanding. Paragraph 160 of Force and Understanding also encapsulates this. 

Best regards,

Mary

On Friday, August 30, 2019, 09:43:17 AM CDT, vascojoao2003@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

"In other words, how can we even think "inversion" of two moments of a unity unless we think of them as separate?"

But we think them as separate. That is why Hegel thought it necessary to show how the thought of them separate, as the Understanding does, is but a moment of the totality of a concept that only reason, speculative reason can discern. The inversions, which are logical movements, are the logical counterpart of the distortions Hegel thought had to be in hold by the understanding's categories. If nothing wrong was ever found with the Understanding, there would be no ground for the Science of Logic. The dialectical inversions are the show of the difference between the Understanding in its self, within its notion of what is true and valid, and the Understanding for dialectical Reason.

Regards,

João.

---In hegel@yahoogroups.com, <bill.hord@...> wrote

Srivats, to see inversion as the "seed of the concept of becoming" is to see the cart pushing the horse -- a kind of inversion itself. (If one reads Hegel as presenting a subjective cart pushing the horse of objective becoming then it's not surprising that inversion seems like an important principle.)

I think your argument depends on an assumption of a kind of subjective idealism. That would assert the work in the Phenomenology as a subjective foundationalism for what emerges in the three parts of the Encyclopedia and the Science of Logic -- that is, becoming (and a becoming that anticipates and drives biological emergentism). The Understanding's inversion -- and it is that beyond any reasonable doubt -- as its own picture looks then, to us, like a necessary precondition for the self-consciousness capacity. Again, I think this is the Understanding's picture.  

If as Hegel asserts at the beginning of the SL Being and Nothing don't exist apart from Becoming, how can inversion be its seed? This Becoming is the Concept, absolute negation. So if there is a seed of becoming it is negation, which is also presented as identical with the Concept.

The concept of inversion is flawed inasmuch as its thought requires one to think as if the two moments that are supposed to be inverted were separate. Leaving aside the problem of whether it's Hegel or the Understanding who finds inversion adequate, the more serious problem is that Hegel is very clear that Becoming isn't this kind of structure. He spends a good number of words in the SL considering others who have made this error.

"Now, wherever and however being or nothing are at issue, this third must be there; for the two have no subsistence on their own but are only in becoming, in this third. But this third has various empirical shapes that abstraction either sets aside or neglects for the sake of holding fast to its two products, being and nothing, each for itself, and showing them as protected against transition. Such a simple manoeuver of abstraction can be countered, with equal ease, simply by pointing to the empirical concrete existence in which that abstraction itself is only a something, has a determinate existence. Or else it is by virtue of other forms of reflection that this separation of the inseparable would be held fixed. But in any such determination of reflection, its opposite is present within it in and for itself, and it is thus possible to refute it on its own terms without going back to the nature of the fact and appealing to it, by taking the determination as it presents itself, and by pointing to its other in it. It would be labor in vain to attempt to ensnare, so to speak, all the shifts and turns of reflection and its argumentation in order to pre-empt and render impossible all the evasions and the leaps with which it hides its own contradiction from itself. For this reason I also refrain from taking notice of the many self-styled objections and refutations that have been advanced against the claim that neither being nor nothing are something true but that becoming is their truth. The intellectual education required to perceive the nothingness of these refutations, or rather to dispel such arbitrary ideas on one’s own, will be attained only through a critical cognition of the forms of the understanding. But those who are the most prolific in such objections straight away set themselves upon reflecting on the first propositions, without helping themselves or having helped themselves through further study of the logic to the awareness of the nature of their crude reflections." (SL pp. 69-70, Remark 3, di Giovanni)

In other words, how can we even think "inversion" of two moments of a unity unless we think of them as separate? What would "inversion" even mean for two moments that "have no subsistence on their own but are only in becoming, in this third"?

Bill 

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From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com> on behalf of R Srivatsan r.srivats@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2019 8:45:27 PM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: [hegel] The transition between the Consciousness and Self-Consciousness Sections in PhS

 

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Bill,

Thanks for this challenge.  Let me rephrase, I think Hegel's Notion (in the full sense of the term) of inversion is the most important and unique contribution of his thought to Western Philosophy.  The Notion of inversion is clearly the seed of the concept of becoming, and later of contradictiion in the Science of Logic.  He may not use the term (I haven't read enough of Hegel to know this), but the idea is there, being refined and reapplied,  infusing his thought through and through.  The becoming of being into nothing, and of nothing into being, and the transition to becoming, from thence to determinate being.  The diremption of the self same, and the unity of the different, etc. 

In terms of his own argument, I see his development of the term inverted world, as the sublation of the aporia of the Understanding -- viz., the first supersensible world of the law of identity.  Without the idea of inversion, though the term may not be used (it survives into the Self-Consciousness Section that follows, though), the very idea of speculative thinking falls to nought because unless Hegel can argue that the identity is identity in difference, and that difference is within identity's pores, he cannot develop the concept of thought's internal transformation and transitions of the patterns of consciousness.

If you say Hegel has a strong realist element to his thought (by implication of your point of approval of Kojeve against his generally poor reading of Hegel), he is a realist simply because he sees that the world doesn't reduce to the identitarian laws of the first supersensible world, thus introducing the Notion of difference through inversion in the second supersensible world, incorporating the variance of the real in the realm of thought itself.  Through all this Hegel inverts the Notion of the world as a self-same, stable entity, free of contradiction.

Srivats

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 7:03 PM bill.hord bill.hord@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Srivats, I know that I owe you another response, also about Force and Understanding, but this includes some of the same observations.

First, "inversion" just doesn't seem to hold up as Hegel's methodological principle. He hardly uses the word anywhere else. This makes me think it is the Understanding's principle, and leads into aporia.

Second (a move like Hegel's in the "transition" from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness), it's fairly hard to get a good grip in Hegel's use and abuse (i.e. criticism) of the natural science of his day -- what is he doing? However, it is fairly certain that Force and Understanding is a case of Hegel working with or against (particular) physical science. Here's my suggestion. The concrete universal emerges as the object of consciousness at the end of Perception. This concrete universal is the Earth, or the concrete whole. In F&U consciousness, in order to grasp this whole as a whole, performs what you might call an inversion: it tries to grasp the whole by reducing it to a lawful interaction of forces, everything is supposed to be constituted by attraction and repulsion. One kind of reduction that Hegel presents is the dual-world model with a true supersensible world beyond appearances (that seem to contradict the 2 forces explanation). However, we find that the Understanding's forces explanation fails because each of the supposed forces is implicit in the other -- they are one, or an identity in difference.

So, the Understanding's reductive explanatory model leads into a number of aporia. Then we have self-consciousness, which I earlier suggested is a sort of interlude (though a necessary one) before we return to Reason and the continued examination of the whole. The necessity of the interlude comes from the failure of the reductive approach. Self-consciousness is necessary (but not sufficient) as the kind of consciousness that can arise to a proper grasp of the whole -- absolute knowing. (As Reason, consciousness continues its search for reductive explanatory laws, unsuccessfully.)

Kojeve asserted that Self-Consciousness is the key to the book, but we also know that he ignored (or worse, ridiculed) Hegel's engagement with empirical sciences. (He ignored Observing Reason.) Unfortunately, Kojeve was a very poor reader of Hegel, who influenced many readers (and I say this despite the fact that he recognizes Hegel as a realist).

Bill 

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Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2019 9:13:07 PM
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Subject: [hegel] The transition between the Consciousness and Self-Consciousness Sections in PhS

 

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Dear friends,

The transition from the consciousness section (Three chapters Sense-Certainty, Perception, Force and the Understanding) to the section on self-consciousness is a difficult one to follow.  I have come to realize that it is actually a double move: 

One, it is of course as widely discussed (and by Hegel) the progress from the point of immediate, raw realization that self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness, and is therefore the true object of knowledge.  As Hegel argues in the last section, in order to fully actualize this incipient realization, 'we' need to chart the progress of self-consciousness from a different direction, which turns out to be from that of Life and the practical aspect of self-consciousness.  There is also the promise that the truth of self-consciousness and its identity with consciousness will become clear with Absolute Knowing.  So we wait for this while we also at the same time see glimpses of its possibility.

Two, the transition is also one which inaugurates the conscious application of the methodological principle of inversion which is developed in the last part of Force and the Understanding as the law of the second supersensible world.  Up to this point the reader has (more precisely I have) been flailing as Hegel tacks in a seemingly random fashion between consciousness and self consciousness through the previous chapters.  Even at the end of this chapter, the inversion whereby the inner self and the inner world fold into each other, the mediation of the phenomenon collapses, and we 'go to the other side' not only to see, but to give ontological meaning to the inner world, the methodological move isn't quite clear: i.e., we don't understand yet fully here how the principle of the second supersensible world is applied, viz., all that is identical suffers diremption and all that is different comes together (sublates).

But in the self consciousness section, the autonomization of a shape as a living thing in the process of life is tagged explicitly as an inversion.  Then in the trial by death, the intention of self-consciousness to establish its truth by staking its life and taking the other results an inversion of its purpose -- self-consciousness loses itself into nothingness by losing its basis in living and the two collapse into one.  This inversion results in the sublation of the pattern of consciousness to one in which one side realizes that life is as important to it as pure self-consciousness, inaugurating the dependent consciousness of the bondsman.  Then of course there is the inversion of the relationship between the lord and bondsman...

So the point I am making (to clarify it to myself) is that the purpose of the consciousness chapter, in addition to being a starting point for the patterns of consciousness on the way-stations of spirit, is also to provide the methodological first step in the ladder where the principle of Hegel's investigation of the path of spirit is laid out: that the progress of spirit is to be comprehended through the law of the second supersensible world: diremption and sublation. 

Perhaps obvious, but each of us has to learn for him/herself.

Srivats

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R Srivatsan
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R Srivatsan
Flat 101, Block C, Saincher Palace Apartments
10-3-152, Street No 2
East Marredpally
Secunderabad
Telangana 500026
Mobile: +91 77027 11656, +91 94404 80762
Landline: +91 40 2773 5193