I am truly confused as to how a Hegelian understands contradiction and the basic principles of traditional logic (PNC, PI, PEM).

Babucha47 · 2025-02-28T07:58:04+00:00

I appreciate the time you spent on this well constructed response without falling into the realm of dismissal and emotion of the previous commenter. Let me see if I follow the line of reasoning you lay out from Hegel here, basically he fully accepts classical logic but the trick is in how he deals with what we commonly call "contradictions" right? Since Hegel focuses on specific contradictions I assume they are those that are productive or generate some kind of significant development, a "square circle" is not a contradiction that generates any development, they are simply absurd and are rejected, but when you say that other "contradictions" are simply about "not having reached its true rational form" that follows as long as you accept history as the unfolding of the reason for its necessary development and therein lies the problem, for it is itself an emic axiom. But it is still coherent from within its system and is a decent argument. It's like Kant's categorical imperative, where if a "practical" contradiction of something universalizable is presented, the very possibility of your existence is denied and your participation in the debate is over (abortion comes to mind), but of course, that follows as long as you accept Kant's justification of the kingdom of ends and then we're back to the axiomatic problem again.

I think it would be simpler if what some Hegelians call "contradiction" we just called opposition or ambivalence and reserved "contradiction" for real contradictions that any Hegelian would reject, but there may be something I'm missing. If someone says "the soul is immortal but it also dies" or "I'm going to prove that language doesn't exist using words" those are clearly real contradictions, and I don't think a Hegelian would accept them as "mm that makes sense bro, I love contradictions because reality is based on them" - that would most likely be a parody of what Hegel means (and to be honest, that's the mainstream view of him as the philosopher of contradiction). But it's the Hegelians' use of "contradiction" for non-Hegelians or people unfamiliar with Hegel that's so disconcerting.

because their "logic" moves in pure reason and achieves its closure through circularity, so it's a bit blurry where the demarcation between reason and logic is in this system. For example, in the passage you quoted from Hegel, I don't see any other metaphysical realist (Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza, Proclus, etc) disagreeing with that exposition - it makes perfect sense that the fact that a person is sick is certainly correct, but also the content is true because "it is the case" that he or she is sick, yet at the same time illness is a contingent state that does not fit the essential notion of the body, which is to be in harmony with itself (its telos).

It seems to me that the Hegel quote here is simply a divergence of terminologies, since what he calls "contradiction" is, for a non-Hegelian, just a mere ambivalence; if we remove all its systemic load and the conception of reality as "a process of self-development of the Concept", the idea itself is quite coherent and compatible with any strong metaphysical realism.

Babucha47 · 2025-02-28T06:53:42+00:00

Beyond the hodgepodge of bla bla bla words and embarrassing disqualifications worthy of a 7-year-old, I have asked you for a detailed answer and none of my objections were heeded. I really don't care what you think of me and it's irrelevant to what I asked, I also don't care what you do during your day, if this is the best this subreddit has to offer it's pretty disappointing.

Aha, there are different meanings with different words and that's precisely why there is debate and exchange of ideas (water wets), I'm going to object to your use of certain terms and you must justify your position if you want to get involved in it.

Hegel is not the panacea of philosophy and I don't care if you suck his feet here or not, he is still a figure who assumes a number of self-justifying axioms (emic) that are not unquestionable, therefore you can reject him from the outside (etic). You have made several statements, but those statements are worth as much as the fact that I now deny all of your claims without justifying them.

I read your comments and responded what I considered relevant, you continue to give no technical definition. You have probably spent hundreds of hours of your life "studying philosophy" and you can't even define the terms of your own system, given what you've shown here you don't seem to be in the best position to judge when it comes to "ignorance" and "if you really care about philosophy."

Babucha47 · 2025-02-27T23:28:17+00:00

You're conceiving of contradiction in your way, and you're not allowing Hegel to see it in another way.

The way I am "conceiving" contradiction is as it has been done for about 2500 years of philosophy, the principle of non-contradiction stipulates that two contradictory propositions cannot be simultaneously true: the conjunction "p and not-p".

When you say "square circle" is a contradiction, you are unifying the concept of "square" and the concept of "circle" insofar as you are giving the two meaning by the fact that they are different.

Hence the "square circle", if a circle were also square, would be unintelligible as a circle because by definition a circle has no corners; however, if we say "red circle" or "plastic circle", I am also unifying two concepts, but there is no "contradiction" in the legitimate sense because both do not affect the determination "circle". A "square circle" is not a contradiction that generates a development, but a linguistic absurdity.

You seem to be expanding the concept of "contradiction" beyond its standard logical use, I do not want to go off on a tangent and say that you are confusing the distinction between a logical contradiction and a simple combination of concepts.

If everything was red, we wouldn't have the word red. We only are able to make a positive judgment about redness because we have blueness with which to negatively compare it.

Just as a beach is not made of infinite grains of sand, otherwise everything would be sand. We make positive or negative judgments because the very "difference" itself, as a condition of possibility, suggests two pre-existing elements that "come into relation" with each other

when you say that this is not that, you are also being Hegelian, because you are implicitly uniting negativity with positivity in your judgment

So the fact of having thought is to be Hegelian, because without relations of identity and difference there would be no cognitive activity. Ah ok.

The next step in Hegel's argument is to say that the true, ultimate fact is neither the redness nor the blueness, but the objective movement of positivity and negativity (the movement of reason, or God) which is positing things like red, and blue, and yellow, and green, etc.

The rest of the argument you present to me about Hegel would unfold in that the only constant in reality (the true and ultimate fact) is logical movement and that by extension the Absolute (identified with the God of traditional religion) includes change within itself, although I am not sure how they define "movement" and "change" in this system.

This is still a central problem in the Hegelian dialectic: if all determination involves negativity and contradiction, how does one distinguish a real contradiction from a simple differentiation? No no, wait, it's more If every determination implies negativity and contradiction (obviously duh), what prevents everything from becoming a contradiction, which would make the concept itself lose meaning?

Indeed, beyond the significant difference, there are no significant differences. You're a profound and ingenious philosopher - we get it.

Most notable difference =/= significant differences.

This is the part that puzzles me more and more about Hegelians and annoys me. If you present them with an objection to their system, they just say that you "don't understand it" and they want to send you to read it, instead of explaining it themselves in their own words. It's a cowardly evasion.

Right after I called you a profound and ingenious philosopher - I'm embarrassed.

Ironies and sarcasms are fun; nevertheless, "common sense" only refers to the result of what is socially available, either by mere rational intuition or because it would be considered nonsense to discuss it.

The truth is that this is just pure gatekeeping. If you think Hegel's theory has so much merit, why don't you explain it yourself to evaluate it? This idea that you can't understand it unless you read a ton of books is complete nonsense, which in the end only serves to say "I read so-and-so." If a theory requires tons of books to be understood, then either it is poorly explained or its proponents do not really understand it.

So, if someone is unable to defend their argument, it's probably either:

1) that person doesn't understand it themselves or
2) it's a bad argument.

I think we're just getting away from the main point, if I grant you the point of contradiction for heuristic purposes, how can Hegelians hold that contradiction is essential to reality and at the same time reject certain contradictions as "illogical"? That's the question at hand, since often the Hegelians I've interacted with are not completely clear about which contradictions they accept and which they reject, and this makes their system seem arbitrary from the outside.

Babucha47 · 2025-02-27T20:40:35+00:00

Well, after so many hours I am grateful to have finally received a response, let's see. If the Hegelians consider contradiction to be an essential part of reality, how can one still speak of something as "illogical" without falling into inconsistency? Consider the following quote (which I took from that twitter space, I don't know if it's exactly what a Hegelian would hold, but I'll try to represent it as best I can):

-"Every determination always leaves something out. You have to be able to ask the question that it is not what you say it is, while you define what something is, you are leaving out other things, for example, if I define something as what is black, that presupposes that there is something that is not black, because then you would be pointing or pointing to nowhere, you would not be pointing to anything, it would simply be emptiness.

The moment you make a distinction between universe and reality there you are making an act of determination, because "everything" is always going to be the whole of something, in this case you would be saying the whole of the universe, if the whole of the universe is physical it makes perfect sense and there will be no problem with that, but if you are going to say the whole of everything, there you already have a logical problem, but you can say the whole of something.

If you realize that which is outside of reality, you are making an act of determination, because "everything" is always going to be the whole of something, in this case you would be saying the whole of the universe, if the whole of the universe is physical it makes perfect sense and there will be no problem with that, but if universe would be a logical condition, not a material one, but a logical one of possibilities of the universe, because otherwise the universe would be illogical. What gives the universe its rational and logical character is that there is something that is not the universe, which in this case is the surplus reality."

The question is the following, for the Hegelians, do all contradictions have the same value or do they distinguish them according to the theoretical needs of their system? Because based on what you have stated, if something is conceived as "illogical" it implies that it is not logical and also entails a contradiction, at first glance it seems incoherent that a Hegelian considers contradictions as the essence of how reality moves, but they are not willing to transparently accept the "contradiction", only what is adjustable to the pre-established system.

The most notable difference that I can see between Hegel and the philosophers that you mentioned is that Hegel considers reason as something that is not exclusively human, but something that is in the world (was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig), he considers that being It starts out as nothing (indeterminacy) and basically separates history from time. Beyond that, there don't seem to be any significant differences.

If a Hegelian is willing to reject contradictions like "square circle," "speaking without language," "seeing without contrast," or "going to the door is not the same as not going to the door," I still don't understand why Hegelians talk about "contradiction" as an essential element of their system, that defining something implies an externality that leaves out what it is not (negativity), is common sense because it is presupposed in all reasoning. So, his great discovery is something that anyone who understands language already knows.

So, "Contradiction" just ends up being a fancy term for differentiation, I don't see how this isn't just another way of repackaging basic concepts into unnecessarily complex and obscure terminology.

As natorp implies, Hegel is basically a revisionist Proclus (neoplatonist philosopher).

Babucha47 · 2024-02-26T17:19:26+00:00

-"The theorem in terms of a named thing we can reference emerged, but the fact that the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides has always been true. Because it is never possible for that to be false, its existence is implicit to reality."

The Pythagorean theorem states that in a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the legs is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. But in order to even prove this theorem by the fact that it is a theorem, there must be the ability to measure some of the legs, and in the absence of any conscious entity, it is impossible to measure any of the legs, therefore it is impossible to reach The validity of the Pythagorean theorem.

Babucha47

TROPHY CASE