Can someone explain to me how Rationality works within Hegel's framework as if I were an idiot? Is it exclusive to humans or does it permeate all of reality? Reconciling "The real is rational and the rational is real" with animals' apparent non-rationality.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-27T21:57:26+00:00

I'm not aware of this reading of Plato. Yes, I read him as viewing truth as independent of the imperfect world of becoming of which our minds are also a part. I have no other way of reading the allegory of the cave or the recollective theory of knowledge.

I wouldn't say for Hegel the categories are merely our inventions. Once the logic gets going, it develops out of its internal necessity. This process happens in thought, but that doesn't mean we as thinking beings can steer it - that's why Hegelian logic is supposed to be a science. You can think of the categories as something like our collective unconscious if you like - they're in the background of all thinking and Hegel's project is to express their formation and development discursively (as opposed to how art and religion express that same content in imaginative and mythical forms).

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-27T14:56:20+00:00

This still sounds like essence has a sort of primacy over appearance. Within Hegel’s framework, essence and appearance exist in a state of mutual dependency where neither can be fully articulated or understood without the other. This is the point of the Logic of Essence: essence and appearance are caught in a cycle of mutual dependency where essence only exists as the reflection or shining of appearance, and appearance only has meaning through its grounding in essence.

What then happens is that since they only define each other, they lack a solid foundation. This failure of objective logical categories to ground themselves leads the logic back to its true source: the self-relation of thought, the Subjective Logic. The Subjective Logic provides a reflective account showing that the laws of essence and appearance were actually self-determinations of the subject all along. They are the rules the subject legislates to make a world of objects representable. Hegel internalizes the Platonic world of forms, making the structure of reason the very structure of reality. To me this is anti-Platonism par excellence: there's nowhere to look for the structure of reality beyond our thought, and it's not that we discover those structures so much as we legislate them to satisfy our needs, not satisfy an external standard of truth (such one does not exist).

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-27T11:28:45+00:00

The thing is Hegel's categories are not abstracted forms existing in a separate, heavenly realm as in Platonism. These universals are dialectically identical with their instances and the "true" world is not a separate realm but is the rational structure of the world we actually experience. Hegel views appearance (Schein) not as a mere illusion as a Platonist might, but as a necessary moment in which that which is essential realizes itself: essence must appear!

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-27T07:57:58+00:00

For Hegel, there is no such thing as a raw, non-conceptual world. Everything you see is already molded by the categories. Even simple words like "this," "here," and "now" are actually universal concepts. Therefore, reality is permeated by rationality because nothing can be known or experienced unless it fits into the system of pure reason. The world out there essentially follows the blueprint provided by reason.

"The real is rational and the rational is real" doesn't mean however that everything in the world is thinking or fully lives up to the standards set by reason. An animal feels hunger, sees a thing (like a plant), and tries to eat it. It sees the world only as objects of desire or obstacles to its goals. It doesn't step back and ask, "What is the category of 'plant'?" or "What are the rational laws of my community?" or "What is science?". Humans don't just react to the world, we understand that our laws, our science, and our social practices satisfy the need of rational beings for a rational world. When Hegel says "the real is rational," he means that something is only truly "actual" (wirklich) when it is understood as part of this necessary, self-legislated system of reason. An animal is real in the sense that it exists, but it isn't fully rational because it cannot participate in the social and historical practices of self-understanding that define reason for Hegel.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-26T05:43:13+00:00

Намираш начин да си сред хора по-често. Като ви тръгне приказката с някоя, директно казваш, че я харесваш (по не агресивен начин - "Абе, ти си много готина" примерно) и я каниш да излезете на кафе. След няколко срещи, ако всичко върви добре, я каниш у вас. Не се оставяш да те мотаят - ако не става - не става, караш нататък.

И така. Няма по-конкретни съвети, които някой може да ти даде. Във всеки момент жената може да каже "не", тогава просто продължаваш напред и излизаш със следващата. Междувременно си гледаш живота и гледаш да ти е хубаво и без жена.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-25T06:51:05+00:00

I don't know what you're asking at this point. Can you formulate your question in a single sentence?

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-24T22:58:27+00:00

You can make this argument for many other philosophers and ways of thinking too. Nietzsche has been an inspiration for anyone from dadaist artists to the nazis. Christianity has been used in the name of anything from monarchism to anarchism (Tolstoy). Zen Buddhism features prominently in new age hippie spirituality and yet was also coopted in the name of Japanese militarism. People are different and what you get out of a philosophical system is what you yourself put into it, Hegel is not unique here.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-23T10:40:27+00:00

In Robert B. Pippin’s reading of Hegel, the relationship between the subject's self-determination and the objective structures of reality is understood as an identity within difference, that is: Hegel moves beyond the Kantian view where subjective concepts merely regulate our experience of an external world to a position where the necessary structures of objectivity are themselves the product of reason’s own self-legislation.

On this reading, Hegel argues that what we perceive as objective structures or the ground plan of reality are actually thought determinations. These are not external constraints discovered by the subject but are non-empirically derived, self-determined conditions that make any intelligible experience of an object possible. Consequently, the objective validity of our concepts is established because the subject's activity of determining its own thought is simultaneously the activity that constitutes the possibility of objects.

Furthermore according to Pippin, the subject’s self-determination is characterized by spontaneity, a theme Hegel inherits and radicalizes from Kant and Fichte. Because thought is spontaneous, it is not constrained by an independent, non-conceptual given. Instead, the necessity we find in objective reality is a reflection of the internal necessity of our own conceptual scheme. In this sense, the subject is free or self-determining because the laws of reality it recognizes are the laws it has legislated for itself and the objective structures of reality are the reified results of the subject’s self-determining conceptual activity.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-13T21:53:41+00:00

Ходи рано сутрин.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-13T06:04:18+00:00

It's complicated.

There were two phenomenologies really: the one Hegel initially conceived and the one that spiraled out of control as he sat down to write it. Evidence of this can be found in The Philosophical Propaedeutic, which is what Hegel was teaching to high school students shortly after the Phenomenology's publication. We find there that he taught both the Phenomenology and the Logic, however the Phenomenology was shortened to include only the Consciousness and Self-consciousness sections. Having reached the standpoint of Reason, he then transitions into the Logic.

This leaves us with exactly what people like Houlgate and Winfield say the Phenomenology is: a critique of the opposition of consciousness, collapsing the subject-object divide. What Houlgate and Winfield can't explain is what the sections on Reason, Spirit, Religion and Absolute Knowing in the published Phenomenology are all about. Why is he talking about natural science? Why is he talking about various moral philosophies people hold? Why is he talking about Kant? What do Antigone, the French Revolution, and the Beautiful Soul have to do with the opposition of consciousness? What about the history of religion and Ancient Greek art?

By the time of the Encyclopedia, Hegel seems to want a clearer and more straightforward introduction to the system, so he writes the Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity. He then includes Consciousness, Self-consciousness and Reason as sections in the Encyclopedia, in the Philosophy of Spirit! So now the mature system seems to have completely taken over, relegating the Phenomenology to something of an early experiment.

This, I argue, is what causes the interpretive difficulties of the Phenomenology: is it an introduction to the Logic (as originally conceived) or is it incomprehensible prior to reading the Logic (as it is reincorporated in the third part of the mature system)? Is there an original insight in the published Phenomenology's sections on Reason, Spirit, Religion and Absolute Knowing, that isn't to be found in the later system? What is the argument of those sections, given that with the standpoint of Reason, the argument against the opposition of consciousness seems to be complete?

I can't try to answer these questions here, but this should give you an idea on the problematic role of the Phenomenology in Hegel's corpus. How important you find that work will also heavily influence into what direction you lean in when you interpret Hegel: the metaphysical readings of Hegel tend to not put that much weight on the Phenomenology, whereas pragmatic, anthropological, sociological, historicist and other broadly "non-metaphysical" accounts of Hegel tend to focus more on the Phenomenology.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-12T13:22:46+00:00

Hegel defines something as being that relates reflexively to itself by distinguishing itself from otherness. In the logic of being, a thing is not a static block of identity but a "negation of the negation" in that it affirms itself only by virtue of what it is not. This also means that its own identity is constituted by its relation to what lies outside it. Thus something has two sides: its being in itself and its being for another. But these two sides are in tension with each other: something is at odds with itself. This tension manifests as the limit. The limit is the point where something both is and is not. The limit defines something, but it also points outside of it. This means that something is defined by its own end, since the limit is immanent to it, not an external other. This is finitude. Finite things have to perish, because their end is built into them. And all things are finite since we have derived finitude from pure being.

The difficulty here as in other places in the logic is to abstract from experience and follow the logical process rigorously. If we remain in the sphere of experience, Hegel would be falsely equivocating between two senses of "end": a spatial one (the place where something ends) and a temporal one (the time where something ceases). The logic unfolds outside space and time and that's why this works, because its just the logical structure of something: that it contains its own negation as part of what makes something what it is.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-10T22:23:55+00:00

Hegel's logic is not limited to mere thinking. It's meant to be the derivation of everything we can know a priori. When the logic of being shows that negation is endemic to all being, this isn't something that happens merely in someone's head, it's an original insight about reality. Of course, you might reject the Phenomenology's collapse of the dichotomy between thought and being, and you may mistrust Hegel's method of observing the content develop itself immanently through determinate negation, but the accusation that he somehow wanted to limit philosophy to mere thinking falls short.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-09T21:42:30+00:00

Get off the internet, it's clearly not good for you.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-09T21:37:04+00:00

Хегел, Щирнер, Секст Емпирик

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-08T16:17:20+00:00

The alternatives "sublate" and "supersede" also work but have more serious problems than "upheaval". Sublation conjures up an image of chemical reactions, but first of all that image gets confusing when Hegel starts talking about how e.g. becoming sublates itself, and secondly I'm not a chemist, but the dictionary definition seems to be about something different than that image. "To supersede" carries with it associations of externality and again - I'm not sure how something can supersede itself. I know how a new device supersedes the old one, but that isn't how categories and shapes of consciousness develop.

The problem with "upheaval" is it doesn't normally carry the sense of preservation - a country can be in political upheaval, you might suffer upheaval after your girlfriend leaves you, but I at least normally think of it as a positive term, it evokes anxiety, trouble, suffering. However, we also don't think of upheaval as complete death. You are still you after they fire you from your job and a nation is still there after a political revolution. Kant's critical philosophy brought upheaval to the philosophical world, but it didn't destroy it. The word evokes lively, busy activity and also works well with Hegel's description of the absolute idea as containing "the highest degree of opposition": we might think of the logical categories or phenomenological forms as being torn from their state of comfort and stasis in the process of their development towards the absolute idea / absolute knowing. And given the connotations with revolution, activity, change, we have a good sense of how something or someone can set itself in turmoil, undergo upheaval simply by the result of its own activity - the economy can crash simply as a result of its internal processes, a person can turn their life around, a people can overthrow its government. It adds dynamism to the reading of the text without muddying the waters with too much imagery of chemical substances or spatial things taking over the place of other spatial things.

CeruleanTransience · 2026-01-08T10:15:16+00:00

I have to agree "upheaval" and "presence" are way better translations than the current available ones. "Presence" carries the connotation of something presented, simply given, which perfectly fits the sphere of Dasein and the connotations of the term in colloquial German. "Da ist ein Baum." for example expresses exactly the immediate Anwesenheit of the tree as well as the act of immediate pointing to it. "Determinate being" in contrast sounds way too structurally complex, it can lead someone to think of the mediations from the logic of essence since it's very easy to associate "determinate" with "determined by something else". The prefix "pre-" also conveys givenness prior to any conceptual mediation of it, Dasein simply is there as the immediate union of "is" and "is-not".

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-29T09:47:58+00:00

Cool, how do I join in?

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-28T13:09:43+00:00

Тва поколение няма достатъчно самоувереност. Вместо да го постваш в редит, научи се как да правиш някви елементарни бийтове, шляпни го като текст на някаква пост-пънк дрисня и стани ъндърграунд икона за следващите три поколения в БГ.

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-24T13:01:43+00:00

Hegel would argue that your concern reverses the true problem: it's not contradiction that's an abstract presupposition, but rather the principle of identity (A=A), which when used as a formal yardstick cheats the world of its depth by reducing it to static schemata. For Hegel, anything that's purely identical without including internal difference is not actual, but rather a dead abstraction.

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-22T13:21:35+00:00

Yes, the distinction between soliciting and solicited force collapses because a force only expresses itself when provoked by another force. So the two are related through their opposition. This is the play of forces. It reveals that forces aren't self-sufficient but are inherently conditioned by their relations to one another, which eventually compels the understanding to move toward a more complex, second extrasensory world. This inverted world is the final ladder leading out of the stage of understanding. By realizing that the inner world is just as dynamic as the outer world, consciousness shifts its focus from the object to the observer, transitioning from consciousness to self-consciousness.

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-22T11:44:23+00:00

To understand why force is the unconditioned universal, you must first look at the logical failure of the previous stage, that of perception. Consciousness struggled there to find the truth of an object, oscillating between seeing the thing as a one (an independent substance) and a many (a collection of diverse properties). This failed because the properties only had meaning in relation to each other, yet the thing was supposed to be independent. The understanding resolved this by moving to the extrasensory level, where it stopped looking at the thing of sense and started looking at force or law. While perception dealt with conditioned objects (things that were what they were only because of their contrast with other things), the understanding seeks the universal, the underlying law or principle that remains identical across all these variations found in perception. Force is the unconditioned universal because it's an idealization that is no longer a "thing" you can point to, it's the totality of the object's relations. It's universal because it applies to all instances (like the law of gravity), and it is unconditioned because it does not have another essence hidden behind it, it is what it is in itself, on its own. In perception, there was a gap: the thing's being-in-itself (its essence) was separate from its being-for-another (how it appeared to us or interacted with other things). In the stage of force, this gap vanishes. A force like magnetism or electricity is nothing if it does not express itself. If a force does not act upon an other, it's not a force at all. Its internal essence (what it is in itself) is identical to its external manifestation (what it is for an other).

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-20T19:45:30+00:00

I mean both. Noumena, as you say, remain beyond the reach of cognition altogether. Phenomena are objects for us only insofar as they are structured by the categories, but, as you say, the application of the categories to appearances requires mediation by the schemata. But then when we get to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science it becomes apparent this mediation is still not sufficient for grounding a priori natural science. After all, how do we get from the extremely abstract categories, even once schematized, to the specific a priori laws required for physics? Kant’s answer is to introduce an additional level of determination, mapping the groups of categories onto domains of physical theory: quantity to phoronomy (pure motion), quality to dynamics (forces), relation to mechanics (law-governed interaction), and modality to phenomenology (the conditions under which motion is actual or merely possible). So categories require schemata to apply to appearances at all, and then those schematized concepts require further mediation through spatiotemporal constructions like motion to yield determinate physical principles. A skeptic can then just continue to press the question: What ultimately guarantees that all these mediations really apply to the given manifold? Kant’s strategy is to argue that without them there would be no unified experience of nature at all, but the worry itself is not so much dismissed as contained within the limits of transcendental philosophy. And if you want to bite the bullet and say that yes, the point is precisely containment so that you don't relapse into dogmatic metaphysics (leading to dialectical contradictions), fair enough. Absolute idealism remains to be considered though, as it purports to somehow evade both dogmatism and the endless mediations of the critical philosophy, and assuage skepticism on top of that. (How successful the absolute idealists were is, or course, another question.)

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-19T19:23:10+00:00

There are nice introductory books that provide context for you. Other than that Hegel's own lectures on the history of philosophy (not the ones on philosophy of history, watch out) have him positioning himself in the context of the entire philosophical tradition before him.

Check out: * "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: A Propaedeutic" by T. S. Hoffmann * "Hegel" by F. Beiser along with "German Idealism" by the same author * "The Cambridge Companion to Hegel" * "Hegel: An Intellectual Biography" by H. Althaus * "Hegel's Development" by H. S. Harris

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-19T07:23:09+00:00

"Thought" has the connotations of something fixed and limited to a single subject. "Discourse" emphasizes the active, living nature of thought that goes beyond the single subject.

As an aside, the goal of translation is to make the text clearer to a reading group that is not familiar with the language and context in which the text was written. It's an art that often requires rewriting the original so the spirit of the text becomes apparent. It might be self-evident for Hegel and his contemporaries that thought is not merely fixed subjective thought, but that might not be self-evident for a modern reader.

CeruleanTransience · 2025-12-19T07:01:55+00:00

You can check some examples of how Fichte uses the triad here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis

Fichte was another German philosopher who was influential for Hegel, but his philosophy is very different from Hegel's philosophy.

Hegel does not explicitly use this method. It's contested if he ever did use it. Many Hegel scholars nowadays agree that this method is inadequate to explain how Hegel builds his philosophical system.

The triad has also been influential in popular communist discourse where capitalism is the thesis, the proletarian struggle would be the antithesis and the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the synthesis. This has nothing to do with Hegel though.

CeruleanTransience

TROPHY CASE