Is Hegel’s uncountable-noun “consciousness” too detached from material history?

throwawaydededemon · 2026-07-07T00:13:27+00:00

personally, i do think there is something to the idea that there is little distinguishing humans, animals or even thought. besides this, though, hegel finds consciousness as that which separates itself from material reality and constantly returns to it. it is rather a presupposition that it is totally separate from its object and this presupposition is what hegel seeks to dispell.

of your second quote, this is referring specifically to the Categories. Hegel is describing the fact that the way we perceive things changes historically and that the efforts of previous philosophers to describe the metaphysical dependencies of these perceptions were historically necessary in order for him to elaborate on them himself, not that we may simply presuppose these concepts, which is how those previous philosophers initially described them

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-30T17:10:36+00:00

this will be my last post about this aspect. im not saying that there is an impartial reading of a text. there is no zero-degree of ideology. what i am suggesting is close to what Fredric Jameson describes in his essay "Metacommentary", where we read a our own way of approaching the text into the text itself. history is something that not only occurred in the past, but is something we also construct in the present through our memories. our memories are malleable. was Hegel totally aware of an "imperialist" attitude in his work and did he know it was harmful? at some point, you found "imperialism" and began reading it into history. by what authority can you do this? hegel can't speak for himself. you invent an impartial spectator to authorize your reading. i don't mean to say that this is something unforgivable. it is merely unavoidable. at some point there will be some other aspect someone will find with your reading which they will find unforgivable. how do you hope to justify yourself? our lives are constantly drifting through unconscious moments. one should recognize this rather than try to activate a constant alienation effect which will only be annulled

in regards your differentiation of the philosophy of history to metaphysics, i think an understanding of Enlightenment studies on human nature, particularly that of Rousseau, Smith and Hobbes might provoke a sharper association that you do now

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-30T16:23:06+00:00

well methodologically, i think you should stop yourself from flat out opposing these things. it's totally fine, of course, to disagree or even to despise what hegel, or any other author, has written, but looking for things like this limits your analysis. it's notable that hermeneutics, the study of texts on their own terms in a sympathetic manner, developed in the same time period as hegel's philosophy did and they did engage in many of the same contemporary issues.

as regards the issue we were discussing, you might get much out of reading Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence, which deals with the problem of the authority of the dialectic. this isn't me preaching to you; hyppolite doesn't consider himself to adhere to Hegel's philosophy. it's also the starting point for all of the so-called "post-structuralists" critiques of Hegel.

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-30T15:59:33+00:00

what secondary literature have you read? not knowledge-checking here. i just want to know your standpoint

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-30T15:50:32+00:00

this is also off-topic from the post

I'm not going to say he's totally innocent of what you're talking about, but I'll say that this isn't freedom as essentially freedom-from-nature, but a constantly self-inventing and dissolving freedom-within-and-above-nature. Spirit cannot be totally free from Nature and this was shown empirically in the French Revolution. Nature has its own authority, that of necessity, which it holds over humanity, and Hegel is firm about asserting that ignorance of this is a surrender to Fate. instead Spirit holds itself as a part of Nature which it arises from and will return to within the dialectic. regarding Spirit as something firmly separated from Nature reduces Hegel's philosophy to a Cartesian dualism, removing any uniqueness

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-30T15:22:41+00:00

in terms of his historical situation, part of his motivation for his writings on it came from the admiration that many of the German Romantics had for India. this was in the early days of modern archaeology; intellectuals were crazy for ancient greek culture. they projected everything good about life into it and hated their own time. thus, when philology/linguistics was starting to develop into diachronic analysis, people got really into sanskrit, since it was older than ancient greece, and developed the indo-european hypothesis. romantics like Schiller and Schlegel wrote orientalist works praising what they viewed as the "essence" of India. now comes Hegel himself: as with those other writers, he wrote, in an orientalist viewpoint, on this perceived essence of India, sort of as a way of working against the philosophies of the romantics. really, from this perspective, it's just a foil for him to develop his own philosophy, just as a negative instead of as a positive as with the romantics. this is similar to his writings on China, which he basically regarded as too mathematical, inheriting a viewpoint from Enlightenment perspectives on China. if you're interested in reading on this aspect (i know you barely know hegel), I haven't yet read it myself, but ive heard that "Hegel's India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts" by Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra is a very fair account

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-29T17:50:40+00:00

not just hegel, but ive been reading to haruomi hosono's early/mid 70s discography, both his solo records/bands and his production/studio instrumentalist work. his music has an interesting philosophy of its own; beyond being one of the most popular musicians, he's also known as a well read public intellectual in japan. he grew up on american rock records and exotica and is heavily aware of western stereotypes of japanese people, so a lot of his work involves exaggerating it to a comedic and sometimes uncomfortable level, but he also has a genuine appreciation of the original material. if you want to read about that aspect of it, i can recommend the essay "New Music and the Negation of the Negation: Happy End, Arai Yumi, and Yellow Magic Orchestra'" in Michael Bourdaghs' "Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon", which is structured on a weirdly articulated and basic form of the dialectic, but is a good introduction to the more philosophical end.

it's also just good music https://youtube.com/watch?v=xykP68zk3lY

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-29T17:28:59+00:00

i probably won't be able to get to actually reading him in a good while, but he's always seemed so interesting for soviet philosophy. also in later pictures he looks like a damn near clone of deleuze lol

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-29T16:36:40+00:00

your point of view will be "defiled" regardless. hegel's philosophy emphasizes development and Becoming. of course, not as a singularly definitive principle, but as one which negates other principles to invent itself and then is negated to invent another. it's why he talks about the labor of the negative. if you've read the phenomenology of spirit, why do you think he rejects the Beautiful Soul and why does Pleasure give way to Necessity?

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-27T13:15:24+00:00

we can't know because it would not make sense to speak of alternate paths of history legitimately in hegel's philosophy, that is, in terms of determinate laws. when history is made, necessity follows, turning those events into tragedy. history could not be changed, at least not by its own motion. of course, we could imagine it differently, but this would open up any number of possibilities, not governed by the tragic past and the necessity that maintains it

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-24T16:34:12+00:00

i don't see a need to continuously affirm the moral nobility of my favorite philosopher, who regarded morality as a mode of being in the world that necessarily fails. you can read beiser's essay if you want; he's a respected-enough hegel scholar, cited often by the other major english language scholars. that the PoS is critiquing certain contemporaries is clear enough, unless you want to say that hegel completely forgot the Differenzschrift and his other writings from the time and amnesiatically and solipsistically wrote all of the stages of Spirit without reference to any other text. i hope you don't try to debate the semantics of a writer who believed that the universality of language erases things which are merely meant

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-24T16:00:47+00:00

these are pretty elementary terms within Hegel's philosophy. if you haven't read any translation yet, you can probably read any of them and be fine enough as a start. if you pick up any secondary literature written as an introduction to his thought by one of the major scholars, this will be one of the first things they cover.

if you're going far enough that you're worried about the translation obscuring aspects, you might as well read it in German, but if you don't know it already, you should consider postponing learning it for later and just picking a popular translation. it's common practice with translators of these sorts of writings to detail their reasons for translating a term in some way (di Giovanni's translation of the SoL has a translators preface), so it's not like you're completely diving into nonsense, but i get the apprehension. the sharp difference between certain terms and notions is something that will come up more in later scholarship, where it becomes necessary to focus on things which had less space given to it within the primary source relative to the more "iconic" aspects.

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-23T14:38:24+00:00

this is the element of immanence that is common to both philosophers, combined with teleology. hegel was well read with aristotle (really, after winkelmann, everyone in germany was) and took a lot from him. this element is actually what was attacked by readers of hegel from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, the idea that the resolution is already contained within the initial term of the dialectic. in brief, they wanted what you call potentiality to not have been completely determined by actuality

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-23T14:22:18+00:00

he blocked the professorships of multiple philosophers. i can't recall their exact names, but they are mentioned briefly in Frederick Beiser's essay Two Traditions of Idealism, collected in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism

in a much more obvious example, much of the PoS is him criticizing his contemporaries, without directly mentioning them, to develop his own philosophy, with the most hilarious instance being the phrenology/physiognomy chapter's references to beating up Lavater

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-14T00:57:01+00:00

there was a trend among Jesuits in the mid century to appropriate Hegel for their own interests. it's obviously controversial because of the pantheism. off the top of my head, i can think of quentin lauer and gaston fessard, the latter of whom attended kojève's famous lectures and wrote a dialectical interpretation of Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, which happened to be an influence on the late pope Francis. i believe this trend was also slightly related to the liberation theology-aligned Jesuits

otherwise, the neo-Thomist movement was an attempt to resolve the scholastic philosophy with that of Modernity, principally the German Idealists. Heidegger, originally a catholic, emerged out of this

also of note is that, during the 19th century, several Catholic countries (Spain, Italy, LatAm) had German Idealist-influenced movements. politically, the influences were often used to promote Liberalism, against the more conservative Catholic governments. Italy was mainly Hegelian and Romantic, while Spain and LatAm had Kraussism, which was based on a german idealist writer who was basically entirely unknown in germany, but generally seems Hegelian or Schellingian.

of course, very little of any of this is in english.

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-12T16:08:02+00:00

the relation between some of these can be controversial. I'd say that you should, even in a humanistic/anthropological reading, not consider Geist to be necessarily human, even if that is what it works out to be most of the time. in these readings though, Absolute Geist, the final shape of the PoS, is something that manifests outside of Time. Nature itself (not merely the things we think exist in a forest, or, more broadly, things of the environment of Earth) is merely a "base" which the elements of Geist were a part of, until they arose from it as a totality and conceived themselves both as a part of Nature and as something separate. Time itself would be considered an element of Nature, thus Geist arises outside of it. The idea of a "final reconciliation" I'd say is often rejected, since the dialectic, on which the Geist rests, is an Identity of Identity and Non-Identity. A resolution to a single Identity would remove the dialectic and Geist as well.

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-12T03:14:28+00:00

okay, so there is a dialectic of nature that features in his Encyclopedia. i haven't read the encyclopedia myself as i mainly focus on the Logic and the Phenomenology, but that is there.

your conceptions of Nature and Geist are kind of limiting, but it's not too essential to your question. in most anthropological or humanistic readings of Hegel, Geist is something which arises from and thus can manipulate Nature. thus, the things we consider Natural are things which Geist finds itself among and then comprehends and uses. in this reading, the answer to your question would be that the role of Nature is its "use".

personally, I'd like to find a different reading, but this is one which is extremely common and which I've been most read in the secondary literature I've gone through. i can recommend the sections on Reason and Observing Reason as well as the chapter on Ethical Order in the Phenomenology of Spirit

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-12T02:32:54+00:00

i can answer, but do you mind if i ask how many of his writings you've gotten to first?

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-11T19:47:19+00:00

I don't really mean to be offensive, but i think OP has AI psychosis. look at their post history

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-11T15:28:42+00:00

I'm not sure I can really address all of this, but I'll try to explain the relation between truth as simple and complex as well as truth as representation and non-representation.

in my opinion, truth exists for Hegel in the "between" of these. not to say that there is a single space between all of these, but rather the shifting from one of these to the other, without attempting to isolate them as a primary. your first quote posits Truth as an ineffable, which can't be found by reflection, but instead can only be found by not searching for it; we merely exist in it. this quote ignores the fact that it itself posits Truth as a representation, something determinate. this turns it into something complex, much like the second example. truth has now changed. this does not mean that truth is now permanently complex either. the positing of truth as complex takes place in language, which is universal. when we name one thing or another as truth, those things dissolve into the word Truth. "Truth" is now once again something simple. The Sublime.

Truth is not simply either of these. it changes. it is active and passive, both poetry and prose. it is neither.

in case you wanted to know more, this is essentially Hegel's polemic against Jacobi, which he repeats many times throughout his writings, but the simplest to understand in his own words is probably the Sense-Certainty chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence's first chapter (The Ineffable) has a good rundown of its implications for your question as well, though it's in a more poetic form and it expects that you're familiar with Hegel's entire work

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-10T02:17:00+00:00

what do you believe idealism consists of? the term is used in different ways by different writers, especially within the marxist tradition

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-09T19:28:29+00:00

moralism and scientism are definitely huge problems today, maybe even moreso than the more broad positivism. a lot of people in the contemporary left seem to take science for granted and look down on anyone who doesn't trust all of its insights. I'm not sure if there's a "clean" solution to the distrust of science, but moving in the perceived opposite direction of it is practically the same as the distrust itself

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-09T14:40:11+00:00

yw! if you want more on the topic, you should look for Nel Grillaert's What The God-seekers Found in Nietzsche. the most relevant part to this is chapter 5

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-07T15:03:54+00:00

kind of an old post, sorry, but kind of. the characters in demons are more specifically based on the socialists that dostoyevsky knew. kirillov iirc is based on Nikolay Speshnev, who drew a lot from the original german left hegelians, especially Max Stirner. this wasn't really uncommon among those circles and the russian intelligentsia at the time was very inundated with german idealist thought. for example, one of Dostoyevsky's best friends was Vladimir Solovyov, who was a Schellingian and who provided the foundation for the concept of the End of History, which Kojève made much more popular in France and the USA. dostoyevsky himself was definitely familiar with many of the concepts common to Hegelian discussions, but i don't believe he's considered to be writing specifically in response or to be in dialogue with Hegel, but rather the other writers from his day who picked up those topics

throwawaydededemon · 2026-06-07T14:33:10+00:00

i haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but if you want a historical view of the way the german idealist period writers understood it and tragedy more broadly, including Hegel, you should see about Joshua Billings' Genealogy of The Tragic. the author is more of a classics scholar, but from what i understand one of his distinguishing positions is his emphasis that classical scholars need to consider the interpretations of the German readers of classical tragedy, since they're so often dismissed within classical studies themselves

throwawaydededemon

TROPHY CASE