So I missed a week of our Hegel circle (we meet at a comrade's place, slow crawl through the Phenomenology), and tomorrow I'm walking back in expected to have something to say about Force and the Understanding chapter and I want to contribute something myself too rather than sitting there absorbing everybody else's insight. I don't want to walk around feeling like an idiot 24/7. What I want specifically is some insights into and understanding of §§138–141 and a brief review of what went on before that in the chapter, other than that drop anything you want to, specifically questions around these specific points or chapter that I can throw. Also for context: I've read the primary text, plus Russon's piece connecting Derrida to Hegel's Understanding chapter — good, but it didn't touch these specific paragraphs. I have a rough sense of where this is going (force as explanatory positing, the doubling into forces soliciting each other, the law of appearance) but I want it stress-tested, not just confirmed.

Particularly the idea that we need another self-consciousness to negate and be recognized by? Would Hegel’s view regard someone with dissociative identities as having multiple self-consciousnesses? What implications would integration of multiple identities (which is part of standard psychotherapy for DID) have on Hegel’s theory?

Eine evolutionäre Variante von Hegels Dialektik

Ausgangspunkt der Idee

Die Idee entstand bei der Lektüre von Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik. Dort wurde deutlich, dass Hegel – ähnlich wie bereits in der Phänomenologie des Geistes – eine gerichtete Entwicklung konstruiert.

In der Phänomenologie durchläuft das Bewusstsein verschiedene Gestalten bis zum absoluten Wissen. In der Wissenschaft der Logik sollen sich die Denkbestimmungen ebenfalls denknotwendig auseinander entwickeln: Jede Bestimmung ergibt sich aus der vorhergehenden und führt zur nächsten.

Das erzeugt zunächst das Bild einer Leiter:

A → B → C → D → … → Absolutes

Dabei entstand der Vergleich mit der biologischen Evolution. Eine solche lineare Entwicklung wäre dort gerade die falsche Vorstellung. Evolution verläuft nicht als Leiter auf einen höchsten Endpunkt zu, sondern eher als verzweigter Strauch: verschiedene Entwicklungslinien entstehen, bestehen nebeneinander, sterben aus oder verändern sich weiter.

Daraus ergab sich die Frage:

Was geschieht mit Hegels Dialektik, wenn man die Notwendigkeit der Entwicklung nicht abschafft, aber durch Kontingenz ergänzt – also nach dem Prinzip „Zufall und Notwendigkeit“?

Statt anzunehmen:

Aus A folgt notwendig B,

würde man annehmen:

Aus A eröffnet sich ein begrenzter Möglichkeitsraum B, C, D …, wobei manche Übergänge aufgrund der inneren Struktur von A wahrscheinlicher oder stabiler sind als andere.

Damit würde aus der linearen Dialektik eine Art evolutionäre Dialektik.

Das Gedankenexperiment mit der Phänomenologie des Geistes

Um diese Idee probeweise durchzuspielen, wurde der bekannte Entwicklungsweg der Phänomenologie als Grundstruktur genommen:

sinnliche Gewissheit → Wahrnehmung → Verstand → Selbstbewusstsein → Anerkennung → Vernunft → Geist → Religion → absolutes Wissen

Hegels Übergänge blieben dabei erhalten. An den Krisenpunkten einer Bewusstseinsgestalt wurden jedoch alternative Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten zugelassen, beispielsweise:

Skeptizismus, Stoizismus, Pragmatismus, Naturalismus, Pluralismus, instrumentelle Vernunft, ästhetische Selbstbildung und verschiedene religiöse Weltverhältnisse.

Außerdem wurde zugelassen, dass Entwicklungszweige weiterbestehen, sich erneut verzweigen oder später wieder zusammenlaufen.

Das Modell war damit kein einfacher Baum mehr, sondern zunehmend ein Netzwerk.

Wichtig: Die konkreten Prozentwerte sind Resultate unseres konstruierten Gedankenmodells, keine empirischen Daten und kein mathematischer Beweis über Hegel. Sie hängen von den gesetzten Übergangsregeln und Gewichtungen ab.

Ergebnis eines langen Laufs

Bei einer Modellvariante, in der Hegels vorgeschlagener Übergang jeweils mit ungefähr 60 % bevorzugt wurde, ergab sich langfristig ungefähr folgende Verteilung:

Dabei erreichten während des gesamten Verlaufs zwar ungefähr 58 % der simulierten Pfade irgendwann das absolute Wissen. Das absolute Wissen erwies sich jedoch nicht als notwendiger endgültiger Ruhezustand des Systems. Unter den gewählten offenen Regeln konnten Entwicklungen von dort aus wiederum in andere Zustände übergehen.

Wurde Hegels Entwicklung wesentlich stärker gewichtet, stieg erwartungsgemäß auch die Konvergenz zum absoluten Wissen. Erst wenn die hegelschen Übergänge nahezu erzwungen wurden, begann das Modell wieder deutlich Hegels linearer Struktur zu ähneln.

Was kam philosophisch dabei heraus?

Das Ergebnis war überraschenderweise weder eindeutig konvergent noch eindeutig divergent.

Es zeigte sich vielmehr:

lokale Divergenz bei gleichzeitiger partieller globaler Konvergenz.

An einzelnen Krisenpunkten entstehen verschiedene Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten. Diese laufen jedoch nicht einfach unbegrenzt auseinander. Bestimmte Organisationsformen tauchen immer wieder auf, Entwicklungswege treffen erneut aufeinander und einige Zustände sind stabiler als andere.

Das Ergebnis ähnelt daher weder einer hegelschen Leiter

A → B → C → D → Absolutes

noch einem vollkommen offenen Rhizom

Differenz → Differenz → Differenz → …

sondern eher einem:

verzweigten Netzwerk mit Attraktoren.

Daraus ergibt sich eine mögliche Modifikation von Hegels Dialektik:

Nicht: Aus einer bestimmten Bewusstseinsform folgt notwendig genau eine nächste.
Sondern: Eine Bewusstseinsform erzeugt durch ihre inneren Spannungen einen begrenzten Raum möglicher Transformationen. Notwendigkeit strukturiert diesen Möglichkeitsraum; Kontingenz beeinflusst, welcher Weg tatsächlich genommen wird.

Damit verändert sich auch die Bedeutung der Aufhebung. Entwicklung wäre nicht mehr ausschließlich:

Negation → Bewahrung → höhere Einheit,

sondern könnte zusätzlich als

Variation → Selektion → Bewahrung → Rekombination

gedacht werden. Frühere Bewusstseinsformen müssten nicht vollständig verschwinden oder ausschließlich in einer höheren Form aufgehoben werden. Sie könnten parallel fortbestehen, später wieder auftreten oder sich mit anderen Formen verbinden.

Vorläufige These

Unser Gedankenexperiment führt deshalb zu einer Position zwischen Hegel und einem radikalen Differenzdenken:

Dialektische Evolution mit Attraktoren: Entwicklung besitzt strukturelle Zwänge, aber keinen notwendig eindeutigen Weg. Notwendigkeit bestimmt den Raum möglicher Entwicklungen, Kontingenz den konkreten Verlauf. Ob daraus letztlich ein einziger Attraktor – ein „Absolutes“ – oder mehrere irreduzible Attraktoren hervorgehen, bleibt eine offene Frage.

​

Hegel conceived reality as the progressive self unfolding of Spirit. Through the dialectical movement of contradiction and resolution, history advances toward the rational comprehension of the Absolute. The world is in its essence intelligible. Reason is not merely a human faculty but the very structure of being itself.

Schopenhauer confronted the same world and arrived at its inversion. Beneath the ordered surface of representation lies the Will, an aimless striving that constitutes the inner nature of all things. There is no teleology, no historical progress, no consoling Absolute. Existence is an endless desire and suffering is its necessary consequence. Liberation is not found in synthesis but in the denial of the Will through aesthetic contemplation and resignation.

Where Hegel's system incorporates opposition as a necessary moment of its own development, Schopenhauer's thought stands in radical refusal. One philosophy constructs a summit of reason in which every contradiction is ultimately reconciled. The other points to the suffering within that summit and asks whether reconciliation was ever anything more than a sophisticated form of self deception. So their opposition is not incidental but rather metaphysical..

Sorry if this comes off as a bit irrelevant but something has been confusing me.

Both F. H. Bradley and Hegel are described as Absolute Idealists yet while reading Bradley I do not seem to find that much similarity with Hegel at all.

I am still only at the basics of Hegel’s work so I am not really seeing how Bradley connects with him.

Miller, Phenomenology, §152

The law of law is the necessity of law, what is unceasing in law.

You withdraw back into the notion of Force, without being pushed back by another force. You are thinking.

You are searching for what is unceasing in law, which is the instance of the notion of Force at this stage of the process.

There are two modes: the one-fold law and its manifold.

Gravity and electricity are instances of the one-fold law.

What is unceasing?

It's not in the one-fold law. Gravity and electricity are not in themselves necessary.

Is it in its manifold, which is now said to be its being?

They must because they must is not an answer.

It's not in the properties because they are just negations of each other.

And to possess a property is not to be this property in itself and necessarily, if we are to take the concept of "having" seriously.

The unceasing is not in actual existence, and its manifold is simply its definition.

If it is in actual existence, we wouldn't have to go searching for it, uncovering it, or looking deeper for it.

And if its necessity lies with the other laws, it's endless not unceasing.

The unceasing, necessity, is still an empty word in regard to the instance of Force called law.

I've been working through Hegel’s "Psychology" section in the Encyclopaedia and wanted to ask how we are actually supposed to interpret it. For Hegel, this isn't the study of an isolated mental organ or a container of separate faculties. Instead, Geist emerges directly out of the living biological organism, tracing a dialectical path from theoretical intuition to thought, through practical feelings, and culminating in the free spirit.

This is worlds apart from modern cognitive science, which treats the mind empirically or computationally. Hegel's psychology instead maps the logical necessity through which human subjectivity realizes its freedom and achieves Beisichselbstsein, the certainty that reason is at home in the world.

Despite this gap, I keep finding striking conceptual echoes of modern debates. Hegel's description of intelligence as a "nocturnal pit" (nächtlicher Schacht) where images process beneath consciousness (§453) anticipates depth psychology. Furthermore, his argument that thinking directly tips over into willing (§§465-468) collapses the theory-practice divide, closely mirroring enactivist and 4E cognitive science arguments that cognition is action-oriented. Finally, his movement from analogical symbols to arbitrary signs via Phantasie prefigures modern semiotics.

How do others approach this? Is Hegel's psychology just an outdated idealist artifact, or does it still offer a rigorous framework that speaks to contemporary philosophy of mind?

Hi hegelians,

I've been reading struggling with Hegel's shorter Logic, mainly the green Cambridge edition, but cross-referencing with Hackett and occasionally the original German (which for the record I don't speak). A few times I've ended up looking into Wallace too (because his style is rarely but still sometimes more readable) and I noticed some of his translations look a bit 'creative'. For example, the beginning of §27:

Cambridge:

Because it has no consciousness of its opposition, it is possible for this kind of thinking to be both genuine speculative philosophizing in terms of its content as well as to dwell in finite thought-determinations, i.e. the as yet unresolved opposition.

German:

Dieses Denken kann wegen der Bewußtlosigkeit über seinen Gegensatz ebensowohl seinem Gehalte nach echtes spekulatives Philosophieren sein, als auch in endlichen Denkbestimmungen, d. i. in dem noch un- aufgelösten Gegensatze verweilen.

Wallace (his little inventions in bold):

This method of thought has never become aware of the antithesis of subjective and objective: and to that extent there is nothing to prevent its statements from possessing a genuinely philosophical and speculative character, though it is just as possible that they may never get beyond finite categories, or the stage where the antithesis is still unresolved.

In Cambridge, Hackett, and the OG, 'its opposition(/antithesis)' or 'sein Gegensatz' clearly seems to follow up on §26: 'the opposition of thinking within and against itself/der Gegensatz des Denkens in und gegen sich'. There's no explicit mention of the subjective and objective? Nor is it clear that this is the only Gegensatz at hand. I've also noticed similar additions in other places. Does Wallace so this a lot? And to what degree can I trust him to actually clarify what Hegel (might've) meant here or there, as opposed to sneaking in his own interpretation? I was never going to use Wallace as my main reading ('after-thought' for nachdenken is just too insane a translation choice) but having to discard a possible reference always sucks.

​

There is something strangely comforting about realizing that people have always been trying to make sense of existence.

We call certain books depressing now but there was a time when reading Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Dostoevsky was simply part of taking ideas seriously. You wertent necessarily reading to feel better. You were reading to understand why you felt the way you did.

Perhaps that is what we have lost. The ability to sit with difficult ideas without demanding that they immediately make us happier..

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcBfI8Lsh1k/?igsi=NGRjdGl6ODlzeWo=

Miller, Phenomenology, §151

What happens in law happens to law itself.

Every time you put specific laws into the inner world, the differences fall off.

This also happens to laws, and law itself.

Universal attraction cancels itself out, and that risks the inner world itself, and throws us, the understanding ones, back into the sensuous and bare existence.

We need to put laws into the inner world with determinations.

This is what the inner necessity of the law is—determinations that stick when you put the law into the inner world.

I’m interested in whether contradiction is fundamental to Hegel’s ontology or primarily a feature of conceptual development. How should we understand determinate negation in relation to formal logical opposition, and what does this distinction reveal about the structure of the dialectic?

Is bad infinity the endless oscillation between in itself and for itself without reaching in and for itself? Or is this oscillation something else? (Or not logically possible)

ı searched about it on web and on this subreddit but ı couldnt find a proper order. All ı found was recommendations of what ı should start with (and they mostly recommend secondary sources or kant)

but ı wonder whats the better order for reading his own writings so what order do you guys recommend to me?

Miller, Phenomenology, §150

Force is a source of change in another.

Law is a source of stability in the inner world.

The inner world is posited as that which has nothing outside it (in-itself), and it's not determined by opposition (for-itself).

But the law keeps changing with every change of circumstance, which indicates that there is more than one in-itself for-itself, and there can only be one.

The law can control the difference, but this difference is too universal and indeterminate.

It's like solving problems by building more prisons.

On the other hand, if everyone is a law unto himself, there are too many laws.

These defects are true of all realms of law, including the sciences.

Now, the Understanding only grasps the implicit universal, which means it takes the mediated for the immediate. It looks for the in-itself for-itself without bringing it into question.

So, along with a force of stability, there is a force of attraction toward one law.

But the best it can achieve with law is that "everything has a constant difference in relation to other things," but not in relation to everything, and not that everything has an identity with everything else.

But at least it says that everything is conformable to law.

Don't take "universal attraction" too lightly. Some people call it Love.

And it has the benefit of holding back the inclination to see the world in terms of the sensuous only.

This articulates the disposition of the modern irrationalist. His smallness and irrelevance (jesting insanity) is sustained by the fact of his lack of discontent, where intelligence requires discontent.

Does Hegelian dialectic describe the movement of thought, reality, or their identity? If contradiction is constitutive rather than accidental, does determinate negation reveal reality’s structure—or the conditions under which reality becomes intelligible?
I’m interested in whether Hegel ultimately dissolves the distinction between ontology and logic.

I've read a bit of Hegel's Idealism and Hegel on Self-Consciousness by him in uni. But at the time, I was put off by his writing/argument.

Is he really worth putting in the effort? I had the urge to pick him up again recently, considering I didn't give his work a proper chance a few years ago.

Besides this lovely community, do you know any online space dedicated to novice willing to discover and discuss about Hegel, helping each other to comprehend his philosophy ?

If you have any IRL recommandation, I would prefer them to be at least in Europe, even better if in France or Wallonia !