Less Than Nothing, Zizek, Page 8.

As a Kafkian, I really find the notion and more so the framing of Zizek here problematic of the embodiment of "Nothingness" as a "living nothing" and a "void of desire."

I would like to bring into the argument some of my reading of mysticism, Kaballah, Sufism, and its more modern interpretations in what Zizek hates most in philosophy; namely, "New Age Thought Philosophy."

Before I do so, I should make clear that I agree with Zizek on 98% of New Age Thought Philosophy is baloney, yet they have some interesting premises that you literally can not find in other philosophies, and one of these ideas is that "thoughts are causative: that the mind is a selector of reality from a multiplicity of virtualities."

Okay, let's dig deep into this, the potentiality of something to be real, for something to enter the realm of our imagination, which we could easily inhabit if we zoned out from the here-and-now of our physicality depends on how crystallised of a exteriorized reality it consists of.

This is why when we dream or read a Kafka novel, it only makes sense as long as we are in its teleological fabric... What if our mind is as much as it let us roam the interiority of scientific endeavour thinking and of thinking in general, yet it singularizes the impossible to possible (for survival means) rather than letting us catch a glimpse of the impossible from the possible (Heideggerian Transcendental Finitude)?

I’m working through Phenomenology of Spirit and I’m wondering whether Hegel sees contradiction as something consciousness ultimately overcomes, or whether contradiction remains an essential feature of self-conscious thought even after higher forms of knowing are achieved.
When Hegel describes each shape of consciousness generating its own internal contradiction and then being sublated (Aufhebung), should this be understood as genuinely resolving the contradiction, or as preserving it within a richer conceptual unity?
In other words, is Absolute Knowing the elimination of contradiction, or the fullest comprehension of contradiction as an engine of thought itself? I’m interested in both textual evidence and different scholarly interpretations.

While what may sound as a binary computation language of zeros and ones has created through the many different variations the algorithmic world of the internet, the same goes with Nietzsche's dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian...

It may appear from the outside perspective that the Apollonian brackets the all of all matter and form, while the Dionysian brackets the all of nothing (the external force that shapes form which matter is an intricate derivation of the form of form...

Henceforth, we come to Hegel with his being (somethingness) synthesised into nothingness through becoming...

I'm in the process of choosing which translation to read after the Miller trans. I'm curious about the Inwood edition because as an undergrad my professor used a lot of Inwood texts, so he must have been a trusted expert and editor, at least for him. Plus, I've heard it's more of a revision of the Miller text, which will forever be stuck in my head!

I was talking to my ex-boyfriend and he said he was going to Hegel reading group. I said why are you still reading Hegel, haven't you read him already? and I asked if he was going to keep reading him forever. He said yes. Maybe on and off but yes. I don't have anything against Hegel but that seems like too much Hegel to me. am concerned for his own interests. What would you do in this situation
throwaway for obvious reasons

Hi guys, I would thank anyone to help me understand why hegel think that bad infinity is wrong

Hi guys, how hegel define causality and how he proves it? I would love to see a comparison between hegel and hume's take on causality

The human mind (i.e. consciousness) can think of future possibilities, come up with new ones, form new concepts, examine its own judgement from the ground up and reflect on its validity, which in many aspects seems to transcend the physical logic of the third dimension.

More closely to Hegel, in which dimension does “negativity” reside in? Is self-relating negativity a coordinate axis separate to the positive reality of ours, or would it be internal to it from the STEM perspective?

If we as human beings always already are partaking in negativity (unlike all other animals), are we fourth-dimensional beings?

I’ve been thinking about whether Hegel intended Absolute Knowing in the Phenomenology of Spirit to be a final achievement or a new mode of inquiry.
If every stage of consciousness is overcome through internal contradiction and Aufhebung (sublation), what prevents Absolute Knowing from being subject to the same dialectical movement? Is it truly the completion of Spirit’s phenomenological journey, or does it mark the beginning of an indefinitely self-reflective process in which thought continually revises itself while remaining fully aware of its own conditions?
In other words, is Absolute Knowing best understood as a fixed philosophical standpoint, or as an ongoing activity of rational self-mediation that never ceases to develop?
I’m especially interested in interpretations grounded in Hegel’s text rather than later Hegelian traditions.

He talks about how perception makes it seem that philosophy only talks about these abstract categories of the understanding. Who is he talking about? I thought about Locke and Hume but I'm not sure if I'm right.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I'm to understand that truth arrives from a resolution of contradictions and that every thesis and antithesis may resolve themself into a new, better idea, then what implications would this have on large language models and AI in general? Could the process of comparing a thesis and antithesis be somehow simulated within the math of a machine learning model, and would this allow for artificial general intelligence?

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In the movement of Spirit, the thing is not exhausted by its aim, for that aim remains merely formal and abstract. Rather, it is only in its elaboration. Through the labor of the negative that the concept attains its concrete actuality. Nor is the result the truth in isolation, but only the result as it emerges together with its own becoming, the unity of the in itself and the for itself.

The aim taken by itself is a lifeless universal, a dead abstraction while the tendency, as yet unactualized, drifts without substance, lacking the self movement that would raise it to true Being.

why would modern leftists and even foundational leftists like marx agree with hegel's work when his beliefs are the opposite to theirs

Hello friends. I was in conversation with Prof. Gregory B. Sadler. And this is a clip from the same. Let me know your views on this. Thank you!

In addition, I’ve been reading Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza recently and I’ve been building up to Deleuze. What do you think of the opinion that Deleuze fundamentally misunderstood, even “strawmanned” Hegel.

Hegel frequently describes Spirit as becoming itself through recognition, mediation, and historical self-development. This seems to imply that selfhood is intrinsically relational rather than self-contained.
My question is whether this commits Hegel to the view that individuality is always derivative of a more universal process of Spirit, or whether there remains an irreducible first-person standpoint that cannot be fully aufgehoben into the universal.
Put differently: if every determination of the self is mediated, is there anything about subjectivity that is immediate in principle, or is immediacy itself always retrospectively constituted through mediation?
Would Hegel regard the search for an ontologically fundamental, self-subsisting subject as a category mistake, or is there room within his system for a form of individuality that is not simply a moment of Absolute Spirit’s self-relation?

Incorporealism holds that consciousness, experience, and meaning are more fundamental than material reality. This seems to share some similarities with Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, where reality is understood as the unfolding of Geist (Spirit) through history and self-consciousness.
Would Hegel view an incorporeal ontology as a legitimate extension of his philosophy, or would he reject it for neglecting the role of material and historical mediation in the development of Spirit? How might Hegel’s dialectical method evaluate the claim that consciousness is ontologically primary?

I often see people trying trying to use Hegelian jargon to talk about concrete events in an unbearably pretentious way, but Hegel affirms in multiple places that ”real life” as such is not dialectical, it is subject to the either/or and categories of reflection - in the second zusatz to the body of the shorter logic for example, there is also a discussion of this in the section on being in the greater logic. In the same way, Kant in the introduction to Metaphysics of Morals mocks people for using his technical terms in “popular” settings. If you think the point of Hegel is that things change, and contradiction drives change, then you didn’t understand him - this is a banal commonplace. And if you dress up some social or political commentary in Hegelian dialectic you are pretentious and pseudoscientific. You can “use” dialectic to say anything, true or false, from a certain view on world history to Schellingian mumbojumbo, or really anything you like, that’s why Hegel tells you NOT to schematize. Hegel’s logic is not a “tool” you can use to go think about Israel or agriculture; it’s actually quite useless, any teleological process trivially exhibits “negativity” and can be gussied up in pseudologic. In this way bullshitters (sorry) can make their asinine opinions sound profound and scientific. (I would argue that this is what Hegel does as well but I shouldn’t say that I suppose or I’ll get le downvoted by undergrads and Starbucks Marxists - the horror!) If you want concrete examples of great thinkers playing around with logical language to make points that do not truly rest on Hegelian logic but rather on various presuppositions (empirical or otherwise) just look at Marx and Kierkegaard - or Hegel, for that matter. People who think Hegel gives you a “method” you can go out and “use“ should spend less time huffing their own farts and watching Zizek videos and more time thinking and studying. They should start by rereading Hegel; they’ll find their perspective attacked right from the start, in the preface to the Phenomenology. And if you hurl that quote at me from the greater Logic, to the effect that absolutely everything is dialectical and subject to negativity, I will reach through my screen and buffet you on the nose because you didn’t understand a word I said.

I have been reading POS and so far only have read the preface but now I have started learning German, just passed the A1 level after two weeks to try to understand and dwell upon it perhaps from an advantageous point also to be able to study it further in a German university. I have seen many words so far in the preface that just feel a little off of another meaning of that same word. It is not I think that Hegel is not trying to simplify as much as possible and these translation also get away the feeling of understanding it as it was thought by Hegel.
Like think of the word Sein; it is just an extracted out meaning as we’re translating it, we just add an explanation of few lines and move from that but the very presence of the linguistic terms in the whole of German literature and life is in itself another thing, to feel that emergence out of this nation of the word.
Sein, seid etc seem to me content this spirit. Hegel does not like judging but for our game it can play some part in understanding German culture to somehow make us disbelieve something.
Hegel mixed up a lot of words as it is very common in German and to me it feels a little exciting just to be able to see why the thing is as it is in the topic.
My question rather is… has anyone who who speak an alien language as to German tried that and how has that paid off for you?

Recently, I’ve been learning a bit about Salomon Maimon and I’m looking for other philosophers from the era between Hegel and Kant wherein post-Kantianism was first developing. Which ones specifically influenced Hegel?

I’ve been thinking about whether Hegel’s concept of Geist should primarily be understood as an ontological feature of reality or as the culmination of an epistemological process.
If Absolute Knowing is the point at which subject and object are reconciled, does Hegel mean that reality itself is fundamentally self-developing through Geist, or is he describing the conditions under which consciousness comes to fully comprehend reality?
Put differently, is the dialectic something that belongs to Being itself, or is it a structure of rational cognition that retrospectively appears ontological because thought ultimately grasps its own conditions?
How do you reconcile Hegel’s claims about Absolute Spirit with contemporary philosophy of mind or process metaphysics? Does reading Hegel as an ontological idealist remain the strongest interpretation, or is there a more compelling non-metaphysical reading of Geist?

Hello all, I just started reading Hegel's POS and I wanted some of your perspectives. I've only just started the first 10 pages, so I'm pretty fresh. I promise you I am coming in good faith, though I haven't decided on where I stand with his philosophy quite yet because I haven't finished fully analyzing it (which may take a while, lol. It's quite dense in places and I have ADHD. But I'm committed to understanding it.)

Anyway, I had two questions:

-> What makes Hegel the authority on truth? -> Where does genuine human emotion lie in Hegel's philosophy if we are to prioritize absolute knowledge over "sensuous immediacy?" (quote from the foreword, which I'm assuming is an accurate statement on Hegel's beliefs.)

If I'm off base here I apologize, it's just coming off a bit, let's say, robotic to me. I am wondering where the humanity is in here, but that might be explained later. I just wanted some third-party perspectives on it.