On Wednesday, November 24, 2004 at 8:14:52 AM UTC-8, Jeff Rubard wrote:
ernobe wrote:
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 23:02:38 +0000, Jeff Rubard wrote:
Precisely because existence is defined as Species, it is a simple >>thought: *Nous*, simplicity, is substance. On account of its simplicity >>or self-identity it appears fixed and enduring. But this self-identity
is no less negativity; therefore its fixed existence passes over into
its dissolution. The determinateness seems at first to be due entirely
to the fact that it is related to an other, and its movement seems >>imposed on it by an alien power; but having its otherness within itself, >>and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the *simplicity* of >>thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and >>self-differentiating thought, it is its own inwardness, it is the pure >>Notion. Thus common understanding, too, is a becoming, and as this >>becoming, is *reasonableness*.
He implies here that the definition of existence as Species then becomes its definition as Generality, on account of an "other". And since the "other" is fully entitled to his existence as a Species of your same kind, it is possible to conceive of a confrontation between common morality and dialectical uncertainty. But nothing impedes the concession that
the determinateness of our relationship was due to the "other", and that therefore he had realized his own inwardness without manifesting a confrontation. In other words, our own determinateness is not due to any previous confrontations, since there is determinateness in the very nature of our physical existence. Even the notion of general determinate
physical existence is not necessary; the idea that notions can be shrouded in a fog is nothing but this confusion of the levels of existence.
Hegel's language can be tricky, and I am pretty sure that in this
section he does not mean another person by "other". However, we have
some of the same responsibilities to this general other as we would to another person: considering how the given quantity of commonsense
reasoning manages to manifest some of the labor of the concept, the happenstances through which we reason to things as they are. (If Kant's principle of the transcendental unity of apperception could be rendered
as "thoughts are thinkable", Hegel goes one further and declares that thinking is the thinking of thoughts; the subject-matter of a particular cognition, idealizations and all, is not beneath reason as regards its ability to dialectically right a one-sided conception.)
--
Jeff Rubard
http://opensentence.tripod.com/
Essays on theory, culture, and politics
2022 Updates: This is okay. (I wrote actual books under Hegel under a nom de plume, so it's not my "final word" on the topic.)
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