/lit/ - Literature

coffee without cream is not the same thing as coffee without milk. once you understand this it all makes sense

>>14085198
but what happens when you mix them? They don't cancel out each other. did I get it right in the OP?

>>14085239
when you mix what?

>>14085261
coffee with cream and coffee without milk. they aren't the same but they aren't direct negatives like I stated in the OP. I guess it would be easier to say the exact dialectic that I'm trying to understand. This is from Evola's "Ride the Tiger." He is summarizing the first chapter which I completely understood, but then he framed it or it was translated in a way that is foreign to me.

>The significance of the crises and the dissolutions that so many people deplore today should be stated, indicating the real and direct object of the destructive processes: bourgeois civilization and society.
>But measured against traditional values, these latter were already the first negation of a world anterior and superior to them.
>Consequently the crisis of the modern world could represent, in Hegel's terms, a "negation of a negation," so as to signify a phenomenon that, in its own way, is positive.
>This double negation might end in nothingness—in the nothingness that erupts in multiple forms of chaos, dispersion, rebellion, and "protest" that characterize many tendencies of recent generations: or in that other nothingness that is scarcely hidden behind the organized system of material civilization. Alternatively, for the men in question here it might create a new, free space that could eventually become the premise for a future, formative action.

My understanding is that bourgeois and traditional values negate each other as they can't find any compromise. This conflict leads to one of two outcomes, thus, "breaking" the dialectic. I just don't know why he had to waste some much time saying this. Is my understanding correct? Why would he go through all the trouble to describe such a simple hypothetical situation?

Maven but for philosophy.

>>14085417

bump

The negation of a negation is a positive conflict. For ( - )+ ( - )= (+).

>>14085891
It just doesn’t seem that cut and dry. This isn’t math. Why go through over explaining it? The article on Hegel’s dialectics on Stanford’s site was super long

>>14085986
You overthink too much. Keep reading Hegel.

>>14085999
checked. I’m just not confident, honestly... constantly second guessing myself for fear of being incorrect

>>14085410
>Why would he go through all the trouble to describe such a simple hypothetical situation?
it's called philosophy bro

>>14085178
People often get Hegel's triad wrong by imagining it as a triangle. The triad (for what it is worth) is really the idea of a circle; to give a rough example: you come back (synthesis) to your starting point (thesis) after visiting the antipodes (antithesis) with the accumulated impressions of the globe enlarging your initial conception of your home town.

>>14085178
I'll explain it as well as I can.
In classical logic, the negation of a negation is the identity (for example, -1 x -1 = +1). Hegelian thought deals not with Boolean propositions but with thoughts and notions. Let's take an idea, "I have ice cream." Its negation is "I don't have ice cream." But it's double negation is "I don't not have ice cream." This is plainly different than "I have ice cream," because now it contains as one of its moments the possibility that I don't have ice cream.
Perhaps a better example. The initial thought is "the earth revolves around the sun," heliocentrism. Its negation is geocentrism, "the sun goes around the earth." Its double negation is "the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around." Present in the double negation is the entire negated term. If we taught simply the initial thought (the "thesis," to use non-Hegelian terms) we would simply tell students the earth goes around the sun for XYZ reasons. But, since history is a dialectical development, we teach them the "synthesis," which is the double negation here. We teach them this whole story of Copernicus and Galileo. In fact, when they teach you about heliocentrism, the very first thing they teach you is what geocentrism is. They don't teach heliocentrism itself, they teach heliocentrism-not-geocentrism.
In the >>14085198 example, we might begin with "coffee," just coffee. Standing opposed to it is "coffee with cream." The double negation is "coffee without cream." We see that "coffee without cream" is, objectively, the same simple "coffee" with which we began, but the informatic content of the thought is now different by means of the double negation. Similarly, "coffee without cream" and "coffee without milk" are both the same thing, simple coffee. But the ideas present as moments in the ideas are different--simply or objectively, they are identical, but for the understanding they differ in informatic content. The thought process by which you reach dairyless coffee changes your conception of the (objectively identical) end result.
Now that I've written this I fear I've not simplified it as far as I wanted, but I hope it helps.

>>14085178
http://www.quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/on_the_dialectical_method.htm

>>14086071
kek

>>14086165

>>14086135
This anon explained it more than well, there you go OP.

>>14086135
The single greatest Hegelpost I've ever seen.

>>14086135
>I fear I've not simplified it as far as I wanted
kek

>>14086135
awesome. thanks for this. it helps a lot. Just asking for a clarification here:
In your coffee example, we say "coffee without cream" as a double negative to be a more specific descriptor? In other words, when someone says, "let's get a coffee," their idea of "coffee" isn't specific enough to assume that they'll take it black, correct? But if that same person said, "let's get a coffee without cream," we'd know exactly what he/she means. Is that more or less the whole concept? It's a way to be more specific using double negatives?

>>14086831
not him but the trick is, you can have two cups of black coffee on the table, both exactly the same materially, and yet they can be different because you understand one as having no cream and the other having no milk. what something is matters, but what something /is not/ matters too. this is where the negation of negation plays a role

>>14087063
gotcha. that's why I asked for the clarification. I didn't know whether to reason it materially or conceptually. Excuse me for continuing to oust myself as a brainlet, but why do we need to think things this way? I can understand the reason can be educational for the heliocentrism example here >>14086135 but all in all it doesn't seem so useful since we sort of already know how to communicate effectively without having to learn hegel's dialectics.

>>14087134
it's not about classification it's about our own understanding. before democracy existed, there was no state without democracy, now there is. something about the lack of democracy, once concretized, has its own effects, over and above of the material reality of the state

>>14086135
Fascinating. Can you elaborate how does he apply this to history, philosophy or the way of thinking life in general?

>>14085198
It is, though.

>>14087227
Thats what I'm thinking lol, they are the exact same thing you're just describing it differently. Is that the point Hegel is trying to make? Frame of reference and context effect our understanding? Im too much of a brainlet for this shit.

>>14087168
>it's not about classification it's about our own understanding.
so it's also supposed to track how things are understood over time? meaning that the dialectics themselves change as the concepts making up those dialectics changes?

>>14087241
not just framework and content, but the lack of framework and content too. identity isn't just a product of what something is, it is also a prodproductuxt of what something is not

>>14087279
>prodproductuxt
product* excuse the phone posting

>>14087181
The whole idea in the phenomenology of spirit is that knowledge of what is, the idea of the knowing and what is known, goes through the dialectic from apparently immediate knowing - sense certainty - to absolute knowing by each conception of knowledge not being able to live up to its own standard, having its internal contradiction become sublated into a different conception of knowing and what is known, and the previous contradictions, while being transcended, being nonetheless preserved within the new internal contradiction of knowing and what is known. Once this reaches its conclusion, and all the connections between the different "shapes of consciousness" are learned, you have absolute knowledge.
The Science of Logic is a similar process but with pure metaphysical/logical (Hegel considers logic and ontology to be the same thing) concepts, from Being to the Absolute Idea.
I don't know his philosophy of history very well, but I think its meant to traverse the same kind of process but for social relations, like despotism to slavery to feudalism to the prussian state.

>>14087302
>(Hegel considers logic and ontology to be the same thing)
now this whole thing clicked for me

>>14085178
https://youtu.be/NyeTaXv6o4Y

>>14087134
We can reason quite effectively about things without Hegel's dialectical method, for sure. But the Hegelian model is quite useful in many contexts, such as the pedagogical example about heliocentrism. I think in that example the Hegelian model is the best you'll find anywhere in philosophy. What the model is really designed for is analysis of the world-historical, which is why it works so well in that example.
Hegel's dialectic is wholly unsuited for analyses of things-in-themselves or for understanding of existence (in the existentialist sense; this is Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel).
>>14087181
I'll build on >>14087302 somewhat; I didn't finish Phenomenology before the library wanted it back but I did read Reason in History, which has more direct bearing on the historical parts of your question (the philosophical part is perhaps better served by that other anon's answer). As for history: the Hegelian thesis is that history develops dialectically. The absolute Idea develops in both space and time; its development in space we call Nature, its development in time History. Among human beings the realization of the Idea is the State. The State begins to develop, then peaks at exactly the moment it attains self-consciousness; it has insight into itself only as it wanes ("the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk"). Then the process will begin again. The development of the State occurs dialectically, by means of abolishing what were considered universals as particulars. To give an example: the State has the idea of slavery, then confronts the idea of abolition, synthesizing this into abolition-not-the-historical-institution-of-slavery. What was thought to be universal to the human condition (slavery) was abolished as a particular (that is, slavery was an artifact only of some particular people). These are the major ideas. This last point should strike you as very Left-leaning, and rightly so. There's a reason Right Hegelianism never went anywhere while Left Hegelianism literally took over the world. What new universals will be abolished next? It could be heterosexuality, cisgenderism, monogamy, non-bestiality, etc. I think it's fair to say that for Hegel, history is spiritual "progress."
Again, Hegel's thought is quite complex and I don't know that I do it justice (I'm not a Hegelian myself; I stand by Kierkegaard as he BTFOs Hegel). But that's at least a working understanding of the man's views on history.

>>14087583
super cool. thanks, anon

>>14085178
dude. the guy was a charlatan, ok? a sophist. a "snake oil salesman" he's your typical 19th century gobbledygook pseud, who wrotle lots of incomprehensible stuff with exotic, high-concept prose to baffle high-society cuz back then in that culture that's what you did if you wanted status and prestige.

nothing. there is nothing of value there other than historical or aesthetic interest.

N O T H I N G

I know it can be uncomfortable or hard to believe this, given how so many schools and so many people teach and read the guy. But, you know what? So many smart people used to believe in bloodletting and earth-centered cosmology. It's a trend. And a dying one, thankfully.

>>14087694
>N O T H I N G
same thing as being, retard

>>14087699
like I said, only aesthetics or historical interest.

It may be nice, aesthetically to imagine things like "nothing is the same as being"

but it is of no insight whatsoever. it's simply a cool verbal formulation (in your mind apparently). I can get the same stuff from reading a deepak chopra book. But poor deepak, he won't go down a a "great philosopher" and people won't be reading his books in universities for a hundred years...

what a farce.

>>14087705
He shows pretty clearly how any other definition of pure being leads to contradiction. quick anon: heraclitus or parmenides?

>>14087723
>heraclitus or parmenides?
Not Heraclitus, not Parmenides, not both and not neither.

>>14087723

I am SO moved by that...revelation! Pure being!!! Contradiction!!!

I am now going to watch another re-run of star trek, have a frozen TV dinner, and wake up tomorrow on my commute to my dead end job, but my life has been so enriched by this consciousness raising realization!!!!!!


YES!!!!!!!!!!


T H A N K YOU!!!! Now I can be just like you and maybe even like the great HEGEL himself! god bless that towering intellectual giant!

I can talk more with other psueds at coffee bars and maybe seem more intelligent around my friends! I have fulfilled a primal urge!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>14087729
t. Sextus Empericus
>>14087736
please give me a rundown on your theory of being/nothing cause I thought Hegel's was pretty neat

>>14087736
>reddit spacing
>derailing the thread
are you like a shill against deep thought or something?

>>14087723
I'm sorry I don't mean to be a party pooper. it's just that, I can't help but think of millions of people, alone on their computers, exchanging quips about Hegel with each other anonymously, all as a sort of grand game or self-therapy. I pity people who's lives are so degraded that they have this need, but I can't help them. I can only shout from afar. A lonely voice crying in the wilderness.

>>14087758
>deep thought
lol

Ok, Ok. I'll let you guys carry on. I had to be a bit of a Diogenes there for a bit.

bye.

>>14086074
Hegel’s philosophy isn’t one of triads but one of sublation or “Aufhebung” you dumbass. The unity of opposites is completely incompatible with the idea of “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” because this approach (fichtean dialectic) proposes that one thing comes first and is then negated by another when in actuality the two things emerge simultaneously and both negate each other.

>>14087760

>>14087830
Not quite right, but I understand what you're trying to say.

>>14087302
What the hell did you said.

Hegel is a hack

>>14087616
Books about this? Not Hegel himself since I'm afraid that I can't keep up with him.

>>14086135
Okay, now why does any of that matter

>>14085178
I hate the fact that after I think I'm through with this guy and moved on to many other philosophers his writings just comes back to me, more convincing than ever. Hegel please get the fuck out of my head

>>14089056
Bruh Hegel is the root of future philosophy deal with it