My Advanced Epis Outlines

The Problem of Modernity

Also a problem of German idealists.

Modern Science emerged in the 17th Century (1600s).

We’re also told that Science became the foundation of our relation to the world, formerly it was not science, it was metaphysics. The foundation of the pre-Moderns, is metaphysics. And also the question of its relation to Greek Philosophy, but science cannot provide the answers to that

Significance of Hegel

One last great attempt to reconcile Science and Philosophy.

Hegel is usually referred to as the “Last Metaphysician”: last to attempt a “grand synthesis” where science and philosophy are reconciled: science is still within the realm of philosophy.

Gadamer: Hegel in a way, did that successfully.

How? Hegel sees that nature, (that other than the human being), not really a stranger, not an opposite force which cannot be reconciled. Because Hegel ends the dialectic with an absolute spirit.

Subject/Object: The object simply as the moment in the movement of the life of the subject. Through the object the subject knows itself.

Example:

"I am woman, I am most acutely aware of my womanhood only in encountering an antithesis: a man. I encounter an other. It is an other that is not an opposition that breaks me, it is not a contradiction. In this opposition, I, in fact recover myself."

After Hegel, what they would inherit, they will not inherit the object (the other) as opposition, but the other as completely alien. The other then does not lead to self-knowledge, and does not lead to the recovery of self.

Reflection/Reflective Movement: other going out of myself and in going out of myself, I recover myself.

What we will inherit is the Fremheit: the other is real contradiction, real alienation; alienation takes on a negative connotation (rather than positive)

Hegel & The Idea of Objective Spirit

The dekalog: p. 113 (last paragraph)

Hegel’s idea of objective spirit has its origin in the Christian tradition: pneuma in the New testament. The pneumatic spirit of love: Jesus.

Arabian expression: a son of the stem of koresh. A particular man is not an individual but a member of a tribe.

How does an individual human being achieve self-fulfillment? Not in self-indulgence, not in self-propagation, only when I lose myself in others.

The objective spirit is not an opposition to me, but the object spirit is a step in my fulfillment. I fulfill myself only in community.

Irony: many feel constrained with the rules of the community: shackled by the community

Examples

1. money for religious;
2. parents and rules; we feel constrained by rules
3. Australian: sacrament of marriage as utilitarian (property and being able to pass it on)

When you belong to a community; the rules of the community, the culture of the community always seem to startle the subjective. In truth, however, the subjective will only flourish in being totally immersed in the objective (community) and the moment of that objective is the society, the community of which you are part;

This concept of objective spirit: (the roots in antiquity) finds real philosophical justification in Hegel through the fact it is itself transcended by what Hegel calls absolute spirit, the third moment in the triad.

Absolute spirit: a form of spirit that contains nothing more in itself that is alien (other, in opposition such as customs which can stand over against us that limit us, or laws of the state that restrict our will by expressing prohibitions).

Hegel sees the distinctiveness of art, religion, philosophy in the fact that no such opposition is experienced in them. We have a final and adequate mode in which the subjective consciousness and the objective actuality that supports us permeate each other so that we encounter nothing more that is alien so that we know, recognize everything we encounter.

Hegelian dialectic ends with the recognition that the human being then (as steps) with the human being going out of itself. The highest moments of the human being in knowing itself: religion, philosophy, art—the social endeavors—but only in this sociality can the human being empower themselves.

What is the Hegelian dialectic like? The Hegelian dialectic therefore sees science and the way science treats its object simply as a step or a moment in the dialectical movement. The objectification of the object for which science is famous for, is taken up in a higher movement in which the object is part of the realization of the subject in a moment called absolute spirit. Auf-Hebung is a dialectic. Alienation in Hegel is not negative, it’s a positive moment.

Auf-Hebung after Hegel: The Problems

Three Masters of Suspicion: Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. After Hegel, the objectification of the spirit does not have a third moment, it remains stuck in opposition. It means that the object is not instrumental anymore to the understanding of the subject of itself. It really remains object, it remains other.

After the Hegelian synthesis we inherit this understanding: the philosophers will remain skeptical of our ability to come up with an absolute spirit, will be skeptical of a teleological movement. The philosophers after Hegel do not believe that the subject in encountering the object will know then itself in a completely reflexive act that will lead to self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is a reflexive moment: it is the subject going out of itself in a moment of reflex, where its image is thrown back to itself by what is other than itself. Philosophers after Hegel will refuse to accept that self-knowledge is possible. They will only capitalize on the woundedness.

Not Descartes

This is not Descartes. Hegel has already attempted a synthesis. Why?

Hans Geog Gadamer

outline

I. Foundations of our century?

• Not chronologically defined period
• Not “age of world wars”
• Epochal awareness seems to separate (no fear of catastrophe)

II. Rooted in the 19th Century

• Industrial revolution
• Development of natural Sciences

III. Yet a Departure from 19th Century

• WWI begins with an epochal awareness of leaving an epoch
• A conscious withdrawal even the sharpest rejection of it
• The impressions of the 19th Century as embodying inauthenticity, stylelessness, tastelessness: a combination of materialism and an empty cultural pathos

• Examples:

1. Cubist destruction of Form: no structure, no boundaries, no borders
2. Architecture: as opposed to historizing facades
3. Spiritual situation: anonymous responsibility

IV. Philosophy: Guarding the Limits of Scientific Orientation of Consciousness to the World

• not the simple tension between science and philosophy
• yes, science as the foundation of relation to world
• but how can science be united with traditional forms of relation
• Christian Church
• National consciousness of modern state
• morality of private conscience
• Then the question is: how can man understand himself within the totality of a social reality dominated by science
• Hegel responds
• last attempt to grasp science and philosophy as a unity
• critique the standpoint of subjective consciousness/spirit
• Speculative idealism
• criticism of philosophy of reflection
1. as illness of the romantic mind
2. feeble inwardness
3. external reflection - the raisonnement; a modern sophism
4. Kant and the categorical imperative
• Hegel's law-testing reason
• testing of the binding force of every ought to guide moral reflection to ascertain the moral will
• situations of moral action not ones we have the inner freedom for reflection
• Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
• suicide example: enough reflective sense to ask if it is in accordance to the law of life; to even consider suicide means no longer has reflective sense
• Hegel: morality is living in accordance to the customs of one’s land
• The Objective Spirit: a spirit that surrounds us all and over against which no one has reflective freedom
1. the transendence of the subjective spirit present in the orders of human community

2. a man as a member of a tribe

3. itself as transcended by an absolute spirit

• a form of spirit that contains nothing more in itself that is alien, or in opposition
• How are the objective spirit and subjective spirit related?
1. how is the individual related to world spirit (Hegel)
2. how the individual is related to the moral powers that are the genuine sustaining reality of historical life (Droysen)
3. where the invidual finds himself within the relations of labor, the basic structure of human society (Marx)
• The End: