Must (self) consciousness have “desire” or is it rather the case that is only through desire that self-consciousness can experience? His reasoning for why desire must concern life is obtuse; something about it having to confront infinity (which refers to more garble back in the previous section) and infinity necessarily including life, etc ad absurdum. SC is defined as “the...
Having already written about Hegel's master/slave dialectic, I read and describe Charles Taylor's interpretation of this section. I attend to what Taylor says about the mechanisms underlying this dialectic; why self-consciousness is motivated to challenge another.
When I first read Hegel on "the unhappy consciousness", I struggled to make sense of it; a strange conversation gave it new meaning. The epiphany came about as we started talking about why dogs are so happy; why a dog's life can be said to be perfect, and enviable too! And not just any dogs - domesticated dogs. What we seem to want is an external standard and confirmation of our purpose...
Reading Hegel about a form of consciousness he calls "unhappy", because not only does it define itself as a dichotomy, but it divides and separates the aspect of itself that it feels to be unchangeable and essential. This leaves a self that sees itself as a changing transience, and that strives to relate to the truth, i.e. to the unchanging aspect of itself which was divested, and Hegel sees this...
Three headlines selected from this week's Science/Nature journals: (1) Memory in the innate immune system, (2) water in extrasolar atmospheres, and (3) enhancing photosynthesis in crops. Herein I summarize these, highlighting what makes them interesting to this person.
Reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the first time. Here I've read the first part of section B "Self-consciousness", chapter IV "The truth of self-certainty", part B "Freedom of self-consciousness". That elaborate indexing adumbrates the topic matter: Hegel's studying a self-conscious entity, whose basis for truth is its certainty of its own self, and which (just now) is acquiring the...
Charles Taylor's reading of Hegel on "sense-certainty" is informed by his understanding of the intellectual ecosystem from which Hegel's philosophy grew, esp. the German Romantics. It can be simplified as a desire to provide an intellectual basis for human expression, and for a unity between man and nature. These ideas can be seen as goals paralleling the main thrust of "Sense-certainty".
The description of the early analytic philosophers is that of a methodology, namely to analyze the world in terms of logical propositions. This is really a methodology, but I extract a metaphilosophy from it: philosophy seeks to (1) discover a method for describing the world (and its subjects) in such a way as to be informative (i.e. not mere tautologies nor contradictions), and then (2) to apply...
Experiencing the history of philosophy Reading “Hegel” by Charles Taylor, about the ideas, beliefs, opinions and motivations that flowed and ebbed in western Europe between the time of the Enlightenment and Hegel’s philosophical career. As I read Taylor, and my mind emulates and empathizes with the various zeitgeists, I discover that this in itself is a peculiar and personally...
← Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit (via the translation of A.V. Miller), seeking sense, but also a way of extracting and explaining that sense into writing. In this entry I am planning an adjusted approach to this problem: I plan to extract the major concepts as I find them, and allow an explanation to develop organically around them, hopefully, as they are collected. What I want to avoid is...
