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".
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...
← As consciousness proceeds into self-consciousness, it is forced into contact with another ego. The mediation of this contact is apparently necessary. Something to do with infinity and dynamic unities and the law of inversion and life. I am not convinced. For the in-itself, or the universal result of the relation of the Understanding to the inwardness of things, is the distinguishing of what is...
[90] The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowing of the immediate or of what simply is. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it. Thus begins...